What’s your stance on tipping at restaurants?
I realize that waiters don’t make a whole lot of money, and therefore, I try to always leave a good tip, typically around 20%. Of course, I’m also not eating at the most expensive of restaurants, so a 20% tip might not amount to much. Most of my friends share this opinion, so we rarely have difficulties calculating a tip on a shared bill.
When service is bad and it is clearly the waiter’s fault, I still tip, but I might knock that tip down 10%. That means that I don’t like to penalize the waiter for having too many tables at once or for a slow kitchen. If the waiter is down and out rude, they might not receive a tip at all, but I’ve only experienced service that awful once in my life.
I’m always conflicted on how to tip for substandard service though. A few friends and I dined at a restaurant here in D.C. known for slow service, so I wasn’t expecting a quick meal by any means. The waiter was hard to track down, though, and even though he was busy, a drink refill shouldn’t take 25 minutes.
The major frustration was with the food, however. One of the parties dining has a food allergy. She knows what she can and can’t eat and often calls restaurants beforehand to find out ingredients. She had eaten at this restaurant before and knew what she could order, but needed to order it without a particular ingredient spooned overtop the meal, something done as a last minute garnish. Of course, her food arrived with this garnish. Luckily, it was a very visible mistake, and after 10 minutes of trying to flag down the waiter (another staff member brought the food), she pointed out the mistake. He first told her she hasn’t mentioned it. Then he asked her if she could just brush it off. He was asking these questions in a kind manner, but the general attitude was “I don’t want to have to deal with this problem if at all possible.” He told her it would take half an hour to make a new meal.
She opted to just sort of pick the offending ingredient out of her meal, something I think she’s learned to do over the years, and she didn’t seem too frustrated by the whole thing. I was impressed with her patience. I think she just didn’t want to hold up the rest of the group, but she shouldn’t have had to do so in the first place.
The rest of the meal went off without a hitch, though the service remained slow. And then it came time for tipping. “Conveniently,” the bill came printed with a calculation of the tip at 15%, 20% and 25%, just so we knew. We actually debated the tip because of the service, and we ended up somewhere around 15%. I’m not sure if this was an appropriate tip or not, based on the service and the attitude we were given regarding my friend’s food allergy.
What would you have done in this situation? I strongly dislike not tipping or leaving a ridiculously low tip because I realize that people who wait tables make very little money. And I realize that mistakes happen. But I found myself frustrated by this waiter’s annoyance with my friend’s food allergy. To me, that bordered on rude, rather than just being bad service. I don’t like to be stingy. But I also think that on some level, a good tip should be earned.
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
I don’t know how to handle this myself. It’s not like you can pull them aside and have a meaningful conversation.
Maybe you could leave a thoughtful note later on explaining the situation and how you felt about it. Leave it for the waiter directly, not his supervisor. The waiter can take the time and read it when they have a moment, and if they have any ounce of compassion, they’ll at least consider your words. If they just junk it or are even more rude to you the next time you go in, you’ll know that nothing you could say or do can help this person, and just request a different waiter.
i once left a 73 cent tip. And not because that was the change from my meal either; that night we paid with a card. I wanted to indicate to the waiter that his service was far below acceptable. And it was not busy in this restaurant. That night we were one of two tables in the restaurant.
I have worked off and on as a server for almost 20 years now. What happened to your friend was unacceptable! As your server was no help you would have been justified asking to see the manager as this was an ingredient that was easily left off the entree. I would have left no tip and quite possibly a note to the server in addition to speaking to the manager. I have a niece who has severe food allergies where simply scraping the sauce off would not have been enough to enable her to eat the entree. I work in an “upper-end” establishment where no substitutions are allowed, however we will do what we can to accommodate food allergies.
Although I don’t agree with the practice of tipping, in general, when you have substandard service and a poor experience due to your server you are completely justified in not tipping and in informing the manager on duty of your poor service.
I have to say that the allergy thing is always a deal-breaker for me. If I ask that thing Y be left off or I check to see that thing Z isn’t an ingredient, then I expect it not to be there. It’s not because I think it’s fun to make the waiter run back and forth or because I like to harass the kitchen staff, it’s because their carelessness might mean that I spend the night in the ER–and that’s if I’m lucky.
I’m generally a fairly forgiving customer–I’m fairly patient about long waits for food, long waits for refills, and servers who are clearly overworked. I tidy up the table and pick up after the kids as best I can so that the server won’t have to crawl around picking up lost french fries or whatever. Allergy mishaps, though, especially if I say ‘hey, this wasn’t meant to be on this’ and they suggest that I brush it off and/or say that the kitchen is too busy to make another plate, will result in no tip, a complaint to the manager, and sometimes a phone call to find the store manager and complain to them, as well. I think that your friend was far more tolerant than I would have been in the same circumstance. Disregarding people’s allergies is well beyond rude or bad service, in my opinion–for many people it’s basically a threat to their life.
We try to always leave some sort of a tip, as both my husband and I have worked as waiters.
But just so you know, we were able to make pretty decent money where we worked (Ruby Tuesday) and were able to support our family of 3 just fine on that income. Of course, we lived a very simplistic lifestyle (by choice at the time).
Anyways – so I think if you are going to work in that line of business, you need to work hard at it, just as any other job you would do. And if you don’t make a lot at your job (at least to support what you need) then you possibly aren’t doing your job well enough?..
I usually tip 20% no matter what…but i usually don’t have a-hole waiters or anything, so i’m sure if i come across one i might react differently.
Let’s hope your next experience is better though!
I wanted jump in the conversation as a current server. If someone tips because of poor service, but does not communicate to anyone that they had poor service than the point they may be trying to make by not tipping could be lost completely. This is because not everybody tips very well, and some people not at all(unfortunately).
In the past, I and other servers I work with have had tables that I have worked really hard for, and even been friendly and conversational with. Yet they still failed to tip even the 15%(and some to tip at all)- In my experience when servers come across tables like these we just have to assume that they generally don’t tip or don’t tip very well on a regular basis.
Therefore- when other people come in and perceive that their service was less than acceptable and as a result tip less(and don’t let anyone know)- some servers will not realize that they could have done a better job and will just figure that those kinds of people don’t tip well. In the place where I work, some servers will even try to avoid taking certain tables where the genre of people sitting down is perceived to be the kind of person who hasn’t tipped them(at all or very well)in the past.
Basically, I believe one should always tip something. If one has had poor service- it is so much more beneficial to you and to the restaurant to let someone know about the issue, than to just eliminate part of your servers wages for the day.
Wow, sorry about the book length post- I tend to over write when I get on an issue I’m involved in!
No apologies necessary! I appreciate your thoughts. You do make a good point. I actually wondered about the lack of tipping to “make a point” about bad service in terms of how it affected others. I know that in some restaurants, tips are split or shared with other staff, such as those who bus the tables, or bartenders making drinks, etc. And they might have done a wonderful job.
You’re right that complaining (even though people don’t want to be complainers) might be the best route. I know people who have left notes for their servers, but I’m betting they were not the most politely worded and more passive aggressive. I always worry that I’m going to get someone in trouble and might be risking their job, but at the same time – if service is not up to par and the manager has heard this time and time again, then perhaps the service industry is not where this particular person belongs.