Discretionary tipping in the UK
 

I have been amused on a trip to London that restaurant bills now say:" a discretionary 12.5% Service Charge has been added to your bill." beyond the nuisance of beng forced to tip for bad service, do they have any idea in this country what the word "discretionary" actually means? It is not involuntary...

It is phrased that way to reduce the VAT element of the bill compared to if the word "discretionary" had been left out. For those that do not object to the service charge then the restaurant has saved the customer a higher vat (tax) bill which would otherwise include vat tax on service as well as the meal compared to if it was automatically added as "non-discretionary" as in many other cities and countries.

By all means have it taken off and don't tip. But if it isn't a problem and if the tip were say £5 then the word "discretionary" has actually saved you £1 tax which wouldn't benefit you or directly the people that served you - it would simply make the bill £1 more - and would instead help "the rest of us" reduce the terrible deficit we now have as a result of .... well I won't blame people on the "Upper East Side" because I think we're all innocent casualties - but you get the drift.:p

Hopefully, now that you have had it explained you will say how great it is that even under the terrible circumstance we find ourselves in that our cunning spunky British service industry has found a way to reduce the tax for our very welcome overseas visitors.;)

If you don't like it ... shrug and have it taken off .... but it was there to save most people tax .....

Legally, it is voluntary if described as discretionary. You are entitled to refuse to pay it. Most of us never would refuse, however, even if faced with extremely poor service.

Speak for yourself! I always have it removed as I rarely tip in the UK (not a visitor-english born & raised), and if I do it is usually a round up, certainly not 12.5% which seems to have become the norm for these increasingly common added on service charges.

I just got banned from a forum for calling out a "service charge" as being nothing more than an additional fee, literally because I was the only one that didn't accept the service fee as a given.

It pisses me off to see countries adopting additional fees instead of just raising the prices on the menu.

The service fee I questioned was in Jamaica and is a 10% "service fee", yet then they want gratuity for the servers.

It just reminds me that sometimes having the unpopular opinion even when you're right can have repercussions. :mad:

Were you banned because you expressed an unpopular opinion or was it because you persisted in personalising the exchanges by calling everyone who disagreed wrong? ;)

To keep it short, it was actually for expressing a very unpopular opinion.

When I contacted the site's owner for clarification why I was banned I referred to flyertalk's 22 page thread on how to get rid of tipping, this is his response without the site name.

I removed the location and his site but hopefully you get the general idea of the mentality that I encountered when I questioned a service charge.

The best part was when people started referring to the service charge as a "charity" and helping others, I'm like you can rename it all you want, but at the end of the day it's us paying for it.

Countries need to pick one, either a service charge OR gratuity, expecting travelers to pay mandatory "fees" in addition to a gratuity and/or a built in gratuity(in the price of the meal) is ludicrous.

Comparisons between countries don't work well. Different countries have different customs and that's just the way it works.

In fact, many tourist-facing businesses in places where tipping is traditional, wind up addiding service charges just because foreign visitors don't realize it's expected and so don't.

When in Rome...

But many places adding service charges aren't even tipping based countries....

Also if you're going to add a "mandatory" service charge it should be factored into the price of the food, otherwise it will "confuse" the foreign visitors even more.

There really isn't a good argument to be had that a service fee that is mandatory everywhere should be tacked on at the end of the meal, if it's part of the cost of dining out then the prices should reflect that.

There's a big difference between gratuity(which is recommended in tipping countries because otherwise you're being a .........), and service charges which you don't have the ability to modify or object to.

I'm afraid that because you hold the opinion so strongly I feel you are blind to the reasonable contra-arguments put forward by others. There are very good "arguments" it is just that you don't agree with them. In many countries "service charge" has the same meaning as "gratuity" in practise and making some sort of difference seems irrelevant.

Firstly, businesses have their primary responsibility to themselves and their own survival and the notion that establishments across the world should standardise in order to make tourists lives slightly easier is somewhat naive. It only ever takes a moment or two to establish what the tipping practice is in any country for those bothered to find out.

There are completely different reasons in each country why these practices started, have grown and evolved, and why they may be currently felt to be essential and why they have therefore diverted from the traditions and practices of other countries. Some are to do with employment practice and legislation. In some countries this might have been minimum earnings legislation making the viability of some or many establishments tough or impossible and the service charges might be used towards that. Some countries find that some nationalities because of their home country practices presume service has been included and therefore never add a tip. Compounding the issues in those countries might be low base earnings that presume a level of gratuities. Other reasons concern how and what VAT and income tax is based on.

In all countries that I am aware of their practices are made very clear on the menus both given to you when you sit and/or outside the restaurants, and as long as you are given the opportunity to know before you order I do not accept your beef. Simply don't eat in places that do this, and if it is prevalent in some countries then don't go.

You are certainly at the very least morally wrong if those conditions are made clear, and you receive adequate service that you then refuse to pay it. You are perfectly entitled to express the opinion that you object to it and will not pay it and therefore avoid places that do so - but I do not agree that it is right to use these places knowing of the practise and then refuse to pay.

I've asked for it to be removed only once. When the waitress spilt 12 drinks on my friend and his phone, didn't give him a free drink or anything, and it took one hour for our lunch to arrive.

But I'm not British, so I didn't apologise for the inconvenience of them having to change the bill.

Did she spill all 12 on them at once or one at a time? Inquiring minds need to know.

I would love to say that as she brought each replacement drink she managed to spill it on him again and again. But alas it was all at once. She had a tray full of drinks, and thought it would be smart to start taking them off one side. She got to 3 before the whole tray unbalanced and tipped over onto him.

OMG! Did he manage to absorb them all or was there a puddle on the floor?

Agreed, as I'm a reasonable person and I'm not going to screw an employee out of his earnings just because I disagree with the system.

The thing is though, that doesn't mean my reasoning is flawed and that I can't hold an opinion, just because I follow their customs doesn't make their customs right morally even if it's legal where they are.

At the end of the day a Service charge IN ADDITION to Gratuity is immoral because you're disguising the price of a meal twice, if they want to add a mandatory service charge have it factored into the price of the food.

Gratuity IS optional, a service charge is not optional, therefore there is absolutely no reasonable argument to be made that the service charge can't be factored into the price of the food.

Ah, I've seen many new servers or even experienced servers lose entire trays of drinks.... I personally always hated carrying drinks, thankfully I was never a server or bartender.

The worst was when the restaurant I was working at was running an hour and a half wait for food the day before mothers day when our POS system crashed and things went haywire, we had about 1,000 people seated and the server and I ran into each other turning a corner and he lost a plate of food......

That was a joyous talk with a table while wearing their food on me, needed a new suit after that but we managed to smooth things over as much as humanly possible.... Not that the patrons that evening were very happy given the huge delays in food.

Oh man the restaurant business, the movie Waiting was pretty dang accurate even in the mass scale fine dining atmosphere...