So after watching yesterday’s episode of Medium, which by the way RULES, I flipped on the local news and wouldn’t you know to my dismay there was a segment on how waiters and waitresses are putting together websites that disseminate customer information to the public regarding:

  • What Restaurant
  • Name of Person
  • Summary of Events
  • Date
  • Amount of Check
  • Amount of Tip

all for the public to view and to critique. Actually I’d assume that this is more so for those within the industry to critique and to know whether or not that person is a bad tipper.

But what questions come up with this type of behavior? First off, let’s think about the actual economics of this. Take one example off their website (which by the way appears to be going through some technical difficulties, probably because of a poorly written script to host the page, and a poor host of the site):

  • Dennis Gallagher
  • Number in Party:4
  • Date: 02/16/08
  • Location: Upscale, Downtown Cleveland, OH
  • Amount of Bill: $213
  • Amount of Tip: $25

Now let’s break this down. So your telling me that for a period of 1 hour, you have to get drinks, appetizers, main course and desert for 4 people, and of that you make $25 straight up? Doing the math, I would say you would make close to $1000 per week (assuming 40 hours a week and 1 party per hour). Now you might say to yourself, well that sounds pretty good. So I ask myself, in a typical restaurant is your server only waiting on you? The answer to that would be no–typically due to the economies of scale, the server has many tables, so they could be serving more than 1 party at a time. And since they are for the most part always busy, it is a revolving door. Brace yourself, if you continued this math lesson, that person would be banking $52k per year. Now some reality checks.

First off, do they declare all $52k per year as taxes? Or would the temptation of an all cash system deter someone from giving Uncle Sam his fair share? I tell you what, those who are in corporate environments, don’t have that luxury and are pigeon holed into following the letter of the law. The income is tracked, the W-2′s are mailed, Uncle Sam wants his cut. Now is $52k unreasonable? I think not! Just doing a quick search, I’d say that the average wage in America is about half that per week.

Now you may say that I’m being unfair to the people who do these types of jobs–ABSOLUTELY NOT! I think what they do is a necessary job, one that comes at a high rate of demands, and requires someone to be quick on their feet and good with recalling a lot of information from their short term memory. But you know what, considering the other jobs out there, it’s a lot of rinse and repeat wouldn’t you think? The soup lists don’t change during the course of a shift (generally), the menu typically doesn’t change, the eating behaviors of people doing really change. I mean it’s not like you work for a software development company where you have 2 million lines of code that continually change from person to person, new code checked in, old code checked out, things are moving around, and you have to keep yourself up2date on everything that is going on around you as well as changes to the base code from version to version! WOW!

Here comes the kicker. I ask you gentle people, cause I am assuming that servers are mild mannered and reasonable people–what is fair these days? I find myself looking at the service provided and what is being asked, and wonder to myself are we just becoming greedy or believe that self worth is measured in the eyes of the beholder and not by the market? 10% isn’t good enough these days, now it’s 15%, soon to be 20%, when does it stop? Are we going to continue being nickeled all the way to 50%!!! If it gets this high will people stop and thing to themselves, OMG, why do I have to pay so much?!?!?

Let’s be reasonable people, if I got to charge a tip for all the extra services that I provided, my customer’s would be BROKE! Our economic system currently strives on the believe that quality services deserve quality and FAIR compensation. But let’s look at all those people in so called ‘white collar’ jobs. Are there times when you think that your bonus each year isn’t all that fair? But do you always go in and tell your boss ‘you know what, I don’t think that 3k bonus was fair’. Or when you get that 3% raise, you tell them again ‘you know what, I don’t think I deserved 3%, I want more’. More, more, more, more. That’s the same old tune that American’s are whining about. Job’s aren’t necessarily out there to make you rich–sometimes you work to get the job done and take satisfaction in knowing that even though you didn’t get a monitary reward you know inside that what you did had value.

All jobs are like this, so let’s not single out the service industry. We are ALL in a service industry these days. We all have customers, we all have to work long hours, and do things that we don’t necessarily want to do, but know that in order to keep employed in these changing times and with George W Bush at the helm of this sinking ship, we have to do these things to get by and make it through another day.

Tips are just one way of making an income, let me ask all of you this question, if you walked into Best Buy and you have a pushy sales person who is trying to sell you a 50″ Plasma are you going to buy it from them? If that person works on tip, that’s their livelihood, shouldn’t you pay patronage to the time he spent talking you through this complex system and all the things you need? What kind of tip should he get when you DON’T purchase a TV from them but took up 30 minutes of their time that they could be selling an item to someone who is more serious or more able to understand what it is that they want? I know you all know what I’m talking about here.

We have to approach this from a fair vantage point. In this case, using the example that I gave, 10% sounds more than fair–15% if you got someone who really cares about what they did and is more selfless about it. Tips are just a way to say “Thank you”, and sometimes we forget, sometimes we don’t feel that it was entirely up to OUR own individual and highly bias standards, sometimes we can’t afford it and 10% is actually at the top of our budget, sometimes we just plain feel that standards are standards and 10% is 10% across the board–whether its you or the next, principles hold true and 10% is held all the way down the line. Why are these a bad thing?

I have some customer’s who are reasonable and others who are not so reasonable, and others who I think are just plain out of their minds sometimes when they ask for things that it would seem so plainly obvious what the answer would be–but is my reaction to treat them any different, or say that I’m not paid enough to take their petty issues? I think the answer to that is plainly no. Regardless of what the customer brings to the table, in a service industry one where we are concerned about service delivery and where we/I care about what I do irregardless of how the person on the other side feels or expresses their happy/not so happy experiences, I do the best that I can each and every time. This is the price we pay folks, so either get use to it, or move to a place where tipping is not required/expected, or move to a place where the cost of living is so high you forget about tips and move to a job where you have stable income each and every week.