http://www.uwmpost.com/article/c58b6a04079622c80107964766ca0008 Interesting article, especially for those of us who have worked as waiters. Most of my waiting career was in Texas, but this article was written by a guy from Wisconisn. It's very interesting that his experiences are very similar to mine. However I do think that bad tipping is more of a class thing than a racial thing. Professional black folks tip just as good as professional white folks.
everyone should have to work for a week or three as a server. also, i hope that as many americans overseas arent as horrible about adhering to tipping customs (of course, over there, the waitstaff actually gets paid salary, as opposed to relying on tips. at least, in europe, typically, i have found...) as forigeners tend to be here (i worked at an indian restaurant, so lots of brits, who were almost guaranteed to be the worst tip of the night, if you had a table of them). as far as the article, i never had that problem, but i saw it with those of indian/pakistani origin. you were lucky to see 5% with them. thankfully, the store owner would let us automatically add 18% to tables of indians. of course, i HATED that policy, i hate stereotyping people, but after i gave them the benefit of the doubt time after time and got burned, i started to do it myself.
I personally always go for the 20%, unless the service was absolutely horrible. I've never waited tables before, but I know people who have, and I know it's not an easy job. They rely on tips for their income, and when you consider that on a $100 bill, the difference between 15% and 20% is only $5, it's not that big of a deal. $5 may not mean much to you, but I can guarantee it means a lot to that waiter.
Maybe what this waiter should be bitter about is the anachronistic practice of tipping itself in place of being paid a reasonable wage?
Define reasonable wage. When I was a waiter I was pulling down $200 a night for 5 or 6 hours of work. Very few restaurants would be willing to pay a waiter $1000 plus per week. In my experience the service I got in Europe was very subpar compared to the service in the US. European waiters for the most part (not all, some were excellent) do not give outstanding service because they have a guarenteed wage. Tipping helps to ensure better service. If your wage is based on the quality of your performance you have more motivation to do a better job. If I was getting let's say $10 an hour to wait tables I'd do just enough to not get a complaint. I wouldn't have any motivation to up sale drinks, desserts, or make the dinning experience a memorable one.......Unfortunatly there are some tables that no matter how good the service is will leave a bad tip. Quotes like the above are usually made by people who are too cheap to pay for good service. If the service sucks, leave nothing, but also explain why to the management.
Or maybe service in service-oriented industries in Europe is poorer regardless of whether it is a job that it is customary to tip on in The US? Why is waiting any different from the multitude of service oriented jobs where tippnig is not the norm? And why cannot a restaurant reward its better-performing staff itself, just as is the case for most jobs, instead of creating a kind of "moral obligation" for customers to tip in general? nice generalization. Btw, most people tip regardless of how bad the service is. And a customer most certainly is under no obligation to explain anything to the management if they don't.
so you think that most restaurants could easily handle the overhead of a "real" salary for all of its waitstaff?
Why not? If tipping wasn't the norm then increased prices - equivalent to current prices + tips - to cover increased salaries would be a financial wash for both customer and business.
Is it legal to charge only one set of customers (based on race) a mandatory service charge? I find this practice unacceptable.
its not mandatory. its up to the sever. however, most servers do, especially after getting shafted a dozen or so times in a row after giving the benefit of the doubt.
The whole tipping system is an anachronism. Factor in the service charge to the prices and have employers pay incentive-based bonuses to their employees the same way it is in any other job. There is virtually no tipping at all in Australia, and although the average service standard is noticably lower than the US I do not have a major issue with it and personally prefer the tradeoff. As with anything in life, you will still get good service at at good restaraunts because they employ good staff. That isn't to say I don't recognise the good points of tipping, and I am not wholly opposed to it. It's certainly one way of providing an incentive, and for that reason I do not especially mind tipping for exceptional service. I do however detest a system that has tipping as an expectation.
Having worked several jobs where I did not receive tips as well as one where I did (for a moving company; although it should be said that we received a decent salary and tips were more or less supplementary), I definitely made more of an effort to please the customer in the job where I did. I currently work as a doorman at a bar/restaurant, first night I worked there we got a huge table of Russians. They had more than 6 or 8 or however many people it takes, so there was an 18% gratuity automatically added to the check. They actually crossed it out on the check and didn't leave a dime for the waitress, after spending almost 3 hours there eating and drinking and running up a bill of a couple hundred dollars. My boss said that he couldn't add the 18% back onto the check because they could simply dispute it with the credit card company and the bar would lose the entire thing, so he just gave the waitress $40 from the check to compensate. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that a lot of places the waitress would just end up getting screwed. The place I work at gets a ton of foreign customers, about half of them are Brazilians who are OK but there are also a lot of Russians and Brits who are generally awful tippers.
Perhaps they were pissed that 18% was automatically added to the bill? I know I would be unless it was the stated policy of the restaurant for a group of that size.
That's what I'm talking about. There shouldn't need to be a sense of entitlement towards tips. Service costs money, the servers have a right to be paid fairly for it and the customers have a responsibility to pay for what they use. Charge a fair price for the meal and pay the servers a fair wage for their work. Then, if the service has been exceptional, the customer may choose to tip as a form of bonus - which is what it should be.
If it's written on the menus, why wouldn't this just as much form part of the contract between restaurant and patrons as, say, the price of any menu item?
Not sure. If I had to guess, it'd be that the bar has no way of proving to the credit card company that they had a party that big.
The thing is that the tipping system is generally beneficial all around. The waiter/waitress generally gets more money than they would under a straight salary system. The restaurant operates at a lower overhead, since they don't have to pay the employees as much. And the customer benefits from better service because the waitress has incentive to provide quality service in return for an anticipated tip (the customer doesn't really lose any money in the system; if waitresses received a higher salary instead of being tipped, the additional overhead for the restaurant would be passed on to the customer anyway in the form of higher food prices). It's not a coincidence that service is generally better in the US than in Europe.
We're not talking about eliminating tips here. What's wrong with eliminating the 'expected' component of tips by bundling it into the fixed price (which is logical), and allowing the 'performance bonus' component to remain?
In my experience service is better in the US than Europe even when no tipping is customary for the service rendered. I'm not sure I buy the argument that this is due to tipping.
what's funny (after reading the article) is that the foreigners in this thread are the same ones complaining of the tipping system in this country ahhh irony *sigh*