I’m going on a trip very soon and I’ll be needing to take a taxi cab. I don’t know if it’s proper etique to tip cab drivers? I know Steve Buschemi said in ‘Resivour Dogs’ that the common practice of tipping waitresses was idiotic. This leaves me wondering whom should and should not be tipped? (I’d like to know about taxi cab drivers, people who do your dry cleaning, the mail carrier, etc.) And what is reasonable, overly generous, and stingy?
I tip taxi drivers generously except at peak times, when the price of a short journey is extortionate. Then the tip is small.
IMHO, you would tip a cab driver a couple of bucks for a regular ride in the city. If you mean a metered cab, and it’s below $10, add a couple of bucks. An unregulated cab anything goes but there’s usually a sense of how much a ride should cost.
Food delivery people: a few bucks or 15%
Waitstaff: 15% standard and more if they did a better than average job
Hairdressers: 15%
Mail carriers, newspaper delivery people, doormen, etc.: people tend to give a bonus amount at the holidays but may not tip throughout the year
YMMV
Most people hate to be tipped because it can be an extremely startling experience–especially if they are sleeping standing up at the time.
what?
Oh…THAT kind of tip. For the most part I’d agree with gigi but I for one don’t think a tip should be a given. If the service sucked at a restaurant or the paper carrier has more than a few brain farts in a year then they get their wage and that’s it. My trash guy gets a ten outta me a few times a year when I need to dispose of some particularly troublesome things.
Ashes53 doesn’t say which country the trip will be in. In some countries (e.g., the US) you tip taxi-drivers; in other countries (e.g., Australia and New Zealand) you don’t tip, or just round up the the next dollar.
I’ll probably wind up getting pitted for this, and let me preface by saying that I consider myself a good tipper when it comes to food servers, skycaps and others that I have interaction with.
But to me it makes no sense at all to tip someone I have never met or spoken to, such as the person in the hotel who cleans my room. The first time someone hinted to me that this was expected, I was flabbergasted, because the idea would never have occured to me.
In fact the whole concept of “expected” tipping seems foreign to me, but that’s a sentiment for another thread.
Just as a general rule of life – anytime a character played by Steve Buscemi says something, you probably can’t go wrong by doing the opposite.
I’m not pitting you, but I will say that I not only tip hotel cleaning staff (as long as they’re actually getting the job done), but I tip them every day of my stay. I do this because:
(a) It’s a nice thing to do. They get paid crap, partially in the expectation that they’ll get tips.
(b) It gives them an incentive to look out for me and my family, instead of snickering while my room is being burglarized.
© It can lead to better treatment. In Vegas, I followed my usual practice, and the maids responded by leaving us enough soap and shampoo to open our own pharmacy. No problem getting extra towels, etc, during our stay, either.
My wife would never let me get away with not tipping at a hotel.
She used to work as a maid for a hotel and was never pleased when people
a) left a big mess and
b) didn’t tip
Oh and something I didn’t know. You should always put any used towels in the bathtub when you leave. It really helps housekeeping.
I used to tip my hair stylist 20%. I figured that was fine. My wife’s cousin who worked as a hairdresser told me that 50% was more traditional. It shocked me.
Wow. I had no idea people tipped housekeeping staff at hotels. I don’t have an opinion on it one way or another, but it seems odd to me that I wouldn’t have encountered. I used to travel a lot with my parents and my dad’s tipping habits border on the extravagant, but I never once knew him to leave a tip for the maid.
Is this like a length of stay thing? What if you are only there one night?
I’ve never, in my entire life, tipped a hairdresser more than 20%.
50% seems absurd!
Valet parking…an average tip is about 2 or 3 dollars: a one dollar tip was barely adequate 20 years ago, so its time to keep up with inflation!
One thing I’ve noticed: Mercedes Benzes only give one dollar; no matter how expensive the Benz model or how formal the occasion, the owners always give a measly buck, what’s up with that?
