That last paragraph certainly is clueless, isn’t it?

Side note: while it’s important to treat service workers as people because it’s just terrible not to, there are material benefits as well. Some extra dish may appear with the excuse of “We’ve just added it to our menu” or “We have too many desserts”. Cashiers at stores may ring up a coupon you didn’t actually have, just because you assure them that you’re not going to be cranky about the wait in line.
And of course there’s the simple benefit that it is much more fun to smile and say something nice and get smiles back than to be a jerk.

We receive free drinks (non-alcoholic) on a regular basis at a couple of places because our rep for good tipping, as well as a dessert on occasion, as well as a coupon off as you said. I don’t see why these cheapskates cannot understand that a little common sense and kindness go a long way, particularly having just prayed, sang and glad-handed in a house of worship. It says a lot, doesn’t it?

The class of people whose only dining experience is going to be the low-cost family restaurants usually resorted to on a Sunday afternoon after church aren’t going to be the crowd of people who’s particularly conscious or understanding that tipping is not optional: it’s a means of paying the salary of the wait staff. It’s a socio-economic class that is not prosperous enough to go out to eat regularly, but middle-class enough to be obsessed with both demands that one be “served” and extreme thrift while not actually ever having to resort to entering the food-service industry to support oneself (so there’s no possibility of the empathy factor involved).

Raging Server is also an interesting blog of a waiter who works in a low-cost family dining restaurant in a mall and generally reserves his ire for poor tipping for (a) unsupervised teenagers and (b) demanding low-class types. Of course, his restaurant caters to a very limited group of people. More wide-reaching surveys find bad tippers in all classes.

As far as those fake-tip-tracts, I’ve always wanted to find one for myself, but I can’t find them being sold online or on Ebay. Anyone know where these come from?

Beck’s point here:

rather than being a decent human being the following is a list of some commonly acceptable substitutes:

Going to church
Worship
Praying
Spiritual disciplines (e.g., fasting)
Bible study
Voting Republican
Going on spiritual retreats
Reading religious books
Arguing with evolutionists
Sending your child to a Christian school or providing education at home
Using religious language
Avoiding R-rated movies
Not reading Harry Potter.

is basically a good summary of the sort of thing that the blog Stuff Christian Culture Likes makes fun of—a lot of cultural behaviors are being selected for, and the interest in promoting those cultural behaviors has taken the place of “being a good person”.

Not that they get tips or anything, or that this is their reasoning (they’re one of those “Christian” businesses), but the Chick-Fil-A people may have been smart to close down on Sundays.

My absolute, iron-clad rule for tipping in a restaurant is 20% or more if someone was super-nice, threw in a freebie, or what-have-you. It just the right thing to do. I’ve never had bad service in my life, but if one day that happens, I’ll still tip. Everyone can have a bad day. The way that people take out all their frustration with a restaurant on the wait staff is appalling. You always come across people who talk about not having tipped because the food wasn’t great, or the host didn’t sit them within 10 seconds. How is that the waiter’s fault?

But I do think that tipping is absolutely a class issue - it’s all about who eats and where. And I think some of it is due to ignorance as well. Most people don’t know that outside of California wait staff is specifically exempted from being covered by minimum wage laws in most states. Tipping isn’t just a way to show appreciation for good service, it’s how people who wait tables make their living. I don’t think most people are aware of that. So while I’m always too willing to believe that all godbags are inherently assholes, I think there are other factors at play as well.

First I have to admit that I worked as a waitress for 2 nights.  I was no good at it and I hated it.  When I was a poor college student, I only tipped 15%.  Now that I am a working professional, I typically round up the bill and go 20%.  I know full well waiters and waitresses live off their tips.  The only waitress I never left a tip for was one who took my order then simply walked out of the restaurant never to be seen again.  I tipped her replacement the typical 20%.

On one hand, sure, slam dunk.

On the other, holy fucking shit, is this the worst of the christianist sins?  Bad tipping.  Give me a fucking break.  These people are hell bent in converting the world or killing those in their way.  Whether it’s reproduction and contraception policy (or a myriad other policies) or the millions they rake off ignorant masses who think they are “spreading god’s word” and instead gilding the toilets of the various bishops, deacons, ministers and other various tv personalities they find so charismatic.

The sad part is, they’re not just a danger to themselves, they’re a danger to the rest of us.

Is there anyplace in the blogosphere where people come out against tipping? Every time the tipping issue comes up, people fall all over themselves to declare themselves to be good tippers. I never see the anti-tipping contingent standing up for themselves, either in a blog post of its own or in the comments. But obviously they have to be somewhere, or there wouldn’t be anyone for waiters to complain about.

I disagree on the class issue.  I think that plays into some cases but I’ve seen this too many time personally and heard and read of too many instances where well-heeled heels are just stupidly stingy as their lower class doppelgangers.

I’m a ridiculously high tipper—I can never leave less than $10, even if the bill only comes to $16.  That said, I’m always a little leery of these “[insert demographic] are bad tippers” rants because they so often target Not Us.  Women, tourists (furriners!), French-Canadians, you name it, I’ve heard it.  They almost never go after their own demo.  That makes me suspect them a bit.

“So while I’m always too willing to believe that all godbags are inherently assholes, I think there are other factors at play as well.”

Im willing to believe this, 2 adults and 4 kids going to low budget family restaurant after church may tip low because they don’t have that much disposable cash, or are distracted by kids arguing, etc

but the fake money with bible quotes on it kinda sinks my willingness to give the benefit of doubt to the church crowd

yeah, i know, dont tar with a broad brush and all that, but even a handfull of that type of behavior is too much

Oh, I’m against the tipping culture, Tyro.  Pay the damned wait-staff a decent effing wage so they don’t have to kowtow unreasonably to unpleasant patrons to make the rent.  I hate the whole structure—it goes to dignity.  But until things change, empathetic people will keep paying 20-40% more for their bill and making excuses for “bad day” servers because they’re paid too little for their work.  Yes, 20-40%; as someone said above, 20% is pretty much the bare min, so when someone’s extra good at their job, or you’re in a regular haunt you love, you feel compelled to add more.

How could such a confusion have occurred? How did we end up going so wrong?

End up going so wrong!? AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!! Wackaloon religious fuckwits started egregiously, irredeemably, and despicably wrong and have kept it up for millennia. The wonder is that these fucking cockwads ever get anything right!

I was a waitress in Santa Fe in 1998-2000. I didn’t smoke at the time. The only non-smoking laws Santa Fe had at the time involved places like hospitals and one that required restaurants to have a non-smoking section. When they enacted a law to prohibit smoking in all restaurants, I and my coworkers were pissed. Smokers are good tippers. They stay for coffee and dessert and will tip well even if all they had was a cup of coffee. While non-smokers may be decent to good tippers generally they don’t even compare to smokers. Especially when non-smokers come in for a cup of coffee and get free refills for 2 or more hours where they are attended to every 5-10 minutes and then tip 15% on a $1.50. Smokers never did that to me. I lost over $150 of tips a week after that law. I had to find another job as did many of my coworkers.

the church ladies left him what looked like a $20 bill, but it was a mockup of one that if you unfolded it gave their church address and had scripture on it.

In poker they call this slow-rolling, and it’s a pretty unambiguous fuck you. I can only surmise that either these people never go to the same restaurant twice, or they actually want the staff pissing in their food.

Reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where Alice is dating a psychopath:

Psychopath: Tipping is optional so I never do it.
Alice: Um…have you eaten here before?
Server (flingling loaf at psychopath’s head): Here’s your bread.

20% minimum?  You have got to be kidding me.  Then again,  I was shocked when I moved from the Northwest to the Northeast and $15% was considered a typical gratuity.  No, not 20-40%.  That’s ridiculous.

Then again, servers in my native Oregon don’t get a special reduced minimum wage - or, at least, they didn’t used to.

All the same, I tip for service and I tip for hassle.  If a server goes above and beyond, that gets up to 30% or more.  When I used to dine with small, messy children, we were always happily welcomed back because we tipped generously for the sake of those tasked with cleaning up the mess.

Take forever to get me the bill when I have asked twice and need to leave ... the tipometer declines.  I won’t leave a zero tip or a tip under 10% unless something really odd is going down, though.  Like when our assigned watron ignored us, argued with us about a promotional item, and then got in a screaming fight with another waiter who was taking up the slack because he was “stealing her tips”.

Shakahi, are you aware that there is a 50% reduction in most cardiac deaths and ER visits when those bar and restaurant laws go into effect?

That’s why they happen.  Oh, and so asthmatics like me can actually eat a meal out now and again.

Sorry if that doesn’t fit in your calculus.  That and the fact that you were exposed to excessive toxic hazards when you worked there.

I waited tables in college at an upscalish sports bar slash steakhouse that was attached to an Embassy Suites in Scottsdale, AZ. So mostly we got “snowbirds” - older people escaping some wintery climate for some dry heat, golf, and Native American souvenirs - and the local family types. We also got a sprinkling of Eurotrash, business travelers, and lower-end sports celebrities. Don Amiche and Harry Carey were semi-regulars. I also served at a Mexican restaurant in Tempe and at a Bennigan’s in Great Neck NY. The local family post-church crowds were pretty bad. They had very high expectations and made ridiculous demands on your time and attention. If you weren’t at their side the instant they thought of something they needed - which was about every 30 seconds because they were need machines - it was an excuse to dock your tip. If they had to wait 90 seconds for one of a gazillion iced tea refills, you could expect to be severely scowled at and given a 10% gratuity at best.

The biggest cheapskate pricks though, and this carries on to this day as I’ve heard from server friends in recent years, are the Eurotrash tourists. In European restaurants, gratuity is included in the bill, and more often than not the Eurotrash pretend to think this is the case when they go out to restaurants in the U.S. So they’ll order a couple hundred dollars worth of steaks and booze, you’ll be stoked you got a drinking smoking table (drinking smokers are generally the best tippers) and maybe you’ll be able to actually fill your gas tank for once, and then they’ll leave you with like 37 cents from rounding up to the nearest dollar on their checks. Fucking assholes.

FWIW, I tip 15-20% unless the service is egregiously bad.

When I was waiting tables, my co-workers would stereotype African-Americans as the worst tippers but they were wrong; it was the Europeans. I remember one of the more experienced waiters explained that in Europe the tip was included in the service. I’m not sure if that’s still true.

The absolute nadir of my brief waiting career was when about 100 Scientologists came into the place. They were all wearing the uniform and they were demanding, uppity, obnoxious in the extreme and in many, many cases tipped no more than a dollar per check, regardless of the amount of the bill.

Re Christians and Scientologists:
Should we not factor in that most of their disposable income is siphoned out of them by their religious organizations?

Tyro @9 said:

Is there anyplace in the blogosphere where people come out against tipping?

You’ll get some of it on Digg when articles on the subject come up, though most of those comments get downrated pretty quickly, in my experience. Also, my parents frequent cruise line message boards, and since there are mandatory gratuities for some of the staff on a lot of cruise lines, the subject comes up now and again. There are invariably people who go on about how they never tip anywhere because they’re already paying the bill, aren’t they? And if the staff want more, they should just get better jobs. My parents say those threads go downhill pretty quickly.

I spent a summer as a waitress—hated it and was pretty terrible—and I never tip below 20% anymore except for extraordinarily terrible service. I remember the awful pay and the kinds of bullshit my fellow servers and I had to tolerate with a smile. The leers and just-subtle-enough-that-they-couldn’t-get-called-on-it sexual comments. The people who blamed me for everything from other patrons’ noise to ‘unfair’ prices. The family that flatly refused to do anything about their child standing on a chair and throwing things.

I remember, too, though, the customers who were incredibly generous. The large party that tipped me 70% on a $250 bill in cash because it was my last day and I stayed upbeat through the one person sending back her steak 3 times because, no, seriously, she wanted it more burned than that, and they didn’t even wait around for me to notice how much they’d left. Or the family with the fussy small children who I noticed from afar scrounging though all of their pockets and bags to leave me a 40% tip because their baby had spilled a drink and a bowl of dipping sauce, but had gotten a free birthday cupcake anyway.

Luckily, the restaurant had just opened when I worked there, and hadn’t yet been discovered by the Sunday morning church crowd. Only a handful of people ever showed up on Sunday mornings. If the servers had been paid a reasonable wage, it wouldn’t have been financially viable to open Sunday mornings. There were a couple of habit-wearing nuns who came in on Wednesday afternoons. Very polite, but not great tippers. Of course, they were probably living on practically nothing. It’s not the nuns who make money in the RCC.

I don’t have a solid opinion about which group tips worst, but from my time waiting tables I believe that the best tippers are other servers who have just gotten off work.  I worked at a 24 hour chain restaurant and tables of servers from other restaurants would routinely double my take home.

Tyro,
I don’t know about the blogosphere, but at least twice a year, usually at the beginning of the semester, some budding Neil Boortz or Debbie Schussler writes an asshole-ish column in the UGA paper about tipping. Invariably, it’s recycled Reservoir Dogs dialogue about how s/he ONLY tips if s/he gets “exceptional service” at local restaurants and bars and how if bartenders and waitrons don’t like it, they can get a real job. The column’s run with the writer’s picture, so for at least the rest of that semester, that particular crank is eating cold food and drinking water-down drinks.

I work in the service industry as a prep cook*, so I really don’t deal with customers directly, but since most of my friends are bartenders, cook or servers (hey, I’m a musician). Our church crowd actually tips pretty well, but we get the same bunch week in, week out. There’s a big Methodist convention that comes to Athens every year, and they tip really well and are uniformly awesome. Bikers for Jesus leave the fake $20 things and Chick tracts. Mostly, we like the Chick tracks, but a fake sawbuck as likely as not will have your waitron following you for a block telling everyone what a cheap hypocrite you are.

