A woman walks into a restaurant and pays the dinner tabs of everyone in the place, and tips each server $50. Many of the comments on the article complain that the $50 tip is less than 10 percent, and say that the woman "screwed" the servers. I don't see how it is screwing anyone when a person receives a $50 tip for an hour's work.
I am so sick of this "tip should be a minimum of 15%, or you are screwing the server" mentality. A server who works at a place that has a mid level menu (like Olive Garden, Red Lobster, or Outback Steakhouse) averages a $50 tab for two diners. If each server covers three tables of two diners each, and the diners take an hour to eat, that server is seeing $150 an hour in sales. At 10%, the server is getting $15 an hour. At 15%, the server gets $22.50 an hour. Not too shabby for doing nothing more than writing down what I want and then carrying it to the table.
On the one hand, using some simple math: a tab of almost $2,600 (let's just say it is $2,600 to make things easier) divided by 180 customers comes to $14.45 per customer. A 15% tip on $14.45 is $2.17. $2.17 multiplied by 180 is $390.60. $390.60 divided by five servers is $78.12 per server, not $50. Going by that logic, she did screw the servers.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, out of that 180, how many were likely to leave a 15% tip, or leave any tip at all? I waited tables years ago, I've seen large parties with well over a $100 tab leave a $5 tip and I've seen parties with over a $100 tab leave no tip at all. Nothing whatsoever to do with service or quality of food, just that wealthier people are notoriously bad tippers. Those 5 probably averaged a lot better than they normally would have.
Also, if you think all the waitstaff does is write stuff down and drop it on your table, you should try doing their job for a while. You would have a much better appreciation for your server and would probably tip more than 15%.