4 months as a waitress when I was in high school, which has resulted in me being a good tipper. And I have no respect whatsoever for people who treat servers as lower life forms in any way. This issue is one of the sticky points I have with my mother-in-law.

And I tip everyone. When in doubt, tip. I never don’t tip.

This comes, I’m sure, from being married to a chef.

Sorry, but I find tipping a very American system which seems increasingly inappropriate in the UK. We have a minimum wage and it’s illegal to use tips as part of that; I don’t think waiting staff work any harder than every other minimum wage employee. Plus, it’s sort of their job, y’know? How many jobs are you allowed to expect extra just for doing what you’re there to do?! If the service is out of this world, fair enough, but 99% of the time it’s just… okay. The expectation of a tip anyway annoys the hell out of me.

Mainly this stems from the fact that eating out is an expensive luxury for me – paying an extra 15% on top of a meal that’s already costing waaaaay more than I’d have paid to make it myself just seems… grr.

Do you find it annoying when the establishment adds a 17% gratuity to the check because there were six or more people at the table?

I do.

I guess if it’s your business you can do anything you want to, but …

when there are so many people at the table, the service is rarely good. So, call it a surcharge, not a gratuity.

As for regular tipping, it is for the personal service. When I get my hair cut, and the beautician thinks it’s done and I don’t, and she goes on to give me a fabulous cut, of course I tip her. Often double the cost of the original cut, because she ended up doing two cuts. But I’m going to a neighborhood salon not an extravagant big city spa. When the service is really good – when it’s obvious the server has paid attention to what was going on at the table the whole time, that deserves a tip. And a generous one. When all the server does is take the order and deliver the food after it’s sat long enough to develop a film, and the order isn’t as ordered, and there is never a return visit to the table until check time, well, what is that worth?

I will never, ever tip for bad service. Ever.

I know in the US that’s considered bad form, but I don’t care.

Don’t get me wrong I’ll tip even for “okay” service, and I’ll tip if the food is bad but the waiter/ess still does a good enough job, but bad service is kissing their tip good bye.

Normally though I tip a small amount on lunches, aim for 10% for a meal out if it was good but round up notes rather then work out exactly what it should be.

And in Sweden I hardly tipped anything, but everything was so expensive I couldn’t really afford too much of a tip!

I always, always tip somewhere between double the tax and 20%. It’s just part of the cost of the meal. I also try to leave the tip in cash since a friend of mine in college used to have her credit card tips reported to the IRS and not her cash ones. I leave a dollar tip at bars, even though I’m just getting free water or a glass of juice. There is one café I visit where I leave money in the tip jar because they take the food out to us and clean up afterwards. They’ve also made an effort to learn our names, so I give Eric and his friends a buck or two in the tip jar.

I don’t like feeling like I have to tip, however. People should be paid a decent wage and I think it’s unethical that restaurant owners have figured out a way to get around that. Everyone else has figured out how to pay their employees properly! I don’t buy that the restaurant industry is different or more marginal.

When I was in Egypt, everyone, even the locals, tipped for anything that could be considered “service”. It was really annoying. People would ask for a tip when they opened the gate to a site when we’d already paid a fee for the site. We had a steward on one train who wrested my little carry-on out of my hand and then asked for baksheesh. When I gave him five pounds [a lot locally—about a dollar], he came back a minute later and asked me for five euro. The other steward [who had been really good and had taken my friend’s much heavier bag] accepted the same amount graciously and we tipped him more generously at the end.

I’ve worked as a waitress, cocktail waitress, bartender, kitchen staff, caterer, maid, etc.

As a restaurant waitress (in the US), I was paid about half the minimum wage because the government assumed I’d make the difference in tips. In fact, the government assumed I’d get at least 8% of our total sales (we’re talking 1990s) and that’s what they would tax us for. What this meant was if a table didn’t leave a tip, it would actually cost ME money to have served them their meal.

When you go into a restaurant, the service included in the price of the meal is someone taking your order, and then bringing your order to you. If they are pleasant, check on you to see if you want anything else, bring your refills, etc. THAT is where the tip comes in. Higher end restaurants cost more not just because of the gourmet food, but also because of the better quality of service. If I want to dine out, I tally cost + tip in my head and if I can’t afford to pay both then I don’t go there to eat. If all I wanted was to treat myself to a meal I didn’t prepare myself and not have to pay a tip, I’d be better off going to some place like McDs.

Many restaurants force their waitstaff to pool all tips together and then divide equally amongst the entire staff, including the folks in the kitchen. This would piss me off to no end, as invariably I always made more money on my own. Of course I did, I worked way harder than many of those slack-asses! I chose how much to give my busboy, the bartender, and the prep-cook to ensure their continued assistance with turning my tables and even after that I still took home more money than I would by ‘sharing’.

I know just how hard it is to waitress, so I can be quite a forgiving customer, but this also means that I have a higher level of expectation. Sometimes I’ll tip well just to compensate for the schmuck at the next table but I have left without tipping when the service & attitude were atrociously poor.

I lived in Japan for many years, where tipping is considered rude (as noted above). But when Japanese travel abroad, they need to quickly master the art of tipping, so I used to advise them to look at the local tax on the bill. In most American states (and many other countries where tipping is normal), the sales tax is around 7-8%. Just double it, and you’ve got the tip.

I tend to leave a base 15% even if the service is poor. I will usually note the poor service to the manager on the way out or on a comment card if the restaurant has them. For great service I’ve been known to tip 100% or more.

I recently was at a restaurant and there was a mistake made and the waiter volunteered to take something off the bill. When I paid, I based the tip on the original bill with the removed item which made the tip larger for that waiter, and in fact made the total about what it would’ve been originally without a tip. The waiter earned that tip because of his good customer service. (This was in San Diego.)

I was at a restaurant in a casino in Atlantic City a couple weeks ago, and had a really bad waiter. He had poor service skills, copped an attitude when we asked to have the bill split up, and really just wasn’t helpful. He got $2 from me on an $8 bill, but that’s only because I knew the majority of other people were not going to be tipping him at all. (Plus it was easy to hand him a $10 and get the heck out of there instead of waiting for change.)

At bars, I always tip $1 per drink to the bartender.

Depending on where I get my hair cut, I’ll tip $2-3 dollars.

I tip doormen and shuttle drivers $1, and if someone carries my luggage for me it’s $1 per bag.

At the holidays, I usually give the girls at the deli $5-$10 each, as well as the check out girls at the grocery store, and the bag boys. Postal carriers are not permitted to receive gifts, or I would tip them too. I give my landlady a $20-25 fruit basket.

I think that’s about all I tip, at least that I can remember.

I have a friend from Canada who when he comes to the states, he never leaves a tip. So I always have to slip the tip on the table without him noticing because he’s adamant about not tipping.