Financial Jungle

I’m not in favour of the automatic 15% as it doesn’t give me any leeway to reward superior service or punish inferior service. If 15% is the “expected” gratuity for the “expected” (i.e. average) level of service, then I see fit to cary my tip based on how the server varies from average.

Extreme example: a party of 6 of us were at a well-known sports bar in Edmonton. Our tab was in the hundreds of dollars. We left the girl a nickel because she was completely miserable - wrong orders delivered, didn’t come by for close to half an hour at one stretch. Why would she get 15%?

1. I know that restaurant wages are low with the expectation that it will be made up with tips. But I never automatically tip either. I don’t think i’ve tipped less than 8 or 9%, but never more than 20-25%. Sometimes, it’s not the wait staff’s fault (not enough servers on, slow kitchen). Rewarding bad service only begets more.

2. Yes, I would.
3. I think that would take the fun out of life if you knew when it ended.
4. One could probably make a million work out nicely. A second career might be in order.

I actually let the waiter earn his tip. For average service, they get 10%. For good, 15% and for amazing service (you know the type of perfect evening) I went as high as 25% (on a $150 bill, it was quite a good tip!).

I once gave 1 penny to the poorest service ever ; we had to wait 1h30 for breakfast, no smile, orders were misplaced, didn’t come at the same time, no bread on the table nor water, only burnt coffee. I though she deserved it

Yeah, one and a half hour is unacceptable! I’ve never experienced that extreme of poor service. (Knock on wood.)

Do keep in mind that tips are sometimes distributed among staffs. It’s difficult to punish selectively.

I have a pet peeve: printing the gratitude right on the bill. That’s a major turn off.

Tip - sure I definitely base the tip on the service.

Naked? - yup

Death? - no way. What if the answer is next week?

Quit job? I don’t think that would be enough $$ but I would definitely either think about a new career or at least plan to retire a lot sooner.

Mike

Every think about how much money a 15% tip really is?

I worked in the restaurant industry and truth be told, I’d be further ahead if I’d never gone to university and stuck to waitressing.

My tipping isn’t as by a percent but service and unlike the crazy ideology of tipping a higher percent in a more expensive restaurant, I’ll give a higher percent in a cheaper place.

So, a well known chain kind of restaurant, where dinner for two will run $30-50, lets just say $40. Well, with tables for 2 you can serve about 6 tables per hour and bus your own tables, more if that’s a separate job. At 10% that’s $24/hour. You can only count on that for about 6 of an 8 hour shift because of slow times, so about $18/hour, or an equivalent of about an extra $36k on top of the wage, at a 10% tip, $48k at 15%. They get their $16k minimum wage as well.

They don’t pay taxes on all that and usually the sharing of the tip is highly unequal, most I’ve asked keep 80-100% of the tip. They usually only claim about 1/5th of their tips on taxes, so every $10 actually has the buying power of about $13 gross on my paycheque.

I tip more because of social pressure and expectations, but truthfully I think we’ve been brainwashed on the unreasonableness of this.

The girl that sells you your cloths probably makes the same base salary as the restaurant worker, do you give them a tip? What about the person who cuts your hair? The cheap shops pay minimum wage, yet some will be making $20-25/hour. I can tell by their actions my $5 tip is rare, but they take 30-40 minutes to do my hair. By comparison it would be the equivalent of tipping 3% in a restaurant in terms of the amount it puts in their pocket.

There are a lot of workers that make minimum wage or not much more and we don’t tip the vast majority of them, but we have this thing built into us that we do this enormous and ridiculous redistribution of wealth for an entry level unskilled job.

When I do the math a $1 person tip brings them up to a reason wage for the work performed. Give the difference to all the other disadvantage workers that provide services for a non-living wage.

I would definately do number 1 and 2, number 3 no thank you, I couldnt live knowing that my date with destiny may be close by.