Wait, $40-60/pp INCLUDING the small children? And 25% tip on top of that?? Clearly I live in a different America than the the typical Disney family. But then, wasn't it Disney that built the town of Celebration, FL (?), a buffed and polished simulacrum of what America should be?

Of course, for a family with several active small children, a 25% tip could be too low.

They'll be very lucky to get anything more than 10-15% from a British Tourist in Florida

Well, I stand corrected: there are a few nutters out there arguing for 25% tips, not just servers trying to scam foreigners. I can't see it being common.

Gotcha. So we've got an individual nutter there; mind, there have always been big tippers, but excoriating someone else for being cheap in the usual range is uncalled for.

Frankly, my own rounding rules these days -- always round up to a whole dollar or throw an extra 50c-$1 in if there's any doubt -- makes for relatively large tips at the very least expensive restaurants, although it makes eff-all difference in percentage at pricier ones.

Servers don't get what they expect to make; they get what people expect to give, and that expectation AFAICT has been constant for the 20+ years I've been an adult and paying for my own meals.

Who the heck asks for a specific server at a restaurant where you're not a regular? Or even if you are, how often do you do that?

If you are a regular, and you're not an a-hole, you're going to get better service (and more likely to get a server who isn't brand new) than some yutz off the street who's never been there before even if you leave a tip merely in the normal range. How often does the restaurant have so many regulars that they're competing for individual servers?

I'm sure it happens at some ultra-trendy places, but I can't imagine this is remotely common.

Youch. Of course, one goes someplace like Disney World expecting to be ripped off, and paying $40-$60 per person with kids is insane. That's low for fine dining, but fine dining with pre-adolescent kids is wasted, and it's above the reasonable range for casual dining unless you're spending a fair bit on alcohol.

Why are you bringing up regulars? What difference does it make whether you're a regular or not? The vast majority of customers at a restaurant are not regulars. I doubt Dadaluma's Facebook friend was a regular at this restaurant she posted about.

Children's menus at the Disney restaurants ARE cheaper. However, Disney moved the cut-off age between adult prices and child prices to 10 - 10 and above pay full boat.

Of course, there is no prohibition against adults ordering from the children's menus in the Disney restaurants, and many who aren't big eaters do so quite often. But Disney has been shoving their Disney Dining Plan down the guests' throats for several years now; the DDP is a pre-paid meal credit system, and on that system, those age 10 and up pay full boat.

I really love WDW, and I love many of the restaurants there, but I'm no fanboy - I despise some of the ways they've come up with to separate unsuspecting newbs from their hard-earned vacation dollars.

Unfortunately, it's more common, at least among the Disney crowd, than you'd imagine. Heck, there is a raging debate over whether a server at a buffet deserves less, the same, or higher percentage tip than a server at a full-service restaurant. Some say the buffet server works harder because he has to clear more plates, and so deserves a higher tip, while others say that bussing tables and taking drink orders is far less skilled work than waiting full-service tables, where you have to memorize menus and get orders straight and synchronize food delivery and split checks.

$40-$60 covers a wide range of restaurants. The signature restaurants, the ones that really could be considered fine dining, are by far the most expensive, and tend to have fewer kids because of the price and the higher level of culinary sophistication. Granted, you're not going to find a true five-star restaurant at WDW - I think Victoria and Alberts, the best on site, is rated four star - but there are a few exceptional places down there is you care to look.

I have come to the conclusion, however, that a lot of the tip creep we've seen over the last 20 years is simply due to the fact that Americans are becoming mathematical dullards who don't understand the difference between flat amounts and percentages. They think, "same percentage" means "same amount", even when you're talking about a higher bill, and fail to realize that 15% of $10 is $1.50, but 15% of $100 is $15, so yeah, the server is getting a higher tip, even if you use the same percentage you used in 1987.

I was responding to this comment:
If you're not a regular, why would you ever see that server again, or even worry about your reputation with other servers? Even if it's someplace you go to very occasionally -- the odds of being remembered as one out of many is unlikely.

There's no "bidding," as the tip is purely after the meal.