Teenagers are horrible tippers, as are new freshmen. A lot of UGA kids come in from Atlanta and Augusta suburbs, and a disturbing number of them seem to have no idea whatsoever how the real world actually works. Generally, though, by their second semester, they’ve picked up on a couple things and tip better. And to cast a horrific and embarrassing wide net, it seems the smaller the town a group comes from, the bigger the headache they are and the smaller the tip. Friend of mine got a table of two families with nine yowlin’ kids between ‘em from somewhere in South Hell, Georgia, and they rounded a $60.97 up to $65. Upset my friend so much the manager wound up sending her home.

Large groups of teenagers wearing similar looking clothes, all part of one group or function, and usually accompanied by one, maybe two adults are dicey options. Gymnast and soccer groups tip well and most of the rest you never can tell. The Future Business Leaders of America, however, deserve special notice for the smart-asses they bring. Not only will they not tip unless there’s “exceptional service”, they’ll try to argue their way out of paying for the meal they’ve already eaten by using poorly understood business and economic theory. My boss just tells ‘em if they don’t pay, he’s calling the cops and that generally trumps any argument.

Drag queens are awesome tippers, especially in large groups. People make bank during Boybutante. Athens has a lot of events like AthFest and the Human Rights Festival that are held right in the middle of Downtown, and for some reason, the attendees are pretty friendly with gratuities. And as obnoxious and overwhelming as Dawg fans can be, they do take care of us, as do most of the visitors. Only time I ever heard of a school being uniformly stingy when they came to town was Alabama three years back. No idea why.

*Moving to New Orleans at the end of November, so if you know anyone looking for a reliable guy, help a poor boy out.

I’ve left tips ranging from 0% to 40%, depending on the service.  It takes more effort to get a zero than a forty, but some places earn it.

What’s much needed in this country is for people to be more open about what they make, since I’d love to support a restaurant that paid its staff a decent wage.  I like Costco for that reason, feel not so good about not liking the fries at In-n-Out, tend to avoid chains as much as possible, but am not at all convinced that my favorite local restaurants and stores are any better to their employees than the giant corporate behemoths.

Ms Kate, you should read Waiter Rant and other articles by a certain type of server (or speak to folks who do the job)—some (by no means all) consider 15% to be miser territory even if the patron spends a quick 90 minutes over three courses + booze.  I blame tipping culture for creating entitled monsters on both sides of the menu.  Wait staff need a better wage and to not have to dance like show-dogs for their supper (courtesy shouldn’t have to cost).  And patrons who aren’t made of money should be able to eat out once in a while and not have to throw 25% on top of their bill in order to be thought of well by the person who waited on them.  It’s asking a lot of everyone, IMO.

Okay, Thorn.  Millions of folks who don’t have that extra five or ten percent.  They stay at home.  The restaurants close.  Which is better?  That’s easy, Ranylt notes it:
“Wait staff need a better wage and to not have to dance like show-dogs for their supper..”

One must also differentiate between America and other areas.  In Canada (were Ranylt and I and others here live) I’d argue that 20% isn’t necessarily so important.  I’d argue for 10 or 15%.  Here the base wages are higher for servers and they get free medical care, so the economic need is that much lower on a sliding scale.

Ranylt:
Tipping isn’t the only thing to blame.  The chain restaurant I worked for made up claim 15% of our sales as tips, whether we had made 15% or not.  So, if I was stiffed by a table with a $100 bill, in addition to wasting my time they also cost me a little over $1 out of my pocket.  At $2.13/hr and with absolutely no control over shifts or tables or how well the food is cooked and how annoying the restaurant management is forcing us to be, it’s hard to not get upset about that dollar.

Which is to say, like every other problem there are a lot of things which can be blamed.

The wait staff does not set the prices AND the wait staff is paid abysmally.  If you can’t afford to eat at a particular restaurant and tip, you can’t afford to eat at that restaurant.

I can afford, and know all too well what it’s like to serve; two reasons why I tip well (though I prefer the food in “cheap” mom-and-pop Asian restaurants to most things continental).  And while I don’t disagree with you, your logic is iffy—it’s same logic the anti-tippers use re. waiters who can’t afford to work in a restaurant if they can’t survive on wage+moderate or no tips.  I think we can agree that the system is b-u-s-t-e-d.  Or at least, I sure do.  I think it’s dog.

Ms Kate:

Shakahi, are you aware that there is a 50% reduction in most cardiac deaths and ER visits when those bar and restaurant laws go into effect?

Not disagreeing, since my husband is a musician who works in bars that are no longer smoky and therefore may live longer because of it, but…50% reduction in cardiac deaths in and ER visits to the bars and restaurants?  50% reduction in cardiac deaths and ER visits by bar staff?  50% reduction in all cardiac deaths and ER visits total in that area? 

I’d love to see the number in context, so I can use it.  I love going to a bar or restaurant and not coming home smelling like an ashtray.  I stay longer, because I can breathe.

Going to church, well, that is working on your relationship with God.

As a Christian-who-probably-isn’t-according-to-other-Christians-because-she-thinks-abortion-and-gay-marriage-should-be-legal, imo it’s more about working on the perception of fellow Christians, and making sure you’re godly through their eyes.

appear godly in their eyes, rather

What about self-serve buffets?  I went to a breakfast buffet with about 10 friends, and we got our own food.  A waitress came by and pored 2 or 3 coffees, the rest of us served ourselves juice or milk.

There was a discussion about what to leave for a tip.  We didn’t leave enough, since the waitress chased us out to the parking lot and threw the $10 at us, shouting “You need this more than I do!”

I’m still bemused by the incident. My inclination was to go and chat with the restaurant manager, but one of the guys in the group gave her more money.

The biggest cheapskate pricks though, and this carries on to this day as I’ve heard from server friends in recent years, are the Eurotrash tourists.

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich recounts how restaurant customers with foreign accents got their bills bumped up automatically, on the assumption they wouldn’t tip. Of course, some of them did tip, and they ended up really getting zinged. Hard to say where the justice lies, but I really wish restaurants would pay their servers a fair wage and be done with it.

Well, the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration puts out research reports on Blacks being bad tippers.

...waitress chased us out to the parking lot and threw the $10 at us, shouting “You need this more than I do!”

At this venerable (and now defunct) German restaurant in Chicago, one of the German waiters, renowned for their rudeness, used that line on a diner who had left what he deemed an inadequate tip. The guy replied, “My father should have shot you in Germany when he had the chance.” (This took place some time ago.)

Nobody tips in Australia unless the service is exceptional, because restaurants have to pay people a decent award wage. Restaurants who want the best staff often pay above this amount. It hurts my union steward heart to hear how the human dignity of wait-staff is compromised by having to suck up to people just to make a living wage. Crikey!

Re Christians and Scientologists:

Should we not factor in that most of their disposable income is siphoned out of them by their religious organizations?

Seeker, if they donate their money to nut cults or hate groups masking as religion, that’s their choice. It doesn’t give them an excuse to be cheap, obnoxious assholes. If they need more money, they can pick another religion, one that doesn’t mandate 10% or more of their income, or they can spare people in the service industry their shitty behavior and save money by eating at home.

Bellacoker, the IRS has the authority to add 15% in “tips” to a waitperson’s annual wage income, and then tax it. To cover that, restaurants do the same thing. So in the end, the waitstaff are paying taxes on 15% tips whether they got it or not. So I ALWAYS leave at least 20%.

This morning Beloved and I went out for hangover food after a tequila excursion gone wrong, and she wanted a cheeseburger at 9:30 am. The restaurant was making loco moco, so they had hamburger available, but the cooks didn’t want to do it. We were seated right by the kitchen, and I overheard the waitress saying, “Come on, please, they look like hell. Just make a cheeseburger!” Beloved got her cheeseburger, I got my fried rice and eggs and coffee, we got a $27 total bill, and the waitress got a $20 tip.

I’ve gotten those bloody tracts disguised as a $20 bill… and I was stiffed regularly by the after-church crowd, both at a low-end buffet style restaurant/steakhouse and at the Crimson Crustacean. At the low end place people were generally just classless, leaving messes and being cheap… at the Seafood Lover place the after-church crowd were generally looking down on us awful people who WORK on Sunday instead of attending church. Never mind that if they weren’t coming in we wouldn’t BE working every Sunday.

Another lovely group of churchgoers would go to my now ex-husband’s restaurant every Wednesday after evening church. They would call ahead to give a heads-up, but stay late even to after closing and never, ever tipped. Ever.

I don’t know why Xian charity doesn’t seem to extend to people in the service industry.

“the IRS has the authority to add 15% in “tips” to a waitperson’s annual wage income, and then tax it”

Thank Ronald Reagan for that

My first “real job” upon moving out and getting my own place was waitressing, in a pub; it was, in many ways, the job from hell. I was under twenty one and allowed to work in a bar on a technicality, pretty much a recipe for disaster.

I have to say, though, for all I would not work there again even if they did pay me the agreed upon wage, it gave me a lot more respect and consideration for waitstaff. I grew up very privileged, didn’t have to work a day in my life until I moved out, yadda. Waitressing for me was a very serious reality call, and while I never refused to tip or was rude to the people bringing me my food before, now I am careful to tip at least fifteen percent, with a baseline closer to twenty, and I try to be so much more understanding when I can see things are slammed.

...Side note, the worst table I ever had was a family, there for Sunday brunch. They were rude, they were demanding, one woman even grabbed my shirt to get my attention while I was serving the table next to them. After close to two hours of them being horrific, I was expecting a good tip, especially given the bill neared $120. They left me a little over a dollar. I actually cried, I was so frustrated.

Pay the damned wait-staff a decent effing wage so they don’t have to kowtow unreasonably to unpleasant patrons to make the rent

That’s what I really hate about tipping, especially if I’m not 100 percent sure whether I should tip or not.  I feel like if I tip the doorman, I’m effectively saying, “Thanks for hailing a cab for me.  Here’s a dollar, peasant.”  The issue of $2.13/hour aside (with the increases in federal minimum wage, it’s now $3.25, FYI), the defense of tipping boils down to:  since it’s a service, you’re obligated to pay something a little extra since the person is debasing him/herself for you.  Well, I feel the opposite.  I feel like it debases the person to tip them.  Whenever I can, I try to tip discreetly just for that reason, and I never tip at a place where tipping is “rewarded” with extra attention.  (Speaking of which, I really hate Cold Stone Creamery.)

“What about self-serve buffets?  I went to a breakfast buffet with about 10 friends, and we got our own food.  A waitress came by and pored 2 or 3 coffees, the rest of us served ourselves juice or milk.”

I still tip, even if they dont bring your food to you, theyre still “serving” you by bussing the table

the IRS has the authority to add 15% in “tips” to a waitperson’s annual wage income, and then tax it

I believe it’s technically 11 percent.  Although waiters often have to pool their tips and share it with other employees in the restaurant, which really underscores the pointlessness of the whole exercise.  You’re not paying to get better service from the waiters; you’re paying it to subsidize the restaurant owners’ refusal to pay a living wage (and the pretense that their prices are 15-20 percent cheaper than they really are/should be).

“[insert demographic] are bad tippers”

Pretty much any demographic you put in there will be correct.  We were halfway between a church and a synagogue, and it turns out both Christians and Jews who have just left a religious ceremony are bad tippers.  Young couples on a date?  Bad tippers.  The elderly couple who rolled up in a fancy convertible but dress like hobos?  You bet they were bad tippers.  People who try to combine coupons?  They will not be tipping.  Families with small kids?  Maybe OK tippers, but the tip will be inversely proportional to the amount of crap their children manage to grind into the carpet.  I also learned not to work in a place where the “X of the month” (where X is the day welfare benefits are distributed) is an ominous time, because that not only brings out bad tippers, but also outright scammers.  We got a busload of army people once, and they tipped well.  My most memorable bad tip was when someone left $5 on a $100 bill, then when I came back with their receipt decided to have another beer and took $4 from the tip on the table to pay for it.  That actually cost me money after I was done tipping out the bar that evening.

The restaurant that I worked at that had a salad bar was awful, too.  You had to police that thing, and of course charging people for extra salad bar when one person ordered it and there are four plates of salad on the table at one time came right out of your tip. 

Now I don’t serve, but I do work and frequently eat out with a whole passel of foreigners, and yes, that stereotype rings true more often than not.  They are often confused by the requirement, frequently are not aware about the special sub-minimum waiter wage, and even when they agree to do it, they do it just enough for us to stop yelling at them.  My boss has lived here 10+ years and still whines about tips.

Sure, anybody from any group can be a bad tipper, but when I was a bartender in NYC there were certain types who rarely if ever surprised you with a decent tip. Like the aforementioned Europeans playing dumb, suburban college kids, or NYC cops in a large group (slightly better as individuals).

As others have mentioned, most people really don’t know that servers in many states are paid much less than the minimum wage. They think tips are on top of a normal paycheck, even sophisticated restaurant patrons who eat out often. Of course, knowing the facts might only make them play dumb, too.

Among other things, waiting on people is a perverse form of anthropology. My favorite object lesson was when a large group left a decent tip and walked away only to have one of them return to steal most of it back.

I appreciate the sub-minimum wage, but I’m sometimes at a loss for an appropriate tip at certain establishments.  It seems like recently there are a lot of places where you order at a counter, pay up front, get your own drinks, may or may not bus your own table, but somebody brings you your food.  I don’t have any idea if those people are getting a real wage or not, but it seems odd to tip the same for the 45 seconds of work that they do as for full meal service.

After the election, Dr. Mrs. Glen Reynolds wrote something saying people should stiff their waiters on tips and tell ‘em it was because Obama won. But five’ll getcha ten that the Reynoldses never tip anyway.

So yeah, there are people out there who are hostile to the entire idea of tipping.

My mother worked as a bartender or waitress for more than forty years, in OR.  She noticed that people who came out to eat at Thxgiving or Xmas (but weren’t seen at other times) were poor tippers.

