So for the third year in a row, I’ve been honoured by an invitation to the Holiday party at the President’s house. This is rather stretching my theory that they ask all the fancy folk, and then a few people like me along as seat-fillers (like at the Oscars) but, hey, I’m a string theorist, I stretch theories for a living…I don’t see a better alternative theory, you see.
Anyway, I need your help with a dilemma that comes up every time. I’m going on my own this year so I could go on my bike….but I’ll tell you now I’m not going to cycle over there…it just does not work so well to cycle quite that far dressed up in one’s fancier duds, even if it is in one of the swankiest neighbourhoods around. So I’m taking my car. I’ve made sure to get it nice and clean so that it is not too embarrassed near all the truly fancy bling-bling cars. It does not do to embarrass your car. It can take revenge at the most awkward of times.
But in taking my car I end up with a problem every year. A very Southern California one. When you go to a function at a private residence, and they have a troupe of valets to park the guests’ cars, are you supposed to tip the valets when they bring your car back to you? I’ve never got a good look at what others do when their cars pull up. Also, some of my fancy neighbours have done this for their parties (I’m still shocked by this) and I admit that I did get the binoculars out one time to see if I could see what the guests do, but I failed: Fell asleep before the guests started to leave – young people’s party you see. Finishes way after my bedtime, and I need my beauty sleep, you know.
Last year I did not tip, and felt particularly bad, as the very young girl who pulled up in my car (yes, I nearly had a heart attack – worrying about my transmission -as I do with all valets) handed me the keys looking all pleased, and (possibly) expectant. (It might be that she was just grinning at having won the short straw to drive the least fancy car in the lot…some sort of ironic reversal I hear that the hip young people go in for…)
Anyway, your answers would be helpful. Tip? No tip? If tip, how much, since there’s nothing to compute a percentage of.
It’s tonight. I must leave in four hours.
-cvj
December 2nd, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Clifford
You should not tip at a private party; your host takes care of that. A well managed valet service will require its valets to decline your tip should offer one.
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:05 pm
Emile… thanks! And such a quick answer too. So, yet another good use for blogging.
I could do more with this…. Perhaps I should get everyone’s opinions about what to wear to various things …. you know, post pictures of me in different outfits, say what the event is and then get people to vote. Hmmmm…… “Today I’m giving a class on Faraday’s Law of Induction….do you think the blue shirt with the khaki pants is more appropriate than this dark grey + navy blue ensemble?”
Risa, Mark, Sean, JoAnne…… I’m joking!
-cvj
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:13 pm
I say tipping is still appropriate. Five bucks is standard.
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:28 pm
oh dear. I’m confused now. [Five bucks!? I'm just a professor, not the Provost!]
-cvj
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:48 pm
After a lot of research (ok, just two random websites picked on google), the suggested tip for valets is one to two dollars per car at time of pickup. Five dollars seems like Beverly Hills inflation.
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:55 pm
Clifford,
I’d go with $2.00. Although I agree that this should be covered by the host. If it is the valet can politely refuse.
Now if you’re driving a Maserati, you better pony up a little more
Elliot
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:57 pm
David: No no… this is a fancier ‘hood than Beverly Hills….
Elliot: My Maserati’s on order…
-cvj
December 2nd, 2005 at 6:13 pm
I would say that it can’t hurt to tip $2-3. At the worst, you’ll be seen as overly generous (not a bad thing). I doubt you’d offend the valet.
Okay, now can you help me decide what to wear to a company “holiday” party tonight? Option 1: black velvet trousers and a loose flowy long top (the conservative choice); Option 2: flashy besequinned black dress. I like the dress and I think it looks really good on me, but I realized after I bought it that it’s awfully short, and worrying about that will probably make me a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, it fits me now (8 months pregnant), so this may be the only chance I ever get to wear it. I bought it consignment, so it’s not a huge investment down the drain.
