Tipping For Service,

seems to be a growing thing, 

image Hulton Archive/Getty Images, but there was a time in America that tipping was not only frowned upon, it was loathed as a master-serf custom that degraded America's democratic, anti-aristocratic ethic, apparently the custom of leaving gratuities began spreading in the U.S. post-Civil War, imported from where? Europe of course! The practice of tipping was tarred as "a cancer in the breast of democracy," "flunkeyism" and "a gross and offensive caricature of mercy." But the most common insult hurled at it was "offensively un-American." for their part, Europeans were irked by wealthy Americans who ruined the rates by over-tipping, America's anti-tipping hall of fame includes millionaires John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, who were stingy tippers, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who famously said, "I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, yet it is a wicked dollar, which, by and by, I shall have the manhood to withhold." The tipping abolitionist campaign came to a boil in 1915, when three states (Iowa, South Carolina and Tennessee) passed anti-tipping laws, joining three other states (Washington, Mississippi, and Arkansas) that had already passed similar bills. Georgia soon followed. By 1926, however, all these anti-tipping laws were repealed, but could there be a change of wind sweeping through the practice of tipping? With New York restaurateur Danny Meyer banning tips in his restaurants and Berkeley restaurateurs Andrew Hoffman and John Paluska joining the no-tip bandwagon, the tipping debate has started again, for the article have a look here.