Who is judging a waitperson’s service when they tip? You are simply adding a surcharge - unless the service is so incredibly subpar that its so obvious no judging is involved? If what you are doing is saying “well, I was going to tip 20% on $100 bill, but there was that time my water glass sat empty, and that’s a $1 knocked off. And they didn’t land the triple lutz, that’s another $2.” then you are putting way too much effort into tipping.
And yeah, its stupid. But about the only way its going to change is to make sure that waitstaff gets a living wage. And even then, you’ll still be expected to tip for service - just like you are expected to tip for a haircut or a massage. It just won’t be a violation of human decency when you don’t.
Tipping isn’t “peer pressure”, it’s protection money. People who begrudgingly tip aren’t doing it because their friends will think they’re skinflints; they’re doing it because they don’t spit or worse ending up in their food. They’re doing it because a failure to tip will cause them to be blamed for depriving the servers of their very livelihood, which will give the servers great incentive to enact vengeance, and thus it’s protection money.
When the ‘standard’ tip suddenly jumped from fifteen to twenty percent, it wasn’t because the servers got thirty percent more skilled and efficient, it was because word got around that a 20% tip was what was expected now, lest you end up with piss in your milkshake.
It’s a system that incentivizes worse service to customers while allowing employers to underpay employees while giving both employers and employees an avenue for attempting to defraud the government. And those latter facts, the underpayment and the defrauding, are why socially required tips will never go away, because what it would take for not tipping to become socially acceptable would be for the bulk of businesses to voluntarily refuse tips, until people internalized that the protection racket was over and that giving tips is no longer necessary.
Holy crap, if I saw that happening I would stop frequenting that establishment. I shouldn’t become a second-class citizen just because I didn’t pay the secret price for a secret E-ticket.
Moving a decimal point is not doing math. The point is that is so simple to figure out a tip in your head and people act like it’s a terrible burden that it’s unfair tp expect from them.
You must tip differently than I do. I don’t tip until the end of my meal. They have no way of knowing what the tip will be when they have an opportunity to piss in my milkshake.
Heh, you must not look around much. I get my delivery orders sooner than other people too. Tips done right reward good work and ensures the good work continues or gets better. Of course I’m also not afraid to not tip my delivery driver if my food is late.
I’ve heard this argument – that tipping is what keeps your server from messing with your food – more than once, and honestly, it doesn’t make much sense to me. Unless you are a regular at a restaurant, and you have already earned a reputation as a lousy (or generous) tipper, when your server is bringing your food out, they have no idea if you are going to tip them 20%, 15%, or two cents.
And if you are a lousy tipper, I would suggest not being a regular at any restaurant. If you are a good tipper, the benefits of being a regular at a restaurant are fairly nice. (We are good tippers and regulars at a few places - we’ve gotten invited to the owners invitation only pop ups and parties, drinks given to us on special occasions, free desserts, great tables, and if we call for a reservation on a booked night, we get a call if there is a cancellation (we aren’t such good tippers that tables just show up) - and drinks are always stronger for regulars who are good tippers).
I mentioned more than once that the substandard wages behind the tipping system bother me. But if you increase the wages I’ll still tip. It will likely be more like 5-10% instead of 15-20%, and that’s still a lot if the prices have gone up to match the pay. Otherwise, I don’t care, I tip people who perform menial tasks for me. They’re never getting paid enough for what they do, and if they provide a good service for me I’ll reward them.
Now there are plenty of things that do annoy me. You don’t want to bring up thank-you notes with me. There’s a societal expectation I can do without.
There are a nontrivial number of people who live in the same area for weeks, sometimes months at a time, and carefully tracking where you have “stiffed” your servers and avoiding those places in the future is undue hardship. I find it reasonable to assume that I will be returning to anyplace I go (unless the food or service sucks because they’re too busy serving a 30%er or something) and history has shown that servers do remember me. So yes, failing to give a good tip at the end of a meal is a perilous proposition.
If you truly believe that restaurant staff are willing and eager to spit in your food (which is, you know, a fireable offense in pretty much any restaurant) if they don’t like you, maybe eating at a sit-down restaurant isn’t for you.
If you have a bad experience at a restaurant, which leads you to leave a bad tip, would you actually go back there again?
If you experience what you feel to be poor service often enough that you are regularly leaving bad tips (regularly enough that it is an “undue hardship” to keep track of them all), then, again, maybe eating out at sit-down restaurants isn’t for you.
