Chet Coppock's Fur Coat wrote:
HawaiiYou wrote:
sjboyd0137 wrote:
KDdidit wrote:
No, actually I just look at the total.
This. I'm not worried about 2 bucks or whatever the difference is between pre tax and total with tax. And if you are...stop being a cheapass.
Truth be told, the only time I look at anything other than the total is if I know there was a discount applied.
I definitely tend to over tip (usually around 22-25%), but I'm also super harsh if the service was really bad. Like, one time we went to the Gurnee Tacos El Norte...decent food, reasonably priced. It was a slow night. We sat down, the waitress saw us, then continued the conversation she was having with the bartender for another 15 minutes. She comes over. We order a couple of beers. 20 minutes later, she comes back with 1 of the 2 beers. Not a word and she walks away before I could ask to place our food order. 10 minutes, comes back for our food order. Still short a beer. Food comes 20 minutes later (about right for this place). Second beer shows up with our check. $30 tab for the 2 of us (never had the opportunity for a second drink or anything). Glad I had cash, so she got the $30 paid...and I left some loose change for a tip. So we're leaving and my wife stops off to go to the bathroom. I'm standing by the door and the manager comes running over asking why we only left a 24 cent tip...especially since we were there over an hour. So I explain the service issues. His response, "well that's how Martha is...you just have to roll with it". My response, "I don't tip on shitty service, and I find it unacceptable that you keep her here knowing she sucks as a waitress". I was asked to never speak of his sister that way again, and to never return.
Never have bothered to try and go back...Jalisco opened up the street with far better food.
if a waiter or manager comes up to me and asks a question about tips then they get FUCKING ZERO!
I had that happen to me only once by a waiter who I left a 20 percent tip and he asked for more. I took it back and crossed out the tip and left him with zero.
Many years ago, that happened to my family at the restaurant at a New England Hilton while we were on vacation. The service was terrible, lots of mishaps and just not giving a shit. My dad tipped them a half tip. Because my dad had a strong accent and my parents were probably speaking in a non-English language to express our pissedness to each other... the manager chased my dad out towards the lobby to explain that perhaps he didn't understand the courtesies of tipping.
It was the first time in my life (I was about 11) that I saw
my father (who worked white glove banquets at the Edgewater Beach Hotel when he came to the US, before opening his own place) totally lose his shit verbally with somebody. After he finished losing his shit, he went to the front desk and lost his shit all over again. The next morning, he had a rather pointed conversation with the general manager about being treated like an idiot immigrant, and the hotel night, dinner, and tip were all comped.
This reminds me of a guy named James Panalogakos who worked for me when I was running company that provided temp waiters and cooks for banquets and private parties. James was a highly experienced fine dining and banquet waiter but like most of the people that ended up with us there was something not quite right with him. In James's case, it was that he was a fussy old guy who always knew better than everyone else.
The woman I worked for is a really good person. She had worked as a placement director at one of those for-profit "universities" and she felt terrible when she couldn't actually place the graduates anywhere. So she started a temp firm to get them going. A lot of our people were really rough around the edges. I couldn't really send them to a house party on the North Shore. But I could mix some of them in with a big group at a Field Museum or Planetarium event.
James was appalled by how unprofessional some of these people were and he was constantly getting into beefs with them on the job. I had to take him aside multiple times and tell him he wasn't working as a captain and to let me worry about these other dopes and just do his job. James was the only guy on my staff who had his own crumber. Probably one of the few who even knew what a crumber is.
Last I heard James had returned to Greece. I hope he's still alive and doing well.