I don't like to talk too much about tipping to too many people because it usually comes off whiney/unappreciative but if you could all indulge me with the knowledge that I appreciate every single one of your tips when I am working (even the shitty ones) I will go ahead and let you in one the science of check amount v tip %.
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT TIPPING
A: EVERYONE ALWAYS TIPS THE SAME %
this isn't really true
B: BIGGER BILL=BIGGER TIP
mostly true but not always
C: BUNCH OF OTHER STUFF
we won't really worry about the other assumptions about tipping today although I should point out that most of the people I work with are using their tips to pay for school or other worthwhile stuff.
Back on track--- if A and B are more flexible than you thought than you are probably demanding answers in your head right now like
"I silently demand for Luke to explain any patterns of tipping% vs bill amount I was previously unaware of!!"
Fine here it is my..,
COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF BILL SIZE VS TIP %
In Dollar Increments
$1 NA if you have a dollar tab then you are not really in a tipping situation
$2 Good Start! You probably just had a coffee and am scared to tip less than a dollar. I am secretly delighted by my tip percentage. It is only a dollar but who doesn't like a 50% tip?
$3 This is definitely a pop or juice and you might not tip at all because you might be 14 but the number of people who cant be bothered to wait for change and just leave you $5 makes up for you underage non-tippers. Also if you do get change and leave me a dollar we are still very sweet % wise (although not really as good as the jackpot coffee tip)
HOLD ON YOU SAY!!!! same dollar! who freaking cares if you sold a coffee or a pop?
you would be neglecting two very important factors that will play out over the course of our analysis.
1. we tips out our hostesses, food runners, and bartenders as a percentage of our total gross sales (gross means after tax). So if my total tip-out responsibility is about 5% then we are looking at
Coffee: $1 dollar tip - $0.10 tip out($2x.05%)= $0.90 take home jackpot
Pop: $1 dollar tip - $0.15 tip out($3x.05%)= $0.85 take home
Ok not a big deal for the pop and coffee comparison but you can see how it would effect and $5 tip on a $30 dollar bill (take home $3.50) vs a $5 tip on a $50 dollar bill (take home $1.50)
2. we look at serving as kind of a game and the tips we make as kind of game pieces that reflect how well we are doing. Tip % as feedback is so entrenched that I know several servers who seem happier at the end of a slow day making high percentages (feedback: good job!) then if they had made more money but with higher sales and lower percentages (feedback: still good job!! - mostly everyone thinks they are an awesome server at all times)
$4 nothing costs $4 in Toronto but I wish it did because you are almost guaranteed a sweet $5 done no change.
$5 bottled beer maybe some places this is bad because your good one dollar tip people (%20) will be mitigated by the people who just hand you a five and are on their way.
$6 pretty good in that usually at least a loonie or two will be given in return for change and one of them will probably stay on the bar for a sweet 15+% not great because there is very little chance (0%) that the hassle-minimizers (HMs-the same people who just hand you a five on the pop) will just hand you a ten on a six dollar beer.
$7 see $6 but with slightly worse % balanced by slightly better chance of the nice HMs 10
$8 really good chance of a ten no change here and that is great and more than makes up for the change receivers who then leave a dollar (12%ish) or the people who leave nothing because "I could almost buy a BOTTLE or wine for $8"
I love you ten no change wine drinkers (less love for those who presumably think I influence the bar prices).
$9 BAD BAD BAD do not want to serve a $9 drink. The ten no change thing which was working so well for us on the $8 and hopefully sometimes $7 transactions is back and ready for vengeance with a 11% tip premium martini. The chance for more than $10 is almost always eliminated by pissed off/surprise that one drink is costing you $9.
$10 unlike the $5 dollar trap we were concerned with ten dollars usually is high enough that no-one really thinks they can get away with flippantly handing you a ten dollar bill. your loonies and toonies should balance out to give you a solid 15% in this range.
$11 same as ten even better because change is definitely involved
$12 GOOD ONE might see $15 even here for a 25% tip
$13 almost a definite $15 which at just under %15 is livable.
$14 by now you should be getting the drift. $14=bad, very little chance of a twenty no change here and a good chance of the 8% $15 no change
$15 ok/good, i mean we have an outside chance of a 33% no changer and even a surprising amount of generous $3 tips on this amount.