December 2nd, 2005 at 6:26 pm
janet:- thanks…. (I’m a miser…it’s the principle of the thing…..not the amount per se. If they are getting paid, why pay them extra for what they’ve already been paid for?)
As for which dress, I would say go for comfort every time…..(all other things being equal-ish). But then, I don’t like any of my besequinned outfits, so maybe I’m just biased.
-cvj
December 2nd, 2005 at 6:36 pm
I sympathize — I hate tipping, except in restaurants, where I know exactly what’s expected.
Not into sequins, eh?
December 2nd, 2005 at 6:39 pm
Usually I get around on foot or by public transit, but in my limited experience $2 or $3 is typical for valet parking. I would go with $3. To me $5 seems excessive, and I tend to tip generously at restaurants, but I guess I could be ignorant.
I agree that at a private party this is probably not expected, and wondering whether it is appropriate would make me worry, so I sympathize with your post.
One thing that always bothers me: at little cafes or sandwich shops or whatnot, such as one finds on many college campuses, there will sometimes be a tip jar. I always wonder what is expected, since at a fast food restaurant one does not tip even though the employees are probably paid less than those in posher cafes, and the service is similar. I rarely observe anyone else leaving a tip in these jars, so when I do I feel somewhat uncomfortable. And of course when I don’t, I feel somewhat uncomfortable.
Can’t we have standardized mandatory tips to make me worry less about proper tip sizes?
December 2nd, 2005 at 6:42 pm
Well, I wouldn’t say that, janet. Just have not yet found the right outfit…. Could have been useful in the disco/70s monster mash a while back……
-cvj
December 2nd, 2005 at 7:05 pm
I think for disco/70s it would be glitter, or maybe rhinestones.
I’ve asked the cats for fashion advice, but their only opinion is “black — all the better to shed on.”
December 2nd, 2005 at 7:09 pm
Yep…I always agree with cats. Go with that advice.
-cvj
December 2nd, 2005 at 7:17 pm
I’d go with $2.00 tip and the besequinned dress. Nothing worse than having a dress hanging in your closet that you’ve never worn….only thing against the dress is that it is supposed to be COLD here tonight (at least by Northern Cal standards!).
December 2nd, 2005 at 7:35 pm
I’ve never ever heard of not tipping a valet, but then, I’m not exactly in California. It’d be warmer…
December 2nd, 2005 at 8:02 pm
Hmmmm JoAnne, are you suggesting that I tip $2.00 and janet wear the dress? Or that I wear a sequinned dress too? Not clear. I was just going to go with the traditional jacket, tie, shirt, pants, socks and shoes…. no sequins in sight….too boring, eh?
I got email from Cathy, a good friend of mine who works pretty high up in The Industry and so she’s probably been to as many of these valet-equipped private parties as I’ve had hot dinners, and she is Southern Californian through-and-through (not a recent import like most of us)…she says “Don’t need to tip at a private party, even if the valets give you a pitiful look”.
I’m beginning to lean towards not tipping again…..
-cvj
December 2nd, 2005 at 8:10 pm
This is a question that simply cannot be answered until we know which of your cars you are taking. If it’s the Lamborghini Murcielago, you must tip. But if you go with your more understated Aston Martin, then you will seem so cool that the valet will not dare to hint. With the Rolls, however, it could go either way…….
December 2nd, 2005 at 9:19 pm
Perhaps the most important thing to ask is: How much do you value getting your car back in one piece? Given a twenty or thirty thousand dollar car, perhaps the least you can do is slip the valet a fiver. If they refuse, fine. If they don’t refuse, at least you’ve gotten your car back in working order.
On an entirely different note, I was in the University Press bookshop here in Cambridge today and browsed through your book. I’m beginning to defect to the dark side since becoming interested in T-duality recently and you may be pleased to know that I picked up a copy of your book (with a great 20% discount upon presentation of my ID, yay!). I do have one question about it though. I’ve browsed through it since I’ve gotten home and I think there are at least a couple of typos. For example, the definition of the Riemann tensor given at the very beginning is incorrect (it’s no big deal, simply a couple of errant indices). Do you know of anywhere that I can find a list of errata?
