My point, Clio, is that tipping is a way for the powers that be to keep people in their places. “Hold my, mount, urchin. Here’s a penny for your trouble.” It’s based on a class system that should no longer exist.

If servers weren’t reliant on tips, the restaurant owners would have to share the wealth in the form of a livable wage. Writing is a profession that is now being dragged down with the low-skilled ones and its saving corporations a bundle. They’re trying to teach us to beg because then they don’t have to give us fair pay. Let the readers handle that. Secretaries and receptionists are no longer needed because people are willing to communicate with a machine.

Engineers used to have a typing pool, providing good-paying, respectable jobs to women without college degrees. Now they type their own reports and those secretaries get to spend their golden years packing boxes for Amazon. It’s never been about creating jobs. It’s about creating surplus revenue to make the stock holders happy.

Once more, corporations get people to do things for nothing they wouldn’t have dreamed to ask them to do years ago. We leave a voice message or send an email. Customers and clients are no longer treated with respect because we played along to our detriment.

You don’t tip your doctor, your lawyer, or your dental hygienist. You tip the server, and the valet parking attendant Next time you see Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates at a book a signing, try slipping a $5 dollar bill in their pocket and see how it goes over. We train others how to treat us.

Set up shop like a street musician and that’s how you’ll be paid; in spare change. Our content is their product upon which fortunes are being built. They can afford to pay us better, but they won’t If people keep chirping about the side hussles that pay most of the bills.