I really hope you’re not admitting to tampering with someone’s drink. Especially when they are under *zero *legal obligation to tip you, shitty as though it may be.
After reading more than a few examples of the outstanding company you keep, that really isn’t saying as much as you think it is.
One question that should be addressed in any thread on tipping is why is it the customer’s responsibility to subsidize the server’s salary up to minimum wage and not their employer’s.
I’ll play devil’s advocate on this one. The idea of a minimum wage is to ensure that working people have a certain minimum standard of living. We may argue that the legal wage is too low, but that’s the idea.
So, if we have decided that $7.25 is the sweet spot, then that is the mark we are shooting for. If we further understand that due to custom, people in certain fields will receive tips, then we have fulfilled our goal WRT these employees by allowing a lower base wage. For example, if we determine that the average server can make $5.50/hr on tips through the normal habits of customers, then we can allow the employer to only pay $2.13/hr because we know the employee will make $7.63: more than the minimum. In case that doesn’t happen, we require the employer to make up the difference.
If we required the employer to pay the full wage, $7.25/hr, and then know that the employee will make $5.50/hr on top of that, then we have legislated a minimum wage of $12.75/hr, far in excess of what we deem the appropriate minimum should be.
You’re presuming that tipping is/should be a thing, though, which fights the context of the question.
It’s often argued that customers have the obligation to tip, and tip well, because otherwise they’re taking money out of the mouths of the servers. As you note, this is only true when you’re talking about money above minimum wage. Which leads to the conclusion that when people demand that customers tip lest the servers starve they really mean that they think that servers are justified in expecting a wage higher, possibly much higher than minimum wage.
Which is neat and all, but why am I expected to pay the difference? Because their employer is cheap and they want to be paid well anyway? Because their employer promised that being a server would grant a steady high income on tips alone - that I am somehow responsible for? Fuck that. If I’m to be expected to pay extra to bring the employee’s effective wage up to twelve dollars an hour, print it on the menu.
Seriously, the last time I went to the restaurant, they upped my bill by 20% automatically, without asking my permission or giving me any way to reverse it. How the hell is that legal? They print on the menu that it costs $25 and then they bill me $30?
I am presuming that tipping is a thing, because it is a thing. Americans tip in restaurants.
If I am a policy planner structuring the minimum wage laws, I’m not interested in the substance of this thread or whether tipping should or should not be a thing. I simply know that it is and I want to take that into account when drafting the law.
But now taking my policy wonk hat off, I agree with you fully. The system should be scrapped.
I am also sympathetic to the argument that tipping is a responsibility of a customer because that is what is expected in the society that we live in. Sure, it said $25 on your menu, but I’m guessing that you didn’t just walk out of your spaceship from the Planet Xyxcrus in the restaurant parking lot. You know that just because the menu says $25 that they still expect a tip of some amount on top of that and that $25 is not the out the door price. I’ll bet that they charged you tax on top of that, right? Was that printed on the menu? No, but you know that will be billed to you.
So until it is crushed, eliminated and buried, I have no problem tipping as is custom. But this thread illustrates the problems with that: We don’t know what that is and it is ever changing. Servers will tell you what they think, but you can’t go by that. If I made tips, I would say that 50% was the recommended amount.
Someone upthread said that you should tip 10% if it was the worst service ever. Why? Why am I paying anything for poor service?
And for the restaurant you mentioned to automatically add 20% is outrageous. AFAIK, that amount is reserved for exceptional service, but they are already billing their service as “exceptional” even when it maybe wasn’t and telling you that you have to pay as if service was exceptional.
And who to tip? No, I am not tipping the Subway “sandwich artist” for making a sandwich anymore that I am tipping the kitchen guy at McDonalds for putting together a Big Mac.
I am an attorney who performs personal services for people, but I don’t receive tips. Why not? The distinction seems to be one of arrogance and social status. No, I don’t receive tips, because I am high falutin’ and I am several rungs up the ladder. The guy that delivers pizza to my door is a peasant who can carry my piss bucket so I’ll throw him a few pennies as if he were a beggar on a street corner. The whole idea of tipping is, IMHO, an insult at its very core.
But, I agree with what you are saying. If tipping remains a custom and we are really in the dark about how much to tip, it is most unfair for a server to point at the customer and complain that he “paid to work” when he didn’t get a sufficient tip. Maybe he didn’t get a sufficient tip because his attitude sucks overall and that showed through when he waited on that table?
But that complaint, like any complaint about compensation, should go to his employer and not his customers.
Maybe you need to up your game?
At the completion of my divorce, I gave my attorney a nice bottle of champagne.
Which is the obligation of the employer not the employer & customer together.
Nope. A tip is not a wage. It is extra money I choose to give for personal service above and beyond the standard. It should not be considered supplementary to the wage paid by the employer.
No you haven’t. The legislated wage is still $7.25 because tips are not wages.*
*I know the IRS disagrees. I’m using “wages” as money paid by an employer. And if a server is good then what’s the problem with them earning more than minimum wage because of tips?
And I came into the restaurant entirely prepared to write my usual generous ~17% tip onto the receipt; fortunately I noticed the mandated 20% tip in time to avoid inadvertently giving a 40% tip for adequate but unremarkable service.
Out of terror of reprisals, mostly. Because crime is okay when it’s done to your food.