It seems like a great read and came highly recommended. I’m looking forward to studying it in detail once term is over.
December 2nd, 2005 at 9:40 pm
Yes. At least $2.
December 2nd, 2005 at 9:56 pm
I keep meaning to get this book too. The table of contents looks very enticing. The thing is, I usually wait for the paperback version then get a “new and used” copy on Amazon for a fiver:) Seriously, the hardback version looks well worth the money and seems to cover a lot of interesting stuff. A really nice book. I promise I’ll get it in 2006! Too near Christmas right now.
I do like these Cambridge Monographs but they do tend to have a lot of typos, not the author’s fault. Usually the second edition has most of them cleaned up. Anyway Clifford, a $2-$3 tip should be no problem with all these new royalties coming in
December 2nd, 2005 at 10:41 pm
No question: a couple bucks. Perhaps the host may have taken care of some sort of tip, yet one is not karmically excused from offering one of one’s own.
December 2nd, 2005 at 10:49 pm
Clifford-
Re: your miserly tendencies, I’ve often found that a good antidote is the realization that the service employee’s wage is often set accounting for a certain level of tipping, and not tipping based on the idea that they’re already getting paid is refusing to play by the rules of the game; admirable, but rather than screwing the system, it’s screwing the little guy.
(Oddly, I’ve noticed that miserliness, and its ruder cousin, restaurant-localized cheapness, are endemic in physics, for reasons I don’t quite understand…)
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:01 pm
I’ve noticed that miserliness, and its ruder cousin, restaurant-localized cheapness, are endemic in physics, for reasons I don’t quite understand…
This is a habit picked up through necessity when one is in grad school. Didn’t you get the email?
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:07 pm
@steveM: I’ve had a bit more time to read through the book and I’m suitably impressed so far. I’ve been most pleasantly surprised at the quality of the pedagogy; as far as I’m aware this is Clifford’s first book and yet he is able to explain topics unusually well. Just as well as Sean Carroll did in his GR notes in fact. Again, I stress that I bought the book only today but it does look like it will be useful.
The Cambridge monographs are a great series by the way. CUP seem to publish a great number of titles of interest to physicists. In fact, I’m going to get Hawking & Gibbons tomorrow if they’ve got it in stock. I also highly recommend John Stewart’s Advanced General Relativity.
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:13 pm
How much does $5 mean to you? How much difference will $5 mean to someone pulling minimum wage? I kick in the extra bucks when I have them…
December 3rd, 2005 at 12:03 am
Sinatra to valet parker: “What’s the most you ever got tipped?”
Parking guy: $100, Mr. Sinatra.
Sinatra gives him $200, and asks: “Who gave you the $100?”
Parking guy: “That would be you, Mr. Sinatra.”
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:13 am
NL,
I don’t see any expression of “miserly tendencies” here — at a private party, it’s not at all clear that one should tip. It’s an entirely legitimate question to have.
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:28 am
On the tipping: Thanks guys, but you’re missing that there’a distinction here. I’m not talking about a public valet service, I’m talking about a privately hired service for a private function. The rules are not the same.
On another note, I generally have to say that I don’t buy the whole guilt trip that is usually put on one about tipping irrespective of service. I recall several occasions when I’ve had lousy service in a restaurant and was still bullied by my dining companions to give the full “service” tip anyhow…some story about how accounting includes the tip, etc, etc. Well, fine, but if it is for service, and the service is crap, then I reserve the right to reduce the amount… otherwise how are we to ever get better service?
If the system of remuneration for work, etc, in that industry is broken in some way, I don’t see how it is to be mended by buying into the flaws of the system….. anyway, I won’t get started on this since it is another topic.
The point here is that there is a different system in operation for privately hired valet service – or so I have been led to understand…by tipping for a service that they have already been fully paid for, you are inflating and distorting the system…..creating expectations…and allowing the bosses of the valet company to cream off more of the lump sum outlay on the expectation that the rest will be made up by tips.
