Nope, since I report my tips and get them all at the end of the night, they’re all the same to me. Just tip. 
It’s said to help tipping, I don’t flirt, so I don’t know or care to know.
Focus groups say yes, tho.
Nope, not in my 2 years of serving. I’ve dropped only one tray because the restaurant was flooded and I lost my footing.
I have, however, caught a tray w/ 2 plates of food on it in mid-air after another waiter slipped and fell. The food was fine and went to the table with a round of applause. That was amusing.
We don’t pay for anything at work, except the food we buy to eat at a deep discount.
At the two corporate restaurants I’ve worked for, you are charged a percentage of your sales at checkout time. This is divided up appropriately from there.
Where I work, we tip out the hostess, runner/busser (same person) and bar. The servers tip out 6% of food sales on nights when we have a hostess and 5% on nights we don’t. The hostess gets the 1% and the runner/busser gets 5%. Bar gets 6% of alcohol sales.
Since I tend bar, I only tip out 3% to the runner. S/he runs all my food, but I bus my own bar.
Cook chiming in here - it has been my observation, and some servers have verified it, that servers tend to be some of the most pain-in-the-ass restaurant customers. It seems to boil down to them demanding the same level of service that they think they give to their own customers (no reflection on you meant - I’ve never seen you in action).
One Christmas, my boss at the last restaurant I cooked in took the entire staff out to dinner at a fancier restaurant. We three cooks sat there eating in embarrassed silence because our restaurant’s waitresses and boss (also a waitress) ran the other servers into the ground, making all sorts of demands, complaining and sending things back to the kitchen.
I was working in a restaurant one night when a woman came in and ordered a T-bone steak. She proceeded to send it back three times, claiming it was overcooked. The third time, she actually came to the kitchen window and informed me that she was a waitress and such-and-such a restaurant - a restaurant known for great steaks - and she knew how a steak was supposed to be cooked. I didn’t say anything, but one of my own waitresses was kind enough to explain to this woman that I had been a cook at that same restaurant for three years, and I too “knew how a steak should be cooked”.
Strangely enough, I rarely see or hear of a cook send food back when eating in a different restaurant. We tend to take what we get. We also make very few “special requests” such as adding or subtracting ingredients for the item we’re ordering. The only time I’ve ever sent anything back was when I ordered some biscuits & gravy for breakfast, and the gravy literally tasted like they had melted some styrofoam into it.
On the funny side, here’s an anecdote I saw in Reader’s Digest years ago:
Customer: Waitress, may I have another glass of water?
Waitress: I’m not a waitress, I’m a server. “Waitress” is a sexist term.
Customer: Oooo-kay. Well, then, Server, may I have another glass of water?
Waitress: Sure! I’ll send the busboy around with the pitcher.
One waitress with whom I worked years ago once got a great big tip from a group of Canadians after she told them the “What’s the difference between canoes and Canadians?” joke…
My boyfriend works at an upscale restaurant (and he’s still on lunches; they have to work lunches for a couple of months before they get to work dinners), and it’s mandatory to tip the bussers 15%, bartender 10%, and runners (the people who run the food to the tables from the kitchen) 5% of his total tips for the shift (food and alcohol). He can tip more if he wants to, but so far I don’t know if he has or not. He gives the cash for those folks who worked that shift to the manager and she gives it to them on their next shift. So he actually only pockets 70% of the tips he makes, but it’s a nice enough place that he usually brings home $40-$50 for a lunch shift. The place he works has a big focus on the wine they sell with the meals (I think their wine list, all CA wine, has over 350 wines). They had him running on Easter Sunday for brunch and he made $40 as his 5% of the waitstaff’s tips for the time he worked, plus a runner’s wage is higher than the server’s wage of $2.13 an hour.
I can’t wait til he starts doing dinner shifts. That’s when people order whole bottles of wine, not just glasses. I can’t believe the markup on wine in restaurants.