Fuck you non-tippers! Fuck you a lot!

The BBQ Pit
61

Slight Hijack…

I just wanted to point out that while it sucks for restaruant workers to get less than minimum wage, at least there is an opportunity to offset that with tips. But a freakin’ FARM worker?!?
Holy Mother of God! I can’t think of any farm work that is not absolutely mind-numbingly back-breaking, not to mention the exposure to the elements…for them to be legally making less than the minimum wage is about the most digustingly exploitative thing I can think of, short of forced prostitution.

62

Wait…what?

When I pay for a restaurant meal with a credit card, I put in the total I intend to pay in the tip and it’s charged to my card along with the price of the meal.

He paid with a credit card and wrote the amount of the tip on the slip he signed? You have a problem with your management if you didn’t get that amount tipped out then. He paid it, or thought he paid it, through the card.

63

Oh, wait. My mistake. “He marked it through” must mean he did the null-slash or something. In other words, he didn’t credit a tip.

Sorry! :smack:

64

On the other hand.
Keep an eye out for Aussie billionaire Kerry Packer.

He and some friends went into a London pub to get a meal. The owner said that service was over. Packer said some sandwiches would be fine but the owner said the kitchen was closed. They went to a pub down the road. After the meal Packer tipped him 10,000 pounds on condition that he go and tell the other publican about it.

While eating in Sydney once he asked his waitress why she was working instead of being home with the kids. She replied that she had a mortgage to pay. His tip was a cheque to pay off the debt.

65

My servers always remember me, but that could be because I always use a walking staff (I have mobility problems), frequently wear a hat, am very fat, and usually inject my insulin at the table (very discreetly, but I roll the syringe while waiting for my food to arrive). They ask me how I’ve been, if my husband or daughter is joining me, stuff like that. They bring me a BIG glass of water with just a little ice and a straw, which is what I want. If I haven’t been in the restaurant lately, they ask if I’ve been all right. I’ve had servers tell me that it’s nice to wait on me, because I ask for everything all at once. I don’t wait until my food arrives to ask for a couple of lemon slices, and when the slices arrive, then ask for extra napkins, for instance. So the server has to make fewer trips for me. Again, though, they might remember me because of my appearance and habits rather than my tips. Also, I say “Please” and “Thank you” when ordering and when my food arrives or my drink is refilled or whenever else it’s appropriate.

66

Doesn’t everyone, even when being served in a shop?

67

Actually, this part would ruin your whole plan. You can’t get rid of tipping and then bring back tipping at the same time. The REASON that wages get lowered is BECAUSE of tipping. Think about it. If you were making 14$ base pay guaranteed, and then getting 7$ more in tips an hour in general, waiting tables would be a pretty darn attractive job for low wage earners, wouldn’t it? It would attract more people to the biz, supply and demand, and the base wage would drop all over again. If people on average started tipping less, then base pay would have to go up in response, as would menu prices, etc. If they started tipping more, their tips would be returned to them in the form of lower menu prices.

The main effect of tipping is that it allows customers to have more direct and at-a-whim control over waiters and busboys. It’s quite interesting to consider the reasons why some professions are traditionally given tips, and others aren’t. You tip taxi cabdrivers, but not doctors? Why? Is it because the incentive of a small tip has more of an effect on a poor person? Is it because tipping your doctor is less likely to drive down his base wage (since his profession is in some respects a small and artificially controlled labor pool)? Is it, despite seemingly being a generosity, really just a sign of how easy it is to control poorer people vs. richer ones?

Oh, it gets better. A lot of this work is done by illegal immigrants. No one else would work for such crap wages in such backbreaking jobs. We as consumers all benefit, in the form of lower prices, from the fact that these people are willing to risk their lives and break their backs to work these for-a-pittance jobs. And yet, these workers are for some reason seen as detestable and a plauge upon our society. Explain THAT one to me.

68

To the OP,

I’ll tell yopu what is bullshit is that YOu have to help PAY the door hostesses and the bussers and the restaurant is paying you a measily 2.13 an hour. So, you are basically working for the restaurant for free at best, or paying the restaurant for the homor of working there, not including the side work and closing side work that has to be done. THEN, you have to report to the IRS your tips which has to be over the minimum wage in your state. UGH!

These damned restaurants need to pay their people minimum wage, 6-7 dollars per hour at least. As mentioned before, waiting tables is labor intensive. It is hard-ass work. I know, I have worked as a waiter before. Not anymore.

My anger is not towards the cheap bastards, it is the restaurants that wont pay their help a fair fucking wage!

