As opposed to themed nights, such as the hip-hop night.
Oh, sorry, I mean, “We all hate black people. They aren’t normal.”.
or :rolleyes: , depending on your motivation.
As opposed to themed nights, such as the hip-hop night.
Oh, sorry, I mean, “We all hate black people. They aren’t normal.”.
or :rolleyes: , depending on your motivation.
Well, I don’t know who you’re working with, but they sound like a bunch of idiots. If you don’t like working with the public, do everyone a favor and don’t get a job as a server.
I can honestly - HONESTLY - say that I never approached a table with a preconceived opinion of the people sitting there. (No, wait. There was the time Gale Sayers came in to the restaurant, but I only wet my pants; I don’t think that counts.) And the only time I ever refused to serve someone was when my husband’s ex-wife came in with her boyfriend.
I had a regular couple who came in every Wednesday. They were friendly people, but they could drive a server to drink. They’d want to split a steak, but she wanted it medium with fries, he wanted it well-done with baked potato. They’d each order soup and salad. They were FOREVER droppng silverware, and sending me back into the kitchen for something or another. They requested me as their server every time. And each time they left, they paid their bill and left me a quarter. <shrug> You take the good with the bad. At least the guy had some good jokes to tell.
Attitude does have a lot to do with it, but I still maintain that given the same level of service, some people are just not tippers.
Okay, now you made me think about the time I waited on Steve Harwall (lead singer of Smashmouth). All I could think about was how I was going to get his autograph. Gosh you’d a thought I was a teenage groupie or something.
Well, I think Ashkicker has come close to answering the question of the OP, but other than that this has devolved into personal experiences. I’m guessing that the OP wanted to know if there were different tipping prcatices out there (the title says by race but I would say by social group would be better).
So, here I go: I’m a white male college graduate with a great job now. I worked as a waiter in college and know how they make their money. I tip 20% as a rule; if you are a total buffoon you might get 10%, but it’s hard to earn that distinction.
At the bar, it’s $1+whatever change is left for a round of up to 4 drinks. More than 4 drinks, and you get more.
Of course, when I was poor I ate and drank at different places, and tipped differently (ie less). I think the OP has noticed that different groups of people tip differently at the SAME PLACE.
So, any white high-school only graduates out there? How about some black PhDs? Is it really what group you belong to or what job you have that determines what you tip?
That’s not a case of economics, that’s called living beyond your means. I don’t care what colour, class, nationality you are… If you can’t afford to leave an appropriate tip for the country you’re in, you can’t afford the restaurant.
When travelling, I would suggest a little research beforehand, but if you don’t know what/whether you should be leaving a tip, feel free to ask. Most of us will gladly tell you what is acceptable. Skimping on the tip is NOT an option since it’s what many people rely on to survive.
If you couldn’t tell, I work in the service industry (barmaid), and this topic has hit a nerve.
I make cr*p pay because the Canadian/Quebec governments have decided that since we are generally tipped for our services, our employers shouldn’t have to pay us as much as anyone else… They’ve also decided that since we make tips, they’d like some of them, so now I get taxed on them too.
If for example, I sell $100 worth to a client. The government taxes me 8% of that, so if you only tip 10% ($10) I make $2. This is NOT helpful to me when it’s time to pay my rent. When people ask me what they should be leaving I tell them that it’s a MINIMUM of 15%, in Quebec at least.
in the US it’s the same, misskitty. servers get taxed on tips, however, if they aren’t paid via credit card they have to be reported by the tax payer and I suspect most people don’t really report the correct figure
No, see, I think you missunderstand what I said. We get taxed 8% of our SALES, whether or not we recieve tips… Therefore if I sell $1000 worth of merchandise in an evening, the government taxes me $80. I still have to declare my tips, but I have this theory that someone ‘upstairs’ is amused by wasting my time.
Disturbing isn’t it?
Well, at least one restaurant owner has found, to his cost, that you should not make assumptions about the tipping habits of African Americans. I can’t provide a link to the following story, because it’s from a Lexis-Nexis search, and you need to have a subscription to the service. The story is from the Washington Post, 26 November 1999, p. A16:
And from the St. Petersburg Times, 9 December 1999, p. 7B:
There are a couple of weblinks to the story here and here.
And it’s not only a Florida thing. According to this site,
Interesting, mhendo. Sad, but interesting. We really shouldn’t make assumptions about people tipping according to race, but stories like the ones you link above lead me to believe that the stereotype has some basis in fact.
On the other hand, I suspect that servers get what they deserve here… someone like REHarris above, for example, who would be more inclined to tip generously, is presented a bill with a 15% tip added in. The server then gets a 15% tip, where he or she might have gotten 20%. Servers who discriminate reap what they sow.
As a side note, we had a black waitress where I worked, and she was a lovely, nice young lady who busted her butt for her customers. With sales equal to anyone else’s, her tip percentage was consistently less than that of the white servers. So it definitely goes both ways.
As a Black woman, let me just say that if all it takes to get me nearly 40K is to have the gratuity automatically added to my check in a restaurant, ADD AWAY!!! I’ll even help ya with the math.
