Tipping in New York

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Tipping in New York

Postby Royal » Wed Jun 29, 2005 4:05 pm

New Yorkers..............
Has Harry got it right?



A tip in the Land of the Free.
Free
http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/global/ma ... tusa28.xml
By Harry Mount
(Filed: 28/06/2005)

Could a newly arrived Brit survive a week in New York without playing the gratuity game? Harry Mount finds out..........

Tell any New York waiter that you are British and he will talk obligingly to you of ravens in the Tower of London and Austin Powers. What he'll be thinking is "Oh no. Here comes the verbal tip."
"British customers are very good at saying, 'Everything is wonderful, so delicious'," says Toby Patterson, a 26-year-old waiter working at Pastis in the West Village, "but when it comes to the money, you're not so good. You're famous in this restaurant for the verbal tip."

He should know. His part of the West Village has become known as Little Britain for all its invaders from across the Atlantic. And we have brought Little Tips with us.
Two weeks ago, I left the country of service-with-a-scowl, where the tip often has to be included in the bill to force us to be generous, and where a waiter is lucky if the tip climbs above ten per cent.

And I came to live in New York, where service is immaculate and wreathed in smiles. The moment you walk through a restaurant door, you're effusively greeted by a grinning stick insect of a supermodel and whisked to your table.
Before your hand hits the door handle of the restaurant lavatory, the door's swished open by a man dressed like a snooker player. He will have set the tap running at mid-flow and pitch-perfect lukewarm level, your prospective towel folded over his left arm.

Such service comes at a price: 20 per cent, to be exact - the expected tip rate. They say it's "discretionary"; they don't mean it. Just how much they don't mean it, I found out when I worked at perfecting the ancient British custom of stinginess in America by seeing whether it would be possible to survive my first week in New York without paying a tip.
My first encounter was with the cab driver who took me from John F Kennedy airport to my hotel in Washington Square. A Pakistani, he treated my leather holdall like his first-born, cradling it in his arms and resting it gently in the boot of his people carrier, painted in New York taxi yellow.

As we idled in the traffic jam we'd been diverted into in Ozone Park, he asked after my family as if they were his family. By the time we'd surfaced in Manhattan out of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, he'd been talking solidly for 35 minutes.
He kept on talking as he handed over my receipt: $45 for the journey; $4.50 for the tunnel fare. I handed over a $50 note.

"It's $49.50," he said.

"Yes. Here's $50."

"But it's $49.50."

He didn't say another word as he flung my holdall to the ground. I didn't have the heart to ask for the 50 cents.

I was lucky to get away with just silence, says another taxi driver, Ahmed Benlezerg, 33, from Algeria. "You're a skunk. For the JFK trip, you got to tip at least $10. The real skunks are the ones who get you to take them for a block for $2.90, and then give you $3.10."

I tried doormen next. I dropped in on a friend who lives on luxurious East 63rd Street. The cab ($12 from my office; total paid - $12) pulled up inches from the kerb in alignment with the long canopy that led up to my friend's front door. As the car stopped, the doorman noiselessly opened my car door.
"Thank you very much," I whispered as I entered the building, keeping my hands in my pockets.

"No. Thank you very much," he bellowed, sarcastically.

Not tipping the doorman in Manhattan is like playing Knockdown Ginger with your own front door. If you don't give a tip, your flat's liable to turn into one.

Doormen take your dry-cleaning on your behalf, sift out any stalkers or loonies who've taken to visiting you, and call the heating repair man while you're schussing to work in the January snow. But they won't do any of that if you don't give them the accepted Christmas tip - around $80. Generous tenants give $250.
"People just do tip," says Pasko Vukelj, 46, from Albania, one of the doormen at 1025 Fifth Avenue, "It would be strange not to. If they didn't, they might find that their doormen, who do things they don't have to do, don't do those things any more."

Doormen have good unions and good wages - $18 an hour. Waiters don't have that cushion. The average Manhattan waiter's standard wage is $3.30 an hour. If you don't tip, while you may not be quite starving them, you're certainly making it impossible for them to live on the island, where the cheapest apartment goes for $1,000 a month.
That's how the deal works with waiters. If you tip them, they can pay the rent. So it wasn't surprising that, when I put $120 on the saucer for a $102 dinner in the Union Square Café in Gramercy Park, the waitress thought that was barely enough.

"You want change with that?" she said, in the same way she might have asked, "You like drowning kittens?"

"Yes, please."

