Tipping started as a way to skip the queue

0:00 Tipping did not begin as a reward for good

0:02 service.

0:02 In seventeenth-century English coffee houses,

0:05 customers dropped coins into a box on the

0:08 counter to get served ahead of everyone else.

0:11 The point was speed, not gratitude.

0:14 The custom crossed to America after the Civil

0:17 War,

0:17 where restaurants and railways used it to

0:20 avoid paying wages at all,

0:22 particularly to newly freed Black workers,

0:24 and several states tried to ban it outright

0:27 as undemocratic.

0:28 Those bans failed.

0:31 What survived is a system where the customer

0:34 covers the payroll and calls it generosity,

0:36 which is why arguments about tipping never

0:39 quite resolve.