“Rounding up” is insane. I would throw probably the biggest fit in history if this happened. Rounding up on-top of an auto-gratuity is just too much for me to even fathom. Even if I intend to tip out of the change owed to me, it’s still my change. Very often when paying in cash I do not, in fact, tip out of the change owed to me. I like to tip in even amounts (I tip well, and I don’t like to leave coins and such on the table) and actually like to save up coins because I go through a lot of quarters on a regular basis. Either way, my change should be coming back to me.
I’m not really sure the police will get involved in a dispute over an auto-gratuity. Maybe they will, I’m totally uninformed about the whole scenario. Considering many police officers I’ve spoken to in my life say they never get around to answering their “lowest priority” calls in many given nights, I have my doubts. It sounds like a matter to be settled in a civil court, not a criminal one. I think there is a difference between theft and a disagreement over an ancillary charge. For example, I know from the perspective of renting out places to others, a lot of land lords charge something like a $5 a day late fee on unpaid rent. It says in the lease that at the end of the lease term, this will be applied to the deposit and if it is greater than the deposit it will be owed by the tenant.
I’ve known a lot of other people who rent properties who send out itemized forms explaining why a tenant owes them X amount of money (often we’re talking property damage + accrued late fees which have eaten up a deposit and then some.) In these cases, the tenant refuses to pay 99.99% of the time, the worst that happens to them is a relatively insignificant mark on their credit. If the land lord truly wants to pursue it they have to go to small claims court or something, which just typically is not done.
While we’re talking about a restaurant versus property rental, in both cases you have customers who have agreed to pay for a tangible product but have refused to pay ancillary charges to that product (be it an auto-gratuity or late fees for not paying rent on time.) I can see the cops arresting someone for not paying their bill (as that would clearly be theft of food), but I’m not sure they’d get involved on failure to pay an auto-grat.
My dept went out to a bar a while ago on a company credit card. We had a budget so every penny was important. When I asked for a tab to be ran the barman said it’s 15% extra for a tab. WTF? was my reply. They had a very modern till that I know for a fact has a tab function so it puzzled me why so much. The manager was adamant, tab = 15%. Fuck’em I thought. For the rest of the night every order was done on the credit card as a stand alone payment. The barman was very busy having to do all those individual transactions. Not one of them got a tip from us. We actually didn’t spend our budget that night. Normally when that happens we tip the delta if it’s not a huge amount. In this case it was around 10% IIRC. Fucking idiots.
BTW it’s normal over here to tip in restaurants but not to tip barmen as they are generally paid a decent living wage.
Exactly. This one guy, who decides to order all this wine for the party, is being pretty petty. Does anyone really think a person who spends $600 bucks on 3 bottles would have blinked if the price was $120 more? That this rare bottle of wine is affordable at $200, but not at $240? The reality is that he should have been aware of the terms of the arrangement before he ordered the alcohol. At most decent restaurants, the server will pour wine for you all night long if asked. Just because this guy didn’t want to take advantage of the service doesn’t mean you get to pay less than what you implicitly agreed to. Most restaurants that sell wine that expensive expect you to have the class and tact to behave accordingly.
That’s an incredibly stupid policy; not only were they busy handling the transactions, they got dinged for a transaction fee for each one. If anything, they should charge a fee to pay by credit card per the drink rather than by tab!
In the U.S., it’s against the T&Cs of the major cc companies to tack on a usage fee. It’s also against the T&Cs to require a minimum purchase. Vendors can get around this by offering a cash discount, but they can’t add a cc fee.
Apparently, the practice is allowed in Europe. Not sure about other countries.
There is a lot more to serving an expensive bottle of wine than just yanking out the cork.
First the waiter, or somebody has, has to have prepared the bottle - perhaps openning it to breath for the proper time or chilling it properly? Expensive wine is a whole nother thing from the jug wine I drink out of a tumbler down at the local watering hole. When folks pay $200 for a bottle in a restaurant they are expecting more than the same bottle they could get at the store. In fact, restaurants have huge markups on wine, so if these people were searching for a bargan they were already out of luck.