:mad:
It could go along with the old stereotype (obviously based on some empirical evidence) that richer people (such as Mercedes owners) don’t tip as well as poorer people, who may have had similar jobs and realize how important tips are to survival. Personally, I learned how to tip well in restaurants from my friends, most of whom worked as servers and bartenders themselves. They are the best tippers I know.
There’s regional variation even within the US; I think in most of the urban NE waiters get closer to 20% (sometimes more) and bartenders usually at least a dollar/drink to start. (Philadelphia leads the nation in tipping, which I attribute to the blue collar background of the overwhelming majority of natives.)
Visiting friends in NW Pennsylvania recently we seemed to have blown people’s minds with the $1/beer thing in 3 different bars. The bartenders couldn’t stop thanking us, to the point where I think it was embarrassing for all concerned.
Yes, in parts of the world no tip for taxis and others a little rounding up.
I’d like to second the motion for tipping Americans (or whoever is cleaning your room in that Miami hotel…) in the service industry because people depend on that money and are paid less accordingly. Europeans especially dont seem to get this on the whole; once as a tour guide for a very nice British group who seemed to have a great time for a week I received not one penny from them. :mad: I do however have a very nice copy of a book on the city of Birmingham they presented me as a gift, which normally would have resulted in 
but in lieu of my rent money was a :rolleyes: . This seemed typical of what happened in the job with other guides; Europeans meant you got screwed on pay for that period, no matter how many times the company made polite suggestions that, yknow, we were basically working for the tip cash. Some Americans are as bad, but don’t have the cultural excuse…
Different cultures I suppose, but it would never occur to me to tip a tour guide. I’ve certainly never done so in the past. I pay for the tour and expect my ticket price to cover the operator’s expenses (including staff wages).
Hate to bring it up, but I’m in a place now where you’re expected to tip the parking lot attendant virtually everywhere you go. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a tip so much as extortion. Also baggers are tipped and don’t make a salary at all.
Now I’m a pretty generous guy, but what really friggin’ irks me is that I use a credit card virtually exclusively. I bought some damn gum in the checkout last time I was at the local, big grocery to give the bagger. But I forgot about the parking lot guy. Then at Gold’s Gym, I don’t even have my wallet, let alone money. Restaurants are the same deal. Of course when I go to places that don’t take credit cards (lots of 'em down here), I have to take cash. But it’s these places that tend to NOT have lot attendants! Grrr!
Oh well.
Also, for hotels, I make a distinction between “hotel” and “motel.” The FiestaAmericana or the Holiday Inn (not Express) get tips; the Motel 6 or Red Roof Inn don’t.
The general rule is that if someone is doing something you could easily do yourself, you tip them
This includes driving around, carrying bags, fetching food, cleaning up, mixing drinks, parking, taking care of your kids, etc. It supplements their crappy wages (here in America, tipped positions make $2.15 an hour instead of the $5.15 minimum wage) and it also is a gesture that says "Hey, I really appreciate you doing this. Although your position is relatively unskilled, I recognize that you work hard doing stuff that I’d be doing myself if I didn’t have other important things to do. I honestly don’t regard you as a peon that I can pay to do my menial tasks because I’m too lazy or important to do my personal tasks. "
It’s also polite to tip when asking for an extra amount of service, like going to the local coffee house and ordering double long half-soy half-half-and-half mochas with one inch of whipped creme and two hits of strawberry one hit of almond syrup for you and your ten best friends. Generally tip jars on counters are for really large or really complicated orders.
Strippers allegedly expect $10/dance, although $1-2 is more realistic.
Nononono… the federal government recognizes that for businesses dealing in interstate trade that wait-persons are subject to this. It is NOT true for “any” tipped position. Of course for practical purposes, the federal rule applies in most (all?) states.
Even so, a general survey of wait staff indicates that in a decent restaurant, the waitstaff don’t makes a $2.15 salary. That’s the minimum. That’s what they pay at a place like Big Boy where you have constant turnover.