The Cheesecake Factory restaurant in San Francisco gets really, really busy on a Saturday night. If you arrive at quarter to eight in the evening, you will be asked to wait for half an hour, then given an electronic pager, which will buzz when a table becomes available. The staff let you know that it mat take anything up to an hour and a half before you are seated – and, standing shoulder to shoulder with the hungry half of California in the waiting area, you don’t doubt it. It will be almost ten o’clock before you are finally shown to your table, on the breezy patio overlooking Union Square, by which time your stomach will be ready and growling for the enormous dishes this place offers. From then on, however, don’t expect it to be any better – you might wait another twenty minutes for your drinks, another hour for your food, and by the time the cheesecake arrives you will be getting ready for breakfast. It is made all the worse by the fact that other diners around you, and I mean those who were seated after you, are already tucking into their mains by the time your bread arrives, and are pulling out the credit cards while you are still waiting for the server to notice you are finished. At least, that’s what happened to us last week, because we were unlucky enough to have a waitress who, as my mother would put it, lived most of the day in dolly daydream land, wandering about the restaurant as if it were empty. For this reason, we decided to protest in the most effective, if controversial, way possible: we left her no tip.

Tipping is a major part of American culture. When I was a London tour guide Americans who appeared to have paid no attention whatsoever to my rambling stories on the finer points of Regent Street lamp-posts would nonetheless leave me a couple of quid as they escaped the rainy open-top bus. It is something I have naturally taken up myself here, particularly in restaurants, where the common thing to do is to double the tax and there’s the tip. I even tip barmen, who do little more than pour fairly expensive beers and grunt while inspecting my ID to make sure I’m over thirty. The tipping culture here is such that you actually feel guilty if, as we did last week, you decline to leave the extra for what was surprisingly poor service (surprising because this is America, and the level of service you do come to expect is higher than in Europe). This guilt doesn’t only stem from the fear that if you don’t tip, not only will they do nasty things to your food or drink should you return, or that the universe will somehow extract those few bucks from you in some act of karmic vengeance. This guilt stems from the knowledge that many waiters live not off their wages but from their tips, and that the State allows these large restaurant chains to pay below minimum wage for this very reason. Waiting is a very hard job, after all (I know, I did it for many years, often in far more stressful environments than the Cheesecake Factory); but then, waiting until almost eleven o’clock for your food is pretty hard as well.

Now I’m not Mr. Pink, I’m certainly not anti-tipping, but I do see some of the points of the classic argument – why do we tip some people but not others? Why do we leave tips at restaurants but not at fast-food places (where people earn even less in a harder job with arguably more demanding customers), why do we tip bell-boys but not the poor sods who pack our groceries at the store, why do we tip bar-staff in American pubs but not the hardy folk who have to clean the toilets after people have thrown up? The day we went to the Cheesecake Factory we had lunch at a small, unkempt burrito place in Berkeley. The tables were decorated with pictures of famous footballers cut out of Mexican magazines (one had an Arsenal player; I didn’t sit there). The food was incredible, authentic Mexican, and very cheap, but I noticed that nobody was leaving tips, despite the place being reasonably busy. I mean, the service was no worse or better than you’d expect at any burrito bar, in fact I was really quite impressed that the server spoke to me exclusively in Spanish. So as we left I stuck a couple of bucks in the empty but optimistic tip jar on the counter. It probably made little difference, but it showed my appreciation. So when later at a busy, fairly expensive restaurant the waitress gives me my drink twenty minutes after giving my wife hers, with no apology or explanation as to the reason for its lateness, and then continues ignoring us in this fashion for the rest of the evening, then taking away the tip that would have been given automatically is, far more so in the US than in Europe, perhaps the most effective way to express dissatisfaction.