Mandatory tip??? (or) Jonmarzie and Soup at lunch

In My Humble Opinion
1

Yesterday, Soup_du_jour (my brother), and I went to a local diner. It was a general run-of-the-mill diner experience until the check came. It looked a little like this . . . .

(The waitress wrote the words in italics)

…

410 Diner

Chkn Mozz 8.50
Chkn w/ Queso 7.75
SubTotal 16.25
Tax 1.34

Total 17.59

                                *Tip + 3.00 :confused:
                     Total    20.59*

…

Our main complaint is the $3.00 tip the waitress thinks she deserved. We usually just double the tax, but that is still not the 3.00 she needed. Also, she decided that we apparently weren’t competent enough to give her a tip, being two teenagers. :rolleyes:

My two questions are these.

  1. Has this happened to anyone else, a waiter/waitress billing you for a tip?

  2. What should I have done? (I was late for a bowling party, :cool: so I just paid the tip and left.)

  3. Hi, Opal! :slight_smile:

2

Yeah, that’s pretty ballsy. I thought the customer was supposed to determine how much to tip. Some places automatically add it in if you have a large party, but even then it’s only 15%.

So:

  1. No.

  2. Had it been me, I would have ignored the tip charge and given what I thought she deserved, minus a deduction for insulting me by adding the tip herself. (Although FTR, if it had been decent service, a $3 tip for that bill is not at all unreasonable, IMO.)

  3. Please stop doing that.

3

  1. No, but I did have a taxi driver, in a shared cab, announce that SOME PEOPLE JUST DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO TIP and that one of the other passengers had only tipped him $1 when she got out.

  2. To be perfectly honest, I’m a coward, so I did tip the taxi driver. I do think hitting customers up for tips is both rude and unprofessional, and that you would have been within your rights not to tip at all and / or to complain to the manager.

I agree that $3 sounds reasonable, though; unless the sales tax in your area is 8% or higher, you’re probably undertipping if you use the doubling method.