That is very true. And often they don’t. I have had several employers who turn you loose and fire you if can’t perform.
Heh. It’s like Lucy’s advice stand in Peanuts! A dollar or two for a paid friend ain’t so bad… do you do phone service too? 
People act like being a waiter is like performing brain surgery, and I have been a waiter so I feel qualified to speak on it. How hard is it to take my order, bring me a drink, and bring me my food? I could see if you are at a real high end restaurant where you are discussing the advantages of various wines with your imported baby Chinese asparagus, but by and large most are working in Dennys/Logans/Outback, etc style restaurants that are unskilled labor and take little to no education. I would consider the at least 10 to 20 dollars an hour the wait staff in every restaurant I have worked at to be pretty good for something that requires no virtually no education. Contrast that pay to the cook in the back, who unless he’s a chef in a high end restaurant, is making much closer to minimum wage than the wait staff.
Well, being an actor or frankly, a prostitute doesn’t require an education either, but people pay more for some than others.
I’ve had lots of customers who didn’t tip me for slopping food in front of them. They paid me for how I treated them and made them feel. Not every customer needs the same treatment, but some definitely do.
Will that be Visa or Mastercharge? 
Seriously, it was like being a bartender with fewer drunks and not having to actually work much. The only downsides were very long, mostly mind-numbingly boring days.
You are absolutely right- if it’s just me and you.
When I have a twenty top in smoking, and it’s a little league team, and I have two in nonsmoking and both want to finish their apps before they get their meals, with another two on the patio who order perfectly politely directly from the menu, with no changes, and I have to split the bill on the twenty top nine ways and some folks won’t claim their items, I have to remember not to enter the entrees for the two folks in nonsmoking until they ‘appear’ to be halfway through the app, and then I have to get the manager because the parents of little billy on little league would NEVER let him have a sundae, and they refuse to pay it- and that is half an hour in a waiter’s life at a Jojo’s (think perkins or denny’s).
I consider my time at work taking difficult calls and typing on a computer heaven, thanks. And I will keep my baseline at 20%.
I am not defending anyone, however, as the federal law only allows for guaranteed coverage up to minimum wage- so if you want to make more than federal minimum wage, then get another job! I am guaranteed what I signed on for, and that’s a bit more than minimum wage…
hehe, well, you already admitted that you were a horrid waiter…
Seriously, though, I enjoyed and appreciated your posts. i can’t promise much but someone will get a nice tip in your honor.
Tipping in a restaurant of anything above fastfood quality is standard, if someone brings you a drink in a pub you usually tip them. I don’t think it is as rigidly codified as in the United States but it is common. The percentage is discretionary for the most part. Leaving higher than 10% isn’t all that common.
Isn’t it considered an insult to tip in some parts of the world?
I think I’m a fairly generous tipper so I am not going to get into whether 15% or 20% should be the standard. I would like to point out that you keep mis-representing what you make an hour. You seem to conveniently leave out the $4.19/hr base pay from the restaurant when you are talking about the low tip days. So some days you are only making $6-8/hr not $2-4/hr. $6-8/hr is not very much but it averages better when you include the days that you are making $15-20/hr in tips which with that $4.19/hr base pay works out to $19-24/hr.
Admittedly that doesn’t include health insurance or pay for sick days but there are a lot of other jobs out there that don’t include those. Like the landscaping job I had working my way through school. I think minimum wage at the time was ~$5.75/hr and I was making $8/hr which was pretty good. Of course I didn’t have health insurance and if I was sick I didn’t get paid either. Of course if it rained too much I didn’t get to work and didn’t get paid either.
Wait staff love to brag about the good days. “I made $100. I made $200!”
They don’t brag about the off-season days when they made $10 or the restaurant closed early and they got sent home, making $0.
Everyone knows someone who knows someone who makes $200/night, but that’s all they remember, and it’s bullshit when you know the truth, and average out the salary.
There are some pppular places where wait staff make big bucks, but it’s usually places where rent is $3000/month.
It just occurred to me that maybe I’m a bad tipper. I don’t like when the rules are changed, so there are two problem areas.
I never had to tip counter service before, like at Starbuck’s and I still won’t do it.
And I don’t like how the tip range moved up to 15% to 20% so I won’t go above 15% (even though I used to occasionally).
It isn’t the only job like that. I have a lot of friends who are contractors (in the office sense) and others who are contractors (in the roofer or finished contractor sense). A cousin in law who is a truck driver. Few of them get benefits from their employers, many of them have spotty hours and weeks with little money coming in.
It is one of the few professions where your compensation is dependent (as was said upthread) on the whim of your customers. Personally, I think that is wrong - but I think blaming your customers for a system that lets them exercise their whims is putting the blame in the wrong place. Ethically, stiffing your waiter is bad. Legally, its fine (and that is wrong). The big grey area of tipping significantly less (or not at all) for poor service, or if 15, 18, 20 or 22% is a “standard” tip is a different matter.
Jesus, this is the same person as the video game store rant? Because that was uterrly moronic. And this one’s not doing much better.
20% is a good tip and the waiters that don’t understand that are the ones that don’t do a good enough job to earn a 20% tip regularly.
Just to play the devil’s advocate for a sec, I don’t think it’s necessary to drag RedRosesForMe’s past threads into this. This one is about tipping, not “let’s attack RedRoses any way we can!”
Reply - I wasn’t trying to attack her, just pointing out that her general dissatisfaction with the world around her seems to be a trend. Sometimes you don’t realize there’s a problem until someone else sees the pattern.
StG
Umm, no. Yes, the 20% thing is new and really only applies to super-ritzy restaurants with superb service. But it’s been 15% since I was old enough to pay for my own dinners, over 30 years. Yes, back when my Mom waited tables in a coffee shop, there it was 10%- nearly half a century ago, in a coffee shop.
To go back to the 15% vs 20%- 20% is only standard in the really high end restaurants, and with better than average service. In Outback, etc it’s 15%- unless the service is exceptionally good.
Have you ever done it?
I’ve held maybe 15 jobs in my life, and none of them has ever been as difficult as waiting tables. Personally, I loved it. It was a rush. But it was tough. The closest thing to it is playing a complicated and fast paced puzzle game.
It’s a merger of the mental and physical. You’ve got to be able to hold an ever-changing list of maybe 15 things to do that each have their own priorities and time lines. This to-do list is shifting on a second-to-second basis as you navigate the restaurant. Every few steps you take changes your priorities as you move close to some objectives and farther from others. Meanwhile things are being added and subtracted from the list every few seconds. You’ve got to have a perfect mental map of where every thing and every customer is so that you can move seamlessly through the restaurant without missing a beat or colliding with any moving bodies, hot things, sharp things or other dangers. On a mental level, it’s as exhausting as playing high speed competitive Tetris for hours on end.
The physical part feels almost like a complicated dance. Wait staff develop an instinctual understanding of each other’s bodies and intentions as they glide past each other perfect co-ordination. When you are “on”, it can be really good. Like dancing with a good partner. But of course, it’s tiring. You literally do not stop moving- even for a few seconds- for your entire shift.
And you are supposed to be nice while you do all of this.
Did you read what you quoted?
Quote:
Originally Posted by dgrdfd
People act like being a waiter is like performing brain surgery, *and I have been a waiter so I feel qualified to speak on *it. How hard is it to take my order, bring me a drink, and bring me my food?
I might add, that last part is where the skill often really comes in. The good service people amaze me with their ability to remain calm and talk to people who are being complete irrational assholes about things like smoking or insisting that they be served a drink even though they have no ID. Yes, these are people skills, not technical skills, but certainly not everyone can do it well.