From what I’ve seen 20% is about normal for the “we’ll raise the price after the fact and lie and call it a tip” amount. You only see them doing this at high-end restaurants, probably because higher-end restaurants expect their clientele to be flush enough to not care about the extra charge, and because they don’t really want to have their employees degrading their food’s quality to punish those they believe to be insufficiently generous.
The only people I happily tip are the people who cut my hair; I consider their price very fair (almost too low) and really do appreciate their work. Every other tip I give is because of the standing threats of reprisal; I consider good table service expected and, thus, included in the price of the food. But nope, extortion is happening, so I write in that 1/6th overpayment and get out of there.
Yeah, if only.
You apparently expect people to give you good service for free, since, like it or not, tips are how waitstaff make their living.
Also, “extortion?” seriously? Despite legends food tampering is something that almost never happens. And how would they know in advance that you aren’t going to tip?
The only thing that will happen if you don’t tip is that some waitstaff will think of you as “that non-tipping asshole.” That’s it.
It probably is better left to your imagination, but if you must, I can tell you what falls under “feet stuff.”
If it makes anyone feel better, the people I busted were fired when I was the manager, and I reported everything against the state on their food handler’s card, and also their alcoholic beverage card.
The same thing didn’t necessarily happen when I wasn’t the manager though.
The restaurant industry is skeevy in general, I am glad to not need to work it anymore.
That depends. Most people that are strictly commission are 1099 contract employees. Waiters are not 1099 people, they fill out the W-4 if they fill out paperwork at all. Of the 9 places I worked, I was W-4 for 7 of them. The other two were on the “fuck it” system. My name could have been “Waiter McWaitface” for all they cared.
I don’t think anyone ever checked my background or resume when I was waiting tables. I think the most the interview was on most of them was, “hey you got your food handlers/alcohol card? Can you start tonight?”
W-4 employees are guaranteed a wage per hour. That wage is determined by minimum wage laws, and if states vary tipped wage minimums vs standard wage minimums. 1099 employees aren’t guaranteed anything but a high tax bill at the end of the year.
The vacuum cleaner sales lady that came by our house last year made minimum wage for the hours she was at our house, and then commission on everything she sold. When I sold cars for Hyundai, I made minimum wage and then a commission in addition to that.
Is this a personal attack on my character because I chose to work at any job I could instead of being unemployed during the recession?
I hope that nobody judges you on the behavior of your coworkers, whom work at a place before you get a job. That’s kinda a dick head thing for you to do.
I worked in the industry as long as I needed to before I got a better deal. Some people aren’t that lucky.
For free my ass, I pay for my food. And if part of the service the restaurant provides is to hire people to bring that food to me, the restaurant that hired them is solely the one responsible for paying them. They made the employee agreement; they pay for the servers. This is not hard - it’s how being employed works.
Paying somebody else’s employees is not my responsibility, and will continue not to be my responsibility no matter how many of those employees pretend to be panhandlers whose survival relies upon me handing over money that I have no obligation to pay.
I go back to the same restaurants over and over.
There’s no reply to this I want to make that wouldn’t draw a warning, so I’m going to drpp it.
We freaked the fuck out when we saw that go down. We reported it right away. That guy/gal got fired. They were replaced the next night. Most ended up fine, some people hired were creepy disgusting assholes. Rinse, repeat. That becomes the problem. Overhead is huge in the industry, so you are going to have a higher percentage of fuck-ups than you normally would. That and the bar of entry to employment is usually super low as well. Or, the employee starts out great, but is surrounded by bad influences and cash in hand each night. I have seen this industry just wreck people that have a hard time saying “no.” I suppose its like a lot of other things, but I haven’t worked those other things so I don’t know.
The antagonism stuff is in your head though. I don’t care enough about this whole thing, especially enough to antagonize you, brother.
Oh hell no.
I was the bartender with those sweet, sweet martinis. You know the good bartender that watches your drink and calls the cops when your blind date dumped shit in the drink you were about to drink.
I busted that twice in the North Houston area.
Fair enough, but I want to reiterate that I do tip - I usually aim for around 1/6th of the charge, give or take rounding the total towards a nice round OCD-satisfying number. However I do not for a single second buy into the lie that I am somehow the one responsible for paying my servers’ wages, five minutes at a time. I am not. I am not their employer and any server who spits in my food because they think I have somehow underpaid them is 1) an idiot, and 2) a criminal.
The entire tipping system is flatly toxic, putting the customers and servers in an adversarial relationship where the servers believe that any customer who “underpays” is attacking their livelihood and thus is deserving of reprisal in the form of deliberately bad service or worse. All because the restaurants have found a way to legally hire employees and barely pay them.
Waiters in general don’t spit in your drink. If you go out all the time and are a shitty tipper, your risk of that happening to you goes WAY up. That is what I’m trying to say. In no way is that proper or appropriate or right in anyway, but the risk of that does go up. If I walk around a shit part of town flashing money, my odds of being “randomly attacked” go up, even though it is never right to attack a dude.
I can tell you that by the second or third time you go into a restaurant, they remember the tipping style you have. I was usually the “good waiter/bartender” in a restaurant that always was requested by the customer to wait on them. When I was a lead waiter, I could always say “no” and the hostess would say that “TD is no longer taking tables this evening/afternoon, we’re sorry.”
I only had so many times to flip that table, and if I had the choice, I would always go with the money. That’s why I was there slogging it out in the first place, not to be your buddy.
As much as you seem upset by the whole proposition, trust me, the wait staff and everyone else hates it as much as you do.