How to Make the Most of a Small Profit: Selling a Good Product or Selling Something Other than a Service Object – an Exercise in Sales Perception

The trick was to kindle the right feeling in myself — I have something they want and I want to give it to them, but not yet — to render the plates of food a symbol for something else, to exude an air of slight withholding. I learned what all good salespeople understand: If you suggest that a person wants something with enough confidence, there’s a good chance they’ll believe you.

Every shift was an exercise in the art of seduction, and each one ended with a tally of tips that amounted to a kind of grade — numeric feedback on the degree of my success.

I gained my skills quickly. I was able to balance five meals on one tray and instantly calculate the bill, just as quickly as I read the customers. I could tell if a diner wanted me to tease them or treat them with mild disgust, but they did not exist. It was the stream of social cues that made me clumsy in my everyday life. The rhythm was intuitive like a dancer catching a beat. I didn’t think or make mistakes when I worked, which is great because my income depended on it. In 1996, the minimum wage for tipped employees was $2.13 per hour.

The Jewish deli, the Mexican restaurant, and the bakery were all after the Greenhouse, where families came for breakfast. Every restaurant was a reflection of the larger social hierarchy. I was dating the guy I worked with at the time. He often got high before work and was terrible at his job. He never thought about what the customer wanted, never read their faces for subtle cues, never seduced anyone. He did not have to. He could either mix up tables and order wrong, or end the shift with a tall stack of tips. My earnings decreased if I smiled too much or too little.

I learned that the rule in restaurants was that the bigger the tip the more it benefited the waiter. They also rarely had to put up with the kind of abuse that we did.

How does a guest feel? The hostility of the ninth circle of hell and the temptation to attack a stranger with a mob

Hostis’s hostility was not final. From it emerged the kinder cognate hospes, which came to signify both guest and host, a symbiotic duo, and to yield the names of places of sanctuary: hospital, hospice, hotel. Still, its etymology also reveals a threat, for hospes is an elision of hosti-pot-s, in which “pot” signifies “master” (hence “despot”), and thus translates more literally as one “who has power over the stranger,” as the German media theorist Bernhard Siegert has written. Host may be benevolent or hold someone hostage, depending on the degree to which they shift their emphasis. The ninth, final circle of hell in Dante’s “Inferno,” the realm of treachery, reserved for the greatest sinners, has a special place for hosts who abuse their power — by inviting visitors to a feast, say, then slaughtering them, which is essentially the plot of (spoiler alert) the haute cuisine horror movie “The Menu,” released last November.

“How can we distinguish between a guest and a parasite?” the French philosopher Jacques Derrida muses in “Of Hospitality” (2000). And yet the code of hospitality is ancient and nonnegotiable. It’s not the sexual promiscuity of the people in Sodom and Gomorrah which is blamed when sulfur is rained down, but the attempt by a mob to attack two foreigners who are in fact angels in human form. It is not so much that we should offer welcome and succor to the stranger at the door but that we must.