I really don’t “get” the thinking that a tip is mandatory.
If the wait staff (salon staff, whatever) impress me, I leave a 20% tip, minimum.
If they are surly, or otherwise showing they are too busy to treat me like someone they’d like to see again (ever), I feel under no obligation to reward their behaviour.
I don’t mean something like being woefully understaffed - if the customer can see staff rushing around, that’s not normally the staff’s fault if service is slow.
And a $4 tip on a $16 dollar order is a 25% tip, no? I vote with Maude:)
I was an excellent waitress in my college days and usually received good to great tips. There were, of course, the occasional bad tips. Because I tried very hard and I needed that money to pay rent/school, bad tips hurt - both emotionally and financially. Usually, I was able to shake it off, reminding myself that good tips and bad tips balanced each other out.
One night, a couple left me 1.22 on a 30 dollar check and I KNOW they received good service. They asked for all kinds of extra stuff - they were the kind of table that would ask for something, I’d bring it, then they’d ask for something else. But you know, I was a waitress, my job was to bring people stuff, so that was okay. I made it a point to always do as much as I could without being asked (extra napkins when I did the “food check”, etc).
So anyway, I get to the table after working really hard for these folks (who weren’t friendly at all), saw the tip, walked right out in the parking lot and gave it to them. They didn’t come back (as far as I know) and that was FINE BY ME. They did complain to the manager and I luckily did not get fired (I had worked there 4 years and was an awesome server, never missed shifts, or was late and trained new hires) and I think they chalked it up to “sometimes, you just can’t take it anymore, waiter stress”. But, I was still rattled enough I was never tempted to hand money back again.
Still, they were shits and I was glad I handed their damn money back. Assholes.
I have to say that shitty tippers deserve to be outed. Leaving $5 on a $60 bill at a sit-down place? You deserve to have it announced to the room and stared at and humiliated.
Once - a long time ago in a New York City bar. 4 beers, $4 each. I get up to leave and put a $20 on the tab, and as I am walking to the door, the (incompetent) barmaid loudly says to her friend, “Typical Brit, lousy tipper.”
Again, I would have loudly announced to all in the bar “If a four dollar tip on a 16 dollar tab isn’t good enough for you, give me my four bucks back, and I will find a homeless person who may appreiciate the money.”
I would never allow that kind of entitled attitude to go unchallenged, especially as your tip was a generous one in the situation.
I am usually a very generous customer (I travel a lot, and eat and drink out all the time) but I won’t be made to feel inferior if my tip isn’t what a particular server is hoping for.
I would demand to talk to the manager if it came to it; by acting meek and forking over a couple of extra bucks, as you are being “shamed” into doing, you are playing right into this kind of bullshit mentality.
If the service sucked, announcing my tip to the room would be my occasion to announce exactly where my server fell short. Public humiliation does not work on the shameless.
Ages ago when my GF/wife were in college, we had gone to a local restaurant for lunch with a number of classmates. The bill was ~$112 and I think we gave the waitress $130 and told her it was fine. She comes back a few minutes later and puts down $7.xx on the table. We told her that she could keep it, but she informed us that it was insufficient for a tip. We told her that we’d paid 130 and she should go back and check her money. A few minutes later she came back and said, quite condescendingly, “There was only $10 extra.” We grabbed the $7 that she had put on the table and left, since she obviously didn’t want the rest of her tip.
This summer in Istanbul, we had gone to a couple of restaurants in the tourist areas. The restaurants have a habit of adding the tip to the bill. The problem is that they don’t call it a tip, but sometimes refer to it as a service charge.
One restaurant waiter returned the empty billfold and waited for the tip. We explained that the service charge was already added to the bill and it was paid. It turns out that the owner keeps the S/C and doesn’t share it with the staff. We told the server to talk to the owner about getting his tip.
A different restaurant included tax on the meal. Turkey doesn’t charge tax on meals, so they get gullible tourists to pay the ‘tax’ and then tip on top of that. They insisted that it was a tax and not a service charge or tip.
I solve this whole problem by not eating out very often. Maybe once or twice a year I’ll go out and eat at a place nice enough to not have a drive through window.
I’ve seen bartenders who think they’re sooooooo cute ask sweetly “Do you need change?” from a $10. On a $3 drink. They really have huge balls. I guess it must work often enough to warrant the level of absurdity a normal person sees it for.
When I was in college and first started going to bars, I didn’t really know how much was expected, so one night I put a quarter in the tip jar when I got a beer. The way the bartender looked at me, you would have thought I pulled down my pants and took a dump on the bar. Anyway I learned the etiquette pretty quick after that.
Also, once at a bar in New Orleans I ordered a beer and it turned out to be six bucks. Anyway the bartender could see I was a little shocked over the price and he added “oh, by the way, that doesn’t include the tip.” I was tempted to not leave anything over him being jackass enough to mention something like that, but I left a buck just to prove that I wasn’t a cheap bastard. When I ordered my next drink I went to the other bar they had in the joint.
That’s gotta sting even more as there are many places in New Orleans where you can drink for two or three hours on 6 bucks…
(I exaggerate a bit, but New Orleans can be one of the least expensive places in the entire USA to drink in if you know the various bar specials. Dollar bottles of beer are everywhere down there, depending on where you are hanging out)
A massage once. It wasn’t very good. I still tipped 15%, because it wasn’t awful, and she did massage me. It just wasn’t good.
I paid the person at the front desk who had the nerve to tell me “most people tip 20%.” I then explained that I knew exactly what I was doing.
Unsurprisingly, given my attitude towards tipping, my response to the OP is “Yes”- in varying forms from “Was everything OK with the service?” to having an “insufficient” tip thrown back at me.
