I generally go with 20% max, but with me it's easy to get 20%. All you have to do is be friendly (even over-friendly which some customers don't really like, but hey at least they're trying), refill my drink promptly, and ask how everything is once I'm eating. I've never not left a tip, but I did leave $3.00 on a $50 bill once. Fucking waitress was a cunt.
I tip nothing unless they meet all of these criteria -have a tip jar -provide impeccable service -serve me while I have loose change that is bothering me
Used to be 15% until my wife told me the norm is now 20%. But we just found out that we were supposed to have been tipping all sorts of people--mainly anybody who does anything for you while traveling. We have been mainly guilty of not tipping Housekeeping people in hotels. I'm not sure I get it with them--waitresses get paid less then standard minimum wage because they are supposed to be tipped, but I wasn't aware that hotel workers and others got the same shaft. At bars I usually leave a buck after getting my drink/s.
fucking hell that sounds like a nightmare though according to my brother, there are benefits - he says you never have to go to the bar to order drinks, and you'll never encounter a restaurant who won't split bills
Anyone that tips less than 15% even though the waiter/waitress didn't make any mistakes that had a legitimately negative impact on the dining experience is an utter waste of carbon. I say this regarding the American scene where servers make less than 30% of what the hourly minimum wage is.
I usually tip $1 each time I go to the bar, whether I order one drink or drinks for 3 people. Although, if my change from purchasing the drinks is more than 50 cents, I'll just toss that in the jar instead. I'll also tip more for a bartender who makes drinks well. If they're mostly soda with a splash of booze, then I'm not tipping anything. At restaurants I usually tip about 20%, although I will skip out on a tip completely if the waitress was rude or completely shitty. The only other time I purposely tip less is if it's some situation where the waitress doesn't really do anything - for example at a buffet all they do is bring my first drink, and maybe one refill. I also don't tip the carhops at Sonic, which is absurd anyway. I didn't realize I was supposed to tip the person who cuts my hair, until I was about 22-23 years old. I still only tip them if they work at a chain-type place where they get paid by the hour. If they are independent and make their own rates, I don't tip them because my haircut is usually just "take 1/2 inch off the bottom" and takes about 10 minutes to do. Still usually costs me the typical $20-23. If they shampoo my hair and do a really good job of rubbing my head when they do so, then I will most definitely give them an extra five bucks. The exception on this is if I have my brother cut my hair. He charges $10 and doesn't generally do women's hair, so I pay him $15 instead. I'll never tip a hotel housekeeper, because we always leave the Do Not Disturb sign on the door the entire time so they'll stay the hell out.
cool - he lives in canada, though, so maybe canada? either way I'm much happier with our system - pay your employees
On Memorial Day there was a group of 4 people (2 couples) that came into where I work. One couple gave me $9 on a ~$30 bill, and the other couple had given me $60 to "hold for their tab" and they just up and left and only ran up like a $25 tab. That was a fun day.
15% for questionable service, but almost always 20% and sometimes more. If I can pay $30 for a decent meal, I can sure as shit pay $7 for a decent tip if the service was good. My ideal waitstaff: 1. Seats us as soon as practicable. 2. Has water on the table soon and takes a drink order. Bonus points for knowing a tap list. 3. Sounds somewhat knowledgeable about any menu questions. 4. The biggest one ... when I'm fucking done, I'm done. Rarely does anyone bring the tab too early, as in I was going to order a drink, but that's annoying. The thing that really kills me is waiting around in a busy restaurant with an empty glass waiting for you to bring my bill. I can't fucking stand it. I want to go partially because I want to get my seat to the next person so you can make more money and those people can have as good a time as I did. We experienced this fucking constantly in Chicago and it's pretty bad here in Montana, too. I just can't stand it. You can give the bill in a timely fashion without giving the impression that you're rushing us out the door. Also, $1 a beer, or $2 if I'm ordering a round. With pints being $4 here it's easy to just lay a $5 and be done with it. The bartenders get to know you as a decent tipper and that's always a good feeling.
