2.2. Small money, big impact? – Digital Tipping
Tipping is often treated as casually as it is paid. What exactly tipping is cannot even be defined by a precise legal term, but is more akin to a “moral agreement”, as historian Winfried Speitkamp describes it, whose small volume Der Rest ist für Sie! is one of the very few German academic publications on the history of tipping. However, tipping is anything but a trivial matter: 10 percent on every “tipable” transaction, in a restaurant or in a cab, at least in Germany; in the USA, as is well known, it is even twice as common, around 20 percent.
