Yeah, what a douchebag. If I were the server, I’d invite him to go make his own dinner.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it. As others have stated, 10% for poor service, 15% for average, 20% for good. Just rough numbers are fine, if your bill is $27 and you got good service, tip $5.
FWIW I am American and hate tipping too.
While that Slate article generally confirms with my views, I think that the unilateral “solution” it offers is crazy and likely only to engender resentment and hostility.
Here’s an argument for why it’s not necessarily silly: if you can afford to splurge on the $40.00 steak, you can afford to leave a relatively generous tip. If you’re on a tight budget, you’re only being parsimonious with your server if you’re being parsimonious with yourself as well.
That said, I personally would be more likely to tip a significantly higher percentage of a cheap meal than of an expensive one, all else being equal.
You Win The Thread.
Anyone who can’t get what is trying to be said here is better off staying home and cooking for themselves.
+1
It will be the justification used for the rest of the summer by every cheapskate I’ve ever had the embarrassment to know on why cheating waitstaff by being too lazy to divide by 5 is “right” and “good for the country”.
I mean, lets be clear on this: you want every restaurant you visit to serve its patrons like Chef Ramsey is standing behind each employee with a cattle-prod and a gun, but… Pay For It?
How horribly rude. :rolleyes:
Maybe you could do a pseudo flat tip by figuring out the average value of a meal for that class of restaurant (ie. so that you’re still adhering to the convention that you should tip more at more expensive restaurants due to fewer tables per server and higher service standard). You could calculate a reasonable tip based on conventional % (15-20%) then tip that amount every time regardless of what you order.
So for example you tip $2 at a $10 coffee-and-sandwich cafe sort of place, $5 for a $25 casual sit-down restaurant, $20 when at a $100 fancy restaurant, regardless of what you happened to order that day.
If you have such strong moral objections to the tipping culture here, keep in mind that none of your servers will have had any say at all in the policy, but your tipping behaviors will affect ONLY them. If you want to effect change, messing with your servers’ income won’t do a damn thing. Talking to management could (but realistically, not without some critical mass behind it – thousands of restaurant-goers, not just you).
BTW, when I was a server I would much rather have made a wage commensurate with the work I was doing, than to hang onto the system that allowed for substantial tips in theory, but rarely in practice. Because frankly, 99% of America seems to hate tipping, and many of those have no qualms taking it out on the server. If you get one fantastic tipper, it will invariably be off-set by the guy who leaves you three pennies just to show you what he thinks of you. Tips rarely were congruent with my level of effort or service, and were often lowered for things completely out of my control – the kitchen screwed up, for one very very common example, and I once got that 3 cent tip because the guy had to wait an hour for a table, when the line was quite obviously out the door and down the block. I’ve even had customers blame me because they changed their mind about what they wanted. People are idiots.
It’s a brutal, physical, exhausting job, and no matter how pleasant and awesome I was, with tips it never amounted to more than $10 an hour, and on a slow night, or and understaffed one, could often be substantially less. It may be possible to make good money in that place where it is $100 a plate, but the vast majority of servers work in that family restaurant where the average per-person is more like $15.
It’s done because the assumption is that a higher check entailed more food. Either more people ordering, or more courses to bring out; either way, it requires more time, more plates to carry, more trips from kitchen. Six people at a table will take much longer to order than one person. Bringing out drinks, apps, entrees, dessert, and coffee requires more trips than bringing out a sandwich.
So yes, in general, a higher check corresponds to more work. There are always exceptions, of course, for which you may use your Og-given discretion to handle.
In my experience, the $40 steak place waiter also has to share tips with more water people, bus people, bread people, wine people, etc. The high end places employ an army of servers but we only leave one tip.
Like gallows fodder said, I tip a minimum of $5 on lunch (if I sit down and there’s a waiter, not fast food). I tip about $10 on dinner at an average place. Please note this is well over 20%, usually 30-35%, so I’m not sure of the social revolution it will accomplish.
It sounds like you’ll only be eating fast food, so why worry? You won’t have to tip anyone at McDonalds.
It really depends on the state too. In some states, like WA, tipped employees still have to make minimum wage not including tips. Minimum wage here is also the highest in the country (or it has been for many years…in any case its currently within a few cents of it). With tips, I’m sure servers make more than I do, so I don’t feel sorry for them at all. I DO, however, tip them a normal amount. Because that’s just what you do. It’s kind of annoying though, because they must make way more than servers in most other states anyway. Delivery drivers are different because they’re paying for their own gas and vehicle upkeep.
