Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn vos Savant

Etiquette, in Marilyn vos Savant's hands, isn’t about lace doilies and social climbing; it’s a discipline for navigating messy, real-world friction. “Know how and how much to tip people who expect gratuities, even in the case of poor service” lands like a corrective to the modern fantasy that every transaction is a pure meritocracy. The point isn’t to reward mediocrity. It’s to recognize that tipping culture is a system with its own coercive logic, and pretending otherwise just turns your personal annoyance into someone else’s shortfall.

The specific intent is practical: don’t improvise morality at the end of a meal. Have a rule, follow it, and stop using the bill as a stage for your indignation. Vos Savant’s subtext is sharper: “poor service” is often downstream of understaffing, bad management, kitchen delays, or sheer exhaustion, and the worker who “expects gratuities” is frequently a worker whose base wage quietly assumes you’ll make up the gap. Withholding a tip doesn’t meaningfully discipline the system; it disciplines the nearest person who can’t argue back.

Context matters here. Coming out of late-20th-century advice culture, vos Savant treats social competence as a form of intelligence: anticipating the norms that actually govern outcomes. The line also exposes the moral sleight of hand in “I tip based on performance.” In a tipping economy, gratuity isn’t just praise; it’s payroll. Her counsel is less about being nice than being clear-eyed: if you hate the system, fight the system. Don’t audit a stranger’s livelihood to feel principled.