How’s that?
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Check your privilege, dude. There’s a reason why Ayn Rand is universally reviled.
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Elsewhere in the world they provide healthcare and a living wage. You are paying them for bad service already.
Seriously, we’re working on paying them better in the first place, in which case I’d be find with phasing out tipping, but it’s not happening anytime soon.
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[quote=“Mike_Hanrahan, post:67, topic:5743”]
Where is this written down and established as fact? Who is the governing body who decided it?[/quote]
Both Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt had put it in writing over fifty years ago (by around 1960) that standard restaurant tipping should be around 15% to 20% of the bill. If you’ve never heard of either of these people, well, that would explain a lot. But tipping the pre-discount amount of the bill is only logical and sensible as well as the decent thing to do. The restaurant itself is providing the coupon or discount as an incentive to get you in the door and to sell you a meal, usually in hope that you’ll enjoy it enough to come back again, or maybe to feel flush enough afterward to spend a little extra on dessert or something. Anyway, the discount offer is the restaurant’s choice, not the server’s. They are not the ones offering their service at a discount just because you happened to show up with a Groupon or a gift certificate or a Twofer or something. The restaurant can choose to be a “participating restaurant” and honor the coupon or not, based upon policies set at a higher level than the waitstaff. As for tipping in general, the customs are set societally and generally don’t need to be written down or set in stone, but rather are learned as social niceties akin to remembering not to blow one’s nose on the linen napkins at Tavern On The Green. Being fit to move about in polite society isn’t particularly hard to do, and the rules and customs can be learned in a short afternoon, if you know anybody who can be trusted not to soil themselves at a frat party.
Some would say, and I’ve heard it from servers and regular old people
too, that if the tip would be less than the regular cost of the meal
you should just tip to make up the difference.
That sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense. Unless one is serving someone who is celebrating a big win at the racetrack, the tip is always less than the regular cost of the meal. To make it simple, if you go someplace for a ten-dollar steak for which you might usually tip a buck and a half (you big shot, you), and you happen to have clipped out a coupon that halves the cost of your steak to five bucks, you don’t throw down six bits as a tip. You put down (at minimum) the same buck and a half you would have if the steak came with no discount. The restaurant has chosen to eat half the price of your meal. The waitron isn’t volunteering to eat half the price of your tip, and you choosing to make them do so portrays you as a cheap S.O.B. But you’re perfectly free to be one, if you so choose. They might make faces at you or mutter something, but what do you care? You’re $5.75 richer that day. You got the world on a string.
But you’re still a cheap S.O.B. and there’s no way in hell you ever had to work a job where making next month’s rent depended on whether you served a string of cheap S.O.B.s this week or not.
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I’m pretty far from an objetivist, but if people are going to toss around platitudes about how I’m required to participate in a system of compensation that is bad for everybody except employers, I’m going to start tossing around platitudes about how serving is a no skill job, and if you want to make money you’d better learn to do something that any body off the street can’t.
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If you don’t like tip jars, don’t patronize places that have them. If you don’t like tipping table staff, don’t go to restaurants with table service. But, to the extent that you do patronize such places, tip. It’s not the servers’ fault they are trapped in an exploitive working contract.
By all means, if you can find restaurants that explicitly declare that tipping is not required because their staff are well paid, patronize them.
By all means, if you own a business where tips are often part of the standard, pay your staff well and make sure your patrons understand tipping is not required.
By all means, lobby your government representatives against the practice of paying food service workers inadequately and expecting customers to make up the difference.
But until then, tip your server, dammitall.
(edited for more gooder grammar)
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And there it is. I tip 20% all the time, every time. I’ve worked in food service plenty thanks. Participation in a ridiculous, broken, and inefficient system does not exclude me from critiquing said system and pointing out it’s flaws.
