Fighting ignorance starts at home.
My Dad always asks me how much to tip. I’m always like “The aerospace engineer is asking me for math help?”. The concept seems foreign to him. Without help, he is at least an average tipper. He still fuddles with it, it’s almost funny to watch. He’ll take a solid 5 minutes to decide. He means well though.
I got taught tipping at an early age by both my Mother and Father. Mother was/is not a worldly person and tipped the least she could. One of the places we went to often knew of this and would seat us in the newest servers area. So much for Mom.
With Dad, he tipped well. “To Insure Performance” was how he explaned tipping to me. We, Dad sis and I got great treatment at a place we went to a lot. He would make small talk with the staff. When I got older I noticed it was not just the pretty girls that got chatted up, dad would say nice things to the busboys too.
I like to think I take after Dad.
I have to admit before reading some of the tipping threads around here, I was a so-so tipper. I tend to be more generous now, provided the server seems to make an attempt to serve and not just grudgingly wander by my table occasionally. I’ve even gotten my husband to do better than barely 10%.
Not to long ago, we went for breakfast, and after bringing our drinks and saying “I’ll be right back” our server proceeded to ignore us. It was at a restaurant we visit frequently, so we’re pretty good a figuring when they’re understaffed, and they weren’t that day. She just blew us off. My husband went to the hostess station to lodge a complaint, and the hostess took care of us from then on. That girl was extremely busy seating customers and running the till, but she made sure to stop by our table 2 or 3 times to check on us. She got a very good tip. The other one got a comment card naming names. Guess she just didn’t work out - we’ve never seen her there again.
Another reason I’m a bit more generous is that my daughter is a server at Steak-N-Shake. She’s told me horror stories of bad tippers, plus tales of being stiffed because the cooks were too slow or other things beyond her control. I’d like to think my good tips 800 miles away would eventually translate to someone treating my kid well. I’m also hoping she gets a job in a restaurant where she can earn a bit more - it’s got to be rough to put in a hard day and have little more than personal satisfaction to show for it… :rolleyes:
Disclaimer: I’m Dutch and tipping over here is very different. The main difference is that minimum wage is higher to begin with, so most adults waiting full-time get paid decent salaries. Most waitstaff in the average restaurant is young, students or even highschool students, because minimum-wages are much lower for people between 16 and 21 who don’t have to support families from their earnings. Threfore, youngsters waiting table are usually doing it for fun and fun money. That’s why tippin in the Netherlands isn’t such serious business. Tips are a “nice if you do, okay if you don’t” thing over here.
That being said, I don’t get the whole “good service/bad service thing.” AFAIC, the minimum service is the maximum service. Extra’s are just a nuisance.
Ideally, this is how I want my restaurant visit to go.
If necessary, I’ve made reservations. We come in; pick our own seats; the waiter takes my orders within 15 minutes after seating. If I ask the waiter a question, he or she tries to answer it. Questions can range from “We’re in a bit of a hurry, is it possible to finish our meail before seven?” to “Do you have a kiddie chair” to “What, exactly, is Filet Mignonne?”. A waiter is perfectly entitled to say “I’m afraid that isn’t possible” or “yes, thye’re over here in the corner, do you want me to help setting it up for you?” to “I don’t know, would you like me to ask the kitchen?”. When the food is ready, the waiter brings our food to the table. If I want more to drink or more to eat, or if I want to pay, I signal the waiter or walk up to him if he’s busy in another part of the restaurant.
As for demeanor, the waiter should show an easy minimum of politeness. She can be taciturn or bubbly if (s)he feels like doing so. (S)he should wear something clean that makes it easy to spot he’s the one who is waiting tables.
That’s it. That’s the minimum and the maximum of what I expect from waitstaff. A helpful attitude if I had any questions or requests for extra’s (separate checks, kid-chairs, free tap-water refills) or if the food was extra good, I’ll reward with 10 dollars tip on an average 60 dollar meal. If the food was as expected and I didn;t ask any extra service from the waiter, I tip anywhere between 0 and 3 dollars.
Any more “service” is a nuisance, not a service.
