“Mama’s got a squeezebox, Daddy never sleeps at night…”
Here’s a related question I’ve been meaning to post about for a while–do other people tip less when they just sit at the bar and get a to-go order than they would if they ate there? I do, and I don’t really know why. For example, the other day the bill was $76. Normally I would tip $14 (I usually do 20% on the “tens” digit, never tip less than 5 bucks), but I tipped $10.
I think it makes sense to tip less when I’m not getting full service by eating there, but it’s 4 lousy bucks on a fairly high tab (sushi), so I don’t know why I didn’t just tip the normal amount. For some reason I guess it feels wrong to me to tip the normal amount when I’m only there for 15 minutes or so.
I’ve worked in hotels for 25 years and I’ve never seen anything like what the one poster described about sharing tips. The bussers and host(ess) didn’t get a share, they were paid minimum wage or more. The servers got less than minimum but always made out quite well and they got a paycheck as well.
I don’t know what kind of resturaunt you work in, maybe it’s different in stand alone resturaunts rather than those in a hotel, but if it was that bad how do you get any one to work there? What would be the point?
Perhaps the resturuants where the hotels, that I worked at were high end, but the servers made out quite well for themselves, much better than the hosts or bussers or even the asst managers were making less.
I’m not saying that poster is lying, I’m sure he/she isn’t but I’m saying don’t think all resturaunts are like that, 'cause they are not.
Part of the reason I found servers don’t do well is they did it part time. Waiting tables is often a side line, so these servers who did it full time did well, while the ones in school or models or actors were only working three days a week or so. Then they were having small tiny paychecks.
And he gave her a big tip all right. 
Over here, tipping is rather new, introduced for the most part only maybe a couple of decades ago. Even so, tips are at a minimum. In taxis, you tip to round the fare up to next 10 baht; and 10 baht is only 33 US cents, so the tip is much less. (The exception is going out to the airport, when it’s standard to round up to the next 100 baht or so.) At a big restaurant with a large number of people, the tip could be anywhere from US$3.50 to $7 regardless of how much was orderd. (Tips are never done based on percentage here.) In your normal air-con restaurant, you might leave as much as 75 cents or a buck (and the wife always complains when I do), but more normally you just leave the few coins in the metal tray bearing your change, taking only the banknotes with you. In a common non-air-con place, no one tips, and they’ll look at you like you’re from Mars if you do and maybe even run after you with it, thinking you forgot your money; rather than be appreciated, talk will turn about the “stupid tourists throwing their money around” the moment you leave.
The fancier Western places will usually add a service charge anyway that is in theory shared with the staff, altough you hear stories about management keeping it all and just firing anyone who dares to complain.
You stated that you leave “large” tips, which you quantify as 20%. Tonight I tipped 25% for better-than-average service - always full water glasses, extra condiments, and the benefit of being asked multiple times if I needed anything. And I didn’t have a kid with me who is eating babyfood (aka a body at the table who isn’t buying food) AND dropping stuff on the floor. That would be an absolute minimum of 25%.
If you’re so concerned about the busboy, give him $2 on your way out. It’s not hard to find him/her.
Incidentally, the practice of tipping bartenders $1 per drink, even beer, is totally absurd. I have friends that make more than a month’s rent bartending just one Steelers game.
bouv, I have a question - do you prefer your tips in cash? I make my best effort (batting maybe 75%) to have my tips in cash. I always figured…ah…that you fudged the tax numbers with cash.
OK, all I can say is you go around in different circles than I do. Around here, 15% is standard for decent service, and 20% is a huge tip for extra special service. 25% is unheard of. But it all depends where you are in the world. For instance, I’ve heard that in New York people tip higher than elsewhere. But I don’t live there.
This sickens me. I always tip generously, but as a non-cash user, I always leave the tip on the credit card. Thank goodness Uncle Sam has at least a partial paper trail to root out deadbeat tax evaders.
Right, because we should all be in favor of paying more taxes. If bouv does, he’ll totally get out of our trillion dollar deficits. :rolleyes:
From what I know, hotel restaurants are a lot different that stand-alone. For one thing, the hotel makes money from rooms as well. So it’s possible some if that income can be used to “subsidize” the paychecks of bussers and hosts.
And I’m not sure what you mean by “if it was that bad.” Did I say it was bad? The reason we don’t get paychecks is because we make, in essence, too much money in tips. We’re not pulling in 50k a year or anything, but the bigwigs who decided what the tipped min. wage should be figured it would be enough to cover benefits, taxes, and have a bit left over, and they were obviously under-estimating how much those really cost. Like I said, my paychecks are nothing, or maybe a few dollars a week, so it’s pretty close in terms of my hourly wage “paying for” my taxes.
As an example: Let’s say the tipped min wage in my state is $3.50 (I think it’s close to that.) I only do part-time now, but we’ll pretend I do full-time.
I work 35 hours a week (typical,) and have $4500 in food and beverage sales. If I do well, I average 18% in tips (let’s face it, even if I am at my best, some people will always tip crummy…) Of that 18%, 5% goes to the hosts and bartenders, so now I am left with 13% as “cash in hand.” That works out to $585. I give $8 on Fri and Sat. night to the food runner, so now I’m down to $577 a week.
My paycheck would then be $122.50 gross ($3.50 * 35 hours.) Now, even when I was full time, I never had benefits like health insurance, so I will only take out taxes, SS, medicare, etc…
$577+$122.50 = $699.50 a week. If we assume that I take a few days off here and there throughout the year (no paid vacation in the service industry,) we can say I have 50 weeks worth of pay and make $34,975 gross.
Looking up the US tax tables for 2009, we see that I (single) should be paying $4,931 a year in federal taxes.
So that is over $90 per weekly paycheck just to federal taxes. So that leaves just over $30 for state taxes, SS, medicare, etc…so I don’t think it’s very hard to see how many servers end up with no paychecks.
Ohm and regarding tips in cash vs on the slip: I really don’t care. It’s a lot harder to lie now than it might have been in years past. I have to declare all my tips in a computer at the end of the night, and it’s smart enough to know if I lie too much. Basically, it already knows how much I made in CC tips, and it knows how much of my sales were in cash. My cash tips cannot average less than the average of my CC tips, or 12%, whichever is higher. So even if everyone who paid with a CC left me a cash tip and I had 0% in CC tips, I would still have to declare 12% of my sales as tips. And trust me, if by some miracle that happened every night, it wouldn’t take long for my manager to notice, since they look over everyone’s “cash out slip” at the end of the night.
Assuming that the cash the customer handed you includes a tip can be problematic (to say the least). If you’re intending that they keep the balance beyond what you owe, you should say so explicitly. “Keep the change” is pretty traditional.
Otherwise, if you’re at a restaurant, you can leave the tip on the table. (And if the person at the register is not the same as the person who was serving you, you should *definitely *leave the tip on the table, so that it goes to the right person.)