Furthermore……. (he stands on his milk carton now)… I did not choose to use the valet service. This is what is most annoying about a lot of these situations. I would have been perfectly happy to be directed to parking and park my car myself, and walk ten minute if I had to. So I also object to having to be forced to pay for this because there is an expectation that I will be delighted to have some high school kid screw up my transmission. The whole valet parking thing in LA annoys me intensely. Everybody wants to be treated like a movie star…. and for those who don’t you get forced into it anyway because people assume that you want to be treated like a movie star. (In reality I want to be treated like a star writer-director….. ok just kidding.)
Thanks all. I took the aforementioned advice of Cathy, who -probably more than any of us- actually regularly goes to these things!
-cvj
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:40 am
This whole tipping culture makes me sick. A friend told me that until fairly recently tipping was unknown in Australia. What a paradise! Sadly the US influence is creeping in there too. Where can I go to live without this noxious custom??
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:44 am
dampt_dweller, steveM,
About the book, “D-branes”. Thank you! People do seem to like the pedagogy I tried to bring out.( Others treat my attempt at pedagogy as a symptom of triviality. Over the years, my papers suffer from this kind of treatment too: clear and understandable=trivial in some theoretical physics circles unfortunately….you can’t win.) I prefer to err on the side of pedagogy, so it is nice to be told that it’s appreciated.
Yes, there are some really embarrassing typos. Not only is Riemann wrong in the early pages, but so is the covariante derivative, and other terms….. sigh… But luckily those are easy to catch if you’re working through….but that is no excuse. Some errors are mine and a ton were introduced by a bizarre copy-editing experience I won’t go into. Safe to say that they’ve changed their practices in that area now and I would publish with them again. Google D-branes, Johnson and Errata together and you should find an errata page that I wrote. It has not been updated for a very long time now and there are several more (smaller) errors that have been found since. Let me know and I will figure out the link for you if you can’t find it.
The complete set of corrections were all going to appear in a third printing of the book, but we changed our minds since not enough of you are buying it now to do another whole printing…so instead it is going to become a “print to order” paperback until I get around to writing a second edition with more chapters and more fun stuff. (That will probably not happen too soon because I blog too much.)
And then there’s a plan in the back of my mind (and in some notebooks) to do a whole new volume….with some fun stuff in it. But then, I’ve a lot of things in the back of my mind, and most of them are best left there.
And then there’s that completely different book project I should tell you all about some time…..once I’ve written it. It’s a fun and unusual idea. Just got to get around to finding the time…..and a bold publisher…….
Cheers,
-cvj
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:59 am
If it’s a girl valet, flirt, then overtip. If it’s a guy, look down your nose at him, then make sports references, then overtip. Bottom line – overtip, unless someone’s overtly jerkish.
Of course, I’d planned to go to be early tonight, and it’s rolling up a two on the clock, and I live in Podunk, Michigan, so feel absolutely free to ignore me if you like, especially if the tipping thing’s been resolved already.
did
December 3rd, 2005 at 2:19 am
Just use the “WWFD” rule in social occasions a physicist must attend:
“What would Feynman do?”
December 3rd, 2005 at 10:50 am
Well, Pyracantha, from what we’ve be led to beleive by his unbiased writings about himself, he would have outwitted everyone in a seven mile radius, and driven home a nicer car than he came with, and he probably would have also taken the nice young pretty valet home to bed. Or if she was a philosophy major, told her she’s pointless, but still slept with her. None of this would really resolve the problem, to my mind! This is why I never ask WWFD!
-cvj
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:35 pm
Tip the kid five bucks; you ARE in L.A., after all.
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:50 pm
Clifford,
This is one of the few areas of life in which I find myself actually being conscious of of being black. As described in this news story from NPR on the “Tipping Divide”, blacks have a reputation for under tipping.
So, perhaps irrationally, I usually tip generously. My valet tip is always $5.
