tipping

also maria i think you should still tip $2 for the first beer and $1 for each beer afterwards and if the booze is that cheap you should get buybacks every couple beers!

I tip 20% as a minimum, but more than that if I'm alone. Even 20% on a single person isn't much for taking up a table.

Like, if I go to Waffle House alone and my bill is $7 and change, I leave the rest of a $10.

some places add 18% automatically if its a big group

I'm surprised more places don't include a gratuity on the bill, in that case (I mean, if it's so definitely expected that you tip a certain amount, and people's accounts depend on it). They often do if it's a party of 6 or more, but occasionally I've seen it (in the US) for smaller parties. Would this be considered too cheeky by the public? I didn't mind when I saw it on the bill, as it was on the conservative side, and you can always leave extra cash on the table if you want.

I think in the UK (correct me if this seems wrong) a tip is seen more as an optional extra which is impolite not to do.

TBH I hate the whole thing, I'm one of those people who likes to know what a thing costs and just pay it, rather than have the tip I leave be considered as some kind of judgment of performance by me, the mighty customer.

― Not the real Village People, Wednesday, January 20, 2010 9:39 PM (48 seconds ago)

you could just add percent every time if ur in the uk and then u can 4get abt being all worried. if ur bill is 40 pay 44. tadaa!

Laurel:

Would be shocked if any employer actually paid the difference, btw. Can anyone confirm/deny?

I can't speak to New York, having never lived there, but everywhere else I lived and worked as a server/advocated for restaurant employees in some capacity, the employers generally do not pay the difference unless called out on it. However, a savvy and brave server, perhaps with help from his or her friends, can file a complaint with the state department of labor and get back pay, as well as putting the restaurant on notice that minimum wage law violations are not okay.

Basically restaurants rarely do this, but they are violating state and federal law every time they do so.

Please modify that sentence with "US" as applicable. Sorry for being so USA-centric.

The automatic 18% add-on we got was just for 2 of us, btw.

Ailsa, maybe they get a lot of people who aren't invested in the area/won't be coming back/are tourists who find it easy to be rude or drunk or just don't know, so they added the automatic gratuity.

There's a bistro-ish place near my house where they do the same...I think it comes from when it was a more depressed neighborhood and maybe people would stretch their dollars by eating out w/o tipping and think it was okay? Or be shirty about it. So they just made the tip mandatory. I'm fine with it, but then my service has always been v reasonable there.

not necessarily, i remember hearing a "this american life" story a while ago where they tested this and found that the same waitresses got better tips when they were bitchy, i guess because people wanted to be liked or something.

My sister has been a waitress for six years, and she has this hypothesis that she gets better tips if she invisibly makes her customers feel "kind of stupid" about the rules of the restaurant. She says if they eventually have to ask questions about where to pay or something like that, they give her a bigger tip. She thinks this is because they feel they have embarrassed themselves and leave cash to compensate & improve their image. She works at like the only $$$fancy$$$ restaurant in pop 50k Bumfuck, Idaho, so I think that's how she gets away with this.

yeah, we didn't mind at all because we'd have left it anyway, but I guess a few folk who don't know maybe wouldn't? (xpost to Laurel) A few places we went had signs up explaining what different percentages should be given depending on levels of service but thanks to a zillion ILX threads, I was well ahead of the game on that front.

Staff at Walt Disney World aren't allowed to accept tips! We tried to leave a tip, and had it handed back to us!

abbott this is definitely a thing in my exp

even if your bill is 75 bucks, that would make your tip 15 if you do 20%. if you do 15%, it's 11.25. is it really worth that extra 3.75 to not tip 20%?

no no, my point is that i'm more likely to try to order a cheaper meal in the first place, not reduce the tip on what i already ordered. and if you have, say, $20, whether a tip is going to be 15% or 25% or somewhere in between actually makes a difference as to whether you order a $12 or $15 meal, or whether you just have water or a soda (and if you're in a group, the other people are going to forget to calculate tax and you're going to have to throw in a couple bucks to help with their tips ANYWAY, so you have to order a little lower than you plan to spend regardless).

so yes, please add my tip to the bill and save me the hassle of figuring it out.

i do not tip $2 on a $2.50 beer though, i think that's a little ridiculous, and i usually only drink 1-3 anyway.

btw a beer in ireland is gonna set u back closer t $6 for nothin fancy

$1/beer (even the first) is perfectly acceptable, unless you're wanting to get in good with the bartender for some reason.