Some posters have noted the poor are bad tippers.  Maybe they are, because they don’t have much money to spare.  But a lot of rich people are bad tippers.  My FIL falls in that category.  He is an embarrassment to eat out with.  He can be demanding and difficult, and a poor tipper to boot.  SO the rest of us at the table make up for it.

What strikes me as generally bad is the underlying theme of most tip-related comments, which is that the practice of tipping essentially makes us all into performance review managers, or amateur judges.  Decent people are careful to make it clear that we try hard to be nice -unless the service is just terrible-, and tip super extra nicely if it’s good service!  And we’re still better than those meanies who are stingy about it.  But either way, we’ve pretty much absorbed the idea that as customers, we have the absolute right to pass judgment on those who serve us, and woe betide the poor soul who doesn’t meet our standards (even though most of us like to think we have pretty generous standards, right?)  There’s still that moment at the end of the meal, when you’re looking at the bill, and you have to stop and make that evaluation. 

To me, giving tips feels a lot like grading my students—an irritating, crappy, ineffective system that we’re all stuck with because it’s what we’re living with. 

Also, a tip for tipping for people with rusty arithmetical gears in their heads (noticed some talk about math issues on the earlier post Pam linked to, so I thought I’d offer it here)—on most bills you can get a reasonable tip by taking the first digit in the bill and doubling it.  So a bill for $52.84—> $10 tip.  Add a couple bucks if it seems low or you’re paid more than I am.  This method saves a little time and mental irritation if you’re not quick with figuring percentages.

Well, the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration puts out research reports on Blacks being bad tippers.

Does that research indicate that they might be getting bad service?  I’ve waited tables before, and definitely been on the receiving end of mistreatment and poor tips by all kinds of customers.  I also recall the disdain some of my fellow white servers had for certain ethnic groups, and the corresponding decline in the level of attentiveness and respect they showed to them.

On the other, holy fucking shit, is this the worst of the christianist sins?

If you read the original article Pam linked to, no, the article is not merely about tipping. The writer (who is Christian) was ranting about fellow Christians who think that all they have to do is read the Bible and pray, and outside the magic circle of the church, they’re allowed to be complete jackasses. He starts off with a confrontation he had with a student who apparently had been an asshole to many people in her life, and thought that the solution was to study and pray, rather than, you know, apologizing to people for having been an asshole.

You can tell he got it in one because there are a lot of willfully clueless comments from people saying things like “How can you tell us to stop praying?!?!?!!!!!” My favorite is the guy who carefully explains that since Christians are supposed to be apart from the world, it doesn’t really matter if they’re dicks, because that’s, like, in the world and stuff.

On tipping itself, sometimes that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ve been in restaurants where the server very clearly decided right off the bat that we were going to be bad tippers, therefore they just weren’t going to lift a goddamn finger on our behalf. It apparently didn’t occur to them that there was a teeny chance that they may have misjudged us, and so things like rolling their eyes at polite requests, snapping rudely or not bothering to get our orders right might in fact lead to the loss of a tip.

One of my favorite posts ever from Fred Clark at Slacktivist:  Charity, conclusions and cake

Yes, Virginia, there are some people out there who are actual Christians.  They’re few and far between, but they do exist.

Comment #55: DonnaDiva on 10/25 at 01:52 AM

Does that research indicate that they might be getting bad service?  I’ve waited tables before, and definitely been on the receiving end of mistreatment and poor tips by all kinds of customers.  I also recall the disdain some of my fellow white servers had for certain ethnic groups, and the corresponding decline in the level of attentiveness and respect they showed to them.

Indeed.  The worst restaurant experience I ever had was a waitress in a restaurant in Holland, MI, who went passive-aggressively out of her way to make our meal awful because we spoke Spanish.  Mostly just ignoring us, but the peak of it was when I managed to ask her for a refill on my ice water, and then she took 10 minutes to come back with a jug of what must have been hot water from the coffee machine, left to sit for a few minutes to cool it down a bit; the water literally melted the ice in my glass instantly.

This is not at all uncommon treatment if you speak Spanish in a diner-type place in the rural USA.  Once in a college trip to to the USA in Gainesville, Florida, a bunch of guys from our group ate at the hotel diner and were treated badly enough by the waitress that they left not tip.  She pocketed all the money they paid and called the cops on them, saying they left without paying.

Thankfully this doesn’t happen a lot over here in the Bay Area—but on the other hand, 45% of the residents of my county of age 5 or older are foreign-born anyway…

A couple of extra bucks on the tip is one of the biggest bargains left in life. Figure the tip at 15 or 20 percent, then throw in another $2 to $5. You might make your server’s day and you get to walk around feeling like a big shot.

I hate eating out with bad tippers. FWIW, the bad tippers amongst my acquaintances are either highly paid finance or engineering executives or a group of SAHM moms I know, both of whom have explained to me at length that servers don’t really work that hard and make too much money as it is. It blows my mind. I recently recommended a nice restaurant I go to to a colleague for a big team dinner. So after we’d been there for two hours, drinking and eating as a party of twenty, he paid - and tipped so little that the manager actually caught him before leaving and changed it to a mandatory 18% gratuity since our party was so large. It was very tense and now I am mortified to go back there. I think some people just enjoy stiffing servers as a sadistic little power play.

That said, I do think some tipping expectations are out of hand. The kid who delivers my $14 pizza always asks “need change?” when I hand him a twenty. It kind of annoys me. I’m not going to tip six bucks on top of the two dollar delivery charge I already paid for what started out as a $12 pizza, and he always seems disappointed when I just hand him two or three bucks.

Servers have lousy jobs; they deal with people who are hungry and who are often rushed; they deal with drunks and losers who flirt with them and are grabby; they take the hit for bad cooking, kitchen mixups, slow kitchens and the people with the noisy kid at the next table.

That said, no, I will not automatically leave 25%. In fact, I’ve gotten less and less generous with time. I lived from the ages of 20 to 40 in major cities, ate half or more of my meals in restaurants, and routinely tipped between 20 and 25%, even though I was a grad student with virtually no money.

Then I moved to the much smaller town that I now live in, and I can equivocally say that my tipping practices have changed, because eating in restaurants has become an oddly surreal experience. For instance, all of the following have actually happened to me in the last two years: 

1) if you bring me what you think I should eat instead of what I’ve ordered, and then will not take it away and bring me my actual order, I will not tip you.
2) if you sit down at my table for a chat, helping yourself to my chicken wings, I will not tip you. 
3) if you leave me sitting in an empty restaurant for 20 minutes before arriving to take my order and then reappear 45 minutes later with the wrong thing, or with the right thing, stone cold, I will not tip you.
4) if you seat me (a single woman) grudgingly in a nearly-empty room and bus your other tables into a tub that you leave on my table while you run around with the coffee pot, I will not tip you (thus confirming all your dark suspicions about single women being lousy tippers, but darling, what kind of an idiot do you take me for?).
5) if you are the bartender at a martini joint but do not know how to make either a kir royale, a mohito or a cosmo, I will tip you, but not, I am afraid, well.
6) if you pick up my 50.00 for a 25.00 tab and disappear into the recesses of the kitchen without a word, I WILL follow you around the room to get my change back. And THEN I will not tip you.
7) if you charge my card twice for the same meal, I will notice, and I will call the restaurant and get the charge reversed. And not only will I not tip you, I will be very rude when we meet again.

The first several times I visited the US, I had no notion of what adequate tipping consisted of. In the UK, waitstaff get paid regular wages and the tip is a bonus extra. So if you waited on me any time between 1995 and 2000, I stiffed you - though the only time I did it deliberately was once when the staff in a tiny and very gay San Francisco restaurant brought me half the breakfast I’d ordered, and half of that stone cold. Sorry about that. (I knew tipping was expected, but I didn’t realise that the waitstaff are paid on the presumption that they’ll get tipped at 15%: I’d tip at the nearest whole number between 10 and 15%.)

Getting online and hearing directly from US waitstaff: I got the picture. When I visit North America, while muttering about the tipping culture, I tip at 15% rounded up to the nearest dollar, 20% if the service has been excellent or if I’m the guest who’s paying the tip as my share of the cost of the meal.

But this thing about “Christians” leaving a $20 mockup bill with a quote from scripture and their church address: sounds ideal. Collect up those mockup bills, go to their church, and deliver them with a letter saying “you obviously need this more than we do”.

In fact, if the manager is on your side about this, how about stopping each “Christian” at the door from then on to ask “Are you from such-and-such church?” If they say “yes”, hand them one of those mockup bills, tell them they’re not welcome in this restaurant, and explain it’s because their church produces this fake money to stiff the waitstaff.

jrochest: Hear, hear.

if you pick up my 50.00 for a 25.00 tab and disappear into the recesses of the kitchen without a word, I WILL follow you around the room to get my change back. And THEN I will not tip you.

Ah, yes, “the tip game.” Nice way to resolve that.

Add to that: If you drop hints about me tipping you (as one waiter at a buffet who brought me one glass of water did), I won’t tip you. Even if you shout “HEY!” at me as I walk out the door, having left the exact change for the bill on the table and not a penny more.

Don’t even get me started on “tip jars” at counters. I’m bussing my own tray, and the staff is probably making at least minimum wage. Fuck the entitled hipsterlings who think they should get gratuities for just showing up at work, especially if they have to be pleasant to customers.

I hardly go out anymore because I can’t afford it. When I do, I tip 15-20% — hey, I’ve waited tables before, too. But if I’m paying for a nice meal and service, and your incompetence or arrogance or whatever ruins my evening, I’ve got no qualms about stiffing you.

Mythago:

My favorite is the guy who carefully explains that since Christians are supposed to be apart from the world, it doesn’t really matter if they’re dicks, because that’s, like, in the world and stuff.

Oh, this douchenozzle?

Our standard as Christians is not ethical behaviour as the world sees it. It’s not “being nice” or “being a decent human being”. Our marching orders come directly from scripture: that is our standard…don’t encourage people to walk according to what is acceptable in “the world”. What the world views as kindness, or virtue, or righteousness. Our standard is not this transient culture, but the living word of God.

Thanks for telling me up front, Adam, that “what the world views as kindness” isn’t important to you; i.e., that you’re a flaming bag of shit. I hope the waitstaff recognize you on your subsequent visits, and they all gather around your dish in the kitchen to each add a little something to it.

Well I have always tipped 20%.  In good restaurants where the bill is big.  In diners and chain restaurants I often tip more only because the bill is so small and it just works out that way.  But what’s interesting is that 20% used to be considered a good tipper, and this is not that long ago.  (I’m 41 to give you some idea)  Because 15% was considered routine and decent.  At least in the Northeast.  Now, 15% is considered borderline shitty and 20% is considered routine and decent.  Which means you have to move up to at least 25% in order to be considered a good tipper.  Where will it go from there?  It’s obvious.  Soon you’ll have to tip 30% to be considered a good tipper.

But me, I still tip 20%.  I think it’s fair.  Again if I’m in a Diner I’ll throw in a little more than that.  But when I get a 200 dollar bill, I leave a 40 dollar tip.

To me you have on one side the type of people (and no surprise to me they’re churchgoers) who don’t tip at all, and some here mentioned some con anti-tipping crusaders.  They’re assholes.

On the other side you have people who have gone way over the bend on the other side, with one person even claiming that 40% is reasonable.  They’re assholes too.

Pretty simple.

I think the non-tipping nadir of my entire career as a waitress was when these two music scensters who I knew peripherally came in to eat at the restaurant I worked at.  The other waitresses had told me before that they were terrible tippers, but I thought that maybe they’d gotten bad service or something.  Anyway, they got seated in my section and I gave them great service.  They had drinks, appetizers, entrees, dessert, and coffees, and the bill was pretty large, like about $98 (this was back in the mid-1990s.)  They left me ONE DOLLAR.

The next time they came in, I had a really quiet talk with them.  I asked them if they were dissatisfied with the service the last time they came in, and they said, “No, the service was great!” So I asked why they had left a 1% tip.  They said that they *always* leave a $1 tip, no matter what the bill was!

I explained about how wait staff (at that time) got taxed on 8% of our sales, so leaving a tip that small could actually cause the server to lose money on their table.  They seemed properly apologetic about it, but then after they left, I got pulled over by the manager and screamed at for “embarrassing the customers in front of everyone” and got written up.  Those fuckheads had ratted me out, and made it sound like I’d stood there screaming at them.

I ended up quitting that job a few nights later.  The next time I ran into the woman who’d ratted me out on the street, I gave her a piece of my mind, at volume.  You want to see what it’s like to have me standing there screaming at you in front of everyone, for real?  Well you got it, babe.  Fucking jerk.

It’s not just tipping.

I’ve also noticed the behavior in just shopping. Shopping on Sunday afternoon, seeing people in their “Sunday Best”, the entitlement runs deep. What the guy at the bottom of the OP says is pretty much correct, but where he’s wrong is that he doesn’t acknowledge that this behavior is in the core DNA of certain types of belief systems (especially Christian Evangelical).

The idea that the strength of your faith, as measured by certain elements, is a much more important factor to your essential “goodness” than how you act. Faith over works. That’s a core concept of evangelical belief.

And “faith” is measured by going to church, and your stances on the “core” issues. Abortion, homosexuality, evolution, etc. I.E. issues where they personally don’t have to sacrifice over. Treating people with dignity and respect…nope. That doesn’t make you a good person.

Oh, and no offense to those in recovery, but this one huge group of AA folk would come in unpredictably, usually Sundays after their meeting (is what I’m assuming) but would never call ahead to let us know that they were coming.  They would shove a bunch of tables together right in the middle of aisles, blocking traffic patterns, would order minimal amount of food and would demand massive amounts of coffee refills.  They would camp out there for HOURS, during one of our busiest times, ordering next to nothing and demanding refill after refill of coffee.  And of *course* they tipped horribly.  Everyone would groan when we’d see them coming, and would draw straws to see who would get them in their section.  It was guaranteed that you’d make much less in tips that day if you got saddled with that crew.

