Should you tip the waitress and how much thread

I hate tipping, and honestly only do it because I live in a small area of Oregon and frequent the same places, So out of fear I tip. Maybe I am jaded because I live in Oregon where the wait staff is making $9.10 an hour + tips. Cooks barely make more than that here and knowing even if I stiff my waiter they have made more an hour than most people doing jobs that receive no tips. My wife worked day care for 3 years while in college, responsible for peoples children. CNA's don't make that much in my area, nursing homes, you name it, I guess I just don't understand how as a society we decided people bringing us food was the job we subsidize their income with tips.

Fight_sl said:

It is a basic human quality that doing nice things for people makes you feel great. Whether it is paying someone a compliment, giving them a just-because gift, or giving a wallet back to a stranger that drops it on the ground.

I think part of the problem with tipping is that it is a one-sided, fire and forget bit of generosity that rarely receives acknowledgement. It might sound ridiculous, but if servers had an opportunity to say,"thank you for your generous tip!"and the tipper got to say,"hey, you are great at your job", most people would actually look forward to tipping and servers might actually care. The world would be a better place.

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I have that happen indirectly - sometimes I round up generously, and it's pretty obvious when they appreciated it enough to remember me when I walk in the door 2-3 months later (I don't haunt the same places regularly, we go out a bunch but rotate the options a ton) to try to take over the table.

McCheese_sl said:

I really enjoy tipping. I like leaving big tips because I know it makes the person receiving it very happy. I get a lot of criticism from people I eat out with that I tip too much, but fuck it, it makes me feel good. When I worked in a restaurant and I got great tips, I think I cared more about the fact that they felt I did my job so well that I deserved that much moreso than the actual amount of money.

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Word - same - still have a nasty scar on my arm from my summer before college doing my (one and only) food service job at Applebee's - testimony to why they use those wooden trivets for fajitas. No one gave me any grief over it though, the customer actually apologized for it, hah.

I have seen this happen at every restaurant I cooked at, sadly they are happy to see you because they know your a generous tipper, nothing more. My wait staff used to have nick names for these people and they would be pissed when 1 staffer would hog them each time they came in. I think everyone should work the back of the house to truly understand how the restaurant world works. I noticed more often than not the more the person made in tips that week the more time off they took the following week..

Chopxsticks_sl said:

I hate tipping, and honestly only do it because I live in a small area of Oregon and frequent the same places, So out of fear I tip. Maybe I am jaded because I live in Oregon where the wait staff is making $9.10 an hour + tips. Cooks barely make more than that here and knowing even if I stiff my waiter they have made more an hour than most people doing jobs that receive no tips. My wife worked day care for 3 years while in college, responsible for peoples children. CNA's don't make that much in my area, nursing homes, you name it, I guess I just don't understand how as a society we decided people bringing us food was the job we subsidize their income with tips.

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I'd probably, even as a generous tipper, scale back to 10-15% in a state like yours for good service and down to 0% for horrid service (which I never do here in a $2.63 or whatever it is state) - make it the equivalent of raises/bonuses for good work entirely rather than feeling obligated at that point.

There is the rare occasion I tip generously and 9/10 its for wait staff that connect with my kids. Also if we had a wait staff wage here in Oregon I might not be so pissy about it, but seriously I know people doing jobs with so much more responsibility and physical requirements making the same minimum wage and not getting tips to compensate for it. Its rough.

I want a robot girl , to take my order , cook my food , bring it to table and suck my dick.
Maybe if there is something good on TV I will order desert and watch.
Naked and Unemployed , take 100 former whiny cunt tipped employees.
Give them all serrated steak knives and a bic lighter.
Whoever is still alive after 90 days , gets a job , sucking dick for tips.

On second thought if there was a robo girl who could suck some dick . I would just stay home and watch Naked and Unemployed .

A 2010 paper Azar published in Applied Economics found that rather than being a strategic move to ensure quality service, tipping is largely the result of psychological motivations--like feeling social pressure, or wanting to preserve a self-image of generosity. Another study found that tipping is a risk sharing method between a waiter and a customer, ensuring people don't lose too much money on food that could be terrible: "when the meal is unusually bad the diner can choose to withhold a tip and reduce the loss of utility that would otherwise occur," the researcher theorized.