I tip extra if there is alcohol served in the establishment (especially if its the type of place where some serious drinking may happen, like a Sports Bar and Grill). My reasoning is that the wait staff have to endure more flirting or jerky customers.
If one orders a $7-8 sandwich at a sit-down place - that is probably something rather simple and hard to screw up, like a burger or salad. If ordering a $20 dinner, there will be far more in terms of specific instructions and demands involved at there is probably a cut of meat and vegetables cooked to order, and the wait staff has more responsibility in conveying those instructions to the kitchen and making sure the delivery of the food is right. So a larger tip should match the higher ticket price.
Don’t get me wrong – I tip 20% or more regardless of what I order and know that if I’m going for an expensive meal, the tip will be big, and factor that into my budget.
This isn’t about my budget, though, but about the custom. I tip according to the custom, because that’s what the waiter depends on, but I do wish the custom would change because it’s arbitrary.
If I get a $5 soup, $20 entree, and $5 dessert, the bill is $30 and the tip is $6. If I get a $10 salad, $35 entree, and $10 dessert, the bill is $55 and the tip is $11. In both cases, the waiter made the same amount of effort, same numbers of trips to the table, but their tip could vary by $5, which doesn’t seem to be fair to the waiter.
By federal law, employers are required to ensure that tips equal at least the minimum wage, or make up the difference. So a tipped employee should never go home at the end of the night having made less than minimum wage…
yeah, that happens. But it is the law.
As you pointed out, enforcement is utter crap. It’s illegal in most (all?) places to take the credit card processing fee out of the server’s tip, too, but I worked for a place that did it. And because I lacked any kind of power in that situation – I needed a job and they weren’t exactly growing on trees – I didn’t really have any way of doing anything about it. Servers are disposable, so if I’d agitated about it, they’d have just fired me and hired someone who’d keep quiet.
Which leads me to the eternal question – why is there no servers union?
U.S. labor law is very weird. What it comes down to in practical matters is that union representation is really only possible when you have a decent-sized bargaining unit that votes to authorize a union. That’s why, say, cleaning crews at large hotels are more likely to successfully assert collective bargaining rights than, say, a handful of waiters at a small eatery. The result is that the vast majority of waiters are effectively blocked from joining unions. It also doesn’t help that the profession is very transitory. If a large segment of the workforce tends to or expects to work in a particular job for only a short period of time, it’s difficult to organize a union.
Irony, since I’m sure that if working conditions were better and servers weren’t treated like disposable units, more people would be working the job longer. I liked the work well enough, but hated feeling like I never knew if I’d have a job tomorrow, because the manager was tired and cranky or made a mistake and needed a scapegoat. That and the low pay was why I left, ultimately. I’ve even looked into higher-end places where the take-home pay was (presumably) higher, but that place wanted me to do three weeks, 40 hours a week, of UNPAID training… and then maybe they’d give you a job afterwards, but no guarantees. WTF?
Can you clarify a point, though… not all Teamsters work for the same company, so why should it matter if there are only a relatively few servers at any given restaurant? What’s preventing them from unionizing across the industry instead of just within a single business? Isn’t that how most unions work?
To answer your last question first, no. Most unions organize entire workplaces – or rather bargaining units – one at a time. The League of Widgeteers would first get certified at Widgetco’s North City plant and then move on to WidgetWorld’s Eastville plant.
The Teamsters, like most national unions, was formed by the merger of many local unions.
There is also an issue of changing economies, law, and politics. Today’s large unions would have a very hard time establishing themselves from scratch these days.
There have been attempts at forming unions for restaurant workers but problems abound. The workers don’t get paid much already and generally haven’t been thrilled with the idea of paying for union dues. The turnover is very high, and workers move in and out of restaurant work, they don’t always go to a new restaurant. Organizing the restaurants one at a time is a problem because the staffs are so small and the restaurants so numerous. Most of the workers are part-time employees and unions don’t like to have to deal with that complexity. The workers themselves may like the idea of a union, but don’t respond well to the concept of striking and losing pay as a result.
Let’s not forget that a lot of wait staff actually like the tipping policy. This is how they get the high pay at the upscale restaurants, with the tipping system gone the majority of workers would benefit, but not those at the top end.
This.
The tip you leave at Denny’s is likely being kept entirely by the server.
Mid-level establishments the servers will tip out the bartender and sometimes other support staff.
At a high-end establishment the servers have to tip out the bus boys, dishwashers, expo, bartenders, food/drink runners, hosts and so on.
As other posters have said, it’s not that those who work at any one of these places works harder than another, they just work differently.