69

big_yellow_kingswood isn’t talking about a plan. That is how it works here in Australia. Wages don’t get lowered because tipping isn’t 15% of meal costs. If I go with people from work to the place we most often have lunch it’s $8.80 per lunch special. I may throw in $10. Two others chuck in $10. Someone else chucks in a $5 and 2 $2s. Someone else has $8.80 and puts that in. One of the others takes out their $1.20 from this change. So the waitress ends up with a $2.60 tip. But if 10 of us go to a snottier place and spend $500 no-one’s getting a $50 - 100 tip, maybe $20 if we liked them. Recently a group of us went to a place where we were treated like crap. We left no tip at all, and could do so knowing the waiter had earned $20 - 30 while attending us.

And yeah here there are plenty of keen and happy professional waiters and waitresses. I was talking to one at a recent function I attended - he works foe an agency and gets even better rates.

70

I don’t really go to restaurants very often (I don’t like food or socialising much) but when I have, I can’t say I’ve noticed the quality of service at all. They take your order, they give you your order. The end. Doesn’t really seem like there’s too much that can vary.

71

Well, there’s the speed at which they take your order. My husband is a notoriously poor tipper, and when I go out with him (somewhere I’m not known, but where he is) it will take us a LOT longer to get waited on. Why should the server bust his or her butt to wait on my husband, who will tip 10% on a good day? My daughter and I have been retraining him, but he still has quite the reputation to live down. When I go into a restaurant where I’m known, I generally get the table set up the way I like it, I get the table I prefer, and my server usually brings out my drink and lemon slices while the host is seating me. I get my check promptly when I’m ready to leave. Again, my husband has to flag down the server for this. I really can’t blame the servers for not wanting to deal with my husband, because he WILL ask for half a dozen things, first he’ll want a straw, when the straw is given to him, then he wants extra napkins, then he bitches about the tea (it’s never to his taste), then he’ll complain about something else. Basically, he likes to bitch about stuff to servers, generally stuff that they really can’t do anything about. So they naturally give priority to other customers who might appreciate them more.

72

I probably got $7 tips overall in a night, unless, as don’t ask says there was a big group whose average bill worked out to be somewhere around a denomination bill, everyone chucked in an $X note and left you most of the rest. Very occasionally you’ll get a big tipper, but generally all tips here do is tell you that the customer recognises that you’re doing a good job. It’s recognition, nothing more. The equivelent to a doctor would probably be a thank you card or a box of chocys.

Also, this is not “my plan”. It’s just the way things are here, and it works very well.

Bingo. It seems to be based on an assumption (from I’ve read here) that people are inherently lazy, especially poor people, and that the only way to make sure they do a decent job is to hold the possibility of a tip over their head. If they were to get a tip everytime, well, where would the incentive be? Being naturally lazy (otherwise they’d have got a better job, right?), a decent wage would corrupt them into complacency which would result in crappy service.

I don’t believe this for a second. I spent 4 years of university working in hospitality to get by. I worked my arse off just as much as anyone else here. I kept my customers happy. I remembered orders, including departures from the normal menu, got drinks promptly and correctly and kept them topped up, cleared away the plates as soon as the customer was finished, was by their side as soon as they looked like they might want something and addressed any other needs that arose throughout the night. I did all that and more because it was my job, and not because I was trying for a tip.

73

Yep you got screwed. If the resteraunt you work at, does not figure into the cheque a compulsory amount to tip (To protect itself, and you from those who refuse to tip) and you have to pay for it? You should find a new place to work at.

Don’t blame the sinner, blame the sin!

One more question…? If you’re going to be fucking the non tippers a lot, will you be paying for this service>? Or giving of your time freely? Just curious.

Logic.

74

Here’s a question for those who have worked as a waiter:

Which is better: working in a place that makes everyone pool their tips every night and splits them, or an every-man-for-himself type of thing?

I can see advantages for both. If you have a really busy night but YOUR tips are terrible, maybe other people have had a good night and you’ll come out okay. However it would totally suck to single handedly work one huge table, get a hugeass tip and then have to turn around and put it in the community tip jar. :frowning:

75

SnoopyFan - no question, every-man-for-himself is the best way. In any business, there will always be people who work harder than others, and in the restaurant business, that’s even more so. Think about all the times you’ve had crappy service in a restaurant - tip-pooling is fairly uncommon, so chances are good that your server was depending on his or her tip that evening.

When I started serving, minimum wage for servers was $2.01 an hour. Fifteen years later, when I “retired,” it was $2.13 an hour. Twelve cents in fifteen years! As others have mentioned, restaurants assume you will meet at least minimum wage with your tips.