This comparison to evangelical christianity’s emphasis on faith over action makes me grateful for that part of my Catholic education.  While other things about it were terrible it at least thoroughly ingrained into me the notion that if you’re a shit to your fellow humans then you’re NOT a good christian, wheatever you tell yourself.

I waited tables for about ten years at a chain restaurant known for their cheesy biscuits. My experience, and that of my coworkers, was that Sunday morning tips were effected less by whether the customers had been at church and more by how long they had been at church.

Tips from parties that came in between 11 and 11:30 tended to actually be pretty great, those from the 12-12:30 parties were generally below average and often included the fake Jesus bills, and after 1:00 we were usually just wasting our time.

Since the length of church services seems to be inversely proportional to the average income of their congregations, this backs up my general observation that the greatest single predictor of the size of a tip is apparent socioeconomic status. This is more a probability than an essential characteristic of members of any group, though, so it pays off to give the best service possible to everyone. You never know when you’re dealing with an outlier, after all.

SES aside, the elderly and the young were often lousy tippers. For the former, I suspect they tip based on what was appropriate 20 or 30 years ago; for the latter, I reckon they haven’t been fully socialized into tipping culture yet. I think most of our European customers must have gotten the memo about how to tip in the US, but people who went out of their way to identify themselves as Canadian were invariably horrible tippers. White newscasters usually tipped poorly, too, but they seemed to believe it was honor enough for us just to serve them. The worst tippers of all, oddly, tended to be people who ordered 1000 Island salad dressing.

(The best tippers? Groups of Japanese businesspeople, black newscasters, and people who ordered blue cheese dressing.)

“but people who went out of their way to identify themselves as Canadian were invariably horrible tippers”

Okay, this made me laugh and may be true.  (We’re always patting ourselves on our own back for how nice we are, even in cases where it isn’t so.)  And it may be that those Canadians who are all eager to let you know that they’re Canadian may be less nice than those of us who don’t make a fuss over it in restaurants.  But I do point out something.  Take Ontario, for example:
http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/guide/guide_4.html

The wait staff minimum wage ($7.83US)  is within a buck and a half of the regular wage ($9.01US).  Most Canadians simply don’t know how exploitative your wage laws for wait staff are.  (I didn’t, until this thread.  Then again, a 15% tip brings somebody up to minimum wage, even here.  Hmmmm….) 

I’d also note that on a restaurant tab in Ontario you see three taxes added on at the bottom of your bill: PST, GST and, if applicable, a liquor tax.  I wouldn’t be a bit surprised that if wait staff lost out on tips because people reacted negatively to seeing another 13 to 18% put on their bill before they’ve pulled their wallets out and found it difficult to add onto that.  Spending money is often a visceral rather than rational activity, so that sense of “shit, I’ve already been screwed so…” probably plays a role no matter how unfair it is.

One last thing: Ontario law also permits you to pay students less, which I think is shitty.  I’m not fond of creating differing levels of wages for different levels of society.  (What makes paying a student less any more morally acceptable than paying a woman or Indian less?  Nothing, I feel.)

Spending money is often a visceral rather than rational activity, so that sense of “shit, I’ve already been screwed so…” probably plays a role no matter how unfair it is.

As anecdotal evidence of this I remember wait staff telling me that their tips dropped off when the GST started being added to their bills back in the ‘80s.  (Some found it useful, though, because the PST was 8% and the GST was 7% then so one knew exactly how much to pay for a 15% tip.)  Some waiters I talked to believed (but the waitresses didn’t, oddly enough) that the tip should be on the full, post-tax amount.

It is ironic to read this discussion on a feminist blog because my experience as a waiter was that although there were well known bad tippers (all of these are gross generalizations of course) including old people, black people, the aforementioned after church crowd, by far the most notorious were single women in business clothes.  This was particularly galling because the recipient was usually another woman trying to get by.  I guess sisterhood has its limitations.

My dad is really a decent guy, for a Republican, but whenever they take me, Ms. F, and the baby out to dinner, we always have to bring along an extra $10-15 for the tip, because Dad is stuck in the time zone where it’s 10% for good service.

The tricky part is sneaking the extra money in there, because Dad will pop a gasket if he sees we’re tipping extra. And he’s 82 now, and needs all the gaskets he can get.

I read somewhere of a church group that told the waitress up front that they would not be leaving a tip, as they didn’t believe that people should work on Sunday, oblivious to the fact that if they weren’t patronizing the restaurant, the staff wouldn’t have to work on Sunday.

Thursday, I had lunch at a little Italian place in Bellvue, PA.  Had perhaps the best hot chicken sub I’ve ever tasted.  I gushed to the staff how much I enjoyed it, paid the bill, and left for work.  Halfway to work I was mortified to realize I’d forgotten to leave a tip!  I’m headed back up there tomorrow afternoon, and on my to-do list is to find that waitress and give her a very generous tip, along with a sincere apology.

If you can’t afford to tip, don’t go out to eat. End of story.

Yes, Virginia, there are some people out there who are actual Christians.  They’re few and far between, but they do exist.

Ex., the owners of In-N-Out Burger in Cali. Evangelicals and they pay their burger flippers $10/hour. At least they practice what they preach.

The more I think about it the scummier it is.  Many, many, many people will never pay if they can get away with it.  (Hello downloading.)

Underpaying wait staff and expecting them to make it up in tips is a guarantee that they will be stiffed and stolen from on a regular basis.  Nobody says “take less” to any other delivery system (as it were), so why them?

I worked at a “family style” restaurant and we all used to try to avoid getting Sunday shifts because they were the worst, very busy and always small tips—if any at all.  It didn’t help that our boss would make us turn in our tips and would take anything that made our wage above minimum wage (I’m pretty sure this wasn’t legal).  He did not make up the wage if it was below.  The people who came after church would generally sit for 2-3 hours, getting constant water and coffee refills, and would leave change.

I also worked at a high-end hotel and would work the Sunday brunch and the tipping was poor then, too.  In the evenings I worked in the bar that had a combination of businessmen (yes, mostly men) and some college kids who were going to the nice bar on a lark.  Neither group tipped particularly well.  With the older men especially I would get bigger tips if I would giggle at their jokes or flirt.  If I wouldn’t they would often complain to the bartender who always had my back (including watering down drinks regularly.  and, uh, one urine-related incident).  I was in a pretty shit situation where I really needed money but didn’t like having to let creepy married men comment on my ass to get a decent tip.

In my experience there is some truth that single women tipped more poorly but, as someone commented upthread, it is hard to sort out cause and effect.  Most of the people I worked with assumed that women would be less likely to get big ticket items or drink and assumed a bad tip and they tended to spend less time on those tables.

Seeker:

Many, many, many people will never pay if they can get away with it.  (Hello downloading.)

OK, I realize you didn’t make a direct comparison here, but please don’t tell me that you intended any between underpaid and overworked waitstaff and a bloated, useless, entitled, politically corrupt organization like the MPAA or RIAA whose “product” is lowest-common-denominator crap.

Rumblelizard: Good on you for having the strength to walk out on that job — and for tearing a strip off that asshole who not only stiffed you but got you in trouble with your manager.

And, yeah, big surprise that <strike>Goose-</strike> Twelve-Steppers are as entitled and as stingy as fundies. Their entire belief system is based in evangelical xtianity anyway, no matter how much they deny it (“it’s just spiritual,” my ass).

Somewhere up there, Tyro wanted to know where gospel tipping tracts come from, and a whole bunch of people have never seen one. AFAIK, they’re printed by the churches they come from. And that opens up a whole aneurysm-inducing line of speculation - how does the congregation end up with the damn things, does the pastor hand them out at the door after the service?!

At any rate, after considerable googling, I found a website selling them. There you go, now you’ve seen one, even if it isn’t the best example of the species. There were several sites making and printing these things - the churches must be getting them from somewhere, I guess. Not sure if a print shop would be down with replicating legal tender.

Pennylane:

and, uh, one urine-related incident

:D

Oh, and agreed that, oftentimes, women tip poorly because the waiters/waitresses are too busy fawning over all-male parties, assuming the tips will be better there.

I first visited the US long after I’d spent enough time online to learn all about your country’s bizarre system of underpaying waitstaff and expecting the customers to make them up, while arguing ‘it keeps prices lower than if we paid them properly’, so I knew how important it was to tip and how much to tip. So, my first time in America, in NYC, I always tipped 20%, even if my drunken head had to spend ten minutes figuring out what 20% of the bill actually came to.

However, most British people tend not to realise how appalling/weird US labour practices are compared to our own and I’ve found many have absolutely no idea that the tipping system exists so the restaurant owners don’t have to pay the staff real wages. They think, like here, tips are a bonus and not something the staff rely on. There should probably be an announcement on the plane about this shit, y’know, like when you’re about the land in Thailand and they give you the ‘smuggle drugs here and we execute you’ film in five different languages.

I worked as a waitress in a chain restaurant during college. It was in a big tourist area and 75% of the clientele were foreign tourists. I learned fast there who tipped and who didn’t, who was horribly demanding and treated the waitstaff like shit and who was respectful. I actually preferred Americans over any other nationality because while they could be demanding as hell, sometimes ridiculously so (seriously, who goes to a pizza restuarant and orders a pizza crust with no toppings?) they were mostly polite and mostly left good tips. British people are far less demanding, tend NOT to leave tips and it’s pot luck how they treat you. Same with Germans. Australian women were freidnly and polite - Australian *men* tended to be condescending and prone to making awful sexist remarks to female staff. Italians however, ranked the lowest - male or female, they almost always tended to treat the waitstaff like dogshit on their shoe and either left no tip or an insulting one, like 2p or something. I had tables of Italians who would have had piss in their drinks if I could have arranged it.

Oh, and my personal horror story, also from the Crimson Crustacean:

Youth group from local church, 40 teens and 2 adults, all dying to tell me about how dedicated they are to promoting the works of Jesus. The usual apocalyptic mess, ordering cheaply, and staying for hours (seriously, we’d closed two hours before they decided to leave. I had the morning shift the next day, too). All of a sudden, all 42 of them announced that they each wanted their own private separate bill of just their stuff, and they all got up and started running around. In the confusion, half of them skipped out on the bill. The rest, when their tips were added up, managed to leave $1.75. Manager made me pay for the ones that’d skipped (yes, this IS illegal, but the computer system made it possible for him to get away with it), so I ended up working a double for NO PAY.

Got even though. Saw them all out in the parking lot doing weird shit like standing on pickup truck running boards while the truck was being driven around, and got the cops to come out, because OMG SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN THEY MIGHT GET HURT. Then a whole lot more cops came out and many of their vehicles ended up staying overnight.

Nobody in Particular:
I made one point only, and provided two examples.  The fact that they are so much unalike shows the near-universality of the point.

Oh, and agreed that, oftentimes, women tip poorly because the waiters/waitresses are too busy fawning over all-male parties, assuming the tips will be better there.

I’ve definitely experienced that. I barely ever eat out alone these days apart from the odd lunchtime sandwich, but when I did, yes, I have often experienced female waitstaff treating me with a slight contempt while male ones treated me much more respectfully. Guess who got the better tip - or who got tipped at ALL, if I was in a country where tipping is rarer? It’s not rocket science, is it?

Abra:
It appears that they believe that Jesus must always be surrounded by thieves.

This comparison to evangelical christianity’s emphasis on faith over action makes me grateful for that part of my Catholic education.  While other things about it were terrible it at least thoroughly ingrained into me the notion that if you’re a shit to your fellow humans then you’re NOT a good christian, wheatever you tell yourself.

Let me guess… Jesuits?

Me too… BA from Saint Louis University, after transferring from Loyola University-New Orleans… both Jesuit universities.

I was pretty well on my way fully out the door of the RCC by that time, but I did have a respect for the whole social justice emphasis they placed on their teaching and their mission.

Now, 15% is considered borderline shitty and 20% is considered routine and decent.  Which means you have to move up to at least 25% in order to be considered a good tipper.

Being of a similar age, I’m guessing it has something to do with the fact that the IRS now automatically holds 15% of servers’ wages, which means that tipping 15% really just gets them up to minimum wages.

And, yeah, big surprise that Goose- Twelve-Steppers are as entitled and as stingy as fundies. Their entire belief system is based in evangelical xtianity anyway, no matter how much they deny it (“it’s just spiritual,” my ass).

Not precisely.  Alcoholics Anonymous is based on a Christian group - the Oxford Group, which was founded by Lutheran Pastor Frank Buchman (who had his own shady connections, namely to Nazis) in the 1920s.  The Oxford Group wasn’t an evangelical Christian organization in the context that most think of current evangelical Christians.  I don’t know the name of the theological principle, but American evangelicals emphasize the importance of faith over charitable works - surrender to God is considered the singlemost important aspect of spiritual growth, and being a good and charitable person doesn’t really matter, so long as you are “Saved”.  In the case of the Oxford Groups (and AA), the opposite is taught… faith alone, without redemptive and charitable works, is meaningless.  To that extent, the Oxford Group is really closer to Catholicism than it is to Evangelicalism.

The founders of AA, Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, were both members of the Oxford Group, and Wilson based the 12 Steps of AA on the 4 spritual practices of the Oxford Groups.  But Wilson also went out of his way to remove the explicitly Christian definition of God when he formed AA.  This was done largely because many of the earliest members of AA were embittered formerly pious churchgoers who felt that their Christian concept of God had failed to help them cope with their alcoholism, and he believed that requiring that a higher power had to be understood specifically as Jesus would prevent active alcoholics from seeking AA as a solution.

That said, there most certainly is quite a bit of Christian influence in the program, but AA has never explicitly endorsed Christianity as the required or preferred way to experience spirituality.

Yeah, that last paragraph is interesting to me.  I don’t understand how anyone hasn’t noticed that some people in every tradition are basically nice, while some construct elaborate rationalizations for not being nice. 

So much of what people believe is thinking is just thinking theater.

