Vance Packard and The Hidden Persuaders

The continuing relevance of Vance Packard and his warnings against unbridled consumerism

Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders has lessons for assessing supermarkets
Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash

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To Tip or Not to Tip

The practice of tipping and its motivations, and how it might be promoting a culture of bribery and corruption

To Tip or Not to Tip

Around 1990, a colleague shared a real story of a bank branch manager in remote rural Punjab. A borrower wanted to give the manager a gift. It was expensive. New to the job, he resisted. But, the borrower rationalised that he was only sharing in the happiness of having become rich thanks to the loans the bank sanctioned his firm. The incident points to the progressively fine divide between gifts, donations, kickbacks, bribes, extortion, and so on. Tipping is a related, though socially accepted and frowned upon, practice of sharing a monetary equivalent of perceived excess of value over and above what you paid for. Continue reading “To Tip or Not to Tip”

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