$2 on your first mixed drink can be nice if you're trying to work a better pour on the next round, kind of thing

one time i gave the guy $2 to start off with, and he was so nice to me that i kept wanting to order drinks. well, it got to be 2am and i was just about to leave when he was like "want anything else before we close up?" and i was like "sure! why not! 1 shot of jager please." and then i downed it and left

yep, all u bartenders got me where u want me as long as u smile a little bit ;)

I'm sure this point must have been covered before in one of ILX's tipping clusterfucks, but wouldn't it be better for America to just put its prices up and pay their employees a decent minimum wage to do away with compulsory tips?

(obviously I am aware this would be hard to implement)

yes

i tip $1/beer always, none of this $2 stuff i am not here to make friends
i think if states made it so waitstaff got paid minimum wage it might kinda suck for them because people would routinely not tip and they would make a lot less

like i kinda think of it as the reverse. they say "tip because they don't get paid much" but really it's we can pay them less because we know they'll make it up in tips.

well, chicken/egg

Our tipping system works out okay for servers, for the most part. Generally they make at least a 'living wage' (~$12/hour) and often more - you're unlikely to scrap the tipping system and get restaurants to pay that well even if prices go up.

You are reasoning with a country that invented the ".99" price tag. Tricking the eye into seeing a smaller price is a big sales maneuver. This is why tax and tip are not figured into the listed price. To go against this now would be to go against existing, from a business stnadpoint.

sorry if someone has already covered this, but :

leaving no tip at all is basically taking money from the server

has in no way unboggled my mind- I see suzy kinda goes in to how the authorities/owners or someone gets to estimate an extra 10% as tips earned, but you're not taking that away from them, they just didn't earn it.

i'm irish and i'll usually tip anywhere from 10% for decent service and up to 20% for good service. in ireland, with restaurant prices the way they are, that's not ungenerous i think.

$1/beer (even the first) is perfectly acceptable, unless you're wanting to get in good with the bartender for some reason.

― smashing aspirant (milo z), Wednesday, January 20, 2010 10:14 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark

since i moved in the summer it's been nice becoming a regular at like, three local eating/drinking establishments. now i enjoy the benefits of heavy-handed whiskey pours, free bbq, free beer while i wait for my burger, and free deserts and appetizers. this is all because i am a good tipper imo.

<3 the business of being a regular rules

Your bill is $100.
Your server pays out a mandatory $2-5 at the end of the night to other staff.
Your server has to pay taxes on a presumed $10 tip (which is mostly irrelevant).
If you tip $0, you have cost the server $2-5 in actual hard cash, in addition to the loss of a table for the duration of your visit.
You are, quite literally, "taking that away from them."

I rarely drink anywhere that I'm not a regular or friends with the staff. So I basically tip 100% and come out even with what my tab would have been anyway.

wait the server pays who in the what to where now? to backroom staff and the like? that's nonsense. they should get a cut of tips made, not a set amount based on nominal assumed tips.

*sigh*rish

well tbh i did think they got a cut of the tips originally, i take back my sigh

but even if it does work like that, and the service is so bad you don't tip (and remember we're kinda digressing here to the stage where you'd have to remember that most people on the thread would tip well usually) then in effect the server has lost the backroom staff that money, so..............

also maria i think you should still tip $2 for the first beer and $1 for each beer afterwards and if the booze is that cheap you should get buybacks every couple beers!

