Has anybody else noticed the signal to noise ratio around here dropping recently, or am I just in a bad mood? I mean, WTF?
I’m actually quite shocked at the level of civility in this thread. When I read the OP, while I sympathized completely, I was absolutely certain someone would come in and go, “Oh my god, doing your job made you cry? Maybe you better find another line of work, honey. :rolleyes:” That there’s only been one sneering post in 20 is absolutely astonishing.
Yeah, fair enough. I’m in kind of a pissy mood, so I should probably just stay out of the Pit. Plus, I made my living for a long, long time as a waiter/bartender, so I sympathize utterly with the OP. Many has been the night that I have worked so hard on the floor that I went home and waited tables in my sleep. Ick.
Grr, yes. I know someone who when we go to a restaurant, damned near every time she’ll bitch about food not coming out hot enough or otherwise not be to her taste. It feels like she pulls that stunt just so she can feel special and catered to.
Just out of curiosity, what type of ethnic food does your restaurant serve? Also, what is the average tipping rate in your city?
When dining out with my mother, the various members of my family have taken to leaving something extra on the table, as she is a truly terrible tipper.
No need to rant about that, as long as it’s stated up front. 18% is my low-ball tip anyway, so if you just do your job, you get at least that on any given day. If you suck so bad that I’d give you less than that, I have no problems letting the manager know I’d like it removed from the bill. So far, no manager has refused to remove it.
Just what I came in to say. I’m cool with auto gratuity, but you better tell me that.
Why else do you think they call them Restaurants?
Because “restaurcockroaches” did surprisingly poorly in the focus groups.
Right. My (admittedly limited) experience in jobs dealing with the general public says that a small percentage don’t want to be pleased and will go out of their way to be disagreeable. The employee’s job is simply to do her best, and when a customer isn’t happy with that to shrug and say “Well, can’t win 'em all.”
IOW, you do well not to get emotionally invested in any particular outcome.
See now, tonight I had a lady flip out at me because I wouldn’t give her party of 7 a 15% discount (my boss would rip my still-beating heart from my chest if I did something that stupid). She rants at me and says she’s never eating here again, etc. etc. while her tablemates sit there silently. One of them slipped me six dollars for a tip, presumably because she felt bad for me.
What I don’t get is why none of these people speak up and say, “Hey, cool it. You’re being unreasonable.” I’ve seen this happen before where someone flies into a rage at me, and the people with them squirm uncomfortably. If I’m out with my friends and one of them showed their ass like that, I have no problems telling them, “Cut the crap, you’re embarassing yourself in front of everyone.” I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. I don’t associate myself with assholes and I won’t be seen in public with someone who makes a spectacle of themself.
When I was a waitress I had a woman tell me that her husband wasn’t going to get a second beer, and since she was paying the bill, I should ignore him and listen to her.
Her husband appeared perfectly normal and sober, and he laughed when she said it, so I assumed she was kidding. I served him the second beer he’d ordered and they ate their dinner in apparent good moods; she did indeed pay the tab with cash out of her wallet, I brought her the change, and they left.
When I went back to the table, she had left a paper napkin with a quarter on it, and the capitalized words “I TOLD YOU I WAS PAYING THE BILL. MAYBE NEXT TIME YOU’LL LISTEN, LITTLE GIRL.”
I’ve had plenty of bitchy cheap awful nightmarish customers–some of which made me cry–but this incident has always stuck in my head as one of the most puzzling and bizarre.
Heh, I had a similar but opposite experience once. This man was there with a large party of his friends and family and he kept ordering shots of Patron Silver (which we charged something ridiculous like $11/shot for). At some point their party was getting moderately loud and obnoxious, but they were racking up quite the bill so I wasn’t about to say anything to them. The man’s wife pleaded me to stop serving her husband shots but he told me to ignore her and assured me he was paying and would “take care of me”.
I took his word for it and kept serving the shots despite his wife’s protests. Lo and behold, he left a huge tip at the end (he was so drunk at that point how could he not?). 
Anyone who would put a waiter in the middle of their spousal disputes like that is a Grade A Asshole.
If they want to argue about how much he’s going to drink, they should sort it out between themselves and then, when they’ve made a decision, either order a drink or not.
Did you get a call from INSIDE THE HOUSE that night?
Seriously, that is most bizarre reaction I’ve heard of.
Disclaimer: While I have worked in customer service, I have never been a waitperson!
However: I am always polite to the person waiting on me unless I have a really good reason not to be. I tip well; not obnoxiously well, but well. If service is really borderline-poor, 15% is customary. If it’s pretty good, 20%. Better service gets more than 20%.
Customers who are complete assholes should be forced to work as a waitperson for six months, so they understand exactly what it is they are doing. I feel the same about people who don’t tip the pizza delivery guy (or girl)!
Call me an asshole, but I’ve never understood this practice. To me, it’s like one notch above tipping the girl who scoops your ice cream at Cold Stone. Yes, I’ve a decidedly Mr. Pink-ish take on that specific kind of tipping. Nevertheless, the pizza delivery guy still gets a few bucks on the rare occasion when I actually do order delivery. (The barristas/scoop girls, etc., get exactly bupkis.)
Since the topic of ethnicity/tipping was tentatively broached earlier on in the thread, I’ll throw this anecdote out, for what it’s worth: A friend of mine waited tables at the local TGIF for several years, and always said that, without fail, the absolute shittiest tippers were African-Americans. He said that they’d make you jump through a shit-ton of hoops (my friend’s caucasian, by the way), and that after all that, he’d consider himself lucky it he got anywhere near a 10% tip. And he said that, strangely enough, they were even harder on the black servers.
(Incidentally, his nomination for a very close second place in the shitty tips contest? Christians who were eating out after their Sunday morning service. Evidently, their douchiness-to-tip ratio was almost as abysmal as that of the African-Americans.)
You don’t understand why a guy who drives three miles to bring you a nice hot pizza should get a couple of bucks? 
There have been several threads here about tipping delivery people (which I don’t have time to search for right now) and the consensus has been that delivery people (at least in most parts of the US) are almost as underpaid as waitstaff. I always tip when I have stuff delivered, and I’ve noticed that I seem to get my food noticeably sooner than I am told I will when I place the order - I swear one of these days I expect my order of Chinese food to arrive right after I hang up the phone.