Tipping. What’s Up With That?

It seems to me that after having posted a random comment concerning customer service, the next comment of mine would naturally concern tipping.

The concept of tipping has been a topic that I have discussed much. While some may believe that the etiquette of tipping is best left to the self-proclaimed experts on etiquette, I will have to disagree. Tipping is a very important topic that extends far beyond the niceties of mere etiquette.

Tipping is a battleground of ideologies that is being fought over by someone every moment of the day. The war that is tipping has economic, political, cultural, and social ramifications that the so-called experts on etiquette seem to conveniently ignore when they spew forth their false wisdom on the matter.

It isn’t as simple as anyone would like to think.

On one side of the war of tipping is the people who work for tips. That would be mostly waitresses and waiters. To ask a waitress the proper and acceptable policy regarding tipping would be asking the people who directly benefit from tipping their opinion on the matter. This, of course, would be a stupid idea in anyone’s book.

And, of course, to ask a confirmed non-tipper the best policy concerning tipping would be as equally retarded.

My friends, the question of tipping is a tough question to answer.

Over the years, I’ve vacillated many times on my personal tipping policies, and since I’ve been married, the concept of tipping has been a question of great concern.

We’ve tried a flat 10% tip for a while.

We’ve tried a 10% +/- 10%, based on quality of service.

We’ve tried a flat dollar rate that we always tipped everywhere [[and let me assure you that when we went out for breakfast and tipped that flat rate, the wait staff treated us extremely well on subsequent visits]]

For several years, we had a policy wherein if we received a good service experience with a waitress, we would request that waitress on every subsequent visit and tip very well.

We’ve tried a dollar rate that varied throughout the meal based on the customer service experience.

We’ve probably tried a few other tipping schemes, but I’m still not too sure about tipping.

The issue at hand is the contract between the employer and the waitress.

The employer pays the employee. It’s that simple. When looking for a job, an employee enters into a business contract with the employer. During the wage negotiations, the employer offers remuneration and the employee chooses to accept it or not.

Now, one might say that the wage negotiations between an employer and a waitress usually result in some pittance of monetary remuneration PLUS TIPS. And this is the heart and soul of the problem. The employer is pushing his responsibility for providing remuneration for services rendered by the waitress onto the customers.

Now, in any other business, the costs to pay employees are passed onto the customers in the pricing of the product which the customers are buying. Thus, in the food service industry, the costs of the food should be increased so that the employer can fully cover the costs of paying the waitresses a proper amount. But since this is not the case, then it suggests to me that there is some other factor at work here.

It seems to me that there is some unknown variable that prevents the employer from properly assigning a monetary value to the service provided by a generic waitress. This unknown variable makes it impossible for the employer to directly pass the cost on to the customer through higher prices of the food the customer buys.

Now, it is obvious to everyone that some waitresses are better service providers than other waitresses. Thus, the value of a waitress varies based on the individual waitresses. And since there is a turnover of waitresses working in any given dining establishment, the overall service provided by the wait staff working at any given time is in a state of flux. Also, since the particular staffing assignments on any given day and shift also suggests that the total customer service value of the wait staff will vary between shifts and between days.

Thus, the only way that it would be possible for the employer to properly pass the cost of paying the waitresses what they are worth onto the customer would be to have a variable cost added to the food, based upon the composition of the wait staff at that time. This, of course, would turn Buddha into a chain smoker.

So, the end result is that the wage negotiations between the employer and the waitress are a pittance of monetary remuneration PLUS TIPS.

But, for the very same reasons that the employer cannot feasibly pass on the costs of paying the waitresses their full value to the customer, the customer is being indirectly informed that some waitresses are better than other waitresses. Additionally, we are being told that some waitresses provide better service than other waitresses and that some waitresses are deserving of better tips than other waitresses.

So, I imagine that this takes the whole 15% nonsense out behind the barn and shoots it in the head. Let’s face the grim reality, some waitresses are goddesses of customer service, and some waitresses are worth less than shit. The fact that they work for tips directly implies that some waitresses are worth more than other waitresses, and some waitresses are probably not worth tipping.

It has been my experience that it is often the crappy waitress that is the first to point out that they work for tips. That’s because the waitress who is of greater value is too busy providing good service, and getting better tips for it. It is most often the crappy waitress that has an entitlement mentality that they deserve tips regardless of the service that they provide the customers.

I never tip crappy service. A good waitress will notice that my drink is low and refill it before it gets empty. And they’ll do it without having  to approach the table and ask me about it. They’ll keep an eye on it from a distance and just appear there with a refill at the exact moment I need one. The good waitress almost seems telepathic in her ability to pop up right before I start looking for the waitress for something. That is the waitress who gets the better tip.

The waitress that keeps approaching the table to ask how things are going is a crappy waitress, and if she does it too much, she risks passing through the land of lost tips into no tip land. If you want to provide a good customer service experience, you have to do more than just take my order, slog my food out, pester me every 5 minutes to find out if I need anything, and jiggle your tits in my face.

I don’t feel the slightest bit of guilt in not tipping crappy service. This is because I will tip a good service well.

I cannot repeat this enough: The very fact that a waitress works for tips indicates that everyone knows that some waitresses are better than other waitresses, and that some waitresses are deserving of better tips than other waitresses. And this also indicates that everyone knows that there are crappy waitresses out there that don’t deserve any tips.

Now, if we can only stop those stupid customers from tipping waitresses that don’t deserve a tip, we might see an increase in the overall quality of customer service once the crappy waitresses quit and get different jobs.