10% was standard tipping rate in the early to mid 70s when I started buying restaurant food. There were probably higher rates for fancier restaurants, as well as in expensive cities (as a lad of 15 to 20, I rarely ate in those places!).
High inflation in the late 70s and early 80s caused people to think the price of everything should go up. While an argument can be made that tipping rates needed to go up because the cost of food didn’t keep up with the CPI (the cost of gasoline, etc., having a LARGE effect on inflation), a) restaurant prices in general WERE going up quickly, and b) most people weren’t that insightful about it. I remember having multiple discussions with people who insisted tipping RATES should go up because inflation made things go up. Math is not everyone’s forte.
Since 1997, tipping rates DO need to go up as inflation increases prices, because, while the minimum wage for regular workers increases, the minimum that employees in tipped industries must be paid has stayed the same since that year ($2.13/hr). Employers are supposed to make up the difference between that rate and the rate an employee receives by tips, up to $7.25/hr, but a) that’s iffy as to compliance and b) do you REALLY want your server to be being paid minimum wage by you? I don’t, unless they thoroughly deserve it (by poor service).
Those numbers are federal numbers. In some states, there are different rules (California, for example).
There might be a certain “generosity creep” at work. At first everyone tips 10%. But then someone tips 15%, and so forth, and other people follow suit. Pretty soon 15% is the new 10%. And then it goes up to 20%, and 20% is the new 15%. And if someone tips like “back in the old days”, only tipping 10%, then they are “stingy.”
Tipping was 10% in the 60s and into the 70s. Don’t know what happened before then. I don’t know exactly how it changed but 10% was a standard tip and then came the idea that you tipped 15% for excellent service and in the 80s 15% became the standard. I’d assume inflation was a motivating factor, in the 70s with double digit inflation and a terrible economy it must have seemed very cheap to just tip 10% to people making so little.
Technically, this isn’t quite true. Although the plain English explanation on the DOL website uses the phrase “make up the difference”, the actual law says they are to start at full minimum wage and are allowed to claim a credit for tips earned: If the server earned $1.00 per hour in tips for the pay period, the employer can claim a tip credit of $1.00 per hour and decrease their wage by the same amount. Cite:
From what I’ve seen, it appears to be more common for tips to be under reported by the servers rather than over reported by the employer.
Or then there are other standards for tipping that aren’t just a straight percentage. When I eat out, for instance, I start by calculating 15%, and then round that up to the nearest dollar. And at the sorts of places I usually eat at, that usually ends up being well more than 20%.
Although, I’ve never really understood the logic of making the tip a percentage of the price, in the first place. A server in a $5 diner is doing about the same work, at about the same skill level, as one in a $50 steakhouse-- Why should the steakhouse worker make ten times as much?
Speaking for my own personal self, my own income has gone up greatly, and I know servers haven’t had a commensurate increase. So if anyone asks if I need a refill, then they automatically get 25%.
There is no $5 diner, so the 10 times as much is exaggerated. I disagree about the same work or skill level. When I go to a diner with my buddies, the wait stiff basically throws the menus on the table and does a minimum of work. When we’re done eating and we’re just hanging out talking, we get the check and are never asked again if we’d like anything- we pay the check at the register when we’re done.
In an expensive restaurant the wait staff are much more cordial, wearing more expensive clothes, remembering all of the evening’s specials, sharing tips with the Maitre D’ and bartender, generally have patrons spending more time dining and having to give them more attention- there are definitely greater turn over rates in diners than expensive restaurants, etc.
Additionally, they have far fewer tables, and thus checks. At some of the really nice restaurants around here, you will see something like two waitstaff pairing up and covering a grand total of 3 or so tables.
OK, then, make it a $6 diner. And I’m sure that there are $60 steakhouses out there, too, so you can still get a factor of 10.
And if the waitstaff at the steakhouse have fewer tables, then that means that they’re not even doing the same work as the diner servers; they’re doing less. And the waitstaff at the $6 diner my family regularly goes to does all of the things you describe and more: Our favorite waitress, on the third time we visited, greeted us all by name, and already knew all of our drink orders. I wonder how many $60 places offer that level of service?
Ten times as much might be exaggerated- but what about when I go to Applebee’s? It’s the exact same restaurant and I get the same level of service whether my husband and I order from the 2 for $20 menu or each order a $20 entree. The server actually does more work on the 2 for $20 because that includes an appetizer which requires a separate trip. But the tip is supposed to be twice as large for no other reason than I spent more money. There are plenty of times even in the same restaurant where the price doesn’t reflect more work for the server.
This is my question too. And I don’t think the ten times is exaggerated. The ratio between prices in, say, a 98-percentile (for price) restaurant and a 2-percentile restaurant must be more than ten, right? Yes, the expensive waitperson may wait on few tables, but so does a waitperson in a cheap unpopular place.
