Business travelers, beware. The Marriott hotel chain wants you to give its housekeepers a raise. The company announced September 15 that it was teaming up with A Woman's Nation in support of AWN's “The Envelope Please” initiative.
Marriott said it would place envelopes in more than 160,000 hotel rooms, encouraging guests to leave tips for room attendants. As it happens, I was staying at the Marriott Renaissance in St. Louis this week while attending Autotest, and sure enough, I found such an envelope.
AWN is described as a nonprofit organization, founded by Maria Shriver, dedicated to making sure that the value of women is respected at home and in the workplace. It provides information on employment and entrepreneurial assistance, educational and informational resources, and care giving, among other services.
That's all well and good. But it seems envelope initiative is well intentioned but has gone off the rails.
For the record, I do tip room attendants. But I do not want to be instructed to do so by hotel management, anymore than I want to be instructed to tip waiters by restaurant management.
One thing that could be said about a diner/waiter relationship is that it tends to be one of the more personal of business interactions. There can be issues of waiters' courtesy and promptness that a restaurant manager might have trouble identifying—and a generous tip might reward special service. But in general I would favor moving away from tip-based compensation altogether.
Otherwise, you have to wonder where it will all stop. Perhaps Marriott executives could send out envelopes to their shareholders, soliciting tips if the corporate stock price appreciates adequately.
Update, September 21. Cody Fenwick in Cognoscenti adds this: “I welcome any well-meaning attempt to draw attention to workers who don’t get their due, especially if it has their livelihoods in mind. But when Shriver argues that travelers need to know that tipping housekeepers is customary, she fails to persuade me. By definition, ‘customary’ suggests that mass education campaigns should be unnecessary. If the majority of people don’t tip their hotel housekeepers, it’s not a custom.”
But the bigger problem, he says, is that it puts the onus on hotel guests to supplement the incomes of hotel employees, adding, “An increase in the practice of tipping will almost certainly discourage hotel owners from raising wages. And widening the class of jobs that are reliant on tips is almost certainly a step in the wrong direction.”
In the comment section to Fenwick's article, Kierra adds, “The problem I run into is that I rarely carry cash anymore. And if I do, it's a few twenties for emergencies. I almost never have the small bills necessary to tip any of the random service people that you are apparently 'supposed' to tip.”
That's a good point. I generally try to save ones and fives and tens for tips or to pay for taxis that don't take credit cards. At least you can use a credit card to tip a waiter.