No Substitute for Cash

A few bucks here, $5 there, tips for shuttle drivers, skycaps, bellhops, concierge services and housekeeping — it adds up. But for everything else — restaurants, taxis and delivery services — there are ways business travelers can keep better track of their tips.

Thomas King, 23, knows this all too well. As a consultant who travels frequently, Mr. King says he does not have a choice when it comes to tipping. Junior members who travel with senior colleagues are responsible for digging into their wallets. “I do my best to write them down as I go along,” said Mr. King, who does so on his smartphone. But when he is not traveling for work, “I don’t carry cash anymore,” he said. “I really have to go out of my way to have $20 in cash in my pocket.”

Given that the typical company spends 10 percent or more of its total annual budget on expenses related to business travel, according to the Aberdeen Group, a market research firm, those miscellaneous expenditures can nick corporate coffers. That is, if a business traveler actually remembers or cares to add out-of-pocket spending on travel and expense reports.

When he travels, Michael Hilton, a co-founder of Concur, the Bellevue, Wash., provider of travel and expense management software, says he tries to keep most but not all of his tips on credit cards, or he uses mobile apps like Uber, Square and Taxi Magic, which automatically uploads taxi receipts to Concur. But for workers like bellhops and housekeeping, which are typically not included in a final bill, he uses cash.

“I tip people who service the room, but I never once expense them,” he said.

“Nobody likes cash,” Mr. Hilton said. “That’s where technology comes in. People want electronic receipts and want to pay electronically.” Concur uploads such online receipts into expense claims to save time and ensure accuracy, he said.

The automated technology that Concur provides companies with typically helps avoid the opposite problem of the employee who routinely overestimates cash tips.

Most companies allow for “reasonable tips” in their travel guidelines, Mr. Hilton said.

For Abraham Shafi, 26, chief executive of GetTalent, an upstart recruiting software provider based in San Francisco, the issue is straightforward. He follows a personal guideline instilled by his father who was in the service industry: Tip to scale to reinforce positive behavior.

“I’ve never expensed tipping, but now that you bring it up, I probably should,” Mr. Shafi said. “These days, you don’t carry cash. It is difficult when you can pay for everything now with phone or credit card. It’s easier to expense what’s on the credit card.”

The same is true for his 10 employees, Mr. Shafi said. He said he did not think his employees included tips on the expense reports because it was too much trouble.

Business travelers like Mr. Shafi and Mr. Hilton would certainly welcome some kind of technological assistance to help them remember to tip or to make it easier to do so.

Jeff Kagan, a technology analyst, says mobile payments are in their infancy. At present, he says he does not know of a mobile app just for gratuities. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” Mr. Kagan said in an e-mail interview. “There are almost a million apps today. But I have not heard of one yet.

“Gratuity apps seem to make a lot of sense,” he added. “The next question is what kind of app? Is it a generic app that can be used for many different tips at different places? Or is it a hotel app, for that particular hotel? It would not get as much use, however.”

Google Wallet and PayPal are staking a claim in the mobile payments area, as are banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, in offering person-to-person payments.

Back in the paper economy, the reality for workers is that not everyone is inclined to tip, especially for housekeeping, as opposed to say, restaurant servers.

Chicken Farms Try Oregano as Antibiotic Substitute

Oregano lies loose in trays and tied into bunches on tabletops and counters, and a big, blue drum that held oregano oil stands in the corner. “Have you ever tried oregano tea?” Mr. Sechler asked, mashing leaves between his broad fingers.

Off and on over the last three years or so, his chickens have been eating a specially milled diet laced with oregano oil and a touch of cinnamon. Mr. Sechler swears by the concoction as a way to fight off bacterial diseases that plague meat and poultry producers without resorting to antibiotics, which some experts say can be detrimental to the humans who eat the meat. Products at Bell & Evans, based in this town about 30 miles east of Harrisburg, have long been free of antibiotics, contributing to the company’s financial success as consumers have demanded purer foods.

But Mr. Sechler said that nothing he had used as a substitute in the past worked as well as oregano oil.

“I have worried a bit about how I’m going to sound talking about this,” he said. “But I really do think we’re on to something here.”

Skeptics of herbal medicines abound, as any quick Internet search demonstrates. “Oil of oregano is a perennial one, advertised as a cure for just about everything,” said Scott Gavura, a pharmacist in Toronto who writes for the Web site Science-Based Medicine. “But there isn’t any evidence, there are too many unanswered questions and the only proponents for it are the ones producing it.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Gavura said he would welcome a reduction in the use of antibiotics in animals.

At the same time, consumers are growing increasingly sophisticated about the content of the foods that they eat.

Data on sales of antibiotic-free meat is hard to come by, but the sales are a tiny fraction of the overall meat market. Sales in the United States of organic meat, poultry and fish, which by law must be raised without antibiotics, totaled $538 million in 2011, according to the Organic Trade Association. By comparison, sales of all beef that year were $79 billion.

Still, retailers like Costco, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, as well as some restaurant chains, complain that they cannot get enough antibiotic-free meat.

Noodles & Company, a fast-growing chain of more than 300 restaurants, recently added antibiotic-free pork to the choices of ingredients that customers can add to their made-to-order pastas. It ensured its supply by ordering cuts of meat that were not in relatively high demand and by committing in advance to buy a year’s worth, said Dan Fogarty, its executive vice president for marketing.

“We’re deliberately voting with our pocketbooks,” he said.

In a nationwide telephone survey of 1,000 adults in March, more than 60 percent told the Consumer Reports National Research Center that they would be willing to pay at least 5 cents a pound more for meat raised without antibiotics.

“Before, it was kind of a nice little business, and while it’s still microscopic in the grand scheme of things, we’re seeing acceptance from retailers across the country, not just in California and on the East Coast,” said Stephen McDonnell, founder and chief executive of Applegate, an organic and natural meats company.

Mr. McDonnell said a confluence of trends, from heightened interest in whole and natural foods to growing concerns about medical problems like diabetes, obesity and gluten allergies, were contributing to the demand for antibiotic-free meat.

There is growing concern among health care experts and policy makers about antibiotic resistance and the rise of “superbugs,” bacteria that are impervious to one or more antibiotics. Those bacteria can be passed on to consumers, who eat meat infected with them and then cannot be treated.

In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 25 national health organizations and advocacy groups issued a statement on antibiotics that, among other things, called for “limiting the use of medically important human antibiotics in food animals” and “supporting the use of such antibiotics in animals only for those uses that are considered necessary for assuring animal health.”

In 2011, there were several prominent recalls involving bacterial strains that are resistant to antibiotics, including more than 60 million pounds of ground beef contaminated with salmonella Typhimurium and about 36 million pounds of ground turkey spoiled with salmonella Heidelberg.

Consumer Reports released a study last month that found the bacteria Yersinia enterocolitica in 69 percent of 198 pork chop and ground pork samples bought at stores around the country. Some of the bacteria were resistant to one or more antibiotics.

Analysis of Food and Drug Administration data by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are used in animals. The majority of those antibiotics are used to spur growth or prevent infections from spreading in the crowded conditions in which most animal production takes place today.

The European Union has banned the use of antibiotics to accelerate growth, and the European Parliament is pushing to end their use as tools to prevent disease as well.

The oregano oil product Mr. Sechler uses, By-O-Reg Plus, is made by a Dutch company, Ropapharm International. In the late 1990s, Bayer conducted trials on the product, known as Ropadiar in Europe, comparing its ability to control diarrhea in piglets caused by E. coli with that of four of the company’s products.