NTKOG #41: The kind of girl who, after enjoying the service of another human being in the realm of public commerce, neglects to reward said human being with an appropriate tip.
I am: the person who always sneaks back to the table when a friend has paid for dinner, to plunk down another dollar or three to weight the tip from 15% to 20%.
I am not: one of those douchebags who archaically believes a tip must be earned with above and beyond service. It’s built into the wage structure, guys! Tip 18% all the damn time, and more for exceptional service. You are not a scumbag.
The Scene: After midnight at Sister’s house, a few days before our (excellent!) murder mystery party. I am exhausted and have to carry a few armfuls of clothes from her place, so I call up a cab company and they dispatch a driver.
Now my sister lives close to me — about a mile and a half away, so really just a pleasant walk. And the times I’ve taken a cab over to my place (because I had heavy things to carry), the trip has always, always cost $6.50. I hand the driver a Hamilton and ask for two dollars back. Reasonable, right?
When the guy on this particular night comes up, it becomes immediately apparent that his particular brand of ESL is not just pleasantly disjointed or kind of fun to spell aloud in my head. He’s basically English Not a Language. And, I mean, cool. Gainful employment, melting pot, and all that. Unfortunately, his knowledge of the local streets is worse than his English.
He badgers me for a few minutes to try to understand my address. Finally I just punch it in the GPS for him. Then as he starts to drive, I try to convey that he needs to turn on an earlier street than the GPS says, or else he will hit a U-Turn. This does not work. The fare counter hits $6 about a third of the way to my home.
He ends up following the GPS through the long route — $7.35 — and then, instead of turning toward my house, takes the opposite direction and starts driving away again! I protest as loudly and clearly as possible, as the brakes scream up a hill away from my apartment. At $8, we are entering a posh residential neighborhood; by $9.50, the duplexes have taken on an aura of disrepair. The whole time, I am asking him to please just stop the car, while the GPS periodically chirps (in English): “Recalculating! Recalculating!”
Finally I give up and basically let loose a blood-curdling shriek, demanding he stop the goddamn car immediately. The meter reads $10.40. I hand him my stupid Hamilton, gather up my possessions, and walk the last quarter-mile home through the rain.
The Verdict: A two-fer: this was not only my first tip-stiffing, but also my first time short-changing somebody, period. I didn’t feel great about it, but I’m not one-tenth as wracked with guilt as I would have imagined. I mean, dude. Dude. It’s not just that his incompetence make doing the job slightly more inconvenient or expensive. It’s that he ended up charging me more money to not actually do what I was paying him to do.
The idea of his possibly getting in trouble with the cab dispatcher is upsetting. But then I think of my beautiful linen suit, wrinkled beyond recognition from being schlepped around in the rain, and my heart hardens back to stone.
Sorry, bad cab drivers (and other people in the service industry): if you leave me in some way WORSE OFF than I would have been had I not used you, you’re not getting a damn tip.
But hey, everyone else, we’re still cool right? Take my money! Please! And then act like we’re actually just friends with no weird financial dynamic involved!
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
okay, when I first started reading this, I was like “Oh no…she didn’t stiff a waitress- that’s just shitty” I give 20% to any server and will tip 25-30% for exceptional service. I am more than pleased with the way it turned out. That guy deserved to be stiffed.
Oh, dude, worry not: I would never not tip a waitress or server — or anyone else, for that matter — unless they in some way through their own fault made my life worse. I mean, I’ve literally had waitresses visibly spit in my food and still tipped them 10% at least.
(Actually, even when I get bad service, I usually leave a standard 18% tip and a note or, in extreme cases, ask to speak to a manager. That way, I’m not cutting into their livelihood and they know exactly why I was displeased with the service. Otherwise, I’ve found, servers will just generalize that all young adults are shitty tippers and then continue to treat younger patrons badly, continuing the terrible cycle.)
I. Loathe. Terrible. Service. Exclamation point.
when people are a-holes like that, then I stiff them! and dont have a second thought about it! otherwise i am a fantastic tipper!
I do think there might be regional variances in expectation of baseline tip and how much and in what directions you should vary it. TKOG grew up in Vegas, where the entire economy is built on the service industry. I always grew up with a normal restaurant tip being 15%, but nowadays in CA it seems like the expectation is more like 18%.
And I’m more willing to vary my tips. If someone gets a complicated special request right, is helpful answering questions, and is attentive without being invasive during the meal, then I’d go to 20% or above.
On the other hand, if something went wrong in my dining experience that the waiter could have done something about, I’ll certainly go below 15%. For instance, I ate at a restaurant at the Venetian in Vegas, and we after our initial drinks were brought, we didn’t get our food for literally over an hour after we ordered, and our waiter never even came to check on us or let us know how it was going. It was like 4pm and the restaurant wasn’t even busy. We even had to cancel one of the orders because one of us had to catch an early flight. That’s some terrible service! I think I tipped like 4%.
I give a lot of credit to TKOG for this improvement to my tipping approaching: writing a note on the receipt explaining why I was (dis)satisfied. Especially when in college, you don’t want the restaurant employees to have the takeaway “college students are ripping us off” instead of “they were dissatisfied with the service.”
Good point, dear, that I take this so personally because I grew up in the hospitality hotbed of America. But the move from 15% to 18% isn’t a regional thing (except maybe in flyover states? don’t know much about those) — it’s a blanket increase to accommodate for changing living conditions. The thing is, depending on state taxes and stuff, the basic wage of servers is pretty much friggin’ nothing. In some places (like parts of Maryland), once taxes are taken out, waitresses make LITERALLY ZERO DOLLARS AN HOUR. So you know the concept of a living wage? The socially accepted increases in tipping percentage is basically that.
I’m obviously occasionally susceptible to giving a piss-poor tip — especially in the confluence of shitty service and active offensiveness, like my 22nd birthday, when we ended up tipping the guy, like $2.42 on a meal for four. But I can definitely remember every sub-15% tip I’ve ever left, because they were all very intentional. And almost all of them left with notes on the receipt. (Glad you like that tip, by the way. Spread the word! It should be the norm.)
I started reading this blog from the beginning a week or so ago, and I love it! I can relate to so much that you discuss, and it’s really interesting to hear it from someone else’s mind.
Leaving much-deserved gratuity is a huge issue with me. I work as a waitress in a chain restaurant (not my main job, mind you), and it isn’t uncommon for me to go home with less than 20% of my sales, despite my stellar attention to detail and concern for my guests. Combine that with the fact that I make a mere $2.15 an hour (Louisiana = butt-rape high taxes + pitiful minimum wage), and one can understand why servers oftentimes look frazzled and haggard. Despite this, I continue to go in every week with the hopes of leaving at the end of my shift feeling like I didn’t just waste the last 6 hours of my life. Thanks to everyone who understands the toils of an overworked, underpaid server!