For the love of God, not this again.

You can't base anything on actual tips made - how can you verify that it's true? Oftentimes waiters aren't entirely sure what they made - 'keep the change,' your tips/bank get mixed with whatever cash you've got on you anyway, etc..

In some restaurants, tipping out is voluntary (bar aside) and basically just gets you good service from the busboys. But that's less common (IME) than the chain restaurant model of using a percentage of gross sales at the end of the night to pay part of the staff.

End of the night at your average restaurant, whether it's Applebees or a nice steakhouse runs something like:
Claim 10% of your cash sales as tips, all of your credit card tips (traceable)
Pay ~3.5% of your total sales to the hostess/busboy (they get paid on their checks from this), pay a percentage of your liquor sales to the service bartender
Turn in however much cash your total sales were plus tip out, minus credit card tips.
What you have left over is how much you made for the evening.

but even if it does work like that, and the service is so bad you don't tip (and remember we're kinda digressing here to the stage where you'd have to remember that most people on the thread would tip well usually) then in effect the server has lost the backroom staff that money, so..............

in ireland, with restaurant prices the way they are, that's not ungenerous i think.

^^^ if anyone doubts this, I once paid 55 US dollars for two burgers, two fries, 1 can of coke and a half-pint of lager in Ireland

Even if you get a buyback that ends up saving you a buck or two (cost of the beer minus the extra tip you've given), it's an intrinsically risky game. I'd rather tip $1 a drink and know what I'm getting than tip $2 a drink and cross my fingers that this will work out to a free drink sometime down the road. (The idea behind the buyback also seems to assume you're at a bar where there's only one bartender, and that bartender remembers who you are every time you order a drink.)

Note: I have not read any of this thread after Max's original post about buybacks, since it infuriated me.

milo four years of a business degree would obviously not qualify me as a waiter in the states- that just sounds like an insane fucking system.

irish food costs- insane. but getting better since everybody got fucked.

I have friends who go in expecting buybacks or hook-ups, but I always see that as a bonus. I drink as I would anywhere else and if I wind up getting free drinks I make up for it on the tip and we all come out ahead.

since i moved in the summer it's been nice becoming a regular at like, three local eating/drinking establishments. now i enjoy the benefits of heavy-handed whiskey pours, free bbq, free beer while i wait for my burger, and free deserts and appetizers. this is all because i am a good tipper imo.

I am in a country where tipping for drinks pretty much doesn't exist (in circumstances of extreme goodwill you can offer to buy the guy a drink, but I have basically never done this, offered like twice, turned down each time) and get the benefits of extremely heavy-handed shot pouring and "oh hey we'll throw that in" from being a non-tipping regular also, btw

don't really want to say "oh, tips are bad" or whatever, but don't worry that these things would stop existing if you didn't have to tip

Now I have read the rest of the thread, and I am glad to see that other people do $1 a drink and don't bother with buybacks.

I guess I'm not a regular anywhere, though. Even though I have favorite bars and restaurants, I like to mix it up. Chicago's a big city.

Yeah, I think being treated like that is less about tipping and way more about just being nice to the staff as a regular.

barstaff in ireland are very well paid for the service industry- higher than waiters, FWIW- i've never heard of anyone ever tipping a barman here.

i have never been paid more than minimum wage working in a bar in ireland fwiw

nor have any of my friends

i think if states made it so waitstaff got paid minimum wage it might kinda suck for them because people would routinely not tip and they would make a lot less

yeah i think this is one of the major reasons it doesn't change, servers as well as owners make more the way it is. all the waitresses i'm been friends with have always made 2-3 times the minimum wage per hour, so as a person who's used to living on or close to the minimum wage, my concern about tipping is wholly out of concern for my own image rather than their potential starvation.

outside of all the monetary whatevers, i think tipping is one of those cool archaic customs thats a really enjoyable historic throwback. it would suck to go to a no tipping system imo.