4 Dumb Excuses You Keep Hearing from Freeloaders

4 ‘I Won’t Tip. That’s the Employer’s Job!’

A post goes viral where a server calls out foreign tourists for undertipping. In the replies, a smug European will explain that, actually, this is the correct choice, because paying the waiter is the duty of the boss, not the customer.

To avoid singling out anyone for attack, I’ve pasted in someone who doesn’t personally admit to undertipping, but there always will be replies that do. Only, they won’t phrase it as a guilty admission. They’ll righteously say they’re acting correctly because (and this next part is true), it would be better if the waiter’s compensation were guaranteed rather than if it were left to the customer’s whim. 

But skipping on tipping doesn’t make the boss pay the waitstaff their missing $35. It just means the waitstaff never get that money. The enlightened customer didn’t corner the boss and tell them to pay the waiter for their service, and even if they did, the boss wouldn’t obey. 

Now, let’s imagine the boss does respond to that receipt by paying the waiter what they’re owed. Then (in this imaginary scenario, which never happens) the customer did the correct thing, right? No. Because they still walked out on a $240 meal having paid just $205. 

It was a $240 meal — even if, by convention, the restaurant put just $200 on the bill. That convention may well be stupid, but it’s a convention everyone else in the restaurant understands, and if this British visitor doesn’t, that just means they’re ignorant. When you travel, you’re supposed to look up how much people tip, just as you look up whether the water’s safe to drink. Not knowing how much to tip leaves you as clueless as not knowing the exchange rate. 

If the restaurant did pay the waitstaff proper salaries, and no one tipped, then the prices on the menu would be higher. And I don’t just mean that in the way that prices are always said to rise when salaries rise (which isn’t even necessarily true). I mean a dish that’s now $20 on the menu will then be $25 because $25 was the implied price all along, including service charges, and most people understood that.

A tourist who’s convinced they need pay just the number on the bill is equivalent to a tourist who walks out right after dessert, not paying anything at all. “No one brought a bill,” they say, not realizing that’s because the customer is supposed to signal for the check when ready. “That must mean the meal is free.” 

3 ‘I Can Sing in the Theater. I Bought a Ticket!’

Here’s a topic that will hopefully never be relevant again after December 2024, so for the sake of future readers, I’ll have to provide context. There was this movie called Wicked, which later audiences would look back on as an incompetent mess / the Best Picture of the Year (I’ll edit this sentence retroactively as needed). It adapted a famous musical, and some fans who knew the lyrics sang along during screenings. This, of course, ruined the experience for those who wanted to just hear the movie. 

Celebrities, apparently, sided with the singers. This makes sense. Celebrities don’t have to share a theater with them. Also, celebrities don’t especially care if your theatergoing experience is ruined by disruptions; they only care that you bought a ticket. In fact, if singers ruin your experience, that raises the possibility that you will buy a later second ticket as a do-over. 

But the real senseless argument here (said both by The Rock above and by individual singers) is that the singer has a right to sing because they paid for a ticket. In reality, the ticket granted them admission to the screening, but that doesn’t mean it grants them unlimited power. They bought the right to watch the film and bought nothing else. 

Until the eventual special designated singalong screenings, the only way to buy the right to sing in a theater is to buy out the whole room, so it contains no one who also bought a ticket and has a right not to hear you. 

2 ‘If Buying Isn’t Owning, Pirating Isn’t Stealing’

There are many reasons to pirate. For starters, it lets you get something without paying. There are other reasons as well, which pirates will be happy to list for you, but mostly it comes down to how it lets you get something without paying.

Recently, pirates found a new reason. Companies have the ability to remove a purchase from your library after you’ve bought it. They may do this if, say, it’s an online game and the company has stopped supporting it, or for other even less justifiable reasons. This gave rise to the following slogan:

“If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing” might sound catchy, but no part of it makes sense. For starters, no one actually charges pirates with stealing. They charge them with pirating, which we’ve always known is different from stealing, so no one cares if you can prove stealing and pirating are two things. And piracy has never had anything to do with how permanently you own an item. If you copied a rented movie, that was always just as much piracy as if you copied a movie you owned. If you post a full-length CAM video of Wicked, complete with audience singing ruining the recording, that doesn’t become more legal just because ticket buyers never owned the movie. 

Whether you have the right to something without paying and whether buyers keep their purchase forever are unrelated ideas. “If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing” is like saying, “If renting isn’t owning, then squatting isn’t trespassing,” or, “If dating isn’t marriage, then confinement isn’t kidnapping.” 

