That's great, but tipping isn't a gesture in North America. It's an expected part of staff wages. There's no getting away from it, no matter how much one dislikes it, or how much we try to rephrase it as appreciation or reward or a gratuity. Nobody over there takes a waiting job and calculates their income on the basic wage.

Hence the US posters use terms like "jerks" who "stiff" the waitperson about those who tip less than 15% (or 20% or 25% depending on who's talking) , as if they're doing something dishonest by not "overpaying" (as, OTOH, we foreigners might see it).

the expected percentage does seem to be accelerating. Presumably it will slow down as it approaches 50%. Or perhaps it would then move towards a pay what you want model?

They can expect as much as they want but if their service is crap they won't get a dime from me.
What they will get is a rational and polite explanation as to why they don't deserve one, which I make clear I'm quite happy to put into writing,with their name, to the company owners. That soon softens their cough.
Never let the tail wag the dog.

Oh aye, you've got to show them who's boss!

Not my role though. By and large you get pretty good value in the states even with your 18% added so I don't grudge the tips. What I do grudge is the surly attitude one encounters (mostly online rather than real life) toward foreigners who don't quite "get" the system.

Or the pre-emptive "bad service to those Euro/Aussie-tightwads on table four" attitude one hears about. (Haven't actually encountered it much though - once again, it's more prevalent online)

In the absence of a service charge I tip at least 15 per cent of the pre-tax total going to 20 or even higher if I'm a regular patron.

If you are a regular even for a few days do not underestimate the power of a tip. Three friends and I once stayed a week at a small hotel in London where breakfast was included. The server was a nasty, unpleasant woman and service was poor. I left a couple of pound coins at my plate and urged my companions to do the same despite their objections. The server was transformed and for the rest of the week kept our coffee topped up and our toast replenished while the rest of the dining room was largely ignored. :)

So, not a "reward" for good service at all, but a "facilitation payment" to stop the bad service.

Isn't this just what all the anti-tippers have been saying?

Heh, so by that standard the folks I know who did 10% well into my childhood

18% has always been a restaurant-labelled thing for large parties, IME. These days with smartphones (and higher sales tax in places) it might be practical, but prior to smartphones, people have pretty much always used rules of thumb and rounding.

20% has been the high end of the normal range since at least the early 1990s (hence the band name: see http://www.tippersmusic.com/ and they were around in 1991) ... and 15% is still a perfectly acceptable tip.

I haven't seen it anywhere but this thread, except in the specific case of "tipping over a normal amount for genuinely exceptional service."

I don't see any sign of that.

Trip/delivery charge plus mandatory gratuity is pretty standard at fancier hotels. It's an unreasonable charge, but then again, room service is generally priced unreasonably across-the-board.

A few blowhards do not change the fact that a 15% tip is still perfectly acceptable.

Note that he's talking about pound coins; that's not in the US :D

My grandmother used to carry around a "tip card"--a credit-card-sized piece of plastic with a long list in small print of the amount to tip for a given meal. The two columns were labeled "15%" and "20%."

I first remember seeing it as a kid in the early 1990s, so, as you said, the 15-to-20% rule was standard at least back to then. And outside of NYC and a few recent comments on this thread, I've never heard of it being any different today than back then.

Never take tipping advice from someone with an ulterior motive. Those publications would clearly qualify.

My own rule for room service is if there's a small flat-dollar-amount fee for delivery, I'll tip on top of that; if there's already a precomputed percentage fee for service (or gratituity!), that's the tip.

Almost every other price rises; service charges on the bill (or the cost of service incorporated into the menu price) would go up to.

As for the standard percentages, if those went up during the 1970s and a little more during the 1980s -- what appears to have been the case in that case (rather more slowly in some other recollections, quicker than that in others, which I question) -- remember that was the era of stagflation, where we had inflation with less of a linkage between inflation and wage growth than we usually have had.

I'm a regular at a couple places. I try to get the same person & tip around 20%. Get very well taken care of :)

I don't really understand why most waiters seem to think that their job is something so hard/important that they deserve to be paid at least 60k+ a year. C'mon, I know, some people can be rude, especially when drunk, but it's still a meanal service job, without any real skills required, not a nuclear physics.
If you think that working in finances, IT or whereever is so much easier then just go to college, get a degree, and get yourself a job suitable for your capabilities, instead of expecting me to pay you hundred bucks per hour for bringing my food from point A to point B...

This comment exemplifies the misinformation surrounding tips. It's best categorized as urban myth.

Can I assume you never earned tips?

