OMG -a penny!!! This is why when I quit my last waitress job, I threw out those clothes and vowed to starve to death rather than ever do that job again.
This argument has been had at least twice that I remember... and I think last time it was someone else from Canada who had the same opinion as you. In Ohio, waitresses make 2.13 an hour (at least until this year, don't know if it's changed). And your employer reports your tips as earnings. Basically, your wages go to taxes and your tips are all you actually take home. Her employer isn't breaking the law, as other people have stated. That is the law. Tipping, in other words, is written into our wage laws here.
If I ever get a penny tip and I don't know why, I will hunt down the table and ask them what I did wrong. It hasn't happened yet, but I haven gotten piles of change.... I almost quit over too!
I worked in the hospitality industry for many years as a waitress in a restaurant, a cocktail waitress and even a bartender. I know what type of work it is and I know how hard it can be to be rushing around and trying to keep orders straight and all the while being upbeat and cheerful while your back and your feet are killing you.
Eesh! No wonder.
Um... yeah it is the customer's fault! They didn't tip!
It was around 10% and they gave it to the manager asking if it was shared amongst busboys, dishwashers etc (which is the norm here), they were sitting right by us and she didn't seem too interested in serving either of us. I know they complained to the manager about something because they called him over (but that may have been something to do with the kitchen etc too).
Forgot about a table... wow! That must have been either one incredibly busy or really stupid/bad server. I don't care how busy I am though, I never forget I have a table... that just seems so impossible to do! All of what you said sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Wow... I never realized it. I guess that's true... I legally have to report 10% of my sales whether or not I received that much in tips. The majority of days, my sales are at just about 10%, but only a slight majority. It really stinks. Now I'm kind of mad.Originally Posted by CarolPetunia
Forgive me if someone else brought this up and I missed it -- but I believe servers in America are taxed as if they'd received seven or eight percent tips from all their tables -- whether they actually did or not!
Don't get me started on why this is the way it's done -- I'll rant for hours about the rightwing abuse of labor in an excessively capitalist society -- but for better or worse, this is how it is in America. And it's true that an apparent majority of customers either don't know or don't care about the fact that their server is forced by the system to depend almost entirely on them for an income. So not only do they undertip, they also waste the server's precious time by demanding separate checks for a table of nine, and they sit and occupy the table long after the meal is over, keeping the server from getting any new customers in.
Two good friends of mine work at a restaurant. Both are lovely people, very warm and friendly, great at their jobs, and extremely hardworking -- and they work for a very popular upscale restaurant in a city where most of the population is upper-upper-upper middle class. But many days, they will work for five or six hours and take home less than $20. They have to work those "loser" shifts in order to keep the job, and they just hope to make up the difference on Friday and Saturday nights.
Also, please consider that in most restaurants, servers can't even anticipate what hours they'll be working with any accuracy. They get called in on their days off (fired if they refuse), and they get cut loose halfway through a day if there's not enough business, so they don't even get the paltry two-bucks-and-change per hour they can count on!
On top of all this, they have to stand there and take it when a customer blames them for the kitchen's failures, and it's their tip that gets reduced for those failures, too. And they don't dare ask the kitchen to do something over, or they get a reputation as a troublemaker and lose the job, or at least lose the plum shifts.
And in some places, they're forced to throw their tips into a pool that's divided equally among the staff -- a system that rewards the weak servers and penalizes the best ones.
So please... when you hear someone rant about how hard it is to make a living as a server, bear all these things in mind and have a heart. It's a hard job with very little security; it doesn't pay well except in the ritziest places; and for some reason, most people seem to think it's all right to treat servers with no respect whatsoever.
Have you hugged your waitress today?
Wow... you are the perfect, ideal customer!
