I am a server right now, so call me biased, but here is my take:
Eating out is a luxury. You don’t feel like cooking, so you’re telling someone else what to cook for you exactly in the way you like your food made, and then you sit down and you don’t have to get anything yourself, you ask someone to do it for you, which they do, and they have to be happy about it too. People don’t consider this a luxury nowadays because it’s pretty commonplace to eat out. You are tipping a server, who is basically your personal assistant, because by simply participating in this level of personal service and paying a 175% markup on food, then you are tacitly implying that you have money to spare.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s “stealing” to not tip. But everything the server does for you is under the assumption that you will tip him/her 17-25%. The server (hopefully) tries to hold up his/her end of the bargain, so not tipping is seen as kind of a gyp. It’s part of the whole restaurant package, so if you don’t like tipping, then don’t eat out. Again, you are participating in a luxury.
Also, we remember our guests and our bad/good tippers. Many times, I’ve had a party seated in my section and a server would come up to me and tell me they’ve had them before and they were good/bad tippers. I’m too eager-to-please to knowingly give someone bad service, but I do make adjustments accordingly.
Oh, I could go on about why I don’t think an above-minimum wage would work, and about all the things that I do for customers that they will never know about, but I think we’ve gone too far off-topic as it is.
The idea that not leaving a tip is “legal theft” is more than sensationalism- the argument presented here is laughable. All that has been given is a wage fixing methodology .
Is there a statute that says that a person is required to tip?
Can you please elaborate on this statement? The way I am interpreting it, you will adjust your level of work quality based on how much of a perceived benefit you will get from the customer. Meaning, if someone falls outside your expected range of 17-25% to say, 15%, you will not serve them as well as other patrons. Please tell me this isn’t so, before I berate you for your shitty work ethic.
By going into a restaurant in a culture where tipping is the custom, a diner is basically agreeing to a social contract with the server(s), in which the server(s) will provide all kinds of serving, in the expectation of getting a tip. If a diner doesn’t want to tip, then s/he should make that clear to the server at the start. The diner can write up his/her own order, submit it to the kitchen, fetch his/her own drinks, bread, tableware, etc., and generally wait on him/herself. By walking into the restaurant for a meal, the diner knows (or should know) that the restaurant makes money from the food charges, but the server is working for tips.
Really, it’s like hiring any other worker, and then not paying him/her after the work is done.
I don’t like the custom of paying tips, and I’d prefer to see servers paid from the restaurant’s pockets. But this is the custom in this country. It’s a social contract. If you don’t like it, don’t just pick out the part you like (eating out) without holding up your end of the contract (tipping).
You know something? If I was a contractor, and I knew that one person was going to pay me $200 for a job, and another person was going to pay me $150 for the same job, I’d bust my butt more for the guy who’d pay me more. That’s not a poor work ethic, that’s giving more effort for the person who pays more. There’s all kinds of little things that a server can do promptly, or a bit more slowly, or not at all.
An interesting question occurs: Have any of the people who go around boasting how much they tip ever gone to a specialist electronics store and spent ages finding out information from the knowledgeable salespeople, fiddling with the product etc, then gone to a “Big Box” retailer (or purchased it online) to save money?
I can’t speak for others, but I make a point of buying from the person who took the time to answer my questions. Even if that person doesn’t get a commission, having a good sales record is valuable to him/her.
You say that like it’s not the most important thing in this entire thread. The entire moral argument is that, if you don’t tip, these people won’t make a living wage. Without that, the righteous indignation has no basis, and it’s just yet another group of people having to come up with yet another reason to look down on people.
I also love how the whole thing is shown to be universal. Until I got to the SDMB, I’d never even heard of the idea that you tip anyone other than your waitress. And when I’ve asked actual service workers, they agree they’ve never heard of tipping, except maybe the whole round up for change bit.
And, honestly, I see all this extraneous tipping as a way to flaunt that you, unlike everyone else in the neighborhood, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. You’ve got money to burn.
Oh, and on preview I see ladyfoxfyre’s response. I admit that I’ve never seen anyone give bad service that wasn’t fired by the next time I visited the restaurant. I fail to see why leaving a bad tip, rather than reporting the bad service to the manager is a better option. That’s a much more direct way to achieve what I assume is the goal: to get the waiter to improve or no longer be a waiter. How many people report quitting their job because they always got bad tips? I haven’t heard it on here, that’s for sure.
Well we have spent a lot of time in this and other threads discussing whether or not tipping a carry-out order was the norm, when my opinion is putting a box into a bag simply amounts to doing your fucking job in the first place and shouldn’t require extra incentives to do correctly. Tipping 25% regularly on every order seems downright insane to me.