When I got a tip on a credit card, I deducted the the amount from the cash I collected per shift. I left the remaining amount as a remittance for the company (cash paid by customers - charge tips = total remittance). Unfortunately most days charge tips would exceed cash collected, so we would take home all the cash, remit our paperwork, and line up to collect the remaining cash from accounting the following week.

If you believe that a signed tip to a credit card means either tax will be paid or that the tip pool will be enforced, then you are sorely mistaken.

Cash out the door, is cash out the door. All tips charged to a guests room or to credit cards came back to me in cash. Yes, I tipped out to other staff. Yes, I paid some tax. But one is NOT connected to the other.

I don't know where you worked; each place seems to have its own system. But the bottom line is that if you or the restaurant gets audited by the IRS, there is a record of credit card tips. If the restaurant's records show that you received credit card tips higher than what you claimed on your tax return, you will be liable for penalties. If a customer leaves cash on the table and you pick it up and slip it in your pocket, no one will ever know except you and the customer.

Some restaurants do tip outs based on a percentage of the tips you get, others based on your total sales. The latter makes it impossible to cheat, but also potentially unfair to the other support staff.

Currently staying at the Grand Hyatt and we frequent the club lounge daily. I'm getting to know all of the workers really well going onto our 11th night of the trip. They've provided fantastic service. But do they get tips?. I since found out I can leave a tip by posting directly onto the Hyatt Bill. The hotel will ensure that tips get distributed.

Any suggestions how much I should tip for 14 days of breakfast, snacks and hor d'ourves? Tipping is not required, but I like to leave a nice gesture. We've been tipping the chambermaids almost daily as well with my cash on hand.

If the hotel will distribute it so you don't have to worry about it, I'd probably do a few dollars/day/person.

Tipping housekeeping I just don't get.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...y-5-hotel.html

I tip about a buck a day, whether it's 5* or no-*, more if I leave the room in particularly messy shape. The only circumstances where I'd tip $20-30/day would be if I'd been partying like a whole band of rock stars, in the hope that a big tip would save me a significantly larger cleaning or repair charge.

I don't--I just added this item to show that in Las Vegas, tipping has gone bonkers.

I hate not having strong air conditioning in the summer outside the US but my not liking that is not going to make the rest of the world turn down the thermostat.

Your complaining about tipping will not change anything either.

tipping at buffets with "stations"
 

Many buffets have lots of "stations" which (sort of) prepare food to order (1)omelets, (2)crepes, (3)sushi, (4)Mongolian etc. Caesars Palace in Las Vegas closed their Lago buffet and opened the Bacchanal buffet (dinner is now $40)--and if you follow the "rules" (per various publications), if you utilize (say) 5 "stations", you are supposed to leave (at least) $1 per each, this becomes a (very) expensive buffet.
Do "you" tip per "station"?

Coming from northern Europe, I am uncomfortable with tipping. However, I do recognize the necessity thereof in the US and some other countries. So I do my best to be reasonable in tipping, even though the idea that I am responsible for the livelihood of a restaurant worker instead of the owner is very, very alien to me.

But tipping per station and other silly stuff like this is simply making things very inconvenient. Am I supposed to count the stations? What if I don't use one of them? What if I visit one station twice?

If we foreign devils are sometimes bad tippers, is not always entirely our fault - the system is sometimes confusing and sometimes it is hard not to feel our ignorance is taken advantage of (as in 18% mandatory tips in some NYC or SF restaurants, post-tax).

Cheers,
T.

It's becoming clear that some tourist traps attempt to abuse the US tipping system, and such rules not only can, but should be ignored. I'm tempted to say that the tourist traps themselves should be as well; Vegas buffets, and Disney-run restaurants, for the examples given in this thread,

Other than bar/restaurant service and porters (the latter only if you engage their services; many of us skip them), a lot of the other "common" tipped professions are tipped less often and very much optional, especially if you're never going to see the person again and don't need to worry about quality service as a repeat customer.

I've never heard that, I've never seen a tip jar at the station, and I don't see how your server would be able to keep track of how many stations you use.

On top of a $40 buffet, an extra $5 in "station" tips would still put you under the regular sit-down restaurant tip,absent some other tip to the server who brings drinks. I'm sure the same publications suggest tipping the buffet server as if they were a regular restaurant server; I've already given my opinion of that.

The server does not keep track of station use. But I see lots of people handing dollars at omelet, crepe etc. stations. [I don't]
I've even seen people tip the cashier:confused:

I like tipping when its unexpected. The housekeepers probably don't get much. So I like tipping in unconventional fashion. As for restaurants, I pretax the amount and deduct any takeout before tipping.