Most bartenders' jobs are dependent on not fucking up their boss' liquor inventory. There are the occasional ones that seem to magically get away with pouring strong-ass drinks for any/everyone they want to but those are definitely the exception and NOT the rule. If they're getting away with it, they very likely have some special feather in their cap like having been personal friends with a manager/owner before being hired, fucking the boss, or knowing shit on their boss so the boss would be putting him/herself at risk of blackmail if they fired the bartender. That's understandable. I understand where you're coming from but it's very doubtful they're making a penny more than minimum wage and are quite likely making less so they aren't any less reliant on tips than regular servers. Add to that the fact that they're in an environment where upselling is virtually impossible since >95% of the clientele is strictly getting the buffet (and nothing else) and you can quickly see that it's hard to even get more than $2 per customer since 15% of the cost of most buffets is less than that and you can start to realize what a tough way to earn money it is. Beyond that, buffets bring in mostly jewbag stingy bastards which makes this even worse and you also exaggerated how little they do since (at most buffets) they still get you refills, clear dirty dishes throughout the meal, and have to bus your table meaning the only difference between them and a full-service server is they don't have to run food or be familiar with a menu. In fairness to them, you should probably use the drive-thru. Giving a meager dollar ain't exactly parting with a kidney. I'm really confused at how you arrived at some of these conclusions. Many independent stylists have to actually pay their place of employment a daily booth rental fee which means that if they're having a slow day they actually can show up to work to make nothing if they only have one or two customers. It's pretty shitty to penalize someone based on assumptions you make about their pay format. Some people stay in a hotel room for a week or even longer. Do you honestly think any hotel manager would just choose to trust total strangers to not trash a room during that time and not wanna make sure that their professionally trained housekeeping staff has a chance to regularly mitigate the development of stenches, mildew, bug problems, etc.? I'm sure most people are fully capable of keeping a room clean for a week but there's a huge spread between "capable" and "willing." For instance, think of how a public shitter looks and think of how the john might look at your or one of your friend's houses. Pretty good chance the public shitter looks worse, right? And that public shitter was probably cleaned that same day whereas the ones in our homes are probably only cleaned 1-3 times a week yet the public ones still look worse. Bottom line on this one is that these housekeepers aren't just being dicks and choosing to do work they could easily get out of (if they could merely tell their boss "hey, room 243 had the 'Do not disturb' sign on the door") so they have to do the work no matter what and tips are common courtesy for them. It's funny how people will spend $100 for a night in a hotel room where a good chunk of that is going straight to a big corporation's profit margin yet they'll draw the line at leaving $3-5 for someone who's working on the front line just like they are.
So does America but, for some extraordinarily unethical reason, jobs that allow their staff to receive tips are permitted to pay them less than minimum wage. Minimum wage for tip-earning jobs has been only $2.13 an hour for 20 years now while regular minimum wage has increased from $4.25 to $4.75 in mid-1997, to $5.15 a few months later, $5.85 around 2008/9 and finally to the current $7.25 we now sit at as of mid-2009. The whole reason it's $2.13, from what I've heard from a few unrelated sources, is that it's half of what minimum wage was at that time, $4.25, and rounded up to the next penny. By that reasoning, it shouldn't be a single penny less than $3.63 an hour now and even that's slave labor. Beyond all this, most restaurants force you to claim 100% of your tips for tax purposes so that $2.13 an hour is taxed as a regular wage as well as having to cover the taxation of the claimed tips meaning that many servers are beyond used to getting weekly or biweekly checks that are literally $0.00. Another kick in the dick is that most chain restaurants (as well as a fair percentage of mom & pops) basically steal about 20% of your tips to pay what's called a "tipout" to other non-server employees that may include staff such as bus boys, hostesses, bartenders, and (sometimes) cooks. This is done by bilking you out of 3% of your gross sales (the combined total of all of your tables for that shift.) Doesn't sound like a lot but that may be because you're confusing that with 3% of your tips. On a typical shift you'll earn between 15 and 20% of whatever your gross sales are so 3% of your gross sales on a shift where you were tipped 15% of those same gross sales means your tipout wipes out 20% of your tips.
pretty much this. Tipping someone when it is not expected seems like a much more honest system of rewarding good service.
Blame the cunts that provide the need for such a thing to exist in the first place. I'm not sure which circumstances have been the reason for you having automatic gratuities placed on your bills but it's usually if you have a large party (at least 5 or 6 at most places) or use a coupon. American restaurants are tailored top-to-bottom to suck the customers' dicks with less than zero regard for the server. If a restaurant EVER does something that's in the servers' favor you can bet the farm that it's due to it being nearly universally proven that it had to be done. Shitloads of coupon users are folks who come to that restaurant one time ever and can't even afford that one time so they fuck the servers over with bad tips since that's one aspect of the final cost they can control. You can thank assholes like that for auto-gratuity. Big groups (depending on the restaurant, I'd use "big" to describe parties of anywhere from 6-10+ people) are almost always a bitch to deal with: They never show up all at the same time if the group in question is 8 or more which means you'll end up wasting numerous extra trips to their table every couple minutes until all the cattle have settled into the pen. They are rude as fuck when you're trying to initially greet the table/go over the specials/take the drink order. Seriously they're like cunty children in that no one feels an atom of personal responsibility to shut the fuck up for the 2 minutes (max) it would take to mention a couple specials and have less than a dozen people tell you what they wanna drink. They frequently go overboard with check splitting but wanna play musical chairs so you can't even remember who had what by the time the meal's over because it's a severe bitch to remember matching several different faces to whatever seat number or tab name you have 'em rung in as while you're also serving as many as 5 or 6 other tables. For fuck's sake, is it that hard to pick a chair and stay in it for 45-60 minutes? They have the monkey see, monkey do mentality that if someone else in the party is making a mess then it's fine for them to do so as well. Seriously, big parties should be auto-gratuitied no less than 25%.