I don’t want to be seated. I don’t want to be helped in or out of my coat. I can carry my own bags. I don’t want insincere compliments. I don’t want recommendations for what to eat, or drink, if the menu is clear enough I can decide that for myself, thankyouverymuch. I don’t want my waiter summing up the daily specials or extra possiblities; what he says goes in one ear and out the other anyway, and it is much more practical to have the specials written out on a paper menu or on a blackboard on the wall. I don’t want my waiter to bring me unasked for “extra’s”.
I don’t want my waiter hovering near my table, so I have to keep my voice down when talking with my partner. I don’t want him to come to my table at random moments, breaking into the conversation, asking if everything is allright. Basically, I don’t want to think of my waiter at all while I’m having dinner, and I don’t want him to think of me, either.
Does any of the above “things Maastricht doesn’t want from waitstaff” constitute the difference between good and bad service to you?
Nope. But your service was likely better. And I assure you that cleaning up the mess from lobster is a heck of a lot more disgusting than cleaning up the mess from a steak.
Also, don’t forget: your server is likely giving a “tip out” to the restaurant owner, which is a percentage of their SALES. So if you order four $50 lobsters, plus a bottle of wine and apertifs, for example, the tip-out your server will be giving to the house will be $8-$10, instead of the $4-$8 it would be if you’d ordered the $15 steak at TGIF’s.
…And on that $200-$250 bill, I’d get a whopping $20. Of which $8-$10 would immediately go back to the house.
Well, the main problem with that “solution” is that unfortunately, restaurant work isn’t really unionized or anything. So getting an employer to do something like that would be harder than you may think.
Sure, they can’t fire you… but I found myself down to two bad shifts a week when I asked my last employer to stop docking me for the legal “half hour break” when there was literally no opportunity to take one, and he wasn’t willing to provide that opportunity.
If the average waiter or waitress told their employer that “due to standards set out by the IRS, you are obliged to fill in what cheap tippers left out”, they would quickly find themselves with one shift a week.
Here’s an example of very good service to my husband and I: After waiting longer than we’d anticipated to have the waiter come to the table initially to greet us (for whatever reason - being busy, being reassigned to our table due to us being forgotten in the layout, etc.), the waiter commented favorably on our selections of beer from the restaurant’s own brewery and suggested that we might like another kind as well. When we said we’d tried one of those varieties from another brewery, he came by the table with a free sample glass (about a quarter of a glass) of that beer. We commented on the unusual color and he explained a bit about the brewing process, and we mentioned we do homebrewing. During the course of the meal he brought us more beer samples, and at the end he gave us their brewmaster’s name on a business card and suggested we call if we were interested in a brewery tour. I forget exactly how much I tipped (I blame the beer… don’t worry, we took public transportation) but it was over 30%.
He made up for the initial wait (something like 10-15 minutes in an otherwise very sparsely populated restaurant) with prompt service otherwise and a nice beer sample. He noticed our eagerness to discuss beer and brought more samples over, talked about beer production, and suggested we contact the brewmaster for a tour.
Other things I’ll tip well for are good communication about problems - one waiter not only apologized when I innocently commented that the pasta’s sauce didn’t taste quite right, but also came out and assured us that the chef agreed and thanked me for the heads-up (it was alfredo sauce but had no real taste of cheese in it), and even the manager came out to ask if we wanted a free dessert or something for my inconvenience. Another is putting up with a bitchy tablemate, especially if I’m unable to control the situation. My bipolar father-in-law is very tough on waitstaff, so I’ll usually tip the hell out of them for dealing with the situation gracefully when I’m stuck going out to eat with him.
Other things I tip really well for:
Ideally having to physically go get your waiter never has to happen in an American restaurant. If things are not insanely busy, the waiter should be checking in on the table now and then, hopefully sensing how much or little a table wants to be bothered (like don’t hassle too much the table with a lovey-dovey couple who obviously want to murmur sweet nothings, or the person who shows a dislike for the waiter’s doing a checkup), or at least looking to see if someone at the table is catching the waiter’s eye. I ought to be able to summon my waiter with a glance, or at most a raised finger or slightly raised hand. If I had to go track down my waiter, that’s definitely not the American standard of waitstaff performance. (I’m not saying it’s better or worse than in Europe, just saying what’s expected out of a waiter for that tip-wage.)
Can I ask what you do with these two things?
