I make no promises. I’m currently considering arch-villain as a career change, but the paperwork has been keeping me from moving forward. World dominion, that’s where the money is. Then I’ll also execute bad tippers (though that may or may not be completely consistent with evil villain status).
Most people who don’t tip, or tip insultingly poorly, refuse to acknowledge the truth of this statement. They don’t deny it, they simply refuse to process the concept in their (by definition) sociopathic little brains.
Execute? Just make them wait on tables.
That’s a really good point. We have one restaurant in town where we’re actually recognized, and we had to go there on about one Friday a month for years before this recognition occurred (and the recognition we get is, "Hi! How are you guys tonight? with a big smile, not an additional charge added to our bill). The customer in the OP is no doubt an egregious one to get this kind of recognition.
From the way the customer described it in the video, the first time they added the forced 18% gratuity was just at the end of the bill without any warning. That’s wrong.
But I think after that (explaining up front before she was seated that there would be a forced 18% gratuity) was fine. The restaurant could just decide to not serve her period, so I don’t think making it conditional is much more of a stretch.
Not sure if this is the smart thing for the restaurant to do, though. If it’s really just that she’s a bad tipper, that seems a bit minor. Would’ve been on a better moral standing if the customer was overly disruptive/rude/etc. (Though as elbows points out, there probably is some of that to be singled out like this)
Hmm, that could work. Fits the evil motif, too.
Yes, courtesy is nice. But not saying thanks is not being an inconsiderate asshole. You’d probably agree, if you think about it. If such a small offense is to be labelled inconsiderate assholery, you are left with little room to describe truly bad offenses.
I’m actually really amazed that nobody has commented on the type of restaurant this is. A japanese hibachi style restaurant is the new place to be for great swaths of middle America. It’s giving the people their bread and circuses - morbidly obese people cheering the cook on as he lights onion rings on fire, screaming “sake! sake!” and having it squirted into their mouths. It’s practically haute cuisine in my hometown. My brothers love our local place, but patrons get shuffled around like dominoes. My parents (well, my mother) always tip 30% for decent service (and in the boonies, people only tip 10-15% maybe). Last weekend, we still weren’t seated 30 minutes past our reservation time, and a group without reservations was accidentally seated before us. At any American-run place, you’d be plied with free appetizers, desserts, or free drinks for such a mistake of a regular customer, but nothing got the manager to budge or even acknowledge an error.
So if my family didn’t get noticed for tipping double the normal amount at this carnival-like shithole for over a year, you REALLY have to be fucking up big time, demanding and consistently tip nothing or next to nothing to even get noticed.
No kidding. I’m a regular at a particular sushi place in town and the recognition I get is extra free fish and no charge for drinks.
If I was a regular at some place and this happened I think I would be looking at my behaviour for some clues as opposed to blaming the restaurant.
Not so much - although I feel it is wrong to go to a “personal” level, the quite legitimate theory is that if enough waitpeople complain because they are getting shafted, the system may change.
So I guess that people that participate in protests are arseholes for blocking city streets, or for making work for the police also. Not paying a tip is ONE (net neccessarily the best) quite simple way for individuals to make their feelings felt.
Yep, this is quite simple and straight forward, but it still doesn’t address why the waitperson should need to tip-out based on their sales. If the wait person was getting tipped, for example, on how many people they served - why couldn’t the tip-out be calculated based on that?
Not enough cheapskate bull-whipping.
I’ve been in restaurants on office social occasions and have been saddled with these justitification-rationalizing dead-beat scumbag non-tippers that the rest of us have to make up for. Without one single exception, I have observed that each was as crap an employee as they were a crap-tipper.
Too bad interviewers don’t take interviewees out to a lunch where they are expected to leave the tip, because it would be a nice secret knock-out punch to accidentally hiring office a-holes that need to be fast-tracked out through HR later.
My impression after watching the video and before reading other responses here…
I think the restaurant is mostly in the right, but for their own sakes, they should have handled the situation differently. I think it would have been cleaner to refuse to serve her altogether rather than insisting she pay 18% gratuity. That’s rather humiliating, and the customer might not have raised this much hue & cry if they hadn’t pitched it like they did. It would have been better for the restaurant to have waited after they served her the first night to tell her, privately, why they tacked on the gratuity. It’s awkward to walk into a restaurant with friends and be shown up as a lousy tipper. If the restaurant is fine with 15% gratuity for parties of six or more, they shouldn’t be charging her above that automatically.
But honestly, why would anyone want to make national news for being such a notoriously poor tipper that all the wait staff AND chefs refuse to serve her? My God, where is the shame?
The more I think about it, the more I think she possibly thought this could be the black/white/Jesse and some lawyers to the rescue payday of a lifetime. The whole thing from day one could have been a setup.
I think the manager should have told the staff to be a good as possible to her in everyway a few last times and document how much she tipped. If she didnt tip then, they would have a much better leg to stand on justification wise, not that I don’t think they were generally right to start with.
Oh, God, you have to be so careful when you eat out with a group. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people throw down what they figured was enough to cover their meal and take off - hello, what about tip and tax? You do not want to be the last couple of people who have to cover everyone else’s shortfall.
I’m with you on this. As a former waitress at a chain restaurant, I wish we could have kicked some people out. There was one family of 5 (no automatic tip) that would come in about once a month and the only tip we would get is that they would round their bill to the nearest dollar. So max you would get is $.99. It was ridiculous. But my manager didn’t have any spine to talk to them or kick them out or anything. Usually, when she saw that a server had them, she would give the server a free dinner. That’s great and all, but it’s not gonna help me pay my rent to get a free dinner after my shift! What’s worse is that these people were very demanding. Soup wasn’t hot enough. Soup was too hot. Everything must be on the side, extra everything, crackers for the kids, three lemon wedges (and sugar packets) for the water (home-made lemonade? CHEAP!)
It was a very frustrating experience to wait on these people.
The restaurant is in the right…and I think waiters should stop bitching about bad tippers and start bitching about not having the legal right to min. wage.
Plus, the bias of the news report is ridiculous.
How about doing it because it’s the good, generous, HUMAN thing to do for someone who is serving you?
No one demands it. Yes, it’s customary almost to the point of “required”. But, no one is rallying for changing that custom. THAT is the custom of sit-down restaurants. That’s the understood deal for all parties. If you don’t like that custom, hit a drive-thru.
Some people get a sick hard-on for having someone ‘serve’ them & be at their beck and call. Then refuse to compensate for their work. I guess they get to feel superior for a while.
If you know you’re not getting a tip from someone like this then make sure every meal arrives burnt and frozen.
The main reason is because the tax burden is calculated based on their sales. The numbers may be different in the US, but Revenue Canada presumes that a server receives an average of 10% tips on every dollar they bill out and they are taxed based on that. Theoretically you are supposed to claim anything in excess of that you receive but there is no method for reporting less.
That said my job as a waitress was the highest grossing of my teen years.
My bet is the reason they don’t want to wait on her isn’t so much that she doesn’t tip well. It’s that she’s rude, demanding and unappreciative of the extra effort that her bellowing for an entire sliced lemon so she can make lemonade with the table sugar causes.
There are some people who will find a problem with anything the server brings out regardless of whether it is exactly as they initially requested. To make things worse, these types of people tend to travel in packs. I saw entire tables full of food get wasted because of this kind of thing when I waited tables as a youth. When the best server in the house, you know, the one with the sterling reputation and all the positive feedback from customers, gets reamed by this ONE frequent guest and her friends? Makes one want to impose a “You’re a bitch” fee.
The customer is not always right. Anyone who says this wants something they are not owed.