At the end of my shift at Blank Street last Tuesday, I took home eighteen dollars in cash tips. It was momentous, unbelievable. Eighteen dollars! That’s enough for a pad thai.
Cash tips feel good. It has something to do with the ability to appreciate money for what it’s actually supposed to be, for its spending power and its stored value, to feel those things in your hands and then pass forward their accompanying emotions by throwing two bucks in the paper cup at Pizzeria Rustico around the corner. These days, I think a tip in cash restores what tipping used to be: a recognition of exceptional service from someone who is good at their job. It feels different from the prompted tips on the POS machine, the ones that used to offer customers 10%, 15%, or 20% options and now suggest 20%, 22%, and 25%. It’s not a structural mechanism to pass the costs of labor from employers to consumers, and doesn’t ring of the breakdown of civic and financial norms that causes everyone from baristas to frozen yogurt vendors to airport machines to ask for tips. Cash tips feel disconnected from the moment of dislike I feel when someone tips zero dollars (or, worse, ten cents), or the moment of regret when I recognize that dislike. Yes, the structure of tipping in America is blatantly awful, and what I find most concerning is its influence on how people feel, the way it produces conflict between workers and customers by assigning the blame for underpayment in the wrong place. But cash tips are different.
In part, that’s because cash is direct. Rather than being organized and divvied up by obscure payment systems, cash tips pass straight from customers to workers without corporate oversight. In other words, because cash is material, there’s no abstraction involved. It can’t be transported or zoomed up into the cloud or split or counted or moved around in complicated ways, because it’s more than a number on a screen. It’s concrete.
A few days after that record-breaking afternoon, Jack and I were stacking quarters from the tip jar on the side of the pool table at Beantown, reserving our spot against the two burliest (and, actually, kindest) Texans you’ve ever seen. We were a few Guinnesses in, and, there in the dim crass quintessential Boston atmosphere, I was thinking about that spectrum. “Concrete,” as opposed to “abstract.” Corporeal versus incorporeal, material versus immaterial, objects versus non-objects. Specifically, I was thinking about how stacking those quarters changes the experience of the Beantown back room — how you bring your coins to try your game, how they mark your place amid the shuffling and clacking and guffawing, how everyone takes the system as law. It’s not just the material feeling of money; it’s the way those quarters are an entry point into a material feeling writ large, a sense of engaging closely with the fabric of the real world — the silver stack, the cue, the grungy lamps all sullen and misplaced, the slightly sticky floor.
The Beantown pool gauntlet amuses me as an example, maybe for the slight comic machismo it takes on in the telling. Another case study occurred a day or two later, when I cashed in on those once-in-a-blue-moon tips by getting a pad thai at House of Siam before meeting Anna at the laundromat nearby. She was slotting quarters into the machine. Fluorescent light, odd teal walls, the classic tiled laundromat floor, a few one-yuan coins that circulate interchangeably among the quarters in a wonderful figure for global harmony and the inherent randomness of assigned value. Coins are currency, sure, but all you really need is a flat round object to do its mechanical job. You could put a Nilla wafer in that slot and the machine would churn to life.
By the time we got to Anna’s a block away, we’d spiraled into a conversation about money. I drew on the intense knowledge of the global economy I gained when I pass-failed Macroeconomics 101 in college to produce these statistics:
Around 92% of all money in the world exists exclusively digitally.
Around 95% of money exchanged each day consists of trades, investments, hedges, and other abstract financial transactions.
Only around 2% to 5% goes toward material goods or services.
In other words, the majority of money moving around each day is not only incorporeal; it’s also prospective, cloud-based, and not grounded by, as they say, “fundamentals,” but rather by some fusion of hype and predictions and gambles and models. It’s like how Goldman recently both helped the questionable AI datacenter giant CoreWeave raise $8.5 billion and built a separate fund designed to capitalize on the volatility of CoreWeave’s stock — and also, should CoreWeave plummet, is set up to profit immensely from the ensuing reconstruction. It’s how the world got such luxury concepts as the “Iron Condor,” the “double diagonal,” and the “short strangle,” all of which are advanced options strategies that maneuver their way toward profits despite sounding like esoteric medieval tortures. This kind of thing is making money as you read. They’re ubiquitous, superfluous, and more or less ridiculous. Big finance, in other words, is a huge cloud of convoluted transactions hovering like insects over the tiny island of the material world.