I tip 20% or more, no matter what, and I find the idea of holding a few bucks over another human being to make them act nice to me personally abhorrent. If the server is terrible, I assume she’s having a bad day, like human beings do, and I let it go. I don’t feel that stepping into a restaurant entitles me to be treated like a king by strangers.
Only if a server were to be completely rude or inappropriate – making racist jokes, for example – would I considering withholding the tip. I guess I couldn’t tip someone I actually found morally rupugnant. Luckily, in all my years of dining out, that’s never been an issue. If the service is particularly poor and I can’t figure out a good reason, I might let the manager know, but I’d still tip.
If the server never shows up at all, or vanishes after the water comes, of course then there’s nobody to tip, and that’s a different issue. But this has only happened to me once, and I suspect the server had just quit and walked off the floor, not that she was so bad at her job she actually forgot an entire table.
The lists I see here are alarming to me sometimes. It seems like some people really enjoy the feeling of power that comes from having someone around who is obligated to bring them things and pretend to like them, and the tip is like the leash they can yank on. It’s frankly kind of gross to me, but if someone can make it make sense in different terms, I’m open to listening.
I wanted to add that I tip at least 15% for even middling to average service, and almost always more, typically 20%. The things I listed in my above post will push it above 20% automatically.
I can think of one case in which I didn’t tip anything - we were the only group, 4 people, in a restaurant in the middle of the day. The waitress came around to take our drink order and then disappeared. I was suffering from heat exhaustion and after about 10 minutes of waiting without even any water, I had to go up to the bar to ask for some. The rest of the experience was similar, with her forgetting to bring items, being totally unapologetic when notified that items were missing, and so on. The guy in our party who was paying for the check would quietly do a percentage countdown after she left the table, each time she screwed up, and she did get down to 0%. I think he left a penny to be sure she knew we weren’t just cheap. Even a sincere apology each time she messed up would have salvaged it, but from the way she treated us, we were merely an inconvenience to her.
I shoot for 20%. Sometimes my arithmatic is off and I end up closer to 18%, but sometimes I round up and it is closer to 22%.
If the service is not good, I leave 15%. If it is really not good I leave 10%. I can’t remember when I left less than 10%.
My dad does the same thing and he’s a electrical/computer engineer. I ahve to watch him to make sure he doesn’t do the math wrong and under tip and I still wind up sneaking money onto the table sometimes. I can’t decide if it’s an age thing or a cheap engineer thing.
Could all of you come eat at my restaurant, then, please? Because based on this conversation, you’re all way nicer, cooler, and more aware than any of my usual customers. 
My husband and father always tip 15% for average service, a bit more for really good service.
I’m nicer, when I’m doing the tipping myself. First of all, my bar for really good service is lower than my husbands – I give extra points for friendliness, while he looks for above-and-beyond service to get those extra points. And I’m much more forgiving of errors, if it’s at all possible that it isn’t the server’s fault – slow service and things like that I figure could be problems in the kitchen and out of the servers control. My husband (taking the stand that overall service is overall service) will grade down for slowness. End result is that he almost always tips just 15% and I almost always tip closer to 20%.
I admit, though, that math isn’t my friend, so I alwasy do my calculations pretty roughly. For instance, I took my mom out to dinner the other night. Our tab, after tax, was $26.15. I’m not going to figure out 15% or 20% of a number like that. I just left five bucks and figured that was close enough.
My husband will tip 10% for iffy service, BTW, or nothing at all for Really Bad Service. If the service is bad enough to justify him completely stiffing the server, he also makes a complaint to the manager, so the place will know he isn’t just being cheap, but is making a statement with his lack of tip.
Me, I’ve never tipped below 10%, and that was for really terrible service. This only happened once. The server was surly and rude – she rolled her eyes when I asked if there were onions in the meatloaf, and said something like, “Gawd! Who doesn’t put onions in their meatloaf!” When I responded that I didn’t like onions and would like her please to check with the kitchen if she wasn’t sure, she sighed really loadly and slapped her ticket book on her thigh before walking back to the kitchen. I tipped her 10% and left a complaint with the manager explaining why. She was lucky my husband wasn’t with me – she wouldn’t even had gotten the 10% if he was. But I figured she might need to tip out to the bartenders and busboys, so I didn’t want to stiff them by stiffing her.
