In SA it is a custom that you leave about 10-15% of tip on table and if you do not then you mustn't complaint next time around not being served swiftly.
Well that's the thing. It shouldn't be unusual to walk away without tipping if the service was as expected , not because it wasn't bad .
In the US (and other tipping-heavy cultures) you tip if (or to ensure - eg: in a bar, repeat customer) you don't get bad service . In, say, Australia (and Switzerland from what I've seen) you tip because you have gotten great service .
These are the two fundamentally different attitudes towards tipping.
I tip according to service, and if I want to. At the Japanese restaurant on Freiestrasse Basel, I found the waiter there to be very friendly and helpful, so I used to leave reasonable tips.
One lunchtime, for whatever reason, I didn't leave a tip. He was so surly about it, I never went back there again.
Once in Vevey, we had an extended family blow out. 14 of us at a table, and the waitress was great. She almost cried when we left a 10% tip - a considerable amount of champagne had been drunk... She'd seemed genuinely to have had no expectations of ANY tip.
Orlando, Florida Dec 1995. My family and my uncle's family were at a restaurant on the way back from a day out and after slow service, cold food and a couple of "that's not what we ordered" issues we paid the bill (perhaps we rounded it up to the nearest $10 - can't remember now) and buggered off.
Waiter and manager met us at the door and blustered all sorts of threats (never once asking us WHY we didn't leave a tip) as we shuffled our way out towards the car park. My uncle, who was never shy to speak his mind, told the manager he should work on his service and his chef then the tips might flow a bit more freely.
We were gobsmacked that the manager was only concerned with getting the tip and not in the slightest bit interested that his customers were getting a sh*te service.
If service is horrible in the US, you don't ever not tip. No tip could mean that you merely forgot, or that you're visitors from a non-tipping culture, or even that you left it on the table and some lowlife swiped it (which does happen; I've seen it.) Leaving two cents is the customary gesture.
(I would only ever do this for bad service that was definitely the waiter's fault though... overcooked food, for instance, is normally the kitchen's fault.)
It just occurred to me that a lot of foreigners don't realize the kind of service that can be had in US restaurants. You can ask for special arrangements or accommodations. This is the positive side of the tipping system you will not find here. They will typically come by after a couple of bites to ask if everything is alright with your meal. If there are any problems whatsoever, they will typically do their best to rectify it. All the while, they take good care of your experience in the restaurant.
You see, the restaurant business in the US is less about selling food and more about selling an experience. The experience is the product, and they will do whatever they can to ensure that you leave smiling.
It's a serious business tipping in the states. My first ever trip to the US really stressed me out in case I got the tips wrong - I survived
I remember being really peed off as a chambermaid if I had a few guests on my floor depart after a long stay on my day off - I missed out on the tip
Now, when staying in a hotel, I ask the girl who has been cleaning the room if she will be there on our last day.. if not, I make sure she gets her tip before she takes her days off.
Thanks. You're right. I think that's what I wanted to hear. It is overpriced. I will tip only for exceptional service. Otherwise, I'll just let them have the lose change.
The difference being that in places like Switzerland, waitrons are paid a salary (albeit one at the lower end of the minimum wage scale). I recall when I worked as a waiter (in SA) there used to be no basic wage - purely commission - something like 2% (starting wage) to a max of 5%. Good service was a requirement to earn tips to be able to make enough to survive. I don't know if this is still the case down there.
I haven't noticed if they still do it but in London they used to automatically add 12.5% "service charge" to the bill. This always annoyed me as it took away any opportunity for the customer to decide if the service deserved a tip.
One night, I took a group of friends out for my husbands birthday. We received some of the most appalling service I have ever encountered in my life. After waiting hours for menus, food etc, the waitress literally threw the plates of food in front of us. We were one of only a couple of tables dining in the restaurant that night so it couldn't have been because she was too busy.
So at the end of the night, the bill came with the 12.5% automatically added and I handed the waitress my credit card and asked to her charge the card less the service charge. She asked if I was intending to pay the service in cash and I said I wasn't intending to pay for the service at all. She was absolutely livid but I wasn't backing down.
