Not trying to imply it’s a terrible thing, I just think that in a thread about tipping, it’s important to know the financial and legal realities of US tipping before they make grand statements about whether or not they’re going to do it. A mass “tip withholding protest” (as unlikely as such an event would be) without a change in the law, would not only screw the waiter out of the tip, but in an extreme case could cause them to have to pay taxes on the tips they never saw.
I don’t tip at all.
Round a cab far up to the nearest dollar but thats about it.
p.s. If you visit Australia, don’t tip either - if too many people tip it forces wages down and gives the impression that good service is something over and beyond the norm.
As I’m sure many of you know, I’m very Anti-Tipping.
Where I come from (originally New Zealand, of late Australia) tipping is Not The Done Thing.
Certainly, in NZ there were undertones of patronism in tipping someone in a restaurant (ie, indicating that they were poorer than you and needed your “help”, much as you’d tip a shoe-shine boy), and in Australia the general view is that the price on the menu is the price and we’re not magically adding 15-20% on top of it because of some ingrained social custom/extortion by restaurants.
Full disclosure: Minimum wages in Australia are higher than the US for customer service people, and although lots of people (all of whom lived overseas) waded into a previous thread on the subject with web-based “cites” to the effect that tipping was expected in Australia, the people who live here (including myself) pointed out that no-one is going to turn down free money from tourists for doing their jobs anyway, and locals certainly aren’t expected to tip.
I will say that a lot of people have differing ideas of “Good Service” in a restaurant.
My idea of good service is that you smile politely, take our order promtply, then LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE TO ENJOY MY MEAL IN PEACE. If I want more drinks or the bill, I’ll ask you for them. DO NOT INTERRUPT MY MEAL TO ASK HOW EVERYTHING IS. Trust me, if there’s a problem, I will have had a discreet word as soon as it became apparent.
In fact, if someone keeps coming by to “make sure everything’s OK”, I’d consider it VERY annoying and rude- not “good service”.
And where does all this “If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to eat out” crap come from? It’s not necessarily a case of “not being able to afford it”, it’s about magically having your bill increase by 20% (20% which isn’t getting spent on something else) purely because, well, for some curious reason Americans seem to like having invisible numbers on their bills.
And who on earth decided bartenders should get $1 a drink? There is no way I would EVER tip a bartender for anything less than a huge group of people (stag night, for example), and even then it would depend how much crap they’d had to put up with and how much the drinks had cost in the first place.
No way at all am I tipping the bloke or girl behind the bar $1 to pour me a drink- I can do it myself, you know. Hell, if I got $1 for every drink I poured when I worked in a bar, I’d be living in a luxury house and taking overseas holidays every few months.
Oh, and welcome to the SDMB, Carlyjay!
Likewise, if you visit the States, please DO tip, because that’s where the servers get their wages. Otherwise, you’re screwing them over, since they’ll still be expected to pay taxes on what you should have tipped them.
If you say you don’t tip in YOUR COUNTRY, where tipping is not the norm, fine. But don’t come to a nation where it is expected and then proceed to behave as if you were still at home. “When in Rome” and all that.
If only American tourists here took your advice, Guin… If only. 
Yep - when I travelled to Canada and NY I tipped. It was a bit awkward not knowing how to do it exactly, I just knew it was expected. I stuffed things up a bit at one restaurant where I ordered something from one waiter and then something else from another. This lead to some confusion until I discovered that the patron is supposed to only use one waiter.
Also only found out later you were supposed to give barstaff a tip for each drink. :smack:
OK, I’m confused. (like that is hard to do)
If you don’t tip, and it is expected, I can see the problem.
If a 'merican goes to Aussie land and tips when it is not expected, what is the problem? The server just got the magical money for nothing. (Now if they could just get the chicks for free)
Okay… but could you feel obliged because the restaurant and the government both allow the server to be paid less, thus the server cannot pay their rent if people with your mindset don’t tip properly?
I can understand if you’d prefer it that way… trust me, so does every server who serves you and gets a bad tip. But just because you wish the economics of restaurants were different does not make it so. Your beef with the way servers are paid does not pay the server’s rent. They can’t go to their landlord and say “Well, I can’t make rent, but hey, people don’t like the idea of tipping.”
Honestly, and I mean no offense, but if you don’t like the way restaurants expect you to tip, you might want to eat at restaurants less. Or perhaps frequent one with a gratuity fee, so you can feel better that it’s included and you can consider it a “wage”.
Understood that it isn’t done where you are and may thus seem to you like the better way to be. However, I know when I travel, the first thing I do before I leave is get a travel guide which tells me the local customs. Mainly, so I’m not a complete ignoramus while I’m over there, committing a bunch of horrible faux-pas. 
