A dollar a drink is my standard as well, although for bartenders than I really like, I’ll give more. Bartenders who give me free drinks get lots of my money.
There have only been a couple occasions where I refused to tip because of bad bar service. It has to be, “I see you over there with your money and I’m just going to stand here and ignore you” bad before I refuse to tip. Obviously I’m sympathetic if the place is just really busy.
**Omniscient ** Said it best I think. A bartender does more than just crack open beers.
I worked as a bartender for years, in a college town, and the tips sucked. So, basically, maybe one in 20 people actually dropped some change andnot much of that. So I’ve come to believe that only ex-bartenders actually tip. The cocktail waitresses made decent tips and at classier joints they re-tip the bartenders. They didn’t where I worked and they got the sucky service they earned, or at least they got served after my better customers.
My policy is a buck plus whatever change there was … so a $4.75 drink = $6.00. It’s easy and honestly, if you can’t afford a tip, how the hell can you afford to spend a cover and $4 - $5 a drink? Go buy a six pack or a bottle of Mad Dog for the price of a single beer out and have fun at home.
That said, you don’t have to tip. Next time you’re cooling your heels at the bar, wondering why everyone else seems to be getting served ahead of you … well, you know.
[QUOTE=threemae]
Most of the bar-tenders I interact with for the first time are never lacking in attitude and generally wanting in gratitude.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, me too, but THINK of what they put up with. Auugh. Pre-emptive strike attitude is probably a bartender mechanism to limit the level of assholishness they deal with, night after night. Don’t show weakness to a drunk. Another thing I appreciate about bartenders is that if you are not drinking (I’m usually not – in fact, I almost never go to bars anymore, but if I do, I’m most likely not drinking), they will often comp your coke or whatever, probably to support the cause of designated driving.Oh, as for tipping, dollar a drink, but when I went to bars, I would usually tip two dollars or $1.50 for the first drink, which helps the bartender to notice you sooner the next time.
[QUOTE=tesseract]
Yeah, me too, but THINK of what they put up with. Auugh. Pre-emptive strike attitude is probably a bartender mechanism to limit the level of assholishness they deal with, night after night. Don’t show weakness to a drunk.
[/QUOTE]
I guess I’d prefer to enjoy my evening in an establishment that doesn’t operate on the assumption that their customers will transgress social norms or good sense in drinking. I certainly don’t feel moved to compensate a bar tender that makes that assumption about me very well.
I have been to a few bars (mostly in nice hotels for whatever reason) where I was genuinely impressed with and appreciative of the disposition and mannerisms of the bar staff. I’ve been willing to tip very well in situations where the staff does a lot to improve the environment of the bar, but for the overwhelming majority of clubs and bars, when the bar-tenders are only doing the bare minimum, I only feel compelled to do the bare minimum as well.
[QUOTE=threemae]
I’ve been willing to tip very well in situations where the staff does a lot to improve the environment of the bar, but for the overwhelming majority of clubs and bars, when the bar-tenders are only doing the bare minimum, I only feel compelled to do the bare minimum as well.
[/QUOTE]
The problem is, you don’t really know that the bartender is doing the bare-minimum based on your interaction with him.
In those high-end luxury hotels and resorts, the bartender is essentially responsible for servicing you, and thats it. The hotel does this intentionally and hires attractive, extremely cordial servers to cater to their demanding clients every whim. They are there to make you feel pampered and they do a very good job of that usually. To compensate for this fact, the hotel/resort bar doesn’t burden them with any other responsibilities. They have a fully staffed (usually over-staffed since they are more then just a simple bar) bar-backing and bussing staff, dedicated food runners and a full service, in-house cleaning service that handles all the upkeep and pre- and post-shift tasks. That guy kissing your ass, and getting the fat tip, is there to do nothing except kiss your ass.
In a typical bar the bartender has a much wider range of responsibilities, the lion’s share of which happens behind closed doors, out of your sight. It’s likely that he’s not checking on you every 10 minutes for a refill and he’s not taking time to chat you up and ask about your stay. He’s less likely to serve you an elaborately decorated drink or school you and the finer points of your beer or wine choice. However, he almost certainly cleaned and stocked that glass for you, and will clean up after you. He cut those garnishes and carried the beer to the cooler from the basement and changed that keg. He wiped the ashtray and he delivered you your food order. Your tips are paying for all that. In bars where they have bar-backs handling some of that, his tips are paying them to do it. So he might be doing less work in serving you the drink you request, he is always doing more work overall (and much more unpleasant work) than the bartender at that high-end hotel you frequent.