I don’t disagree with the idea of busting your ass for the people who pay you well, but knowingly knocking down the level of service because that guy tips 15% instead of this ever-increasing percentage expectation is poor work ethic. If you don’t like being a server unless you’re being overcompensated for it, don’t be a server. If you’re being deliberately slow and/or forgetful because that guy will not pay you as much as the other one, then yes, you have poor work ethic. Similarly, as a contractor, if you intentionally passed your deadlines without delivering on your contractual obligations that you agreed upon, I’d say you had poor work ethic too.
Like some others, I’m just really happy that tipping isn’t such a big deal here in the Netherlands. I will usually tip in a bar when I’ve had a tap or in restaurants but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever calculated what percentage I was tipping. Usually it is either rounding of to the nearest 10 or 5 euros (no singles in Euroland) or adding whatever change we have. I am positive though that this has never been more than 15% and the waitstaff at the places I’m a regular at really don’t seem to have a problem with that (on the contrary), but then again that might be because waiters are regarded as human and therefore fall under minimum wage regulations.
Just like some people upthread I’ve also had the please don’t forget to tip spiel when going by bus in NYC. I was actually planning to tip but when the lady started with ‘I know a lot of you are from abroad, but it is expected to tip your (uninteresting) narrator and the chauffeur’ and talked about this for 10 minutes while driving past some of the interesting landmarks that she should be telling us something about, I decided against it.
Just to be clear, when I was in the US and Canada I was very ‘when in Rome…’ about it and we tipped around 20%, but just really got fed up with the whole calculating and the constant wondering whether tipping was needed or not (especially while sitting at the bar!). I sort of felt like I was thinking or dealing with money-stuff all day long.
One thing I’m genuinely interested in, is whether (for waiters) it is preferable to have a hypothetical couple come in two times a month with an (apearantly) stingy 10% tip or once with a typical ‘SDMB’ 30% tip? (given people’s budget restrictions and all)
We had a birthday celebration at a cheesecake factory a few years ago. The service was absolutely horrible. To be fair, they had not been open long and perhaps were not as well staffed as they should have been. It took a long time for our order to get to us and some of the food was a little on the chilly side, but the real kicker was when the waitress dropped a glass of wine, spattering the table and breaking the glass under the seat of my kiddo. It took over twenty minutes to get that mess cleaned up and we never did get a new glass of wine. We were very displeased, but still planned to tip the expected 20%. But when we got the bill, they had already calculated a 32% tip and it was not an option not to pay it. They said it was policy for groups of ten or more. I’ve never been back. Which is a shame cause they do have good food.
You’ve never heard of tipping your barber/hairdresser? I mean, if they’re owner of the salon, some people don’t, but other than that it’s pretty much the done thing. Also, don’t ever live in a doorman building in Manhattan. Around Christmas, it’s a good idea to tip them to grease the wheels as it were. (In some buildings, tipping to ensure you get good service throughout the year is a bigger thing than in others–in my parents’ building they’re usually out a few hundred a year.)
I’m 23. The concept of going to any brick and mortar store for electronics is foreign to me. If I need something ASAP - the only purchase that comes to mind is my wireless router, as I needed it for work and couldn’t wait for it to ship - I go to Best Buy after researching it online.
Agreed, I do a ton of research online for any product. But, if I do use the knowledge and services of a sales associate I absolutely purchase the product from them. Nothing is worse than people who take advantage of the skills of a salesperson and then run off to WalMart to buy the item.
On the other hand, you aren’t really sure in the tipping case why the last tip was 12% instead of 18%. Maybe that’s the cash they had on hand that night. Maybe that was the night that the waitress telling you the tale had a fifteen minute long phone conversation with her boyfriend while that table was waiting for their entrees to arrive, and when they arrived they were cold.
In tipping, as with most things in life, past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Someone who tipped awesome two weeks ago when they got an unexpected windfall bonus who you fall over yourself for this week (ever so slightly shorting other tables who you have less time and energy for) may go back to their normal 15-18% this week. Someone who tipped short last week because they were in a crappy mood and you said something relatively innocently that they found offensive, might tip great this week. Martini doesn’t tip in the U.S. - but his WIFE does. So if he is at your table on Tuesday alone (which apparently he doesn’t do - he seems to refuse to tip by refusing to put himself in many positions where its expected), but with his wife the following week, the tip amount is going to be vastly different.
If you know up front that this job is worth $150 and that one is worth $200 - its reasonable to put forth $200 worth of value and effort for one job and only $150 worth of effort for the other. But tipping happens AFTER you put forth the effort. Which is both billed as a positive - waitstaff work harder trying to get good tips, and a negative - you can work your butt off and still get a lousy tip.