No, you misunderstand the way things work in the US.

For full-service restaurants in the US, a tip is neither a way of acknowledging good service NOR an automatic right to anything for employees -- it is, however, a normal and accepted part of the cost of eating out at a restaurant in the US, and while it's nominally voluntary, the fact that one can lawfully cheat the restaurant and their staff of part of the price of the meal is hardly a recommendation to do so.

You're welcome to believe whatever you like, but social norms being what they are, just because you believe it doesn't mean people are going to take your behavior for what you mean.

The conventional range for tipping has, for a very long time now, been 15%-20%.

10% was a conventional tip throughout the US 40-45 years ago, and it may well have been one in more rural areas up to about 30 years ago -- it certainly wasn't typical even when I was a kid between 30-40 years ago in New York, but NYC tends to be ahead of the curve on such things, and I couldn't tell you about any other parts of the country before the mid-1980s.

While you're free to do so, giving 10% is going to be interpreted as a cheapskate or as a sign you disapproved of the service; more likely the former, and you're very likely to get worse service still if you are a repeat customer at the same place.

As for waiters complaining about tips directly to their customers, it's a losing game and they should know better (and managers should make sure they know better if they become aware of it) but some customers certainly ask for it.

Also a no-tip in the USA means that the waitstaff actually paid money out of their own pocket to serve you. The IRS assumes a minimum tip income of something like 8% of the bill and the waitstaff pays taxes on that number whether or not they got a actually tip from the customer.

Also tipping out to various other parts of the staff. In theory, if they don't met the IRS minimum they can document that and only pay on their actual tips. Unfortunately, given the amount of tax evasion about cash tips, the level of assumption is quite high.

I don't think anyone thinks it's a good system, but transitioning off of it would be quite difficult and require a lot of active coordination (possibly illegal) among restaurant owners as otherwise those who maintain the lower tipped menu prices would have an advantae.

I always tip close to 20% if the service is standard, and I will tip quite a bit more if the service is exceptional. The minimum wage for employees working for tips in this country is criminal, and I would feel pretty bad if I tipped worse, even if the service was awful. The only time I would consider a small tip, from a percentage perspective, would be if the service at a high-end restaurant was absolutely dreadful.

As an American, I have to disagree. A tip is a way of acknowledging good service. If service is subpar, you are completely justified in reducing or eliminating the tip.


Last I checked, it was 15%, or sometimes 15-18%. The 20% figure has cropped up recently and seems to be pushed by restaurant owners (via the tipping "suggestions" on the receipt) and tourism bureaus.

The former doesn't follow from the latter; reducing a tip below the normal range for bad service is certainly a legal/social prerogative (although in practice, absent an actual complaint to the manager however justified you feel it's likely that staff is just going to interpret your lack of tipping as being cheap rather than dissatisfied with the service)) but the converse is that a tip within the normal range is not going to be read as an acknowledgement of good service -- it's simply part of paying your bill.

As I've said here and various other threads on the topic, my own rule is that if I'm tempted to not tip or tip substantially below par, the service is bad enough to speak to the manager. If it starts off bad and you do so early in the meal, you'll often get assigned a new server or a comped plate or two, or have an opportunity to terminate the meal there and take your business elsewhere.

20% has been the high end of the normal range since at least the early 1990s. There's certainly no expectation that one tip a consistent 20%, or any problem with tipping 15%. OTOH, at this point anyone expecting that a 20% tip vs. 15% is going to send any kind of a message that the extra 5% is somehow a reward to for good service is at least that far out of date.

Note that for at least some rich folks, tipping 15-20% has been conventional a lot longer:
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I don't know anyone who suggests that normal folk tipped at that level back then; pretty much everyone I know who is significantly older than me says 10% was the old normal tip. OTOH, I am no young buck anymore, and the 15-20% rule was already well in place around the parts I grew up in (lower middle class NYC) by the waning days of the Reagan administration, and in place nationwide by the time I started traveling outside NYC.

As already discussed up-thread, unless your bill is huge, the difference between 15% and 20% won't be huge either (and between 18% and 20% even less so), and most people are going to use various rules of thumb to round it anyway. If you're eating at an expensive place where the difference is more than a few dollars, by all means calculate precisely 15% -- odds are the servers there are doing quite well anyway.

Personally, the cheaper the meal was to begin with, the more likely I am to be generous with the rounding. In an extreme case, the waiter's doing the same work to take my order and bring me a $4 discount breakfast and a water as they are to bring me a $10-$20 entree and $2-3 soft drink at a casual restaurant.

So if the IRS considers 8% to be the norm and servers are expecting to get between 15-20% that means everyone is complicit in cash-only tax evasion.
If that's the case why shouldn't the tax-paying customer be able to use their discretion in deciding just how much they want to be part of this sham ?
And to suggest that paying a full tip but complaining about rotten service to the manager is the best way to deal with shoddy servers is laughable.
Tips are discretionary and it should be entirely up to the customer and not social convention to decide the amount.

That is one reason I almost always add the tip to the credit card (this being Flyertalk, we are all aware of the other reasons :p). Credit card tips are accounted for by the restaurant, and I know that the other service staff will get their share and they will be reported to the IRS properly.

Agreed. Many people who complain to the manager are just trying to get free food. When managers get complaints, they usually just apologize, comp a dessert or something, and then move on. The manager and server will joke about the whiny guest over beers that night.

Agreed, but alas, that's not the case in America.

At most larger restaurants (and chains) where they use an automated POS system, credit card tips will be fully tracked for tax purchases (although because of "tipping out" to other staff, each individual server won't see all of that 15%.)

