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Don’t Leave a Tip
Tipping in restaurants has always been a complicated issue. I usually leave around 20 percent, which is more than the 15 percent expected, but my feeling is, in Obama’s America everyone needs a little more help.
And there are tip jars in almost every coffee shop and take-out place, and what I usually do is just dump the change into it. But it’s a complicated and awkward business no matter how you slice it.
Word now comes from Danny Meyer, one of the most successful (deservedly so) and celebrated restauranteurs in America, that he’s going to eliminate the practice in his restaurants, beginning with the high-end Modern in the Museum of Modern Art. From Eater NY:
Starting in late November, sharp-eyed guests sitting down for dinner will notice four new things over the course of their meal. First, many prices on the menu will be markedly higher than they previously had been. Second, menus will carry a note informing diners of the new policy. Third, the only supplemental charge on the itemized bill will be for sales tax. And fourth, there will be no space on the guest check for leaving a tip — just a line for the diner’s signature.
His reasoning is pretty compelling:
The American system of tipping is awkward for all parties involved: restaurant patrons are expected to have the expertise to motivate and properly remunerate service professionals; servers are expected to please up to 1,000 different employers (for most of us, one boss is enough!); and restaurateurs surrender their use of compensation as an appropriate tool to reward merit and promote excellence … Imagine, if to prompt better service from your shoe salesman, you had to tip on the cost of your shoes, factoring in your perception of his shoe knowledge and the number of trips he took to the stockroom in search of your size. As a customer, isn’t it less complicated that the service he performs is included in the price of your shoes?
What I like the most about this policy is that there will be no little space on the bill for something extra. It’s a No Tipping Period policy. No guilt. No disingenuous little empty space.
Not everyone agrees. From France (of course) comes another way to look at tipping. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry isn’t thrilled with the French policy of service compris. He likes the Tipping Culture:
I come from France. Worse, I come from Paris. Here, waiters are almost universally dour, unkind, frequently forget or mess up your orders, and generally scowly. No, tourists, it’s not just you. I mean, they probably turn it up to 11 for the tourists, but it’s already a 10 for the rest of us. Smiling doesn’t help. Being nice doesn’t help.
Service, for Parisians, is one of the small inconveniences of life. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it will wear you down.
And so when I first had a meal at an American restaurant, where the waitress was friendly and peppy, quick with the order, and inquisitive about how everything was, I felt like I had landed on a different planet. And it wasn’t a fluke! It happened over, and over, and over again.
I went back to my home country, and it was like telling them that in America, whiskey comes out of the tap.
It does, at my house. But back to the subject at hand:
… when I see Americans — predominantly, let’s face it, elite, liberal Americans — who want to destroy one of the nicest things about their country, and one of the nicest things in my life, I get positively angry. I am talking, of course, about the movement against tipping, seen here recently in The Economist (The Economist! Not Pravda! The Economist!), and also in Vox (of course).
I’m no fool. I realize my waitress (or waiter) is not smiling at me out of the overflowing goodness of her heart. There’s something in it for her. But in France, tipping is basically illegal. The waiter doesn’t have any reason to be nice.
I guess I’ll be happy to see tipping disappear — it’s a nuisance — but I also see Gobry’s point. How about this for a compromise? We don’t tip waiters and waitresses, but we do tip IRS agents and congressmen? After all, they’re the ones currently delivering lousy service, right?
Published in Culture, Economics, Humor
Unless that dinner you’re ordering is a Guinness, get the heck off my stool.
I’m recommending this post to the Estonian programmers who botched Mrs. Clinton’s first robot double, which didn’t know to put any money in the tip jar.
Has anyone posted the Reservoir Dogs clip yet? It is not CoC compliant but it makes me laugh.
Here is the Muppets version (NSFW).
I won’t name the place whereby I experienced the same, but it rhymes with bed nook jewelry.
I’ve worked in the industry for about 20 years, which is 19 years too long. There are 2 major factors coming into play here, especially here in the Northeast. First servers/waitstaff make only make about $2-$3 a hour in wages, which is eaten up by taxes. The take home money is that which is earned through tips. So you can now imagine why it is the peppy waitress is so nice to you, especially when your bill is $100 or higher. The second factor is immigration. And not the guys in the kitchen from Columbia or Mexico, but the customers. Foreign customers SUCK. Being in the service industry makes you hate people and possibly also makes you racist. Pick a foreign nationality and put them in your seats in a restaurant and if you are at a server station you will hear the staff groan. Besides being rude and obnoxious they will not compensate you for your efforts, and yet in most (all if they are corporate concepts) you are not allowed to take issue with the poor tip.
