Well, it depends on if you are the employer or the employee, doesn’t it? Obviously it is in the employer’s best interest to have lower payroll costs.
Otherwise, I’ve seen two rationales; one for the employee and one for the employer. First, I’ve heard it suggested that since most tips are in the form of cash, they can be more easily unreported on taxes. Then, there is the theory that if employees know that their pay depends on performance, they will more likely work harder whereas if they were paid a guaranteed amount regardless of quality of service then they would probably not put up with the crap most wait staff have to go through.
I despise places that don]t give separate bills when requested (and yes, ahead of time, so she [typically] doesn’t have to worry about sorting it out later). “No,” she’ll say, “we’re not allowed to do separate checks.” Now I know it’s not her fault; she’s probably following some stupid policy. There are many good, legitimate reasons for separate bills: (1) cash sucks and I rarely have any. How can I split payment without a bill? (actually some places will split payments). (2) I’m a good tipper – I want the waitress to know my tip was from me and the bad tip was from whomever else I was with. (3) I’m the flipping customer; the store should be prepared to accomodate my wishes.
Isn’t it also true that large groups tend to be there for socializing, and consequently stay at the table for a longer period of time? “Just bring us a couple of pitchers of beer, we’re going to talk for 20 minutes before we even look at the menu.” Then it takes 10 minutes to get 15 people to agree on a couple of appetizers, they sit an extra half hour after the meal to have coffee and decide on dessert, and so on. So the group isn’t just taking up four small-party tables; they’re potentially taking up those four tables for twice as long, meaning eight parties overall. The loss can therefore be considerable.
I’ve noticed that some restaurants have started producing an “itemized by group” check, so while it’s a single bill covering all the various parties it does have subtotals based on what the waitperson interpreted as the social groupings. Pretty convenient, and it’s a good way of identifying the skinflints who don’t like to tip, rather than going around three times on the total, saying “we’re still short fifteen,” and trying to figure out who threw in what.
Some people make a big production out of being a Christian, even when eating out, and those people are almost always horrendous tippers. Go to a “home cooking” type place like Cracker Barrel at 12:30 on a Sunday afternoon, and you’ll see the motherlode of them.
These people have apparently already used up all their charity and forbearance at church that morning (and dropped all their disposable income in the collection plate, evidently) and are thus truly obnoxious customers. They complain loudly about how long it took to get seated (the hostess told them it would be 45 minutes, and they choose to wait), exclaim in dismay at the high prices (the prices were the same when they were here last Sunday), and grumble because it took 10 minutes to get their 10-ounce steak well-done. The coffee’s too strong or too weak, or the sweet tea is too sweet or not sweet enough, and oh, they forgot to ask for ketchup, and are you quite sure that salad dressing is the low-fat version? It can’t possibly be, they know the difference, so go get another bowl, rght now.
Then, at the end of it all, they leave you maybe 4%. Or, if they’re in a puckish mood, one of those tracts with the front cover that looks like a five-dollar bill. I mean, isn’t saving your soul the most valuable tip you could ever get?
Hey, I’m as agnostic as they come, but I can’t help but wonder what the reaction would be if someone made the same sweeping generalizations against, say, Jews when it comes to tipping as you’ve made against Christians.
Also, what constitutes a “big production out of being Christian?”
While I’ve certainly had my experience with tip- and even tab-ditchers, I think there is another thing going on. A lot of people I know simply can’t do the math properly on large tabs. If someone can’t add up six microbrews at $4.95 apiece, it’s utter futility to ask them to calculate twenty percent of that total as well.
Ah, spoken as someone who has never faced the “after church crowd.” If you notice, I didn’t say all Christians, I said the ones who can’t order a ham sandwich without mentioning Jesus. It’s a concensus among every server I’ve ever known that that particular subset of Christians tend to be perfectly miserable to wait on, and that they tend to be bad tippers.
It’s not a manditory gratuity, it’s a service charge, and this is a not so subtle legal distinction. We add it so that we may decide how the revenue is distributed. A large party may require several servers and as the owner, I have no control over gratuities.
With a service charge, I can oversee the distribution in a fair and equitable way, With a large party and several servers, I cannot even say who the gratuity belongs to. With a service charge however, I can decide that say, 10% is split among the wait assistants and the rest evenly among the waiters. Imagine the mess of having a bunch of tired waiters arguing over who served more desserts or the price of the wines chosen by “their” guests. So, in the interest of our big fat happy family, I call it a service charge and distribute it in the manner I deem fair.
How does adding a mandatory gratuity for large groups protect their incomes when the law already does? Methinks the extra work involved protects servers who work so hard for so little for the so underserving of such service.
Damn, lost my last post so I’ll try again abreviated version:
I agree we are GQ’d out so I’ll just respond to Stephe96’s direct question and CrazyCatLady’s defense.
CCL pretty much hit it right on the nose with living in my head accuracy. Thanks for the defense.
Stephe, if you don’t know who “obvious” christians are, then as CCL said you have never worked a Sunday lunch.
Regarding sweeping generalizations, I warned everyone that I was doing so, and I hope no-one took offense as it was intended tougue in cheek, though this is a pet peeve of mine. However, I made those generalizations about groups that I have had personal experience with and based them upon the evidence of those experiences. I have not waited on large and/or multiple groups of Jews/Moslems/Hindus etc. returning from their place of worship so I can’t speak to their tipping habits. If I do (unlikely as I no linger work in food service) and they stiff me, I will certainly log back on and complain.
