Bienvenue en France! Now, Don’t Forget to Tip the Usher

The Pocket Guide to France and its advice on tipping in WWII France

Introduction

Imagine you are a U.S. soldier stationed in France in late 1944. On furlough, you decide to visit the French Alps. You take a train to Grenoble, the region’s largest city. You hail a taxi at the railway station and book yourself into a hotel in the city center. In the evening, you eat at a restaurant and go to the movie theater afterward. The next day, you explore the surrounding Alps. As your furlough comes to an end, you catch a train the following morning and return to your unit.

Today, this would be an unremarkable holiday that wouldn’t require special logistical skills. In 1944, however, things were different. U.S. soldiers entertaining the idea of tourism faced logistical and other challenges. The first challenge was informational: where to go, how to get there, what to visit, and what to expect in hotels, restaurants, and other establishments.

American soldiers didn’t have to find all the answers on their own. The US Army published several country-specific informational booklets during WWII. One of these was the Pocket Guide to France, which had a long section on tourism in France. It contained, among other things, destination tips (e.g., visit the walled abbey of Mont St. Michel) and a wealth of practical information. For example, US soldiers were reminded that they “must buy [their] railway ticket and show it to the ticket-taker at the gate which leads to the train platforms before [they] get on a French train.”

A phenomenon featured prominently in the section on tourism was tipping. Returning to my opening example, the U.S. soldier-tourist would have been expected to start tipping as soon as he stepped off the train. First, he would have tipped the porter carrying his luggage in the railway station, then the taxi driver, potentially hotel employees, the waiter in the restaurant, and the usher in the movie theater.

Tipping was by no means a uniquely French phenomenon. That’s why it’s interesting that the pocketbook decided to dedicate space to the topic. The country guide was relatively short at 72 pages, which precluded it from discussing obvious subjects. For example, it didn’t say that soldiers shouldn’t go and snitch elderly Parisians’ purses on the street. Every U.S. soldier knew this. This suggests that tipping, or at least some aspect of it, was not self-evident. As tipping was also practiced in the U.S., it must have been the specifics of tipping that, in the authors’ judgment, needed clarification.

Tipping tips

Remember that if you eat your meals in the dining room and do NOT have them charged on your bill, but pay them on the spot, the waiter is still entitled to his personal 10 percent when he brings you his bill for the meal. … When you ride in a taxi, tip 10 percent of the fare. A franc (maybe more now) is charged for each piece
of luggage. … Porters at railway stations also charge (or did) one franc for each valise
they carry. You also tip ushers at movies and theaters for finding your seat. It used to be a half franc at the movies and a franc at the theater.

The booklet provides some justifications for tipping, but they don’t sound very convincing upon even cursory examination. For example, here is one that explains tipping as a form of price unbundling:

All these little tips in France or the hotel service tax merely mean that the customer pays directly for service given him and not for service given someone else, as figured in our more costly American overhead.

To see why this explanation is lacking, consider the hotel service charge, a flat 10% fee. If everybody pays the same fixed amount, then by definition, a person doesn’t pay directly for their desired level of service. Someone could prefer to pay a smaller amount and not have their rooms cleaned daily or their luggage taken to their room. But hotel guests didn’t have this option, so they were forced to make an overhead contribution. It doesn’t matter whether we call the 10% higher bill a tip, a hotel service charge, a tax, an overhead contribution, an honorarium, a gratuity, a staffing fee, or anything else; the result is that the hotel costs 10% more, and the client has no say in their desired level of service.

The pocketbook writers, like all of us, want to create a narrative that things are the way they are for a good reason. They are saying: “Look, this whole tipping thing looks confusing and arbitrary, but there are very good reasons it must be in this particular way.” Sometimes, there are indeed good reasons why things are a certain way (i.e., Chesterton’s fence). Other times, things just happen to be in a certain way, and alternative ways would work equally well.

Tipping doesn’t seem like an inherent feature of life the same way, say, gossip is. When the pocketbook was written, some cultures had tipping (e.g., wartime France), while others didn’t (e.g., wartime Japan). Even in France, there was tipping in some contexts (e.g., movie theater usher) and no tipping in comparable ones (e.g., museum personnel directing visitors to a painting). The pocketbook itself mentions that the hotel service charge was introduced to replace “having to tip down the line of chambermaids, waiters, etc. on leaving.” This, to me, sounds like an unintended admission that there was nothing preordained about tipping.

Navigating the social terrain of tipping

Whether preordained or not, tipping increases transaction costs. It does this in at least three ways.

First, it increases information costs. The tourist needs to learn which service workers should be tipped and how much.  But even after reading the 2-page excerpt on tipping, the American soldier-tourist would not have all his doubts clarified: “It used to be a half franc at the movies and a franc at the theatre,” we learn from the pocketbook. In other words, the expected tip may change over time and from place to place, which means that tourists need to incur this information cost repeatedly.

The second cost is logistical. In cash-based societies, one needs to have the correct change for tipping. It would be strange to ask the usher in the movie theater to return 19.5 francs from a 20-franc banknote. Multiply this interaction by the number of tipping occasions, and we have a tourist with a nuisance on their hands.

The third, and most important, way in which tipping increases transaction costs is by introducing uncertainty into an otherwise well-defined interaction. Absent tipping, the U.S. soldier could simply decide if he wants to watch a movie at a certain price. Introduce tipping, and he is no longer certain how much the movie will actually cost him. Maybe there is a cloakroom attendant and an usher who expect tips, leaving him with a higher final bill. But there is another, non-monetary cost as well, which might even outweigh the monetary cost.

Tipping (i.e., real tipping, not a flat fee masquerading as a tip) introduces some ill-defined expectations. The worker might get offended by what he considers an ungenerous tip. The client might worry they are not being generous enough, trying to second-guess the right amount. Suddenly, you have two people playing mind games and potentially feeling offended, guilty, or experiencing some other negative emotion. Managing expectations is inevitable in economic life, but tipping adds an extra layer of unnecessary complexity.

One way to avoid looking ungenerous when tipping is to tip lavishly, choosing a tip amount from, say, the top 5% of the distribution. This, of course, is not possible at scale. But somewhat higher tips are possible—and would have aligned with U.S. strategic objectives in France in 1944. More generous American soldiers would have been liked more by the local population, an important consideration in forging a stronger alliance with France.

I couldn’t find other sources to corroborate the tipping amounts suggested by the pocketbook. One thing is certain, though: the pocketbook had no incentive to underplay tip amounts, as this would have gone against its strategic objective of creating goodwill with locals.

Final thoughts

The Pocket Guide to France may have been many American soldiers’ first introduction to wartime France and its people. We tend to forget that even during a war, soldiers care about things other than the war. They want to have a decent quality of life, which can occasionally include activities like local tourism. Among other things, the pocketbook provided guidance to soldier-tourists on the elaborate tipping norms prevalent in wartime France. These norms may have been confusing or inefficient. At the same time, their existence reminds us of the rich tapestry of life, with its messy social rules—a welcome distraction from the brutality of the war.