All Gone to Look for America by Peter Millar Read Free Book Online Page A

blissfully unaware that they’ve just committed a major faux pas.
    The American service economy’s reliance on tipping is inexplicable to most foreigners but an attempt to subvert it by undertipping is as likely to succeed as an attempt to destroy London’s overpriced taxi system by refusing ever to get into one. It is also not just incalculably rude to waiting staff who really do offer ‘service with a smile’, even if it is for mercenary gain, it is also threatening their livelihood. Waiting staff are paid wages that are in European terms derisory. The government recommends a minimum wage but it is not compulsory and many states have none, leaving employers to offer pay rates on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis. Kansas has a near criminal minimum wage of $2.65 per hour, while New York with a cost of living equal to London’s sets a minimum of only $7.15, only slightly above what we are allowed to pay schoolboys on paper rounds, and even with exchange rates distorted by the fall of sterling, lower than the average British legal minimum for adults. Waiters and waitresses rely on generous tipping to earn a basic living. The cheap mobile phone I’ve just purchased to avoid the punitive rates of using a British mobile over here, includes a ‘tip calculator’ function, which lets you decide between a 10 per cent, 15 per cent, 20 per cent and 25 per cent level. New Yorkers will leave up to 30 per cent and anything less than 15 per cent is considered an insult to the staff and you’d be advised not to eat there again. The same goes for drinks too, which is a radical culture shock for those Brits and Irish who are used to taking every last penny or cent back from their barman, in exchange for maybe buying him one later in the evening. But when in Rome… like I said, just because they sort of speak the same language, it doesn’t mean you automatically understand them.
    By now 5:00 p.m. has rolled around, time to board the Mets Express, a cheery launch sporting blue team colours. The round trip price is an even $20 which is a lot more than I’d have paid on the subway but then it’s a treat of a tripon a warm evening with the sun slowly lowering behind the skyscrapers. They sell cans of beer from an ice-filled cooler at a bar in the cabin, not the good beer from the modern microbreweries, but the thin, tasteless stuff Americans put up with for years from the mass manufacturers, Anheuser-Busch, Coors and Miller. Ball game beer. I buy one anyhow. It’s cold liquid on a hot evening and hey, I’m going to a ball game.
    The ride upriver, away from Manhattan to where the stadium is located in the northern part of Queens borough (actually the southwest end of Long Island) is strangely reminiscent of that downriver from Westminster and central London to Greenwich and the old docklands. The familiar landmarks recede to be replaced by a widening waterscape bordered by rusting remnants of industrial decay. Except that there is no sign here of the renovation that has marked eastern London, led by financial services and now spurred on by the upcoming Olympics. This part of Queens is bleak and abandoned, rusting frames all that remain of old waterside warehouses. And then the great bulk of the stadium rears up, and behind it, squatting in the old parking lot like a cuckoo in the nest, the soaring skeleton of its successor waiting for flesh to be put on its bones for an expected opening in 2009.
    As we step off onto the jetty there is a great roar overhead as a passenger aircraft drops into its approach pattern to land at LaGuardia airport, New York’s domestic terminal. Before adjustments were made to the flight paths, games at Shea frequently had to be halted while an incoming aircraft passed low overhead , though I am not sure whether this was just because of the horrendous noise or because they feared some hard-hitting batsman could knock a Boeing out of the sky. As predicted I have no difficulty getting a ticket: Shea can seat