Read this:
This is tipping, but by calling it a “service charge,” it is no longer optional. Then comes the virtue signaling about benefits.
I don’t have an issue with this. I would like to see tipping become a relic of the past.
Categories: Tipping
20 Comments
Noway2 · March 30, 2024 at 8:35 am
I too would like to see tipping go away, but unfortunately, it seems to be getting worse.
In this case, I think they’d be better off to just bake the costs into the price and ditch the propaganda piece, which is just a turn off to which if I approached the place and read that I would probably turn around and leave. It has been my repeat experience that anytime there is a mandatory gratuity, the service sucks.
One time, I recall, at a restaurant in Murder Beach as it’s known, they claimed a toddler with a plate of fries put us over the limit for number of patrons for a mandatory gratuity charge. The service, and food, were awful. When presented with the bill, we left cash on the table, minus the extra charge, and walked out.
Divemedic · March 30, 2024 at 10:52 am
That’s essentially what they are doing- it’s either pay this surcharge, or pay higher menu prices.
Six in one, half a dozen in the other.
It's just Boris · March 30, 2024 at 8:59 am
Sure, they can do that. What I want to know is the total price for the goods and service I’m receiving.
Divemedic · March 30, 2024 at 10:59 am
Breakfast for the two of us was $53 in total. Not out of line with other sit down breakfast places in the area. McDonald’s is more than $24 for two people nowadays.
It's just Boris · March 30, 2024 at 3:45 pm
I hope it was a good breakfast.
It might not be out of line for the area … but it’d be out of line for me. I make a decent salary, so it’s not lack of ability to afford that kind of price, but a lack of perceived value for most breakfast meals. Those are right up there with “airport prices.”
ModernDayJeremiah · March 30, 2024 at 5:52 pm
Last time I ate breakfast out at my favorite breakfast place (Vic’s Daily Cafe in ABQ, outstanding chicken fried steak and eggs with great biscuits and hashbrowns), it was $20 + $5 for tip (service was great and they were slammed). That’s up from about $14 when I started going there about 3 years ago.
Divemedic · March 30, 2024 at 7:01 pm
Yep- that’s what’s happening here. Breakfast is running about $20 per person, plus tip.
I have been tracking the cost of breakfast at Denny’s over the past 25 years. Not just any Denny’s. The same location- located right near my old fire station. I used to get food there regularly, so it’s a great way to make a valid comparison.
At that Denny’s: 2 strips of bacon, two link sausages, two eggs, and two pancakes is the breakfast that Denny’s calls the “Original Grand Slam.” That breakfast sold for $1.99 in 1997. By 2021, that same breakfast cost $9.49, which works out to an annual inflation rate of 6.7%.
In September of 2023 that same breakfast was $11.99, or a 26.3% increase in the past two and a half years. That’s a 10.5% annual increase.
Just two months later in November of 2023, that Original Grand Slam was up to $12.99. That is an 8.34% increase in just two months, which corresponds to an annual inflation rate of more than 60 percent.
Add coffee to that order and with tax and 15% tip, the total cost is $19.10. For a Denny’s breakfast that just 5 years ago would have cost about $9.
Billy Pilgrim · March 30, 2024 at 9:45 am
California is raising the minium wage to $20 and you might be able to get a double wide with that.
These things happen when 1913 Creature from Jekyll Island private banking cartel controls the printing presses and comrade Nixon makes the money backed by nothing.
Fiat currency always go brrr but manboons never learns.
I used to steal tips off tables at a couple food serving places family owned as a lil’ guy, got caught, got straightened right out.
Those FAFO lessons, you never forget.
At the Irish pub family owned in the go-go 1980s all tips were split up with even the dishwasher (me) getting some.
Dirty Dingus McGee · March 30, 2024 at 10:44 am
So an 18% mandatory “tip”? AND an opportunity to add an additional tip? How about you just tell me to go somewhere else with less word’s used.
I’m surprised the cashier at the 7-11 doesn’t have a “tip jar” out, every other swinging Richard does. Of course maybe the jar to “feed the starving chirruns of Snotswana” is their secret tip jar.
Zeb · March 30, 2024 at 11:08 am
If that is posted up front, it tells me I need to go someplace else. I tip well, when I do get great service, but I don’t tip at all when service is poor. And lately (post pandemic) Poor Service is the rule, rather the the exception. And, I decide what percentage to tip, not the restaurant. I’d rather pay more upfront than have the Razzle Dazzle about benefits, and how moral the place is.
IcyReaper · March 30, 2024 at 12:41 pm
I feel your pain on Murder Beach. I’m from there originally. When i grew up it was a nice place, now not safe usually ranks in top 10 for violence. Now with both my parents and other family mostly gone. I wont go there again. Not one person I grew up with lives there anymore, most moved to county away from city areas.