Then the waiter probably has to tip out others like a bar keep or wine steward (what do thay call those guys?).
I would say a waiter has to do more work to serve a bottle of wine and he does in plopping down a plate of food.
My short experience in working a fairly expensive restaurant: I bussed tables and restocked the bar and wine and was tipped by the waiters and bartender. One night a table ordered about $300 (1970s dollars) in bubbly, one bottle after another. The chiller ran out but fortunately I was on top of it and had restocked as the waiter took them out so all was well. At the end of the night, one of the wealthy diners threw up all over the front door and guess who’s job it was to clean that up? So, the waiter gets his big tip (because you tip the bar bill the same as the food bill - 15 - 20%) and then decides that he dosn’t need to tip out me because I didn’t do anything(!). That’s right, he had to carry the bottles to the table and unstopper them! The head waiter then proceeded to ream him out before I could even say a word and I got my fair share. A good head waiter there.
Given the last tipping thread I started turned into a six-page train wreck I probably shouldn’t even comment here, but…
Regardless of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the autograt, am I the only one who’s completely flummoxed at the notion that the the guy is trying to justify complaining about it because the servers supposedly didn’t serve the wine? They brought it to the table and uncorked it as the customer asked. In my mind, that’s “serving” it.
When I go to a restaurant, I ask for a separate bill on every single item. That way when it comes time to pay the piper, I can figure out what deserves a tip and what doesn’t. “Well, he just brought out the bread basket and dumped it on the table, so no tip on that. He didn’t seem to put a lot of effort into putting my salad equidistant from my fork and my spoon, so only 5% tip on that. Wine service was lacking, but the waiter was polite everytime he refilled my water, so full 20% tip on the water…”
I don’t understand tipping on the amount of the bill anyway, as opposed to the amount of service involved- if I sit a table during a busy time and have five free coffee refills, total bill 2.00, I am expected to pay 40 cents, but if I come in and drink an entire bottle of 500 dollar champagne and leave in ten minutes, I owe 100 dollars?
This is going to sound stupid, but here goes anyway.
I eat out at a lot of expensive restaurants. Actually, I am sort of a “restaurant tourist”. I have even flown to other cities to visit places at which I wanted to eat. I usually order tasting menus and also wine pairings if available, but if not, expensive bottles of wine, sometimes multiple bottles.
I always tip ~20% on both food and wine. In some cases, that means I am leaving a $150+ tip, and I am happy to do it. However, I would be pretty irritiated if I was compelled to tip on the expensive wine. I’d do it anyway, but I like feel like I’m being nice by tipping on the whole bill. When you are spending that much money on food, drink and service, it is good to leave with a warm fuzzy feeling. High-end restaurants, and the servers in them, that feel entitled to a 20% tip on alcohol are alienating their core customers, IMHO.
lobstermobster, if you remember the name of the restaurant, please post it, as I will make sure not to take my business there. I wonder if it was Charlie Trotter’s…
I agree. Also, as i said earlier, when i was a waiter i was never angry or felt that i had been stiffed if people tipped a somewhat lower percentage on the more expensive bottles of wine.
Sure, if i had to decant the wine in order to remove the sediment, or something similar, it would be nice for the diner to recognize that effort with a good tip, but for the most part serving an expensive bottle doesn’t really require any more effort on the part of the waiter than serving a regular bottle.
And when the expensive wine is champagne, (as two of the bottles were in this case), it’s definitely no more difficult than serving a cheap bottle.
I don’t think that even the original article had the name of the restaurant. All we know, i think, is that it was in the Lincoln Park area.
I wonder just how this guy got his bottles of wine.
Did he just know the names of exactly what he wanted, and order those?
Did he ask the server his thoughts and opinions on different wines, what would be good to have with the food they were having, what would be three wines that would go together well in case someone had more than one, etc.?
