I ordered one draft pint of beer at a bar the other day. It was happy hour. It cost $3.50.
I put a $5 bill down and finished the drink while he was doing other things.
When he came back, he took the $5, put it in the register, and gave me the “thank you” nod. I just nodded back and went on my way.
My thought is that he should have given me my change, in full, and allowed me to decide, in advance of tipping, whether I was going to leave a tip and how much I would leave. Instead, he assumed I wanted to tip him $1.50, took all the money, and put me in a position of having to demand my change back if I had wanted it.
I normally tip $1 per drink at a bar. Had he given me the $1.50 change, I would have left him a $1 tip and taken the $0.50 back.
A small part of me wanted to ask for the money back and not tip him at all, just to thwart his little power play.
I would have found a polite way to ask how much the beer was and then said “I never got my change”…then left him the dollar tip if I was planning to order another (or be back at the bar again any time soon). Assuming the change is the tip is just plain wrong and if it was a bar I frequented or knew the management or owners of I’d let the GM know about it. That’s the kind of thing that will make regulars avoid his shift.
My ex is a culinary arts major has a major beef (which she passed on to me) anytime a waitress grabs the money from the table and says “Do you need change?” is wrong. They should always say “I’ll be right back with your change” and let the customer tell them they don’t need it. It can put the customer in an awkward position especially if, for example the total is $60 and you put down a 50 and a 20. If they say “do you need change” and you were planning to tip less then $10 for some reason you now have to either say yes and tip more then had planned to or say no and not have the option of leaving the shitty tip on the table and being able to leave without having to see the waitstaff again. (Let’s, for the sake of argument, assume there was a good reason for leaving a small or no tip)
Yea, assuming a $1.50 tip is pretty presumptuous, but… you know, in this economy, I’m kind of inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt. I would imagine that incomes are pretty down for barkeeps while people are cutting way back on eating out / having a beer at the pub. Maybe that $1.50 made a big difference for him.
Ughh, it’s called a “tip” for a reason. :rolleyes: The only time the tip is assumed is when the parties being served are extremely large, right? Dick move, IMO.
(Let’s just assume it was $3.50 even) It’s still stealing. It doesn’t matter if you’re desperate or not it doesn’t mean you get to take someone else’s money. If I found out one of my cashiers pulled something like that because they needed the extra cash they suddenly find they had much less cash because they’d be out of a job.
I can’t imagine a single reason why this would OK with the bar management.
I had an experience with a waitress in a bar once who was bussing the table while my friends were dancing. One had left his change on the table waiting to buy the next round. When she bussed the glasses she cleaned off the money as well. Very. Bad.
This is what I’d have done. What he did is in the textbook as “How not to get new regular customers.”
I’ll add that not getting the money from a non-regular customer for so long that you were able to finish a pint is piss-poor bartending. You could have just left with it.
Not only rude, but doesn’t make sense. How did he know you weren’t going to order more drinks? Was he going to pinch out his tip each time you bought a pint? That’s just wrong.
And I don’t understand why he should get tipped for pouring you a beer anyway. Making a mixed drink, yes. But simply hitting the tap? Why is that such a big deal that he deserves a tip?
Not to hijack too much, but this tipping stuff is getting out of hand. There’s a self-serve frozen yogurt place near me. It’s okay; it gets bustling business because of the sheer novelty, I think. And it is kind of cool. You take a cup, fill it with whatever kind of yogurt you want, add all the toppings you want, and then sidle on down to the register where the guy weighs it. Or more accurately, a machine weighs it and spits out a price on the screen. All the guy does is take your money, make change, and give you a receipt.
So why the hell is there a giant tip jar next to the register? The customer does all the work. All the staff does is wipe down tables and work the register. Much less work than what the folks at McDonald’s do. But you see no tip jar on their counter.
I have no problem tipping people who actually serve me. But I’m not going to drop my change into a jar just because you’re standing there with a smile. Especially since you’re getting paid already to do practically nothing.
