Note to our very welcome guests to the US - Please, for the love of God and all that’s holy, do not fall into the tipping trap. It’s our mess, perhaps we might find a way to clean it up or perhaps not, but save yourselves before it’s too late.
Note to my fellow Americans - Please, for the love of God and all that’s holy, don’t be afraid to stiff the tip for shitty service. It is not now nor should it ever have been your job to directly pay the wages of the wait staff, this is a phenomenon that has grown from an outdated wage structure and business model. If we all stop tipping gratuiosly and start tipping for good to great service, or if we all just stop tipping at all, this will force a change in the business model and change the face of the service industry.
And as to IRS claims, why do you think the laws about tips being declaired are there in the first place? Surely it couldn’t be due to wait staff not accurately reporting their tips and trying to avoid paying their fair share of taxes is it? Naaa, I’m sure it has something to do with the gumment and the suits trying to stick it to them again.
In conclusion, get the hell over it, give me good service or you gets s’nothing, and for Pete’s sake get that man a knife and fork already.
A lot of the whole tipping thing is self reinforcing. Groups seen as good tippers get better service, and end up tipping better. Groups seen as bad tippers get worse service. Some times subconsciously, and some times conscious strategy. From what I see of the service industry, the basic heirarchy in most servers mind, for best tip-to-effort ratio, goes like this…
(Most likely to order off the menu, not complain, and throw everything into one bill with generous tip)
Group of guys out for drinks
Group of guys out for lunch
White families
Hispanic families
Group of women out for drinks
Black families
7 Asian families
Group of women out for lunch
Group of old people.
Most likely to customize, split dishes, argue over bill and demand seperate checks, with exact and cheap tipping.
If you don’t mind, guests to the US should tip appropriately, based on the current norms in the US. Non-US folks can have whatever system they want in their countries, and reduced tipping is arguably better than a highly tip centric system.
I agree with the first, but the second point touches on a funny idea many anti-tip folks have. The idea that “the restaurant” should be paying the wages instead of “the customer”. The customer pays for everything, period. If he doesn’t the restaurant goes out of business, period. Whether that money comes from a tip, or an hourly wage, it must still ultimately come from the customer’s pocketbook.
You’ve got two options that will make you either almost completely blameless or completely blameless–i.e., no pro-tippers will get pissed at you.
Completely blameless: boycott establishments that expect tips. You know what those establishments are. Refuse to give them your money. Eat only at establishments where tips are not expected. Sure, this’ll limit your dining-out experience; such is the glory of the free market that if your concern is widely shared, some entrepeneur will start a restaurant to fulfill the perceived need.
Almost completely blameless: as the host is seating you, tell him or her that you will only tip for good-to-great service (or that you will not be tipping at all). When you’re seated, let the waiter know this also. That way, everybody is going into the customer-server relationship fully informed. They may choose to eject you from the restaurant, or to give you shitty service; they may also choose to give you fantastic service. Whatever they do is their right, and since you didn’t commit a lie of omission, your behavior is almost beyond reproach. (You may still be reproached by some folks for putting the wait staff in a difficult position if management refuses to allow them to adjust their service accordingly, but I won’t be one of the reproachers).
If you don’t follow either of these plans, and if you engage in nonstandard tipping practices, then you’re committing a low level of fraud by obtaining services for which a tip is reasonably expected (i.e., a reasonable person who is a wait staff would predict that you would leave a tip), intending not to uphold your end of the implied bargain.
I’d guess that a Chinese person with carpal tunnel syndrome could get by with one (or possibly two) of those ceramic Chinese soup spoons, and sticking to rice-based dishes (they’d be stuck trying to eat noodles).
I have people who work for me. I directly pay their wages. I (my company, not me personally) directly deduct taxes, SS, Insurance, 401k, etc. and turn the balance over to my people.
When I go to a garage to have my car worked on, the mechanic charges me for parts and labor, I pay for the parts and labor and we move on with our lives.
When I go to a pharmacist, he dispenses the pills, counts them out, makes sure they are correct and will not kill me, then sells them to me. I pay the price on the receipt and move on.
When I go to a restaurant the wait staff sells me food, brings it to me and cleans up after I’m done. Granted this is in and of itself more service than other industries provide, but that is what they are selling - service.
If the people who work for me do a crappy job I don’t pay them, I fire them.
If the mechanic does a crappy job I make him do it again for free until he gets it right.
If the pharmacist does a crappy job I die and he goes to prison.
If the wait staff does a crappy job, I’ll be damned if I am going to kiss their ass just because the food industry has lobbied the government to keep service minimum wages below everybody else. Make everybody’s minimum wage the same or eliminate it all together but don’t expect me to automatically pick up the slack in the mean time.
Poor planning on your part does not necessarily mean cause for a crisis on my part.
Speaking of tipping and Chinese food; why in the hell should I be expected to tip at a Chinese Buffet?
I got my own food, I got my own drink, I even had to get my own chopsticks. The only person who did anything extra was the hispanic guy at the BBQ grill who toasted my chicken and mushroom lo-mein with snow peas and onions for me and he didn’t get a tip.
Why should I pay the wait staff for, um, not waiting?
IMHO, this whole tipping business has gotten out of control and needs to be reigned in quickly.
In the same way, the Wait Staff should tell you as you are seated that they will expect a tip no matter how they perform, otherwise they are guilty of the same fraud.
Unless you’re claiming that “standard tipping practice” in the USA means tipping no matter what the quality of service… which makes an utter mockery of the whole concept of tipping.
