Probably because cash isn’t actually used at a fair number of casinos? You put money on a card, and use that card to gamble. If the server at a casino was the one taking your cash and putting it into the machine, yeah, there’d probably be an issue with tipping them.
Retail is a HUGE industry that also doesn’t really take tips. I’ve seen a jar from time to time, but *never *had anything prompted on a card reader or been asked directly about tipping. And honestly, the jar is kind of useful if I use cash and get back change I really don’t want.
I don’t think you understand what I’m referring to and I’m going to try one more time. It seems that you may possibly think I was specifically talking about you and I wasn’t.
See here, where you talk about that you didn’t owe most days and you will be able to shake the “several” days you paid to go to work by going to work every day - that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people (not you) who go on about “poor” tippers costing them money while simultaneously being unwilling to acknowledge that in general, that is made up for by generous tippers at other tables/other shifts or else no sensible person would keep the job.
Its because there is cash at the end of the day for most restaurants. I worked two places that held your tips and put them on a check two weeks, but that was because the restaurant didn’t have the operating cash to pay the tips at the end of the shift.
Here is another way of looking at it. Say that I was a waiter because it was paying my bills, but it sucked so bad I wanted to leave. So I took a job at “Target” (it was used prior as an example.) When I had an ex working at Target, she got paid each two weeks. There in lies the problem.
I’m fed up and need to leave “for a real job.”
I am going to trade CASH NOW for a paycheck, and that might be well and good, but I start on a Tuesday at Target. I am just now at the end of their pay cycle, so I am going to have to wait two weeks for a check that has one or two days of work on it, then wait another two weeks for a real check. And man, its taxed to shit, so I am only taking 72 percent of that check. In those 4 weeks of waiting on a normal paycheck so I can start a new budget, I had rent due, I had to put gas in the car to get back and forth to work, I had the electric bill…
So now I have a paycheck job, but I am homeless. I don’t make enough to save enough for the 3 months up front rent that is required for a new place. I moved back in with my parents. I realized that I left a job that I averaged 50 dollars a day on, working each day of the week, for a job that pays less after taxes are taken out. I now work reporting an income that disqualifies me for medicaid and any other assistance, so my insurance is gone. I no longer have the ability to work each day when I need money, so I have now this Target job that isn’t getting me back into housing, and I am also back at the restaurant working for cash so I can get back and forth going to “Target”.
Does this sound strangely specific? This is because I have seen this waiting tables happen time and time again. To roommates I had, to family I had, to my mom, to waiters that worked above and below me, a lot of people in my orbit. A young person is ready to “leave the wait life” or whatever they ware saying, and then leave, fall on their ass, and then are working the real job and the waiting job again and still do it. They end up leaving the real job and going back to waiting tables, but this time, at two different restaurants, just to catch up.
Restaurant jobs can save the day, but they get you stuck as well. You make enough to survive if you have housing already. You work all the time on a weird schedule so you only know other restaurant workers.
Its hard to describe to people that have never done it. I would recommend that most people watch the movie Waiting. Its funny and gross and, quite honestly, an accurate representation of what its like. Even the “from-under” cheese and “floor spice” and creepy manager hitting on children. Its pretty damn accurate.
I don’t get what you are saying. I am considering each table its own thing. If you stiff me with a 10% tip, I paid to wait ON YOU. Does that make sense? It doesn’t matter if I had two other tables full of decent people that made me cash positive at the end of the day.
So you are saying its okay to fuck your waiter as long as they have other tables, because surely not everyone is going to fuck your waiter like you did? That can’t be what you are saying, right?
When you talk to a server, they aren’t going to tell you what they made “that week” its what they made “that shift” or “that day”. Each day is a new day when you never get a day off. Hell, if you were like me, you worked doubles each day, which means you were at the restaurant at 9:30 to open it at 11, and then got cut at like 5, back up there at 6:15, worked until 11:30 or midnight, and went back the next day. And do that every single day of the week. Thats what my wife did, and thats what my best friend did (and still does to this day after a couple rounds of a “real job”.)
That 60-80 bucks a day would have been more like 100-120 if I didn’t get stuck with 10 percent folks (or god, the church folks, which tip the tax rate at 8.25 because they tithe 10 percent and don’t think you are worth more than God.)
I spend a lot of time in casinos. Ranging from local tribal places to Las Vegas and places around the world. In my experience, there is always lots and lots of cash at a casino. People put cash into slots, and people definitely put cash on the table at blackjack, roulette, craps, etc, and get chips in exchange. Generally, tips are made with chips. Everything is being watched, of course, by pit bosses and security cameras.
I agree with all of this (except the part I underlined)
I think good servers treat everyone well. Anyone who would give a slight edge to a good tipper, probably isn’t a good server. In any event, I don’t expect any better food or service because I’m a generous tipper.
Mostly, I can afford it. I like eating at restaurants and I know the servers have a crappy job. 20 to 25% on the gross is just not a big deal to me and I know it probably is to the server.