“Oh, and agreed that, oftentimes, women tip poorly because the waiters/waitresses are too busy fawning over all-male parties, assuming the tips will be better there.

I’ve definitely experienced that. I barely ever eat out alone these days apart from the odd lunchtime sandwich, but when I did, yes, I have often experienced female waitstaff treating me with a slight contempt while male ones treated me much more respectfully. Guess who got the better tip - or who got tipped at ALL, if I was in a country where tipping is rarer? It’s not rocket science, is it?”

So do we assume then that the church crowd is tipping poorly because the servers are subtly treating them worse than the average?

I didn’t mean to make any larger point about AA or AA members in general.  I have several friends in recovery, and from having dined out with them and in a few cases actually worked with them at different restaurants, I know they tip well.  This was one particular group, and I seriously doubt that any of them ever waited tables in their lives, or they wouldn’t have been acting like such assbags.

I find that people who have waited on tables sometime in their lives are the best tippers, but beware: they know very well the difference between a server who is slammed/in the weeds and a server who is just giving lousy service.  If it’s the latter, don’t expect too much sympathy or a good tip.

Many people here have said that they were raised Christian including, I believe, Pam’s wife Kate. Did your families tip poorly at brunch after church? If so, why? If not, you must have known fellow church-goers from the congregation who were poor post-church tippers, right?

Former urban Catholic here.  My people didn’t do the whole post-Mass congregational brunch at Cracker Barrel thing - probably as much as anything because Cracker Barrel is a totally suburban restaurant.  But we did have bingo and those darn fish fries in the church basement.

God, that one website included bonus sexism with the female servers bitching about ‘bitches’, one of them even boasting about how all her friends were male. Yeah, sweetheart, other women can tell you’re just that kind of a….God, sexist words would be so satisfying here. I fucking hate the special snowflakes who are SO goddamned desperate to separate themselves from other women by sucking up to men. YOu’re not going to grown an honorary penis if you suck up to guys. God, that’s fuckin’ irritating.

I’d argue that it is hard to get good service when you are rude to the waitstaff, which is the other part of the accusation that this post is making about the post-church crowd.  A single person, male or female, would be hard pressed to make as much of a scene as a large family group.

DTG in STL:
Oddly enough, no Jesuits.  I went from Kindergarten to Grade 13 in Toronto area Catholic schools and I never had a priest, nun or deacon as a full-time teacher for any topic!.  That’s ‘70 to ‘84.  Kinda defies the odds.

I didn’t mean to make any larger point about AA or AA members in general.  I have several friends in recovery, and from having dined out with them and in a few cases actually worked with them at different restaurants, I know they tip well.  This was one particular group, and I seriously doubt that any of them ever waited tables in their lives, or they wouldn’t have been acting like such assbags.

Oh, I’d say it isn’t totally uncommon.  Not necessarily a universal thing, but when a big group of AA folks go somewhere for mainly just coffee, the tips are often gonna be shitty, and they are often gonna occupy that table for quite a long time.

My own personal policy when I’m going to a cheap diner for just coffee or coffee and dessert and I know I’m gonna be there for a while is to tip as if I had ordered an actual meal.  Which means if I just get coffee for $1.50, I’ll leave a $5, if a full meal would have cost me $10-12.  And I tip more if the restaurant is busy and I’m holding up the table and keeping the server from being able to seat more people.

The worst situation is when you go somewhere with a big group of people and everybody is paying for themselves, and a third of your crew decides to be ultra cheap on the tip, but nobody cops to being one of the cheapskates.  I’ve had a few experiences where I’ve personally made up for it by throwing in way more than I planned to make sure the server doesn’t get screwed.

That’s why they happen.  Oh, and so asthmatics like me can actually eat a meal out now and again.

Yes I know why they happened, Ms. Kate. I voted for the change. I never said it shouldn’t have happened, I said I was angry. But the subject was tipping not physical health. My observation was based solely on tipping. I’m quite aware of the health effects working in smoking environments have on service staff.  But there is a completely different set of negative health effects when your income is based on tips and you lose those tips; homelessness has serious health effects.  I do wish someone would have at least mentioned that we should expect to see a large loss in income so we could prepare. I know the writers/supporters of the law knew that would happen since Santa Fe was late comer to the smoking ban legislation. I guess they assumed, like you did, that we were too stupid to understand the need for smoking bans and all the consequences of the bans.

Ah, tipping stories.  How long have you got?!

I worked as a waitress, cocktail waitress, and bartender, both during my college years and for years afterwards, as there were no jobs to be had in the early-mid 80’s (thanks, Ronald Reagan).

The very worst tippers, by far, are people who are wealthy by inheritance.  Obviously there are exceptions, and obviously this is based solely on my experiences, but yeah, oh my God, are the trustafarians the worst tippers EVER.  On top of which, they are demanding, awkward, difficult little sods to deal with: someone is always allergic to something, nothing as-served is okay—there must be substitutions and revisions, always—and if one of the menfolk made the mistake of looking at me (or one of my body parts) for a bit too long, his date or spouse would become extra-nasty and bossy, speaking to me as though I were stupid.

And that’s another gripe I have: the way some restaurant patrons would assume that there is something less-than-noble about food and beverage service, and that this must be the only work you’re qualified for, ergo you are an imbecile.  I always started out being friendly, pleasant, and professional—honestly, I did—but as the meal wore on, it became ever more difficult to bite my tongue and not lay on the sarcasm with a stream of polysyllabic words they probably wouldn’t have understood anyway.  Ugh.

Then there was the sexual harrassment.  Christ, that went along with the territory when I was cocktailing, but it got to the point where I would despair at having my ass grabbed for the umpteenth time and gently grasp the guy’s hand and remove it, only to be told, Ha!  There goes YOUR tip, honey.

It’s a wonder there aren’t more waitress-inflicted injuries, though I guess we all needed the job, and needed the tips, or else we wouldn’t have put up with such abuse.

Second on my list of bad tippers?  Large-ish tables of upper-middle-class and wealthy mommies having a baby shower or birthday supper.  They would eat and drink four or five hundred dollars worth of goods, consume most of my shift and all of my section, and then throw a WHOLE TWENTY on the table and walk out, as though a note of such a large denomination was “Plenty, plenty, I tell you—she’s just a college girl, probably doing this for clothes money.” (Yes, someone really did say this out loud, in front of me, though in fairness, it probably didn’t occur to the women that I spoke more than one language.)

Also, now that you’ve got me going, language.  For the love of God, people, don’t assume that your waitress or bartender doesn’t understand *your* native tongue, and that as long as you don’t do it in English, it’s perfectly fine to pass comment on her body or social class or intelligence—or what you perceive to be the lack of her intelligence (because she’s a waitress)—simply because she doesn’t look like your idea of a person who would speak your language.

Probably because I worked at night all those years, I never had to deal with the after-church crowd.  I’m thinking I ought to be thanking God Himself for that small mercy. (Thank you, God.  Really.  I promise to keep overtipping until I die, at which point the other dead waitresses and bartenders and I will have the after-hours party to end all after-hours parties.)

And now I am in need of a very strong Sunday cocktail.  Garçon!  Garçon!  (Just kidding.)

I find that people who have waited on tables sometime in their lives are the best tippers, but beware: they know very well the difference between a server who is slammed/in the weeds and a server who is just giving lousy service.  If it’s the latter, don’t expect too much sympathy or a good tip.

Exactly this. I have rules for tipping; twenty is pretty much baseline, fifteen if I’m not terribly impressed, with ten as my bare minimum. On bills that are really huge—or really small—I’ll tip even more. There’s one diner across from my apartment I like to get pancakes and do homework in, therefore taking up one table for three-ish hours; I’ll tip them about fifty percent there, like nine, ten bucks on a eighteen dollar check, because… I just took up a table and their time for a good long while. A table and period of time they could have been making tips from other people with. I know how frustrating that can be, and I like to try and make up for it.

On the other hand, I know what shitty service looks like, and I am far less forgiving of servers who just… don’t do their jobs. I don’t not tip because hey, maybe it’s just a really horrific day. It happens. But I also know all signifiers of just… bad service.

It was in a big tourist area and 75% of the clientele were foreign tourists. I learned fast there who tipped and who didn’t, who was horribly demanding and treated the waitstaff like shit and who was respectful.

Killerrobot, I have this funny little book named The World’s Worst. It has a list of the worst tourists according to a large survey of hotel and waitstaff in 24 countries. What I found amusing is your observations were similar to their results. British tourists were ranked the worst. Israelis and Italians tied for second. The Australians didn’t make the top ten worst but New Zealanders (yeah I know, different countries, I just think it’s funny) were tied for sixth.

My point in all this is that contemporary Christianity has lost its way. Christians don’t wake up every morning thinking about how to become a more decent human being.

It’s an inferior religion that doesn’t have the power to change people and their environment is why. It doesn’t work. Also: Christian /=/ moral person.  Most of the ones I’ve dealt with act like entilement minded jerks.

DTG in STL:
Oddly enough, no Jesuits.  I went from Kindergarten to Grade 13 in Toronto area Catholic schools and I never had a priest, nun or deacon as a full-time teacher for any topic!.  That’s ‘70 to ‘84.  Kinda defies the odds.

That is kinda shocking.

But I don’t know how Catholic a city Toronto is.  St. Louis is EXTREMELY Catholic… I think we have more Catholic grade schools and high schools per capita than any other US metro besides New Orleans, Louisiana.  And strangely enough, one of the singlemost popular questions St. Louisans ask each other is “What high school did you go to?”  which is really code for “How much money did your parents make?” since the Catholic high schools here range in price from $5,000 to $30,000 per year for tuition, depending mainly on the location.

Yeah, I had tons of priests and nuns as teachers, even into college.  The foremost expert on the exorcism upon which the movie The Exorcist was based was one of my Jesuit philosophy professors at SLU.  The boy who the 1973 film was based upon was brought from Baltimore to St. Louis in 1949, and stayed briefly with the Jesuits at Saint Louis University in DuBourg Hall, which today is the main administration building on campus.  There’s a wing on the fourth floor that is sealed off, which is supposedly where the kid slept.  Nobody official at the university really talks about it, and the media relations office for the school virtually denies the entire thing even happening.  The kid’s identity was protected for many decades, but some people eventually figured out who it was a few years ago and posted it on the internet… the dude is a retired NASA engineer today in his 70s, living in suburban Baltimore.

Anyway, tangent.

There’s one diner across from my apartment I like to get pancakes and do homework in, therefore taking up one table for three-ish hours; I’ll tip them about fifty percent there, like nine, ten bucks on a eighteen dollar check, because… I just took up a table and their time for a good long while.

Maybe because I live in a relatively low cost-of-living city I’m just naive, but I gotta say…

For EIGHTEEN DOLLARS, those have got to be the best damn pancackes on earth.

If you can’t afford to eat at a particular restaurant and tip, you can’t afford to eat at that restaurant
Excuse me?

Yes, Virginia, there are some people out there who are actual Christians.  They’re few and far between, but they do exist.

Right, just like there are people out there who are actual Scotsmen.

On the other hand, I know what shitty service looks like, and I am far less forgiving of servers who just… don’t do their jobs. I don’t not tip because hey, maybe it’s just a really horrific day. It happens. But I also know all signifiers of just… bad service.

I tend to look at several factors.  If they are really busy, I expect service to take longer, so I don’t hold that against the server.  If it’s just a matter of minor mistakes, I don’t really hold it against them, unless it’s just an endless series of mistakes and just craptastic service overall.  But even then, I consider the possibility that they’re just having a bad day.

What I don’t have much tolerance for is flat-out rudeness.  And I don’t mean “doesn’t come to my table quickly enough”, I mean literal rudeness… like putting your hands in my salad when I complain about the plastic object in it to throw it out, and not offering to replace the food and acting as if I was an asshole for saying anything about it.

DTG:

Toronto used to be the Orange capital of Canada but that started to change big-time with the changing demographics brought about by post-WW2 immigration.  It now has a large Catholic component, and did so during my childhood when it had a huge Italian minority both in little Italy (St. Clair Avenue West) in the suburbs.  I went to Catholic schools where half-cake, half-Italian mixes were normal.  One of the funnier side-effects of this remains with me today: watching the stunned bunny look on Italian faces when perfect pronunciations of their names, no matter how polysyllabic, come flowing from my awfully anglo lips.

“in little Italy (St. Clair Avenue West) [and] in the suburbs”, idiot.

If you can’t afford to eat at a particular restaurant and tip, you can’t afford to eat at that restaurant
Excuse me?
Comment #110: pitbullgirl65 on 10/25 at 02:55 PM

The food cost is kept down by the servers being paid a sub-minimum wage. Due to that, tipping is really just another part of the cost of your meal. If you can’t afford to tip you really shouldn’t eat that meal (pick something cheaper on the menu) or at that restaurant. I’m poor too, I get that this sounds rude, but it’s how it is. If I can’t afford to tip and want to eat out I’ll get my food to-go or go to a self serve restaurant (fast food, panera, that sort of thing) and wait til I’m a bit more flush with cash to go to the sit down restaurant with the waitstaff. It isn’t even about you tipping all that much, at least not just the tip itself, it’s that not only are you not tipping, but you’re taking up a table in the servers usually small section preventing another patron from sitting there and tipping.

I don’t go to your job and demand you work for free.

I actually enjoy giving a nice tip, especially to waitresses.  Also, I used to do book keeping at a dinner restaurant, and my recollection is that I had to total each waiter’s checks, add 20%, and tax the waiter that amount.  No way to get around it, even if the waiter/waitress left a note saying s/he’d been stiffed.  Bummer.  At the time, however, workers at cafe’s & Denny’s type “breakfast” (daytime) places weren’t taxed.

Yeah, I gotta agree with those who say that if you can’t afford to tip, you shouldn’t be eating out.

When you get right down to it, dining out is a luxury, not an entitlement. Whereas the server needs those tips to get by. Again, if they’re a blatant slacker/jerk, I won’t tip them, but if the service is perfectly fine, the tip should be considered part of the price of a night out.

