"gratuity" news and stories

Tipping may be contentious, but it's generally not too complicated. Most diners today are in the habit of adding at least 15 percent to their bills for the luxury of not having to pour their own drinks, fetch their food from the kitchen or clear their table at the end of their meal.

But even practiced tippers continue to struggle with what may very well be the most complex tipping quandary for restaurant-goers: Should one tip on takeout?

Here's why the problem's so advanced: It forces the customer to evaluate what's happening behind the scenes, a tricky proposition even for seasoned industry insiders. Since no server is going to bore you with the details of how your order was taken, placed, boxed and bagged, it's up to you to figure out whether anything tip-worthy transpired.

Tip-haters will be delighted to know I don't think there's generally anything wrong with skipping the tip on a to-go order. My fellow servers and I expect to be tipped on things like knowing the menu, anticipating diners' needs and keeping the dining room spotless – all of which are irrelevant in a take-out situation. While I'm quite sure there isn't a server anywhere who'd turn down a tip, few servers plan to get rich handing bags to customers.

Messy table. Photo: Jason Rosenberg, flickr

Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the tenth in a series of posts.

As a server, I should have boundless patience with my fellow overworked, undertipped brethren. But as anyone who's dined out with servers knows, food industry pros are often the harshest critics of front-of-the-house shenanigans.

Since servers know how restaurants work, they know exactly who to blame for the mishaps that spoil their eating-out experience. The French onion soup's taking too long? That's so not the fault of the server (many of whom would probably be thrilled to pack all three courses in to-go containers and send their table on its way). The halibut doesn't taste good? That's likely the reason the server skips the employee meal.

Diners should never discount their tips for things beyond the server's control: A corked bottle of wine, too long of a wait at the host stand and dirty bathrooms are comment card fodder, not tip-lowering offenses. But there are certain server behaviors for which I'll almost always knock down a gratuity a few percentage points.

It's a stereotype that foreign diners in the US are bad tippers. Whether this is true or not varies from restaurant to restaurant, but it isn't difficult to see why waiters and waitresses might expect people who aren't used to tipping their servers 15-20% at the end of a meal to simply not do it. If a waiter gets stiffed on the tip, the only real recourse is to curse at bad luck before continuing on to the next table. But the manager of the restaurant Aquagrill in New York decided that something should be done about this perceived issue. He decided to add an automatic 18% gratuity to the bill when the diners were foreign, because "foreigners don't tip."

In this instance, the party that was taxed consisted of four diners who all reside in the US, ordered in English and conversed amongst themselves in French during their meal. Their "foreignness" was apparently identified because they all spoke French, so the tax was applied. Adding a tax to a bill without informing the diners in advance is illegal, at least in New York City, where the Department of Consumer Affairs allows a 15% gratuity to be added to parties of 8 or more, as long as notification is conspicuously printed on the menu. The group confronted the manager and eventually paid the bill, noting that they would not return to the restaurant.

The owner of the restaurant, Jennifer Marshall, has since refunded their bill in full and blamed the poor judgment of the manager for the gaff.

[via the food section]

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