Service is Not Included…

This week has found me in New York, the city that never sleeps and whose insomnia is powered by coffee-consumption on every corner to cater to the tourist and traveller from dusk to dawn. Assuming, that is, that you include a pre-defined percentage for every moment of pleasure and leisure in your payment!

The tipple of tipping, US style, is of course an assumed line item to any bill, regardless of service. I confess that I am not typically an advocate of acceptance ‘in advance’. When ‘in Rome’ (or New York in this intance) I do tend follow suit of local custom but, if honest, I believe that tipping should be a reward for a return, not a presumed pre-payment for the simple practicing of purveyance regardless of the standards this provides. Indeed, as a frequent traveller and someone who has an inherently high dependency on the help of hotelier hosts and hospitality, I have developed my own Michelin-esque merits on what determines the star rating between standards, satisfaction and success…as well as what frankly just sucks.

This week, however, I have been inspired by the hospitable nature of the New Yorker. Service is always with a smile and, even if that means that it comes with a supplement with or without compliment, there is undoubtedly a sense of sentiment that is second to none. However, just as I have spent this week submersed in the synchronicity of superior service in the social sense, it has caused me to look at the people around me and I have reflected on just how much we play (or not) by these rules in our personal lives and wonder... do we truly do onto others what we would have done onto ourselves…?

If street service has an expectation of a proverbial smile as standard, why is it that making a contribution of kindness to our inner circles it is often conveniently discounted?

Despite living in a world that encourages goodwill and to give generously it often seems that the satisfaction to be gained from the gesture of a personal gift is now just a hopeful cherry on the cake, served with a disappointing reality that despite goodwill we do not always get the sugar coated topping from giving the treat.

The power of an unspoken thank-you can be the most rewarding silence you can ever hear yet strangely for the recipient they are often some of the hardest words to utter. So, as I distribute my own gestures of goodwill this week, I wonder, have we become so programmed in verseing our gratitude gratuitously on a comments card that we have forgotten the courtesy to do the same in a greetings card, or is it just a fact that the joy of giving has suddenly become the joy of taking....plus 15%?

‘Til next time, Pandora