I hurried for the door, turning my back on her fierce stare. It could have been worse, according to Toby Patterson. "If you don't tip at Pastis, one of the captains comes over and sits down with you and tells you how it works."
The captains are the restaurant managers. And "how it works" is a long lecture telling you how many times a tip is split, and how vital tips are for waiters and their survival. And not just for the waiters.

In a "pool-house" like Pastis, the tips are pooled and divided six times: between the waiters, the maitre d's, the "bussers" (busboys) who clear your table, the coffee makers, the food runners and the bartenders.

The tips are divided on a points system. So the waiter might get a point, the food-runners three quarters of a point, to reflect their worth.
"And if somebody makes a mistake in calculating the tip - say, gives you $3 when they meant $30, you've got to take it," says Patterson. "They can even take it back. The biggest tip I ever got was from a drunk guy at his son's birthday party - $200. The next day, his wife rang to ask for it back."

I don't want to become Toby's next anecdote. I give him $20 on top of the $64.75 bill - and a verbal tip.
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Postby Slam » Wed Jun 29, 2005 4:31 pm

Yeah the whole tip thing threw me while in the States. $1 isn't considered good. The worst was in San Diego where the actually added the tip to the printed bill! What if the service was shit? Chancers.
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Postby coldharvest » Wed Jun 29, 2005 7:27 pm

Nice Guy Eddie: C'mon, throw in a buck!
Mr. Pink: Uh-uh, I don't tip.
Nice Guy Eddie: You don't tip?
Mr. Pink: Nah, I don't believe in it.
Nice Guy Eddie: You don't believe in tipping?

Mr. Blue:
You know what these chicks make? They make shit.

Mr. Pink:
Don't give me that. She don't make enough money that she can quit.

Nice Guy Eddie:
I don't even know a fucking Jew who'd have the balls to say that. Let me get this straight: you don't ever tip?

Mr. Pink:
I don't tip because society says I have to. All right, if someone deserves a tip, if they really put forth an effort, I'll give them something a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, it's for the birds. As far as I'm concerned, they're just doing their job.

Mr. Blue:
Hey, our girl was nice.

Mr. Pink:
She was okay. She wasn't anything special.

Mr. Blue:
What's special? Take you in the back and suck your dick?

Nice Guy Eddie:
I'd go over twelve percent for that.
I know the law. And I have spent my entire life in its flagrant disregard.
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Tipping

Postby el3so » Thu Jun 30, 2005 8:10 am

Royal wrote: Doormen have good unions and good wages - $18 an hour. Waiters don't have that cushion. The average Manhattan waiter's standard wage is $3.30 an hour. If you don't tip, while you may not be quite starving them, you're certainly making it impossible for them to live on the island, where the cheapest apartment goes for $1,000 a month.
So a full-time job as waiter is no garantuee that you can pay the rent, let alone live, in NY? I take it people only get these kinds of jobs because of the medical insurance and make their real money selling movie scripts to Hollywood ;-)

For the desperate: minimum wage as waiter over here is around €6,50 and yes, the rent is cheaper.
Hardly any tipping in bars, very little in restaurants but conspicuous consuming causes clubs to be tip-heaven. If you're one of those beautifull people, they might even give you a discount, though I usually blame mine on mathematically-challenged bartenders...

Abroad: when in Rome, ...
Think it is best not to stray from the local economic habits, esp as a tourist.
skynet prompt: witty line, a bit offensive, medium levels of spelling error, Rastafy by 10 % or so
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Postby Mikethehack » Thu Jun 30, 2005 9:48 am

My GF and I recently got hit for something approaching 20% of the entire bill in cover charges and discretionary service charges before we even saw any food. Scary. And the service was,well,not very natural.They did enough,but seemed to act out the part.

Now I understand the whole tiping mentality because I spent enough time working in bars to know the whole customer gig and I tip like an American IF the service is good,not because it is the rule or tradition. I hate being taken for granted and I would (almost) never take a customer for granted.

A local Starbucks is my pet hate at the moment where arrogant,sneering staff treat me like a retarded child. I feel like taking them to one side and show them how to treat people in a natural and non-condescending manner.

I used to make a fortune in tips because I had great fun with e customers and I never once sucked up to any of them.I was just my natural self with them. And what i didn't make in money, I made in priceless contacts that made life very easy for me when I went to DPs. I treated my customers like good friends (which is what they were),not walking paypackets.

It isn't rocket science.
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