Tipping in America: the insult tip

The BBQ Pit
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I don’t begrudge the OP; he made a cultural gaffe. It’s as simple as that. Know that he’s been properly educated, he’ll know better. We can move on now.

I usually tip a minimum of 15% even if I’m angry at the service, but most places I’ve been to the service itself is usually “Meh, okay”. I usually tip 20% or more if I’m at a bar, and there I can see how well the bartenders are working behind the counter. Even if I have to wait because it’s busy, I don’t mind as long as the bartenders are working and not sitting around talking to each other. But if I see some guy sitting around, playing on his smart phone, and not serving, the tip goes down. I have all the evidence I need. Even then, he’ll still probably get 15% - he shouldn’t, but he will. If it happens enough, I just don’t come back to the place for a while.

And that brings me to my next point, which is that restaurant service is a team sport. What businesses and their employees ultimately want and need are satisfied customers. You can call me cheap - that insult won’t bother me. I’m not petty, but I’m frugal and I don’t have to eat out at a restaurant. And I certainly don’t have to eat at a specific restaurant. I don’t want to hear from some waiter, either in a restaurant or even online, about how hard waiters have it. A lot of people have difficult jobs and don’t get tipped, including service workers who get paid minimum wage. I appreciate the jobs that waiters do and I doubt I could do it well, but that could be said of many people in a variety of jobs. Wait staff aren’t special.

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Nope, it’s not. My husband drinks hot tea with milk, so I have a lot of experience with his ordering it. If he doesn’t ask for milk he doesn’t get it. If he orders black tea, he asks for milk. If he orders green tea, he doesn’t ask for milk and it doesn’t come. If they bring him a box of tea bags to select (common) he asks for milk after they bring him the tea.

Waiters generally understand that some people like milk with their tea. It’s not a weird request, they don’t bring a whole glass of milk and charge him for it, and he doesn’t have to ask twice. But he does have to ask.

No, in the US there we several jobs where it is legal for the employer to psst less than minimum wage because there is an assumption the employees will be tipped. They are taxed on those assumed tips, too. In those situations you need to tip, and if you don’t, you are stiffing the service provider.

Yes, yes, in theory of the tips are inadequate the management needs to pay. And I guess if no customers came in, that might even happen. But you, oh customer, need to tip.

I pay 15% for shitty service at a restaurant, 20% for adequate service.

By the way, I hate tipping. I think it’s a horrible form of compensation, where employees get stiffed for random reasons outside their control and where pretty people are paid more even if they do a half-assed job. Anyplace tipping is optional, I don’t tip. But wait staff and taxi drivers need to be tipped in the US.

Yes, you have to tip. If the meal is shit you should tell the waiter (when they come by to ask “is everything okay?”, or by flagging them down if need be) and they will either correct the problem (no milk is pretty easy to fix, for instance) or bring a manager, who will attempt to fix it for you. Often, the manager will comp the meal, or comp it and replace it if you are unhappy enough.

The manager is addressing the problem with the resources of the whole establishment, which is collectively at fault. The manager can keep track of where the fault lies, and try to correct it. (Overdone eggs would be the fault of the cook) The manager can thus work to improve that aspect for future customers. Stiffing the waiter just stiffs the poor schmuck who brought you the food.

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Toilet paper should spool down from the top, at the front of the roll.

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If, after your meal, you need to take a dump, go to the loo and discover the toilet paper is backwards, are you justified in lowering your tip to 5 cents?

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No way, the server probably had nothing to do with that!

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That only works if the cat is declawed.

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Ahh… I’ve always had dogs. It never occurred to me that there was a cat connection to why people would hang that stuff the wrong way. Cats. Figures.

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Yeah, the manager can take it back to the kitchen, where disgruntled underpaid workers can take their frustrations out on a customer by spitting in their food - there’s that, too. I know some of these accounts are exaggerated, but they do happen.

In any case, I almost always tip, even when I’m angry about the service or the quality of the food. But I don’t like hearing from people in the service industry that they’re entitled to tips. I worked in the service industry for years in retail and there were no tips. There were “commissions” (yay :rolleyes:) - which unlike restaurant workers tips could actually be deducted from your next pay if the customer didn’t like the product and returned it. I had to take abuse from customers and idiot managers just like the wait staff do at restaurants. I’ve never had the attitude that customers owe me or any service worker anything other than to be treated with respect. If you don’t like depending on tips…maybe a different line of work is in order.

One of the problems with tipping is that, as we can plainly see on this thread, nobody knows what the fucking custom is to begin with – not even Americans. And it’s changing all the time. A person walks into a McDonalds or Burger King and doesn’t have to tip; a person walks into Subway or Starbucks and does. Like what are the rules exactly? Do we tip 10%, 20%, 30%? Who writes the rules? Maybe restaurants could just put a big sign out front saying “NOTE: 20% GRATUITY REQUIRED FOR ALL PATRONS” They could do that, but they’d also scare some people away and convince them to stay at home.

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From How to Eat Well In the Woods:

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Nope, it’s not legal.

It’s not a theory, it’s long-standing federal law.

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Will you stop being such a fucking ignorant twat D’Anconia. We get it, you believe that as long as it is law, everyone follows it. Your single working brain cell cannot comprehend that some employers may not follow the letter of the law. The horse you are beating is dead and glue, and all you’re doing is confirming that no one should ever pay anything you ever say any mind.

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Moron.

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You can repeat that as often as you wish, but why not ask some servers/bartenders what their experience has been?

I have a friend who tends bar at a fairly busy beer-emporium. By mutual agreement, he is paid $0 an hour. How he or his boss handles IRS stuff, and what would happen if he were injured on the job, I do not know (nor do I want to know).

When my daughter was in high school, she waited tables at a diner owned by a friend of mine. He told his waitstaff that if they couldn’t average minimum wage or higher between what he paid and their tips, they should seek out other work because they weren’t doing it right. My daughter liked the job and always made better than minimum wage, although she had coworkers who did not.

A friend who is a server at an Applebee’s type chain occasionally has zero customers (snowstorms and such). She makes minimum wage on those days. National chains IME are more likely to follow federal law.

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Which is more authoritative? The law, or your personal anecdotes?

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Which has more to do with the real world?

You should pull your head out of Rand’s mummified rectum and take a look around.

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You don’t even know what you’re talking about, gramps.

Rand wouldn’t have favored a minimum wage, at all.

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Animals & religious experiences; wouldn’t that be Noah?

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Which has nothing to do with what I was responding to.

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Most everywhere I waitressed the end of shift went like this; total and report my tip amount, then set aside some of that tip money for the tip pool shared by the bussers and bartenders. So while my employer was only legally required to make up any difference btwn the reported tip amount and minimum wage, I was already paying a kind of tax to my co-workers and subsequently maybe not making the legal minimum wage.

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Please let us all know what you’re smoking. So we can avoid smoking it. TIA.