As for tipping its gotten way out of hand, they seem to want to start at 18%-25% and higher. For that starting rate you get crappy service since they are now entitled. Being a server was never meant to be a career unless you are a “Studies Major”, its an entry field as you get better skills or education you move on to better paying gigs. It’s like flipping burgers, not a career just a starter jobs for kids to learn about the workplace and standards. So now we are expected to pay more because idiots got degrees with no jobs that pay enough to pay off student loans. I don’t get why no body with BS degrees has gone back to their school counselors and sued them for malpractice and financial harm due to clearly bad advice.
But the issue now is with all these low education workers getting these wages, inflation and prices wont go down until 95% of jobs are replaced by automation, which is coming or the collapse hits even sooner than expected and pretty much everyone is broke and unemployed.
As for getting 25% tips, I will have to ask for a nice pure female waitress because I better get a happy ending from someone for that meal.
Itziri · March 31, 2024 at 5:34 am
Ejecting the 50 plus million illegal migrants plus descendants currently clogging everything up would go a long way towards solving a lot of current issues. McDonald’s would have to offer $20/hr just to attract staff.
Woody · March 30, 2024 at 2:25 pm
You need to double check the bill, some places have added the gratuity already and then have a big tip line for you to add more. Also don’t tip on the sales/local tax either.
Steve S6 · March 30, 2024 at 4:41 pm
Replace it with reverse tipping. Publish standards of service and if they’re not met you get a reduction on your bill.
Alternative is stop going to places with inconsistent service and let the business adjust or vanish.
Steve · March 30, 2024 at 8:28 pm
It’s the idea of a percentage that seems goofy to me. The wife and I went out to a nice dinner last week and between the appetizer, prime rib, a couple glasses of wine for the Mrs., and dessert, we were looking at a $60 tip. Times however many tables she was waiting on. Which was, self-evidently, way too many tables. Call it $150 an hour on the low end.
Had we gone to the local greasy spoon, the bill would have been much less, and the standard tip would have been closer to $15. For the same amount of work, and much better service/personality.
Divemedic · March 30, 2024 at 8:47 pm
I agree and have long used that as an example:
Two couples eat at the same restaurant, at neighboring tables. They have the same server and both couples eat identical meals, with one exception:
The first couple has a bottle of house wine that costs $20. The second couple orders a bottle of wine from the establishment’s wine cellar at a cost of $300.
Question: What service or value did the server add to the second couple’s meal to justify them paying an additional $42 in tips?
IcyReaper · March 31, 2024 at 12:35 pm
Bingo DM, that’s always the big question. What does the cost for the meal have to do with anything. Its the so called progressive ideology (a codeword for Communism), if you get a higher price meal or make more in salary somehow than means you have to pay more for the same service…
Matthew · April 1, 2024 at 8:24 am
I like the concept of tipping wait staff provided that each member gets their own gratuities. That is, they don’t go into a pot and split up at the end of a shift, not enough incentive there. Each server gets their individual tips and then may share them with the bar staff, host or other wait staff that helped or contributed to their efficiency etc. As far as “opportunity for advancement” goes, advancement to what? The only advancement for wait staff would be their choice of shift or the like, other than that you’re no longer wait staff, duh. If you seek and accept a position as waitstaff you understand what you’re signing up for. Don’t take a job and then pretend that you’re being courageous or standing up for yourself by demanding compensation beyond what you accepted when you were hired. That’s just being dissatisfied with your own decisions and an ungrateful troublemaker. You’re fired, bye.
Divemedic · April 1, 2024 at 9:15 am
So you have never wanted a promotion? Or are you advocating for employers looking outside of the company for management candidates?
Aesop · April 1, 2024 at 3:50 pm
No problem.
When I see that, I tack on a -20% Inconvenience Fee for pissing me off.
Keep that sh*t in Europe.
You think you’re going to stick me up, best bring a gun and wear a ski mask, and do it right.
There’s also about a 200% chance that my aim in the toilet stall is going to make Timmy work a lot harder to make it pass a board of health inspection before the end of shift. Tell me again what it is that rolls downhill…?
If someone delivers proper service, I have no hesitation about leaving a commensurate tip. Generally 20%.
If they’re less than stellar, I reserve the right to reduce it appropriately.
That’s my choice, and management doesn’t get to hijack that choice, by any such jackassical chicanery.
If they want to push the issue, Step Two might be alimentary incontinence. Followed by projectile emesis. It can clear out an entire dining room…I’ve heard.
Let them try adding a fee for that to my bill, and see where it gets them.
What you tolerate, you get to subsidize.
https://youtu.be/XJoMt0Igfgo?t=98
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