Not only do most servers have to tip out to bussers and bar (and in some places, host staff), we are also taxed on our sales. We are required to report our tips. MOST servers will underreport, and MOST restaurants will allow that to a certain extent, but standard practices are based on assumptions. The IRS assumes you have made AT LEAST 8% of your sales in tips, so if you ring up $100 in sales in five hours of work, you will be taxed on $18.65 — $10.65 in wages plus $8 in tips. Since a decent server will usually make $15 on that $100 total ring, there’s also the assumption that the IRS is giving us a bit of a break. However… 100% of credit card tips are reported by the restaurant (after all, they’ve got it in writing right there on the credit card slips, so a server can hardly claim they didn’t make that money!) If a server routinely claims only 8% of their total ring, the IRS will take a very close look at that person’s credit card receipts. Servers are audited by the IRS a LOT (and contrary to popular belief, we are not allowed to claim pantyhose as a deduction.)

As for what servers really earn, I can only speak from my own experience. The last year I worked full-time as a server (1996), I earned around $40,000 for the year after taxes, including wages and tips. It IS possible to earn a decent living as a server, but you do have to work hard for it. As many have stated, there’s a huge chunk of people who simply do not get the concept of tipping, and another huge chunk of people who think tipping is charity and that they are being extremely generous when they leave a handful of change. Please remember too that the work servers do “off the floor” is work they do not get tips for - this includes kitchen prep, sidework, set-up and break-down. It is customary for day servers to be in the building at least an hour before the restaurant opens to set up, and for night servers to be in the building an hour or two after closing to clean up and break down.

And finally, the OP: bunch of assholes, if you ask me!

76

Oh, I realize that the restraunt only lets me work for them and make money and that I am totally replaceable. Just kinda how it is.

I do blame the sinners. If they would just have left me a tip then there would be no sin :slight_smile:

As for fucking the non-tippers, I have yet to be offered the opportunity. Picking up chicks as a waiter isn’t the easiest thing to do. When you are in the role of serving it’s just not in character to ask for phone numbers or sex.

77

What LifeonWry said.

IMHO, pooling tips is fucked up. If I’m busting my ass and making awesome tips because of it, why should my co-worker, who’s either lazy or just really not good at her job, who makes shitty tips, take away from me what I’ve earned?

I never understood the concept of pooling tips, unless one works in a Starbucks or someplace with a tip jar. It just doesn’t make any sense and seems horribly unfair.

78

Thought I should mention a little story in case my last post made anyone think all servers are greedy bastards.

I used to work in a resturant that had this regular customer, Pam. Pam was a nightmare to wait on. She was insanely demanding, rude to the servers and would never, ever tip.

So all of us servers developed a “Pam Mug” in which every server on the floor would drop a buck into when Pam was seated, except for the server unfortunate enough to be stuck with her (we usually rotated who had her, and if there was a newbie on the floor, they always got her. It was sort of like “doing your time”) and we would give all proceeds from the “Pam Mug” to that poor, unfortunate soul.

That was years ago, I wonder if Pam still goes in there…

79

Nope - not in America. “Please” is fairly rare. I opened a thread about this, in which several people explained why they don’t say please.

80

bows to vibrotronica

THANK YOU.

I am that bartender. And to-go orders are a nightmare b/c most people assume that they shouldn’t tip. I can’t really get too upset about it, because a lot of places DO have a to-go person, but when I’m working my ass off making drinks for all my customers, does it really look like I’m “The To-Go Person?” I’ve been to places like that, and there’s generally a separate “to-go counter” with its very own To Go Person behind it, who does nothing else but manage to-go orders. (And yes, FTR, I tip that person anyway.)

But most of the time people don’t tip me for their to-go orders, and believe me when I say that a to-go order is actually more trouble than if you sat at the bar and ate it. Part of this is management’s fault–we’re just not set up for a swift to-go system–but either way it sucks when somebody orders $100 worth of to-go food, and I have to spend fifteen minutes in the back packaging it all up, abandon my own tipping customers at the bar, claim those sales on my taxes, and then get stiffed on all that effort just because it’s “to-go.”

And as for the OP: been there, my sister. People who walk into a restaurant right before it closes, or right afterwards, are inconsiderate to begin with…but people who don’t even tip for the privilege of keeping you there are just assholes. Plain and simple.

The other day one of the servers at my restaurant had one of those “no tip on a credit card” things…but it was a new method.

Rather than just drawing a line or a zero on the tip line, the guy put “No.” In quotes, just like that.

What a loser.