In tipping threads I seem to go against the grain. I love tipping and am very generous; partly because I truly appreciate the work servers are doing, and partly because I see my tip as a sound investment.
We eat/drink out very often and frequent the same hand full of places. Chances are I know the bartender, have maybe even met their kids. If there’s a miss pour, chances are it’ll be offered to me. If we walk into a restaurant and a server knows that we usually order the mussels, she’ll make sure to set aside an order for us if they’re close to running out. I know we’ll be offered our favorite table.
The one thing I should probably watch is including the (hideously overpriced) bottle of wine in the total I use to calculate my tip.
And much the best scheme is to be up-front about this. It should not be optional for the customer to pay a fair share of labor costs. It should not be tolerated that an employer shirks the duty to properly pay employees while putting the blame on fickle / stingy / ignorant customers.
In a lot of restaurants, the mandatory tip out by the waiter has gone up. When my wife was waiting tables, 14% of what her total sales were for the day. If you tipped her 15%, she got 1%, the kitchen and the bus guys got the other 14%. If you tipped her 10%, she paid 5% of the bill you paid to the kitchen and she got shanked on the deal. It was a high end restaurant, so lots of foreign born customers that tipped 5-10%. She paid to wait on all of those people.
She got paid 2.13 an hour and all of her paychecks said VOID on them.
If you ordered anything from the bar the mandatory tip out went up 3% to 17 in total.
When you tip, the restaurant makes most waitstaff pay the back of the house with it too. Keep that in mind. The lowest mandatory tip out I was ever exposed to was 11% when I was in the industry.
Fuck tipping on takeout Unless pickup is at the bar, and the tender has to go get it, and the bar is busy, then maybe a buck.
But when waited on, my base is 20%, a little more on low-price-point restaurants. Good service rates extra.
If part of the tab is >$100 bottle of wine, I discount a little for that.
Almost no, rather than ‘not many’ restaurants pay at least minimum wage in cash, before tips, except in the 6 states that require that (see link). At the federal level the minimum cash wage is $2.13; if tips+cash don’t sum to at least $7.25, the restaurant in theory makes up the difference with more cash. But also it’s not ‘some’ states which have a higher min, it’s 35 of 50 and a larger % of the population, counting the 6 which require min wage in cash.
So if you consider the predominant case, where the main source of the ‘minimum’ is actually the tips, you’d expect those tips to rise, at a given tip %, basically in line with costs/prices. So as the combined intake grew mainly with inflation on the 15% of bill, the $7.25 combined nominal min would become less relevant; even the higher nominal mins prevailing most places would. And in the 6 states requiring cash wage of standard min, it would be even more so.
So you’ve pointed out a fact: the fed min wage hasn’t changed in a quite a while. You haven’t IMO given strong logic to the tip custom changing from 15% to 20% in response to that fact.
The change in custom being a subjective impression rather than documented fact, but anecdotally that’s definitely true where I live, inner NY area. When I was kid, same area, 15% was the custom and I believe like lots of customs was more uniform across social groups and econ strata than now. Now in predominantly upper middle/‘yuppie’ part of the area it’s definitely 20%, at least: you’re a cheap skate in that social strata if you insist 15% is standard. At least 20% is part of being ‘up to date’, like various other social views that are now expected in that group. Though like those other social views, the standard among ‘yuppies’ (of all ages) isn’t necessarily followed among, for example, older working class people and some immigrants groups (from places where lower or no tipping was customary).
I don’t see much practical connection between fed min wage law and tipping custom around here. In the big picture sure if you all along had a really high cash min wage relative to median wage, a tip culture might not develop in the first place. That’s plausible. But the connection between a federal min wage still applying in Alabama and tip custom shifting from 15%>20%+ in this area is a much less direct relationship, if any, IMO. It’s definitely not as simple as ‘that answers the question for you’.
A little off the subject maybe, but have you ever tried to tip a bank teller? It makes them step backwards with their hands in the air. Apparently they are not allowed to accept any kind of tip in any circumstance.
This is why tipping culture can such a problem. What you’re saying here is that restaurants are misrepresenting their true pricing. The are underpaying kitchen staff (who customers have no interaction with), taking money from waitstaff to make up for it, and expecting customers to make up the difference with a larger tip. They are effectively expecting customers to make a discretionary payment to staff that they never even see on top of the prices displayed on the menu.
