It's Wednesday morning. I wake up for class at 8:30 and sit in a 3 hour studio class. I have 2 hours in between for lunch and last minute homework with which I follow up with another 3 hour studio class.
Draining, but doable.
It hits 4:30 p.m., and I'm watching the clock every minute, I gotta get out of here, gotta get ready for work. The second we are dismissed I fly out of there with my backpack barely secured to get changed real fast to make sure I make it to work on time.
Again no big deal.
As of now, I'm a waitress at a restaurant while being a full-time student. This is nothing unheard of. The night isn't bad, greeting and taking care of customers as they come and go making sure they are comfortable and content. The day isn't bad, just long.
By the end of my shift I make it back home to a few hours of homework; a 14 + hour day.
In the service industry, you have 3 types of customers; the good, the bad, and the average. These can be broken down further if you'd prefer, tapping into the pleasant, chatty, quiet, needy, friendly, funny, etc. After a while, it all averages out.
You could be having the worst day and all it takes is one great customer to turn your day around. The same goes for having a great day turning wrong. Unfortunately the customer doesn't even have to be rude or uneasy to be a bad customer... it all comes down to the tipping.
There is nothing more disheartening than having a great table that you get along with well, and they leave happy, only for you to return to their table finding a mere $1 tip on a $50 check. One hiccup isn't bad, you'll brush yourself off and continue with the shift. But, 2 or more tables like this and you begin to wonder if this is worth your time.
Being in the restaurant industry for the past 5 years, I have come to HATE a few key phrases.
1. “Keep the change.” Normally when this is said, or has to be said, it is literally just that as your tip; change. Maybe if you're lucky it’ll be more than a couple quarters and some pennies, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find an extra dollar or two.
-What you COULD SAY: The rest is yours. I get that it means the same thing, but from experience, the ratio of good tips on “the rest is yours” is much much better than the over-used “keep the change”
2. “We have a gift card,coupon, etc.” Great. I’m happy for you that you're able to save a little bit of money, honest. But this doesn’t mean that tipping 20% off of your now discounted check of $20, which initially was $50 will be sufficient. To put it in numerical terms that's getting $4 when a 20% tip on the initial bill would have been $10.
3. “Can we order off of the kids menu?” Unless you are a child under the age of 13 or a senior citizen, let’s be real. You are most likely only ordering off of the kids menu because you don’t want to pay full price for one of our adult entrees. I get that life is expensive, trust me I do. But if you can’t afford to spend $10 on a dinner or lunch you have other options for cheaper alternatives.
As a waitress, I make $2.83 an hour plus tips. Of this $2.83, I’ll rarely see a paycheck as it is usually taken up by taxes. So what I make in tips is my salary. If I have a bad night of poor tips, sometimes I make less than minimum wage.
Maybe some can find it hard to justify that someone in my profession makes anywhere between $10-$30 an hour on a good night, but there is so much more responsibility than a typical minimum wage job.
On a busy night a server could be in charge of anywhere from 4 to 8 tables at a time, all with drinks that will need refilled, dinners that will probably need modifications and add-ons (after they have already been delivered to a table), desert orders, split checks and to-go boxes.
A typical routine for a single table goes like this: greeting, drink orders, food orders, delivering food, drink refills, clearing plates, desert orders, deliver checks, collect and run payments, drop off checks, clean the table. Take that and multiply by how many tables you would have. That is a whole heck of a lot of multi tasking, even more so when you are sat twice in a row with no gap to get organized.
It is a clustered mess at best, but if you can take care of your tables still and keep them happy then it’s worth it, and should be acknowledged.
So, as far as educational purpose goes, ignorance should not be as big of an excuse as it is now. A good tip that shows the server did everything right and catered to a tables needs would be 20%, however good tips on average range from 15% to 20% or more.
What most people don’t know is that if you were to tip a server 20%, they don’t see that full amount at the end of their night. Depending on the restaurant staff, there is a tip out at the end of the night which comes from the tips the server has earned. So, a percentage of the tip itself does not even go to the server.
Therefore.. if a server is tipped 10% or less, chances are the server is almost paying for you to eat there since regardless of how much you left they must tip out the busser, bar and food runner.
There is nothing worse than being cut at the end of a shift waiting on one last table to leave for an hour before you can go home... only to find that they left you $0.25 on a $30 dollar check or worse, nothing at all.
In the restaurant industry, ignorance is not bliss, so please pass this along.