So if you’re over here in North America, while it may seem silly that we have this whole tip thing going on, please tip anyway. 
Well, from our point of view it looks like we’re arbitrarily being charged 20% more for exactly the same thing…
So, if you tip on holiday here we get free money, and if we tip when we’re on holiday there, we’re being charged MORE (on top of the exchange rates!) for what appears to us to be exactly the same level of service as we’d get back home.
Carlyjay, I’m curious as to WHY people work jobs that are dependent on tips?
I hate to sound like a heartless bastard, but it’s really not my concern if my server can’t pay their rent because they don’t get paid enough by their boss.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of crappy jobs- but I never blamed the customers for my low income.
Are there ANY restaurants in the US where you’re NOT expected to tip, the staff get paid properly, and the price on the menu is the price you’ll pay at the end of your meal, without any hidden extras?
Imagine if you had to tip the guy in the supermarket who helps you fined the tinned peas, or the McDonalds lackey who brought your food out to the car,
Good question, and I don’t really have a good answer. As I mentioned before, I have family and friends in the service industry, and they told me the “at least 10% during lunch, at least 15% during dinner” thing. It seemed more important to them to get proper tips during dinner than lunch.
You make a good point about servers working harder during lunch hours because diners have less time to eat before returning to work. I usually eat at less fancier restaurants for lunch, and so far, no one – servers, friends, or family (even including those in the industry) – has ever raised the issue.
Fellow Dopers, should I rethink this issue and tip 20% across the board now? (Or at least 15% during lunch?)
By the way, I was taught that in Europe, you never leave the tip on the table. You’re supposed to hand it directly to the server. I sometimes do this in the States. I’ve already ranted about this in my original post, but to reiterate: I don’t want management getting a cut of what rightfully belongs to the server.
Here is a great idea. A cunning plan to avoid embarrasment, reduce confusion, create a more equitable workplace for service staff and streamline payment of bills.
If the government increased the minimum wages of service staff by say 20% and did away with special ‘tipped employee’ minimum wages, then customers would not feel guilty about not leaving a tip. It could be publicised that now for the publics convenience the tip has been included into the wage structure. I mean everyone (except Dr Matrix) pays a tip anyway, so it would have zero net impact.
It may take a while, but eventually this escalating meme would start to fade away. Otherwise we might get to the stage where people actually pay their employer to go to work so they can obtain tips. Sort of like a bum on the street, but in a restaurant serving meals.
Sorry Dr Matrix, I meant Dr_Paprika. I always get my matrices and paprikas confused.
There are people who are already in that position. Many cab drivers are technically “independent contractors” who pay the cab companies for the privilege of using the cab all day. They also have to pay for gas and for the services of the dispatcher. After they’ve covered those expenses, the rest of what they earn is theirs. But the initial charges are pretty steep, so cabs become rolling sweatshops for plenty of drivers. (I get that info from The Karma of Brown Folk, by Vijay Prashad.)
Whenever I take a cab, I tip the driver well.
At least some exotic dancers are in this position, too. They have to pay the manager for time on the floor. The manager pays them nothing; what they live on is the cash customers slip into their g-strings. (I heard this years and years ago from someone who had worked as a dancer.)
…Didn’t get to finish my thought, as I was on my way out the door.
At that point in the thread, people were anticipating a shitstorm, and, having known several waiters, I thought it important tp get some facts out while the weather was clear. My impression is that some who oppose our current custom of tipping, and may be aware that waiters often get paid less than they might otherwise receive, think the reduction in pay is not significant (perhaps only about 15-20 percent lower, even), when in fact, waiters, even at fancy places, IME, make less than half minimum in actual wages. Doing some quick math, that’s about $4200 a year, assuming a 40-hour work week, which I’m not sure is even a reasonable assumption in this sector.
So I wanted to point out the wage issue and the tax issue as a means of showing that tipping is far from a mere custom, as it’s traditions as practiced in this country have been built, by law, into the wage and tax structure of that part of the economy.
If tipping were abolished tomorrow, the restaurant owners would have to start paying the waiters, busboys, bartenders, etc. minimum wage, at the very least more than doubling their salary outlay for the same-sized staff, and the equalizing sacrifice for the customer if the owner wants to maintain profit margin would be either in the price of a meal, or in the number of service staff (and therefore, the quality of service).
Yes, you are bringing politics into this and you are wrong. This laissez faire economics type tips well, first, because I believe in rewarding work, and second, I want to be able to get good service since I down Diet Coke like a camel and can be picky about my food, and third, I want to be able to return to a place without the “bad tipper” label and the treatment that goes with it.
