Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (6 page)

The tip-out doesn’t really end there. Because as we all know, one of the two sure things in this life is taxes—and we do pay them. Servers are required by law to report all their tips. Before the use of credit cards exploded (and I am actually old enough to remember such a time), waiters and waitresses barely declared anything. Sometime during the Bush administration, the IRS
decided to crack down on these scofflaws (after all, everybody knows waiters make six-figure incomes, right?). I know several waiters who got busted for back taxes this way. Regardless of whether or not a server declares all of her tips, the government knows how much she has sold during the course of the year because her restaurant is required to report it. In the old days, 8 percent of what you’d sold was considered taxable income. That figure has since gone up. The last time I tried to calculate, it was hovering between 10 and 15 percent, but these days I prefer to give all my paperwork to an accountant and let
him
figure it out.

To illustrate how this all plays out, I’ll offer an example. Say on a given night I sell $1,000 in food and beverages. Say it’s been an average night and I’ve netted $150 in tips. After I tip out, I have $97 left in my pocket. But shortly I will owe more of that $97 to the IRS, and that will be subtracted from my hourly wage. In fact, the more I sell, the more I will owe, regardless of whether I’ve made any set percentage or not. If I am not tipped, or tipped badly, I will still owe a percentage of my sales. Guests who don’t tip, therefore, are effectively
costing
their server money.

I am sure most diners are not aware of these complexities, nor should they be. Their responsibility is not to calculate how well their waitress is doing financially but rather to realize that tipping is a fact of dining (at least in this country) and deal with it accordingly. There are certain agreed-upon percentages at this point. On the East Coast 20 percent has become the norm but is still considered a good tip; less than 15 percent of the total bill implies that your service was lacking in some way (not liking the waitress’s hairdo or eye makeup shouldn’t really be a factor); 10 percent or less is just insulting and implies that you have been grievously wronged by your server. I have heard many servers say that they’d rather get nothing than a 5 or 10 percent tip. At least that way, they can lull themselves into believing that the diner just forgot.

There are some who steadfastly maintain that tipping is a form of extortion and refuse to do it on principle. In 1905, a large group of traveling salesmen revolted against the policy of tipping. Calling themselves the Anti-Tipping Society of America, this group actually managed to eliminate tipping in several states until anti-tipping laws were declared unconstitutional in 1919. Currently, there are a couple of national organizations that have selected tipping as their focus. Tippers International, founded in the late 1960s, is one such group. It seeks to educate members on how much to tip based on the particulars of the ser
vice. Those who join receive report cards they can leave at the table, grading the server’s job performance and explaining the amount of the tip left. While this ratings system is probably preferable to a message of displeasure scrawled across a credit card slip, where the manager and owner can view it later and possibly discipline or fire the waiter, most servers still take umbrage at being told how to do their jobs by someone outside the business.

WANT (Wages And Not Tips) is a much more extreme group whose members leave business cards with their checks stating that they don’t believe in tipping. According to this group, employers should pay their employees fairly and spare the customer the agony of trying to calculate and then fork over a tip. Get a life, I say. And watch your back on the way out of the restaurant because those who don’t tip can expect unique reper
cussions from those they stiff.

I’ve had some bad tips in my career as a waitress. I have occasionally been left with several pennies on the table (the uni
versal symbol for “We hated you”) as well as being left with nothing at all. There isn’t much one can do in the face of this kind of disaster. Part of the problem is that it all seems so per
sonal (and often it is). In the places I’ve worked, management rarely backs up the waitstaff, nor does the waitstaff expect such
support very often. In most restaurants, middle managers, drunk with what little power they have, make a lower annual salary than the waiters they police and really couldn’t care less if a waiter gets stiffed. Usually, the recipient of a particularly bad tip can expect a gathering of his coworkers wherein everybody mourns the state of the world and curses the exiting diners.

In my restaurant, servers are expressly forbidden to demand a tip or even question the discretion of the guest. I have there
fore witnessed some very colorful curses from my waiter friends upon the discovery of a bad tip. One particularly awful night, a waiter launched into a five-minute spiel in Italian, complete with hand gestures, which he punctuated by spitting on the ground. When I asked him what he had said, he told me he had wished a curse on the customer that involved the guest getting into his car, becoming lost and disoriented in the fog, and then plunging off a cliff into the ocean. He also wanted the customer to die a long, slow, extremely painful death and if, by chance, the cus
tomer had any children, they too should meet a similar fate. It was so detailed and so vehement, I actually got chills. Why would anyone risk this kind of vitriol? I asked myself. Could it really be worth saving a couple of dollars?

Occasionally, a waiter driven insane by his job will follow a customer out of the restaurant and demand justice. I watched a waitress do this once. It had been a very busy night and she’d been waiting on a group of ostentatiously wealthy young women who seemed determined to give her a hard time. The check was high and the waitress really worked hard. In the end, however, the women fled without tipping, taking the credit card receipt with them. The waitress followed them outside and began a heated debate. My coworkers and I watched from the bar, which had a large picture window facing out on the patio where they stood. We stood, bemused, until we saw one of the customers actually attack the waitress, pulling her hair and punching her.

“Hmm, catfight,” mused the bartender, who disliked the waitress and refused to get involved. Finally, the managers pulled the waitress and the customer off each other. The end result? The lovely ladies got their dinner for free and the wait
ress sued (and lost) for assault and battery.