I have a very embarrassing anecdote about tipping.
On Christmas Eve, I was at a restaurant, and the service was genuinely bad, seeming to embody all the aspects of the stereotype of the non-caring goof that is there only to collect tips, service or not. So, I smugly decided that I WOULD NOT PAY FOR SERVICE THAT WAS INSULTING! (Which I really think that it was.)
After leaving a minimal tip (I never said that I had guts) I went home, checked the mail and found the results of my LSAT test. Just as I was opening it, I recalled the verse from the Bible about the merciful obtaining mercy. Uh-Oh. I opened it up and found that my score was 10-20 points below what I was expecting. Then my conscience hit me. HH, you swine! On Christmas Eve, of all days! And this girl probably needed money for Christmas presents, formula for the baby, etc… On Christmas Eve!
I was grateful that a poor score on the LSAT was **all ** that I had to deal with.
Never again. From now on, at least 20%. If the service is *exceptionally * terrible, I’ll try for 25% or better!
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I gotta say, I’m still stuck on this one. You have a kickback for the house? With no bussers, bartenders or hostesses? How does this work? I waited tables for a few years for a place with no bartenders, bussers or hostesses (although we did have hostesses on the really busy nights) and we just didn’t have to tip out, period. It makes no sense that you’d have to be tipping out to the house, that’s ridiculous! Is that even legal? What state do you wait tables in?
Tell me your husband doesn’t actually “snap his fingers” at the servers. That is one of the most disrespectful things you can do to waitstaff! Between that and being a crappy tipper, I’m hoping I’m getting a really wrong impression of your hubby. It’s true that you can tell a lot about a person by how they treat their server.
So… you’re going to reward people for being jerks?
Who the hell do you work for??? If you’re taking home less than 80 a shift on a weekend night, you need to find another server gig somewhere else. There are a lot of places that don’t treat their waitstaff like this and make them tip out to the house. (Yes, I’m still stuck on that, it’s boggling my mind.) I mean, I always had to declare 8% of my sales, but I never had to actually hand over that money. 
Seriously, your employers are taking serious advantage of you. Is this a chain or a locally owned place?
Locally owned place. I quit the place that was docking me for breaks not taken. Most restaurants understand that a break is nearly impossible to take in a busy restaurant, so they don’t bother. This place docked us for a half hour after every 5 worked. Even if we were running steadily for 12 hours. It was horrible.
And the place I currently work, the 4% tip-out is for the kitchen and the house. It’s legal… restaurant owners can make you tip out whatever they want. It’s their standard. Granted, 4% with no busboy, no hostess and no bartender is unheard of in the industry–hence my recent job search–but 3-5% isn’t unheard of overall, especially if there* is* a busboy, hostess and/or bartender.
As for what state I’m waitressing in… none. I’m Canadian. Seems perhaps we’re a lot cheaper over here.
I just can’t seem to leave this thread alone. 
I think you can tell a lot about a person by how well they tip. Take, for example, my SO’s sister. Never liked her all that much. She’s all show, big mouth, lots of “puffery,” ect. She can be rather insufferable. I remember my SO came home after a mother’s day brunch with his mom, her and his other sister. He was bitching about how dismissive she was to the server, then how shitty she tipped. He had to throw down a lot more money than he expected to cover her and his mother’s portion of the tip. Before this, I had never been in a situation where I noticed how she tipped, although I assumed it was cheap. She’s just that kind of person. So I asked him how she normally tips. He said never ever above 15%. Usually 10. I was hardly suprised.
OTOH, my old bosses, who were a couple of the nicest and most generous people I’d known, are great tippers. I did their books and noticed that they ate out a lot and always tipped well. I was happy to see it, since I would’ve lost just a smidgen of respect for them had they turned out to be shitty tippers. See, they’re the type of people who do not look down on anyone and it shows. I think these are the types of people who generally tip well, where people like my SO’s sister, who have a bit of a superiority complex, are generally shitty tippers.
I think that in order to be a good tipper, you’ve got to be able to appreciate what your server, caddy, manicurist or whomever, is doing for you. If you’re too big and bad to even notice those people, much less see them as equals, you’re going to tip them poorly.