Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that.

It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he never once offered a tip.

Frugality aside, he was always very polite and warm so I can't be mad. Makes for a good ice breaker story.

Edit: holy moly, this is a sensitive subject. Please remember this was from a time before tipflation. Tipping meant you left your change behind once in a while only if you felt the desire to show appreciation. It wasn't an obligation. Yes, I still do think it's a funny story. Roast me for being entitled lol

Poor misunderstood Ballmer :(

> Man, your entitlement just makes me want to never tip.

Urban legend has it that the word "tips" is an acronym for "to insure prompt service." Whether or not this is true, the OP's optimization for "prompt service", as defined above, makes an assessment of same qualifying as entitlement puzzling.

> Just because someone has the ability to pay you money doesn’t mean you earned it.

See again the effort of having the drink ready before the customer was on premise.

And I assume you do not expect any non-required service from those transactions. Which is understandable, yet different from:

>> We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait!

If this additional service were provided during your patronage, would that warrant a tip even though interaction was at a register?

Make too little to afford an apartment, healthcare and food and you work in the food service industry? You deserve a tip. You work in a meatpacking plant? Oh, get screwed.

If you're served by a human and tips are not included in normal pay by law, you tip.

If it's a country where people can't live with just the one job, you tip a lot.

If each waiter could provide their own menu on which they could set their own prices individually and take their own hidden cut, then that would be fair capitalism.

They'd make a lot more money because consumers would be too lazy or too embarrassed to ask a different waiter for their version of the menu...

That would be a much better culture for workers.

Unfortunately the current system is set up to make every form of payment for labor into a charity. So workers are always in the position of begging their boss or customers and they are never in the position of intermediating transactions.

There are a set of pretty arbitrary customs about where you tip and where you don't tip. You would be considered a weirdo if you tipped at the grocery store. In the US, you have to tip at sit-down restaurants.

Traditionally, in the US, people rarely tipped when they had to go to the counter to order and pick up food.

That's just the custom, though it seems to be rapidly changing, so that basically any food or drink service now involves tipping.

Tipping everybody who you hand cash to is crazy. And the US is the only place where you have to do it for a large percentage of that population.

But in this culture that Steve exists within, those positions are paid mostly by tips. He certainly could afford to help out the people that prepared his iced tea ritual for him in a timely manner, but he did not.

There’s a place that does this less than a block from me right now. Actually probably 2-3 places if you extend a block further.

By that logic, most reading these comments should expect to hear from their employer:

  What annual bonus?
  What stock options?
  The company is paying full price that your time was being sold at.

This mostly happens at smaller stores and not big chains.

Ballmer was never the richest man in the world, not even for a moment.

Right now is about the closest he has ever come to that marker (#8, $148 billion).

Coffee bars are a grey area. If I'm ordering something fancy, I'll probably tip. If I'm getting a cup of black joe from an urn of pre-made coffee, I may or may not.

I'll continue to tip well for people working in traditionally tipped positions. The last few years have seen companies attempt to massively expand that list of positions so that their employees get paid more without their bosses having to pay for it. Those cheapskates can give their workers raises instead of turfing it off onto us.

In a country with race-based segregation, it's very convenient mechanism to have a method of compensation that can be altered based on your physical appearance.

The way I framed the above was to directly address:

> Man, your entitlement just makes me want to never tip.

False. Presumably this was in WA, employers have to pay full wages. there is no carve out "tipped" wage (most) of the rest of the USA has. Currently, min wage in Redmond (King County) is $20.29/hr.

Many businesses in King County do not allow tipping.

We learned his schedule, we made sure to make his drink so it would be ready on time while also handling the hundreds of other orders in the morning rush. This is something we tried to do for every regular customer with a fixed order.

I'd argue that this sort of thing is well within the bounds of what was 'tippable' service back then.

But to be clear, tips weren't expected then like they are now. It was an infrequent thing. If you dropped your ~15¢ change into the jar once or twice a month, you were a generous tipper.

We served Steve for many years and he was definitely an outlier. He wasn't the only other customer that never tipped. But he was the only one that was famously rich, which is what made it so amusing to us.

That's thanks entirely to the tip system.

I'd love to know if that is a livable wage in King County.

