P.S. And I know that, as a customer in Switzerland, I am very happy knowing that I don’t have to tip. Despite the lack of tips, I haven’t noticed the waiters pouring my soup in my lap or talking half an hour to bring me a cup of coffee. Maybe Swiss waiters need to be re-educated in laziness.
Why is the tax code my resposibility?
Delivery service is voluntary, you shit-stain.
I take back everything I said previously seperating you from your office. You’re one and the same.
Unless you can show me a statute from anywhere, no matter how insignificant the locale, that delivery of food to you is mandated, it’s all voluntary. The restaurants aren’t denying you food. They’re saying the SERVICE OF BRINGING IT TO YOU AT THE SAME PRICE AS IF YOU WENT AND GOT IT YOURSELF CARRIES AN EXPECTATION OF YOU SHOWING A TOKEN APPRECIATION OF THE GAS AND TIME YOU’RE SAVING ALONG WITH THE CONVENIENCE!
Otto. Would you do your job for the same pay if it included you driving to different locations rather than those people calling you? With you paying the gas, insurance, wear and tear on the car? You’d be spending your own money performing your job and the client gets the same price either way.
Let this one go.
Start your own thread about tipping, then. Jesus, how are you hanging onto that title with shit like this?
Are you only having fun when you’re fighting with someone? Didn’t I already say this in a much less hostile manner?
And so do the biggest tips. Both systems are an effort to encourage harder work with increased salary. The benefit of a tipping system is that it rewards good work far more accurately than a salary or hourly system would for that sort of work. A waiter does not produce anything: it’s purely a service role. A tipping system rewards better service with more money almost immediately, and scales up to correspond with proper service on a case-by-case situation. Sure, sometimes you get a situation where a customer is a jerk and undertips or doesn’t tip at all. Sometimes you get a salary job where your supervisor is a jerk and doesn’t give you the raises and promotions you deserve. But the waiter has an advantage in that they have an ever-changing selection of customers, who will, on the average, provide just compensation for the service rendered. If you’ve got a crappy supervisor, you’re going to be stuck with him for months or maybe years, unless you quit and start looking for a new place to work.
I disagree entirely. The waiter’s job is to make that guy off the street happy. There is no one on Earth better qualified to determine if the waiter has met that goal than that guy.
You don’t tip the waiter based on the quality of the food, you tip them based on the quality of the service. If the food is bad, you just don’t go back to that restaurant. And it’s usually pretty easy to tell if a waiter is getting overwhelmed by the number of customers. I always try to factor that into my tips, and overlook substandard service if it’s clear that the waiter is swamped. If it happens a lot, I might stop going to that restaurant, because the management is clearly incompetent at scheduling enough workers to cover demand. But that’s not the waiter’s fault, and shouldn’t be reflected in their tip.
And, yes, some people are jerks, and will penalize the waiter for these things. But most people don’t, and in the long run, these things balance out.
The problem is, especially with the widget maker, there’s a quantifiable level of achievement involved in his job. He made 10,000 widgets today. You can tell how good a job he’s done by looking at his output. How do you do this with a waiter? At the end of the day, there is no output. All the customer’s he’s served have gone home. How do you know how good a job he’s done? How do you tell the difference between the waiter who’s bent over backwards to please their customers, and the waiter who’s done just enough to prevent anyone from complaining to their manager?
Yes, you did. But not so eloquently. And your manner didn’t get it across effectively as we’ve seen.
I have a lot of fun reading your posts when you run circles around your detractors. Where this is coming from I have no idea. I’m the bad guy in this?
Sorry, I’ll try to be polite in the Pit from now on. :smack:
Why should someone deliver to you if you’re forcing them to lose money out of their own pocket?
I don’t think you’re the bad guy in this. I don’t think Otto is the bad guy in this, either. We’re arguing about wether or not tipping is the best way to reward people in the food service industry. I don’t see why there has to be a bad guy in this thread.
And, just for the record, I want to point out that this may be the only thread in the history of the SDMB that will have you, me, Left Hand of Dorkness and Airman Doors all on the same side of the argument.
There is no bad guy in this. But “shit-stain”? Are you kidding? I think you enjoy the conflict. That’s fine, but geez, man, you need to come up with something better than that.
Consistent stiffing can really harsh the mellow of a pizza delivery crew. A pizzeria owner may turn down deliveries to businesses and offices that consistently stiff, to keep their workers happy, and thus increase employment longevity in a businesses with high employee turnover.
