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There’s a famous scene in Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs — and it’s so far out of compliance with Ricochet’s Code of Conduct that I’ll have to just point you
The service received at table is (or can be) very personal. Tipping is responding in kind. I had a waiter once who was so spectacular he earned a 50% tip. His service was worth at least half the price of the food, which wasn’t bad either. He may have technically worked for the restaurant, but during that space of time he was my employee, and I paid him appropriately.
What we really have to work towards is getting rid of waiters all together. Who wants to interact with a stranger just to get a meal. Ideally one would walk into a restaurant sit at a table, and place in orders into a computer. If you want a refill push a button and a robot comes and gives you an new drink. Why should one expect a distracted human being trying to cater to 12 other tables to be able to keep track of you. Robots are the key, and self service is the way.
I tried tipping the waitress…. she got back up and decked me!
I must commend you on your editing of Tarantino dialogue to be Ricochet CoC-compliant. For your next labor, please clean the Augean Stables.
When I was younger, my tips varied widely with the service, but now I usually tip 20% regardless of the service. Exceptionally good service will get 25%, especially when the waitstaff is good with our kids. (Waitresses who quietly offer dessert options to my wife and I so that our already sugar-rushing kids don’t hear it? 30%.)
I have dropped to 10% for dreadful service and 0% for 2-3 of abysmal performances (the owner was lucky I didn’t raze the restaurant and salt the earth).
I find tipping in general to be a mysterious practice, but there are two elements which really baffle me:
– Isn’t it amazing how faithfully people tip when they could get away without doing so? Any tourist on vacation has about a 0% chance of ever encountering a particular waiter/waitress again. They could thus leave no tip and never experience any repercussions, yet waitstaff in vacation areas often earn very generous tips.
– Why do we tip some people and not others? I somewhat understand tipping for personalized, variable services like waitstaff or taxi drivers. But why do we tip the chambermaid at a hotel, when there is a very standardized level of service that person is expected to maintain? Or a bartender or barista for filling up a beverage in a manner which should be completely standardized? And why don’t we tip the cashier at the grocery store – after all, an efficient cashier can save me 10 minutes of waiting around, which is worth much more than any value added by a Starbuck’s barista.
I like the flexibility of tipping, so customers can with more than mere words express enthusiastic approval, satisfaction, or when necessary disapproval of the job a waiter does. Accountability improves the business environment for both business and customer.
Tips should indeed be outside the purview of the IRS and state taxing authorities. Tips should be recognized as gifts, and not taxed if under $10,000 per year to an individual.
Over ten grand per year, someone’s crossed the line between waitress and mistress.
The excellent Freakonomics podcast did an episode some years back that examined the phenomenon of tipping. It’s been a while, so I no longer remember the details, but I came away from it feeling pretty much confirmed in my belief that tipping (as it exists in this country) is broken.
It seems to me that the point of tipping should be to recognize and reward exceptional service that goes beyond merely doing one’s job. The idea of obligatory tipping annoys me and seems like a perversion of the original purpose.
And that, folks, is how you win Ricochet for the day!
Did you hear about the Rabbi who didn’t charge for circumcisions?
He only took tips.
Clearly, Mr. Pink rarely dines at the same restaurant twice.
Head to Applebees, where you can now place your order and pay on a tablet they provide.
I stiffed someone yesterday on a tip, I am low maintenance, about all I need is my glass of water refilled (this didn’t happen yesterday, I eventually had to ask another server for a refill). I’m pretty generally a 20 percent tipper, but I do tend tip small checks larger (sometimes 300- 400 percent if I’m just drinking a coke and it is kept full), and larger checks in the 15-20 percent range.
Of course, there is more than one way of holding someone accountable. For instance, if I refuse to patronize an establishment which gave me bad service in the past, I am also holding them accountable, albeit perhaps less directly.
I have found that the establishments without tips tend to provide a more homogeneous experience – the waitstaff is likely to be equally good regardless of who one’s particular waiter is. This makes sense, as business without tips are likely to have a manager paying closer attention to each clerk’s/waiter’s behavior.
Perhaps that also means that the customer gets outstanding service less frequently. Personally, that’s something I’m fine with: when I go out to eat/drink, I want reasonably fast responses and a friendly demeanor, not some stranger pretending to be my best friend and/or romantically interested in me for the sake of a few dollars.
And to ask the obvious question: about 25 years ago, 15% was standard for good service. Now 25% has become fairly widely established for good service.
Has the quality of service in restaurants really improved 167% in the last 25 years? If so, I must have missed it.
language warning
My philosophy has varied over time. I usually have a floor, or a minimum percentage that I will tip, roughly in the 20% range. Going above that is an entirely arbitrary action that depends greatly on the overall experience, not just how good a job someone did.
For example, the folks at Circa in Thompson’s Station Sunday night got a very generous tip from me on top of the enforced gratuity applied to our bill. Would that have been true if it had been just me and my wife, instead of a delightful wrap to the Nashville meetup? Don’t know that it would, but the fact that the whole evening was great certainly contributed to my decision to plus it up.