I'm going to give the club lounge a substantial tip. Won't be like a regular restaurant, but they usually don't receive anything. Thus the unconventional tipping when I shouldn't but the buck goes a long way when I do.

My mother in law is a housekeeper and even she doesn't think it's appropriate. She'll pocket the money of course, but she doesn't think anything more about the person who left it. All she's thinking about is trying to get through her allotted set of rooms.

OK; Vegas, and Disney are both nuts.

It's been years since I've been back to Vegas, but I've never seen this at the Reno buffets, and off the top of my head am not sure how someone handling food would even be able to safely handle money -- it would involve a glove change, or hand-washing, no?

I can't speak for Vegas; I've only been there once and didn't see the tip craziness at any of the buffets I patronized.

But I can say that Disney World restaurants follow the typical American standard - they add an 18% automatic gratuity to the bill for parties of 6 or more. This can be negotiated if you get bad service. It's the customers who are crazy, increasing their tip percentage to 20% or 25% on an already-overpriced meal.

And that's one place where Disney is crazy - the actual meal price. I love the place, and there are several restaurants that I really love to visit when I'm there, but the prices are getting mighty high. In particular, I will not be returning to the Epcot steakhouse called Le Cellier. For $60, i got a steak and one side with a Coke. Now, it was a very good steak, but frankly, I've had better steaks at Longhorn for $25 including a side, a salad, bread, and either an appetizer or dessert.

Next time I'm in the mood for a steak while I'm at WDW, I'll get in my rental car and find a steakhouse off site.

Anything at Disney is going to be expensive. This latest stay we dined at Le Cellier as well. It used to be hard to get into this restaurant because Disney dining allowed for use of only one sit down credit. Since they changed it to 2 I've been able to get in more often. The steaks are excellent there and yes, driving out and about will get you a better deal.

I agree with all this 18% tip charge by Disney is rediculous. I get hit all the time as a Table in Wonderland card holder. The 18% is added every time pre-discount. Should be post discount IMO.

These publications suggest $1-$2 to the server at a buffet--so they haven't gone off the deep end in this instance.
[The problem with the scenario with "stations", gets super-magnified if you have a family of (say) 4.]

Well, that does balance out a bit; I've seen people recommending the standard 15-20%, which seems out of line to me.

$1-$2 per person at the table sounds about right to me, which is comparable to the standard tip at the cheapest buffets, and quite a bit lower at the pricier ones. Maybe a little more if they don't have self-serve soft drinks (most Reno ones don't, while it's pretty common at hotel breakfast and the the whole non-casino Hometown Buffet sort of places) and the server is good about refills.

Sorry but i only tip the waitress at a buffet ... If no one tips the stations then indeed no one will want to work that job and eventually they will pay the employee the right amount(Supply and demand).

Is there any sign enough people actually tip at the stations to make a difference, as opposed to this "tip at the stations" thing being a rumor dreamed up to get the guys in question a few extra bucks.

I have never seen or heard of anyone tipping at the stations, except on this thread.

Ditto.

That said, I personally avoid buffets, so I'm hardly an expert, but some wings of my family like buffets and I am occasionally dragged to them (kicking and screaming, of course). I have never seen or heard of tipping anyone except the waiter at the end of the meal when paying (and again, with some wings of my family, the waiters at a buffet do more work than a typical waiter as they have to clear off plates between each of several trips to the buffet. ;))

Personally I tip the amount I would normally regardless at buffets or sit down restaurants. It gives me peace if mind and I don't over think.

I don't tip at stations but in the rare occasion I do, I take the difference off at the end if the bill. All post discount and less takeout.

Sounds like a bit of "overthink" to me...

FT has some cheap, misanthropic .......s among its members.

Someone claimed it was in one of those published "tipping guides" for Vegas.

Paying at the end at a buffet sounds seems unusual to me; I've certainly hit it at hotels, but the vast majority of freestanding low-end ones (Hometown Buffet, Fresh Choice, etc) and Vegas/Reno casino ones are pay-on-entrance.

Well, it's always good to know what people think about this, but it's also an example of the hostility that can be generated by tipping, or not tipping, in the USA, so I think your comment illustrates very well why so many of us foreigners get stressed by the whole deal.

I'm all for paying my own way, I'm all for a fair day's pay for a fair day's work - I'm also all for the employer to be the one to pay for that day's work.

Why those foreigners insist on getting a cheap, almost free, labour force in the restaurant trade is just bizarre.