By the way, I forgot to lump Canadians in with the bad tippers (and Australians too), and to present the flip side so you all dont think I’m entirely cynical: gay men, asian businessmen, and surprisingly enough frat boys are all good tippers, generally.
And to further elaborate, in many cases if these groupings are not visibly apparent they are made so via the course of the meal, afterall it is in the servers interest to attempt to bond with the customer, to make the experiance more fun, and easier, and to increas the tip. It is generally while doing so that non-visual stereotypes become apparent.
Then, it should apply to all other businesses. The guy who sell you groceries probably should be tipped instead of being paid correctly by his boss, because otherwise, there will be no recourse for bad service and necessarily the guy won’t bother being helpful, polite, etc…
That’s nonsense. When an employee does a lousy job and people complain about it or don’t come back, he can expect some problems with his boss, or even be fired. The same would apply to a waiter who wouldn’t rely on tips. If customers are unhappy with him, and tell the manager, he won’t last long in his job. He might have got some money he “didn’t deserve” (and why ? He worked for it, and he deserves it as much as the grocery guy in the above example), but he won’t get this “undeserved money” for long. Managers usually don’t like staff members who make the customers unhappy. I can’t see why it would make a difference if the employee is a waiter.
It would work exactly in the same way for all jobs, but for mysterious sociologico-cultural reasons, people working in restaurants are supposed to receive part of their wages from the customer instead of getting it from their bosses.
If you want to be consistent, then you should apply your logic to all jobs and say that, for instance, bank tellers should be tipped too.
I think one reason for mandatory tips for large parties is that these parties, in my experience, have extremely low turnover, staying at the restaurant for longer, and hence requiring more of the waiter’s attention that the customer may think.
The problem with tipping baggers or bank tellers is that they only provide service for you for a max of 5 min. In a restaurant the person with devoting 30-90 min of their life to serve you and make your life more comfortable. I think that is worth some personal gratuity.
I also dissagree with the fact that employer’s can pay their employees less just because they get tips.
Most servers make mor ethan min wage, infact some good one can make quite a bit more than min wage. The law only protects the server to min wage. This means that the wait person is still losing a lot of money because a large group make the server loose $100.
Think of it this way, if your payroll department made a math error and shorted you $100. Would’t you be pretty upset if they came back to your compaint with, “Oh yeah sorry but you are still making more that minimun wage so there is nothing that we are going to do for you.”
I’ll have to confirm that waitstaff do often get the “Tract instead of a tip” phenomenon. When Mrs. RickJay waited tables to make money for school, Sunday afternoons invariably brought in groups just out of church, and an amazing number of them would tip nothing and leave various sorts of Christian propaganda behind, including Jack Chick materials and those tracts with covers made to look like currency (a criminal offense here, ironically enough.) In all cases the tracts came from fundamentalist sects (e.g. no Catholic or Anglican literature that she can recall.)
She NEVER got a Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist, etc. tract in place of a tip. Just Christian ones.
Let’s not forget that a large party with a $300 tab can often be reported as $45 of income by the restaurant. If your group only leaves $30, you’ve cost your server $3 (assuming 20% income taxes overall).
I’ve actually asked a few lawyers about this issue.
Adding a gratuity to large parties is fine. But different states have different laws about the requirement of parties to actually pay the gratuity.
In Texas, you are legally required to pay your bill, not the gratuity. So, you can disregard the 15% or 18% or whatever a restaurant adds to your bill. Of course, most people (including me) pay the gratuity anyway. It makes things easier when trying to wrangle money out of cheapskates and helps support the (usually) struggling waitstaff.
In other states, the laws may be different. I heard (no direct confirmation, however), that in at least one other state that the gratuity was mandatory if it was printed on the menu. It could be the case that it is added as some sort of service charge and treated as such under the law.
Large parties stay at the tables longer-- which means less turn-around for the restaurant.
Also, it takes effort to co-ordinate the meals so everyone gets fed within the same 5 minute time span.
Here’s Barbarian’s rule of thumb for tipping:
For amounts up to $100-- double the tens digit and that’s your tip (so a $14 bill means a $2 tip, a $78 bill is a $14 tip);
For amounts over $100, slap down a twenty for every hundred dollars ($450 bill, $80 tip).
If you’re iffy about this, knock off taxes before making your calculations-- but many people then forget to include taxes when paying:eek:
I must be figuring things wrong or there would be a huge line of people wanting to be waiters/waitesses but…
If a waiter spends an hour or even an hour and a half waiting on a large group and gets ~$60 that works out to a pretty good hourly rate. $40-60 an hour :eek:, it may be tough work but it can’t be that hard. Whenever I look at what I put down for a tip and multiply it by 5 tables that turn over in less than an hour I always think - ‘waiters must be making a ton of money’. And your example of 5 tables leaving $15 each for $150 :eek:. Is there something I am missing, or should I be considering a career change?
And to add to the whole Christian thing…
I worked in an industry where I would spend several days working in peoples homes. In general most people where very nice and offered us coffee in the morning, drinks when it was hot out, sometimes buy us lunch, and fairly often we would get tips for good service. However, when working in a house with lots of religous types of decorations I noticed that the people in general where very hard to please and would not do anything for us or offer anything to us and of course a tip would be completely out of the question. I had expected the exact opposite the first couple of times I worked in homes where the people where obviously very Christian but eventually I came to basically the same conclusion as CrazyCatLady, they used up all there charity and ‘niceness’ at church and they don’t have to be nice to anyone else.