i'm bored come talk to me

[surviva316]

I don't think I would enjoy eating in most places if the servers were paid higher and tipping was not a given even if it cost me pretty much the same. . . .

I don't know how much I want to dip my toes into this conversation, but I will point out that people tend to way overestimate the correlation between tips and quality of service. The business is just much more complicated than that. Just as a couple of salient examples:

1) Scheduling servers is a very complicated thing to balance, and how many servers are on the schedule will much more highly correlate with your service than how much the servers give a shit. The reason scheduling servers is complicated is because staffing 4 servers for a night instead of 3 cuts into everyone's pay by 25%. Even hiring bussers, hostesses, bartenders, etc. has drastic effects on how much everyone in the restaurant makes. For any place that has managers that give a shit about their workers' morale and stuff, this generally leads to there being AS FEW help staffed as can possibly keep the restaurant standing upright.

I found this especially true in fine dining where there are far more corners to cut: not doing the french press at the table, pre-bussing silverware with by hand instead of using a tray with a black napkin for display, spending less time on the specials and wines and stuff, there's seriously like infinite corners that can be cut in fine dining, but people will still get their food and get charged the correct amount.

Anyway, this point isn't me taking a side because I'm not naive enough to think that changing it to a system where the restaurant pays for the servers' wages will lead to more staffing than necessary to keep the place standing upright, but I'm just saying that the guests don't hold the magic wand to decide how much the servers make. A lot of it is still about pleasing the managers so that they give prime sections and trust you with more tops and all that stuff.

2) And this one's important so I probably should have put it first: there is a MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH higher correlation between how much a server makes and how big their bills are than there is with how good their service is. This does not at all lend to great service. Again, this is ESPECIALLY true in fine dining where a glass of wine can range from $7 to $50. Much more of the game of going home with an assload of money is talking people into spending more (or even going so far as ringing up the second most expensive wine when a guest trusts the server to choose for them) than it is about bringing stuff out on time.

I think it's great that two people in here have said that they tip based on how good the actual service was rather than on how much their ass got kissed, but don't kid yourselves and think that you two people in the universe of billions change all that much about servers' attitudes on how to make money. Not all servers are cutthroat (I was not a cutthroat server at all, mostly because I wasn't living off of my wages), but there isn't a server in their right mind who thinks that they make their money by getting free refills out in a timely manner.

I don't know if this post takes a side or anything, I just thought I'd clarify some misunderstandings about how the business works from a server perspective.