Many local school superintendents discouraged you from coughing up cool holiday gifts for your kids’ teachers.
Given that many of you are impressionable bankers and tradesmen, always doing whatever the Federal Reserve and Barack Obama tell you to do, I’m a little worried that you’ve also been reluctant to lavish holiday gifts on newspaper columnists.
Here it is the end of the holiday season and my desk has no gifts, gratuities, or barrels of rum from grateful readers. Oh, sure, I should have reminded you earlier, but I was very busy crafting wonderful columns that enlighten you and make you happy.
School superintendents can get all huffy about gifts for teachers, because teachers have tenure and summers off and champagne fountains in the faculty lounge. Tenure? Each week, the editor of Banker & Tradesman looks up from his desk, stares at me, and says, “You still here?”
Teachers can spend the summers tutoring the kids who didn’t listen to them the rest of the year. Teachers can spend the summer taking tourists on lucrative tours of the path Paul Revere took as he shouted “government health care is coming; government health care is coming.”
Me? I’m getting a little old and worn out from writing columns all year. I have barely enough energy left to wash the publisher’s car on weekends. Don’t let that photo of me fool you. It’s what Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman called the Three Ages of Man: “youth, middle age and ‘you’re looking wonderful.’”
Proper Payment
On the matter of gratuities, some of you investor types might have thought it preferable to give your gifts to the editors, rather than the cannon fodder that populates the newsroom cubicles. Those editors are just like the pretty boys who are senior vice presidents in charge of almost nothing at your bank. If you want to make a difference, be generous to the people who count. How did the famous publisher Joseph Pulitzer describe it? “Every reporter is a hope and every editor is a disappointment.”
Like all of my columns, this message is intended to benefit you, more than me. A study last year in the journal Science, conducted in part by a Harvard Business School professor, found that people were much happier when they spent money on others, rather than cooing over and fondling their money and investing it in commercial real estate.
The study looked at a company in Boston that awarded workers $5,000 bonuses. The bonuses didn’t actually make the folks that much happier. The happy folks were those who spent it on others. I want you to be happy.
Massachusetts will be slower than the national average to emerge from the recession funk, because the state prospers on business-to-business selling, rather than consumer spending. While my business does sell wisdom to business people such as you, I also buy liquor and cigars. If you give me a gratuity, I can help sustain the consumer side of the Massachusetts economy.
There are many sources of advice on how much to tip a waiter or a doorman, but you’d be hard-pressed to find much counsel on the right amount for columnists. The typical, carefully-calibrated gratuity, based on my Banker & Tradesman pay, wouldn’t be enough to buy me a candy bar. The best advice I’ve seen came from Mae West: “Too much of a good thing is wonderful.”
The art of tipping requires you to be especially sensitive to those around you who are creative and responsive. For instance, columnists are not robots, which perform duties that the guys over at MIT call the “Three D’s” – dull, dirty or dangerous.
No, you might not tip a robot, but for someone who soars above the fray, picking out the best news and analysis just for you, a tip seems in order.
There’s a transportation service in Essex, Vt., called “Recession Ride Taxi,” which offers free beverages to passengers, who are encouraged to “pay what you want.”
Some academic studies have shown that this “guilt” thing actually works pretty well. It’s as if Cohen were in a weekly paper that you received – and you could offer up a gratuity at the end of the year, since you sort of got him for free.