Anything cultural is very difficult to change. Having experienced everything from the USA (tipping expected), Europe (service charge, plus a tip if you were impressed, and usually round up the bill anyway, but no tipping or service charge in cheap restaurants) and Japan (no tipping EVER), I prefer the Japanese model, but it is very much a cultural thing. Within Europe, France is more like France, with tipping being expected and in sorts of places, which makes France rather expensive. My second choice is the European model. I doubt that either will catch on in the USA, but in places like the USA and France I felt I was being emotionally pressured to help a poor underpaid server and had to tip him or her to avoid getting the evil eye.
I’ve always thought in regards to this question that it would have to be made illegal on a national level for it to disappear. There are just too many servers who make lots more on tips than they’d ever get in wages (screenshots like the one earlier notwithstanding), too many owners wanting to cheap out on wages, too many customers who’ll go to the “cheaper” place without a second thought,
But you don’t need to be exact. If our bill is $5.41, just double five. Again. no server is going to care if they don’t get exactly 20% on a tip. Seriously, if you need a calculator for this you probably shouldn’t be out alone.
Moving a decimal point is math in only the strictest sense of the word. Point is a fifth grader can figure out a tip on paper, an adult should have no problem doing it in their head. It’s fifth grade math, not rocket surgery.
This is well said. Right now, tipping is needed.
Man, you are way over invested in this. You’ve expended more energy and thought in this thread alone than I have in 45 years of tipping. If eating out is this much stress for you, just carry a $5 with you, pay what’s on the bill and leave the $5 on the table for the server. This is likely to solve the vast majority of your solo eating out adventures.
The thing is, very few people have a problem with tipping. It’s simply a part of life. Other than on this message board I don’t think I ever heard anyone get so excited about tipping. As I said above, the first people you have to convince to end tipping are the servers and any good server will fight you tooth and nail.
You really don’t have to judge anything. Sure, if the waitress slops coffee all over the table or drops your food in your lap. don’t tip. But don’t act like tipping is a terrible onus on you.
Yes, this is it. I don’t tip because the server smiled and said hello. I tip because it’s part of the way society runs in the US.
Why exactly does that bother you?
All social requirements are in your mind. That’s what they are, rules people make up to live in a society. Tipping is not a law .
I should have read to the end, you put this perfectly.
That’s the real answer; at least for my wife and I, some non-trivial amount of our tips are more to ensure that we do our part in making sure these people are properly compensated for their effort, because we’ve both worked tip-compensated jobs in the past, and know that while your average person makes 7.25/hr, restaurant workers only make 2.13/hr in wages, and the balance is from tips. We’re well aware that on average they far exceed 7.25/hr in most places, but on the off chance that they work a short shift, or get stiffed or something, we tip more than usual.
If we had confidence that someone makes the regular minimum plus tips, then I’d be more inclined to tip strictly based on their performance, and not with regard to anything else.
I always thought that employers getting to pay less because people earn tips was particularly shitty though. Part because as a customer, I resent the fact that some of my tip is paying what the employer ought to be paying, and part because it just seems like such a cheapskate move on the part of employers, in line with hiring 2-3 part-time people instead of 1 full-time person in order to avoid paying benefits, or working people to 39 hours 55 minutes each week and running them home in the middle of a shift to avoid overtime. And all that kind of penny-ante bullshit that saves a dime here and a nickel there, but makes workers hate working for you.
Agreed. Whatever you decide your default tip percentage is (15%, 20%, whatever), there’s probably no need to deviate from it unless your server really impressed you, or was really bad. It’s not like you need to do a performance appraisal, or fill out a report card.
When restaurants start handing out scorecards on their waitstaff when the hostess seats you and then calculating the bill based off the score, we will have a problem…
Are you even reading the thread? The assumption here is that we shouldn’t be leaving tips because the expectation of it is extortion. So in this thread I would be refraining from leaving a tip because I’ve gone to a restaurant and it has a listed price for getting served that food at that restaurant. I would be refraining from giving a tip for the same reason I don’t throw in a little extra cash when I’m paying to register my car. Poor service has nothing to do with it.
And I believe that there is a powerful psychological incentive for servers to give bad service to people who don’t tip - they feel that they’re not being paid for their work. As if it is the customer’s responsibility to pay them, not their actual employer. The server may not choose to involve bodily fluids, but it would take an unusual dedication to their craft just to do their job properly.
“In this thread”? I’m not sure what you mean by that. In real life, when you go to a restaurant, do you tip?
The expecatation of a tip is “extortion”? You clearly feel that it is, but the reality is that it’s the way that the compensation system for servers at restaurants has developed.
You may not like it, you may feel pressured by it, but it’s the way it works. The prices on the menu are, effectively, artificially depressed, because the menu prices alone don’t cover paying the servers a living wage.
Assuming you live in the U.S., which I believe that you do, it is the customer’s responsibility to pay them. It so happens that you pay them through two mechanisms:
Paying your bill (since the restaurant does pay part of the server’s income)