Yeah, I thought I was going to read a thread of crazy customer stories, instead I got a crazy trainwreck right out of the gate thread. I like how he hates NYC Jews and then everyone else from NYC, but had to break the Jews out as a subset for specific dislike.
I worked as a barman & lounge boy (table service for bars) for several years, and, by and large, Oriental Asians don’t tip.
Am I a racist? Serious question.
Hard to tell. You could just be a shitty waiter.
It could be that there’s no custom in Asian of tipping, and that people from that culture don’t know (or don’t remember at the time) that we do have a custom of tipping certain people. Or they might know very well, but think it’s a scam, or they just don’t care.
Is it definitely one or the other?
Of course not. You could be a shitty racist waiter.
Never mind then, I see this is going nowhere.
It depends. If an Asian person sits at your station and you assume they won’t tip so you give bad service, you’re being racist.
Or if you act all surprised that they do tip, cause they must be “the good kind of Asian” or whatever, probably.
I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between “The Oriental Asians who come in here never seem to tip” and “Oriental Asians don’t tip.” The latter is racist, the former is not.
Although, again, “I’m not going to give that guy good service, because his race doesn’t tip well anyway” is racist.
Oh yes, there are stupid questions.
When I taught Calculus and the day before the final exam (reading and review day) I usually had an auditorium where students could come in and ask questions. One time I was going over a problem and a student asked…
“What is the meaning of the scribble to the left of your equation?”
{he was refering to the Integral}
I think you still need to be careful, even with your first phrasing. It depends on what led you to the conclusion in the first place. If you are ignore (even subconsciously) the white bad-tippers and through confirmation bias only note or recall the Asian ones, then the conclusion is not innocent. If I came to that conclusion, my first step would be to challenge my conclusion and wonder if cultural bias isn’t involved in what info I notice/retain and what I don’t. If someone doesn’t do the self-reflecting and self-check step, you run the risk of thinking you’re making just a situational observation, but it really does have racial-bias influence.
:rolleyes:
Because of course, we’ve NEVER had a thread about how well different groups tip or don’t tip, according to the resident wait staff.
Jackass.
What, you’ve never heard of confirmation bias?
It’s not inconceivable that a (possibly subconsciously racist) waiter could get a bad tip from an Asian person and think “all Asians are shitty tippers”, while if they got a bad tip from a white person just think “that person is a shitty tipper” without ascribing it their race. And later on, they are more likely to recall the “bad Asian tipper” instances while they kind of gloss over and forget all of the counter-examples that didn’t stick out in their mind.
Note that the racism in this instance is ascribing traits to all members of a racial group. If you say “that Asian was a shitty tipper”, then that’s a fact. But if you then assume that this applies to all members of that racial group, or if a completely different Asian person comes into the restaurant will be a bad tipper even before you serve them, then I would say that is racism.
That could be. However, there is a big difference between that, and assuming that anyone that notices a difference in the way a group acts must be a racist. Also, I’d think it would take far more than one bad tip from one person to form an opinion on a whole race.
Remember that carm was talking about the Asians that came into his place of work. Not all Asians.
Also, I disagree that assumptions based on experience must be racism, if all the waiter is doing is thinking to themselves “I suppose this will be another of those no tip tables” and that’s it. Not acting on it in any way, other than probably lowered expectations. For example, there are waiters who don’t give me very good service, probably because I am a female alone which is a subgroup that tends to tip poorly - I suppose you could call them sexist. However, there are other waiters who give me good service despite the reputation of female tippers, and I tip them accordingly - I imagine those waiters also thought “eh, not much tip coming here”, but they didn’t act on it. That’s the difference.
You’d think that, because you’re a fairly coherent person who appears to use her head for more than a hat rack. I assure you from the bottom of my heart, as a guy who was a shift manager at more than one restaurant and grocery store in high school and college, there are a LOT of goddamn morons out there who will generalize from one person if it fits the preconceptions they came into the job with.
At some point, the dividing line is in how you form your expectations for each person.
Case in point–there’s been proposed a cultural expectation that suggests Asians might not tip as well due to cultural ignorance, and I agree that noting cultural differences is not “racist”.