So what do you do in a store where 25%-50% of your customer base is foreign and does not tip your server staff, and you must find a way to keep your employees?
The Democratic party is saying ‘you deserve a higher minimum wage!’ That should help, shouldn’t it? After taxes that increases your take home by about 1 or 2%, I imagine.
Consider relocating. When I was doing pizza delivery, I made out pretty well in tips, but a lot of our customers were better off and I rarely got stiffed. You give a good example of the shoe being on the other foot — trying to earn enough to pay down my credit cards in a not so well to do neighborhood (of course, there would also likely be a difference in safety to consider). I don’t think I or a lot of other people would have had as good morale in that situation. The owner of that small business better be ready to pick up stakes if he can’t make a go of it in his locale.
Have you ever worked in a restaurant? I’ve washed a great number of dishes, and it is informative indeed to see which waitresses argue with the cook staff for timely, correct, appealing dishes, and to reflect upon which ones make money and stick around.
The Frenchman is correct. Tips propel good service.
I recall a favorite bumper sticker: if you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to eat out.
I found tipping to be “awkward” when I was a young adult. I haven’t felt that way in decades, and wonder why Rob Long finds it awkward since he has had plenty of time to “acclimate.”
Tipping just is. Quit whining.
Mike that is awesome with the Muppets. Harvey Kitel as Fozzy, I love it.
Very interesting point. I, on the other hand, almost never ask for any alterations to the menu – because I have so little confidence they will get it right. I’m just praying they can do the basics.
So tipping has a very different function to a diner who likes to “reinvent the menu.” (Nice turn of phrase, btw.)
I’m curious – Do you ever eat out at places that don’t allow substitutions on the menu? If so – does that affect your approach to tipping?
The magic term: teamwork. In this case, management’s excuse for following the socialist model. Yes, it’s important in many other situations. However, when the situation arises when one waitstaff helps another, the two of them can work out a sharing of the tips without the ‘assistance’ of management. For those who continuously rely on others’ assistance, they must learn quickly to manage on their own if they want to keep their job.
For busboys, bartenders, and those whose job it is to assist all of the waitstaff, it’s customary for the waitstaff to voluntarily share a percentage of their tips with them. If there are those who don’t share tips, life can become very uncomfortable for them. Failing subtle sabotage, at some point there’s bound to be a conversation with them in the back alley.
It’s comforting (not really) to know the extortion flows not just toward the customer, but also toward fellow employees.
Without tips, waitstaff would make minimum regardless of performance, so prices would rise. At the same time, quality would fall — I mean why wouldn’t it? So we should consider ourselves fortunate enough to live in a place were we have the opportunity to critique to service, the product, the whatever, with every experience.
Seems to me that any argument in favor of market wages is well met by tips.
I’m conflicted about tipping. I don’t really like it, but my friends in Australia say the service in America is wonderful compared to that in Australia where tipping is not a standard practice. They agree with the Frenchman in the article. (Although, the Australian servers are just inattentive and casual, not snooty and dour.)
And, as we learned while on a trip in Australia, when tourists do tip, most of the time the restaurant keeps the money. We started putting some cash on top of the credit card receipt to get around this practice (when the service was attentive, anyway.)
Canadians tip. It’s just that they do the math to make sure the tip is EXACTLY 15%. This can be rather annoying, as it results in lots of loose change.
At least, I was once told that was the origin of the stereotype.
We’re also the only nation on earth that turns auditors into bloody celebrities.
Is someone else out there aware that “Canadians” is a code word for certain people reputed to be bad tippers?
So, you’re saying that servers say “Canadians” to refer to any group of stereotypical bad tippers, as code to avoid being racist or something?
I had never heard that. Interesting.
Oh, you might be surprised to learn that’s only the beginning of uses of “Canadian.” It provides a lot of cover against charges of bigotry, ’cause who can hate all Canadians? It’s not possible.