And for many states the state minimum wage overrides this.

Stock options are because you could be paid more or you are taking risks for future rewards.

A mandatory tip is because your employer doesn't want to pay you full wage and instead of increasing the price and pay you more, they pass it over to the customers. So they get the same profits without having to bother.

Quite different reasons.

Fixed my comment to reflect this correction. Thanks!

  > Annual bonus is either performance based

  >>>> We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! 

  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When tipping is no longer customary to receive good service and seeps into other aspects of lives it leads to all sorts of problems and situations.

This[1] is an extreme example of that situation in a different country but are we really ready to accept similar consequences and say they should've just paid the poor nurse ?

1. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/up-mainpuri-infant-die...

Or were you actually waiting tables and he'd be at a table?

If it's the latter I apologise for the brusqueness.

Regardless of how you feel about tipping culture we're not talking about the average person nor are we talking about the average *experience*. The dude is worth north of $100bn, and is making nearly $10k per minute![0]. Someone who cannot spend his wealth. Someone who'd have to spend tens of millions of dollars every single day just to stop his wealth from growing. Someone who makes money faster than he can throw hundred dollar bills handfuls at a time.

We're not talking about anything normal here because no one here *literally* makes thousands of dollars in the time it takes to wipe their ass. You can become poor, he would need an act of god to do so.

We can have a conversation about tipping and how much everyone hates it, but to ignore the fact that we're talking about someone with this kind of money is... ludicrous[1]. Throwing down a hundred bucks means literally nothing to the man. It is not even what a penny is worth to most of you. He's not you and framing the discussion this way is obtuse. Rage on tipping, I don't give a fuck and I'll probably join you. He's not "sticking it to the man" or "standing up for his values" he *is*" the man. He's playing an important role in creating this machine you're raging against. I just don't understand any of you

  [0] 1e11*0.05/365/24/60
        |   |    |   |  |_ minute
        |   |    |   |____ hour
        |   |    |________ day
        |   |_____________ Conservative 5% yearly return
        |_________________ At least 25bn less than he is worth...

  [1] FWIW, I hate tipping too. Fuck the till based tips with the ever increasing percentages. I frequently click 0. But fuck it man, I'm a grad student. Still, if I'm a regular somewhere and they are giving me special service, I'm gonna throw a few dollars into the tip jar. Tipping culture or not they're going out of their way for me and I should show gratitude in some way (you can also do by other means)

Sounds like a tip to me.

> Stock options are because you could be paid more or you are taking risks for future rewards.

Sounds to me like the allure of a job in which tipping is expected.

> A mandatory tip is because your employer doesn't want to pay you full wage ...

Tips are not mandatory by definition.

And no, I don't think we "should" have received a tip. Most regular customers did tip occasionally. He was an outlier but only notable because of his wealth.

Other customers who do never tipped were treated the exact same.

Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely difficult or skilled job. Nobody should expect a 20% cut for doing that. It is not a customers responsibility to ensure unskilled service workers are rolling in largesse. Just making minimum wage is fair for that kind of work provided the minimum is livable.

I'm American but have lived in Australia for nearly 20 years, and in Melbourne for the past 15. There's a huge coffee culture here and almost all cafes have a tipping jar. But I can't imagine any baristas finding it odd to the point of mentioning if a patron, even a repeat patron, never put money in the jars.

I've never been a Ballmer fan myself although he's gotten more likeable post-Microsoft IMO, but to me it says a lot about his character that he both got his own coffee/tea (as opposed to having a PA do it for him), and if you're saying he was always polite then I have no clue why you'd feel the need to cast aspersions on him by suggesting he should have tipped but didn't.

MIT's living wage [0] seems to include car ownership (despite King county having a decent public transit system and I know several people that don't have cars working in tech). My first place in a great part of town was $1,400/mo in a roomshare. The podments are as low as $750/mo, but MIT says you need at least $2k/mo.

[0] - https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/53033

then proceeds to drop emphasis, F words and other strong words.

Maybe take a page of your own book.

Then it should be easy to automate, but the best I've seen is a conveyor belt or a box on top of a roomba. In reality it's a very skilled job, it's just that most everyone is capable of doing it. And "fair" is any wage were you can live and increase the quality of your life over time as much as your work has increased the quality of others.