There’s a tip jar at my work and I hate it because I feel the same way. I pushed some buttons and took your money. It’s not that hard. I’m pretty sure that a lot of tip jars at food places and stuff start out because some common order results in an awkward amount of change, like 17 cents that most people don’t want and so they take the bills and leave the change or if there are no bills just wave off the change. It can’t stay in the till because then the till count would be off so a cup just gets designated to be the change cup. Eventually someone writes TIPS on it as a joke or to legitimize the cup’s existence and voila, a new place has a tip jar and once there’s been a turnover or two in registermonkeys, no one remembers how it got started or why there shouldn’t be a tip jar.
The bartender is an asshole and I would have got my drink on elsewhere.
Being that I rarely pay with cash, the general rule of thumb I have for tip jars is: if the credit card receipt does not have a tip line, then the tip jar is just employees being hopeful and I can ignore it or not at my leisure without feeling guilty. If it does have a tip line, then the servers are likely getting paid assuming tips and I should probably not ignore it.
There are some exceptions like the Mongolian BBQ place I like to hit up occasionally, where the cooks have a tip jar but there’s no tip line on the receipt. They’re actually doing work while I’m standing there watching them, so I try not to eat there unless I have a buck I can toss in. But even then I’m certain they wouldn’t care if I didn’t leave a buck.
As for the situation in the OP: not cool. I probably would have been happy to pay with a fiver, and I like being able to say “keep the change,” but assumption changes things.
It was a restaurant bar. After placing my order with the host at the entrance, I sat down at the bar.
The bartender asked if I wanted a food order in addition to the beer. I told him no, I was waiting for my food order to-go.
When the host came over, she put the bags containing the to-go order next to me on the bar. The bartender then printed up my tab, put it in a shot glass, and set it in front of me on the bar. By that time, I was nearly finished with the beer.
Very presumptuous on the part of the bartender, and I’d have said something then and/or complained to the manager.
I’ve only ever once had a waitperson bring me less than the correct amount of change - say the tab was 18.80 and I gave him a 20, he came back with a dollar only. Needless to say, I reduced the tip by a LOT less than the 20 cents he stole.
It was also dumb behavior - he put the whole amount into the cash register. He can’t just grab that 1.50 from it later on, without risking getting accused of theft.
That is bullshit. I go to bars all the time – not necessarily to drown my sorrows, but grab a pint or two while killing some time. This cat had a major problem.
I’m guessing it was an “upscale” place, and this guy was your typical “upscale” asshat bartender. No neighborhood bar or even a dive would ever do something like that, and, if they did, they’d certainly expect to be chided for it. Even asking nicely is too nice for that POS. Throw the pint glass at the mirror behind the bar and walk out unnoticed, is my advice.
I get that, actually. You are buying something (generally) for your standard tip of $1/drink, though – you get better service, free advice on which road to take to get to Y, and, over time, if the place is packed, you might just get a seat at the bar offered by the bartender passing over his own personal behind-the-counter stool.
Yeah, it’s not hard to pour a beer, but a lot of the extra little stuff is worth it. 6 months later, if you spend a lazy Saturday drinking 16 beers and tipping $1 per, when you haven’t been in for 6 months, you’re probably going to get remembered, as odd as it sounds, but that’s my experience.
He may also have stiffed himself. You might have been planning to tip more than $1.50. Some people do.
I play trivia one night a week, and most of my team drinks a couple of beers a night. Quite a few of them order food. I don’t drink, and I eat dinner with my husband when I get home. I generally nurse a diet soda all evening, with free refills. That costs $2.25, and I usually give the waitress $5. Sometimes I give her $10, depending on how busy she’s been and what I have on me. I don’t want to be that jerk who just comes in and sits all night.
If I gave her $3, expecting her to bring me back $0.75 and I’d leave her a couple of bucks on the table, and she kept the change as her tip, she’d be screwing herself.