What if I love the food? What if I’ve gotten good service in the past? Never go back, because the waitress was a fuckup, or I pissed her off? If I complain to the chef, it’s her word against mine, right?
Your firm belief is incorrect: a tip is for the basic service, by custom.
You may, of course, violate customs. You may go into a restaurant and loudly describe your latest bowel movement; you may go into a restaurant and make nasty comments about other people’s appearances. You may go into a steakhouse and start loudly declaiming the evils of eating meat.
You may be a firm believer that bowel movement discussions are appropriate for restaurants. YOu may be a firm believer that other people need to hear frank appraisals of their appearance. You may be a firm believer that a steakhouse is a great place to spread the gospel of veganism.
In all cases, your firm beliefs will be incorrect.
Daniel
I’m a generous tipper. I want to show my appreciation. But I do often wonder if I am helping to perpetuate a system where the only people who benefit are either the rare server or the restaurant owners.
And good service definitely isn’t solely the preserve of expensive restaurants. The worst service I’ve ever gotten was at a restaurant where the bill for the two of us was $150 without wine. The second worst service was at a Shoney’s where the waitress actually delivered our food, then sat down at a neighboring booth and never came back to our table.
The thing is, the price of the food does NOT include the cost of the service, since restaurants in most states (CA being a notable exception) pay their servers basically nothing. In paying 5%, you are paying less than what the government taxes the servers, and therefore the waitstaff is paying to serve you, rather than the other way around. In paying 10%, the waitstaff is pretty much working for free. You would have to tip more than 10% to even be giving the waitstaff any money for serving you. If the price of the food were to be inclusive of service charges, you’d end up paying an awful lot more for the food. Restaurants keep their food prices low to keep customers feeling like they are getting a good deal for their money (high-end establishments excepted, but in those cases you’re paying for the atmosphere and the well-trained chef, not the food). The restaurant can get away with paying the servers next to nothing, thanks to the “tip credit” laws, and therefore when you do not tip waitstaff, they are paying for the privledge of serving you.
Cite? If the tip is not included in the price of the meal, I think it’s a fair assumption that the tip is for something to be provided which is discretionary. Can you show otherwise?
I tip based on the service, not the price.
Well not all the way, I tip 10% and consider it a non deductable donation to the underemployed, then I tip as I feel the service demands.
Actually now that I think about it, is there a reason that it can’t be deductable?
If there is bad service, give a bad tip and ask to speak to the manager. If you get excellent service, overtip as much as you can and ask to speak to the manager. Both of these will get you far.
Being a good tipper can help you out a lot. Servers can get free things for their customers and if I see a regular that tips me 15-20% or more, I will do everything in my power to make sure he or she is having an excellent time. If a person is known for tipping 10% or less, then in a busy time, I will stop by their table less often.
I haven’t always been able to give good service and I completely understand when I’m swamped and can’t take care of people and they give me bad tips. HOWEVER, when I spend a lot of time at a table, answering millions of questions, running here and there getting a bunch of things for them and they tell me they loved the food, they loved me and in the end, I get tipped under 8%, I get pissed. I am losing money and time by helping out that person.
The waitstaff at a more expensive restaurant are required to have more knowledge and training than those at a cheaper place. While the work I do at a more expensive place is less physical work, it involves far more knowledge and skill. Not only do you have to memorize everything that is in every single dish on the menu, but have an extensive alcohol knowledge, general service knowledge and good people’s skills.
I was trained to be a waitstaff at a $7-13 place in a week. I am still training to be waitstaff at my little-bit-less than fine dining place and I’ve worked there for over 3 months.
I tip 20-50% at the cheaper restaurants and 15-30% at the higher class places.
Would you please move to Boston? 
Says who?
The problem is, it doesn’t, at least for wait staff in general. If wait staff differ greatly in skill and charisma, then the system benefits great servers and hurts poorer servers. It also makes their wages less predictable, which is stressful and frustrating (which is pretty unhealthy). Other than that, tipping, as a social practice, doesn’t really help them at all. I would argue that tipping is essentially in practice a form of further demeaning poorer workers. Their wages are dependant on how servile they act (and are often subject to paying for dumb luck or someone else’s mistakes, like when things not their fault slow down service). More professionalized service jobs don’t have uch features putting their livihoods at the direct mercy of asshole patrons, even though their attitudes and customer service skills are just as much important.
