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

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.

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.

Elliot

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.]

-cvj

“What would Feynman do?”

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

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

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

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.

Parking guy: $100, Mr. Sinatra.

Sinatra gives him $200, and asks: “Who gave you the $100?”

Parking guy: “That would be you, Mr. Sinatra.”

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.

This is a habit picked up through necessity when one is in grad school. Didn’t you get the email?

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…)