Tipping for customer-facing staff can be justified. But it seems to me that we’d much better served if the law prevent restaurants taking or redistributing any of the money a customer chooses to tip. How can it possibly make sense for customers to be making discretionary optional payments to staff they never interact with? Just like all other business, payment for kitchen staff etc. should be entirely the responsibility of the restaurant as part of its cost structure, and should be reflected in menu prices, not taken out of discretionary tips.
I find it [not tipping bank tellers] just a teeny, tiny bit noteworthy given the ever expanding pool of people who now expect tips that we never thought about tipping before.
As one data point, the last time I used a credit card in the point-of-sale card reader to pay for a meal in a no-frills restaurant (Denny’s, I think), it gave me three options to add on a tip: 15%, 20%, and something in between. To add on more than 20%, I would have had to override the default and type in an amount.
Personally, the lower the overall amount, the higher the percentage I am inclined to tip. For a cheap meal at someplace like Denny’s, 20% is my personal minimum (unless I were really dissatisfied with the service).
But surely you can see that if somebody’s job is to handle large amounts of physical cash passed to them by customers, obviously with strict control procedures to make sure that staff don’t pilfer money, it could cause some confusion (at the very least) if a customer told them to stuff one of the pile of $20 bills that they just handed over into their pocket.
So if you consider the predominant case, where the main source of the ‘minimum’ is actually the tips, you’d expect those tips to rise, at a given tip %, basically in line with costs/prices. So as the combined intake grew mainly with inflation on the 15% of bill, the $7.25 combined nominal min would become less relevant; even the higher nominal mins prevailing most places would. And in the 6 states requiring cash wage of standard min, it would be even more so.
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Costs/prices in the food industry don’t increase at the same rate as the standard of living increases. Food is one place where capitalism has worked, driving down prices.
You seem to be treating the custom changing as being a cause, rather than an effect. From what I’ve been told when this comes up, the custom changed because people thought 15% was no longer enough for these people to live off of. Any time you bring up tipping less, that is the argument people use.
I also note that this doesn’t have to be factually true. It only has to seem true to those who tip. They merely have to perceive that 15% isn’t enough. That said, I would guess that perception comes from them actually working those jobs or knowing people who did.
Tipping percentage increases seem to be the type of thing that would be started by the waitstaff.
Yeah, you used to be able to really fuck up their day by cashing a check, picking up the bills and saying “keep the change.” They wouldn’t dare put money in their pockets, but if they put it in their drawers the books wouldn’t balance. Nowadays there are enough of those donation cans scattered around that I’d assume they could drop it in one of those, I don’t know, it’s been years since I’ve been inside a bank.
Here, in the tropics, the tips are divided to everyone. Dish washers, janitors, kitchen, waitstaff. And I like this idea. It takes a team for a successful dining experience.
If you are not there when the last tip of the day is divided up (day shift), it is saved for you.
Maybe the increase from 15 to 20% is due to the prevalence of electronic forms of tipping and different accounting, making it more difficult to hide the income from IRS and state tax boards.
If you pay cash for a pick up order, I have not experienced an expectation of 20% tip. Having a credit card payment offer 20% as an option to tip on a pick up order, is probably not an expectation, just an attempt because some people will go for it.
…I’m not sure what any of this has to do with anything I said. If you want me to scientifically prove a direct relationship between a wild assertion made in the OP and the federally mandated minimum wage then I am unable to do so. But that’s a problem with the wild assertion made in the OP, not with anything I’ve said.
Mandatory tip pools are only legal if the server takes home at least minimum wage. If your wife was getting “shanked” on a 10% tip her employer was breaking federal law big time. Also depending on what kitchen people were getting part of it, that may have been illegal:
(My bold)
It’s not “in theory”. To pay less than minimum wage, the employer has to claim a tip credit. It’s not a matter of “we’ll pay you $2.13/hr but if you don’t get enough tips we’ll give you a little more.” They have to start at minimum wage and can declare a tip credit of up to $5.12/hr IF the employee actually retains that much in tips. If, say, the server worked 40 hours and got $40 in tips the employer can declare a $1.00/hr tip credit. To legally pay only $2.13/hr the employee would have to have made (and kept) at least $204.80 in tips. If they don’t get any tips, the employer isn’t allowed to declare a tip credit at all.