[I’m not defending the tipping culture, but just acknowledging that in the U.S. it’s what we have. If the servers were paid well and there was no tipping, that would be fine with me.]
It doesn’t matter in terms of whether it’s OK for them to stiff you. It does matter in the sense of how much you earned over the course of a day or a pay period - you wouldn’t keep the job if you worked 80 hours and only made $300 total, right?
It’s not at all - I’m not even saying that the 10% table didn’t screw you. If you look back to where this started it was something like
( I didn’t go back to see who the other posters were , or to quote exactly ):
Poster A - Some people think the legal requirement is that servers earn at least minimum wage for each hour, not as an average over a pay period.
Poster B - I’ve never seen that claim.
Me - Nobody ever quite claims that servers must make at least minimum wage for each hour- but it’s not uncommon for people to use a single customer or hour or shift to argue that servers sometimes lose money or make less than minimum.
Yeah, the only “money on a card” situations I can think of are
In the days when slots used coins, bus trips used to give you a voucher for free play that you would turn in to get cash. Now, instead of cash some places give you a voucher and other places load the free play on a players card.
Slots don’t dispense coins anymore - when you cash out, you typically get a voucher that can be inserted into another machine. I suppose there might be an occasional casino that puts the cashout on your card instead of printing a voucher.
On a cruise ship, you may be able to charge casino play to your onboard account by using your keycard.
But aside from those situations, you use cash in slots and to buy tips at table games. Dealers are tipped in chips, and they usually do something like tap the tip box with the chip to make it obvious to those watching that it’s a tip - they don’t just put it in their pocket.
I think maybe the thing to consider here is that I didn’t get screwed for the day because I had seniority to make sure I didn’t. When you start out, generally they put you on Sundays and other days and limit how long you are there. When you are a new waiter, you may only get two or three tables a night because you are the first one to be cut. Waiters don’t work normal schedules, they work until the shift manager “cuts” them, which means you don’t get any more tables. Waiters with bills never want to be cut, waiters that have paid their bills and have money want to the the first cut.
I can think off hand I probably got shafted and owed at the end of the day probably about 15 times, but I walked in being an older white guy with experience, so I never started at the bottom of any restaurant I worked at. The newbies generally get screwed. So do women of color, not under my watch, but in general, they get the worst tables and cut first.
It is very common to put in at least two months making far less than minimum wage before you can outlast the other waitstaff and get good seniority. Turnover is super high because a lot of people burn out. I would say from my experience only about 25% of people stay in the industry any amount of time.
Funny side story that might be relevant to the life of the waiter, whom this thread is about tipping properly:
I was a shift manager, got bumped up from being a waiter at a mid range Texas steakhouse. The point of sale system was glitchy there, and when you went to split a ticket after the order was put in to make the bill right for each group of people at one table, it would “clone” the drinks that were ordered. I got fired because I voided the errant Sprite so that the waiter wouldn’t have to buy the phantom beverage. The phantom sprite was duplicated only on billing and was never actually in existence, but since I didn’t want the waiter to have to buy it, which was standard practice at this place, I voided it off of the bill. I also had full authority to void anything that needed to be voided as the shift manager.
Yeah I got fired for that. The 18 year old kid only made 3 bucks that night waiting tables because that was the only one he had before the cuts came as the restaurant was slow that night. The phantom sprite he would have had to buy cost 2.75 before tax, and I didn’t want that to happen. He got a 12 percent tip or something, it was right below 15, and that steakhouse only had a 9% tip out for non-alcohol sales.
The point of sale system was made by Aloha, which is a very common POS for the restaurant and bar industry. It was common at a lot of places that random shit would clone across both tickets if you split on ticket.
I think the answer to the thread question is “tip at least 20% in the US, and a little more if you order beer or booze that comes from a bar.”
No. Don’t put that on the diner. The mathematics and culture behind this are both arcane and not at all transparent. If you need the diner to come up with a certain amount of money, that needs to be in the bill. If a tip is optional, it needs to be optional. Don’t put me in the middle of your stupid industry games.
Disclosure: I always tip 15% except where I’m a regular, where I tip 20%. Post-tax, rounding up in both cases. I just hate being held responsible for something I don’t understand.
This. I’ve been on the other side of the equation, too. If a person is doing me a service, that’s something I don’t have to do, like cook and clean up. So I tip the waitstaff generously, knowing that they’ll usually kick some of that back to the busboys and such. Good bartenders are also amply rewarded. Waitstaff have long memories. Even if we only show up at a place every 90 days or so, we are remembered and get great service because we tip well and generally aren’t assholes.
The waiter didn’t put that on the diner, so don’t blame them. Don’t blame me for telling you how it works. The owner/s of the restaurant deserves your ire and blame, and they keep it that way due to the lobbying efforts of organizations like The National Restaurant Association.