The other reason that I do so is that I seldom feel good about under tipping, and it’s easily worth a couple of bucks to feel better. [I make exceptions for truly horrid service, of course.]
December 3rd, 2005 at 2:06 pm
Actually, based on first hand personal observation, my guess is that Feynmann would have met someone at the party and gotten a ride home with her after taking a cab to the party.
Elliot
December 3rd, 2005 at 3:27 pm
Clifford,
Maybe you could give the valet an autographed copy of something you’ve published. This may
* get him/ her interested in string theory
* fetch him/ her a good price on e-bay or its future equivalent in, say, 60 yrs when the famous Dr.Clifford J. is no more.
December 3rd, 2005 at 5:57 pm
If it matters, then maybe a bit of background on LALA land valet service would be in order. Essentially valet service providers operate along three different “sets.”
Basic deal: They will charge the client a healthy fee which will include wages, gratutities and of course insurance costs. Then they hire the best looking, most athletic, relatively competent drivers they can, along with some supervisory staff, security, and most importantly, vehicle parking spots. This is a big deal, and if the underlying costs become too exhorbitant the actual valets get the short end of the deal. Most who do that job are using it to pay for a living, whether they are college students, hopeful artists in LALA performing arts, or just some other need. Thus the tips they generate are either pooled to be equitably distributed or are theirs alone, which is usually up to the service: to get more active quicker valets the provider will leave tips up to the individual; to get a more efficient service, the provider will encourage tip pooling. All of this will depend on the second problem.
Location: Depending upon the location of the party, the distance between the scene and the various places to park cars, the provider determines a flexible rate for the crew. If the party was up north of Sunset or in the west hombly hills, upper brentwood, santa monica canyon ans so forth, the service charges more because there are lots of hills and little immediate available parking. If the party is in some major business district, then parking is easier and the costs drop some. If the party is in neighborhoods then the cost is inbetween. If your party is in the “rich” hilllands then please tip the valets, as they have to run up and down along streets picking up this or that car and so forth. If it is near a business district with lots of parking lots and still a private party, don’t tip so much, the work is easy.
Competition: There is lots of it both in services and in what is happening that night. If it is a busy party night in town, and in LALA that is generally true, most of the valets are committed and tipping is hugely appreciated by all concerned. This is because there is lots of available services and that drops the overall prices which increases the need for the tips by the grunts. These are big businesses, growing up out of the Events industry starting in my day back in the 60′s. Enterprising college students looking for ways to make bucks came up with great schemes and the valet one is very lucrative: for the management and supervisors, not so for those actually doing the work.
Please be modestly generous. If you feel you can spare $2 do so. A simple rule of thumb is to calculate how many vehicles each valet will park and then retrieve. Two trips per one tip times x number of cars. If the number of valets is low and lots of cars they are going to make good tip money. If the number of valets is high relative to the cars they aren’t and thus can use a higher tip.
My old buddies run one of the more prominent and hugely successful westside LA valet and parking concerns, and have done so since the later 70s.
December 3rd, 2005 at 8:13 pm
spyder, you illustrate my point rather nicely. This is utterly utterly ridiculous. Why not just pay them a decent wage to do the job and not leave us to sit there calculating how far the parking lot is, how many cars this valet might have driven, and the like. I repeat: Ridiculous. We are feeding this ridiculousness and making it way worse with all this social pressure to tip and make yourself feel good.
In summary, I tip generously as I see fit. That is what a tip is supposed to be about. And I am very reluctant to tip when it is not a service I asked for either! I do it to thank for good service and NOT to make myself feel like a good person, and not because of some idiotic statistic about how various ethnic groups are supposed to tip (Belizean #36). If I want to make myself feel like a good peraon, there are several other ways of doing so….
Cheers,
-cvj
December 8th, 2005 at 8:56 pm
Dang, didn’t you see Ferris Buehler’s Day Off? You’re supposed to tip the guy when you get there – a “five-sky” will do