Sounds like a convenience for everyone involved. Maybe they should have tipped him?

No. But it's funny that he, of all people, didn't. It's the juxtaposition of wealth and frugality that are amusing.

> are you trying to say that in Seattle at the time tipping baristas was literally a well-established norm?

Yes. Without a doubt. But the norm was to tip infrequently, and not everyone did it. Those that did tipped once a week or 1x/2x a month. And it was usually just their change, significantly less than 10%.

> I can't imagine any baristas finding it odd to the point of mentioning if a patron, even a repeat patron, never put money in the jars

No one blinked an eye at the regulars who didn't tip. It wasn't a concern. The only exception is when it was a famous billionaire. It's notable.

> why you'd feel the need to cast aspersions on him

How so? I shared an objective observation. And I made clear that there was no ill will. Not even the slightest bit upset.

I feel like a lot of commenters are working through their own issues with tipping that surfaced with this light hearted story. Tipflation sucks, I get it. But this story isn't that.

Do US waiters really get paid more than UK with PPP/forex? You seem to have the data to hand.

If 0% is good enough for Mr. Ballmer, it's good enough for me.

Idk how to tell you this, but this is a pretty common pattern for human speech. You see it in plenty of countries, plenty of cultures. Welcome to Earth. Words mean more than the literal dictionary interpretation of them.

Edit:

I only have sass in me tonight.

I worked in restaurants, and let me tell you, I never felt exploited in tipped positions. If anything, I felt like lucky at least compared everyone else in the restaurant industry. The real exploitation happens in the back of the house…

In retrospect it's pretty obvious there was a big miscommunication, and he didn't really seem rude about it (supposedly he did talk to a project they put outside the hall because it used a Kinect IIRC). It really wouldn't surprise me to find out the university told him we just so happened to have this research fair going on the day he'd be visiting.

I bet Mr. Ballmer saved a lot of money from his "polite and warm".

I once watched one of TED business talk videos. In the video the businessman proudly claimed that from a very young age, he learned to take advantage of people's empathy towards him as a kid to get a better business term (or something like that, it was long ago I can't fully remember).

From that video, I've learned to reduce my empathy/emotional reaction when making decisions. Because you just don't know if the other side is manipulating you into making mistakes. Money is money, you pay what you should've, we'll discuss extra things after that.

If Mr. Ballmer never pay the tips that he should've, then he needs to pay more for the product (in the form of added on convenience fee, for example). Of course, if you failed in charging such fee, then that's your fault, for falling into the "polite and warm" trap.

BTW: "sensitive" not. But comments on Hacker News are often trended to demand stuff for free, including kindness which is independent of the original stuff. That's very foolish.

Today at least you have 15% 20% 25% choice to punish or reward people who directly serve you. If everything is 20% included in the price (oh, it will be like this, it always goes like this), then you just have to sit there and take in whoever got the altitude that day. That's not even how capitalism let alone democracy works.

There are some philosophical problems there. The business/servers can't renegotiate the menu like that - if they aren't getting paid for a service and the customer didn't ask for it then there is no reason they should get more money for it.

Also, an observation about how the economics of regulars work - if you are a regular the business is probably already making a lot of money off you. Someone who goes back even a single time earns them 2x as much as a one-time walk in. Being a regular is already a favour to a business even if all you do is order something cheap off the menu. In my experience, when a business identifies that I am a regular they try to make me pay less to keep me coming back.

I do agree though in general about tipping culture and how most people feel about it. I’m not necessarily trying to white knight for a billionaire here, either.

Hope that makes sense and I do appreciate your responses.

evidently the tips under discussion were not mandatory.

and i dont even know where to start of your ideology of fair either. i feel like its flexible enough to use it however fits your idea why denying any other

Baristas are paid to make iced tea. The customer doesn’t expect them to do more than that, but they can be nice, learn your name, prepare your tea ahead of time, change the tea recipe to something you enjoy more. Don’t you think they should get a nice bonus too?

In the service industry, you wouldn't need to say end customer, because the person you're delivering to is already the end customer. Either way is still a results based cash reward paid by the entity receiving the direct output of your work.

