tipping

so when you pay by credit in an ideal world you should leave a cash tip?

that's what i try to do and i understand it's "the way to go"

i gave a waitress in denny's a, like, $14 tip or something once in 2006 just because

It sounds like you could have said "Sorry, the kitchen closes right at ten" then given a little eye-roll to say "those lazy cooks!" and gotten rid of them. But if your bosses are monitoring, then I retract everything. And for the record, I would never go into a place just before the posted closing time and expect service.

hi i pay taxes on my income

It sounds like you could have said "Sorry, the kitchen closes right at ten" then given a little eye-roll to say "those lazy cooks!" and gotten rid of them.

Agreed totally, used to do this! New manager guy is really committed to holding this official closing time, if one complaint gets back to him heads will roll etc. etc.

btw that table I was bitching about came back again tonight, this time at 9:15 so OK. Good lady tipped ~$4 for her one meal. Bad lady again tipped ~$4 for the three people on her check. Also I already hold them in really low esteem so they'd really have to do a lot to win me back over. Warning to the world, even if you are a douche with some chip on your shoulder about your contrarian, iconoclastic bad-tipping ways, never crack jokes with wait staff about how severely you are inconveniencing them or how poorly you will tip them.

dag

http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/dish/201108/tiger-woods-regains-no-1-ranking-tightwad-tippers

http://bumpshack.com/2008/05/08/bad-tipper-lebron-james-tips-125-on-800-tab/

5.) Jeremy Piven: Left signed Entourage DVD as tip.

Jeremy Piven, according to Zimbio, showed up at Nobu in Aspen with a party of 12 -- without a reservation. After being seated and served, Piven reportedly told the manager: "Thanks for nothing," and left a signed Entourage DVD as the tip -- which is at least a bit more generous than an autograph. According to the story, a Nobu employee hurled the box at Piven as he was leaving, and Piven was banned from ever returning to Nobu

tbf that's probably where he was poisoned with mercury

I feel bad for the server but still, if you take a job at Nobu Aspen it's gotta come with the assumption you'll be dealing with the world's biggest assholes on a nightly basis.

lol i met a sushi chef who worked at Nobu (not the Aspen one) and he had a nasty case of Mercury poisoning once

just got a $170 tip HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY NEVER COMPLAINING AGAIN

lol Jeremy Piven just as you'd expect him to be in real life

jeremy piven came to a party at my house once and left 20 minutes later.

did he eat all your sushi before leaving?

no but tbh it was a shitty party w/ a bunch of 20 year olds going "hey its the dude from old school!"

i would have left too

hi-five to zachlyon!

yay! i've accepted that my life is just going to be hating my job one week and tolerating it the next, forever, AMERICAN DREAM

pumping my fist over here 4 u, zachlyon

what he said

looool after the last couple weeks have been good with the tips, 54% of my paycheck went to taxes. can't win!

For years I’ve been tipping $1 per drink at “normal” bars (when ordering at the bar, of course). But now that “mixologists” and cocktails with multiple ingredients (and often complicated physical maneuvers!) are the norm at even my neighborhood bar, $1 no longer seems adequate. Are we to start tipping on $14 cocktails the way we tip on food? Say 15 to 20 percent? What do mixologists expect for that Cucumber Basil Crush with house-made ginger-elderberry liqueur, thai basil grown out back and ice shaved by hand the old-fashioned way?
A.

The dollar per drink you might tip for some “well” alcohol on the rocks is not adequate these days for that Cucumber Basil Crush. Mixologists are becoming chefs, and take special care in how their drinks are assembled and served. And for that reason, I’d tip $2.50 to $3 on a $14 cocktail — even if the bartender isn’t a great conversationalist.

http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/dear-flofab-please-dont-take-my-plate-yet/?src=tp

I miss frogbs

The very next time I order a Cucumber Basil Crush with house-made ginger-elderberry liqueur, thai basil grown out back and ice shaved by hand the old-fashioned way, I will be sure to make good use of this advice.

Man, this thread makes me so endlessly thankful I don't work at that restaurant anymore.

tipping is not just a city in china!

^^ meta frogbs

But really, don't ever sit down in an empty restaurant within 30 minutes of their stated close time. I know people who would go as far as to say an hour. Numerous people, tipped and untipped, are trying to clean the place up, both in the front and in the back of the house. Again you might say "tough shit, that's their job" but if that's your attitude you are probably already a horrible tipper and we don't want you anyway.

