I don’t want to derail Siam Sam’s thread, so I’ll start a new one with this question.
In that thread there’s a few interesting things…
In a bar it’s pretty much a per drink tip
For a Chambermaid it’s a per day tip
For a restaurant it’s a % of the bill.
So why a % of the bill?
Isn’t a tip supposed to be to “make up” for the waiter not being paid?
In that regard what does the price off the meal have to do with it? Aren’t I using just as much of their time with the Prime Filet Mignon as with the cheap burger?
Wouldn’t it be better to tip on a time consumed basis, or even a flat rate per table or diner? Eg: assuming a regular dinner of around 90 minutes, wouldn’t a tip of $1 per diner be about right to make a reasonable wage for a waiter?
(I am guessing one waiter handles probably 30 patrons at one time, meaning a flat rate of $1 per diner per meal would be a decent hourly rate)
Of course this doesn’t take into account prep time, or slow periods (but since when is it up to me to make up for slow periods?)
I never really gave this much thought. I suppose it would be because the average meal cost would reflect the type of restaurant you’re at and if you’re at a higher end restaurant where you get better service the waitstaff probably deserves a better tip.
Yes, you can go to Friday’s or Applebee’s and order something expensive, but in general the average meal is, what, $20-$30 or so as opposed to going to Capital Grille or your local high end steak house where the average per plate ticket is $100 plus drinks/desert. It’s probably one of those things where it’s just easier to tip by percent then it is to try to figure out what type of restaurant you’re in and know what the accepted flat rate is for that type of place.
So, for an Applebee’s it might be $3-$7 per plate where as at a steakhouse it might be $15-$25 per plate. But what if (at either type of place) after your desert your have another round of appetizers? What’s the protocol for that? How much extra do you tip? What if you go to a drive in type place? Do you tip like it’s an American chain restaurant type place? How about this scenario or that type of place? IOW, I think we tip by the percent of bill because overall it’s just easier that way. Otherwise there’s too many ‘what if’s’ or the menu would have to have some sort of code/‘accepted tip’ on it so patrons know what to do (I’m starting to confuse myself and probably over thinking this).
The percentage system is flawed when comparing items with different prices, e.g. a steak vs. a sandwich or a cocktail vs. a soda, but it works nicely when comparing the number of items, such as appetizer/entree/four drinks/dessert vs. entree/one drink.
I’ll keep my opinions about tipping to myself, but considering that it is the system we have, the % makes sense to me.
Certainly, I would expect that a pricier restaurant would pay staff more. So, the burger that costs me $6 at the pub gets a tip of $1 (making up approximate numbers here), while the burger at Chez Food that costs me $14 gets a tip of $2. Food is more expensive at Chez Food, and service is more expensive as well.
I guess ‘within’ one restaurant is where it falls apart a little . . . sucks to be the waiter who gets all the tables where no one orders booze, or appetizers, or full of vegetarians (so no one is ordering the expensive steaks) . . . I imagine, though, that those internal discrepancies all iron out over time; that staff working the same shift tend to earn similar amounts of money, except for those few exceptional waitpersons who will likely come out ahead of the average.
Tipping is by percentage because servers are required to declare their nightly sales for income tax purposes. I’m a little hazy on the details (I waited tables about 20 years ago) but I remember having to enter my tips as a percentage of my sales every night at closing. There was some debate with my coworkers whether or not to state our “walk out” income was 8% or 10% of our total sales, I went with 10% because it seemed safer (there were always horror stories of audits).
The reason I declared 10% of my sales as income instead of the 15% to 20% I actually received from my customers was because I never walked out with all my tips. At my restaurant, servers “tipped out”": bus boys, bartender, food runner. In some restaurants, I’ve heard servers also tip out the hostess staff.
Income tax based on my sales were taken out of my paycheck. At $2.13 an hour, my biweekly paycheck was around $20.00 or so.
I’ve always felt this way. At an expensive restaurant, a table for six could easily spend a thousand dollars in a not much over an hour. The waitress would have do a hell of a lot more than bring me my food to make her worth two hundred bucks an hour.
I suspect you may have cause and effect reversed. The requirement to declare a percentage of nightly sales is a consequence of the percentage-tipping custom, rather than its cause.
Sure, but doesn’t it make sense that waitstaff at a restaurant where the bill comes to $170 a person would/should make more than one where the bill is $30 a person?
Whether you think the hourly amount makes sense (and, I tend to agree with you), it does make sense that the massive mark-up in pricey restaurants should also make its way to the waitstaff. You’re paying a premium for everything else at that point.
On the contrary, I think that if a restaurant charges way too much for food, it should pay its staff accordingly, and tipping should not even be necessary. I am absolutely unable to follow the logic of cheerfully assenting to being gouged twice, instead of just once.
Note that I’m talking about the way I think things should be, not what I actually do. What I actually do is avoid pricey restaurants.