All that extra staff at the hotel gets paid a full salary in order to provide the servers the time to kiss your ass. You pay for that in the form of a $12 martini (versus a $8 martini at the pub) and yet you still feel like you should be tipping him more, when short of being at your beck and call, he’s doing far less work. I don’t begrudge the ultra-high end service guy those big tips, he’s providing a very pleasant experience. But you shouldn’t use him as a measuring stick for the bartender working at the corner bar and under-tip him accordingly. They are two different circumstances, two different businesses and two different job descriptions.
You could probably extend the same logic to why it’s unfair for the waitress at Denny’s gets a $4.50 tip and the waiter at Morton’s gets a $45 tip for essentially the same amount of work (though attitudes obviously vary accordingly), but that’s it’s own thread.
[QUOTE=msmith537]
Everyone always thinks it’s so expensive to drink in NYC. There are places in Manhattan you can go for $2.00, even $0.50 a beer. The downside is they are often full of underage NYU students and B&T crowd, but you get what you pay for.
[/QUOTE]
I wasn’t talking about drink prices in NYC, I was talking about the tipping culture there. Articles in the NYT make it sound like you tip your dishwasher when you go out to eat, the guy that sweeps the floor at the post office, and the produce manager at the grocery store. It’s pretty wackylooking to me.
It also occurs to me that if bartenders remember customers and deprioritize the low-tippers, it actually creates an environment in which it isn’t that rude to undertip. Unlike a restaurant, where a single table’s nontipping can seriously hurt a night’s wages, a bartender who’s stiffed learns a lesson at the cost of a buck or two. She can then deprioritize the customer, and the customer can retaliate to this deprioritizing by going to a different bar. If the bartender is okay with driving away the low tippers, everybody is ultimately happy.
Daniel
[QUOTE=Omniscient]
In a typical bar the bartender has a much wider range of responsibilities, the lion’s share of which happens behind closed doors, out of your sight.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t care.
You’re making what is essentially a moral argument for the necessity of more extensively compensating bartenders. I don’t doubt that the position has its difficulties, but again it does not strike me as an inordinately arduous or poorly compensated job. You could go on forever about the adversities of teaching, trash collection, 777 piloting, hospital administering, or forest rangering, and I might be slightly more stirred. Certainly, these are all examples of professions that are more critical to the functioning of our society than bar tending and you could sympathetically portray them as deserving of more income, but then again you could probably do that for literally every job in existence.
The fact remains, the bar tenders that I have spoken to brag about it being an easy job given the wages that come with it. Obviously, there is no emergent dearth of people willing to saddle up with a bottle of Absolut and the soda gun, and if there is, then I’ll figure it incumbent upon the restaurant to recruit and hire appropriately and carry over that cost structure to their drink prices. Again, I’m happy to reward extra effort and consideration from a classy bar-tender, but some guy that regards me as an imposition to his more important tasks of womanizing or generally conveying an image of aloof nonchalance in a service industry will be getting a buck a drink.
[QUOTE=SmackFu]
I’m surprised no foreigners have shown up yet with the “we don’t tip in our country” shtick.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah. Pesky foreigners on the internet. It shouldn’t be allowed!
Anyway, you need to get with the times. “We don’t tip” is very 2003. We’ve since upgraded our “schtick” to “Hello! Other countries are here too, you know!” We hope you’ll find that equally irritating.
[QUOTE=threemae]
You’re making what is essentially a moral argument for the necessity of more extensively compensating bartenders.
[/QUOTE]
No I wasn’t. So far in this thread I haven’t even mentioned what an appropriate tip is, I cannot understand how you can make this accusation aside from propping up a strawman for you to tear down.
I simply explained the differences between the two types of establishments which you highlighted as it applies to the customer and the employees. Nothing more, nothing less.
You obviously have an axe to grind here, but do me a favor and stop putting words in my mouth.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
I wasn’t talking about drink prices in NYC, I was talking about the tipping culture there. Articles in the NYT make it sound like you tip your dishwasher when you go out to eat, the guy that sweeps the floor at the post office, and the produce manager at the grocery store. It’s pretty wackylooking to me.
[/QUOTE]
That’s simply not true. We tip 15-20% in restaurants like everyone else. We tip cabbies and food delivery guys a few bucks. I already discussed bars.
The only egregious tipping I know of is if you live in a doorman building where you’re supposed to tip them all like something ridiculous. I never lived in such a building and I never tipped the maintenance guy in my building because…well… fuck him.