"Be Sure To Tip Your Waitress"

One of the most common norms in modern culture is the tipping of your waitresses and/or waiters.  In the very first scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino challenges this ideology that we must tip our waitresses and waiters.

In the scene above, “Nice Guy” Eddie tells everyone to pitch in some money for the group’s tip for their waitress.  Everyone digs into their wallets for cash, all except for Mr. Pink.  When Eddie verbally pushes Mr. Pink for not tipping, Mr. Pink replies with, “I don’t tip”, “I don’t believe in it”.

Eddies continues to push Mr. Pink asking if he never tips.  Mr. Pink then replies, “I don’t tip because society says I have to”.  He goes on saying he only tips if the waitress really deserves it.  He goes on saying that his refusal to tip won’t cause the waitress to starve.  Mr. Pink’s reasoning is that they work a minimum wage job, and when he had a minimum wage job, society didn’t deem his job tip worthy.  He then compares waitresses and McDonald’s employees.  He says that they are two very similar jobs, yet you only tip the one and not the other.  Mr. Pink continues his point by saying, “Society says, don’t tip these guys over here, but tip these guys over here”.

Classic Comedian Final Words

Mr. Pink and Quentin Tarantino are implying to the viewer in this scene that we don’t tip because the waitress/waiter did a good enough job or that we feel compelled to through generosity, but rather that society tells us to.  The dominant interest here is that tipping is a ruse set up by society to give a select few of individuals your money.  Right at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino hammers the viewer with an idea that a belief repeatedly impressed upon them through out their life is nothing more than a shepherd’s cane that society is using to herd them in the direction that it wants them to go in.  In this scene, Tarantino makes the simple phrase “Be sure to tip your waitress” seem like the world's most controversial topic.

However, Tarantino writes Mr. Pink’s own downfall to his ideology through Mr. Blue and Mr. White’s argument that many waitresses depend on their tips to make a living.  Mr. Pink also says if a waitress doesn’t make enough money she can quit, but it isn’t that simple.  If a waitress is depending on her minimum wage job and her tips to provide for her life, tuition, and/or family, then she cannot risk become unemployed and search for a job that may not be available.  In other words, her only options are either employment at her crumby job or unemployment with a high chance of poverty.