to not leave a tip after a pub meal?

[SingleMum01]

should I or shouldn't I?

Mayorquimby

Do you squeak when you walk?

Unfortunately restaurants will not pay much over the minimum wage as most staff are young or desperate and can be replaced at the drop of a hat.

Stick your hand in your pocket you tight git!

But it is really weird how it's been decided that there are a few professions where we tip, and we don't tip the rest.

Dh gets minimum wage and is a supervisor. It's an order at the bar and the food is brought to you place. You can order when someone brings something to your table if you like, but as there is usually only 2 people having to work the bar and bring out the food, it's not really feasible to table serve the 50 or so tables that are filled every lunchtime.

Head office are tight gits that put wage budgets so low, so there is never enough money to have lots of staff working.

He and the rest of the staff work damned hard, because it's not all just taking drinks orders and bringing food out.
If staff are pleasant but perhaps a little busy, you should still tip.

But why should people have to tip just because their employers don't want to pay a reasonable wage? It doesn't happen in places like supermarkets, where all the checkout staff will be getting minimum wage too.

nobody seems to have an answer for that one gerontius!

Why do we tip a taxi driver when a journey costs you a lot, but not the busdriver when it costs little, and he makes less money?

Dd has just started a pt job waitressing in a pub/restaurant. she is 17 and earns £4.80 an hour, comes home exhausted. People order at the bar in the pub but at the table in the restaurant.

I was horrified to find out the average tip is about £2 per table - it is pooled and rightly shared with all the staff - the washer-up person, bar staff etc.

IMHO unless you can afford a 10% tip and assuming the service is acceptable then don"t eat out - low paid staff depend on it.

Even before dd started the job I would never have not left one unless the service was shocking - but I also worked as a waitress while in college.

Still not explaining why only one type of low paid staff deserve tips when others don't?

BTW if tipping is compulsory, its not a gratuity.

"Still not explaining why only one type of low paid staff deserve tips when others don't? "

Surely I'm not the only person who leaves a tip when they ring a call centre to pay their electricity bill? 15% if I've recieved good service but sometimes less if there's been powercuts etc.

If you've been running around like a blue arsed fly for 6 hours straight, getting abuse from arseholes and still manage to be pleasant and have a smile on your face, then you deserve a tip.
Serving staff differ from, say, supermarket staff because no one cares if their cashier was sullen or not. Waiters and waitresses are an intrinsic part of your dining experience, and have the power to make it great by being helpful, or rubbish by being moody. They don't have to be smiley. They still get paid whether they are moody or not (though their manager might not approve. Still, you're not going to get fired for not smiling) so if they manage to crack a smile and be helpful, then it's worth a tip.

Sorry if that makes no sense, have a wriggly baby on my lap, and it's kind of hard to concentrate.

if you can afford to eat out then you can afford a couple of quid tip. Stop being so tight. I can hardly ever afford to eat out, when I do, I tip. Read up on the Indie's campaign (last year?) re: zero hours zero pay contracts and tipping.

But lots of people have difficult jobs for low wages. Which often bring them into extended contact with the public. It still doesn't explain why we tip some of them and not others.

Its not a matter of being tight. Why pay people extra to do their job properly? When I'm being overcharged for my food and drinks, how am I also responsible for the low wages of the staff? Their employer should pay them more, not me! I'm paying enough already.

To quote someone I can't remember: "When you are at your own place of work, your boss doesn't come to you and say 'I can't be bothered to pay you a decent wage this month, but tell you what, there're a couple of American clients in today, they might bung you a fiver."

I still wouldn't look particularly kindly on someone who didn't tip good service.

Surely it's part of the merry, heart-warming (slightly pissed) dining experience. Share your enjoyable evening around a bit?

And I've never worked as a waitress, but have been in retail, a cleaner etc.

maybe it';s the kind of restaurant i worked in then but we didn't care if people left a tip or not. Obviously we were pleased if tips at the end of the night were good and vice versa but we didn't comment on individual tables unless it was extreme (huge hen night, loads of champagne, no tip or 2 people popping in for a very quick pizza leaving £10 tip)

Gawd knows why waitresses are tipped but not shop workers, even though most are minumum wage.

I think it is just a historical thing - waiting staff generally have always been tipped.

whatever, I am not going to use the argument of unfairness to stop tipping now. I agree it is probably tied up in teh whole eating out experience. And agree that nobody gives a damn if a checkout worker is grim, as the whole supermarket experience is pretty vile anyway, and is not classed as an 'event', however a surly waitress can mar an evening out.

I tip waiters and hairdressers, but nobody else I think. Never have tipped a taxi driver for instance.

If the check out assistant met you at the door, got your food & other items off the shelf, put it in your trolley, wheeled that trolley around the shop, put them thru the till, packed your bags....

That would be worthy of a tip. However s/he stands at the till, looking like they would rather be elsewhere, if you are lucky they carefully scan your food, if they are not, they treat it like football they have caught with dog shit on it.

I know why I tip one & not the other!

Waitresses do a lot more work than just stand there scanning food.

Clearing the table, seting it for next diners etc.

Reading this thread is like watching the beginning of Reservoir Dogs. But without the "Like a Virgin" bit...

Oh, and I worked on a till, and I can assure you I did far more than "just scan food". I frequently packed every item (separating it into logical bags and making sure that nothing squishy was at the bottom), informed people about offers they were missing out on, made pleasant small talk if that's what the customer wanted, opened carriers if they wanted to pack themselves (this is the bit people struggle with and these were the days before bring your own fabric bags!). I also used to occasionally accompany a partially sighted lady around the store with a trolley, picking out the items she wanted.

I never got a tip, I barely ever got a thank you. People seem to think it's fine to be rude to people on tills. Apart from the lovely woman who once gave me some Ice Cream flavoured Monster Munch because I commented on them sounding weird as I scanned them

Over the course of an evening or lunch, waitstaff build up a far more complicated relationship with individual customers than someone at a till. If they do this well, tip them. If they don't, then don't.

A waiter or waitress looks after you, possibly for two hours or more. They use their skills to judge if you need something (above and beyond clearing your plates when you've all finished), to judge what kind of guidance you'd like with the menu and wine list, their knowledge to advise you, to judge whether you'd prefer chatty and invovled service or something more unobstrusive, hurried or unhurried. In acting as a go-between they represent you in your relationship with the chef, and vice versa. If the chefs are pissing around (theirs is a bloody stressful job so it's fair enough theat they get fiery sometimes) they stand up for you. If your pissing around they stop the chefs from going off on one (not that you see any of this).

All this and more is why waitstaff get tips and checkout staff don't. It has, imo, little to do with being on the minimum wage.

Not in the type of pub where you order stuff at the bar they don't!

And I should add that I generally do tip.

When I worked as a waitress in London, I was paid 12.50 a shift (8.00 -15.30 so £1.60/hour) thank God for nice people who left us tips. (that was 12 years ago BTW)

I was one of the fortunate ones as well whose boss was not charging us for the meal we ate in our break (not allowed to choose what we ate much though), a lot of places where some of my friends worked had to pay for their meal!

Needless to say I usually tip , unless waiter/ess really rude and unhelpful (cannot actually remember it happening yet)

Fair point, Littlestlass. But that's why I'd leave a pound or two on the table in a pub, and not 10% or so.