Originally Posted by
ElkeNorEast
11.45am on a weekday (lunchtime) - big city downtown. Very good and popular restaurant & bar. We just want drinks. Walk into the busy bar and find there are two empty tables, both set for meal service. We sit at the table and the waitress comes over with menus; we tell her that actually we just want to order drinks. She says fine, and is very pleasant, refilling the free potato chips twice while our table drinks two beers, a white wine and a Coke. We are just killing time til we need to leave for the airport, so we're not in any rush.
My companions want to pay the bill (as they should really as we've been splitting dinner bills all weekend and since I'm pregnant I've not been drinking anything while they've been ordering bottles of wine). The bill is $25 total. It is now 1.00pm.
They carefully count out $4.00 as the tip, $1 per drink. I pull out a $10 and add it to the pile - in my mind, we've taken a table that probably would have been occupied by four lunch-eating folks at around $15 each, and she could have made a lot more money if we hadn't been taking that table up for our time-killing session. My companions are truly shocked by this idea and don't get it. We spent a long time in the club at the airport debating tipping amounts afterwards. Notable points: I used to work for tips, none of them have ever had a service industry job, and they are all British.
I'd watched them give excellent waitstaff abysmal tips (~10%) all weekend (on their Amex Platinum cards, no less). They argued that they are very nice to their servers all the time (which they are), and therefore did not feel the need to tip "excessively," as they felt that the waitstaff would appreciate being treated well more than they would appreciate a few extra dollars. I argued that it was best to treat your waitstaff very well and still give them a decent tip (for me usually around 17-22%, unless they were bad) because all the niceties and smiles in the world don't pay the rent.
So, here's my question: what would you do in this situation? What is normal, correct, whatever you want to call it? Is $4 acceptable?
I absolutely agree with you... I would have done the same thing in NYC. But as a European living in NYC, I know it is kind of tough to adjust my tipping behavior when I cross the Atlantic. Such a large tip would not be understood in most Paris or London bars. But then again, in Paris or London you probably have been told you could not sit at the table because that was the rule...