In nineteenth-century restaurants and cafés, customers’ tips provided the income of an increasing number of waiters and waitresses. Not only did employers refrain from paying serving staff a fixed wage, the latter had to share their employers’ general expenses, while some even had to pay a fee for the privilege of working. Exploring newspapers, pamphlets, reports, and union sources, the article discusses in a comparative way how and why these practices were deployed in Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, London, and French and German cities. As a result of the overcrowding of the labour market in hospitality, hiring workers became not only a cost-free transaction, it even developed into a source of income. Serving staff paid for the opportunity to collect tips, even if their increasing number reduced individual income. However, as a result of the tipping system, such staff often managed to secure higher “wages” than they would normally have earned.

Nowadays, brands are inescapable. Economists and marketing experts trace this pervasive presence back to the 1980s when brands and branding seemed to promise new, crucial assets for both producers and consumers. Of course, brands existed much earlier, and although some authors claim that “brands are as old as known civilization,” most researchers accept that they burgeoned with the coming of large consumer-goods–oriented factories in the 1870s, generating the “first golden era for the modern brand mark” in the 1890s. The recent success of brands has stimulated historians' attention to product variety, advertisements, brand management, firms' and products' reputations, consumer loyalty, the significance of brands, and much more.