Often, at a more expensive restaraunt, the waitstaff have far fewer tables, so they have a lower volume of tables on which to earn tips. At the Inn at Little Washington, the waiter is pretty much your waiter and no one else’s. He isn’t there at all and then the second you think that maybe you would like another cocktail, he is at your shoulder like a genie. His tip based on percentage of the bill is higher, but I doubt if he had more than two tables on the night we were there.
I can’t be the only one who takes this into account.
At a typical greasy spoon where you can get a decent breakfast for $5.50 a person, I’ll typically tip on the range of 30%. Which means tipping 3 or 4 dollars for a couple of people versus $1.70 or whatever 15% would be. If the place is out in the country and/or particularly dead, I’ll go to 40 or 50 percent.
My normal restaurant tips are in the 20 to 25 percent range, depending on what we ordered and how much my kids have destroyed the place.
At a high end restaurant where the money starts to matter, I’ll try to keep it a under 20% unless I’m impressed by the server.
The more I’m spending, the more I take the quality of service into account. I’m not willing to penalize a waitress at a greasy spoon for having a bad day, but if I’m ordering a bottle of wine and a steak, the least you can do is put forth an effort.
Sure. But, given that in the current system waitstaff make functionally all of their income with tips, I think my perspective answers the OP’s question, which is why tips are based on a percentage. steronz, I work that way too. Tips for really cheap food are often rounded up; I’ll tip a minimum of $2 or $2.50, unless service was specifically horrible. The more money I’m spending, the more I take service into account when deciding whether to leave 15% or 20+ percent.
I can’t help but think that people who think along these lines haven’t really thought this out. If tipping were outlawed tonight, and starting tomorrow restaurant owners were forced to pay their waitstaff an equal amount to make up for what they’d been making before tipping was outlawed… where do you think that extra money is going to come from? Do you really think restaurant owners will just shrug and eat that large amount of money, and you’ll be able to get away with paying that much less for your dinner now that you don’t have to tip? Of course not. Every menu item, in every restaurant in the country is going to raise by quite a bit to make up that difference.
You’re going to be paying that money one way or the other. Wouldn’t you rather have that small amount of control over it?
It’s not the best system in the world and when you nit down to individual items you can find lots of cases that aren’t consistent with the rule (i.e. it’s the same amount of work to bring out a $40 steak vs. a $10 salad), but generally speaking a bigger bill means more work for the server because there’s more shit being ordered. I’ve worked as a server before and it’s a hell of a lot more work to serve a party of 12 than a party of 2, and naturally the former is going to have a higher bill so tipping as a percentage means the server would get more compensation for that work.
Also, fancier restaurants are simply going to have higher prices across the board, so at least in theory the level of service should also be higher, and tipping as a percentage encourages that since a server at Ruth’s Chris makes a lot more than one at Waffle House.
I would have total control over it, by not going to restaurants that charged too much.
And I don’t accept your premise. If tipping were outlawed, obviously the prices would go up, but not many owners would be paying their waiters $200 an hour. So I doubt that they’d go up so much that you wouldn’t save money.
But I’m really the wrong guy to even talk about this, because I haven’t spent my own money in a fancy restaurant in years. The only time I go is when I’m on an expense account, and even then only when circumstances sort of demand it. I happen to be blessed with taste buds that consider a Marie Callendar TV dinner as good as anything I’ve ever been charged a hundred bucks for.
You mean people who can afford very expensive restaurants are expected to tip more than those who can afford only cheap ones? That’s class warfare I say!!!
Seriously, not all waitstaff are created equal. I’d expect the waters at a high class place to be more competent than the ones at the local diner. I’d expect them to be just the right amount of attentive, and to know the menu. I have no trouble paying for this. It isn’t gouging, since you know about it going in. I’ll tip higher for great service at a low price restaurant and lower for poor service at an expensive restaurant, but I start from the same place.
Who said anything about individual waiters suddenly getting $200/hour? But, right now, in most states, restaurants can legally pay their waitstaff less than minimum wage, with the assumption that tips will make up at least the rest of it. Obviously, in any decent restaurant on up, the waiters end up making well over minimum wage after tips are figured in. So the restaurant would have to up their salaries to make up that difference. No, I’m not talking about upping each individual waitperson to “$200/hour”… but at decent restaurants, they’ll have to go from paying each waiter maybe around $10/hour (if the restaurant actually pays more than minimum wage) to probably $25 or $30 (and quite a bit more in better restaurants) an hour to keep them at the same resulting wage. No, taken individually, that’s not a tremendous amount of money. But when you’re talking about doubling or tripling your entire waitstaff salary? You really don’t think that’s going significantly effect their bottom line and they won’t pass that on to you?
The costs of production do not directly affect prices. You also have to factor in whether people would be less inclined to go out if they didn’t have the option (however socially frowned upon) to pay less for the meal, as well as the psychological cost.
But, even if this isn’t true, the worst you get is that food costs the same as it did before. Except I get the benefit that the price is right there on the menu for easy mental calculation when determining how much I wish to spend on eating. And no chance that any server will not at least make minimum wage from people not tipping.
Would make life very easy!!