Here's a tip; when you do something like this, make sure your husband doesn't leave his jacket, with the house keys in the pocket, in the aforementioned restaurant. We went back with 10 minutes of leaving and of course the offending waitress said she had no idea what we were talking about, she never found any jacket or keys.
We had to wake our elderly landlady and ask her to please come let us into our apartment.
I agree. Good service is well worth tipping. But a lot of restaurants these days don't seem to screen or instruct their staff at all. I've nothing against some adolescent school kid or a fresh-off-the-plane asylum seeker getting a job for the sole reason that they're cheap, but would somebody please teach them the basics of decency and politeness first. I've seen some really lousy service lately. And the sad thing is that it doesn't just affect the cheaper places but upmarket restaurants seem to be getting this type of staff too. There was a time when you could expect the waiter in a mid-range or better restauarnt to actually be able to answer questions about the wines on the card or the sauces and such things. These days they will tell you anything even when the only decent thing would have been to admit they don't really know. I wouldn't have a problem with the latter. Everybody's got to learn at some point. But some will just tell you b*ll.
It may work in some cases but I could show you places with very lousy service and attitudes in the US, and very attentive places in Europe. The tipping may provide a reward system, but at the end of the day, if management believes in good service they will make sure by whatever means necessary that you get good service. On the other hand, if a place is badly run and poorly organized and serve rubbish food, even the most skilled waiter will struggle to make it look good.
As a chinese, I am from the non-tipping culture country, but I always tip when I am dining outside China. And this thread definitely helps me a lot on tipping tips.
Most of the people are talking 10-15% tipping rule here. My question is, is there a limit? For example, not exceeding 10frcs?
I once went out for lunch with a swiss colleague, the lunch costed us slightly over 100frcs, so I tipped 10frcs according to the 10% rule. Then my swiss colleague pretended we did not finish the tipping, and took back 5frcs. He told me later not to overtip and 5frcs were enough.
Yesterday I went out with 4 friends for a big lunch in a pretty good chinese retaurant and ended with a bill of 396frcs, then I tipped only 9frcs. Having the 10%-15% rule in mind, I have to confess that I feel difficult to pay extra 40-60 frcs as tip.
Had that once. I was in the US and we ordered a round of drinks. I didn't give a tip because we were planning to have another round and thought we'd put all the tip on the last round. When the waitress realised we hadn't tipped she came back to our table and very rudely interrupted us without even waiting for a suitable break in our conversation and made it very clear she was angry with us. The result was we went to another place for the second round.
Very true. That's why I (try to) tip based on the service, not on the overall experience.
Waiters can't magically make your food tastier, better-plated or even make it arrive faster. Nor can they keep the screaming brat at the next table under control, or chuck his parents out of the restaurant. What they can do is be cheerful and professional, maybe advise you on what's good tonight, take down your order without mixing it up, bring you your food without mixing it up, bring you the bill without mixing that up, and generally look after you a bit in between times. That's their job and if they do it well they've earned their tip.
You can think of waiters (in tipping cultures, which Switzerland is not) as being nearly self-employed. The restaurant pays them a small retainer so that they'll wait tables here instead of down the street, but you provide most of their income - they're essentially working for you, not the restaurant.
Tipping in these circumstances is not just a social courtesy; it's a payment for services rendered. Suppose you went to the hairdresser without negotiating a price in advance - would you then assume payment is optional and that he should be grateful for anything he gets?
No, but if I went out of the hairdressers with a tangled bush on my head instead of a carefully coiffed head of hair I would either complain and at least get a massive reduction and some kind of offer of repair or demand my money back.
Tipping, in this case is the same. If waiters are so dependent on their tips they should be prepared to put in the service.
Exactly! Tip less for bad service, complain to the manager for bad food. But the entrenched practice of tipping - the expectation of a decent tip even for average service - shouldn't be viewed as an impertinence, because it isn't. It's simply the way the system operates in those countries: you pay the restaurant for the food and the waiter for the service.