I DO object to the frequent suggestion that people should tip in cash "for the servers benefit," for that exact reason. I pretty much never pay for anything in cash, although more for convenience and the other reasons cbn42 mentions rather than caring whether something goes unreported for taxes.

I don't know who's suggested doing so; what I've always said is that if the service is bad enough to justify a significantly below par tip, it also is bad enough to justify a word to the manager. My point is that simply tipping low (or not at all) out of spite and walking away is going to send no message other than that the person failing to tip is a cheapskate.

If it's bad enough you've spoken to the manager and nothing is done about it (or the manager's resolution of the problem is inadequate), it is fully justifiable to not tip at all.

OTOH, if you've spoken to the manager and the situation isn't resolved to your satisfaction, it's hardly a sensible thing to sit around for the rest of the meal. Since problems that bad usually become apparent early on, there may not be a bill to tip on at all beyond a drink or two.

I can think of about a half dozen times in twenty years that I've had a server so bad I had to ask for the manager to complain about the server* (or where I've complained strongly enough directly to the waiter that the manager has come over), and I've never once had a manager's reaction be "so what?" -- the usual response is to get a different server, or a comped meal (and no, per cbn42's example, an "apology and a comped dessert" isn't going to cut it; if the issue is bad service, I'm not sticking around for dessert.)

(* kitchen problems a good bit more often, but that wouldn't be an issue with the service to be taken out in a smaller tip regardless.)

Good luck with that. Tips are a weird, quasi-discretionary thing; what they "should be" and what they are are two different things. They are legally entirely up to the customer -- at least for small parties; to what degree service charges on large ones are legally binding is somewhat legally vaguer -- but choosing to exercise that prerogative to under-tip for normal service is an abuse.

Given that you started this whole sub-thread with a suggestion that there is a "tsunami of poorly-run restaurants" you may want to look at the possibility that your own expectations are too high, and/or that if this is happening near where you live you've acquired a reputation for being a problem customer or poor tipper.

2 different servers who are special to the wife & I will get their tips in cash 99.9 % of the time, the rest go on the debit card as I hardly carry cash.

This is probably where we're always going to fundamentally disagree,particularly with your repeated use of the word cheapskate.

If I drop 200 bucks on a meal and decline to give the crap server a 20% ( $40) tip does that mean I'm trying my best to save 40 bucks because I'm struggling to meet the $200 bill ? Because that would be my definition of a cheapskate.

I prefer to think that tipping is a way of rewarding good service rather than " sending a message " about my social standing between me and the server.

Or is that just the price we have to pay for living in a world of entitlement ?

It's the price we pay for not simply paying the server a living wage salary like many other countries do. I'd strongly rather be in a system where service costs were normally included in a restaurant bill, but I'm not going to take out my displeasure on The System or The Man out on a front level employee trying to pay their bills. I really like eating out so tip at reasonable levels, it is.

It's the price we have to pay for eating out in a country where that's how waiters' compensation is structured.

It's a crappy system; you're legally entitled to do what you say you do, but your choice in doing so is nothing more than taking what is in essence someone else's salary out of their pocket in order to get yourself a cheaper meal.

Justify it however you want. Why you decide you deserve to pay $27-$40* less for the meal than the majority of other diners really doesn't matter...

Or, on a different note... you've still never explained why you are even bothering to go out to eat when the experience is so unpleasant... if the servers are consistently so bad that you need to "not reward good service" on a frequent basis.

(* $200 after tax, about $185 pre-tax, so with rounding the normal range of tips would be somewhere around that range. )

Exactly.

Mind, at nicer places, it would likely considerably exceed a minimum/living wage, but either way, it would be a much more honest system to just include the service cost in the menu prices. Whether or not it's Clint Bint's motivation (or indeed, assuming this whole sub-thread isn't just a case of someone jerking our chains) the only way I can see people actually justifying skipping tipping is either as some kind of power trip, or being cheap.

Again you appear to be missing the point.
Tipping is a system with no defined boundaries and what appears to be an increasing upper limit based of what exactly ?
Are severs who expect 20% as the norm instead of say 15% doing so because their base salary has gone down by 5% or are they just being plain greedy.
10% seems to me to be a healthy average with exceptional service earning greater reward and poor service less.
Arguing that a bad server should be entitled to 18-20% anyway because " that's just the way things are " is laughable.
If everyone tipped at a level commensurate with the service they received rather than being afraid of what people thought of them it would soon sort out the wheat from the chaff among servers.
As it is all that is happens is that a system which everyone agrees is wrong will just continue.

The upper and lower limits have been consistent for at least 30 years, possibly longer*... arguments about "increasing" amounts are a huge straw man, not backed up by evidence.

There are occasional appearance of a wishful thinking request for 25% on the "suggestions" (or in resort-related literature, e.g. around Disney) hasn't caught on, and is unlikely to.

(* possibly much longer, given the cite provided, although that certainly doesn't match anecdote about the 1970s.)

Healthy average of what?

Want to average 10%? Go right ahead; I suspect you will be encouraging bad service if you are a repeat customer at the places you do so, but it's your prerogative.

Want to occasionally stiff a waiter outright? Once again, your prerogative. Unlike a below par tip, this one is almost certain to be remembered and held against you.

At least at chain places, if you really want to reward good service, do the stupid phone survey after and score them well. Or vice versa if they're bad.

:rolleyes:

And the odds of everyone agreeing on doings so, let alone what level of service is desirable, let alone what level of tip is commensurate for it is... zero.

Frankly, there's a better chance of passing tax laws making it sufficiently inconvenient to run a tipped shop, and having restaurants start paying an actual normal wage instead.

Once again, you seem to be implying that you're frequently dissatisfied with the service you receive. If so, why bother to eat out at these places in the first place?
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