There is, too, the case of recurring bad tippers. Regulars who tip badly don’t usually last very long. For one thing, one waiter after another refuses to wait on these people until they run through the entire staff. A couple who fits this profile comes into my restaurant now. Waiters scurry like rats off a sinking ship as soon as their faces appear at the door. Lately, these two have been forced to order from the chef while whatever sorry wretch has been assigned to them grudgingly fetches their bread basket. Tip-challenged customers who frequent the same spot get not only the worst service but leftover bread, dirty glasses, and plates that have been prodded at and sometimes eaten off. When a regular is high maintenance
and
a bad tipper, servers really lose it. And yes, I have seen servers spit in food and drinks. Occasionally, some kind soul will straighten the bad-tipping reg
ular out as a public service and then adopt the customer as his own. The customer, believe it or not, is usually grateful and will reward that server (but only that server) accordingly.

My favorite bad-tipping memory, however, comes from Mar-cello, a waiter I worked with several years ago. Marcello claimed to be an Italian (although other Italians claimed that the way he spoke their language was barely intelligible) who grew up in Switzerland (there was very little proof of this) and had made his living largely through “import/export” (slang for just about any
thing illegal). Nobody could tell a joke worse than Marcello, and his punch lines were often so mangled that the humor would be in how badly he screwed them up. Well into the 1990s, Marcello showed up for employee meetings dressed like an extra from
GoodFellas,
wearing white jeans, shirts open to his waist, and
white patent leather shoes. He was built like a very squat brick house and plowed through the dining room arms akimbo, mow
ing down just about everybody in sight. Marcello once slammed into me as I was carrying two mixed salads. He hit me so hard that the salads went flying, smashing on the tile in an explosion of glass, lettuce, and tomatoes, and knocked the wind out of me so completely it took ten minutes for me to catch my breath. At the time of Marcello’s fall from grace in the restaurant, he claimed to be studying law at a school nobody had ever heard of. We assumed it was some sort of mail-order scam that would be exposed, sooner or later, on a weekly TV newsmagazine.

Marcello had been developing something of a bad attitude over a period of a few months. He was getting burned out and venting his frustration on whoever happened to be in his path. He started stealing desserts that other waiters had ordered and giving them to his tables in order to enhance his tips. He pre
tended to make mistakes on his drink orders at the bar and imbibed the results. He became very aggressive at the table and began getting complaints from the few customers who weren’t afraid of him.

One night Marcello went through his usual drill, free desserts and the like, for a large party. He was counting on a fat tip, but he was out of luck and received something way below his expecta
tions. Marcello proceeded to chase the customer out to the front of the restaurant and then, in full view of several patrons, loudly berated said customer for his penurious persuasion.

“I didn’t tip on purpose,” the customer shouted back. “You were rude and awful. You’re an asshole, frankly.”

“
Va fa’n culo!
” Marcello yelled. He then made the universal “up yours” gesture with his arm and fist and stalked off, muttering under his breath, “Call me an asshole? I’ll kill you, motherfucker!”

The customer Marcello yelled at was a regular at the restau
rant and was singularly unhappy. He, too, ended up getting his
dinner on the house. Marcello was fired. Law student that he was, however, Marcello applied for unemployment benefits, claiming that he had been unjustly terminated. The case actually wound up in front of a judge, who told Marcello that telling a customer to fuck off was certainly grounds for termination. Marcello claimed that he never told the customer anything of the kind. “
Va fa’n culo,
” he claimed, was a form of greeting in Italy similar to, say, “Shalom.” The judge turned to the general manager (also an Ital
ian) who had fired Marcello and asked him if this was true. The GM replied, “Not in the part of Italy I come from. Where I come from it means ‘fuck you.’ ” Marcello never received unemployment. Last we heard of him, he was doing “contract work” in Las Vegas.

Admittedly, I have never had an experience that rivals Mar
cello’s. Generally, fear of losing my job keeps me from making any kind of fuss over a bad tip. Ultimately, I’ve found, it evens out. One table may leave me a lousy tip, but the one after it probably won’t. There are other factors to take into considera
tion as well. Perhaps a particular table didn’t anticipate the high prices and has come up short. Perhaps they’re too drunk or con
fused to figure the correct percentage.

I waited on a three-generation family once who seemed to really be enjoying themselves. They had several dietary restric
tions, so I ordered special dishes for them and recommended a couple of different wines. They took an interest in me and so I shared some details from my personal life with them. They were pleasant to wait on and they were very complimentary about the service. When I picked up the bill, however, I saw that they had written in a fifteen-dollar tip on a two-hundred-dollar tab. I was actually saddened more than upset over the low tip because I thought they’d really liked me. I spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. A full week later, I was standing at the bar when I felt a tap on my shoulder. Turning around, I saw a woman from this same party.

“I’m so glad I found you,” she said. “I’m very sorry about the tip we gave you last week. I didn’t realize until we left how low it was. My husband told me to ‘add fifteen’ to the bill and I thought he meant fifteen dollars instead of fifteen percent. It’s been bothering me all week because you were so nice to us. I wanted to give you this.” She handed me a twenty-dollar bill and smiled.

While this type of scenario serves to reinforce one’s faith in the human race, it is regrettably rare.

I have had two experiences that stand out as polar opposites on the tipping spectrum. Both occurred in the same restaurant. Viewed together, the two illustrate perfectly the peculiarity of the tipping system and its inherent contradictions.