Why does one server deserve ten times as much as the other? Certainly the waitperson in the cheaper restaurant needs the money more! (The diner at the expensive restaurant can afford a higher tip; is that the key point?)
I’m surprised that there are so many responses in this thread and only 1 with what I’d consider the simplest explanation.
For people who can comfortably afford the meal, and that will be most patrons, their concern is generally just not to look cheap.
If you’re someone who, say, tipped 10% (unless the service was outstanding) you only need to be at a table with a couple people saying “Oh 15% is really the minimum…” before you feel cheap and like you should tip more.
The thought going through someone’s mind is not “Oh, economic conditions have changed, food inflation and suchlike, I want the waiter to enjoy a comparable quality of life to waiters 10 or 20 years ago”. It’s “For a relatively small difference in cost I can ensure that I’m seen to be generous. Oh but did I hear 20% is typical in these parts? I’ll throw in a couple more dollars to be safe”
There’s little pressure the other way because there are few people who can afford to eat at a given restaurant, but balk at the difference between paying 15% and 20%
They may have gotten used to it but they certainly work as hard for their tips as a waitress at Applebees but the waitress at Applebees is not an “other” so people tend to see her as a mother or a wife or a sister. The waitress at a Chinese restaurant is just some Chinese chick, fungibly replaced by half a billion other Chinese chicks. I tip as much at Chinese restaurants as I do at white restaurants. I don’t really see any rationale for lower tipping at Chinese restaurants.
Yes. The “etiquette” of tipping is different between casual family dining where a 5% difference is a couple of buck and an expensive restaurant where you have separate tip lines for the wait staff and the sommelier.
At a buffet, you tip a dollar or two per person for the person bringing you drinks.
At a diner or chain restaurant, if you sit down for a meal, the tip should be the higher of X% (I think X is 15, YMMV) or some fixed minimum amount (for me that’s ~$5, YMMV), maybe a bit more if you think more is warranted. I almost never reduce my tip for bad service unless it is also rude, and that almost never happens.
At an expensive restaurant, my tips fluctuate greatly.
The sommelier gets 10% of the cost of the wine (plus a half pour of the wine if its a special bottle) if the service is professional, attentive and courteous, bad service, spilled wine or bits of cork floating in my wine warrants a lower tip or no tip at all.
My expectations of wait service are much higher at a fine restaurant than at Applebees. I am not paying $50 for a piece of braised short rib because the braised short rib is worth $50. If the service meets my expectations, I tip 15% (which can be $100), if the service exceeds my already high expectations, I will tip more but it is much more common for them to fall short and then I reduce the tip by a few points. In one case I left a penny but it was an almost surreally bad experience.
Not to disagree with some previous posters, but the “normal” tip has been 15% for at least 60 years. When I was traveling with my parents in the 1950s, we always left 15% for decent service…less if the service was not up to par, and maybe a bit more if it was superior.
However, I’ve worked in the service industry on and off since the 1960s and spent time in many different areas of the country, so I can also state that the idea of what a “normal” tip would be has differed widely. Some ethnic and socioeconomic groups don’t tip at all (or tip very poorly). One of the companies I worked for ten years ago was purchased and became an MWBE. Within a month, we were told that we could not tip above 10% when we traveled on business. Needless to say, we completely disregarded this directive and tipped whatever we thought was appropriate.
I’ll further say that I was totally bummed when I was working as a busboy (please excuse the gender) in a small restaurant in Maryland. The wait staff pooled their tips every day, but did not share them with the busboys. When a small child would vomit all over the table, or the parents would (literally) change a diaper on the table and leave the soiled items behind, the wait staff would swoop down and grab the extra-large tip left by the embarrassed parents and toss it in their common tip jar. I would spend ten minutes cleaning that one table and get nothing extra.
Back in my younger days, i worked as a waiter. I had food service jobs on three different continents, and i worked in a variety of places, from high-volume touristy burger joints to upscale country house hotels where jacket and tie were required in the dining room.
In terms of the difficulty of the job, i always found the cheaper places to be at least as challenging as the expensive places, and certainly more frantic and fast-paced. Sure, the expensive places require a certain demeanor and smoothness that the cheap places do not, and those are traits or skills that some people can’t master, but for the most part the fundamentals of the job are pretty much the same, and you have to do everything a lot faster when you have 10 or 12 or 15 tables than when you have three or four.
It really never made sense to me, and still doesn’t, that the waitstaff who bring my food at a $40-a-plate restaurant deserve a tip four times larger than the waitstaff who bring my lunch at the $10-a-plate diner. Although it is true that, with fewer tables, you might get more per table but not much more overall.