How is our friend **carm **to distinguish between Z Y Cao (recent immigrant from China who has never seen tipping and would think it was silly if you told him about it, guy in his 30s who works as a computer engineer and wears a suit and speaks near-flawless English with a light accent) and Peiyun Chan (second-generation American, worked as a waiter while in college, guy in his 30s who works as a computer engineer and wears a suit and speaks near-flawless English with a light accent)? If he assumes Peiyun won’t tip, he’s at best dancing on the “racism” line if not over it. If he acts on that assumption, he’s over the line into racism.
(Both of the above-mentioned folks have been co-workers of mine. =P)
Similarly, I’d ask Chimera how on earth he distinguishes Sally Cohen (lives in Brooklyn, talks like Fran Drescher with a sprinkling of yiddish words, is Jewish) from Sarah Conroy (lives in Brooklyn, talks like Fran Drescher with a sprinking of yiddish words, is not Jewish), andNancy Goldberg (lives in Manhattan, has a typical New Yawk accent, is Jewish) from Margaret Smith (who’s also Jewish, and also lives in Manhattan), and whether he expects someone with a Manhattan accent and a last name “Smith” to be as rude as any other NYC Jew.
You think if the waiter is busy with too many tables and he assumes the asians won’t tip that they’re going to receive equal treatment when the waiter has bills to pay? I think you’re very naive.
At no point did I specify that “I see X, I expect X”. I said that in my experience, X tends toward Y, and thus group X is over-represented in bad experiences.
It is how they greet me and how they proceed on the phone that is the experience. Snide, sarcastic, condescending, making it clear from word one that they’re important and don’t have time. Walking into the conversation in a confrontational manner, refusing to cooperate. These are the hallmarks of New York City Rude.
I greet NO ONE with “oh, you’re one of those”. I take the call, and if they’re jerks, it then after the call it becomes “oh yes, another person of subset X that thinks being a jerk is the way to get things done”, where the subsets being listed at based on multiple thousands of interactions with the general public, not a mere handful.
I gotta say, I took probably 30 calls today and for some bizarro reason, probably half of them were from NYC. Out of that, I had one complete moron trying to do the absolute impossible, and then demanding my name and information to complain about me because I flat out told her it wasn’t going to work. Can’t say what it was, but it goes right into my Top 10 Stupidest Calls list. Right under the guy with the “OO7” (note, letter O, not number) email address who thought his friends were morons because he wasn’t getting emails from them and it turned out that they were sending stuff to “007” (number 0, as in the James Bond number that everyone thinks of when you say “double oh seven”) like he kept telling them.
Everyone else was awesome. The bad call of the day was an old guy from somewhere else who couldn’t follow directions to save his life. I say “do X”, and he spends 10 minutes doing everything except X, no matter how many times I try to gently say “Sir, have you done X yet?” or “Sir, that’s not going to help right now, please do X”.
Which makes me want to change my list to put OLD PEOPLE behind People from NYC.
But as far as anyone goes, beyond the attitude, is the willingness to learn and follow directions. The worst thing about the old people is that a few of them* won’t follow directions to save their lives. If you told them the flood was coming down the hill and they have 30 seconds to get in the car and leave, they’d say “Ok, well I guess I’ll go pack a bag and call my sister. Oh, and then I’d better shut off the furnace and get some things out of the safe, and…” WHAM. Dead.
- definitely not all of them because some of my most awesome calls are working things out with older people and getting their shit all working when they’ve been struggling with it all for months and no one else has resolved it for them.
Okay. I’ll admit it. I would tear off my trendy little apron and walk off the job, rather than wait on anyone who talks like Fran Drescher.
That’s not racism, that’s self-preservation. I mean, what if I happened to be standing right next to her when she laughed? Workers’ Comp doesn’t cover bleeding eardrums.
On a serious note. I think if we’re honest, we all make some racist assumptions.
(yeah, that was me who locked my car doors when a bunch of thug-wannabe minority “Disinfected Youths” walked by my car yesterday)
It’s recognizing those reactions and compensating for them that keeps us decent. Denying them keeps us racist.
In the interest of fighting ignorance: sure it does, as long as the condition is the result of exposure to a hazard in the course and scope of your employment. 