In the seventeenth century the word "tip" was originally thieves' slang and meant "to give; pass along". By the early eighteenth century, the meaning included "to give a gratuity to a servant or employee".
In 1972, George Foster, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, found out that in many languages words "tip" or "gratuity" evolved from "drink money", and theorized that the practice began in eating establishments as the way to avoid envy on the part of the server and to send the message that the server can have a drink at the customer's expense.
Funnily enough, the tipping didn’t take hold in the USA, which is today the country with the highest tip percentage, until after the Civil War. The anti-tipping associations were formed and their campaigns were so effective back then that six states actually banned the practice. In 2000, however, Americans paid out $14 billion in tips (according to the Internal Revenue Service).
The studies and researches are conducted now to reveal the behaviors of servers and customers, and one of such studies conducted by Cornell School of Hotel Administration in 2003 found that black Americans tip on average 20 percent less than white Americans.
While Michael Lynn, US expert on tipping, suggests in his studies that "nonverbal server behaviors that communicate liking for the customer, such as lightly touching the customer and crouching next to the table when interacting with the customer, substantially increase the tips restaurant servers receive."
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