Title is pretty much the question. I’m trying to remember what it was usually. My grandmother, who was tighter than two thumbs up a pigs ass, would take money off the table if she thought is was too much. She wouldn’t give it back, that was found money for her.
wow shes lucky … you know in some places that can get you arrested for theft ?
15% was standard.
That was a dick move by granny.
She’d take money off of your table or some other random table?
She’d wait to be the last o e to leave our table, then say we had left seven dollars, she’d grab the five. Always our table, never anyone else’s.
In the 70’s the standard (cheap) tip was 10%.
In the 80’s-90’s the standard tip was 15%.
Then 18%
Now it is 20%.
In the old days the minimum wage bore some relationship to a minimum living wage. As inflation increased the cost of living, the minimum wage didn’t keep up and people were aware of that. Many people weren’t/aren’t aware of the fact that wait staff didn’t even get paid minimum wage, but a fraction of same. Tips make the whole thing work in the US.
yeah if you have a job that you could get tips from the min wage is 2.50 in some states …they expect the tips to make up the rest
im told places like uber/grub hub doordash keeps a workers tips and combines it with whatever they pay people as wages so when you see 15 an hour in uber ads only 5 of that is from uber the other 10 is tips they put on your check to inflate it …
Since this depends on people’s own experiences, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
15%
And your grandmother had no business judging how much the tip should have been unless she was the one leaving it. What did she do with the “excess” tip money? She kept it? In my family we don’t call that being cheap. We call it stealing.
It was 15% in the 60s.
I’m not sure what you mean by “standard,” but at least in New York in the 1960s and 1970s the accepted tip for average service was 15%. The minimum was 10%, and good service got 20%.
That’s certainly not the standard (cheap) tip. On restaurants that include a range of “suggested gratuities,” I can’t recall ever having seen anything higher than 20%. Most commonly they will give 15%/18%/20%.
I think it may have crept up to a degree in the last 50 years, with 20% being more common than it used to be, but the standard hasn’t changed all that much.
ISTM that %15 has been standard since I started paying restaurant bills in 70’s (at least I always kind of felt that friends who started at %10 were cheapskates). I usually start at %20 these days, mostly because I feel like the service in restaurants has generally gotten better.
When I started paying attention to such things in the early 70s, in California, the standard tip was 10%. When inflation went nuts in the late-70s and early-80s, everyone decided that the percentage of tips had to inflate too (completely ignoring the fact that inflation was already increasing the value of the tip by inflating the food prices). So we ended up tipping a standard 15% in California in the 80s.
Since then, tipping etiquette has gone pretty wonky. There is simply no good reason to increase the percentage of a standard-service tip, since inflation to food prices should presumably increase the take to cover the increased cost to the server of living (inflation). However, most people simply fail to grasp percentages, so it’s hard to get them to accept this simple idea. Plus, there is the moderately compelling argument that the minimum base wage paid by the restaurant hasn’t changed much in the last few decades. However, if you are in anything other than a low-end diner, that’s really irrelevant, because the tip take is so much more than the wage, and always was, and always will be.
It’s not irrelevant. If the renumeration of a server comprises two components, wage and tips, and if wage is frozen or increases at less than the cost of living, then tips must increase at more than the cost of living if overall remuneration is to maintain its purchasing power. If we take changess in the the cost of the meal to be a proxy for changes in the cost of living, then the percentage tip needs to progressively increase for so long as wages are not risingin line with the cost of living.
Doordash does this. It’s pretty scummy. Doordash will give you a guaranteed payout for a delivery - say $6. If the customer tips nothing, doordash pays you $6. If the customer tips $5, doordash pays you $1 and the custom is paying the rest of the $6. Essentially, tipping is just paying back doordash - doordash is effectively stealing the tip. If the customer knew their tip (unless larger than tha guarantee) was going to doordash rather than the driver, they’d either not make it or tip in cash rather than through the app. It’s scummy and deceptive.
Grubhub gives you the entire tip separate from any delivery fee, as it should be. I believe this is the case with uber eats also but not 100% sure. I think doordash is the only scummy company that does it that way. Instacart (IIRC) used to, but there was enough outrage that they changed it.
That’s interesting SenorBeef. Thanks for letting me know about it. I almost always tip cash, since I don’t trust anyone (management, bussers, etc.) to actually give the full amount to the server. I’m beginning to think it’s a good idea.
What does Uber/Lyft do in this situation? I don’t use any of these services, but my kids do, and I encourage them to tip cash to the driver/deliverer.
As a Brit I have often answered queries from Americans about tips. The USA seems to have developed a low wage/high tip ratio for waitstaff and others. Over here tips are considered a reward for service that is above and beyond the basic. Wait staff and pizza delivery people will be paid at least the minimum wage (£8.21 per hour), but local demand may well mean that they get paid more than that. When I go to a restaurant or use a taxi, I often don’t tip at all. If we go as a family (along with the baby) then our waiter will probably earn a tip and that would max out at 10%.
I almost never tip taxi drivers - why would I, they probably earn more than me… Okay, when we go on holiday with a load of luggage. and they help load and unload, they will get some financial appreciation but not a percentage of the fare.
It is against the law for an employer to take tips from staff, except as a tronc to distribute them among the back-room staff.
Fifteen percent.
A couple of years ago my daughter almost got on my bad side when she hinted that as a server she considered 20% the base, and anyone tipping less was rude.
I explained that not only was her sense of entitlement unappealing, but that in a diner or low-end restaurant things are a bit skewed since a 15% tip on a ten-dollar meal really seems pitiful, so people will often leave more than 20%. She pondered the point and agreed on both counts.
If I eat a meal that costs $20, I might leave a five-spot as a tip, just for the convenience, so the server gets a 25% tip from me.
If my family goes out to eat and the bill is $150, I will be much more conservative with the tip, especially if the service was lacking.
Doordash takes it to an extreme, but that’s how basically how all tipped jobs work in states that haven’t abolished the tip credit. The first $5.12 in tips in each hour (averaged per pay period) effectively accrues to the employer rather than the employee, as the employer gets to offset what would otherwise be a wage obligation.
In the 70’s I always knew the standard tip at 15%. That’s the earliest I was aware of tipping and it never was lower than that.