Stop fucking it up for the rest of us. When waiters start getting 20% tips on a regular basis, then management feels no pressure to increase their salaries.
If waiters have complaints about how much they’re getting paid, they should complain to their fucking managers, not to the fucking customers. When a customer has a complaint about the service, does the waiter ever say, “Since you pay 90% of my salary, I am obliged to do whatever you say even if it goes against the restaurant’s stated policy”? No, of course not, they say, “Let me get you the fucking manager who has absolute control over my behavior and yet refuses to pay me.”
Tips in general are a shitty way to do business. All it means is that the restaurant gets to hide the “true” cost of doing business by shoving the responsibility onto you, the person who is going out for a nice dinner.
The trend of ever-increasing tips needs to be stopped, now.
Pay the waitstaff a living wage and stop fucking lying about your fucking prices.
I tip for excellent service and waitresses with great legs and asses. Sucks to be you if can’t shell out an extra 20-30 percent above the meal for a great night out but Pitting people like me won’t gain you much sympathy.
I didn’t say I couldn’t, I said I dislike it. Let’s say I start a trend of tipping 50%, and get 1,000 of my friends to do it as well. Wouldn’t you be annoyed if, for no reason at all, a waiter who formerly accepted your 35% tip as generous started snubbing his nose simply because “people are tipping more now”?
Wouldn’t it piss you off to know that the restaurant, upon seeing their waitstaff earn far more than expected (because they’ve based their calculations on a 25% average tip rate), cut the minimum wage that is required and simply place more and more of the bonus on you?
Well it should.
And I’m not Pitting for sympathy.
No, I’m a believer in people getting paid according to performance.
I don’t mind if the restaurants eliminate tips and increase their prices by 20% across the board. I can then look at their prices, and make an informed decision about whether I consider it worth it to dine at this establishment. I can expect a certain level of service, and if I don’t get it, I can complain to the person in authority who controls my waiter’s salary. Should the authority decide that I have a legitimate complaint, then they can take action as they see fit (i.e. they can side with me and discipline the waiter, or they can side with the waitstaff and tell me to get the hell out).
Now, with the tipping system, the correlation between performance and payment is completely eliminated. Should I choose to give a 20% tip, I might consider that to be a high compliment – while the waiter is sitting there seething with rage because he considers only 20% to be an insult. Yeah, it’d be fucking nice to have a little card that came with the menu, that says, “This is what we expect you to pay for your service” – or simpler yet, just lump the cost in with the fucking prices.
Because one involves me looking at a menu and deciding beforehand whether I want to dine there, and the other involves me being acquainted with the nebulous concept of other people’s dining habits and guessing based on what I know.
I fail to see why the waitstaff continually pressures their customers, rather than their bosses, when they have financial difficulty. It’s a sick concept.
What if a car salesman came up to you and said, “Hey, man, they pay me jack shit and I can’t afford my bills. Why don’t you leave a little extra for me since I’ve helped you purchase a car?” You’d tell him to fuck off, that’s what you’d do. You’d say, “If you have such a problem with finances, go talk to your fucking boss, not pressure it out of the customer.”
I see nothing different with waitstaff. I am not buying food from the waiter; I am buying food from the restaurant. I do not bring my own waitstaff into a restaurant and tell them what to do (in which case, I will gladly take care of my personal waiter), the restaurant provides a waiter and tells them what to do.
Tell me about. I think some people must have decided that we must have one at least once every couple of weeks, where people who don’t like tipping can bitch and moan, and people who tip a lot can bask in their own sense of superiority.
I over-tip on a regular basis. In return, I get great service, and waitstaff that fight over my business. A coupla times I’ve gotten phone numbers. What’s the problem again?
20 % is too damn high. Not all of us can afford it, and I’m with the OP -
Except I’m really tired of tipping threads, too. If we have to talk about tipping, let’s talk cows.
However, I have to submit, that if you go for dinner at restaraunt X where your meal costs $25 and you can’t afford the 20% tip, perhaps you should go to restaraunt Y where your meal costs $15 and you can afford the tip.
Honestly, I would love to only wear Jimmy Choos - however, sometimes I have to compromise and get a pair of Franco Sartos instead.
This would be illegal, making it a spectacularly poor strawman for you to tout about, you cheap bastard.
If you don’t mentally add the cost of the tip when you dine out to the prices, then you are a fool as well as a cheap bastard.
Only in your fevered hallucinations. The correlation is immediate and direct. Looks like you don’t understand causal relationships as well as being a cheap bastard.
I waited tables and tended bar for years you cheap bastard, and I never met a fellow server who didn’t understand the implied contract. As long as the patrons tipped reasonably, be it 10% or 20% or 50%, we understood that they were doing their part of the job. We might talk about how they were doing it poorly if the tip was on the lower end of the scale, but we understood that some people didn’t know any better, and that’s part of the risk you take as a server. It was cheap bastards like you who leave a penny or whine about what is a widely accepted social custom who really got our scorn. Leave a couple of extra dollars you cheap bastard, or stay home and cook for yourself. I guarantee that restaurants won’t miss the patronage of a cheap bastard like you.
Uh, yeah, and pigs are flying. In the several waitressing jobs I’ve had, the management paid the state minimum wage for waitstaff (currently $2.33 in Wisconsin), no matter the tip average.
Let me say that again: They paid me the minimum wage, and not a cent more, because most restaurant owners are cheap bastards. In every job. In Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. And tips had absolutely no influence.
You’re bitching about something that doesn’t (and couldn’t) even exist.
ps. When I was waitressing full-time during the summer, that 2.33 turned into about .50/hour after taxes. Remind me again why you don’t want to tip me 20%?
If you don’t want to tip your wait person or bartender, then stay the hell home. I vote for cheap bastard OPer. Hell, you sound like somebody who would complain when restaurants raised their prices based on cost of living allowances each year.
I travel a fair amount on business and I really appreciate the waitstaff and bartenders in the hotels I stay in. They go out of their way to make my experience a pleasant one, so, hell yeah, I’m gonna tip generously.
Because if he “over-tips” you then your cheap bastard managers won’t have a reason to stop being cheap bastards. Duh. Makes perfect sense to me, then again I have a railroad spike embedded in my skull.
What alice said. I’m sorry that you don’t have that much disposable income, but that doesn’t make it right for you to stiff the waiter. Not yelling at you. Just saying.
My system (not that anybody cares):
Excellent service (Very rare) and/or really cheap food (say a 5 dollar burger): 25%-30%
Good service: 20%
Adequate service (The waiter would rather not be there and it shows.): 10%-15%
Down-right awful: Nada.
