Last night my wife and I went out to dinner at a local restaurant. We got the bill and I paid with my credit card. When they brought the receipt back for me to sign I noticed that there was a place to write in additional moneys for the "tip". No problem, I thought to myself - the waiter was efficient (except for the plastic cups that leaked) and he deserves to make a living too. In general I like to leave more than expected because it doesn't cost me a lot of money but it sure makes a difference to those who are on the receiving end.
And then I noticed that a "gratuity" had already been charged! What to do - what to do? Maybe this particular restaurant has "gratuities" for the waiter and "tips" for the busboys? (For a minute I considered writing in "lucky lady in the 5th at Aqueduct")
So I called over the man who appeared to be the manager of the place and asked him about it. He said "the gratuity is for the waiter which is automatically added to the bill while the tip is what you give the waiter if you feel you got good service - after all the gratuity is only %15".
Maybe I should explain. I'm not upset about giving the waiter more than %15 - I do that quite often. What I am upset about is the doublespeak. A gratuity IS a tip - just call it one and the same thing - and if you can't trust us to give the standard %15 then why not go all the way and charge us a %20 gratuity? And %15 is not "just" %15. It's a serious piece of business and I believe it is an appropriate number to use as a basis for deciding a tip - I mean gratuity ;-)
Actually I'm not "upset" about this at all - just amused - but then I don't eat out often or at too many places (have to be Kosher of course) - so maybe you out there can tell me if this is standard practice elsewhere and maybe it's just my sheltered little life that's causing me to be commenting on this at all.
We (two friends reading from one laptop) are both students and so we don''t eat out lots, but we eat out enough. Tip and gratuity are the same thing, and it is highly unusual to include a gratuity in the bill for only 2 people. Usually, that is a parties of 6 or more kind of thing and oftern then, they do 18%.
ReplyDeletedepends on the place - a lot of the time, when I waited tables, we'd do it as a matter of course for any table with more than 6 people. Some places, it's just SOP (but often at the waiter's discretion). If your actual question is, "does it look like they expected you to stiff them?" and there was just the two of you... the answer is: yeah, probably.
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