some light questions

[cellio]

I learned today that there is a full-service gas station on my way to/from work. I didn't know we had any of those locally. It's been years (probably decades); what is the conventional tip?

As I pulled up to an intersction (all-way stop), someone from the cross street was backing through the intersection. After backing into the space in front of my car, he immediately popped into drive and went through the intersection. Whose turn was that, the cross-street or mine? :-)

I have occasionally noticed (because of tracking/RSS feeds or because I viewed the journals directly) posts to LJ that did not show up on my friends page. Is this happening to anyone else? I haven't detected a pattern yet.

Why does Hebrew have two words for "open" that differ only (apparently) in what objects they take? It's peh-kuf-chet when talking about eyes and ears, and peh-taf-chet for anything else.

Comments

[cellio]

In NJ I would definitely agree -- if there's no option, you just pay the posted price. Same for resataurants that assess a standard "tip" for large parties; if you didn't give me the option to leave less than 15% for deficient service, I'm probably not going to leave my usual 20% for decent service either. (I realize that at some level this penalizes the servers for their employer's policy.)

Outside of NJ, the reason I asked is that I see no rhyme or reason to the things that do or do not conventionally involve tips. My newspaper carrier is just doing his job, too, as is my hypothetical barber, but both of these are jobs where it's conventional for customers to tip. But you don't tip the UPS guy, plumber, or physician's assistant. I know that waiters' jobs are specifically structured around the idea of tips (and employers are exempt from minimum wage because of it, or at least used to be), but none of the rest of these jobs are, so far as I know, structured that way. The difference isn't "personal attention" (e.g. the barber, or a taxi driver), because the newspaper carrier also gets a tip and that's an assembly-line-type job. (Mine is an adult, by the way, so this also isn't about being extra-kind to kids.) So far I have not been able to detect a pattern.

I have a very vague recollection of my father tipping gas-station attendants when I was a child. It was always "keep the change", though, and I have no idea how much was involved. Of course, gas cost 25 cents a gallon back then, so it wouldn't have been large.

[jducoeur]

I see no rhyme or reason to the things that do or do not conventionally involve tips.

There's no reason to believe there *is* a rhyme or reason to it. Tips drive many economists batty, precisely because they rarely make sense from an economics POV. Far as I can tell, they're basically cultural artifacts, and are pretty arbitrary...