0% is an even easier calculation.

You just take a zero, and add a dollar sign to the front.

> Terrible waiter? Subtract $2 or $3.

Really? Surely if they're a terrible waiter/terrible service, you shouldn't leave any tip.

In most cases the service you get is merely a function of how well managed the place is that's it. I believe that it's somewhat unfair to withhold an employee's salary because their management is dysfunctional. Even if they were downright lazy they still work somewhere where they are allowed to be downright lazy.

I say this as someone who has worked for both very dysfunctional management as well as very functional, process oriented management. The difference between how well customers were served was like night and day. Some issues that contributed to the dysfunction was lack of training and lack of feedback.

Also, in many places tips are pooled, every single person I know who was a tipped employee was part of a tip pool, so you probably taking away salary from an amazing server in the process. Sometimes back of the house is tipped out a small percentage as well.

Restaurant service is, above all, a team effort, so basically tipping is super unfair no matter how you slice it.

My brother-in-law is a waiter and his work complaints echoed this. At his current employer they pool tips, but mgmt has overstaffed for nights that are traditionally slow. That means easier work, but also less money.

In places where they don't pool the direct wait staff might still need to give a cut to others. It was explained to me that the busboys will sandbag you if they feel cheated, and then good luck turning over tables in your section when they haven't been cleared.

>mgmt has overstaffed for nights that are traditionally slow

Of course management doesn't have an incentive not to over staff because they aren't paying the employees hardly anything anyways. Add that with employees bribing^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htipping other employees and, wow, what a dysfunctional system.

I'd imagine bartenders would pretty much always be required to pool tips with each other since whenever there's more than one working they always work in a team.

If you plan on leaving a $0 tip, you'd better complain to the manager first.

Why is it my responsibility to do performance reviews of restaurant employees? The management already forced me into a performance rating system through tips, I shouldn't have to sit down with the manager to do a detailed performance review too. Besides, if the food and service was so bad that it warranted a $0 tip, I'm probably not coming back.

For one thing they have no idea if you have a legitimate complaint, are someone who has such high standards that it's not worth catering to, or simply a cheap bastard. They care strongly about the former, will shake their head at the middle and will dislike you if it were the latter.

If you actually speak up they'll have a better idea.

If the manager has no idea whether or not the service warranted a 0% tip, then that's the problem right there. It's his job to know that.

My point was that if the service was bad enough to not leave a tip, complaining to the manager might result in you not paying for the food, either.

You can demand that the bill be discounted or waived entirely (or that what you paid be refunded) if you didn't get what you were expecting. For instance, if you walk out of a movie because the sound was a half second out of sync and the picture was out of focus, you could just eat the price of the ticket, or you could find a manager and get your money back for the low, low cost of just voicing what was wrong with your experience.

What else would you do? Angrily write a bad Yelp review in your car?

I don't care about getting comp'ed food (unless the order was obviously wrong and I was over charged), that's not going to make up for the 2 hours of wasted time. I'm not going to spend another 15 minutes waiting to talk to a manager while I "demand" that the bill be discounted or waived.

Fortunately, I live in an area where there is no end of new restaurants to explore, if I have bad service at one, then I just won't go back there. Problem solved (for me).

For the record, I've never tipped 0% (but have tipped only 10% for particularly bad service).

I come from a country (Australia) where I can always leave a $0 tip, and the server won't mind because they are paid properly by their employer.

I wouldn't leave a $0 tip in a country where tipping is an essential part of the server's income, but I do think such a system is backwards.

20% is also a big part of the bill, and if you go out everything is overpriced already.

The standard tip for table service at a restaurant in the US is 15%.

There is considerable upward pressure on that, with many recommending an 18% or 20% norm (and restaurants themselves are actively part of this with the tip hints they provide on bills.)

And retail stores are now putting Christmas holiday items on sale before Halloween. At some point, you have to plant your feet, grit your teeth, and hold the m-f-ing line.

You can recommend 25% of the total if you want. Heck, recommend 40%. But as long as the restaurant business continues to operate with respect to employee pay in the same fashion that is has for decades, I will continue to consider 15% of the pre-tax total to be a reasonable tip for median-quality restaurant table service. If that ever becomes such a bad tip that servers can't be arsed to work for it, I guess I can pay higher percentages with proportionally higher service expectations. If you want me to tip 25%, you can bet your ass that if I so much as order a burger, I will be asking my server what the cow was named, how old it was at slaughter, and to identify the stockyard where it was finished. (Note: My grandfather actually asked one of those questions. At a diner.)

Of course, according to my brother-in-law, mine is "the most stubborn family that has ever lived". Recommending 18% on my bill is a great motivation for me to calculate exactly 15%, to the penny, instead of estimating and using the ceiling function to the next whole dollar. People like me are just one of the many reasons why tips are not now 80% or more of your bill, and why you can't yet buy Christmas decorations in the seasonal aisle of your local retailer on Memorial Day. You're welcome.~

Not for at least a decade, more in larger cities.

A percentage-based tip scales with the prices on the menu, which are closely associated with the cost of living in a particular area. A 15% tip is exactly as appropriate in 2016 as it was in 1916. It works as well in Florence, Alabama, as it does in Baltimore, Maryland.

The only reason to increase the percentage of table service tips is if the restaurant employee does more for the customer. I have not observed this to be the case in the last decade, in larger cities or out of them.

As logical as that might sound the tipping percentage is a matter of cultural norm and not about maintaining a status quo. In metropolitan areas 20% has long since been the standard and is arguably increasing. The rest of the country has been steadily catching up.

Try doing 20% on an american credit card bill when you're drunk and leaving the house, where it wants you to write down the total AND the difference.

It's completely retarded in every conceivable way.

Just write the total. No need to calculate the difference - leaving it blank works fine 100% of the time.

Isn't that an either-or? I've always either written the tip or the total amount on trips to the US.

As an American, I have always written both the tip and the total on the slip. Until this moment, I have never actually considered only writing one or the other.

I probably will continue to write both as I'm a little paranoid about people making changes to the values before they get put into the machine, and having to change 2 lines is harder than 1.

Is that more likely than you making a mistake and the person picking the higher value?

All of the americans i was with told me to do both. But they were drunk too, so who knows.

> retarded

Maybe consider not using this word anymore.