“You neglected to note that when the restaurant ‘calculates’ the tips they usually do it including the tax now which has nothing to do with the food purchased and simply pads the tip.”
Don’t Do This When Leaving a Gratuity at a Restaurant
What you just read was this comment which was posted by Jim Richter — who is a reader of The Gate — in response to this article pertaining to whether or not a gratuity of 25 percent has become the new default tip to leave to members of the staff at a restaurant after waiting on you and serving you.
You are supposed to calculate the percentage of the total bill prior to any taxes and fees added to it when leaving a tip at a restaurant. For example, if your bill was $100.00 and you want to leave a tip of 15 percent, you would leave $15.00…
…but if you dine at a restaurant located within the special district of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority in Chicago, be prepared to pay as much as 11.5 percent in combined taxes on your meal, which includes a sales tax of 10.25 percent — plus an additional meals tax of 0.25 percent and another one percent tax for the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority. This will add $11.50 to the total of your bill used in the aforementioned example, bringing the total to $111.50.
Including the combined taxes in figuring out how much of a gratuity you want to leave the waiter or waitress who served you adds an extra $1.73 to your bill. That might not seem like much money — but calculate the number of times you dine out at restaurants within one year and see how much that figure adds up. For example, dining out once per week using $100.00 as an average means that you could be tipping $89.96 too much per year…
…and by blindly using 25 percent of the total as the amount you decide to tip automatically via the handheld electronic card reader, the total increases to $2.88 per dining experience — which becomes as much as $149.76 per year.
Summary
By including taxes and fees as part of the equation of figuring out how much of a gratuity to leave to the person who served you in a restaurant, you are overpaying — and it seems that more restaurants are engaging in this sneaky practice by including those taxes and fees in the convenient calculation of the tip for you.
That almost seems to take a page from the deceptive practice of dynamic currency conversion, through which some operators of automated teller machines of banks and merchants in foreign countries offer you the opportunity to pay for a product or service in the currency of your home country with the illusion that it is being done for your convenience — but usually at a significantly increased cost which translates into pure profit for the seller.
Gratuities and tips have long been controversial with regards to travel and dining — to the point of contentiousness from all sides of the issue, as evidenced by the following articles which I wrote for The Gate over the years…
- 25 Percent Gratuity: The New Default Tip at Restaurants?
- Do You Leave a Tip or Gratuity for Taking Out Food From a Restaurant?
- Should Breakfast Attendants at Hotels Receive Tips and Gratuities From Guests?
- Should Flight Attendants Receive Tips and Gratuities From Passengers?
- Should Customers Pay Servers By the Hour as a New Concept Pertaining to Tipping and Gratuities?
- Should Gratuities and Tips in Restaurants Be Discontinued?
- Tips and Gratuities: Your Thoughts, Please
- How Much Should You Tip Around The World?
- No Tipping Policy Pared Down at One Restaurant Chain
- Comparing Tipping to Paying Taxes? Get Real…
- When Is a Tip Not a Tip? When It is Mandatory
- Hey, Marriott: I Will Tip When I Darn Well Feel Like It
- Should the Practice of Tipping Be Abolished?
- Tipping the Hotel Maid: Yes or No?
- Tip: Charge the Charge to Tip the Tip Separately From Charging the Tip as a Charge
- Bad Service at a Restaurant: Should You Leave a Tip?
All photographs ©2015 and ©2019 by Brian Cohen.