In college in the 1980s, I worked for three years as a pizza delivery driver. For the most part, tips were good. However, there were certain businesses that ordered from us during lunch, that, for some reason, never tipped, no matter who paid for the pizza when we arrived. Same thing with one dorm at one of the colleges in the delivery area; residents in all other dorms at other schools tipped well, but at this one dorm EVERYONE stiffed.
When orders came in from Canavan Hall or those stiffing offices, it affected the working environment. Nobody wanted to take those pizzas, and drivers would fight over who wasn’t going to deliver them; “It’s not my turn.” Drivers delivering to stiffers returned angry, bringing down the morale of others.
The place where I worked never turned down an order within the delivery area. Turned otu other pizzerias started to refuse orders from certain businesses and Canavan Hall, citing the lack of tipping and the need to keep their workforce happy. This left the pizzeria where I worked as one of the few would would deliver to those places. On a multiple-pie run, guess who got their pizza last? On a warm day, guess whose pizza was put on the passenger seat with the box open and the AC vents blowing towards it?
The sad part about pizza delivery? I’ve seen many a new, once open-minded driver driver turn into what seemed like a raving Klansman after delivering for a few months. Many pizzerias won’t deliver to predominantly African-American neighborhoods not because of a perception of safety, but rather because blacks are unfamiliar with the custom of tipping (cite, another cite) ; pizzeria owners and managers didn’t want to deal with a store filled with angry drivers.
Yeah, how 'bout that. It’s about time you three got something right. 
I like cum-bubble.
Again, I apologize. I was talking about the OP, not the hijack that is focusing on tipping in general.
If my language disturbs you, another apology. I forgot what forum this was.
I’ll bow out now. I’d hate to offend you any further with a post concerning what this thread start was started for.
I’m not in the food industry, but I will absolutely stop selling product to a customer who treats my employees badly. Happy employees are good employees. I’ll tolerate a customer being rude to me, but not to my people.
I see this issue as the same. If I ran a restaurant, one of my priorities would be protecting my employees, making them value their jobs. If the job isn’t worth fighting for, they don’t have an incentive to keep it.
I’m not a big fan of tipping systems. I’m a good tipper, but I know too many people who aren’t. But a restaurant needs to keep its employees as happy as possible. Turning down some orders, just as I will turn down some orders, can be where it’s at.
I’m in business to make money. I don’t make money without employees.
Airman has already shown that he made that point. I wasn’t as polite as you in this post, but you being the 3rd I just wanted to give you a head’s up on it.
Extortion requires:
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Some sort of imposition or demand and
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A threat of harm if 1) is not satisifed.
If you don’t want to tip, shop elsewhere. See if someone else will deliver sans tip. Really, good luck with that.
But please stop molesting a perfectly nice word. And if you are too cheap to tip, two words for you: Brown Bag. Or maybe … McDonald’s.
I have no idea what you’re talking about here.
So why do we tip waiters but not other people in the service industry? The cooks, the airline stewardesses, the salesman at the department store, the cashier at the supermarket, the bag boy at the supermarket, the customer service guy in the complaints department? etc.
I disagree again. The waiter’s job is to serve the food offered by the restaurant in a prompt, efficient, courteous manner. If that makes the customer happy, so much the better. A manager should be perfectly capable if the waiter is doing a good job. I was a waiter at one point in my life and I met some real pain-in-the-ass customers, who never would have been happy unless I ran out to the grocery store to fetch them something that wasn’t on the menu. If a manager can’t tell if a waiter is doing a good job, how do other managers in other branches of the service industry ever decide who is a good employee?
And I don’t want to have to determine how a restaurant is run when I decide on my tip. I want paying the bill to be simple and uncomplicated.
How many meals he’s served, how many customer complaints he’s received, etc. Same with any other service employee.
I hear the arguments that
a) Underpaying and having the employee depend on charity makes people work harder
b) If we didn’t have this system, service in restaurants would go to hell in a hand-basket
c) It’s what the waiters want anyway
My answers are
a) Maybe, but I think it’s unfair to the employees and a reprehensible method of compensating an employee
b) I know this is false, from seeing an example of a country where tipping is not expected or commonly done, if at all
c) I would want to see some unbiased survey to convince me of that. Surveying waiters in the USA right now would obviously be slanted towards people who choose to work in a job where tips are the norm.
That’s pretty much all I have to say.
For the same reason we address medical doctors, but not doctors of philosophy, as “Doctor”: because rules of courtesy are not rational. Nevertheless, it is to be expected that if a customer is consistently discourteous to a business’s employees, the business may cease to solicit that customer’s custom. Actually, I wish that would happen more often.