If you go to the same restaurant regularly, obviously things are different, but assuming the staff doesn't turn over quickly (in which case tipping better won't help either) just being a known quantity and polite to staff in my experience is enough to get better treatment as a regular at that point even as a thoroughly average tipper.

Right, which means she's back to some silly notion of karma, rather than any hope of an impact on future service.

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.

At Disney, perhaps.

IME outside of resorts and hotels, that's kind of a gap where you don't see many meals in if you're a non-drinker -- too expensive for all but the most overpriced of casual places ($30 entree at a casual place?), too cheap for steakhouses or the low end of fine dining.

Alcohol at a pricier casual place can readily push you up into that range.

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.

It's still standard in Norcal, and in the parts of the Northeast where my family remains*. When I lived 20 years ago, the sales tax was 8.25%, it's 8.875% now. It's 8.5% here now (was 7.75% here 20 years ago). "Twice the tax" has been a rule of thumb for at least that long, and has been within the normal range for tipping that entire time in the major metro areas I've lived.

(NH, which lacks a major metro area anywhere in the state, and where I went to college, had a 8% meals and rooms tax despite the lack of other sales taxes. "Twice the tax" was a common rule of thumb there too. Obviously, won't work in places with significantly lower sales tax.)

(* since they're mostly in Queens, and my brother who works in Manhattan isn't exactly hobnobbing with investment bankers, it's quite possible that the subset of Manhattanites who spawned the "$500k is middle class" BS a few years ago may have a different standard... NYC is a big place, culturally more diverse and with a bigger population than many states.)

People still want to make their server happy, it's just human nature. It's not rational, but then again, nothing about tipping is rational.

It's still "bidding" in the sense that a few people will tip more than the going rate. Others will follow, and eventually that will become the new standard. Then a few years later someone will raise it again and the cycle will repeat itself.

The rule is round up the bill when in Germany, unless of course you happen to be American, then the rule is feel free to tip your customary 20% and confuse the hell out of the wait staff. :)

Some people do. Some people just stiff them. Most people seem to follow the social convention for its own sake, with very little to do with the actual server.

The standard range has been consistent my whole adult life; if it's a cycle, it's a wicked slow one.

It was around 10% in the 1920s (Emily Post's advice) and 15% became standard a few decades after. Now it's "15 to 20%" or whatever it is.

I think it goes up each generation.

"10-15%" seems to have been standard for nearly a half century, then -- if it was standard a couple of decades after the 1920s through to when I was a kid in the 1980s. That's a lot slower than once a generation.

15% is still an acceptable tip anywhere in the US, a few odd folks online and a few irate servers trying to bully people aside. IOW, I wouldn't worry about it; at the level of changing from a flat 10% to a range of 15-20% in 70 years (and then being stable for another 20) doesn't make it sound like it's individuals "bidding" it up so much as major structural changes in the economy ... and even then, that stuff seems to change faster.

We need someone like Clint Eastwood to sort this out.
I make that a 1.7% tip.

There is nothing benign in percentages going up, no matter how slowly. A so-called "flat" percentage is still an increasing amount, as prices keep going up.

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.:D
[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?]

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%.

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.

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!

It's important to remember that gratuities are voluntary and not obligatory.

I never let anyone try to intimidate me into paying for a service which I think has been sub-standard and if they want to cause a scene I'm willing and able to out-scene them.

This is why I think Tripadvisor, for all its faults, is a fantastic way to keep restaurants and hotels on their toes.

That and health inspectors. They're always my last line of defence when restaurant owners are particularly rude and their standards are poor. The inspectors will always find something wrong in a kitchen. Any kitchen.

Having said that I believe when service is outstanding there should be an equally appropriate response. I remember calling into a motorway service area very late at night on a long journey when my kids were young and starving. The kitchens had closed and the place was all but deserted but a kindly waitress quickly rustled up a snack for the kids and a cup of strong coffee for me. Later I sent a letter and a monetary gift for the waitress to the company's head office - their response made clear both they and the waitress really appreciated the gesture.