I generally love watching Fox News, if only because watching it is not nearly as mindnumbing as subjecting yourself to those "There's the week, there's the weekend, and then there's the day when I would rather listen to Celine Dion in hell than watch this commercial again and that day came a LONG TIME AGO" New York Times ads that lord over CNN, but all day most of its anchors have been on this preposterous rant about Starbucks tipping sparked by a ruling in California court that requires the company to pay $100 million in lost tips to baristas. (Starbucks didn't keep the tips for itself, but it allowed shift supervisors and managers to share them, which violates the law and also prompts the question as to, if the company is so worried about reclaiming its lost culture, why it doesn't pay managers more.) But the issue: not a single person on Fox seems to think tipping at Starbucks is appropriate. In fact, they seemed truly astonished that actually giving such tips was such a widely-shared practice that, even in a guilty liberal state like California, the money in question could ever amount to more than a few thousand bucks. And the astonishing rationale behind this shared opinion: that the coffee costs so damn much already.
There are moments when the true sinister black hole in the place of a heart of the Right reveals itself, and I would think this to be one. You know where they don't tip, Roger Ailes? Fucking FRANCE.
A citizen of this country should not be fucking buying a $4 cup of coffee if he or she can't slip in a dollar - or shit, you know, some larger coins — into the lucite box. The end.
No, not the end. Seriously. I spent many years as a barista, at Starbucks and elsewhere, so I have perhaps a measure more sympathy for their plight than Neil Cavuto, but tipping is the only way I can justify going there. Some days tipping is the only way I know I'm still human. Tipping wherever possible, wherever it is allowed, is your civic fucking duty. Whatever your political stripe, your beef with the way things work in this world— that hard work is insufficiently valued anymore, that market capitalism unfairly rewards elites and hucksters, that the meritocracy is dead or that welfare dissuades anyone from working or that cynicism has permeated our every action these days — tipping is your quickest, easiest, most painless mode of dissent.
Okay, soooo... T.G.I.F.! See you in church!