And, if placing quarters on the edge of the pool table or two bucks in the jar at Pizzeria Rustico is really about a feeling of material engagement, big-time financial abstraction is also a disconnect in feeling. Treating people, labor, and lives as merely factors and numbers is a detour around not just the real world, but its associated meaning.
With a little more economic savvy, I might take a stab at articulating some of the structurally dangerous consequences of that disconnect in substance and feeling. (I gave it a shot, especially after watching The Big Short and feeling depressed about how 2008 was just a bunch of financial abstractions that came unlatched from their material basis; but I ended up with my own tangle of abstractions, and writing, like money, is better when it’s concrete.) I would focus on how private credit, with all its obscurity and closed doors, overexposes the economy to a tech sector vulnerable to both AI disruption and material precarity. I would examine the way the physical threats of climate change are gradually undermining the feasibility of insurance, and, especially, reinsurance. And I would think closely about geopolitical risks; Iran, for instance, is as blatant a collision between the concrete and the abstract as I can imagine — between a price of oil (or nitrogen, or helium) set in an abstract market and the material reality of choked supply.
Instead, being a regular guy with a penchant for making a green goopy drink I don’t like, I feel I mostly just have the authority to articulate the following things. I spend more when I pay with a tap of my phone. I have more social interactions at the grocery store when I pay in cash. And I feel loosely, hazily aware that financial abstraction is also just financial obscurity, a way to grow wealth and consolidate power behind the scenes. That white-noise sleepiness that creeps over you when you start to think the word “fiduciary”? It’s completely on purpose. To put it differently, big finance is not just a structure of feeling that avoids accountability to normal lives and normal labor; it’s also a feeling structured to discourage close inspection.
The thing is, though, that the world — however it’s run and wherever power lies — is still material. When I hand someone a slightly burnt almond croissant in the morning, it is a real croissant, made by a real person who got up early and went to work at Pain D’Avignon Bakery in Hyannis, MA. When I drive to the suburbs to tutor, the traffic I bemoan is made of lots of real people in real cars, all bemoaning together. The three-dollars-per-pound Trader Joe’s gyoza in my freezer? Most definitely real. And so are oil, natural gas, fertilizer, aluminum, superconductors, plastic waste, and carbon dioxide.
The brunt of the effects of this disconnect, of course, fall on people who make their living in the material world. That’s true both in and out of crisis. I recently took an Uber from Charlotte, NC, to Davidson to visit June, and the driver — an older guy in a button-down and a newsie’s cap who lives with his family just south of the city and had the most dignified cough — spoke up when talk of Iran and gas prices came on. “That’s me,” he announced. Later, back in Boston, I paid in cash at one of those Cava-style food bowl chains downtown, and despite watching the person ahead of me tip over the POS system, when I asked if they had a jar for cash the guy ringing me up gave a little laugh. “No,” he said. “The company doesn’t like that.”
I'm not sure when the two realities will clash, or how, or where. In fact, I would like to be proven wrong about this altogether. I would like to be convinced of the utility — not just ease, but actual, large-scale, good-for-average-people utility — of these crazy systems. But for now, on a personal level, my solution is just to spin Madonna into a mantra and appreciate that we are living in a material world. There’s lots of it to go around. I like cash tips, fixing bits and bobs at the cafe, and pouring a good coffee; I like Jack’s print Boston Globe, and that dangerously great pad thai at House of Siam, and shot glasses of chocolate with Anna, and cold apples, and fizzing passes on the soccer field, and the way the newly warm weather allows you to literally just sit anywhere and hang out. I like the centimeter of foam on a Guinness and the off-kilter heads of the pool cues at Beantown, the color of matcha, the rickety commuter rail I take each Tuesday to tutor a great kid in Wellesley, the miso powder sprinkled on Blondie Lattes, even that awfully material feeling of pollen in the air. Maybe we should all throw our phones in a swamp. Maybe we should take an old-fashioned material (zero-dollar?) hammer to some tech hardware. I’m tired of online clouds and code and derivatives, because the trees are blooming, and the scent of magnolias has spattered the city, and people are made for material life.