Is that such a hard concept to grasp? I get my money’s worth and more. At one local pizza place all my pizzas mysteriously get upgraded to the largest sizes available with all kind of freebie sides, for example. In fact I have several libertarian acquaintances and I don’t know any among them who doesn’t tip well. Only jerkwads & cheapstakes don’t tip well. Politics has nothing to do with it.
It occurred to me that my tone might have been clearer initially if I had expressed my own tip philosophy right off the bat:
I tip 20%. Realy good service may get about 23% or more. Less-than-satisfactory service gets about 15%, because I’m sympathetic to the fact that it’s a crappy job. Only abysmal service gets less than that, and I’ve only stiffed a waiter once*, at the insistence of an indignant date (and it really was the worst service I have ever received).
I used to always leave a cash tip, even when paying by credit card, because I had heard that at places where the waiters pool the credit-charged tips at the end of the night, the restaurant often inlcuded itself as a kind of extra waiter when the division was made, so if you had four waiters, the charged tips would get split five ways, with the restaurant taking a cut. Cash tips the waiter could just keep in their pocket.** Once I found out about allocated tips, however, I have followed this practice less diligently. Automation of credit card transactions and the fact that a great number of people pay and tip on their credit cards has made tip-reporting a breeze, with the result that many waiters who are quite young, and have been raised with the traditional wonderful American understanding of how to handle money and work with taxes :rolleyes:, don’t keep tip records as meticulously as they should. I’d hate to think of a young, naive waiter whose service I appreciated having to pay taxes on some indeterminate amount later allocated to them because they didn’t have the records to prove otherwise.
I have seen the benefits of being a big tipper with my own eyes. The local pizza place I used to order from all the time when I lived in Cambridge would announce on the phone that delivery would take about 60 minutes or more on a busy night, until they heard my address. I’d get that sucker piping hot in less than 30 minutes every time.
*And my earlier posts should make it clear that when you leave no tip at all, you are effectively telling your server, “Your service tonight was worth only your wages, which an illegal-immigrant janitor on a midnight shift wouldn’t even take the time to stop and spit on.”
**I mentioned this while out with friends one night, and one who had been a waiter hadn’t encountered this practice and called bullshit. To settle it, we asked our waiter of that evening if he had to do this. He said he was new to that restaurant, and didn’t know yet, but that his previous employer did exactly as I described.
Which brings me back to my original point that it’s their problem if working as a waitperson pays so appallingly. Nothing stopping them from getting a job working as a janitor or a grocery bagger or whatever.
Hell, if people without the appropriate working visas and documentation earn more than waitstaff, isn’t that telling you something?
Waiting tables is a viable option because tips on top of the abysmal salary make it so.
If tipping disappeared, restaurants would pay minimum wage, and the waiters who could get better paying jobs would leave for those greener pastures.
Which would leave the ones who can’t get better jobs to serve you in the restaurants for minimum wage plus nothing at all, with the commensurate dedication to service.
I don’t consider my self to be a crappy tipper. I am usually in the 10 to 20% range depending on the service. As a former cook, I kind of am confused about this tipping debate. People have suggested that we do away with tipping and simply pay the waitresses/waiters a fair wage. What exactly is that? As a cook at a steak restaurant where the meals were generally $6 to $15 a piece, the cooks were paid $5 to $8 per hour with almost no tips (in 2.5 years I was tipped a dollar). The waitresses before their $2.XX were making $10 to $20 per hour. I consider this to be very typical. How much is fair for the waitresses/waiters? Do they work that much harder than the cooks? D we pay them minumum wage or slightly above that as we do the cooks? Do they really want that?
Frankly, except for very rare occassions where a waiter/waitress is given a small smoking section of a very abnormal day, I have never heard of them making a considerable amount less than the cooks. This may vary when you get into more expensive restaurants where they hire chefs - but I think this would be very typical for most relatively lower cost restaurants, i.e., Logan’s Roadhouse, Applebees, etc.
I guess my point is that I don’t have a lot of sorrow for waiters/watresses complaining about tips because in my completely anecdotal evidence I don’t see them hurting for money at all compared to what others with similar education/skills are making. Making $10 to $20 for unskilled labor (not sure if that’s the right terminology. I am referring to labor that requires very little training and no education beyond simple arithmetic) is not bad at all.
No offense to you, but in all my years as a server, I’ve never met a cook who’d last five minutes as a server. “What do you mean you don’t like the steak??? I cooked it the way you ordered it bitch!” ::doesn’t get tipped::