You should still tip — at least for now

When Ontario announced its plans to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2019, loud reactions for and against dominated the discussion — it’ll empower the lower class; it’ll kill jobs — but if you listened close you could hear another voice, meekly in the distance: does this mean I still have to tip?

The short answer, say experts, is yes.

Tipping is cultural, according to Julie Blais Comeau, chief etiquette officer at etiquettejulie.com. Try it in Australia or Scotland and you might insult someone, but here, it’s expected. How much your server is paid, she says, isn’t relevant to the discussion.

“The best way to sum up etiquette is, ‘when in Rome, do as Romans do’,” said Comeau.

Tipping is commonly believed to have originated in Europe, but from there, things get murky.

One theory is the custom of vails-giving — after a lengthy visit from a nobleman, servants from the host’s residence would line up to be paid off for the extra work they’d undertaken on account of their guest.

Another take follows an Englishman who owned a popular inn. He was so overwhelmed at lunch time that one day, he decided to put an urn on the counter engraved with an acronym: TIPS — To Insure Prompt Service.

The rattling of coins, deposited before the meal, let him know who to wait on first.

Even if tips weren’t necessary for a server to make a decent wage, Michael Lynn, a Cornell professor who has written more than 50 research papers on tipping, says other motivations for tipping mean it’ll stick around.

“Clearly, if people are making $15 an hour, they need less financial help than if they’re making $2,” said Lynn.

“But the opportunity to show off is still there, the desire to reward a server for doing a particularly good job, the desire to get better service on future encounters — all of those motivations are still intact.”