So, there I am once again in this store or that one (it doesn’t really matter which store it was) taping my card (not a euphemism at all, I assure you) making a purchase but sans glasses, I can’t see the checkout screen so well. So, I ask the person checking me out (not a euphemism I assure you) what is displayed on the screen and once again I am referred to the options, one of which is to ‘tip’. Which, yet again, I do not do, instead hitting the button for a paper receipt (yeah, I am that kind of a human slug, I want to waste paper and further pollute some landfill). So, not only do I not leave a tip but now the person who wanted a tip has given me the option and I have refused to their face.
I should have used cash. But then again, there are tip jars everywhere and when I don’t take a dollar or leave some change in some hastily-rendered tip jar I sense the look coming off the cashier and sometimes my fellow customers, all too happy to tip.
So, there’s one place where my money is not going.
Then, the other day, I’m checking out at this store or that one (again, it doesn’t matter) and I am told that my bill had been calculated to some amount over a specific dollar ($11.34 I think it was) and I was asked, “Do you want to round up for a donation to charity?” As if me allowing the cashier to add the extra 66 cents will keep some freezing dog from dying or some third-world country kid will get his rice or some Holocaust survivor a blanket.
But again, I say no, slug-of-a-human as I am.
Where are the old-time beggars lying in the street? I much rather give them my loose change, even though we all know it’s human nature to resist it (sorry, bad pun). Don’t guilt me into leaving a tip when all you are doing is your job (waiters and waitresses are exempt from this rant of course), it won’t work, and I will take to wanting to go out and about even less than I already do. I am a charitable sort anyway, I could tell you of the time that…the point being, don’t push the tip thing on me or the giving to causes (I know I have been on about the tip thing before, but it is of epidemic proportions now). Did I tell you the one (and stop me if I did) where my girl and I were recently in a restaurant and when the tab for the credit card receipt arrived, in that spot where tip percents are calculated for those of us mathematically challenged (yes, not an unusual tab breakdown, I know) the three options listed began with 20% being the lowest, rising to 25 and then 30!
You want a tip, how about “Don’t go out with bowl-legged women,” an old quip I heard used back in the day when somebody would ask for a tip and the person they were speaking to wanted to be snarky.
Back off my wallet there Potsie. I know where my $ is going (most times) and it’s not anywhere you may want it to.
