(no subject)

I get dessert if I get good service, which tops cheap wine. Plus I am a better tipper than almost anyone I know...if you don't ignore me.

think they will give you a larger tip

I don't know...perhaps the older couples eat there all the time and have established a reputation for leaving good tips already. (We always get excellent service at our regular restaurants for this very reason.) Still, not a good idea to ignore you guys.

Waaaaaay back in the day, I worked at AT&T. My team would occasionally order Chinese, and I'd sometimes be the person to go around and gather the money. One day, when I told someone that her amount of the bill plus tip would equal $X, she replied "Oh, we never tip them because they're always late."

Strangely, whenever I called, they'd always say "Oh, hello, Stephanie!" and the food would arrive in less than fifteen minutes. GOSH I WONDER WHY.

I love ordering from the Chinese place at WC's, they let us do special ordering if we ever want to since we've been ordering from them for years (before the house) and they deliver fast even on large orders. The receipt has a running total on how much you've spent there over time and we managed to break the system and cause them to have to roll it over.

Hah! XD

We always joked we were spending enough to send one of their kids to college. Not quite true, but we've paid a good chunk toward it. The roll over happened when we hit $10K.

Also, goddammit, tipping shouldn't be optional, not as long as restaurants assume tips will substitute for wages. If the quality of the service is not so bad that in any equivalent scenario elsewhere you'd refuse to pay the bill outright, you have no moral right at all to not tip.

Which is not to say that I would blame you for not leaving a generous tip for a server who ignored you.

I think it's absolutely shocking that restaurants can get away with paying such a crappy wage to servers and expect them to make up the rest of a decent wage with tips. I don't know if waiters are taxed on tips here in England, but it seems like a bit of a kicking on someone when they're already down.

It just seems like an enormously dumb way to run a system to me. There's lot of evidence that tipping has more to do with the way the customer thinks than how well or badly the server serves--cheap people are cheap; people like me tend to tip heavily unless the service is seriously bad, because I know that servers are chronically screwed over on tips by cheap people. It's like a game of Prisoner's Dilemma....

I disagree. You can have execrable service and great food. That's definitely a no-tip situation.

I said comparable, as in, if in a scenario in which you don't normally have the legal right to arbitrarily withhold payment for the service, which is what not tipping/tipping very badly usually entails. If you, say, hire a contractor to rebuild your deck, and they use great materials but the work takes three years longer than the estimate to complete and you fall through the deck it the first time you step on it, you'd be justified in withholding payment, regardless of how nice the paint was--because the service you paid for wasn't provided, or was of unacceptable quality. But you wouldn't withhold that payment on a whim--you'd only do it if it was egregiously bad. Most people who stiff on tips don't stiff on tips because the service is bad, they do it because they can.

Tipping is a pretty heated topic, but whenever I read something like this, I have to mention that the server should get no lower than the regular minimum wage by law, no matter what. If a server doesn't make up to regular minimum wage due to a lack of tips, the restaurant is required by law to make up the difference.

Yeah. I wish food servers got paid decent wages to begin with, and tips really were nothing more than a gratuity to express appreciation, not the primary source of the server's income. It'd take the heat out of the argument.

Story time!

The one case in which I and my tablemates didn't leave a tip, the service was so bad that the manager actually, while we were trying to pay, comped our entire meal and drinks and gave us coupons for free appetizers. And there were eight of us, who had 1-2 alcoholic drinks each, a couple of appetizers, and an entree each.

Most of the details of that experience have faded out of my memory, but the service was incredibly slow, the server had no idea what she was doing and no clue that maybe it was way past time to get a manager and ask for help in serving us, and at the climax, brought out the wrong entree and proceeded to get into a heated argument with the diner over it, which, I think was the final straw that made the manager comp us.* And the restaurant wasn't even crowded, so there wasn't that excuse.

We were pleasantly surprised when we tried to pay - which was a clusterfuck in and of itself because the server was actively avoiding our table at that time and didn't want to bring the bill or to pick up the credit card - and the manager comped it rather than deal with the situation any longer. We agreed that the kitchen wasn't at fault, other than perhaps not making sure the server was trained enough, and were quite willing to pay.

* She'd ordered the beer cheese soup. What she got turned out to be a giant bowl of queso - the server (not a kitchen worker) had ladled it out of the wrong container in the kitchen. And instead of saying "I'm sorry, I'll check in to that right away," she argued that no, it was definitely beer cheese soup. We had to call the manager over and get him to taste it. He agreed that it was definitely queso. XD

Edited 2009-08-12 20:25 (UTC)

That's hilariously awful. Good for the manager for comping you--it's the smart thing to do, and the right thing to do.

Ironically, my *other* worst service ever, we overtipped because we were there precisely because the service was so awful - the exact phrase was "You HAVE to go there! The service is SO AWFUL!" We considered it part of the entertainment when it totally lived down to our expectations. XD

My sister tells me that there's some local chain here in Boston where the schtick is extraordinarily rude service. As in, it's on purpose and people go there expecting it. Presumably people eat there because they think it's funny.

Hee! This one was a plain old Waffle House, now forever known as the Waffle House from Hell.

(I think I may be making a later post asking for tales of woefully bad service, and shall save the full story for then. XD)

Oooh, I was just reminded I have one!

Posted! XD

That would be Metro Diner here in Dallas. That and it's a great greasy spoon after heavy drinking.

At first I was confused at how some hardware could be dancing on a table. It then took me another two attempts to read those few simple lines correctly, mainly because on the second read through my brain was still caught on the idea of something having to dance on tables. XD

I'd have thought that it was always good practice to try and do your best, especially with new customers you haven't seen before who may turn out to be extremely generous.

Almost worth writing a little note on the tab for that.