$16 same as fifteen
$17 That's Better! really good chance of a twenty even here for an acceptable 18ish%
$18 See $9
$19 See Horrible
$20 most people can do the math on this one so you are probably getting $3
$21 Look I can keep going on this but you get the idea. People have a tendency to push their total payment towards an easily manageable increment which can be good ($100 on $83) or bad ($100 on 91). Surprisingly this is also true for credit cards where someone will leave me something like 5.83 on a 54.17 bill for an even $60
$22 So I guess I am just outlining something everyone already knows
$23 What a triumphant return to blogging this is
$24 $24 is actually pretty good (big chance of 30 even)
$25 I am going to see imax beowolf tonight I am pretty excited
$26 Last night I had a dream where the wall in my house was a big statue (tapestry?) anyway wall shaped and relativly flat but still a statue.
$27 Still reading?? Great ok so the statue has various Roman or Greek gods on it but they are more biblical in nature like everyone in my dream thinks they are real and scary and I kind of joined my dream mid story in that it was clear to me that last year we had accidentally cursed one of the gods, and the statue started crying white blood, and then that god appeared in the form of a human in our lives, and we had to stab it to death.
I am pretty sure that was the back story to my joined in progress dream because when that was happening in my present dream everyone was like "here we go again..."
So the god we cursed accidentally in our mind (really hard to avoid) was kind of like a girl Satan (maybe athena I don't know) and sure enough her statue was crying white blood within seconds and then a girl shows up at the door and we aren't sure if we should stab her or not.
Luckily for dream Luke I am somewhere in a sleep period that also features my body trying to metabolize 7 tall Stella cans (on sale at lcbo) so my dream probably lacked some of the subtlety of a sober person's and just when Ben and I were arguing about whether or not we should start stabbing our strange guest she flashes me a terrifying exorcist-like dead-girl face and then all the statues on our statue wall start crying TONs of white statue blood which clarified the situation considerably. Justifyably we are like "we have to stab this greek demon!" and then she made herself invisible.
Fine here it is my..,
COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF BILL SIZE VS TIP %
In Dollar Increments
$1 NA if you have a dollar tab then you are not really in a tipping situation
$2 Good Start! You probably just had a coffee and am scared to tip less than a dollar. I am secretly delighted by my tip percentage. It is only a dollar but who doesn't like a 50% tip?
$3 This is definitely a pop or juice and you might not tip at all because you might be 14 but the number of people who cant be bothered to wait for change and just leave you $5 makes up for you underage non-tippers. Also if you do get change and leave me a dollar we are still very sweet % wise (although not really as good as the jackpot coffee tip)
HOLD ON YOU SAY!!!! same dollar! who freaking cares if you sold a coffee or a pop?
you would be neglecting two very important factors that will play out over the course of our analysis.
1. we tips out our hostesses, food runners, and bartenders as a percentage of our total gross sales (gross means after tax). So if my total tip-out responsibility is about 5% then we are looking at
Coffee: $1 dollar tip - $0.10 tip out($2x.05%)= $0.90 take home jackpot
Pop: $1 dollar tip - $0.15 tip out($3x.05%)= $0.85 take home
Ok not a big deal for the pop and coffee comparison but you can see how it would effect and $5 tip on a $30 dollar bill (take home $3.50) vs a $5 tip on a $50 dollar bill (take home $1.50)
2. we look at serving as kind of a game and the tips we make as kind of game pieces that reflect how well we are doing. Tip % as feedback is so entrenched that I know several servers who seem happier at the end of a slow day making high percentages (feedback: good job!) then if they had made more money but with higher sales and lower percentages (feedback: still good job!! - mostly everyone thinks they are an awesome server at all times)
$4 nothing costs $4 in Toronto but I wish it did because you are almost guaranteed a sweet $5 done no change.
$5 bottled beer maybe some places this is bad because your good one dollar tip people (%20) will be mitigated by the people who just hand you a five and are on their way.
$6 pretty good in that usually at least a loonie or two will be given in return for change and one of them will probably stay on the bar for a sweet 15+% not great because there is very little chance (0%) that the hassle-minimizers (HMs-the same people who just hand you a five on the pop) will just hand you a ten on a six dollar beer.
