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Getting Tipsy

Category: Life

Published on Tuesday, 11 May 2010 05:00

Written by Paul Roy

As I was staring through the dirty windshield today, which, since it is now bug season here in New England the windshield is a little dirtier than normal, I started thinking about tipping.

I was always under the assumption that when you received good service you gave a good tip, when you received excellent service you left a bigger tip, and when you received bad service you left less or even no tip. Today it seems that waiters, I’m sorry – servers, expect an automatic 15% to 20%. It doesn’t matter if they were good or bad. My fiancé (who I will alternately refer to as my woman, my girl friend, my partner, my best friend, my soul mate, my love, my significant other) and I love to go out to breakfast on our day off together. We love diners and small local restaurants. When I sit in a booth and am having breakfast I expect the server to come over and ask me if I want more coffee, preferably she will be carrying the pot at the time. I shouldn’t have to ask her for more. That is the difference between good customer service and not so good.

Have you ever been in a restaurant, especially a chain, where you are sitting near the waitress station or at the bar where they pick up the drinks and heard them complain about not getting good tips? Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that they are all standing around complaining and not checking on their tables? Hey what do I know.

We go to a small local restaurant here in town and the waitress always knows us there, she doesn’t know our names, but she knows I drink coffee, my woman drinks iced tea. She always smiles and is pleasant, but every time we go there I have to ask for another cup of coffee. Now I understand that in this day and age it is tough to make a buck in the restaurant business, but coffee refills should be a given. If I don’t want another cup of coffee when she comes over, I will decline, simple enough, but at least she asked. As part of this blog I may start doing some diner reviews and I think this will be one of my criteria: Did I have to ask for a second cup of coffee?

Speaking of coffee, why is there a tip cup, jar, can, whatever you may want to call it on the counter of Dunkin Donuts? What are you tipping for? Do you tip because your order wasn’t messed up? Do you tip because you received your coffee in a cup? I’m not sure, I don’t get it. And even if you wanted to tip the person who actually served you because she actually placed the cup of coffee where you could reach it, she would only get about one fifth of it because they split it with the whole shift. And you would think with all those managers at DD they would train people how to hand your coffee to you instead of making you reach for it. That really frosts my doughnuts.

I know what you are thinking, why go to a DD anyway? Well if nothing else they are convenient, and most have a place where I can park my truck. Would I go out of my way for a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee? Hell no, but I would go out of my way for a cup at Mary Lou’s, and way, way out of my way for a Tim Horton’s.

Ok so the last point I would like to make about tipping, and definitely the most important, is that, yes it is okay to tip your tow truck driver.