There’s always the alternative of learning to cook.

DTG:

but AA has never explicitly endorsed Christianity as the required or preferred way to experience spirituality.

It’s still endorsing “spirituality,” a/k/a superstition, and in a way that, I’m sorry, is quite xtian. Ask your “higher power” for forgiveness? Uh, yeah, I don’t think so. Especially not the people in the group who have been far more victims than victimizers in life….but this is not a movement with much attunement to social justice, notwithstanding the GLBTs of Color AA group you might have attended in Provincetown or Santa Cruz five years ago. And people are often forced into these groups at the hands of judges and employers for “treatment.” At the very least, they should be allowed to attend Rational Recovery or Secular Sobriety as an alternative.

I highly suggest reading Charles Bufe’s Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? The second, not the first edition, because after the first one came out, Bufe got reams of hatemail from Goose-Steppers convincing him that he’d been to kind to them if anything.

nebby @75, I’m not going to defend crappy tippers, but sisterhood goes both ways. I travel a lot on business as a ‘single woman’ (meaning, I’m by myself), and if I get a crappy table, rude service and a long wait because OMG broad in a business suit…. as pennylane pointed out at @81, sometimes the cause and effect is the other way around.

I didn’t see anyone over on the original blog saying “Hey, I was in one of those church groups, and the reason we tipped poorly is that we got rude, crappy service,” interestingly. And there’s absolutely no excuse for those tracts. Notice how you never see any of these people giving religious “tips” leaving an expensive copy of the Bible that they paid for themselves? Funnily, the only verison of The Word they spread are versions that were given to them for free and just so happen to save them the cost of a tip.

For people baffled at tips (and no, I don’t excuse Canadians - I get the GST but I used to live in Canada, my ex was Canadian, and FFS they all understood the 15% concept), tips are a means by which the cost of labor is passed off directly to you, rather than being incorporated into the cost of the food.

Nobody In Particualr @82, setting aside the RIAA and all that, consider that World of Goo, a DRM-free indie game, had something like a 90% piracy rate DESPITE offering a free demo. And in the ensuing online debate, plenty of people said that it was OK because, like, dude, I didn’t like the game that much so it’s OK not to pay for it. There are people who are cheap and people who are assholes, and just like the “but I pray a lot!” Christians, they make excuses for their behavior.

Being low-income ourselves, my man and I reserve going out to eat at “nicer” places (I.E. more expensive than Subway’s) for special occasions, so that we can leave a decent tip and enjoy interacting with our server knowing we’re not going to be an asshole to him or her at the end of our meal. We dine out half as often so we can tip twice as much, is what it boils down to.

If we don’t have the money to tip, we get takeout: ribs, Chinese, burgers, something from a place where we won’t be expecting someone to basically give up a chunk of their income for the privilege of waiting on us. It’s just as yummy and we still don’t have to do the dishes.

Jesurgislac, Check out Rumblizard’s #68.  U.S.ian restaurants never do that European, “You’re not welcome here” thing with customers.  It’s just inconceivable to turn away a paying customer; and some people are afraid of lawsuits if they do.

Now, in the U.S., socialist restaurants in the Thirties and Forties did not allow tipping, just as the Soviet Union did not allow tipping, for more or less the good reasons that have been discussed above.  But when I try to explain this to an upper-class liberal friend, the idea that tipping was a condescension turned out to be incomprehensible to him.

I used to wait tables at a pseud-Hooters in my college town, smack in the bible belt. Families, churchy people, and, sadly, the post-AA/NA crowd always seemed to be the worst tippers. I also had this guy who asked for a beer in a coke glass. I brought it to him, and he request that I put it in a RED coke glass, rather than clear. I was puzzled, but obliged. Upon bringing him his replacement beer, he explained that he wouldn’t want any of his church people seeing him drink a beer. Odd…

@Tyro #97

Many people here have said that they were raised Christian including, I believe, Pam’s wife Kate. Did your families tip poorly at brunch after church? If so, why? If not, you must have known fellow church-goers from the congregation who were poor post-church tippers, right?

My father was/is a horrible tipper; when I was in my teens and saw this and had money on me I would always throw down more. My mom always tipped well. Re: Kate’s family—they always overtipped as well. Her late grandfather set the example for the family, having lived a humble existence in Alabama, a Maronite Catholic Lebanese man who was discriminated against as a POC in AL, knew hard work, and appreciated those who worked hard as workstaff, and Kate said he specifically told his grandchildren to always leave a generous tip. I don’t think that’s the norm.

Sorry Pam, but a friend of mine you used to tend bar at a gay bar disliked his lesbian patrons.  He said they hardly ever tipped, demanded a lot of attention, and were constantly asking him to break a dollar for the pool table or electronic dart board.

Reading all these comments really brings home the ways that some people use their creeds as an excuse for superiority and anger. (“Thou shalt not muzzle the ox” comes to mind.)

But I find I tend to tip better, percentage-wise, at some of the lower-priced places (although I don’t go to that many higher-priced places any more, so it’s mostly moot). The person taking my order, bringing my drink and meal and asking once (maybe) if everything is fine at the $30-a-plate place is doing essentially the same work as the person doing those things at the $10-a-plate place.

Whoops! My post should’ve read “a friend of mine WHO used to tend bar…”.

Except for a brief stint as a pizza deliverer, i myself have never been in the position to receive tips based on a percentage of the bill. I generally tip 15-20% depending on quality of service. I have no problem not leaving a tip or leaving a small tip if I think the service was poor.  And I admit that i will leave a very large tip if I thought the waiter was hot and it is a restaurant I plan to frequent.

I confess that while reading this thread we seem to have one side arguing that the “true Scotsmen” in this story are the Christians who tip well, making them “real Christians” and another side arguing that the “true Scotsmen” are the Christians who tip poorly, making the good tippers “not those kind of Christians” or “one of the ‘good ones.’”

My guess on the badd tipping from Churchy is that Churchy doesn’t see waitstaff as actually doing work. As they are seen as layabouts by Churchy they get charity instead of actual pay. And bibles and scripture on fake $20s? That’s charity.

Next time some old lady does that crap with a fake $20, call the secret service.

I generally tip 15-20% depending on quality of service. I have no problem not leaving a tip or leaving a small tip if I think the service was poor.  And I admit that i will leave a very large tip if I thought the waiter was hot and it is a restaurant I plan to frequent.

On average, I tend to tip between 18-25% depending on the quality of the service from the waiter/waitress.  Only times I have considered/actually left without leaving a tip was if said waiter/waitress was downright rude to me or a member of my dinner party.  As another commenter noted, I do not tolerate blatant rudeness, especially if it is to the point of insensitivity such as disregarding someone’s disability. 

As for leaving very large tips, I’ve left higher percentage than my average tips if I found someone is working their way through school and/or who went out of their way to make my/my party’s dining experience pleasant.

In response to comment #46, I have to say that I am not aware of any law that requires servers to be paid 3.25/hour. I work as a waitress in Michigan, and I am paid 2.65/hour. Not terribly different, but it does vary.

As for Christian tippers, I used to work in an area with a large population of Apostolic Lutherans (Finnish heritage, huge families), and they would come in after Sunday evening services in large groups of adult men or adult women, and always tipped well, at least two dollars per person on checks ranging from 2-15 dollars. Even though most of us waitresses were going to hell for not being born into the right religion, they still exhibited some generosity.

I’d rather abolish tipping all together and have the real costs reflected up front.  It’s not really fair to anyone except the restaurant owners who get to expect their customers to cover the cost of labor.  And now the wait staff has to share their tips with other staff who aren’t tipped because the restaurant owners don’t want to pay them either.  I will say I mind restaurant tipping a lot less than other kinds because the rules are clear and you know that it’s the only way those waiters are going to get paid.  That being said, I still think the 18-20% that i normally tip is good enough.  I usually find most service to be unremarkable, not particularly good or bad, and tip about the same every time. 

What bothers me is the confusing rules about tipping in other arenas where either you’re buying a service from the individual in the first place, so you already are paying them for the service, or they are already being paid a decent hourly wage, not a tip wage.  Deliveries come to mind, and other home services.  It just makes me anxious.  Just tell me how much it costs, end of discussion.

Yeah, I’m of the mindset that the true religious people are those that don’t tip.  In fact, anytime I see a Christer doing a good deed, my confirmation bias about them just assumes that it’s a statistical anomaly.  As religious people themselves say:  why bother being considerate if all you have to do is sing louder than the person next to you to secure your place in heaven?

I tip 20% because the math is easy:  move the decimal point to the left, multiply by two.  And I leave that regardless of service, as long as they fill their end of the deal:  they bring me food and don’t treat me like shit, and I leave them 20% and try not to act like a dick (like coming in 15 minutes before closing without realizing it.  Left them 20% and 10 dollars, if memory serves).  If a personal connection of some kind is made, then I’ll leave a dollar or two extra, maybe.  I think it demeans us both to put a dollar figure on a pleasant interaction between two strangers.  I still leave that dollar or two extra, but it irritates me all the same and makes me slightly more stand off-ish the next time I go to a restaurant.  I’m not a people-person and I don’t want to engage in chit-chat.

I don’t leave money in tip jars unless the cashier was adorable/interesting.  I think that goes back to what tipping was supposed to be about:  a bonus for good service.  If they somehow manage to distinguish themselves from every other person who pushes a button to pour me drip coffee, and they catch me on a day when I’m in the mood to be humored, then I’ll tip.  But usually, no.  I just want my coffee and that’s not asking for anything special.

If you can’t afford to tip, don’t go out to eat. End of story.

Fuck you.  That’s just classist.  An offer is an offer.  Fullstop.  And a menu is an offer.  If tipping is mandatory then it should be mentioned on the menu.

How about putting the actual price on the damn menu in the first place?  If someone in any other profession asked for more money than was stated in the offer?  Imagine a car salesperson with his hand out expecting 15% of the purchase of a car for his “service”.  For that matter, why shouldn’t the cashier at Best Buy put out a tip jar just like the cashier at the coffee shop?  And why not give a 15% tip the workers at Subway who make your sandwich to order in real time?  Is a middleman who delivers your order to the kitchen and carries your food to you from the kitchen really deserving of 20% when the person at Subway isn’t?  And don’t even give lawyers any ideas about putting a tip jar on their desks ...

Now before someone blows a gasket and sputters about waitpersons earning a bullshit wage, I agree that waitperson jobs are exploitative and recommend leaving a 20% tip.  I leave 20% because the waitpeople do not deserve to bear the brunt of a system designed to exploit them.  But it is high time we question this tipping practice.  Tipping instead of paying a regular wage is just another example of stupid “American Exceptionalism,” like refusing to use the metric system.

I don’t go to your job and demand you work for free.

jessilikewhoa,

Funny enough, I constantly get this demand from co-workers and acquaintances who feel entitled to free services once they find out I am good with computers.  Then, they get angry when I quote them my hourly service charge. 

Oddly enough, I never got this level of overentitlement from family members*.  Heck, some even insist on paying my hourly rate despite my reluctance to do so because they happen to be the nicer relatives. 

* Heard many horror stories from IT/CS/engineering friends whose family felt entitled to free services 24/7 solely because they are family.

But it is high time we question this tipping practice.  Tipping instead of paying a regular wage is just another example of stupid “American Exceptionalism,” like refusing to use the metric system.

That’s all true. Nevertheless, if you can’t afford to tip at a restaurant, you should have gone to a less expensive restaurant and tipped appropriately. You’ll never hear me defend tipping: nothing improves service more than a staff and management at a restaurant who insist on and train their employees for good service as a matter of course. Depending on tipping to drive customer service only incents management to ignore the issue, since the waitstaff, no they, pay the cost.

Meanwhile, it’s not classist to say that if you can’t afford to pay the wages of the waitstaff of a nice restaurant, then you can go to a restaurant where you can afford to pay them. It’s not “classist” when I suggest that someone who can only afford a certain level of wages hire someone else rather than me.

Generally, tipping is reserved for something you can do yourself but you choose not to do, right?  Paper delivery, pizza delivery, food delivery, etc.  Every person is capable of buying their own paper, making their own food, picking up their own food, and if you choose to make someone else do it for you, then you tip on top of the price it actually costs.  So if someone goes to a restaurant to have food made and brought to them instead of making it at home, there’s no reason not to tip just because you can’t afford it.  You aren’t entitled to eat at a restaurant just because some people can afford to do so.

That’s also why I go to Aveda to get my haircut.  I’d rather just pay for the price of something I’m not capable of doing and not tip because it’s a skill.

Questioning the practice of tipping is one thing - particularly as it’s used as an excuse, in many ways, to avoid paying people a living wage. Pretending to be shocked and offended that full-service restaurants expect tipping, and OMFG it’s not on the menu so it’s not a contract and it doesn’t count? Sorry, but slapping an -ist on the end of a tantrum doesn’t make everybody curl into a tiny, guilty little ball.

There’s a restaurant in San Francisco that did away with tipping; I believe they have a flat service charge on the bill, which they will rescind if a customer believes they did not in fact receive appropriate service. Otherwise, they pay their workers a real wage. They’ve apparently had trouble with some angry customers who just don’t like not getting to tip.

There’s a restaurant in San Francisco that did away with tipping; I believe they have a flat service charge on the bill, which they will rescind if a customer believes they did not in fact receive appropriate service. Otherwise, they pay their workers a real wage. They’ve apparently had trouble with some angry customers who just don’t like not getting to tip.

