Tips?

So I have been thinking lately about tips. When are you required to give them? Wen are you not required to give them? When are they expected by the person providing service, and when are they not?

I have always been in the school of thought that at a restaurant you provide tips to an employee when they take your order while you are sitting at your table, bring out the food and drinks that you have ordered to your table, and come back to check on you several times during your dining experience to make sure that your food and drink are satisfactory and to offer you more food and drink.

When this takes place, granted the service is satisfactory, you then give that employee a 15% tip. Tipping more than 15% is excessive because, afterall, they are simply doing their job and getting paid to do so by their employer. Tips larger than 15% should only be given when extremely good service has been provided.

While tipping less than 15%, even if the service has been inadequate, is considered rude because in most places a waiter or waitress is taxed on a 15% tax average.  However if service has been intentionally horrible on the part of the employee, then you may consider foregoing a tip or giving a very small one. A better option, though, is to give a normal tip for poor service, but leave a note describing the bad service or nicely attempt to tell the employee in person.

Questions come into play, though, while at establishments where you order at a counter, but someone comes to serve you at your table. Or nicer buffet-type restaurants where someone comes to take your drink order and services your table with those drinks, but you have to get your own food from the buffet line. In these circumstances, I believe a $1-3 tip is appropriate regardless of what your bill comes to.

Things get more tricky, and more irritating, at places where you order at a counter and your food or drink are prepared for you behind that counter until it is handed to you on the other side of that counter. Usually there is one person who takes your order and your money, several people who are involved in making and preparing your order, and another person who gives you your order. All of these people are simply doing the jobs that their employer pays them to do- nothing more and really no one-on-one service has been provided. Why should they recieve a tip??

Many of these places have “tip jars” out on their counters to guilt people into tipping. One place this really gets on my nerves is Starbucks: they are extremely overpriced as it is and their employees are paid decent wages and receive decent benefits for what they do, yet they try to guilt their customers into forking over even more money than what they have already paid for a service that their employees are paid to do in the first place.

Debit cards make this process more difficult. Many of these counter service places, when you pay with a debit card, make you sign a reciept for your card purchase and on these reciepts there is a place to write in how much you would like to tip- once again guilting you into to paying more than you already have. I am always afraid that after I leave, that the employee who rang me up will add a tip onto my reciept. So, I am always sure to write the total amount of my purchase down underneath the blank left for a tip to lessen the chance of fraud.

This weekend, at a snobby-posh-overpriced counter service sandwich shop I went to, the receipt that had to be signed actually provided you with suggested tip amounts to write in!? Give me a break!

So- How Do You Tip?