Originally Posted by
nkedel
Sounds like the Disney crowd is a little nuts.
Frankly, for buffets, I'm going to tend to tip a flat couple of bucks per person. At a cheap place, that'll likely be a normal tip. At an expensive one, that's going to be a very small percentage of the bill.
Yes, I say with a chuckle, we of the Disney crowd are a little bit nuts. But at least we're nuts in a positive way, even if it does cost us enormous sums of money.
And I agree with you on buffets. When I'm at a $13-$18 place like Golden Corral or one of the local Chinese buffets/hibachi grills, I tip a flat $2. When on vacation at WDW, where the buffets range from $25 up to a whopping $35, I tend to tip a percentage. But being that it's a buffet, I tip 10%, not my standard 15%.
Originally Posted by
nkedel
Perhaps this comes of coming of age in NYC, but I haven't seen tip creep over the last 20 years. 20 years ago, 15%-20% was standard. Maybe in flyover country, it was still 15%-20% in the early 1990s, but it definitely was not in the urban Northeast.
I have lived in the suburbs of Baltimore my whole life.
When I first started going to restaurants with my parents in the mid 1970s, the percentage was 15%. I still abide by that.
By the late 1990s, the 18% thing started to appear.
Inevitably, the 20% thing came along in the mid-2000s.
Over the last 3 or 4 years, I've been seeing the 25% thing a lot.
It's been a slow creep, from 15% to 25% in 40 or so years, but it seems to be accelerating.
This sub-section of FT has to do with Dining, BUT, in Las Vegas (there are various publications, like "Whats On in Vegas", which are in your hotel room), tips in general have gone "off the deep end"
--per those publications, which have a
page of "suggested" tips...if you follow those suggestions, you could be out of money in a day or two.
[When you order room service in most of these hotels, they add a service charge to the exhorbitantly priced food, on top of that are you supposed to give the deliverer a tip also?]
Related story: A friend recently was at WDW and couldn't find bananas in the hotel's store, so she asked for some from room service. They sent her four bananas, and a bill that read:
Whole fruit (4 bananas): $11.96
Trip charge: $3.00
Subtotal: $14.96
18% gratuity: $2.15
Tax: $0.98
Total: $18.09
So, $18 for four bananas? Even the Minions wouldn't pay that much! She complained to management and they removed the entire charge, but the whole thing left a sour taste in her mouth (so to speak), because bananas at fruit stands in WDW are $1.50, but from room service they're $2.99, PLUS a "trip charge", PLUS a mandatory 18% gratuity? Bonkers!