First of all, no they aren’t, not everywhere. Some are paid more. Some are, illegally, paid less. And the pretty laughable observation here is that that minimum is ridiculously low compared to minimum wages in general. Obviously, it’s that low because of tipping, and the law was changed (as well as let lapse with no increases to keep up with inflation) to accomodate the particulars of tipping professions.
People respond to incentives. First of all, you’re wrong about the minimum wage issue. But second of all, resturants can simply compensate by taking larger cuts of the tips.
What happens on the aggregate is not the same thing as what effect a particular input has on the cost of something. Menu prices would be a lot higher if resturants had to pay their wait staff real minimum wages. The cost of running the business would increase: where else would the money come from?
When tipping becomes a separate system off the “books” so to speak, not listed on the menu, it becomes a cost not accounted for on the menu. When wages are lowered to the absurd level that they are for wait staff, competition forces resturants to lower their prices in response.
I didn’t say his desire was. His desire is perfectly reasonable. What’s pretentiously meaningless is the phony sanctimony about tipping. All other things equal, I think tipping as a social custom generally hurts those professions that get tipped. It’s no real surprise that it’s the poorer workers who are looked down upon work in professions where they are forced to depend on the largess of fickle customers and they cannot depend on a stable wage for solid, predictable work.
You’re asking for a cite that the tip is for the basic service, by custom? Lemme dig some cites up for you showing you what the custom is in the United States. I’m getting these through an obscure source, Google, where I typed “tip customary” and clicked the Search button.
Or go down to your library and pick up any travel guide to any destination within the US, and look in the section on “tipping.” Tell me what it says.
You may dislike the custom, but you’re incorrect to deny that the custom exists.
Daniel
See, Apos, we’re talking about quite different things here.
You’re discussing a situation that maybe could be alleviated by changing the system altogether. On this score, i agree with you completely. I’ve made very clear in at least two other posts in this thread that i don’t like the tipping system. I didn’t go into details about why, because i didn’t really see it as relevant, but i agree with much of what you say.
You’ll notice that i said earlier that i’ve worked in the service industry in Canda, England, and Australia. For me, by far the best system is Australia’s, where tipping is not really practiced, and where minimum wage laws ensure that employers have to pay hospitality industry workers a reasonably decent wage. I think this is, or at least should be, the employer’s responsibilty. I dislike a system where, as someone else has pointed out, waiters essentially become contractors who pay the restaurant for the privilege of serving its food. I’d be quite happy to see a rise in menu prices to accommodate a shift to a higher wage with no tipping. And i agree with you completely that it’s a poor system that leaves a server’s remuneration up to the whim of the general public.
But my whole argument in the previous post was predicated on the not-unreasonable assumption that the current system is here to stay. You can call it “pretentious sanctimony” if you want, but until i’m granted the unilateral authority to change the American labor system, i will continue to insist that “fickle customers” do the right thing and leave a decent tip.
I concede that the 15%-ish range is what is socially acceptable, or customary.
No, I’m talking about the indifference principle, one of the cornerstones of economics. The indifference principle doesn’t stop working beneath a certain “approved” level of massive change. Nor is it generally stopped by legislation and “systems.”
But the deeper point is this: there is no particular need to change the labor system. If everyone stopped tipping, then wait jobs would be a lot less attractive, would be in far less demand, and wages would have to go up, inevitably. Who would work for two dollars an hour!? And the customer stinginess that caused this effect would be rewarded with higher menu prices.
Now, if you can agree to that scenario, then what about if people started tipping half as much? Or what if they tried tipping double? Again, in the overall picture, the fortunes of waiters would not in the end get much better or worse (though I do think they’d be better without tipping). When does it cross the line into not working?
When we come to the single example, I agree that not tipping what they expect is a dick thing to do. But why is it dick? Because the low menu prices that basically do no include the cost of labor are a result of tipping being an approved practice, meaning that you are stiffing someone out of their real wage. Consider if there was no tipping: if a server was inattentive and not particularly impressive but still did the basic job, almost no one would insist that they should only be paid a laughable 2 dollars an hour because of it. Yet, this is EXACTLY what someone like Bone is insisting. Economics helps us see that there is no real difference between these behaviors, and to see that they are dick.