I invariably tip at my favourite Japanese restaurant, and the staff there are sufficiently Japanese that they can barely speak English. They seem to like my tips. In fact, the more I tip, the more food they seem to bring us on the same order the next time we go in. At this point I think we’re getting twice as much food as we’re supposed to.
No, the linked stories show that the stereotype is widely believed - that servers think that black customers do not tip well, not that black customers actually don’t tip well.
Yes, but why would people think such a ridiculous thing unless there was some empirical evidence to suggest that it was a fact?
Yeah, there’s probably a lot of people who heard that black people don’t tip well and made the assumption that this then applied to all black people - and that’s just wrong. That doesn’t mean that black people DO tip well. And in my experience, many don’t.
I still maintain that teachers are the worst, though.
I used to work at a restaurant, and a woman who waited tables out front once remarked, “Mexicans don’t tip for shit.” She saw the look on my face, and I thought she was about to beat the hell out of me. She told me she was from Texas and knew what she was talking about.
One thing I’ve heard from my table-waiting friends is that sometimes they’ll get someone coming to a restaurant for an obviously special occasion, and it will become clear during the meal that eating out is not a regular event for the group. Such groups usually either don’t tip or ridiculously undertip, simply because they don’t know any better.
Daniel
My son says blacks are notoriously bad tippers. I was shocked to hear him say that (he wasn’t raised that way!), but other servers seem to be experiencing the same thing. I think it very well may have something to do with economics – right or wrong.
When I was waiting tables, there were definite trends in who was likely to tip well. While there are always exceptions, in general,
White people tip more than black people. Didn’t serve enough hispanics or asians to make a judgement.
Women tip more than men.
People coming in after church tip very little. Sometimes, they’ll leave you a tract that looks like a $10 bill instead of a tip.
Old people tip even less than Christians. They’re also more likely to be mean to you. We used to call Senior Discount Day “AT&T Day,” because we knew we wouldn’t get any tip larger than the cost of a phone call.
The larger the group, the less likely you are to get a decent tipped. I once served a room containing at least 20 Baptists (I knew they were Baptists because of their T-shirts) and left with a total of $5 in tips.
The very best tippers are gay men. The servers in the kitchen fight over who gets to wait on the gay couples.
In addition, everyone will , in general, leave a larger tip for a male server than a female one. In my experience. The guys on the staff at my restaurant acknowledged this as well.
Most restaurants i’ve been in over the last few years add a tip automatically to tables of more than six people. Usually 18%. Back when i was working as a waiter in Vancouver, B.C., we were permitted by the management to do the same thing, only the standard amount was 15%.
In my experience as a waiter, those who tipped poorly tended to be from particular countries, rather than from any specific racial/ethnic group. Tourists from Britain, Australia and New Zealand often tipped poorly, mainly because they were not used to the practice. As an Australian, this used to infuriate me. Not only did it mean that i would get worried looks from the wait-staff whenever i went out for dinner (i’m a good tipper, though), but i also think it’s the height of ignorance not to find out what the tipping practices are in a country before you go on vacation.
What infuriated me even more was that i would come across some Aussies, Kiwis and Brits who knew what the tipping practices were in North America, but would ignore them anyway, saying something like “If they want me to pay more for the meal, let them raise the price on the menu.” While i agree that an argument can be made for paying waiters better and doing away with tips altogether, THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS, SO OPEN YOUR FUCKING WALLET AND PUT A TIP ON THE TABLE!!! Your server relies on tips to pay the rent, buy food, etc.
The funny thing was, when i returned to Australia after a few years overseas, i found it very hard to get out of the habit of tipping 15-18%, and my friends would all look at me aghast when i dropped $5 on the table after a meal. Now that i’m living in the US, tipping just comes naturally again.
One other thing. Despite the fact that tipping is standard practice in the US, some of the other bad tippers that i served in Canada were American tourists. There seems to be a sort of mentality that grips some people when they are on vacation, whereby regular tipping practices go out the window and people become as cheap as possible. In my experience, some families also seem to have the attitude that they don’t need to take the children’s food and drink into account when calculating the tip. What the fuck? I still had to make the drinks, order the food, serve the food, clear the table, etc., etc. If anything, children often make the servers job harder.
For these and other reasons, i hope never to have to work in the food service industry again.
I always tip well (or well enough). And I’m black.
But my question is how much of this turns out to be due to a sort of self fulfilling prophecy? Suppose that blacks are the same type of tippers as everyone else, or possibly a little worse on average, but for whatever reason they’ve gained a reputation as being poor tippers. It seems reasonable that many servers would then give them inferior service which would result in a lower tip. All they see is a black person giving a bad tip, thus reinforcing their conviction that blacks are bad tippers.
Another possibility is that people have this belief and tend to notice more when blacks don’t tip simply because they are expecting it. When blacks do tip well they are written off as exceptions. Conversely people may not notice that many whites are bad tippers because they get put into subgroups, such as Baptists, teachers, etc. as opposed to just being “white” (not accusing anyone of anything, just using handy examples).
Of course I’m coming up with all of this off the top of my head, and I suppose that it’s possible that there is some socioeconomic and/or cultural reasons for people from a given group to be worse tippers than the norm.