Tipping

Ever had this experience? You're sitting in a restaurant with a friend. You order your beverage and it seems to take forever until it arrives. It's not a fancy drink, just a regular coke. You order your food and wait and wait for it. While you and your friend are talking you see your waitress standing around and chatting with the other servers, even though you could use a drink refill and you're wondering where the hell your plain ol' burger is. When your food finally arrives you attack it, starving, only to realize that your glass is empty and your waitress never offered you a refill. You spend the next five minutes trying to flag down your waitress to ask for a refill, which predicatably, takes five minutes to get to your table. After you finish eating, a good hour at least after you've entered the restaurant, you wait for your bill to arrive. It comes and you and your friend put your money on the table. You now have to debate the eternal question, "how much of a tip should we leave?" The standard seems to be about 15 to 20 percent. You wait and wait for the waitress to return and ask you if you need change. You ask for a certain amount back and you wait and wait for her to return with it. Does any of that sound familiar to you? More and more often it's situations similar to the one I've just described that I encounter when having lunch with my best friend. We have a standing date every Saturday afternoon for lunch and one of the few constants it seems we can count on is crappy service. We always leave roughly a 15% tip, but there are times when we debate leaving a tip at all. I can't speak for her (though I'm sure she shares these thoughts), but I'm getting sick and tired of tipping for sub par service. Don't get me wrong, I understand that service people like waiters and waitresses rely on tips to make ends meet. I have no problem tipping my waiter or waitress, but in return I expect some service that's at least halfway decent. I'm tired of my waitress walking right past me multiple times when I clearly need a beverage refill. And why does my waitress always seem to disappear for her coffee break at the exact time that I'm ready to pay my bill and leave? Would it kill my waitress to stop by the table once in a while to see how I'm doing with my meal? Today my friend and I experienced our usual level of poor service, so we decided to do something a littler different. We always split the bill 50-50. Since we've usually just been to the cash machine we always only ever have $20 bill, nothing lower, so we always need at least a couple of dollars in change. Today we were debating about whether to each leave $1 as a tip (which would have been approximately 12% of the bill) or $2 (just over 20% of the bill). Our money sat on the table for a little while. Our waitress walked past us a couple of times and we decided that if she came for our money within a couple of minutes we would give her the higher amount, but if she continued to walk past us we would give her the lower amount. We ended up giving her the lower amount and she looked quite peeved as she gave us her change. I really didn't care since she could have quite easily stopped at our table to pick up our money any of the 3 or 4 times she walked past us. What ever happened to the days of decent service? Or service with a smile? Seriously, why should I tip you for crappy service? A tip is meant to be a thank you for a service performed. I'm not willing to give you a generous tip unless you've actually given me some decent service! My friend and I even had a waitress take her own tip out of our change once. We gave her our money and asked for a certain amount back in change, which included roughly a 15% tip. The service had been okay, but nothing special. When the waitress returned a few minutes later with our change she said that we must have made a mistake on the tip and that she had corrected it by bringing us the "correct change", which was a couple of dollars less than what we had asked for. At the time were so shocked by her nerve that we left without saying anything, but I often wish I could talk to that waitress, whom we never saw again, and give her a piece of my mind.

To those bloggers reading this who currently work in the service industry or have in the past, I just want you to know that I do respect the work that you do and I know that crappy service sometimes isn't your fault. I have never not left a tip, even after really crappy service. But as someone who eats out on a weekly basis, I feel perfectly justified in asking that my waiter or waitress not ignore me or repeatedly walk past me when I'm trying to pay. Is that really too much to ask?