Another Brit - you tip when the service was good (and by that I mean on the right side of acceptable). If the service wasn’t good (and by that i mean on the wrong side of acceptable) I don’t tip. I generally tip 10% or £1, whichever is more. If service is included in the bill I won’t tip.
This is all in relation to restaurants, however. I can’t understand how a bartender can think they deserve a tip for doing very little in the way of service (“can I have X beverage please?” “There you go, that will be £X.XX”), however that doesn’t mean I never give them. I’ve been a bartender and regulars would generally buy a drink and say “And get one for yourself” which, as I don’t drink, meant I’d just stick a pound in my tip jar. I’d never expect to get them though, they were a pleasant bonus.
I’m a high tipper. Most likely because I once worked as a waitress and I know what hard work it is and how dependent one can be on those tips. Normally I tip 20%. The highest I’ve ever tipped is 100% (of a $10 bill–I was just in a damn good mood that day.) I have never NOT tipped, but I’ve never encountered anyone blatantly rude, either. If someone was blatantly rude I’m not sure I couldn’t tip at all, but I could see myself tipping only 5%. In instances of poor service I tip 15%. They might be having the worst day of their lives for all I know.
American. It needs to be a full service restaurant to warrant a tip, ( that means I park my ass in a booth and a server does all the rest) but I will occasionally make exceptions for cafeteria style places if the workers are all pleasant and generous with the portions. Normal tip is 20% which you as a server can expect to receive from me if you do an adequate to good job. I would like my water glass kept filled, and for you to come by the table every 8-10 minutes or so to see if we need anything until the meal comes. If I have to wait more than that period of time twice when in need of a refill or anything else, I start knocking the tip down. I won’t punish a server for bad food if they give good service; that’s a complaint to management. Excellent service will be rewarded above and beyond, usually 25-30%.
I have on one occasion revoked a tip left by an insistent member of our group after receiving abysmal service. This waiter was outright hostile to us the entire time, treated us poorly, and never checked up on us. He even made a snide comment on **Nashiitashii’s ** weight and lunch choice. :eek: He actually had to be tracked down to get re-fills. The restaurant was not busy, we were a late lunch, but no holding anyone up past closing time, which was an hour or so after we left. Our friend was adamant about always leaving a tip regardless of service and we argued about it for several minutes. After the ladies left the table, I told them I needed the restroom, and retrieved the tip. I gave it instead to the manager, with instructions to deliver it to the cooks, with a full report of the waiter’s behaviour, in front of the server himself. He threw a hissy fit, and I told him that if he expected a tip, than he ought to have conducted himself accordingly.
In America, tipping is expected. As such, the act of tipping itself has little to do with the quality of service. That said, it’s quite fair to raise or lower your tips according to that quality.
I have a very difficult time leaving no tip. But I did it just a couple of weeks ago.
The waiter at an Italian restaurant couldn’t speak English all that well and had a difficult time understanding us. My wife ordered a drink, an Americano. It’s not a particularly popular drink but it’s also not too difficult to figure out: Campari, vermouth, soda. Mix. The waitress couldn’t understand my wife’s explanation but she promised to go to the bar to check it out. She didn’t. She also took our drink menus from us without bothering to ask if we did want anything else, even though I specifically said I would order something later.
So my wife ordered Chicken Carbonara. The sauce is made with egg that’s tempered into it. It came with raw chunks of egg white. I mean thick gooey globs of a snotlike substance my wife had to take out of her mouth and place on the breadplate before calling the waitress over. The waitress looked at it and started arguing that that’s how the sauce is made. We showed her the raw egg glops and said no, that’s not how it’s made. It made no difference to her.
The waitress reluctantly took her meal off our bill but then proceeded to ignore us as we sat there for 10 minutes. My wife with no meal and me with a meal I wasn’t going to eat alone. A busboy finally came along and boxed mine up while she sat across the room gabbing with other waiters. If we could find the number to the restaurant, we would have called it just to ask for our waitress to come to our table. It was pretty damn clear we wanted to leave and we couldn’t until she got our bill.
The bill was $21.99. We rounded up.
And yes, we talked to the manager. No, it made no difference. The manager really seemed bored with the situation. As if a waitress that ignores your requests and RAW EGG in a pasta sauce is an everyday occurance around there. But he did know what an Americano was at least…
(sorry this is so terribly off topic. I guess I still needed to vent).
I normally try to give good tips, but I do tip depending upon service. Much like Acid Lamp, I’ll let the manager know if service was really good or really poor, and will not tip at places where I’m doing all the work beyond order taking and making food.* Additionally, if it’s a smaller meal and I’m not paying much for said meal, I’ll probably tip more. In fact, I gave a 25% tip on a $12 meal yesterday because I got attentive service and I was alone. If I had been with someone else or the place had been super busy, I may not have tipped as much.
*Reason: I generally don’t make an order that’s not something standard on the menu and thus I’m not asking the person to go above and beyond in their job duties. If I required a menu item to be modified in a way that no longer made it similar to anything on the menu, I’d leave a small tip for the trouble; however, I find, beyond food allergies, people who excessively change menu items at dining establishments to be insufferable.
I tend to tip the 15 percent if the service is good. They are nice, helpful, etc… If they go above and be on, I will leave more.
I remember one time, my ex husband and I went out to dinner at a restaurant. The food wasn’t cooked at all. We sent the food back and got new meals. When the bill came, well there was no bill. They gave us free meals. The meal would have come to close to 50 dollars, had there been a bill. After discussing with my ex, we decided that when we came to the restaurant we planned on spending close to 60 dollars. So we did just that. We left a tip of 60 dollars to the waitress.
