Although tipping permitted a certain amount of autonomy in service work, it also fostered individual entrepreneurship, competitive behavior, and dampened the ardor for collective effort. With its “remnants of use value,” tipping lay outside the commercial exchange system; this intimate transaction created a more ambiguous kind of worker consciousness than the classic adversarial “us versus them” attitude. Some servers chose to rely on the ephemeral, sporadic tipping system rather than join with their co-workers to push for higher cash wages. Tipping also weakened the potential alliance between customer and worker. At times, workers perceived the customer rather than the employer as responsible for their feeble income. And to a large degree, employers convinced the public that low wage rates were justified because servers received tips and special fringe benefits such as room and board.