Once I was at a bar with a friend. I paid for a round (2 beers) and told the waitress to “keep the change”. But I had a brain fart – I thought I was giving her $2.50 when in reality the “change” was 50 cents. My mistake, yes, but this waitress just flipped out, and actually called me a “cheap asshole” to my face.
If she’d only smiled and said “thank you” a) I probably would have realized my error and made up for it, and/or b) tipped her well the rest of the night, because that’s just what I tend to do. But since she felt the need to berate me, that half a buck was ALL she got from me and my buddy. We switched tables and were quite generous to our new waitress.
Oh, and I took a moment to mention our first server’s rudeness to the manager on my way out.
RedRosesForMe, this is an extreme example, and I am not implying that you act this way in front of your customers. But my point is that staying polite and professional, even in the face of what you think is a shitty tip, will pay off for you in the long run.
Essentially, as the US system stands, you buy the food from the restaurant and the table service from the wait staff. In practical terms, waiters are more like independent contractors or barbers renting a chair than salaried employees. If you do not want to pay any tip, get your food to go or stay at home. If you want to be waited upon while you eat, recognize that the standard prices for that service do fluctuate.
And a quick response:
Waiting tables - especially as you get into finer dining - is absolutely a specialized skill set. I’ve worked in kitchens, but if you stuck me in the front of the house I’d be lost in 10 minutes. Everything from physically getting all the food to the table without dropping it to being able to accurately discuss and suggest wines to accompany different dishes has to be learned, mostly on the fly. Washing dishes is unskilled labor. Waiting tables is not.
And in finer restaurants, my understanding is that it isn’t uncommon to make $60k or more a year waiting tables - and that good waitstaff are often poached from one fine restaurant to another. Which seems like a fair wage for when the skill set becomes specialized.
And here is the disconnect that seems to keep occurring in this thread. You claim to be a good or generous tipper for greater then 15% tips while others claim that anything less then 20% makes you cheap, ignorant and potentially an asshole should you accidentally leave only 14.5%. So who is right?
In my mind, if you’re going to work as a server and can’t come to grips with the reality that the average tip is going to be about 15% then you’re probably in the wrong line of work. And trying to change perception about servers having an attitude of entitlement with regards to tips by calling anyone that tips the average (15%) cheap is probably going to work against you.
I used to live in Japan, where you don’t tip in restaurants. Not only is it not expected, it may not even be accepted. A Canadian coworker of mine when first in the country left a tip on the table in a restaurant, and the server actually chased him out into the street to return the cash he “forgot”.
I received excellent service everywhere I went in Japan, without exception. The only problems I ever had were due to my poor Japanese language skills. (That is, I occasionally didn’t get exactly what I thought I’d ordered, but it probably was what I actually had ordered). Even at the fast food level the quality of service and general cleanliness was always MUCH better than I’d expect in the US.
People can and do perform very well in a no-tip situation. I’d be perfectly happy to see the US adopt a similar system, where servers are paid decent wages and the price on the menu is what the customer actually pays.
Maybe in a big city, but in most of the US that is far more than I have ever heard of someone making in tips. You’d have to make over $200 a night, 5 nights per week, to pull that, and no one’s taking in $200 a night on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Or even a Friday afternoon, if you’re not lucky enough (or if there’s drama) and you don’t get that dinner shift. Generally, I’d say it’s closer to $25K - $40K for fine dining wait staff I have known in North Florida and Georgia. And that’s with no insurance, no sick leave, and so on.
I’m starting to think you’re hard to please as well.
I waitressed for quite a few years in college. It wasn’t that long ago. I expected 10%, and most of the time I got that. 15% made me happy.
You are asking, nay, demanding 20% now?
Tipping IS optional. I made the $2/hr quoted in this thread, and I DEFINITELY agree with other people that tipping is optional. Always.
Yes, sometimes waitresses make zilch. That’s the nature of the game.
If you are demanding 20% because somehow the people coming into the restaurant owe it to you, you definitely need another line of work. And I’ve worked with plenty of waitresses – the ones that got offended by the amount of tips they were given were terrible at their jobs and a trial to work with.
If you are treating your customers as if you think they’re assholes, it’s probably showing. If you are treating your customers as if you are entitled to the cash in their wallets, it’s probably showing.
From what you’ve written in this thread, I would hate to have you as my waitress, and I would probably give you 10% just from fellow feelings for you. I know it’s a hard job, and I know the sick feeling I always got when a table stiffed me for no reason. But, RedRoses, you’re coming across as an entitled whiner.
I always felt pretty philosophical about it. A table of four overweight ladies-who-lunch who sent me for extra lemons for their water because they were too cheap to pay for lemonade? I knew I wasn’t going to be tipped more than a dollar each – usually they only left me two dollars in total. Another table of six – two adults, four kids? A buck fifty.
But then you’d get the kind single diners who would leave five dollars, or a table of rowdy college students who would meticulously measure out 15%. It all evens up.