Porter, for his part, thinks diners' preference for tipping has something to do with power. In his first post, he presents this gem of an observation:

"A certain small number of very vocal men (and it was always men) resented that we were not letting them try to exercise additional control over our team members. This was true even though compelling research has shown that servers do not adjust quality of service as a result of tips; instead the idea that the restaurant was not offering our servers up as objects of control, was heresy. For these people, the primary service they wanted from the restaurant was the opportunity to pay for favors from the server ? much like the patron at a strip club pays the club for the opportunity to dangle bills in front a dancer for individual attention."

http://www.popsci.com/science/articl...fUMIZShURyA.99

Tipping servers and delivery people is one thing, but I read an article a while back about tipping that was off the fucking wall. It was talking about tipping your garbage men, mailmen, UPS/Fedex people, and buying them gifts at holidays and shit. This, to me, is unreal.

chaos_sl said:

Tipping servers and delivery people is one thing, but I read an article a while back about tipping that was off the fucking wall. It was talking about tipping your garbage men, mailmen, UPS/Fedex people, and buying them gifts at holidays and shit. This, to me, is unreal.

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Depends on the service.

When I lived in a town, the Garbageman had the same route for the seven years I was there, always the same two guys. Friendly (Met them quite a few times running out at 2am when I forgot) and if they were already past my house, they would stop and one of them would hop off of the back and come back up to grab the bags. Always had a Christmas gift for them (Bottles of Vodka), but I never gave a gift to anyone else who had a service like that.

The only people I feel the need to tip are the delivery drivers for the local pizza shop. And that is because they are the only people who deliver to my house out in the sticks.

If I was on a first name basis with a postal employee who delivered to my house (again, I live in the woods), I would probably give them some booze or a cookie package for the holidays, just to be polite.

If you live in Mayberry or something, i can see that sort of thing on a case by case basis, but even then not for the laundry list of people they had (christmas present/weekly tips for your dry cleaner? come on...) you just couldn't keep up with that. I don't even buy gifts for everyone in my family for the holidays. But in the city? or even suburb? I don't know who comes and picks up my trash, hell, I have switched companies like 3 times. And our mail people suck, always fuck up, if I knew them I would hate them.

Relatively certain that them stopping after I brain-farted out of getting my bags out on time and even having one of them run back up the hill to grab my trash when it would happen was 'above and beyond'. Plus, they were not loud as fuck, which seems to be a common problem with trash collectors.

Besides, it was two $10 bottles of booze once a year, not like I was giving them bottles of top-shelf once a week.

Yesterday I tipped ?1.50 on a ?23.50 bill for two. Then I realized, I just tipped the restaurants owner, which is something you're not supposed to do at all.

How do you deal with this in the US? Or is this not even a thing there, being served by the owner, since they can hire people for two bucks an hour? It is rather common here, even if the restaurant does have hired servers.

Quineloe_sl said:

Yesterday I tipped ?1.50 on a ?23.50 bill for two. Then I realized, I just tipped the restaurants owner, which is something you're not supposed to do at all.

How do you deal with this in the US? Or is this not even a thing there, being served by the owner, since they can hire people for two bucks an hour? It is rather common here, even if the restaurant does have hired servers.

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Go in sometime in the future , use the shitter. Take a roll of asswipe and some soap , use it to tip the waitstaff in another eatery. That stuff is expensive . Problem solved

Panda_Assassin_sl said:

This isn't restaurant related, but what do you guys usually tip for cab rides?

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If I'm in portland, ME I'll give them 5 bucks if they get me home using a reasonable route and the Somalian didn't smell awful. In other cities I usually plug the route in my phone and if the time about matches up usually 20% but no less than 5.

Why is this thread sexist against waiters?

Famm_sl said:

Why is this thread sexist against waiters?

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If you already have a dick, why would you need a tip?

Quineloe_sl said:

Yesterday I tipped ?1.50 on a ?23.50 bill for two. Then I realized, I just tipped the restaurants owner, which is something you're not supposed to do at all.

How do you deal with this in the US? Or is this not even a thing there, being served by the owner, since they can hire people for two bucks an hour? It is rather common here, even if the restaurant does have hired servers.

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Just saying, but again, it isn't 2 dollars an hour. Anyway, in the vast majority of eating establishments, if a manager/owner takes a table, they split the tip with the front and back house staff. I'm not sure how it works in other countries, however. But unless the owner is a dick or something then it is probably being reallocated to other employees. The owner wants your return business, and unless you are tipping at like 100% of the bill price or something, he mostly just wants you to use product and pay for it via his markups. The tip, especially at 20% or less, is negligible compared to paying for the item.