Which doesn't seem like it should be a big problem in an already not tip-heavy, but there are a surprising number of people who make a very big show of not being able to tip because there's no credit option.

The customer was presented a deal. That the deal includes non-written, ever increasing additional charges unilaterally imposed by other side is exploitative.

If you have enough money that tips are a rounding error for you -- not tipping just makes you an asshole.

Are you the kitchen hand washing dishes? Are you the chef or cook who makes the meals and food that the customers eat? Are you a cleaner mopping the floors after business hours? Nope - none of you get a tip, unless the restaurant has a policy of collecting all tips and redistributing them to all employees. But how often does that happen? It's really easy to just pocket the tip and keep it for yourself.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S...

Very few waiters are making as little as you say. Just think of what you pay as a tip for one table for 2-4 people and remember they’re handling quite a few tables at a time. Quite often if they get a bachelors degree and the attached salaried job they take a significant pay cut, but the hours are better for having a family.

So how long did you spend doing it, to be able to asser that?

I don’t know if it’s well intentioned but it’s peak HN.

Back to the topic at hand: Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to objectively analyze

The mower was £500 (my Dad was the gardener)

It is the workplace's responsibility to pay their staff adequately. NOT YOURS.

0% tip all the way everywhere. No matter if I have $10 or $10k on the bill.

I suppose people who have lived there all their life just don't notice it, but for me as an outsider the amount of stress and awkwardness that the tipping culture produces in daily life is ludicrous.

Oh yes, the wealthy are superior to us unwashed masses in every way. How I wish I could see through and objectively analyse, but my bank account won't allow that.

Are they? Google claims the average is about NOK 200 per hours? That’s barely above the tipped minimum wage in Washington or California. So it would be considerably less with tips?

Variable, pseudo-optional tips seem like a much bigger problem.

tipped workers would probably be making considerably less on average than now if tipping just disappeared. Especially in states like WA, CA, NY etc. which don’t even have a tipped minimum wage

I wouldnt be too harsh judging that business though, quite a few restaurants are barely cutting it so this may help them stay afloat. Its this or generally higher prices in restaurants.

Min wage for tipped workers is $17.25 per hour. London is ~$18. So with exorbitant tipping it should be considerably higher?

Also taxes might be lower.

Maybe 20 years ago? Almost nobody in the US is making that little these days regardless of the Federal minimum wage.

And in nicer states you get $15-20 + tips.

That's exactly the point? Buying iced tea everyday for some time means that he liked it. Not showing appreciation to something he clearly appreciates

My distaste is exactly because of how he spent his time working. I believe we'd be further along without them, considering efforts against free/libre software.

It is weird to me that a guy like that even bothers to pick up his own daily black iced tea. Once you are making a few million dollars per year (and you have a net worth > 1B USD), I would assume that everything would be brought to you. Literally, have an assistant who does all of this stuff and brings it to your office. The most highly paid people that I have ever observed up close were in non-stop meetings all day long -- talkin' money! They had no time to buy their own daily coffee or lunch. There was an assistant who would bring everything to their office. That said, maybe he did it to "feel normal". For any human being, having a net worth > 1B USD must really screw with your world view.

I don't see this hyper-optimization as a good thing. Externalities and so on. Of course dragons hoard coins. They look nice, bring good things, and who is going to stop them? "Game theory" is broadly applicable

All this to say: if tipping is a life altering decision for you, I have news. You're closer to the townsperson than the dragon, outlook is grim. Now the cycle may continue!

    > It is the workplace's responsibility to pay their staff adequately. NOT YOURS.

You don’t feel the need to tip the people stacking shelves at Walmart or the Amazon driver.

In almost any other job we reasonably expect that someone’s compensation is between them and their employer and that the state should be making sure they’re protected from exploitatively low income.

Why are waiting staff a special case? People have worse jobs that come without tips and it doesn’t seem to bother anybody.

Those tips are expected now and irrelevant to service so it’s also just helping employers get away with paying those staff members less, so it’s really just subsidizing restaurants and cafes at this point.

I'm not aware of this, but then the U.S. has a different tipping culture to elsewhere. Have you got any examples?

Also, if it's your responsibility to pay the staff, do you also get the right to dictate how they do their job (within reason)?

