I would think that little yellow pads with carbon paper would be the easiest system to get individual bills in. Write up one tab for each person.
Tossing a little fuel on the fire…
So tipping from at least 18%-20% is customary per this board, right? Custom is defined by the collective populace, right? The collective population includes stingy old folks, stingy folks of different social/ethnic minority, stingy tourists, stingy philosophy majors ;), and so on. The 20% and over crowd are really the high-end outliers in my experience.
So why does the custom dictate the tipping practice based on the right hand extreme of the tipping bell curve? Why not the mean/median? Just because disgruntled-ex-waitstaff-person-X insists that anything less than 20% is a stoning offense doesn’t justify that being set as the social custom line.
Tip table:
Old folks: 5% and a piece of Bazooka-Joe gum and a “What a nice dear, you should meet my grandson” comment.
Ex-waitstaff: 25%, an obligatory tale of their work experience to others at the table while presenting the receipt with a flourish, and a background hallelujah chorus performed by the sous-chefs barbershop-quartet style.
Happy medium: 10-15%
In theory, yes - but some chefs can be sticklers for how a table of orders are written up, and if they are like the one german chef I worked with at a hotel, he would request that you rewrite the orders all together for a table so he knew which orders went together.
Personally when I waited tables, most of my issues were not with customers, not with separate tabs, and not even with rude or insane customers who were cruel to the staff, but with other staff.
You get a chef who’s worked in top hotel’s worldwide who thinks he’s god’s gift to the industry, and freaks out if a customer finds a problem, legitimate or not with the food, and then you throw in clueless restaurant managers who have never waited a table or cooked in their lives, and a few older servers who thought they were the pillars of the restaurant who truly believe that if ever they were to leave the place, the whole company would topple - then you add in the alcoholic bartender and a couple of servers who dated for 6 months who have recently broke up, and the married banquet manager who is sleeping with the married waitress, and the 40 year old cook who hits on every female server under 21.
15% is standard and expected in the U.S. at this time. I tip 20% because I can afford it and I remember how much difference a few extra dollars made when I had a job where I had some extra income from tips. IMO if you’re tipping less than 15%, you got poor service, you’re an old person who hasn’t looked at the economy since 1955, or you’re a cheap asshole.
Black culture in the U.S. isn’t monolithic. There *is *a difference between “on average, Black people tip less than white” and “Black people are shitty tippers.”
But that would mean that, overall, black people tip less well than do white people; ergo (and speaking in general terms, of course), black people are, to put it colloquially, shittier tippers than are white people.
Well, the IRS doesn’t care about collective customs when it takes taxes, and the reason for tipping creep is because restaurants try really hard to keep the cost of a plate down. A 15% tip on a $10 burger in 1980 went further than a 15% tip on an $10.95 burger in 2010. Even in places where meal prices have shot up with inflation, it’s usually in areas where the cost of gas, rent, utilities, insurance, tuition etc. have shot up right past inflation.
Food for thought.
Yep.
About 5 years ago, former Doper and Mod manhattan, who worked in the financial sector and followed these sorts of stats, addressed this issue. I made an observation about the problems of tipping creep, and he noted:
Actually, shotfromguns, the subject of the thread was If you’re a waiter, waitress, or otherwise serve food at a restaurant or eatery, feel free to post here and let off some steam.
So it would seem *your * rants about how waiters need to split checks are off topic.
Start your own thread if you want to bitch about how much waiters and waitresses suck because they don’t kiss your ass just so.
You might want to wipe the spit off your screen also.
The discussion hasn’t been about the stated topic in ages, doll. And as it’s not been deemed worthy of closing or other such admonition by any of the mods, you might want to stick to the topic at hand (which has grown larger than the OP’s (who hasn’t made an appearance in this thread in ages, either) initial intended discussion topic), instead of bomplaining about the thread going off topic because your nose got put a tad out of joint, and, as such, coming off as a silly person.
If you can’t understand why “Black people are shitty tippers” is racist while “Black people are more likely to be shitty tippers than white people” is an observation of fact, there’s not much more I can say.
Apparently you are fucking retarded, so I’m going to explain this to you slowly.
Threads can have more than one topic under the heading of the main discussion. People will get off on tangents related to the subject being discussed. When you reply **TO ONE OF THOSE TANGENTS **with **UNRELATED WHINING **that’s just more of your own attempts to EXCUSE YOUR OWN LAZINESS AND INCOMPETENCE, I’m going to call you on it.
***YOU ***equated asking for a split check with other things that would actually legitimately classified as mistreatment waitstaff. That makes you an idiot.
So, since you think requiring you to perform a simple part of your job is asking you to kiss my ass, I’m guessing you didn’t *choose *to stop being a waitress so much as you were fired for being a shitty one.
A decade ago, 10% would have been okay (in Toronto at least). These days, 15% is standard, and some folks do 20%. I think in another decade or less 20% will be standard.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to get in the way of your feelings of white guilt.
Admittedly, not exactly a hard news source, but you might enjoy watching this (relevant part is at about 9:10).
Ooh, he just cited a TV show! Shot From Guns, you just got OWNED.
Except that “overall” black people don’t tip and “overall” white people don’t tip. Individuals tip.
Yeah, objecting to blanket statements about people based on the melanin content of their skin makes me a real race traitor, all right. Maybe next week, you can tell us about how Hispanics can fit 20 or 30 people in a house, and how Asians can turn a TV into a watch.
I’d type more, but I’m off to put my hair into shitty white girl dreadlocks and get fitted for a dashiki.
Remember, while they may not tip, they have the gift of dance!
I love you for getting what I was referencing.