It’s called Fish & Farm.  Not only did they do away with tips, they did away with all extraneous charges on the bill.  If you buy a glass of wine that’s listed as $12 on the menu and and an entree listed as $20, you pay $32 and not a penny more.  The price you see is the price you pay.  The tax and tip are both already built in, and automatically deducted by their computer system - the server collects a flat 18.5% on every ticket, and taxes are also deducted on the POS system.  In regard to the taxes, it’s sort of like sporting event, movie, and concert tickets and concessions… people often think they don’t pay taxes on those things, but more often the case is that the taxes are already built into the listed price.  Regarding the taxes, I sometimes wish more retail outlets operated this way.  It would be nice to go to the grocery store and be able to pay exactly what the price of the item says it costs.  That’s how gasoline is priced, why can’t that be true for a loaf of bread also?  Tax-exempt organizations could just get a reduction at the register when they present their tax exempt documentation.

So the servers do still have incentive to push for bigger ticket items, as they are essentially commissioned salespeople under this model.  I don’t know whether or not they increased the hourly wage of the servers, but they do still essentially work for tips, the main difference now being that the customer doesn’t really have an easy way to avoid the tip, and it will be a set percentage for every table.  Which has both an upside and a downside for servers… they can’t really get stiffed, but they also miss out on the chance to collect a 25-30% tip from more generous patrons.

Sure, if the service was genuinely shitty, the customer can complain and will get the bill reduced, but I don’t think most customers are going to be prone to complain about bad service to try to reduce their bill unless they genuinely got bad service - it’s just pretty crass behavior if it isn’t warranted.  Under the old system, a customer had complete control over what they tipped, and didn’t have to exert any special effort to screw over their server by not leaving a decent tip.  Now, if they want to screw over the server, they would really have to actively go out of their way to do it… most people just won’t complain to a manager in the presence of the server about poor service when they know they didn’t get poor service, because they don’t want to have to feel the guilt of having an angry server glaring into their eyes.  One thing about consciously bad tippers today is that they generally tend to get out of the restaurant quickly before they have a chance to see the server’s disappointment.  It’s a way to try to avoid a guilty conscience, because you refuse to look at the hurt that you know you’ve caused.

All in all, I think Fish & Farm has a decent model, far better than what we currently have.  Sure, some servers who regularly average 25% or more a night on all of their tables are probably frustrated by it, but at least now it takes away the apprehension that one feels when they don’t know whether or not they are gonna get stiffed, or the sheer anger one feels when one has a large table that screws them over.

It’s seems to have become pretty standard practice for most restaurants to automatically add in 18% to tables of 6 or more in most places I’ve been to in the past 5 years, regardless of whether it’ a little dive diner or a high-end restaurant.  They almost all have notes on their menus that read, “18% gratuity will be added to all tables of 6 or more.”  I know all of the large chains now do this, and I think it’s a good policy, because huge tables that don’t tip adequately really wind up ruining your night when you are a server.

Oh most definitely.  I worked for a summer at a bistro in Nashville and every single person hated the Sunday morning shift.  Granted we were all 20 somethings so having to work with a hangover really sucked, but so too did the amount of money you’d make from the churchgoers.  It is not across the board, mind you.  I had many afterchurchers who would tip within the usual societal norm, or even more.  But consistently I made far less money on Sundays than any other day of the week.  It got to the point where I started asking my boss to put me down for a double if she scheduled me for Sundays.

The other thing I noticed a lot with Sunday lunch was the number of campers.  People would socialize at church and then go to lunch (where they’d tip poorly) and seriously just sit there for an hour or two drinking coffee and having cake or pie.  They were not increasing their bill.  They were just eating up my table for hours at a time.  So in this way they would screw me out of money two different ways: they’d pay me minimally for the service I rendered and then they’d rob me other customers.

It makes me so angry when people argue that people who can’t afford to tip should still be able to go to the same places and order the same things and just not tip.

Guess what? I’m POOR! And I also am aware that waitstaff get taxed on the tips they should make, even if they don’t. So if I can’t afford what I WANT + tip, I order something cheaper and a glass of water so I can pay the tip and not stiff the workers.

It’s called being a decent human being who treats others right. And I’ll never be too poor to stop doing that, even if I never can afford to eat out again.

(Yeah, near the top of the thread I talked about my experiences as a nice customer, but that was before I was abysmally poor. Both sets of experiences are genuine.)

Sorry Pam, but a friend of mine you used to tend bar at a gay bar disliked his lesbian patrons.

I’ve heard that about the bad bar tipping and lesbians before as well, but strangely not about restaurant tabs; I don’t go to bars, so I wouldn’t know what the score on that is from any personal experience.

I think it might have been mentioned already, but part of the reason us ‘Eurotrash’ tip badly is that our waiting staff get the same minimum wage as everyone else. So here at least, 10% is the standard and if the service is excellent or we’re a big group, then it’ll be more. Of course lots of places will sneak it onto the bill hoping you don’t notice and pay twice (and in, say, France it’s pretty much always included), and lots of places automatically add 15% for more than 8 or so people, which seems reasonable. It never crossed my mind that it would be legal in the US to pay someone under $3 an hour (that’s about a quarter of our minimum wage here), so the first time I went there I just tipped as I would here. I was mortified when I found out how the system really works.

God, Denelian, that is one of the most awful stories I’ve heard. I don’t order out a lot, but when I do I tip hugely because you know what? Because I’m disabled military, I don’t pay taxes, so I figure I pay my taxes in tips and donations and shit like that. Sometimes I order shitloads of food—-$60——for gatherings here adn the tip is twenty or twenty five on top of that. It just makes my day. If somebody is nice, they get a huge tip because I know what it’s like and what assholes people can be. I want to be nice to people; it’s that simple.

If you buy a glass of wine that’s listed as $12 on the menu and and an entree listed as $20, you pay $32 and not a penny more.  The price you see is the price you pay.  The tax and tip are both already built in, and automatically deducted by their computer system - the server collects a flat 18.5% on every ticket, and taxes are also deducted on the POS system.

THAT is the way to do it.

“And why not give a 15% tip the workers at Subway who make your sandwich to order in real time?”

Um…. isnt that standard practice?

Generally, tipping is reserved for something you can do yourself but you choose not to do, right?  Paper delivery, pizza delivery, food delivery, etc.  Every person is capable of buying their own paper, making their own food, picking up their own food, and if you choose to make someone else do it for you, then you tip on top of the price it actually costs.

Hmm, the workers at Micky D’s, Subway, etc. don’t get tipped, and yet they make your food for you.  Hell, the person at Subway does more for your meal than the normal waitperson.  Last time I went to Mancora, I don’t remember having the option of walking up to the kitchen and bringing my own food back to the table.

Your argument falls flat.

Um…. isnt that standard practice?

No.

“And why not give a 15% tip the workers at Subway who make your sandwich to order in real time?”

Um…. isnt that standard practice?

Not that I’ve ever noticed.  I mean, I can’t say that I have ever seen a tip jar in any Subway store I have ever been in, anywhere.

I know Starbucks is one low-cost counter service retail food/beverage chain that requests tips, and they have a very specific corporate policy on how tips are to be divided among coworkers (which resulted in a federal lawsuit in California), but as far as I know, they’re the only one in that category.  St. Louis Bread (known as “Panera Bread” in every market outside of St. Louis, where it was founded) doesn’t permit tipping, but they do have a charity donations jar at the counter.

While I agree with your basic premise Richard - that our tipping system doesn’t make much sense - I still think it’s pretty assholish to not tip, so long as the current system is what we operate on.  It isn’t an effective way to get the system changed, and the only thing it does is hurt a poor server’s pocketbook, not to mention their feelings.

I think you said you still tip anyway, which is good, so I wasn’t trying to call you out personally.  Just pointing out that even if we agree that the tipping system is absurd, we should still tip anyway until the establishment changes the system.  The servers are pretty powerless over the status quo, and not tipping only hurts them.

Stuff like this always makes me wonder: WWJT?  (What would Jesus tip?)

Tip jars in Starbucks (on those rare occasions I go in) piss me right off.  They’re already charging a ludicrous premium for their products and underpaying their staff and they want me to subsidize that by twigging on my guilt to do something that I don’t do in other over-the-counter stores.  Get bent.

“I can’t say that I have ever seen a tip jar in any Subway store I have ever been in, anywhere”

im suprised, they all have them here
dont think ive ever gone to a Subway when traveling

Tip jars in Starbucks (on those rare occasions I go in) piss me right off.  They’re already charging a ludicrous premium for their products and underpaying their staff and they want me to subsidize that by twigging on my guilt to do something that I don’t do in other over-the-counter stores.  Get bent.

I agree with your arguments that Starbucks overcharges for their product, and that their employees should be paid better wages so that tip jars aren’t necessary, but by the same token, the tip jar seems to be pretty ubiquitous amongst almost all coffee shops these days.  Starbucks may have created that trend, but it is what it is… pretty much every non-Starbucks coffee shop I’ve been to in the past decade has had a tip jar, and virtually all of them tend to overcharge for their product.

And similar to protestations against tipping in general, when you choose not to tip at Starbucks, the people you are hurting are the baristas who don’t make shit in regular wages.  I guarantee that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz isn’t losing a minute of sleep over it.  So everytime someone decides not to tip at Starbucks and walks away thinking they should “get bent”, they should realize that they are actually giving the proverbial middle finger to a poorly paid coffee slinger, not to the big bad corporate monster that is Starbucks.

I just wanted to add my voice to the many others here—ex-waitpersons and responsible, decent diners alike—who are saying that yes, the system sucks, but until there is wholesale reform and service charges are built into the prices on the menu, PLEASE don’t punish the terribly-underpaid waitstaff with cheapskate tips or stiffing.

Also, as someone who at some point in her adult life has found herself at income levels ranging from No Money in the Bank Whatsoever to Doing Fabulously, Thank You, I totally agree: if you can’t afford to leave a good tip for good service at Restaurant X, you shouldn’t be eating at Restaurant X.  That’s not classist at all—just common decency, as well as being possessed of the logical ability and moral fibre to not take goods and services from others without paying.  Because accepting the good service of someone who performs it in good faith, doing his or her part in the diner-server arrangement that is well-known and accepted as status quo in this country, and then not paying for said service, whether the stiffing arises from actual lack of funds or is meant as a protest, a way to “stick it to the system”, seems rather a lot like stealing, to me.  And as far as I’m aware, neither poverty nor a sense of righteous indignation work well as excuses—much less legal defenses—for stealing.

Always tip between 15-20%, more if we eat out with kids. There’s a jewish deli that I take my kids to a couple times a month (they usually just eat grilled cheese and fries) and I always tip a little more, although as my kids get older they’re less disruptive.

I have a group of friends that I play cards with a few times a month, and we often order pizzas. At least 4 of the people I play with have been pizza drivers at one point or another, so we tip very generously. When I order pizza for delivery I don’t tip a lot unless the weather’s really terrible, but I’ll never stiff the driver. I figure on a $20 pizza order I’ll round up to the nearest dollar and add $3 (which is 15%). Am I being too cheap here?

Richard, my point was when someone delivers something to you that you are otherwise capable of getting yourself (OH MY GOD WHAT ABOUT DISABLED PEOPLE?!???) a tip is expected.  Totally talking out my ass, granted, but that seems to be the kernel of commonality in when a tip is expected.

Starbucks is also in the middle of an ongoing legal dispute about the fact that their shift managers share in the tip jar.

DTG, thanks, I could not remember the name of the restaurant. What amazes me is the commentary from people angry about a flat service charge because OMG, how do you guarantee good service if you don’t have the carrot/stick of a tip to hold over your server’s head? (Gee, I guess you could expect good service, just as you do from people you don’t tip, like your mechanic or your doctor. And if you get bad service you talk to the manager. But I guess that isn’t as much fun.)

The system of tipping in the US is not coherent or consistent, but in terms of restaurants, if you’re being actually served your food, tipping or a service charge is the norm.

DTG:
I deal with the problem by avoiding Starbucks.  I will make a note to tip in future as not to be a dick.

Me, I’d advocate getting rid of the difference in minimum wages entirely.  Make tipping entirely discretionary, make it more like a bonus.  There is no sustainable policy reason for the prejudicial treatment.

DTG, thanks, I could not remember the name of the restaurant. What amazes me is the commentary from people angry about a flat service charge because OMG, how do you guarantee good service if you don’t have the carrot/stick of a tip to hold over your server’s head? (Gee, I guess you could expect good service, just as you do from people you don’t tip, like your mechanic or your doctor. And if you get bad service you talk to the manager. But I guess that isn’t as much fun.)

That’s the supposed fear?  That without being able to dangle a tip over a server’s head so they adequately behave like a trained animal to your satisfaction, you might not get good service?

Wow, that’s asanine.  Like you said, if that’s really their problem, why not levy a complaint about not being able to tip your doctor, car repair guy, customer service reps, or even the grocery bagger?

If the service sucks, there’s always an outlet to seek remediation for it.  In a restaurant, you talk to the manager.  I mean, if an employee gave you particularly bad or rude service at a fast food place, that’s how you would deal with it, right?  Why shouldn’t that be the case at sit down table service dining establishments, too?  Or for pizza delivery drivers, hair stylists, or taxi drivers?

I don’t know the history of tipping in America, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the sort of ritual that became the industry standard in restaurants during the Gilded Age, when filthy rich robber barons could try to make themselves feel better by being able to decide how generous they were feeling that day towards the poor little plebes that waited on them hand and foot.  If they were feeling particularly generous, the aristocrat could give a nice tip to be showered with praise by his dinner companions and have his feet kissed by the dirt poor laborer who’s day he just made.  If he wanted to show who’s boss, he could skimp on the tip to teach that little ungrateful server a lesson.  Either way, it’s about control, and about being able to say, “I have money, therefore I’m a superior being.”

The tax and tip are both already built in

I believe that’s how the VAT is handled in European countries that use it, and I vastly prefer it.  I see the price, I check how much cash I have in my pocket, and, voila, I know if I have enough money.  As it is, I have to calculate the tax in my head sometimes and I really hate it.  I also hate having to factor taxes into my monthly budget.  Stores shouldn’t be allowed to pretend their prices are 10 percent less than what you ultimately have to pay.

Generally, tipping is reserved for something you can do yourself but you choose not to do, right?

