Don't tell me what to tip!

I'm generally a heavy tipper (you try carrying around plates and dealing with jerks all day), but I don't believe in automatic gratuities being tacked on at the bottom of checks, no matter how good or bad the service happens to be. Greg Beato puts it this way:

If tipping isn't exactly a rational exercise, it is an ingenious and metaphorically valuable contrivance. It gives plate-schleppers a chance to act like entrepreneurs. It gave men who can't afford dessert a chance to act like philanthropists. It imbues the players on both sides of a transaction with a greater sense of autonomy. A waiter isn't locked into whatever limits his boss might set for him -- he can partially determine his own fate. A customer can exert some power in determining the ultimate value of his dining experience. Make it automatic, though, and tipping loses this power.

Chicago Pizza introduced a policy in which a 15 percent tip is automatically added to the bill. The restaurant, it seems, wanted to ensure that its waiters earn at least $7.50 per hour. Fine. But why not just raise prices instead of laying a wage increase on customers?

Last fall, a pair of college students in Pennsylvania tried to settle their bill at a local tavern. Brazenly and rebelliously, they tendered $73.87 for the food and beverages they'd consumed. But they didn't want to leave a tip, even though the tavern had thoughtfully applied an automatic gratuity of $16.35 to their tab. (The tavern presented this automatic gratuity as an 18 percent charge, but $16.35 is actually 22 percent of $73.87.) Because they'd had to get their own napkins and utensils, fetch their own soda refills, and wait for their food as their waitress grabbed a smoke, they decided a more appropriate gratuity would be zero. The tavern's manager insisted otherwise and called the cops, who promptly handcuffed the Bonnie and Clyde duo and hauled them off to jail. Eventually, the local district attorney had to let them go. There isn't any law against not tipping. Not yet anyway.