It sucks to say, but the only way you don’t participate in it is not going out to places to eat, or go to counter service type places or what not where the employees don’t get tipped.
I had a young woman living with my wife and I while we were in Oregon recently, and she did really well there, because she got paid full state minimum wage plus her tips. The told me in Oregon she was still getting 20% like she did when she was in Texas. She was shocked she actually got a paycheck as well. I never worked in a state that didn’t do 2.13 in the industry so I can only speak of the states where its 2.13/hr.
I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous. If there’s a fundamental problem here that requires better government regulation, I’m happy to listen to the issues, write to my Congressman, vote accordingly, etc. But it’s not the diner’s responsibility to solve problems like this on a transaction-by-transaction basis, and attempting to do so may actually enable the dysfunctional system. Similarly, I’ll support the idea of helping homeless people through organized taxpayer-funded social programs, but I won’t try to compensate for the lack of such programs by handing out banknotes randomly to panhandlers.
I’m not blaming the waiter for the system. I’m not denying that I participate in the system by going out to eat. But it is simply unfair to drag diners into the middle of it when the information needed to make a good decision is not available.
What we need to know is:
Will the server be paid fairly if we don’t tip?
What percentage tip brings it up to a fair wage?
If we do tip, who actually gets it? Server, server + other staff, server + staff + owner, or what?
Are the server and the restaurant all declaring and paying the appropriate taxes?
All of that is going to vary from person to person, and place to place. It’s not possible to keep track of it, and nobody is going to be honest about it, anyway. So I refuse to be held hostage to it. If your employer is not paying you enough, sort it out. Unionize or something. Don’t just accept exploitation from your bosses, be complicit in hiding it from the patrons, and then tell me that I, the customer, am the problem.
Look at any discussion of tipping, or restaurants that have eliminated it and you will see people who receive tips in favor of keeping the current system , for reasons ranging from the belief that they earn more with tips than they would with an hourly wage to the difficulty of evading taxes if all of their earnings were reported. You may not favor it, but it’s not just the restaurant owners.
It’s not even just a state thing, but an individual restaurant thing. My brother is the manager at a bar/restaurant that pays minimum wage plus tips to employees. He worked two jobs in Nashville that he did enjoy, but came back to IA because the offer he got was so much better (he makes manager pay now, but when he worked the same place previously as just a bartender, he made min wage + tips). He’s also periodically handed his own tips (he isn’t just in the back - he’s always working out front just like the others) back into the pool for the other employees.
But the customer can’t always tell which places do this and which don’t, nor should we be expected to know. If your pay is horrible, do what you can to find another job (hell, Walmart starts you out at more). If certain restaurants are having a hard time employing enough waitstaff, maybe they’ll start to reconsider their business practices.
I can tell you a reason why a lot of wait staff don’t like it when the restaurant changes over from tips to a non-tip situation. Its not the loss of ability to fraud the government out of declaring income. The waiter still gets cut the same when the restaurant slows down. They make even less that way since they didn’t get tips, the restaurant wants to shed labor as fast as they can each day. No chance of a good table if you get cut early. You get cut way faster if you are getting paid 7.25 or whatever wage is instead of 2.13. At 2.13, you are essentially free labor to the restaurant and you tend to get held around longer in case it gets busier later. Remember, waiters don’t work 8-5 most of the time. They have a start time and work until they get cut. I have been cut immediately walking into work, never taking a table at all, just doing the side work that gets the restaurant ready for the shift. That is free labor to the restaurant. With the loss of potential tip income, that sweet Target job becomes equivalent to the waiting job and people will take guaranteed hours over “maybe” hours. Its gone from tables to hours.
The whole situation is fucked up to be honest, and I am not sure that restaurants are prepared to take a hit on labor to bring the tipping issue away. It can be crazy if you think about it. If you want to tip in a way that makes you happy, go for it. If knowing how the sausage gets made pisses you off, don’t ask how the sausage gets made. I don’t think anyone expects the customer to do anything about the situation, but the customer is actually the one that holds the power in the situation. If they don’t show up to eat, the food joint doesn’t make any money and will have to adjust or close.
If you are serious about writing your congressman or senator to counteract the restaurant lobby to make meaningful changes, that would be a great thing to do.
If you don’t want some sort of bodily fluid in your food, tip accordingly. Trust me.
Ever tip shitty and then the waiter is super happy to make you a to-go drink or something anyway? There’s some extra DNA in there for sure, I don’t care how nice the place is.
Translucent Daydream, would you care to comment on how you deal with co-workers who do such things to the customers’ food? Because if you’re at all okay with that, even to the point of looking the other way, you’ve kind of lost any moral high ground you had in this discussion.
You don’t treat people like that because you think they should voluntarily give you more money. That’s not acceptable.
I don’t like tipping because I feel it’s unfair. You’ve pretty much confirmed that, but you’ve added a level of antagonism that does nothing but make me feel like the whole thing is just extortion.