Well, I guess I’m capable of growing my own food, but I’m not planning on taking a Greyhound down to Yakima to tip migrant farm laborers even as they need and deserve it more than anyone else who gets tipped in this country.  I also don’t pay a tip on the pre-packaged roasted chicken I buy at the grocery store even though I’m capable of buying a raw chicken and roasting it myself.

There are also many instances where people (car mechanics, massage therapists, hairstylists) who apparently expect a tip perform a service that most others are incapable of doing.  So, no, I don’t agree with that theory.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the sort of ritual that became the industry standard in restaurants during the Gilded Age

I think it says a lot that the only other societies where tipping seems to be the norm are in the third world.

There are also many instances where people (car mechanics, massage therapists, hairstylists) who apparently expect a tip perform a service that most others are incapable of doing.  So, no, I don’t agree with that theory.

Car mechanics are supposed to be tipped?

If that’s true, then every car mechanic I’ve ever dealt with must despise me.

I don’t know if I have the complete list right or not, but as far as services I’ve used, here’s who I tip: restaurant servers who actually provide service at your table, even if it’s only bussing/water refilling; food delivery drivers; hair stylists; taxi drivers; coffeeshop baristas; bartenders; car washers; movers… who am I missing?

who am I missing?

the people who take care of your pet in the event of rapture

As for the whole argument about tipping - yeah, our system is messed up, but if you can’t pay for a service (i.e. having the server bring you your food and take care of you), then you shouldn’t be there.  Imagine if you didn’t pay for the labor when you brought your car to the mechanic!  If you can only afford the food, great - order it as take out. 

I worked as a waitress for all 4 years of college.  For 3 of those years I worked the Sunday lunch shift.  I have to say there were some “true” Christians who really treated me well - always asked me about school and my life, remembered my name (this really makes a difference!!), and tipped me very well.  Unfortunately these people were the minority.  Most people would only tip on the adult’s food, and not the kids (since when has this become ok?!), even though tables with lots of kids are 10x more difficult between spills, noise, and the mess of food on the floor.  In those three years I was left a New Testament, a pamphlet informing me that I was going to hell since I was working on the Sabbath (note the hypocrisy!), church programs, a plastic rosary, and a pastor’s business card as tips.  For some reason when I tried to use these things in place of money else where, they were not accepted…

I have to say that groups that consistently treated us poorly were served poorly.  If we had to choose between getting refills for our “good” table or our “bad” table - the “bad” table waited.  We never gave them freebies, like free drinks or desserts.  We never offered to make them specials that weren’t on the menu.  Overall, we took their order, brought them their food, and dropped off the check.  There is a price to being a bad customer.

Sorry have not had time to read all of the comments so apologies if I’m repeating. I come from a non-tipping (or at least rarely tipping) culture because wait staff are on an industry award here and so get at least a reasonable hourly rate. In my culture you only leave a tip if you have had exceptionally good service. For ordinary service you either pay the exact amount or round up (e.g. $37.50 check, leave $40.00). I know people have said that you should factor a tip into the cost of eating but personally I find it confusing and anxiety producing. I don’t want to have to think about how much money to pay a waiter who doesn’t work for me. His employer should be the one doing that. I expect to see that reflected in the cost of the food and drink. If you can’t afford to pay your staff properly you shouldn’t be in business.

I do think that tipping is absolutely a class issue - it’s all about who eats and where.

Tipping is a vestigial cultural artifact of master-servant relationships, which is why I like being in places (usually in other countries) where the waitstaff get decent wages, have guaranteed healthcare, and tip culture doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, the US isn’t one of them, so I tip appropriately and remember that the price on the menu is subsidised by systematic, institutional stiffing of the staff.

Oh and the whole who do I tip issue? It’s enough to put me off travelling to the US. I never know. I’m sure I’ve pissed off more than a few people by not tipping or not tipping enough.

The whole system is just broken. Why can’t the cost of stuff be up front? Why do we have to play the gracious lord or lady by handing over a few dollars to the peasants? It’s supposed to be a commercial transaction not a fucking Dickens novel. Does it make people feel good or superior to be able to do this? Because honestly it makes me feel like crap and I always imagine it makes the people I’m giving money to feel condescended to.

Also all those people upthread who think we foreigners are ‘pretending’ not to know. We’re not. We really don’t know. Even if we do know we don’t know how much - 10%, 15%, 20%, 40%. Even the people on this thread aren’t consistent so how the hell are foreigners supposed to know?

I had a friend who worked in the kitchen at a fancy resort.  The state allowed the management to dock their pay by how much tips they got, if the place paid over the server-wage (less than minimum wage.  There was a ‘training’ wage, too, which was even lower.  Some restaurants always fired their untrained staff every two weeks so they could always pay training wages…).  So he, in the kitchen, would get his wage docked by half the server’s tips, whether or not the server shared.

Like the aforementioned Europeans playing dumb

Part of it may well be playing dumb, but part of it is… well, it’s this thread. If you’re a tourist from the UK in NYC, then your guidebook might say 15%, which is towards the top end of the British tipping scale, but if 15% is now stifftastic, then as Jesurgislac said, they’ll be inadvertently stiffing you. And as others have said, plenty of foreign visitors really don’t appreciate 1) that the minimum wage for waitstaff is a disgrace; 2) that waitstaff don’t get health benefits—just because that information only shows up on the internets or the Rough Guides, and not in the standard tourist stuff.

(I’m not going near the absurdity of tipping bar staff.)

the owner would call them, am say something like “if you do not tip your driver and appropriate ammount then this is the LAST delivery we will every make too you. my workers NEED those tips (and honestly, the boss? he was barely scraping by everyone month, he could NO affod to pay us more.).

Now, I can guess why the owner probably felt unable to raise menu prices, but still, that’s kinda perverse. Everyone gets screwed—including, to some degree, the customers.

The easiest way to change tip culture? Universal healthcare and a standard minimum wage. And tipping’s origins are absolutely in the gratuities offered to household domestic staff. Masters tip servants. That’s why you don’t tip your lawyer.

ecause honestly it makes me feel like crap and I always imagine it makes the people I’m giving money to feel condescended to.

I’m pretty sure they’d rather feel condescended to than hungry, though. I mean, I know I would.

I’m pretty sure they’d rather feel condescended to than hungry, though.

In that case, let me go in front of the people who want calorie counts on menus and start lobbying for state laws that mandate the base salary of the waitstaff appears in BIG EFF-OFF TYPE on the bottom of the menu. “Your servers today will be paid $3.25/hr plus tips, and if they slip on the kitchen floor and end up in the E.R., that’ll put them back three months’ wages because we don’t offer insurance. Thank you for your patronage.

Many corporate chains - I dunno about Subway, but I know some - don’t allow servers to accept tips.

I usually tip according to service rendered.  When I worked service, I felt no ire vs youth who didn’t tip (where are they supposed to get the money?) or other poor people.

I tip $10 for a dinner or breakfast (or 10-20% if $10 isn’t over 20%); $5 for a lunch (unless it’s dinner-fancy, then diner); $2 per person for a stand or bus-yourself; $1 for vending (no prep); $2 per pizza + $1 for every dollar gas is over $2.

One last comment: tipping threads on mainly-American forums are like BCS sports threads: everyone has an opinion. But everyone has an opinion on tipping because pretty much everyone has to make choices about tips.

My guess is that tipping threads on mainly-Foreign forums are fairly short, if they exist at all.

Now, with the BCS, you can argue that the argument is as much a part of the fun as how the argument is resolved—it’s fun to blue-sky playoff brackets and chew over schedule strength, but in the end, if Boise State gets stiffed out of a big bowl game, no-one goes hungry or homeless or bankrupt.

But tipping? A 200-comment thread on the topic is a symptom.

I’m pretty sure they’d rather feel condescended to than hungry, though.

I’m sure they would too but I’d rather they feel neither. Also why is it up to me, an individual, to worry about whether my waiter eats today, why doesn’t the society he lives in care enough to mandate a decent minimum wage? The master servant dynamic is sick and yet perpetuated by the tipping culture. It’s an impossible dilemma. No-one (except arseholes) wants to stiff a wait person who has done their job competantly and yet by tipping you let everyone off the hook and ensure that the system will not change.

A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay is the old rallying cry of unions the world over. Perhaps we need to bring it back into fashion.

pseudonymous:  “if 15% is now stifftastic, then as Jesurgislac said, they’ll be inadvertently stiffing you. “

I have never read an angry waitperson site post or comment complaining about a person who tipped 15 percent *and treated the server like a human being, and didn’t have extraordinary demands*.  Most rants are reserved for those who don’t tip and act like the waitstaff is their personal shitbucket.

I think the whole “OMG I’m afraid I can’t tip 50 percent so the waiter is going to piss in my soup” is silly, and those of you who are freaking, get over it.  It’s too reminiscent of shit like straight white Christian males thinking they’re a persecuted minority.  Tip 15 percent or more.  If it’s a little more than you expected, then order less next time.  Don’t make the waitstaff bear the brunt of your innumeracy.

And just for completeness’ sake—I think the tradition of not tipping on the alcohol is based on dining in an establishment where there is a sommelier, who is the one helping you select your wine, and who gets tipped for that separately from the waitperson.  In an establishment where the drinks are brought to you by the same person who brings you your food, this wouldn’t apply.

JC: The whole system is just broken. Why can’t the cost of stuff be up front? Why do we have to play the gracious lord or lady by handing over a few dollars to the peasants? It’s supposed to be a commercial transaction not a fucking Dickens novel. Does it make people feel good or superior to be able to do this? Because honestly it makes me feel like crap and I always imagine it makes the people I’m giving money to feel condescended to.

I felt that way too, till I actually *worked* as waitstaff - a couple of years ago when my regular job put me on part-time hours and I had a couple of extra days a week to hang out in a volunteer-run cafe/arts center, where only the kitchen managers were paid: as it pointed out in a big sign on the counter, everyone else wasn’t getting paid: the shift would split the tips. (Most of the people working there were students/unemployed/wannabe artists. I fell into the wannabe-artist category, more or less, though I also was looking for the experience and I’d always enjoyed hanging out there.)

I didn’t mind people who just ordered a coffee or one of the bargain meals not tipping: a lot of the people who ate there were pretty damn broke. I liked people dropping in their small change: pennies add up, and I wasn’t working there for the money: free meals, great company, all the coffee you could drink (and the coffee was great). The tips were a bonus extra and very nice too at the end of 8 hours cooking, doing dishes, etc.

But… the middle-class couple with two small kids who stopped by in the middle of the day: who’d clearly heard this was a funky cafe with lots of character with cheap food: who got lunch for 4 for £20 (and because the two kids were picky eaters, and the cafe was quiet, I made them each their own “special” bagel sandwich and let them point to the exact bagel they wanted) - cheaper lunch than they would have got anywhere else in the area, and if I say so myself, better/friendlier service:

...and they left without leaving any bloody tip at all.

Okay, I wasn’t going hungry over it: and I’d likely have done the same again for the next family with little kids who came in wanting lunch (not that particular family, mind…) if I had time: but no, pseudonymous in nc, I never felt “condescended to” when people dropped their change in the tip jar, and I wouldn’t have felt “condescended to” if that couple who paid for their meal had left me a substantial tip: I’d have felt they appreciated that I’d gone to some effin’ trouble to make sure their daughters had a nice meal.

Anyway, after that, I stopped feeling embarrassed about tipping: I realized that when you’re the other side of the tip jar, it feels a lot different to what it feels like when you’re dropping the money in. Even when you don’t need the money to get by on.

Many corporate chains - I dunno about Subway, but I know some - don’t allow servers to accept tips.

I think that’s more the case for fast-food and fast casual type restaurants that don’t have table service.

As far as I know, all of the obnoxious corporate sit-down dining chains where they actually bring the food to your table (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Outback Steakhouse, etc.) all expect patrons to tip their waitstaff.  As a matter of fact, pretty much all of them will automatically add 15-18% to your bill for gratuity if you have a party of 6 or more.

I think that tipping—with its corresponding underpayment of wait staff—has stayed around so long is simply force of habit.  Face the problem, change the laws and make it a minimum wage job, period.  Work out what the average tip receipts are (factoring in overtipping and stiffing, and if it hasn’t already been done) and tax based on that.

I bartended for several years, and the WORST were Bachelorette parties.  They’d order a round of 6-10 complex drinks with “obscene” names, giggling so badly they were next to impossible to understand, block up my serving area, and then tip a buck.

Part of the problem with people who don’t tip around Seattle is that an awful lot of the people my age or younger have never worked service industry jobs.  When I was in high school in the late 80s, Nintendo would hire teenagers at double the minimum wage as game testers and also to man the phones to talk people over the difficult parts of games.  After that era passed, we started getting tech support jobs and other entry level IT jobs that kids in or just out of high school would start out in.  So we have an entire generation who don’t understand why tipping is important. 

My best tipper was a guy who had, ironically enough, lost his job that day and drank me out of Stella Artois.  He knew he was taking up space at my bar, but he wanted to talk, and so he drank and tipped extravagantly, and I let him park there all night.  $5 tip a beer is pretty expensive rent, but it’s what he dropped in the jar.  It was no big thing to listen while I washed glasses and waited on other customers.

Jesurgislac, you’re responding to JC @174 and not me about the whole condescension issue.

Personally, I think it’s the calcification of master/servant, which means that it’s a system based upon rewarding “the help” that persists beyond the era of domestic service and has been institutionalised in the form of lower minimums. It’s clearly not condescension on a personal level, but it does perpetuate that structure, which is why I think it requires institutional changes.

My best tipper was a guy who had, ironically enough, lost his job that day and drank me out of Stella Artois.

Ah, Stella… a once fine brew.

Now it has been reduced to being the upper middle-class cousin of Bud Light.  Literally.  They’re both made by the same company - Anheuser-Busch InBev.  Gotta love globalization and mergers.