After my last post on the Rules for Eating Out, I’ve decided to make the Rules into a short series.
The RagingServer Archives
Here lie the first posts from the original RagingServer.com
After my last post on the Rules for Eating Out, I’ve decided to make the Rules into a short series.
The RagingServer Archives 
I love it when you post stuff like this! People need to get with the damn program & stop being ass holes!
I completely agree with most of what was said, with the exception of the person who responded. I am a server and without peoples tips then I would not make any money. We get paid $2.65 an hour. That is not very much. I work at a relatively up scale restaurant for my area of town, and I like to pride myself on giving good service. I will always have a refil of your drink on the table before you ever have to ask for one, and I rarely ever make a mistake on an order. I can
Clayton 811
“I will always have a refil of your drink on the table before you ever have to ask for one”
That’s one thing that IRKS ME is that servers think they can do the ORDERING FOR YOU. You have NO RIGHT to order for me. If I want a refill either you ASK me or I ASK you, but this getting things BEFORE you even KNOW 100% for sure the customer wants it is STUPID.
I have switched from dr. pepper to coke before LOTS of times. One time, a Red Lobster waiter was TOO LAZY and UNCARING to COME TO SEE WHAT ****I****** WANTED, NOT WHAT HE WANTED TO BRING ME. Just because refills are free DOESN’T mean they are wanted. My husband one time switched from a cup of coffee to diet coke. I’ve also declined refills before also. There’s NO SENSE in making an extra trip that you don’t know 100% FOR SURE you have to do and there’s NO SENSE in getting glasses of ice and drink if you don’t have to. That WASTES VALUABLE TIME you could have found out some people at the table did NOT want the refills in the first place. I absolutely HATE when servers try to do the ordering for me. When someone orders a soft drink or tea, they order ****ONE***** GLASS, NOT REFILLS OF IT. If the customer wants a refill, ASK THEM or let them ASK YOU. This way you won’t waste your time, the customer’s time, and other customer’s time getting a possible unwanted item. I do NOT like when servers try to ASSUME OR READ MY MIND. It’s NOT THEIR PLACE. I am the customer, I get to order, NOT my server.
“I rarely ever make a mistake on an order. I can
Psycho
Thanks for the heads up for the tax amount not always including alcohol. Sometimes I’ll double the tax looking for about 20% and didn’t realize this.
And I am totally with you on tipping based on time if you’re going to be staying a while.
“Why should I care that the server isn’t making money?”
Why should they care if you get any service? You don’t care that they need to make money. It seems justified.
Also, bussing the table is a service YOU receive. Consider it a service you receive before you got there, not after the last customer left. They aren’t bussing the table for the people who just left. They are cleaning the area for the people who are coming next. Which is a service YOU are receiving, whether or not you want it.
They could just leave it all at the table and sit you down at it and then clean it while you are there. But I bet you wouldn’t like that, now would you?
And you’re right. It’s not like the server sitting in your office and chit chatting. It’s like the server sitting in your office, hanging up on phone calls that come in for you, and calling your debtor’s and telling them to fuck off on next month’s bill payment. ‘Cause that’s what you do when you camp tables and don’t tip accordingly. The server is there to make money, and if you don’t understand that then you need to go and eat places where you serve yourself because you are not mature enough to understand proper etiquette of dining out.
While you think it’s not fair for a tip out (which I don’t think is fair either), it’s still a fact of life for most servers. If you are too base to take that into consideration (on principle or not) then you really aren’t taking your tip into consideration of what it actually is. It isn’t a tip for just the server. It’s a tip for the server for serving you, the bussers for having the table clean and prepared for YOU when YOU got there, and the bartender for making any drinks you may have had.
That brings up another point: Tip sharing. Most people don’t realize that tip sharing is based on TOTAL SALES. It is not based on the tips the server made. If you stiff a server, you aren’t just not giving the server money, you are forcing the server to pay up to 5% of your bill out of their pocket to other people in the forms of tip out. They have to tip out whether or not they make money.
And you keep saying, “What did they do for me?” when you sit at the table and not get service but still sit there? What they did for you is put up with you being there stopping them from making money. Most people are much less than amicable when people are taking money away from them out of their own greed. They could, however, come and be rude, but most don’t. Most let you be a jackass and waste their time (wasting the time doing nothing for your table they could be making money on the table you hi-jacked). Servers aren’t there as a hobby, it’s to pay bills. Eat, tip and get out. A restaurant is a place of business. Go to a park if you want to sit and chit-chat for hours on end. If the restaurant is busy, most servers don’t care. If it’s busy, however, you better get your ass on the move or else you may find yourself on the receiving end of an escort.