I personally only tip if service was extraordinary and I appreciated it. Which is once a full moon at best

Tipping culture is quite different in the Americas than it is in e.g. the UK. I don't think it takes much effort to analyse that the winners of tipping culture are the restaurant/bar owners as they don't have to pay their staff properly and can avoid tax.

Whilst I don't like tipping culture, I think there's a different reason as to why billionaires might not tip - greed. Normal people would never get to be a billionaire as it takes a particular kind of greed to have millions of dollars and to be determined to hoard even more money when you know full well that it's often made by exploiting the employees that made you all those millions. It's a very nasty, selfish form of hoarding that hurts society, so don't be surprised when billionaires demonstrate that they don't care about anyone else.

And by tipping you are keeping it so they can just afford to keep making ends meet, thus enabling the status quo.

It could be argued you are continuing the problem.

For example?

That seems unlikely - do you have any figures to back that up?

What exactly are your expectations here?

This has no bearing in reality. Most of these places can't staff their stores because no one will work for prevailing wages.

>Thus, you, someone with enough means to eat out

Oh yeah, the people grabbing coffee at Starbucks are all rich.

Raise your prices and pay your staff.

He shows appreciation by showing up and buying tea every day.

How much do you tip Apple or Microsoft as appreciation for their software every time you show up to use it?

Name one (let alone "lots").

It makes no sense to psychoanalyze a Ballmer's mind from this short episode.

That "service charge" is usually (mandated?) listed on the menu, so it would lead to quite an awkward conversation if you then complained after sitting and eating the meal. It's quite often specified for groups over a certain size and it makes more sense than getting into a "tipping" argument after the meal.

Since tipping is done by customers. It is like employers tell employees you can let customers know good service is for good tippers. Maybe car repair mechanic can pour sweet tea in instead of engine oil since customer is known to be bad tipper.

I am sure that will go very well with that business.

I don't use their products which for me are all garbage and I tip often free and open source software.

Now the important thing, comparing "tipping" Apple and Microsoft to giving a tip to a minimum wage worker is quite evil.

Relatively speaking? Yes.

Someone spending $4+ on one coffee mean they can easily tip.

And if your argument is that they can't afford that?

Then those same customers won't be able to afford the price increase if Starbucks simply raised labor costs and passed it on.

I don't get this argument, because at the end of the day you're paying both ways.

Either you're paying higher menu prices (because labor costs have increased) or you're paying tips (because labor costs are artificially low and you're supplementing them).

There is no magical "the business pays its employees more, but everything you buy stays the same price."

Especially not with food service margins.

That said, obviously I have some concerns on the billionaire class, especially the hundred billionaires.

  > can’t understand how big big numbers are.

I think the best example of this is MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos's ex-wife. She's been spending her money as fast as she can and she "hasn't lost a dime". Forbes had her starting at $36bn and currently has her at $35.6B[2]. In the time since she has divorced Bezos she's given away nearly $17bn. We're talking less than 5 years.... In <5 years she's "spent" half of her static wealth and still has what she started with. Money at this level simply does not work the same way and a lot of people do not fundamentally understand this.

But there's also a psychological issue I don't get. What is the point of having so much "fuck you money" if you are not going to tell people to fuck off. Certainly they do at times, but often they don't. To have the wealth to do whatever you want, to be unconstrained, unburdened, and to still have anxiety and concern? To be stressed? I can understand that old habits die hard, but they do die.

[0] I started my academic life in physics. We do giant numbers and tiny numbers. I can with great certainty assert that our brains are not made to actualize these numbers. It is amazing that we have the math to work with them but when you stop to compare and it blows your mind. This is not done enough.

[1] https://www.spend-elon-fortune.com/ or articles like this https://youngfinances.com/spend-1-billion-dollars-you-cant-h...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/profile/mackenzie-scott/

Money is a proxy. Did we forget what it was for?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In the scenario I set forth, an employer assumes the role of customer during annual reviews of their employees.

> It is like employers tell employees you can let customers know good service is for good tippers.

This is non sequitur as clarified above.

In the scenario I set forth, an employer assumes the role of customer during annual reviews of their employees.

How about we go with the rock-paper-scissors suggestion?

Yes, what is considered "livable" varies wildly from person to person.