Maybe what they mean is, “If you sell me something and tell me I’m buying it forever, I still own it even if you take it away from me. I’ll access the content I own through means that you call illegal, because that’s my right.” If so, someone needs to work on condensing that, because that’s far too wordy for a slogan. 

1 ‘Insurance Should Pay for Everything. They Have the Money.’

Along with a surprisingly spirited debate over whether murder is good, the recent shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has brought attention to how exactly insurance works. Specifically, it brought attention to how a lot of us have no idea. For example, a chart went around claiming to show how often various insurers deny claims, but it turned out that those numbers were made-up because no one has access to all that info. Even each insurer doesn’t know how often competitors issue denials. 

You also heard some people indignant that if they never get sick, they don’t get back all the money they paid to the insurance company:

You probably already understand how that doesn’t make sense. The simplest explanation is that if the company refunds money to well people, where do they get money to treat sick people? It won’t be from the sick people themselves, as insurance is not a savings account and sick people’s own premiums aren’t enough to cover their treatment.

But once you understand that insurance payouts have to come from somewhere, you discover something more worrying. Insurance companies don’t have enough money to fully treat sick people even with all the money they do keep.  

We hear many people say that anytime an insurer denies a claim, that’s wrong of them. Insurers should cover all claims, using that massive haul of money they take in. That raises a question: Just how much money does the health insurance industry take in? One estimate of this received wide coverage, thanks to a rep initially overestimating it by 1,850 percent: 

That $71 billion figure is large, even if it’s far from $1.4 trillion. But given that those companies insure some 200 million customers, it adds up to just $360 per person. That’s something, but it’s hardly enough to newly cover everyone’s needs. To put it another way, insurance company profits are equal to 3.4% of their expenses and payouts. So, if they decided to forgo profits altogether, they could increase everyone’s coverage by a few percent — which would be nice, but that’s not exactly a gamechanger for everyone.

See, insurance works well enough when it insures against something unlikely. Let’s say you take out insurance against getting hit with a pie by a professional clown, and the chances of this happening are one in a hundred. We could all pay the insurance company a dollar a year, and they can pay out $90 to each of the one percent of people who get clowned on annually. Every claim is accepted, claimants get much more than they paid and the insurance company still makes a tidy profit. 

But if insurance must cover something most people need, and lots of people file claims every year, no one will get back much more than they paid in. Picture half of people getting pied annually, in which the insurance company could only pay each $2. Then if everyone files claims every year, no one gets anything more than they paid in. Unless (and this is what does happen in practice), the company pays extra big to those who really need it, and some people are less at risk but pay the same premiums as everyone else. In that case, people who aren't top-priority get less than they paid in, even if they do get sick. 

When you take out insurance on something, you have an expected payout. That’s the sum you might get, multiplied the chance you’ll get it. In the original clown example, it’s 90 cents per year. Your premium will always be more than your expected payout (or, if we say the company has no profit or other expenses, it’s exactly the same as your expected payout). Insurance only works if you can afford your expected expenses, and if you gladly pay even more than that to be spared the small risk of a giant unaffordable expense. If hospitals cost so much that people can’t even afford their expected expenses, those prices don’t become more affordable when those same people pool their money together. 

Right now, the many insurance executives reading this article are grinning, figuring they just read a defense of their profession. “Finally,” they say, “someone explains why we can’t pay out on every claim.” But “health insurance can’t cover people’s needs” isn't much of a defense. It means the very concept of health insurance is broken. 

In fact, if you have your own idea for fixing health care (say, funding the pool more, by taxing people who can afford to pay more), you shouldn’t be surprised that current health insurance isn’t the solution. If insurance companies could just cover every claim using their vast profits, fixing health care would be easy and we wouldn’t need to devise any new plan for it. The real problems — illness, and high costs — aren’t caused by insurance, and we shouldn’t be taking cues on how to address them from Saw VI.

For now, you’ve still got to get insurance. Otherwise, you have zero chance of affording those occasional giant expenses, and the hospital would bill you even more than they bill the insurance company if they could. Then when it comes to ultimately fixing health care, people have a few different proposals, but all sides can agree on one thing. It’s that Saw VI not only is one of the best installments in the Saw series — it has one of the most remarkable endings in the history of cinema.

I’m serious about that. Because along with concluding its own storyline (in which people decide whether to kill a health insurance executive, and we watch the result), it crosscuts to a different character in a separate deathtrap. This character has been around for four movies, and rather than resolving his fate and then giving us a brief closing sequence for us to process that, the movie leaves his fate unclear until determining it in the absolute last second.

What other movies resolve the suspense in the literal last second? Challengers? Some Like It Hot, maybe? This is something more films should be brave enough to try. 

Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.