I have also seen managers (especially very good ones) come to the rescue. They kindly move the people to another section that isn’t busy, or ask the people to leave.
Jimmy-James
http://howtobeagoodserver.blogspot.com/2007/07/how-to-be-good-server-in-restaurant.html
My comment is TOO LONG for Ribeye to want to post, so I posted it at my own blog. You can read the comment to you there.
I’m not a server. Never have been and never will be as I could never do what they do, which is put up with rude people who equate watiers and waitress to slaves. As a customer who expects good service, tips well in return, is polite to my wait staff, I think that maybe Springs1 needs to eat at home as she has many, many rules for servers that would make me want to spit in her food. We all expect good service but, holy cow! If you expect that much from your wait staff maybe you shouldn’t be going out at all.
I think this post screams “entitlement”. The definition of gratuity is “something given without claim or demand”.
You want big tips? You should earn it. If you don’t make enough money- look for a different job.
Have you ever waited tables? We servers work VERY hard, run our asses off for the Entitlement Junkies, and do it with a smile on our face, only to get a 3% tip from them. We run for their constant skraws and lemons, their 15 sides of ranch for their house salad and their exkra croutons, and still we get nothing. When we get a tip like that, 3% to nothing, we end up PAYING for those entitlement junkies to eat in tip-out and taxes. So think again before you say I should earn big tips, because I go above and beyond for this trash and still get nothing for my efforts.
Springs1 wouldn’t last a day in my little joint as a customer. What a Nazi.
Please stop encouraging people to “double the tax”. It is not acceptable under any circumstances to merely do that. People are dumb and lazy, still, this is no excuse to not be able to move a decimal place over (10%) and double that (thus making it 20%). For christ’s sake, people have calculators on their cell phones, pda’s and every other abysmal, excessive piece of ‘connected’ technology, all they have to do is type in bill amount and hit “x” .20
(On a similar train of thoght…they even have ‘debit card’ monopoly games now…no need to teach the kiddos basic math skills!)
Wow, only $2-$3 an hour? That is unbelievably low. Over here in the UK it’s usual to tip 5% of the bill if you’ve received good service. If you have bad service then it’s ok if you don’t want to tip. And there’s a minimum wage in place anyway (
You are so full of it, you should be grateful for whatever you recieved. Your comments seems as though you are providing a needed services. The way I see it you are in a no win situation. How would you feel if no one came back to your resturant or bar because you expects the customer to pay your employees a suitable salary. I do not tip nor share I start…and I am not alone in my opinion at least in my area. I go out to have a good time not pay the order bills
And the people like you that don’t tip don’t deserve service. You can’t run your server to death for nothing. You pay your bill & that means you pay for the food only. If you expect actual service, stop being a selfish bitch & pay for your service. If you came into my restaurant, you would sit there with no service, seeing as how I won’t get paid for it anyway. Get your food to go bitch.
Wow, Springs is a complete psycho. For a non-server to dedicate all of that time obsessing over eating out? The only explanation is that she’s an enormous whale who got shorted one too many mozzarella sticks and hates the skinny waitress her husband is drooling over.
Dee Cee we already know you don’t tip- how could you possibly tackle basic math when you haven’t yet grasped the English language?
Tipping for service is customary in American culture. People that don’t tip like you wait 2 hours for a table where I work. Once you sit, we want to get rid of you quick so we give you the old food that was a mistake and has been sitting in the window for an hour. Then we charge you for refills and drop your check before you say boo.
Sounds like a fun night out!!
Dee Cee…… are you black??
Black people usually tip 3-4 dollars no matter how big the bill. They dont even tip black servers.
My friends ex husband said that as servers we pick to make 2.13 an hour (yeah its bs). im not working my ass off for you for volunteer hours!!
Tipping is a funny business is it not? I think some of these rules go too far, tipping remains a gift not a requirement. I know that you guys may be paid unfairly but who is to blame, the owner of the restaurant or the customer? Is there not a union you guys could join?