However, in the end, that personal dickiness doesn’t help or hurt waiters in general. That negative interaction itself goes towards making waitressing less attracitve as a profession, which reduces interest in it, which… and so on. The end result is that dicks or no dicks in any one single interaction, spread out over an entire population it has an effect that undoes the dickiness of it. If customers are dicks, those waiters who still choose to serve them will make more money for suckier job, in the end not really being any better off (because the two effects cancel each other out in overall hapiness).
Now the picture is a bit more complicated, because if some waiters have extremely thick skins and don’t mind dicky customers much, they will benefit disproportionately (higher wages without the job getting much worse, from their perspective).
Jesus H. Christ, you’re obtuse. Can you not comprehend that i agree with your argument, but am making my case in this thread on the very reasonable assumption that, in the aggregate, people will not decide to stop or reduce their tipping, with a resulting increase in wages? And that, as a result, it is perfectly reasonable to expect people to conform to the current system of gratuities, if we want waitstaff to take home enough money to live?
My whole position is based on the fact that this cultural practice is likely to continue in something like its present form. I agree with you that if everyone stopped tipping, there would be the type of shifts that you describe. But the fact is, everyone isn’t going to stop tipping, so the individual diner who stiffs the waiter has done little more than ensure that that particular waiter has a less remunerative week, and is less able to pay rent and buy food. Sure, the indifference principle still applies below the macro level, but on the scale i’m talking about the shifts in the indifference curve are very small, and may be outweighed by the other factors that you haven’t considered, such as the overall job market, and the consequent ability of waiters to move out of their jobs and into other positions
But if you think you agree with me, then you are not understanding what I am saying. What I am saying includes the idea that even small reductions or increases in tipping rates cannot in general make the lives waiters better or worse off. If you argue vehemently against Bone because you believe that by trying to make his behavior less common, you are helping waiters, you are mistaken. While Bone can probably be rightly pitted for his attitude, the prevalence of his attitude cannot harm the fortunes of waiters in general.
If we really want all people to conform to the standard, then why isn’t is a part of the bill, as a service charge? Alternatively, if we wanted all people to conform in the first place, tipping would never have gotten started and it could never change percentages. Tipping is a phenomenon that takes into account whatever degree of deviation from conformity there happens to be.
While small effects may be swamped out in the sense that something that makes wages fall is overcome by another factor that leads to a rise in wages, leading to an overall rise in wages, that doesn’t mean they are swamped out in terms of opportunity cost or utility. The still have the effect, it just isn’t as directly observable in grosser macro-statistical measures.
and
So, which is it? Can changes in the level of tipping affect the overall position of waiters, or not?
Now who is being pedantic? I clearly stated why I think waiters are worse off with tipping: not because they make less money, but because their wages are less certain and that uncertainty is based on the fickleness of wealthier people. In other words: it’s not an issue of economic goods or bads, but of class snobbery.
A more recent difficulty with tipping has also cropped up. There are more and more places now that, even though they have serving staff, have a separate register for payment. No problem, but we are increasingly living in a world of debit/credit cards. I just realized that I haven’t had bills or coins on my person for several weeks.
This brings up the “stealth tip” conundrum…
So what often happens is that we finish our meal but, having no coins to plunk down or bills to slip under the corner of the butter dish, we walk up to the register to pay by card. Here, someone who is usually not our server runs our transaction. We scribble our tip on the receipt and leave.
No what often happens is that the server has no idea whether or not they were rewarded well for service, or by which particular person they were tipped from, or even if they were tipped at all, if they don’t see their receipts until the end of shift and can’t connect a specific tip to a specific customer. I’ve even had servers glare at me as I’ve left the table seeing no physical money present, and thinking that I’d stiffed them, when I was really only in a bit of a rush and walking up to pay directly at the register by card.
I don’t like it, takes the whole “personal gratuity and thanks” feeling away from the tipping experience if the only person who gets to look me in the eye is the person ringing the register.
I have this urge to devolve back 50 years and shuffle up to my server saying “Why thank you dearie, here’s a little something for your trouble” and press a shiny new nickle into their palm. A nickle with a bee on it.