[Sca-cooks] food manners/tipping

[Celia des Archier]

Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise passed on the following:


>>And never ever say some stupid crap like, .The restaurant should pay the 
>>servers a living wage so that I don.t have to tip,. and then use that as 
>>an excuse not to leave a tip, because that is a crass bullshit excuse to 
>>just be a tightwad. If you go out with me and say such a thing, guess 
>>what? I won.t go out with you again. End of story.

Presumably you wouldn't go out with me anyway ;-) 

Of course, you are entitled to your opinion.  However, My Personal Opinion
is that a restaurants *should* pay their waitstaff a living wage and a
gratuity *should* be just that... a gratuity.  Thanks for a job performed
well.  Otherwise it should not be considered a gratuity or "tip" but should
instead be mandatory and added to the bill as a "service charge" (as they do
in many European countries.)  Which is one of the reasons I'm happy to be
living in California, one of the states which does require that "tip
earners" be paid minimum wage rather than having their wages adjusted to
*assume* that the tip earner's tips are part of that minimum instead of the
supplement that it *should* be.

And I say this not because I'm a "tightwad" ... indeed I have a habit of
overtipping when service is good both because I'm from a state where tip
earners do *not* make minimum wage (and thus I'm used to trying to
compensate for that fact) and because I, my husband and both of my parents
have all been waitservers at one point or another. I say this because I
believe that a gratuity, which gets it's name because it is a show of
gratitude for a service performed well, and beyond what is required, should
not be conscripted out of one because the employer is too cheap to pay their
employees a living wage.  Such a symbolic gesture looses it's meaning when
it becomes mandatory. 

Of course, if I went out with someone and the service was poor enough for me
to not tip (or to leave the symbolic 1 penny that signals to the server that
the service was so poor that they had earned chastisement rather than a
gratuity) and that person took umbrage to the fact, then we wouldn't be
going out again either, as I would take our sensibilities to be too far
apart for polite companionship. 

Celia