First off as far as tipping is concerned, I have dealt with some pretty rude as well as inatentive servers, sorry but no 15% to 20% for these people. If you think you just deserve this 15 or 20%, then find another job. Do your job correctly and with a little tact and then you are deserving…
poor widdle Spring 1 and to start off I pity your poor husband balls as i can infer from your posts his balls are stone cold BUSTED.
and to quote the BARD on the I tip well 25% and better repeatedly “you doth protest too much” if you were such a great tipper you wouldnt be bitching about the crap you have posted about like kids gone wild at the table and the clean up involved. I personally always wonder how nasty their home feeding environment must be like when they leave a table looking worse than if a farm animal ate there-farm animals lick their feed containers clean in REAL LIFE.
you need to learn to enjoy yourself when you go out NOT obsess about how the one boy kissing chic took care of you and made six mistakes. Now you count anything wrong as the servers fault. That food runner should have checked the ticket to verify your order but maybe the chef nazi expo’ing just handed him 2 plates in his hands and screamed “Table 12.” Not a uncommon event AT ALL! And thats NOT the servers fault but it is their problem to fix.
As to occupying space over the time needed to eat your meal. A server has a section of tables which can be considered rental property with each specific table of diners being a rental customer. When one customer occupies the table over the time it takes to dine you are STEALING not from the fellow customers BUT the server they cant make any more money because you stopped spending, the owner stopped making a profit the SECOND you stopped spending, and EVERYONE being tipped out by the server isnt getting any more tip share because YES once again you stopped spending money.
YOU are taking away from their CHANCE to earn their lifelihood for the shift. How would you enjoy it if I came to your JOB and hung out with you and your boss took you off the clock and called it your personal time.
The shittiness of this practice grows exponentially as you add tables to the initial 2 or 4 person table you added to first one to accommodate your party of 6 or more and the worst offenders tend to be large parties as they can take forever to break up and since their bill is large they think their entitled.
You only begin to injury fellow later arriving diners who cant GET a table because your parked in yours despite being finished eating. If you want to eat over 2 or 3 hours go to FREAKING Europe its a socail custom there and better news for your cheap ass tipping isnt normal there!
Springs1: do you really think you are going to change anyone’s mind?
[If you can’t figure out the answer to that question, here it is: NO.]
P.S. What’s up with your penny fetish?
Spring get a grip. I’m not a waiter/ress either and I feel sorry for the ones who get you at their tables. Anyone who sits and counts each and every mistake they imagine the staff made against them is looking for just such a thing. Hitler died, when did you take his place? You say you tip 25 to 30% for good service. My guess, with your hoity toity attitude, is that this doesn’t happen very often unless they agreed to give you a manicure and a brazilian after desert. *rolls eyes*
I’m a server, and when people sit at your table for an extra 30+min, AFTER they have finished all their food/drinks, they really should tip extra. Servers live off tips, that means we need tables to pay our bills. We do not rush you out the door, because that would be poor service. But you are in a restaurant, not a coffee shop. For every hour you sit at a table just talking, you cost the server money. Now if there’s lots of open tables around you I suppose it’s a different story.
The people that say that tips aren’t really necessary have obviously never served before. If we got paid a fair wage, maybe it wouldn’t be. When you sit down and it’s different from a McDonald’s because we bring you all your food. You don’t just stand there and wait for it. We have to bring you drinks and refills and condiments and extra napkins etc…when at a fast food joint, you go and get them yourselves. That is what you are paying extra for.
And for those with children. Screaming children are annoying at restaurants. It annoys all of the other people eating them , and annoyed people don’t leave good tips. And if your child makes an unusually large mess, you should tip more. It’s not my fault you can’t control your child. If your child can’t behave long enough to make it though a meal, don’t take them out.
Springs1, Dee Cee, I have worked in countless restaurants for over 14 years so I say this with 100% knowledge on the subject: Do you have any idea how much spit, pubes, ex-lax, and other assorted goodies you have unknowingly ingested over the years due to your hateful attitude toward servers you have come into contact with?
Hey Ribeye…great site…I feel for ya buddy…I put up with all that shit at my restaurant too. Somebody needs to bitch-slap that ghetto-ass Springs1 whore! Let her work a day in a restaurant and see how she likes dealing with bitches like herself.
I used to serve tables for a Garfield’s restaurant many, many years ago. Now I am a pharmacy technician (9 yrs). Guess I’m a glutton for punishment and abuse…
Anyways, after waiting tables, it opened my eyes to the tipping situation. I was only making $2.15 an hour, and I worked SO HARD for tips. I hated working Sunday afternoons….loathed it actually, because typically church crowds were among the ranks of the worst tippers.
After my short-lived experience with waiting tables, I ALWAYS tip at least 20%, and that is for just average service. Ribeye….You sound like someone that I’d tip 50%, and yes I’ve been known to do it. My fiance sometimes bugs his eyes at me when he looks at how much I tip. But I KNOW what it’s like to be the one serving the food.
Keep up the good work, and excellent blog Ribeye. I’ve become a daily reader.
Heather, CPhT