Why you should always tip…
A friend’s post got me on the subject, and I have soooo many friends and loved ones that have a dog in this hunt I’m just going to say it.
Stiffing or shorting tipped personnel is like asking for service and then refusing to pay for it. From a server’s point of view…you just stole from them.
The service industry minimum wage for tipped personnel is 2.13 an hour.
$2.13 PER HOUR!
The national standard % for tips right now is 18%. Not 5% for pizza guys and 15% for servers…it’s 18%. As a professional courtesy, service personnel usually tip each other much more, usually at least 20-25% or even more. This courtesy in many cases is the only reason some service professionals can claim a reasonable income.
…because everyone else thinks someone else will take care of them.
So tip your service.
Most restaurants never allow overtime so these servers make less than $90 a week unless they get a tip from you. Not tipping under the premise that they are already making enough is a shit poor excuse and is one of the biggest reasons turnover in the restaurant industries is crap. So now when you short or stiff your server you’re hurting the restaurant too.
I’ll take it a step further. In most restaurants and hotels (and even pizza delivery), significant portions of the tips go to personnel other than your server. usually 1-5% of a servers sales will go to wine/bar/buss/etc. Now if you stiff or short the service, you’re actually costing the server money.
Next step. Large group gratuities. Next time you get “grat’ed” don’t get your feathers in a ruffle. The reason restaurants do the is because if your party spends hundreds/thousands of dollars on the check and your split-check requesting idiocy allowed half the party to stiff on their tabs, it is very likely that the server may not claim to have made enough to cover the difference in minimum wage. This will cause problems for the restaurant because the restaurant is required to cover the difference if the server hasn’t shown to have made enough to clear minimum wage. They don’t care that the server didn’t make what they wanted to, they only care about making sure they don’t have wage insurance claims filed because the IRS absolutely loves seeing those records…because the IRS considers it a sure sign that “someone” is misreporting their income.
Now before you decide to say that not all hospitality concepts pay minimum. I’ll go ahead and say this, I’ve worked for about 10 different major restaurant groups in almost every capacity. Of those, only one paid above minimum wage, but then only for experienced servers. Now the real statistic…of the hundreds of concepts out there, only about 3-5% provide compensation past minimum wage…EVER. Annual salary increases don’t happen for tipped personnel.
If you base your tip on the quality of the food, you’re effectively blaming your paper boy for the crappy articles in your newspaper. While some concepts allow the servers a modicum of control over the food that comes out to their tables, most do not. Your best bet is just to make sure the server repeats your order back to you, because thats all the control they actually have on your food as well. The same occurs for drink service as well.
So when you decide it’s okay to not tip, here’s what your really doing:
*Insuring the servers income is sub standard and even sub minimum
*Increasing turnover in a business
*Costing the restaurant mucho $$ because of turnover for the job
*You will likely always get “grat’ed” on large groups
*Damaging the restaurant industry as they will just raise the price of their food to cover the profit margin…or worse, employ inexperience and/or unqualified people to server you to replace the ones that got fed up when you stiff or shorted them.
*You’ve probably punished a server for a problem they didn’t have much control over.
This all said, this little rant is mainly just to give people an idea of why all the craptastic ideas about why they shouldn’t tip properly is slowly eroding a good industry, because the restaurants are making more money from it and the level of service and professionalism coming from once-great hospitality concepts is slowly getting destroyed.
So…if you have a question about this subject please fire away, I love educating people on this stuff.
/Rant over.
-Tony
UPDATE
Unfortunately, someone that trolls restaurant service/hospitality industry articles and regurgitates content via comments decided to post about 7 pages of comments last night and after a significant amount of research (including calling Yahoo and other Website owners) I found that this person has been trolling forums and regurgitating the same article content for quite some time and actually using indexed comments as a method of getting self promotion on their own written articles as well.
After finding that this person had been equally as aggressive on multiple other service-based forums and blogs (and in most cases banned), I have removed their material and all links to my website. In addition, because these comments are in many ways identical to the comments posted on other venues, I’m going to treat them as a comment spammer. In a future article I will be sure to cite the submitted content as prime examples of deplorably ill-thought and incredibly jaded ‘opportunistic’ netiquette and hopefully this will help said person to understand that their point of view, while certainly relevant, was presented in such poor taste that they could only be regarded as a troll looking for a fight rather than a contributor to an intelligent discussion.
I would like to note that I do NOT subscribe to censoring comments lightly, but once I saw that the same content had been posted multiple times in other websites, that was a crossed line. If you have something to say, say it but don’t post a ton of pages of comments/content used in other sites and expect to retain any shred of credibility with me.
Something to keep in mind (which has no reflection on the relevance and importance of this article), is that other countries have much different opinions on tipping. Some consider tipping an insult – the belief is that a tip indicates they are in need of charity. So tip away while in the states, but research before you go abroad!
@sonnyu28 replied to me with the following:
Sunny,
You aren’t hurting the employer when you don’t tip. You’re just hurting the server, as I explained above, the server usually has to pay a percentage of his sales (not a percentage of his or her tips). In effect, you’re usually making them spend money.
People idea of “Good Service” vary greatly. But here are the basics…
Greeting – 30 seconds to 1 minute (most concepts want this in 15-30 seconds)
Drinks – 1.5-3 minutes (most concepts want drinks out in under 2 minutes)
Appetizer – 7-12 minutes (most concepts work towards apps being on the table in under 8 minutes)
Entrée – 12-17 minutes (most concepts lean towards the 12-14 minute marker)
Desert – 3-5 minutes (most concepts lean towards 5 minutes)
Check – 2 minutes (not all concepts have embraced a check time as a standard, but almost all concepts know that this is the most important time)
Payout – Immediately (they should never have to wait)
Usually your server is only able to directly influence Greeting, Drinks, Deserts, and Check times. Apps and Entrées are usually something they have to wait for. If your food isn’t cooked properly, the server didn’t cook it.
I don’t think docking someone income actually address the problem, if anything it just augments it. Telling them why you’re docking them will make it clear. Unfortunately most people are content to just stiff and walk so there is no communication on what the actual problem was.
If it were me, and the server made sure to entertain regardless of how craptastic the food and drinks were, they get their tip (and probably more…professional courtesy).
I teach service like this:
Thanks for commenting Gill!!
Good call!
Yeah I really should have mentioned that many countries do not do the whole tipping thing at all. I know France it’s insulting.
Tony,
Haven’t seen much about server attitude. I agree with you all the way with service and tipping. I base my tipping on 20%, and 90% of the time I am above that or right at that amount. I ususally round up. However from time to time, a servers attitude can make or break my experience. Too often (especially now in my community) there is very little attention paid to good customer service. When I tip, I award service and attitude. To me, both are keys to a successful experience, ann I will pay for that, and more importantly return, and request for that server’s area.