Standard tipping in the US is 15-20% for standard service. Exceptionally poor service earns exceptionally poor tips; exceptionally good service earns exceptionally good tips. If both customer and wait staff plan to operate according to that understanding, neither needs to announce it; it’s the understood default.
A waiter who expects a tip no matter how they perform is a dumbass, but they’re not guilty of any sort of fraud, since they provide the service BEFORE you provide the tip. If the tip came first, followed by service, then things would be reversed: you couldn’t defraud them (if you expected good service for your lousy tip, you’d be a non-fraudulent dumbass) and they could defraud you (by not fulfilling the expectation of standard service for your standard tip).
I have provided the most rigorously analyzed sources available, published by respected experts in their field. If you’re willing to let your ignorance be constrained by what can be found in the first few results on google, then I’m wasting my time.
But by all means, google “chopstick diet.” It’s no secret, and if you’ll be better convinced by health.about.com than literature published by leading experts in food psychology, be my guest. But I refuse to take two steps back and provide information that is less reliable than what I have already provided.
If you would like me to explain the mechanisms behind why eating with chopsticks leads to lower overall food intake, I’ll be happy to, with citations (shitty, shitty peer-reviewed citations).
You are just bending over backwards to remain staunchly oppositional, aren’t you? I can’t believe I’m going to explain to you why a business might not provide chopsticks with french fries.
Restaurants have certain images to uphold. Chopsticks are only associated with Asian restaurants, so they can get away with defaulting to chopsticks. If you go to a Chinese buffet and they give you chopsticks, you won’t think twice about it. As I already pointed out in my first post, Chinese restaurants that default to chopsticks earn by default a higher degree of authenticity. It’s either Wansink’s Mindless Eating or Cialdini’s Influence that provides an anecdote with the owner of a Chinese Buffet that says exactly this. Neither of them have particularly good indexes, though, so I’m having trouble locating the exact paragraph.
If you’re in a mexican buffet and they give you chopsticks, you will be seriously confused. The restaurant will have compromised its identity as an authentic provider of mexican food. For the same reason a picture of Emilio Zapata lends authenticity only to a mexican restaurant, chopsticks only have a place in Asian restaurants. Any possible savings they may have in making you eat a burrito with chopsticks will be more than offset when people realize “why the fuck do they have chopsticks at a Mexican restaurant?” and stop eating there altogether.
Good point. I didn’t realize I had misread the OP; I thought he was eating at a buffet. I don’t go to the restaurant style chinese places, only buffets or hole-in-the-walls with no waiter, so when I read waiter, my brain defaulted to “buffet.” My mistake.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to direct that at you, specifically. That was generalized frustration and I didn’t aim it very well.
I give a little tip if there’s some kind of waitstaff at a buffet, but I am not in the habit of doing a full 15% tip. I hadn’t actually thought about this before, though. I wonder if they’re just getting the $2.50/hr that “full” waitstaff at other restaurants get? :eek:
A buffet waiter/waitress (can’t really be called a server) who is attentive enough to keep your drinks filled and your table clean of plates is absolutely worth a tip. That’s really what gets the tip from me in most restaurants, not just buffets.
Obviously this doesn’t apply if the buffet has self-serve fountains and dirty dish receptacles.
In my opinion, much of the argument about tipping on the part of people of say that tipping is optional, only for good to exceptional service, or something to that effect comes down to this:
Arguing about how things should be rather than accepting how things are.
I agree that tipping is messed up. But it is expected.
You already know I agree with this:
and this:
In the end, I’m glad I almost never go out to eat with people who are like some of the stingy posters in this thread. Nothing is more uncomfortable than eating with someone who has to be a jerk about tipping, and gets bent of shape of trivial perceived slights and stiffs the tip (usually making someone else cover for their pissiness.)
When I find out someone is an asshole tipper, I lose interesting in socializing with them in restaurants.
The waiter eventually gave the OP his knife and fork. After saying repeatedly that they didn’t have a knife and fork. In other words, the fucking waiter LIED to him. He didn’t deserve a tip, and anyone condemning chowder for what he did is totally off base.
I was responding to the poster’s idea that “we all stop tipping gratuiosly and start tipping for good to great service.” I interpreted “good…service” to mean better-than-average. That may have been a misinterpretation.
Panda, chill. Your cites require me either to believe that you have excellent reading comprehsnion, or to spend a couple hours driving to a university and digging through peer-reviewed journals. You know I’m not going to do that for an online debate. Would you do that if I offered you a counter-cite that required a similar amount of work to verify? Your unlinked cite is unconvincing. What you cite might be convincing, I’ll grant you, but you’re right: I’m not going to take the disproportionate effort to rid myself of a relatively minor bit of ignorance.
That’s just how these discussions work: if you’re unwilling to provide either a direct link to your cite, or a substantial relevant quotation from your cite, you’re wasting your time. And don’t pretend for a second that you’d treat a similar cite from a similarly unknown poster dissimilarly.
For shits and giggles, I did google “Chopstick Diet.” If you got from any of the links on the front page any proof that eating with chopsticks is objectively more difficult for our species than eating with a fork and knife, then I’m right to doubt your reading comprehension skills.
I then went to Google Scholar and looked up “chopsticks.” The only relevant results I found in a cursory search suggested that
This is not proof that folks who have learned these motions can eat equally proficiently with chopsticks as with fork&knife, but it does suggest that they can eat without problem with chopsticks.
Google scholar returns no results for “chopstick diet.”
Next post: I show you how to make an effective cite on the Internet!