She was really nice and sweet. So we gave it to her.
Pretty much this. I worked in restaurants washing dishes and bussing tables as a kid, and I know how hard waiters and waitresses work for shit pay, so I have a soft spot in my heart for them. They have to royally fuck up not to get a tip from me.
I have refused a tip once in my adult life because of truly abysmal service. BTW, if you’re ever passing through New England, you might want to avoid the Denny’s in Stoneham, MA. Just sayin’.
For a full service restaurant, I usually tip 10% for poor service, 15% for fair service, 20% or more for great service. I wouldn’t have a problem with no tip or the 2 cents tip for abysmal service but can’t remember a time when service was that bad. I don’t usually tip for counter service or self-serve buffets.
The half-service places are really confusing —you know, the ones where you serve your own food, but a server brings your beverage? I generally avoid those places because I’m never sure if the server bringing the beverage is receiving a standard wage or that ridiculously low server wage. I’ll leave something but it’s not going to be more than 15% ever. I get the impression that a half-service place is trying to avoid paying a busboy by hiring these half-servers. I’m already up getting my own food. Why can’t I get my own beverage while I’m at it?
This is not entirely correct: the restaurant too loses in that the patron will not be returning and will tell all their friends about their bad experience, so they’re less likely to go too.
Apologies to any emotionally trigger-happy servers, but this doesn’t fly, for me. If you’re having the worst day of your life, it’s not my problem, as your customer. Whether I’m the first table you serve all day, or the last, I expect the same service. I understand that you might be having the worst day of your life, but I didn’t make it that way, and don’t expect to be treated as such. Suck it up and put on a happy face at work, or call out sick for the day.
I used to think this attitude made me a heartless bitch, but after conferring with several of my close friends who are waitstaff, I feel just fine about it now.
I’m old-school. It’s 15% for doing you job, because that’s the way it is. Don’t like it, cook your own damn meal at home. Okay, it’s more like 20% these days. The cost of living is going up faster than restaurant food prices.
20% or more if you make me feel good.
I don’t expect you to suck my cock for 15-20%.
If you suck the other way though, maybe no tip. I’ve been a waiter & bartender, so I kinda feel like I can judge where the total complete fuck up is, and if it’s you, no tip. Do your job, you get the tip. Suck my cock, I marry you and take you home.
My mom taught me to do the “leave one penny” thing to show your displeasure but I think that’s pussy. If I’m going to stiff you I’ll tell you why, if you bother to show up, which you probably won’t, which is why you’re probably not getting a tip.
FWIW, most if not all of the small-town waitresses I worked with back in the day would agree with you. They were professional, because if they weren’t polite, and they didn’t get tipped, they didn’t eat. The happy face was just part of the uniform. I never saw a full-time waitress get out of line, even when they had reason, and believe me, some of those customers provided them with plenty of reasons.
I don’t dispute that you see “tip jars” in a lot more businesses these days, but IMO it’s a long way from being expected. I certainly don’t feel any guilt about not leaving a tip. In the major area of restaurants, the only concession I see is having a line for a tip on the bill/credit card receipt. But I’m not sure how much of that is the software (presumably from an american company), or a hope that you’ll give them one. I don’t think I’ve ever left a tip in a restaurant here at home.
I have seen on occasion the “change tray”, what a heap of crap that is. But by the same token, as you do, I’ll general leave the silver coins on it, partly because I hate carrying around pockets full of coins.
Taxi’s are an exception, and uis probasbly the one area in Australia where tipping would not be considered at all unusual. I usually tell the cabbie to keep the change, or if there is a big differnece between the note(s) I’m paying with, specify an easy round number of change to call it even. I’ve been doing that for years.
Word. My parents were once with another couple at a very fancy restaurant, and the waiter totally screwed up their orders. The manager saw that there was a problem, got them all their correct orders ASAP, and then at the end of the evening said they owed nothing. My dad protested, fully intending to pay, but the manager said, “When you leave here I don’t want you to have anything to complain about. What you’ll remember and tell your friends about is the good food, not the fact that the waiter screwed up your order.”
Customer word-of-mouth can be very important to a restaurant, esp. a high-end or “destination” one.
If only it worked the other way around too. It’s not the server’s problem the customer had a shitty day. They’re probably going to paying for it though.
It’s perfectly fine to leave no tip if circumstances require.
You’ve got to work really hard to get no tip. I can only recall doing so once; as one of only two groups of people in the small-town restaurant, the waitress spent all her time chatting with her friends in the other group, even when actively flagged down. She performed what my friends and I termed a ‘drive-by fooding’ when our order was up, literally dropping the plates on our table from inches up as she walked by without stopping or saying a word to yak with her friends s’more.
With good service and a low bill, I’ve tipped 20% or more on occasion.
For me not to leave a tip it would have to an exceptionally bad experience and it would have to be largely the server’s fault, and the server would have to be rude/apathetic. It would have to be something like a severed finger in my pasta and the server saying “just eat around it.”
I tip 20% to 40% depending on where I’m at and the level of service I get.
I bartend for a living so my tipping habits reflect that; to me it’s just good karma to tip well. I’ve tipped 100% or more at bars, depending on my tab.
I don’t recall an occasion where I haven’t tipped at all. I can recall maybe two or three occasions where the service was so bad I tipped 10 or 12%. You have to really *&%$ things up royally to get a tip that low out of me.
