Stories of Waiting

Tips; a short rant

Why is tipping 18% or more important? Two reasons:

• Servers get paid $2.13 per hour. Not including taxes taken out. You try living off that.
• Most large-scale restaurants and chains require servers tip-out the hostesses, bartenders, and/or back-wait staff, up to 4% of the server’s total sales. So, if you tip 15%, the server only gets 11%.

A couple of un-named race tipped $2 on a $44 check. That means the server, after tip-out, get 24 cents for herself. 24 CENTS!

Its not racism I feel, its culture-ism for the way people were raised and taught what is acceptable in society.

Results on tips; your thoughts?

After a month of gathering data (yay data!) on the tips that were left for myself, here are the initial results. If anyone really wants to see the Excel sheets, I can show you, and apologies for the statistical speak (it gets me excited).

(n= is the quantity of data in particular set; “outlier” is more than twice the standard deviation of the average)

Based on age & race (with outliers/ without outliers):

White people:

• Young (n=29) - 20.1/19.5%
• Middle (n=42) - 20.1/19.5%
• Older (n=14) - 18.3/17.7%

Black people:

• Young (n=7) - 17.9/17.9%
• Middle (n=6) - 15.8/15.8%
• Older (n=3) - 16.5/16.5%

Other Ethnicity:

• Young (n=8) - 18.6/18.6%
• Middle (n=4) - 17.4/17.4%
• Older (n=0) - N/A

Based on sex:

• Women (n=47) - 19.6/19.1%
• Man (n=55) - 18.5/18.5%

Based on Type of card* used:

• Amex (n=7) - 19.5/19.5%
• Discover (n=0) - N/A
• MasterCard (n=14) - 18.1/18.8%
• Visa (n=48) - 19.5/19.3%

Overall average tip:

19%

Observations:

• Both black people and Other need more data collected to start drawing conclusions; their standard deviations were huge, and confidence was low.
• The * indicates this realization: I wanted the “Type of Card” data to be on credit cards, but I forgot most Visas are also debit cards. Should I try to keep it limited to just credit cards, or all card types?
• MasterCard users tip lowest, While Amex users consistently tip highest.
• Lowest tip: 5.3% (Middle Black Male); Highest tip: 42.9% (Young White Male)

Further research:

• Someone suggested I separate data further, into Day of the Week. Yes?
• Is there anything you guys want to see?
• I will continue to collect data over the next months. This is becoming really interesting.

Your thoughts/concerns/questions?

It all comes down to simple math

I recently got furious over a person’s comments on a story about server etiquette.

In his mind, servers have no right to complain about poor tips, because we make enough money already.

He asserted (WARNING: Math ahead) that if a server has four tables of four people each, each table being turned over every two hours, with the average check being $100, and the people tip just 10%, plus minimum wage:

[ (4 x 100 x 10%)/2 ] + 7.25 = $27.25 per hour

We should be happy with that, right?

In actuality, I would, if I really made that much an hour.

Here is how it really works, using the same number of tables and tip %:

[ (4 x 100 x 10%)/2 ] - (400 x 4%) + 2.13 =  $6.13 per hour.

Huge difference, huh? What happened? That’s less than minimum wage.

Well, servers tip-out the busboys, back-waiters, and bartenders an average of 4% of the net sales (hence the “400 x 4%” part).

Whatever percentage you tip, subtract 4%. That’s what the server is getting.

And for anybody working in a tip-based profession, their minimum wage can be $2.13, according to US Federal Law.

If you do the math right, and tip too low, the server can actually owe the restaurant money. And I haven’t even talked about how servers owe Federal and State tax on both the hourly wage AND the tips earned.

You see, now, one of the reasons why servers get frustrated at people who tip poorly?