I have been a waitress/Server for most of my adult life. I’m going to school now so that I will get to be in charge of Servers rather than be one myself. So, having been in the food serving industry for so long, I cannot say enough about tipping. For instance, do people know that when a Server get’s a bad tip, they go to the back of the house and tell everyone, and then every employee, on the sly, I’m not kidding, will walk by your table and check out the people who left the really bad tip. Server’s never forget a face, so if that bad tipper goes back to that restaurant, more than likely someone will remember them and alert the whole staff that the bad tipper is there and everyone will argue and fight about who get’ s to take them, it usually ends up being someone who is new and a terrible server. On the flip side of that, if you leave a good tip! OM Gosh! That server will go into the back of the house and brag about their great tip and everyone will do the same thing and try to get a good look at the good tippers and they will remember them and fight over them the next time that they come to the restaurant.
So, if you really want to make a server’s night, week and even month…give them a good tip for crying out loud, who cares if they did a bad job just give them a good tip. I remember one time I was at a restaurant and the server was doing a terrible job, she was kind of rude and everything was going bad. The check ended up being about 40 dollars and I was tempted to give her a bad tip but something inside of me said that maybe that was a bad idea so rather than giving her a bad tip I did the opposite and gave her like a $25.00 tip, on a 40 dollar ticket, that was pretty good, considering that she did such a crappy job. So I left her the tip, we got up and were walking out to our car and the waitress chases us out the door and with emotion in her voice she says, “Thank you, so much, thank you for the good tip.” She didn’t have to say anything more because at that moment I know that that girl had had a really crappy day and that tip had just 180’d it.