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I want a restaurant or food truck, just so I can hang a placard (sort of like the Square House one on the Cheers set) that says:
“I am (me), and I am the proprietor of this establishment. The employees who work here are my employees, and you are my guest. If you feel that you have been treated disrespectfully, please notify me immediately. Do not take it out on the staff. If my employees feel that they have been treated disrespectfully, I invite them to do the same. Please have a damn good excuse prepared.”
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Did you customarily refuse tips during your food-service days, since you didn’t feel you had earned them with your unskilled monkey labor? Or did you use them to, like, live on?
Yeah, there’s a long, long line of highly educated and skilled people currently working food service jobs today as a direct result of today’s economy who would like a word with you about that.
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I think service staff everywhere should be paid a decent damn wage instead of this insane system. But until that day comes, I will tip them all from the coffee shop to the pizza guy to the food truck to the Japanese place I love to eat lunch at every Thursday. I know enough about myself to know I would never be able to hack it as a server anywhere. That job is brutal. I also know what it is like to live with no room for error, worrying about paying bills and buying food and oh god what will I do if the car stops working, etc, etc. Since I am in a position to do so, I will tip all those people and hope that those dollars help.
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Ah yes. The Bootstrap Doctrine. Clearly, workers in the service industry just aren’t trying hard enough.
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I tip my server every single time. What I’m not doing is putting a tip in a jar when I buy food that has a noted price and pick it up at a counter and take it home. That’s never, ever going to happen.
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“Retail employee”? What? The person standing in the sweltering heat of a food truck who puts up with your “Oh, gee. Let me see. What do I want?” With thirty people waiting in line behind you, who cooks your food, serves your food, takes your money and gives you change, all with a smile, is a “retail employee” who you don’t think deserves a tip, Dejadee? You are one cheap person.
Do you really not understand why allowing your employees to insult your customer base, whether or not they tip, is not a “good thing” from the truck owner’s perspective? Do you not understand how the truck owner could see this trend as being seriously damaging to his or her overall business? Come on. Just because we have access to social media, it doesn’t mean we should throw away all common sense practices we have figured out to date.
In a word, no, you don’t generally want your employees to publicly call out customers they have not had ideal interactions with. It’s bad for business. And absolutely a firing offense. It would have been nice for all parties to work this out amiably, but that didn’t happen. The employee should have just dealt with it, instead of “taking to the streets,” but instead they had to make a stink, and they got fired for it.
Would I have preferred to see Glass, Lewis & Company go slightly out of their way to make amends to the truck and employee, in exchange for an agreement by the employee to publicize that action? Certainly would have been a much more savvy use of social media at almost no cost. But it didn’t play out that way, and again, at the end of the day, from the truck owner’s perspective, this absolutely is a firing offense, WHETHER OR NOT Glass Lewis & Co. complained.
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I don’t answer posts like that.
Get thee to a nunnery.
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No, I’m a socialist. Fantastic analysis there, chief.
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Tipping is about acknowledging another human being. In the USA it is an integral part of the sort of society we hope to attain. It is probably a cultural quirk that developed in direct opposition to the English tradition of treating waiters like slaves. From the American perspective there seems to be a thing in English culture for poking ones finger in the eye of the person who serves you. This seems like an extension of the monarchical model of governance which was left behind long ago but drags it feet when it comes to leaving the culture.
Damn, there are a lot of skinflints on BB, not to mention a lot of people who seem determined to be confused by when one should tip and when one should not.
I do not know about any other markets than where I am (Kansas City). Most fast food staff get hourly wages that are set and normal. Most waiters/waitresses, etc. get paid server wages – i.e., a way lower minimum wage that is expected to be supplemented by tips and not the employer.
That said, THEY ALSO GET THE INCOME TAXES TAKEN OUT AS IF THEY ARE MAKING REGULAR MINIMUM WAGE. The employers are expected to make up the wage difference if tips+pay don’t equal a full minimum wage but I am betting good money they don’t.
Just my two cents.
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Heh. Probably why I don’t like the practice much. Not really a fan of human beings.
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