UPDATE: Holy overpriced ribeye! I can't believe the outpouring of comment and sympathy. It's good to know there are people out there who understand tip and server minimum wage policies (even if it seems sometimes like no one who I wait on does!). I'm working lunch today and I've got to walk out of here in 20 mins. The sitter isn't here yet and I've got to clean up myself and my two year-old before going in. When I get back, I'll be commenting.
After the comments started coming in last night, I can't tell you people how much better I felt. Maybe DKos would allow a "Tip Your F***ing Waitress Daily." I promise you, it'd be outrageous if I relayed the day-to-day. I DO have a Master's degree in creative writing...(tip your fucking waitress because she's got student loan debt up the wazoo!)
The following is a rant which in no way helps the election of any democratic candidate. But, dear Kossacks, it's 2:30AM EST on a Wednesday, and I'm hoping some of you are on a wait-staff somewhere, home from an awful shift and cursing at the same twinkle star out the window.
I tried to go to bed an hour ago to no avail. My daughter couldn't sleep so I put her in my bed, and now I'm out here doing this when I know damned well I should be asleep. Nothing makes working an insane lunch shift harder than having your brains scooped out of your head by 3-4 hours of sleep when at least 6 are needed.
Tonight's shift was taxing. When it rains, it fucking pours in this business, that is, The Finger will somehow deign it that you recieve not one or three or even a full half of your checks undertipped, but ALL of them in one night, so that you walk miserably out of a seven hour shift, feet numb like every other night, but with forty-one dollars in your fist. In my case tonight, it was every check but one tipped less than 15%.
But, The Finger didn't stop there. It also deigned that not only would the tipping be skimp, but that the majority of those people would be campers: those who hang out for so long after they've paid, flies are landing on them and they cease to notice-- which is never so bad, especially if you're having an insane night turning and burning-- that one lingering couple will keep that table from being resat, which may have otherwise pushed you over the edge and into the weeds. But no, not tonight. Three of the four tables in my section were occupied almost two hours after I cashed them out. Which meant that after receiving $6.16 on $53.84 (the asshole decided $60 was as much as he was spending, not $60.01 or even $63 which may have put me at earning 15%), He and his family became engaged in a discussion so engrossing that two more hours at my table were necessary to discuss it. Really? Like I said, I don't care if you wanna camp, but when you stiff me on the tip after I run my ass off for you AND after you tell me "everything was wonderful," asshole, don't keep your asses in those chairs in a packed dining area during a dinner rush, and keep me from making 15% on someone else's business.
Then there were these two middle aged women at 58 who were my first table of the night, AND my last because they camped out for the entirety of my fucking shift. Which again, wouldn't have been so bad, had they not used a $30 Chez Francois gift card and tipped me $4 on the remaining $20 balance. Really, ladies? I guess that gift card means you didn't receive $50's worth of service, right? Because maybe you think I'm gonna see some of the gift card because I work at Chez Francois and Chez Francois is what it says on the card? --And even though they were cashed out by seven, I'm sure I refilled their waters half a dozen times until 10, during which time they used their tip amount in toilet paper and latrine flushes-- Soak up the ambience, ladies. It's your world.
The things that's always the most infuriating about instances like these, is that people who don't tip 15% do it thinking, "Hey, she'll just think I don't know any better." Wrong. Or, "That waitress can't be making $3 an hour, that's a myth because minimum wage is $7, so it's illegal." Wrong. The only people I give a pass to, when they shit-tip and play the ignorant card are Europeans. Over there, the service is included. In some places it's considered insulting to tip. But even a huge majority of the European tourists I've waited on have ASKED, embarrassing as it sounds. They'll politiely ask, usually bashfully on top of it, "how much do you tip?" in their bad English, and I'll say, it's customary to tip 15% if the service was agreeable, or more if it was exceptional."
I'm really at a point now where I refuse to believe that people in this country don't know that servers make less than half of minimum wage, and work for tips. Especially at a place like Chez Francois. It's the most upscale joint in town. I cannot imagine how people who walk in there and drop $30 on a steak and some pommes frites (french fries, asshole!) expect me to believe that somehow they didn't know that tipping 9% is unacceptable (they way being brought a half-raw slab of ribeye when they ordered it medium-well would be considered so). Which leads me back to default option: they don't give a fuck. They don't tip because they don't have to. Well, Clyde xxxxxxx, who tipped the $6.16 to make it an even $60 on his Banana Republic Visa, what goes around comes around!
Okay, I'm done. I'll save the part where I almost exploded at the 20 year-old (and utterly fucking useless) food runner for later.