David Mitchell in the Guardian a couple of months ago:

Lots of people find tipping interactions perfectly normal and can say: “Keep the change!” without breaking into a sweat. More than that, they say it with pleasure because, if they’d been unhappy with the service, they would have said that as well.

“If you’re unhappy, you should say something!” is their refrain. “Otherwise how will the restaurant know?” What a utopia they’re inhabiting, where people say when they’re unhappy, where you can wander around blithely confident that you haven’t upset anybody because, if so, they’d have mentioned it.

Well, that’s not my world. Here, covert displeasure is ever-present and you never really know what anyone thinks of you. So what right does a disappointing restaurant have to the free gift of information? Why should I make the enormous effort of will of telling someone something they don’t want to hear when, instead of thanking me, they’ll dislike me? Society is divided between those who can unselfconsciously tell people what they think and those for whom it takes tremendous gumption.

In this article Mitchell’s arguing on the side of the socially awkward in favour of predetermined service charges at restaurants. Mitchell’s writing is keen, full of humour and sometimes arrestingly creative (“side orders of vegetables that bordered on soup”). Fun read.