But the method is almost as important. I’m not a big cash carrier. If I can’t tip on a credit card (which I don’t think you can do at a fast food joint), I’m not going to have cash to drop in a tip jar sitting on the counter.
Twenty-five per cent?!?!
Man. I have never tipped more than 15% (well, not sober anyways).
No wonder American waitstaff think Canuckistanis are cheap.
“What’s the difference between a Canadian and a canoe? A canoe tips.”
On the other hand, I’ve never tipped less than 15% either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84x7fBTfMqc
Yes. I hate tipping. I don’t hate the act of tipping; I hate the expectation of tipping. I would certainly prefer the non-tipping method – and, quite frankly, if a waitress provides consistently bad service, perhaps she should be fired? I don’t see any really good reason to not run a restaurant like all other businesses.
also… I think Reservoir Dogs could have been a much, much better movie if they had given it a happy ending. I guess I’m just a sucker for happy endings, but I don’t really feel like investing 2 hours in a show where everyone dies. That’s why I never enjoyed Shakespeare.
The flaw in Mr. Pink’s thinking is that wait staff don’t earn minimum wage. The tips are relied upon to get them there.
From the gov:
What is the minimum wage for workers who receive tips?
An employer may pay a tipped employee not less than $2.13 an hour in direct wages if that amount plus the tips received equal at least the federal minimum wage, the employee retains all tips and the employee customarily and regularly receives more than $30 a month in tips. If an employee’s tips combined with the employer’s direct wages of at least $2.13 an hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference.
The chambermaid can, potentially, cause you harm that you don’t even notice.
What’s weird is that we don’t tip chambermaids at the beginning of the trip rather than at the end, like protection money.
Ah, but you forget, Resevoir Dogs takes place in an alternate reality where Hitler was assassinated in a theatre. Who knows how that event could have altered California’s minimum wage laws?
;-)
Right, but so can the guy making my burger at McDonald’s, or the person who stocks the lettuce at the grocery store, or….about 10 other people a day whom we don’t tip.
There are certain ethnic groups who are infamous for not tipping. I have heard this from every single person with whom I have discussed the subject who has wait staff or pizza delivery experience, including three of my own children. Even servers of their own ethnicity hate it when they see their co-ethnics seated at their stations, because they know almost to a certainty that they will get stiffed. Pizza delivery drivers make no special effort to deliver to members of such group(s) in a timely fashion. Then, these same customers will often complain about inattentive service. For these people mandatory service fees added to the bill will have the counter-intuitive consequence of improving the service they get.
For everyone else, voluntary tipping does improve service. Maybe not for you, personally, in any particular instance, but overall. I make this assertion based on the evidence of my experience in countries where tipping is not customary. Service tends to be noticeably worse. Not terrible, just a bit worse.
Adding 20% to my bill and calling it an “administrative fee” is not eliminating tipping. It’s making it mandatory, only now the proceeds get split between the waiters and the cooks and indirectly, the owner who no longer has to pay the waiter or cook from money brought in through the sale of menu items.
As a former waiter and restaurant manager I can tell you that Dirt Candy (I actually warmed to the name as I typed it) is going to have a hell of a time keeping good servers if all she pays is $15 an hour. That’s $75 for a standard five hour shift. Good waiters can average $150 – $200 in tips alone at dinner. Why would anyone with ability or talent accept half (or less) the value of their labor? The end result will likely be bad service with a 20% mark up.
You know what grinds my gears? Bartenders that expect to get a tip with every drink. Maybe I prefer to tip at the end of the night, as a reward for consistent service!
But, oh no, instead they refuse to serve me unless I drop a buck with each and every beer. That’s WAY more than 15%!!!
The guy making my burger at McDonald’s doesn’t have a key to the room where I sleep.
I tip, and I tip at 20% because I choose too, not because society tells me too. Some place that makes me carry my check to the register, they get less, because I do more work.
Don’t tip at Subway. Making a sub in front of me is no more hard than a big mac where I cannot see it. I tip a guy for carrying my bags (which I avoid at hotels), I tip the curb side guy for taking my bags at the curb. I don’t tip the hotel cleaning staff, as usually, I don’t have them come clean while I am there. I sleep on the same sheets a week at a time at home, and use the same towels at home, I don’t need my room cleaned at the hotel for a three night stay.
My mother was a waitress at a local diner-like chain in Boston, Brighams. She’d spend hours every evening counting out and rolling her tips, coins she deposited in her passbook savings account the next day on the way to work. As the chain was shrinking, when they closed her restaurant, she was always recruited to work at another nearby location. She came with clientele who followed her. She worked at four separate restaurants, a Brighams employee for more than thirty years. It’s probably a record. When she died, my father found a roll of 5000 one dollar bills in her nightstand drawer.
I always tip and I’m always generous