― Doctor Casino, Friday, July 29, 2011 12:17 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this reply is half a year out of date, but i really dislike this kind of super-aggressive service staff hostility toward customers. look i know it's a tough job and that we're all just a bunch of drooling nincompoops, but the issue here isn't whether or not we figure it's you're job to be inconvenienced. a restaurant that chooses to seat you is a restaurant that has made it clear that it wants your business. period. if restaurants don't want the business past a certain point, then they should quit seating people at that point. and i tip very well, thank you, whether or not i can really afford it.

i mean, i wouldn't walk into a near-empty restaurant fifteen minutes before closing time and expect to eat. but a hopping full house at half an hour to close, why not? that's just me, though, and i don't expect everyone else in the world to adhere to my standards. bottom line is that restaurants shouldn't seat people they don't actively want to serve.

And for that reason, I’d tip $2.50 to $3 on a $14 cocktail — even if the bartender isn’t a great conversationalist.

Conversation skills come into it now? I've been way overtipping in that case.

For what it's worth, the restaurant I worked at was basically never, ever busy in the evening. I'm sure in the story I told, those people were the ONLY table seated in the restaurant.

And I maintain that in terms of increasing or decreasing the amount of unhappiness in the universe, the person deciding to sit down five minutes before closing is an asshole, even if the posted closing time ALLOWS them to do that. They're making a whole lot of people's day a lot worse. The ONLY way to make up for this is to leave a huge tip out of proportion to the price of the meal, and even this won't necessarily mean much to the cook, dishwasher, cashier, or whoever the fuck else is stuck there drumming their fingers waiting for this person to just goddamn order something already.

look i know it's a tough job

what job isn't tough though? the only jobs that aren't tough are the ones that are in another stratosphere from the ones you would get tipped for. 95% of jobs are tough.

Yeah I spent 5 years being yelled at, every single day, by at least 50% of the callers to my helpdesk job. No one much was thankful, everyone was rude, it was shiftwork, and it was very stressful.

Tips? Id fucking loved to have had tips.

They're making a whole lot of people's day a lot worse. The ONLY way to make up for this is to leave a huge tip out of proportion to the price of the meal, and even this won't necessarily mean much to the cook, dishwasher, cashier, or whoever

i've worked these jobs and these people can be pain in the arses. but ultimately they are right and the pissed off waiter, if he is pissed off, is very wrong. if it's the much of a problem then get another job.

*that much*

a call centre operator gets a call 5 minutes before the end of a shift that goes on for half an hour. that is brutal. and that person is not getting a tip or getting paid much, if at all, more than a waiter either.

well theyll get paid for that extra half hour of work

so will the waiter, cook, kitchen porter or whatever.

and if not then it's not the customer's job to reimburse them for that fact.

kitchen staff probably front of house... maybe

xxxpost I didn't like getting the last minute calls in the call center, but to be honest it's a less egregious crime than the restaurant sitting. The sin is when you call right at closing and aren't prepared (ie, if you're enrolling in something and don't have your choices already made, didn't bother to read your materials, etc).

and yea, you usually get OT anyway generally (or at least I did cuz I was already scheduled 40 a week). whereas in a restaurant, not necessarily, plus if you're a server you get paid dick so overtime isn't squat.

like the reason the last minute sitting in a restaurant sucks is because A. you probably cleaned everything and now it's getting messy again, and B. unlike a call center, when once the call ends, you can dash, you have to wait for the customers to actually get up and leave, which they don't always do after they're done eating and paid (sometimes you have to give them the subtle hints like turning the lights on).

So usually after they leave, you still have a bit of work to do, whereas in a call center you can generally up and walk out the door.

yeah, not sure folks are understanding that the average American waiter is making $2.13 an hour in wages

yeah my paychecks were usually like $20-$40

bartender wages are all over the place - sometimes decent money before tips (by decent I mean actual minimum wage), sometimes completely off the books so that tips are their entire income, sometimes $2.13 an hour just like a waiter

At my first waiting job, I actually had health insurance, drawn from my paycheck. Only I didn't realize that I didn't really have insurance for six months because my paychecks were non-existent even before my insurance. (I was 18 and stupid, or that might have occurred to me.)

fwiw front of house staff in a nice place are probably making way more money than someone in a call center after tips so i dont think its really 'about' that. and sometimes you just really want to eat at a place or are tired yourself and dont want to search for anything else or this was the only place everyone could agree on blah blah blah its not the end of the world but you are being inconsiderate to the ppl that work there

I promised myself I'd never go back into the restaurant industry after I got laid off in 2003, and so far haven't. I now make about 5 times the salary I did back when I was a waiter. And I find the work stimulating and like it. I wasn't built for restaurants due to my short fuse and big mouth.