The server then went and ordered the wines, made sure they were the correct ones, got his little clean towel over his arm, carried them to the table, opened them up, and put them in the center.
How did the glasses get to the table? Likely at least 8 wine glasses were brought over. Probably also 8 Champagne glasses. Someone picked those up, probably polished them to make sure they were pretty and spot-free, brought them over, set them in place, possibly removed any that were no longer being used during the meal (by someone who switched from wine to Champagne, for example), and cleared them and the empty bottles at the end.
That’s all part of “service.” “Service” doesn’t consist solely of hanging around the table and picking up the bottle and refilling glasses.
I wonder what that guy would have thought would be an acceptable tip.
I just think tipping in general is so out of hand. Tipping percentage on the total of the bill is just so insane to me. I know you have to have more expertise and take more care in your job at finer restaurants, but I just have a hard time with the principle that snooty Pierre over at Chez Food is going to make $120 more off of me than Doris at the all night diner just because Pierre pours wine and Doris pours coffee. I know Doris won’t know much about wine but she’s still wiping down the cups, being prompt and friendly. And Pierre won’t have to deal with the sexual harassment and 2 am robberies.
Maybe I’m missing some secret about the difference in server quality in nicer restaurants. I only waited tables for three months on a summer break in college. It was a nicer but not incredibly fancy restaurant in nashville. Entrees hovered around 25 dollars. None of us new shit about wine. We had a cheat sheet from the bartender about what wine to suggest with each entree if asked and what to say if asked “what’s it like” (this came about after a table complained that I said “it’ll get you buzzed”…apparently no one likes a lot of sass with their 30 dollar filet)
And the thing about nicer places is they make it a lot easier to give you that attentive service. The waiter has an expo, a runner, a busser, and a bartender. Other places the waiter is doing a lot of that themselves. Even so, I’m sorry but it’s really not rocket science. My back and legs would hurt but thats about it. People ask for something you go get it for them. They ask you questions, you answer them. And most of all you have to try try try to not tell them that you hate them with the fire of a thousand suns.
I’d walk out every night with a huge wad of cash thinking “god bless america and its population of suckers who care more about being classy than actually thinking about what the service is actually worth”
120 just always seems a lot for three bottles of wine. I don’t care if the waiter shoved them up his ass while juggling cats. It’s a lot of money. The whole system is fucked.
I need to add that quotes like this are why lobstermobster is my favorite poster, she is funny, smart, and snarky, and those qualities are second only to a good ass to get someone on my favorites list.
Presumably the exact same way the table next to his got 3 cheaper bottles, yet he is expected to pay significantly more for the same service.
Calculating tip as a percentage of the bill is a nice way to come up with a number, but it is not foolproof, and not without stupid pitfalls like paying $35 more for someone to open bottle X instead of bottle Z, just because one is fancier than the other.
I think you may have answered your own question here. I know nothing about who gets paid what at high-end restaurants, but I always thought that the larger tip for more expensive service then has to get partially distributed to the expo, runner, busser, and bartender. This, while Pierre gets a massive tip, it gets somewhat diminished by all the other people helping. The waiter at the less expensive place has less help for the tip to be shared with, so s/he gets a higher percentage of a smaller tip.
I could be totally wrong about that, but that’s how I always thought it worked.
(Note that I am NOT saying that waiters at less expensive restaurants take home more or even equal tip amounts than those in more expensive restaurants. I am sure that’s not the case).
Here’s the deal. If you don’t want to pay ridiculously high tips, don’t go to ridiculously expensive restaurants. But if you think you’ve been overcharged, do something about it quietly, 'cause I don’t want you ruining my meal making a fuss over a tip. Or, chalk it up to experience and take your business elsewhere.
You should always tip on the “theoretical full price” if comped something, unless for example you’re being comped because your waitress threw the appetizer at you. It is rude not to.
