When should you tip a waiter or waitress?

[spoonitnow]

I stopped by a Waffle House a week or two ago to grab some lunch while I was running errands. I ordered a chicken sandwich, hashbrowns and a drink for a total of about $8. The restaurant was not busy, and I was one of maybe four people in the place. Here are two extremes on what could happen:

Scenario A: If the waitress brought me more drink when she needed to, brought my ticket without me having to sit there with an empty plate for several minutes, offered me a to-go cup without me having to ask for one and acted polite, I'd easily tip her $5 or more.

Scenario B: If my drink sits empty for a couple of minutes while my waitress sits on her ass on the phone, she's probably getting a tip in the range of $0.03 so that she knows I did it on purpose.

Thoughts?

[bikes]

I stopped by a Waffle House a week or two ago to grab some lunch while I was running errands. I ordered a chicken sandwich, hashbrowns and a drink for a total of about $8. The restaurant was not busy, and I was one of maybe four people in the place. Here are two extremes on what could happen:

Scenario A: If the waitress brought me more drink when she needed to, brought my ticket without me having to sit there with an empty plate for several minutes, offered me a to-go cup without me having to ask for one and acted polite, I'd easily tip her $5 or more.

Scenario B: If my drink sits empty for a couple of minutes while my waitress sits on her ass on the phone, she's probably getting a tip in the range of $0.03 so that she knows I did it on purpose.

Thoughts?

legit. however i'd still end up tipping reasonably okay.

[surviva316]

I stopped by a Waffle House a week or two ago to grab some lunch while I was running errands. I ordered a chicken sandwich, hashbrowns and a drink for a total of about $8. The restaurant was not busy, and I was one of maybe four people in the place. Here are two extremes on what could happen:

Scenario A: If the waitress brought me more drink when she needed to, brought my ticket without me having to sit there with an empty plate for several minutes, offered me a to-go cup without me having to ask for one and acted polite, I'd easily tip her $5 or more.

Scenario B: If my drink sits empty for a couple of minutes while my waitress sits on her ass on the phone, she's probably getting a tip in the range of $0.03 so that she knows I did it on purpose.

Thoughts?

My thoughts, again, are that tip is a charge that is implicitly added to every bill, and if you don't feel that this establishment is worth their service charges, then don't go there to eat. I mean, Waffle House is pretty fucking infamous for having horrendous service, so if you weren't interested in getting $8-worth of food for $10 because the service there isn't worth the $2, then I would suggest going somewhere else to get your waffles.

I mean, hell, to extrapolate it even further, you could make waffles at home for the price of like $1 per waffle, but clearly the Waffle House dining experience appeals to you so you can sit on your ass and do nothing but point at a picture and you'll get it brought out to you (also, the cost of overhead and all that). I'm sure that cooks at Waffle House are also terrible at their job (helping to contribute to how slow the food comes out, btw), but if your eggs come out with runny yolks when you asked for over-hard and your waffles are a little chewy from being undercooked and all that, you can't really negotiate how much the cooks get paid. You can decide to not eat there anymore, you can decide to complain to a superior about the quality of their work, in extreme cases you can urge to not pay at all if it is completely unacceptable/inedible/etc, but directly docking their pay isn't an option you have.

We only get into these considerations of "well ANYone could of done what he/she did" or "they're not good at what they do" or "it all evens out in the end" when it's this strange implicitly built-in price that restaurants have.

[NightGizmo]

My thoughts, again, are that tip is a charge that is implicitly added to every bill, and if you don't feel that this establishment is worth their service charges, then don't go there to eat. I mean, Waffle House is pretty fucking infamous for having horrendous service, so if you weren't interested in getting $8-worth of food for $10 because the service there isn't worth the $2, then I would suggest going somewhere else to get your waffles.

I think spoon's "I waited 3 minutes for my drink at Waffle House so I don't tip you" example is a bit extreme, but I think that your argument doesn't work either, surviva.

If you're going to work in a service industry, you had better make some kind of effort to provide service to your customers. It's bullshit to expect that you can just sit on your ass and expect people to tip you because "it's part of the price" for going to the restaurant. Yes -- if you go to a restaurant, you should expect to pay a tip for decent service. But if you get crappy service? Regardless of whether the restaurant has a good reputation or a bad one, crappy service deserves a crappy tip.

Also -- nobody is forcing this person to choose a waiter job over some other job that pays minimum wage. Using the "but they are paid less without tips" argument isn't valid, because that difference is supposed to be earned by the quality of their service.

[surviva316]

If you're going to work in a service industry, you had better make some kind of effort to provide service to your customers. It's bullshit to expect that you can just sit on your ass and expect people to tip you because "it's part of the price" for going to the restaurant.

If you replace the word "people" with the word "employer" and the word "tip" with the word "pay," this is, quite literally, how it works for any other service job in the world. Not that I mean to argue that how we pay any employee in any line of work is even remotely optimal, (I'm not arguing that a cook who gives fuckall about his job and doesn't care how runny the yolks are should make more than competent, at least half-caring cooks), but I'm just pointing out that this thing you're calling bullshit is a pretty goddamned mundane thing.

Also, we'd have to give much more specific examples of "good," "bad" and "mediocre" service for this to become any kind of real discussion. We're talking in very general terms, which is why I didn't answer the poll. When I say that the tip is an implicitly built-in expense in all but extreme cases, I mean that I know a ton of people who grumble about tipping anymore than 15% when everything went perfectly fine except for one little gaffe (which sometimes aren't even gaffes and which very often aren't even remotely attributable to the waiter). It is also the only line of business where you might not be paid if you "rub people the wrong way" or any other kind of ridiculous criteria for fulfilling your job requirement.

If we're truly talking about situations where you received no service--like, you had to go to the cook and tell him what you'd like, and you had to run your own food and stuff--then obviously this is a different discussion. That's a little extreme, I know, but this is just kinda to put into perspective some people's NIGHTMARE stories about service that was unsatisfactory but still not at all the equivalent of not being served at all.