I take it you are a waiter of some sort? I used to work in foodservice, though it was more of a fast food place. Didn't deal with tipping, which was so very nice.
Yeah, I think we've discussed it once or twice on DTF. I hate doing it but until I complete my undergrad it's the best I can do unfortunately and I really hate it in case these posts weren't bitter enough to make that point clear.
As a recent graduate who finally got out of the shitty foodservice thing, keep at it. It is so fucking worth making money doing something you can enjoy
Totally. I loved working at a coffee shop where $500+ weeks were fairly common but politics kinda fucked that up. I'm literally way uglier than I otherwise would be due to job-related stress. I've noticed that I'm almost like a jubilant child when I'm working jobs that aren't tied to tips but unfortunately the quickest path to finishing up my degree involves returning to a burning building so to speak. I find drinking helps.
It has always been with a party of two. In America. Granted, it most often happens at hotel restaurants, but my wife and I have experienced it in a few "normal" restaurants, too. Frustrating as shit. If I want to leave a shitty tip, fuck my shitter, I will. Thank fuck I live in New Zealand, where the food is delicious, service is normally great and people don't bitch about big groups coming in to a restaurant to have a good time and spend some money.
What fucking difference does it make how much money a big group is spending if I'm not seeing any of it because they don't know what a proper tip is and they slow me down enough with their childish antics to also fuck up tips I'm trying to earn at other tables? Fuck 'em and fuck 'em hard and without lube either.
I tip 20% standard at restaurants, unless the service was shitty. That rarely happens to me though. If I'm at the bar, I tip $1 per drink.
at my local bar, i tip heavily, other bars dollar per drink is pretty standard. at restaurants i start at 15% and if they really did something, then 20. fuckin cabs, 2 bucks in a 15 dollar ride so they stop their whining. i hate cab shit, makes no sense, esp in nyc where they drive like shit and smell like shit.
25-30%, depending on how pleasant they are and if they don't bother me too much. For bars, I don't tip anything because I don't go to bars. Also a question for servers: Do you wait till the person takes a bite of food to ask if everything is okay?
If I notice then yes. I virtually never fail to ask a table if the food came out alright (I'm not gonna lie and say I never make mistakes) but sometimes I get back to the table before they've taken a bite. In those cases I usually just politely say something along the lines of "Oh, my bad. I didn't realize you hadn't had a bite yet." Then I'll return in a couple minutes to make sure it doesn't taste like my uncle's dick.
20% for a meal and drinks. One dollar per drink at the bar, unless I order more than 5 at once. If I order a round of 10 beers, I will tip like 5 bucks. It's not that hard to pop a top off a beer.
What I mean is, do you wait to ask right after they take a bite, so they can't respond because their mouth is full of food?
lmao, someone like that would get little to no tip from me. I hate servers that are extremely fake, or jump down your throat, literally.
I can honestly say I've never had a server literally jump down my throat. I would imagine that it would kill me or at least severely damage my esophagus.
Not sure why I typed "literally", should have been "figuratively". Oh well, still works, if they jumped down my throat I wouldn't tip them.
20% of the pretax amount is my standard restaurant tip. If they were pretty bad 15%. Once or twice in my life i left no tip due to horrible service and attitude. At order from the counter places i either round up to the next dollar or add a buck, but omly at small places, not subway or shit. I did tip whataburger drive thru five bucks once cuz i was happy. At bars typically 1-2$ depending on the number of drinks, or 10% if i started a tab cuz ittakes all of 30 seconds to make a drink, and they have a much higher turnover compared to restaurants. I pay the barber 22 whereas they charge 18. A bit high for the kind of place but its not hard to tip an extra buck a month to someone who cuts my hair and create some goodwill... He seems to appreciate it.