I don’t care that waiters and waitresses make so little per hour. It has no bearing on my tipping calculation. Like Mr. Pink said, you don’t like it? Learn to fucking type. Mods, it’s a paraphrase, not an attack.
That said, I tip 15%. I also will tip 0% if the service is plainly terrible - not “oh, I’m not being doted on” but plainly terrible and multiple screw ups that are not the fault of the kitchen. I hate that my circle of friends once refused to stiff a waitress in a pizza place for her epically horrible service. The whole concept has become so overly-mandatory that people think they’re breaking the law by stiffing a truly crappy server.
I’ve mentioned it before in tipping threads. The percentage creep is justified because the price of a meal hasn’t kept up with inflation. Restaurants try to keep meal prices really simple, $10, $20, whatever. 15% on a ten dollar meal was fine in 1970. 15% on a $10 meal in 2009 doesn’t pay rent, tuition, food, car, gas, utilities, child care, etc.
You are correct that the service at high-end restaurants is usually better both in terms of quality and finesse, but I wouldn’t attribute it to tips per se. These restaurants tend to attract career waiters with superior knowledge and skills, and they are pretty picky about who they hire. The higher tips attract better waiters, naturally, but even in a non-tipping system, I would expect the better restaurants would continue to offer better service.
Yes, by raising the cost of food quite a bit. A high end restaurant in Florida generally pays wait staff around $3.15 an hour. For the level of service you expect, that would need to be raised by $10 an hour or more. That’s a huge new cost to the restaurant. Lower end restaurants - say, Denny’s or some other diner type place - would go with a flat minimum wage, and you’d get fast food level service. Me, I’d rather tip.
I really must disagree with you on the 15% thing. My husband has been a server for over 20 years. 15% is totally acceptable, 20% is great…anything higher and I am getting flowers that night. He also expects on 10% on a bottle of wine which is customary.
Now here’s the deal regarding why some waitstaff will make 30 or 40 dollars per hour and some won’t. If you work in fine dining (which my husband does) you have certain responsibilities regarding the menu. Where the fish came from, what is in the sauce…which of the hundred bottles of wine goes best with which dish. Each special is drilled to each server and there is a test. They must know every spice and every ingredient. Half the stuff he studies I don’t even know what it is.
Each week there are mandatory meetings. Clothes must be dry cleaned and pressed. Socks cannot be the least bit faded, shoes must non slip and polished. (quite the pain to find those) Clothing is not provided by the restaurant.
Now maybe because his average ticket is over 200 dollars 15% is a nice tip. Whereas if you work at Chilis it is significantly lower. The point is fine dining servers get more because they deserve more. They aren’t simply refilling cokes but are expected to be experts on the menu and providing exceptional service. Personally, I couldn’t do it.
You’ll actually tip someone 15%, when they’ve given you really bad service? If someone was giving bad service intentionally, or if they just didn’t care, they’d be happy as hell to get 15%. What have you taught them? If they’re lazy, you’ll give them 15%, but if they bust their ass, you’ll give them another 5%. BFD.
If I get bad service at a restaurant, no one will have to assume that they didn’t do a good job by getting a 15% tip. They’ll get a 0% tip and know for sure.
For the record, when visiting the US in 1991 the guide book printed that year said that the standard restaurant tip was 10%, except in New York City where it was 15%.
Why is it the customer’s job to “teach” them how to do their job and repeatedly evaluate them? Shouldn’t that be the employer’s? Also, since customers get such a limited snapshot of the server’s overall performance, aren’t our individual evaluations somewhat unfair to the server, particularly when they don’t take into account deficiencies that are completely out of the server’s control?
And since when is receiving a fair wage for work performed optional? Apparently, since it was okay for restaurant operators to allow customers to be responsible for a significant portion of their employees’ wages and call these “tips” optional.
In 1993 I was working as a busboy in a popular late night spot - effectively a diner with trendy organic versions of normal diner food- and flashy walls. The food was so so and of average price, the bar was normal. It was a fad location at the end of the club strip on Richmond in Houston, TX, right next to a 24hr denny’s. Our hours were effectively 24 hours if it was busy, but if it was a regular night we would close at 4:30am.
I hung out with these guys all the time- you could buy beer at seven am, so we would all go down to the 24hr pool hall and shoot some games. They blew money like nobody’s business. On more than one occasion they would realize it was the end of the month and exclaim, “Oh, I was going to trade out my Saturday because I don’t really want to work, but rent’s due!” They would then have a $600.00 evening.
As a busboy I usually received tipouts of $40 to $50 a night, because they were tipping me out as a percentage of what they received, not as a percentage of the total sales. I only had one of the waitstaff who would be super meticulous and hand me a few dollar bills and change.
I mentioned the denny’s because we served pretty much the same food with the same skill- denny’s even served beer and wine- but we were the ‘cool’ place to be. Some of the waitstaff sucked, and one of the cooks actually worked at dennys on his off days.
