Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan02
I'm confused here, it appears your thinking is all backwards. Tipping a flat percentage provides incentive to push volume. Tipping based on quality of service provides incentive for quality of service rather then volume.
My personal tipping strategy is minimum 15% rounded up to the nearest 5$ as I dislike carrying pocket change. Of course this is also dependent on my ability to do math if I've had more then a couple drinks but I usually aim for the high side.
As for the particular bill, if they did wait a hour after ordering their food that is pretty egregious. I was out for dinner and drinks a few weeks ago with a friend of mine, and the food was taking a really long time, after about 25 minutes the waitress came around and said she just checked and it would be about 2 more minutes. Well it took about 20 more minutes after that, when she brought the food to the table she apologized and said she talked to the manager about it and they comped the appies. That's quality service, honestly we didn't care that thing were running slow because we were just there to chill and hang out but it was nice to see the management took care of both their staff and customers.
I know if I was out for dinner with a group of friends and we had plans after I'd probably be a little irked if we waited an hour for our food to get out. Not stiff the waitress on the tip irked, but probably not go back to the restaurant again.
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You can't tell when you seat a table if they will be a good or a bad tipper. The quality of service has very little effect on the size of a tip. If you serve four tables an hour and could instead serve 5 you can get 20% less tip and still break even. So in general provided you can maintain adequate but not exceptional service you are better off pushing tables through and stealing tables from coworkers. It also incentivises stupid things like low cut shirts, touching the arm of the person paying the bill, a smiley face on the bill.
Tipping based on quality doesn't work as the things people blame on the server are rarely in their control. I agree that a server handling the situation well deserves the same tip but most people do not tip like that.
My flat rate tipping is because I don't want to participate in the tipping game anymore. The real solution is for tipping as a practice to end.