$7 see $6 but with slightly worse % balanced by slightly better chance of the nice HMs 10
$8 really good chance of a ten no change here and that is great and more than makes up for the change receivers who then leave a dollar (12%ish) or the people who leave nothing because "I could almost buy a BOTTLE or wine for $8"
I love you ten no change wine drinkers (less love for those who presumably think I influence the bar prices).
$9 BAD BAD BAD do not want to serve a $9 drink. The ten no change thing which was working so well for us on the $8 and hopefully sometimes $7 transactions is back and ready for vengeance with a 11% tip premium martini. The chance for more than $10 is almost always eliminated by pissed off/surprise that one drink is costing you $9.
$10 unlike the $5 dollar trap we were concerned with ten dollars usually is high enough that no-one really thinks they can get away with flippantly handing you a ten dollar bill. your loonies and toonies should balance out to give you a solid 15% in this range.
$11 same as ten even better because change is definitely involved
$12 GOOD ONE might see $15 even here for a 25% tip
$13 almost a definite $15 which at just under %15 is livable.
$14 by now you should be getting the drift. $14=bad, very little chance of a twenty no change here and a good chance of the 8% $15 no change
$15 ok/good, i mean we have an outside chance of a 33% no changer and even a surprising amount of generous $3 tips on this amount.
$16 same as fifteen
$17 That's Better! really good chance of a twenty even here for an acceptable 18ish%
$18 See $9
$19 See Horrible
$20 most people can do the math on this one so you are probably getting $3
$21 Look I can keep going on this but you get the idea. People have a tendency to push their total payment towards an easily manageable increment which can be good ($100 on $83) or bad ($100 on 91). Surprisingly this is also true for credit cards where someone will leave me something like 5.83 on a 54.17 bill for an even $60
$22 So I guess I am just outlining something everyone already knows
$23 What a triumphant return to blogging this is
$24 $24 is actually pretty good (big chance of 30 even)
$25 I am going to see imax beowolf tonight I am pretty excited
$26 Last night I had a dream where the wall in my house was a big statue (tapestry?) anyway wall shaped and relativly flat but still a statue.
$27 Still reading?? Great ok so the statue has various Roman or Greek gods on it but they are more biblical in nature like everyone in my dream thinks they are real and scary and I kind of joined my dream mid story in that it was clear to me that last year we had accidentally cursed one of the gods, and the statue started crying white blood, and then that god appeared in the form of a human in our lives, and we had to stab it to death.
I am pretty sure that was the back story to my joined in progress dream because when that was happening in my present dream everyone was like "here we go again..."
So the god we cursed accidentally in our mind (really hard to avoid) was kind of like a girl Satan (maybe athena I don't know) and sure enough her statue was crying white blood within seconds and then a girl shows up at the door and we aren't sure if we should stab her or not.
Luckily for dream Luke I am somewhere in a sleep period that also features my body trying to metabolize 7 tall Stella cans (on sale at lcbo) so my dream probably lacked some of the subtlety of a sober person's and just when Ben and I were arguing about whether or not we should start stabbing our strange guest she flashes me a terrifying exorcist-like dead-girl face and then all the statues on our statue wall start crying TONs of white statue blood which clarified the situation considerably. Justifyably we are like "we have to stab this greek demon!" and then she made herself invisible.
The rest of the dream we just went around the room stabbing stuff hoping it was the demon until i stabbed a couch cushion and blood (red) started shooting out everywhere. I woke up mid-stab and was tempted to go back to sleep to make sure she was stabbed enough but gradually I came too.
$28 I probably shouldn't drink so much right before bed it seams to give me nightmares.
$29 I also shouldn't fall asleep watching prison stabbing videos that is a big one.
$30 Not really that good you seem to get exactly 15% or just under in the 30s and 50s and 15-20% in the 40s and 60s. I havent figured this out yet. your input is welcome.
I have to go now- thanks for listening
$28 I probably shouldn't drink so much right before bed it seams to give me nightmares.
$29 I also shouldn't fall asleep watching prison stabbing videos that is a big one.
$30 Not really that good you seem to get exactly 15% or just under in the 30s and 50s and 15-20% in the 40s and 60s. I havent figured this out yet. your input is welcome.
I have to go now- thanks for listening
1 comment:
"mid-story" = "in medias res"
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