Tipping in U.S. bars

Yeah, I know - here we go with the tipping thing again. But I’ve read the recent tip threads and haven’t really seen an answer to this.

Just for background, I live in Montana, where restaurants and bars are required to pay their servers full minimum wage (not accounting for tips), and may not mandate tip-sharing or tip-out systems (servers can voluntarily set up tip-share systems and tip out the kitchen staff, but the restaurant/owners may not take a share).

Tipping in restaurants is a piece of cake. I have two percentages (standard tip & tip for outstanding service) and I apply something in the range between them to the entire bill (both food and drinks) unless there is a service charge added. Easy-peasy.

At bars, on the other hand, people talk both about percentage customs and per-drink customs. Percentages make no sense to me in a bar. It takes the bartender exactly the same effort to pour a $12.00 glass of Macallen 18 as it does to pour a $2.00 well Scotch. Why tip six times as much? On the other hand, your frou-frou six-ingredient blended drink with fruit on stick takes ten times as long to prepare as my premium draft beer. Why should the tips be the same?

One of our local watering holes has a beer club. Pay your membership and draft microbrews are $2.50 instead of $4.50. Should club members tip less? And, by the way, I’m not going to tip 20 cents a drink on dollar beer night.

So I tip a buck a drink. Since I don’t do complicated stuff, that feels right to me. I mostly order draft beer. If I order tequila or Scotch, I order it neat or with a couple of ice cubes. The most complex I ever get is a black and tan once in a while.

The buck a drink number feels strange on dollar beer night, or when I’m drinking the high-end stuff, but most of the bars I go to charge between $3.00 and $5.00 for what I drink, so it is around 20% to 33%.

Thoughts?

Thank you for asking this! I rarely go to bars and I’m always flummoxed by tipping.

Additional Q: if one is served by a cocktail waitress instead of the bartender themselves, does one tip more to reflect the fact that there are two normally tipped positions involved?

Buck a drink if I’m paying as I go. Move the decimal one spot to the left, double it, add a couple of bucks if I start a tab and pay at the end of the visit, so, +/- 25%.

A buck a drink is fine unless you ordered some complicated drink that takes a lot of time. No tips less than a $1.

A buck a drink is almost always the right answer. Yes, even on dollar beer night you tip a dollar…that’s still only $2 for a draft beer.

The exceptions would be if you get a frozen drink, or one with lots of ingredients (Long Island iced tea, Mai Tai, etc…) then go $2.

Rarely do you go less than a buck, but I would say if you got two beers at the same time, then a $1 tip for both is fine for most places.

A buck an order, unless it’s a huge or overly complicated order. One beer, two beers, a pitcher, it’s all a buck. If I order 8 Irish car bombs or something similar I’m probably tipping a 5. I tend to work in simple denominations. All the bartenders I know understand that it evens out over the course of the night.

$1 per drink is standard in most bars in the US. For pitchers of beer, though, I tend to percentage it, although it probably isn’t always a 15-20%. More like $2-3 for cheaper pitchers, up to $4 for expensive. I don’t order fancy Long Islands and such, but I think lots of bars use mix for that, anyway. Sometimes I tip more or less per round if staying awhile, but it evens out mostly.

I never pay by the drink (I always start a tab), so I always do a percentage. If you do buy drinks individually, then $1 is fine for pretty much any drink.

A buck a drink unless you ordered something fancy when the place is mobbed, in which case you should be 86’d for Life plus 20. Cocktail waitresses get the tip. If they share out with the bartender, so be it. I’m not tipping him, because he did not interact with me. Be a fascinating and interesting enough guy/gal to make me want to sit at the bar instead of a table and you get the tokes.

What sitchensis said if I’m paying as I go at the bar. If I ordered two proper cocktails (at least 3 ingredients, not a rum and coke or a gin and tonic) I’d probably tip for each drink. Of course, if it’s really crowded I’ll over-tip occasionally if I think it will get me better service, and once I’m good and liquored up I resort to this esoteric tipping algorithm I’ve come up with that I (probably erroneously) believe gets me some leeway on my tab.

If I’m ordering from a waitress I’ll usually tip a percent of the tab as opposed to per drink.

A dollar a drink is a good idea. Unlike restaurants where there is little that the server can do for you based on the tip unless you are a return customer, if you tip as you go with the drinks, you may get fuller glasses, and maybe one on the house.

Depends on how drunk I am.

A buck a drink/order makes perfect sense, but it’s such a nice convenient amount it makes me wonder what people used to tip back when a dollar was worth a lot more, or how far back you have to go before $1 is considered too high for a single tip.

Ok, first of all Macallen 18 is like twice that in New York.

Second, it seems kind of cheap to me to only tip $1 on a $20 drink.

I think a good rule of thumb is standard %15-20 tip with a minimum tip of $1.00 per drink (rounded up to the nearest dollar for cash).

Round of 5x $2.00 beers? $5.00
$12.00 scotch = $2.00 tip

Buck a drink is always going to be fine with the server.

Until you’re Donald Trump and ordering $350 drinks, you’re good.

At a nice place, that’s about what I do. If I order 2 drinks that come to $17, I’m not going to take a buck back from a twenty dollar bill.

I always tip well because I know the bartender will give me first priority when the bar is full.

I do percentages. Around 30 to 40 percent But then again, I only drink beer.

What kind of bar are we talking about? Somewhere upmarket and slow moving? In a busy Australian club or pub bar a barman would be making hundreds of dollars a shift if Aussies tipped like that.

Assuming one drink per hour per person and one barman per 50 people, they’d get $50 an hour in tips.

I bought a round of drinks on Friday at the local club. In the few minutes it took including standing around waiting, the 3 bar staff would have served (at a guess) 20 - 30 drinks. This includes a few things like cider - pull a bottle out of the fridge and pop the cap. Surely that’s not worth a tip.

On reflection. I guess the best way to answer my initial question is name a bar I would know. Say the bar in "Cheers’ or “Crazy Stupid Love” vs the bar in “Invincible”.

I wasn’t really thinking abot the places that charge a fortune for a drink. I’ll end up doing the same thing, tipping more towards the total tab than on a per drink basis. But it annoys me to no end when I’m paying 10 bucks for the same drink I got for $3.50 tonight. I don’t take it out on the bartender, but it makes me avoid those places. At restaurants with drinks served with the meal I’ll just roll it all into the price for the meal and tip high as usual if I recieve decent service.

Yep, buck a drink, unless it’s some real cheap drink and the change is more than 50 cents, in which case I just leave that. But 25%? No way.