It was hard to get a job there, I got lucky even to get the busboy job with no experience, but you can make a whole lot of money as a server. Even the day shifts were cool, because we were frequented by celebrities, biker gangs, and offered bottomless champagne brunches nearly every day.
Yes- many waiters think they are a lot better than they really are. When I finally got a wait job, I quit after three months. I knew I sucked, never made more than $38 on a single shift EVER, and I hated being so bad at something. I have still worked in customer service my whole life. I dig people, I didn’t want to give them bad experiences.
I live in an expensive place, and I expect good service. I treat a baseline tip as 20% and will go higher or lower based on service quality. Most of the people I know are the same way. I grew up with the expectation of 15% since the 70’s. As a server I expected 15% when I did a decent job, and was often happy with 10%, due to the fact that as I mentioned upthread, I was a horrid waiter. But, I will also not tip at all if it was bad service that was due to the waiter. Example: Food is cold? That’s on the waiter. Food just sucks? Not the waiter’s fault, etc.
On the few occasions where I have actually gotten bad attitude, I will leave only the coin change, pointedly make eye-contact as I exit, and shake my head.
I have known people who got the stupid tips $1500 on a $300.00 meal because the people were celebrating insanely- that girl tipped out $20.00 that night. :dubious:
I have also tipped insanely percentage-wise myself. I have put down $20.00 on an $8.00 tab and said keep the change if the service was stupendous, and I have put down $150 on a $92 tab (only once, and I was just so happy to have any money at all that I had to share- long story)- but I will also admit that most of the times I have been so generous is if the waitress was hot and flirty. Of course, I never hit on waitstaff, as that is their job, but I want to let them know it was appreciated.
So yeah, I think RedRoses is acting a bit entitled, but I agree with her basic premise that 20% is standard in large cities.
I worked in a little diner in Vinton, IA as a dishwasher for $3.35 an hour when minimum wage was $4.25, and was damn glad to have the job. There weren’t any to be had for more than 30 miles around. The farmers would come in for breakfast and coffee, and the tab would come to about three fifty each and the guys would each throw down four dollars and call it even. That comes to slightly under 15% and was considered standard for a regular who was tipping well.
Not in America. It’s the employer’s job to give the stockholders the best return on investment possible, and if that means paying minimum wage and no benefits, so be it. It’s the individual employee’s or the unions’ job to ask for and get a living wage.
I don’t think stockholder return on investment is a valid argument. Not many restaurants are owned by publicly traded companies, and the vast majority of companies that are publicly traded are not eligible to pay their employees a reduced minimum wage while having their customers optionally raise the wage based on level of service (or whatever random metric customers arbitrarily choose).
I don’t really see what’s so compelling about the restaurant industry that the government sees the need to set up different compensation rules for them. What’s the benefit to society that wouldn’t be of further benefit extending those special rules to other industries, i.e. the medical and retail sectors? Frankly, I can’t see a benefit other than making it easier for Mom & Pop-type establishments to stay in business while chain restaurants exploit labor cost reductions. So, why don’t Mom & Pop retailers get that consideration? Do you know how hard it is to sell handmade tchotchkes in these trying economic times? Being a retailer can’t be easy, especially now.
What is the tax consequence of the lower minimum wage for restaurant operators? Do they end up paying less payroll taxes per employee than retailers? Because there couldn’t be payroll tax on tips. Yet, employees are obviously required to report all income, including tip income, and pay taxes on that. I guarantee you, by and large, they are not. I wonder what the tax consequence of this reduced minimum wage law for the government is. How much revenue is lost as a result of this silly system?
I’d be willing to bet that menu prices wouldn’t rise much over 15-25% if employers were to be required to cover their own payroll. I’m sure it would seriously hurt restaurants that were poorly managed to begin with and, granted, a few more would go under. What of it? A significant percentage of restaurants fail despite reduced labor costs.
The thing that really bothers me is that tips are still considered optional by just about everyone despite the fact that the government gives restauranteurs a break on payroll because tips are expected. This is a system that favors only the employer. But not all employers. Just certain ones.
Last summer, I worked at a golf course as a cashier. It was very much like working in a gas station…but with tips. Lots of tips. For essentially nothing. Still, I made minimum wage; not the reduced minimum wage that the servers got. The real minimum wage. Yet, I generally earned much more from tips than my wage. For ringing people up after they prepared their own hot dogs and grabbed beers out of a cooler that I stocked periodically. Did I do my job? Yes. I was polite and efficient with everyone. What did the tippers get that the non-tippers didn’t? Personal interaction: I laughed at their jokes, listened to them rant about their games and asked about their families. They seemed to appreciate that and were willing to pay for it. People will still tip even if they aren’t required to. But to expect servers to rely on those ‘optional’ tips just to make their bills is cruel at best.