Cumulative Tipping

I’ve never been much of a fan of tipping, even though I’ve worked for tips before in the restaurant business and as a taxicab driver. The problem, as I see it, is that it’s entirely subjective. Most people agree on what constitutes a reasonable tip for reasonable service, but the definition of “reasonable” is painfully elusive. Another problem with the current system is that tipping is based on the size of the bill, not on the quality or amount of service provided.

One of the biggest problems I have with restaurant service these days is the "fake service:"

• Waiters who suggest “superior” entrees, as though they’re offering you an inside tip on a winning horse. If the entrees weren’t all good, they wouldn’t be on the menu.
  
  
• Waiters who congratulate you on your choice, as though you clearly have a keen culinary eye. I know what I want, I don’t need validation.
  
  
• Waiters who return to the table again and again, interrupting your meal or dinner conversation, to ask if everything is OK. If it wasn’t OK, you’d already know.
  
  
• Managers who creep up to the table just to make sure the waiter has been asking you if everything is OK often enough. If it wasn’t OK, the waiter would have told you about it.

So I’m often tempted to reduce a tip based on the amount of bogus service I’m forced to endure, which of course is the opposite of what the restaurant intended.

The amount of service a waiter is able to perform for a customer is limited, which limits the opportunity to do it well:

• Service must be prompt, with an understanding that there are busy times in restaurants and times when they are short-handed. If service isn’t prompt, waiters have to expect a reduction in tips, even if it’s not their fault.
  
  
• Service must be accurate. Duh. If you can’t get the orders straight, find another line of work.
  
  
• Waiters must be knowledgeable, able to answer questions about the items on the menu and how they are prepared. Waiters must know before they take an order if a menu item is no longer available. However, waiters can fake knowledge about wine, because wine snobs are just bullshit artists anyway.
  
  
• Service must be flexible, allowing for the little peculiarities of diners. Salad dressing on the side? No problem. No onions? Just remove them. Whole wheat toast instead of hash browns? Yes, sir.

Simple, right? But the hard part is the small intangible things that distinguish a good waiter from an ordinary one:

• Eyes in the back of your head. Waiters must be able to spot an unhappy diner from across the room, at any moment, drop what they’re doing and race to the rescue. There’s nothing more frustrating than discovering you don’t have silverware and spending ten minutes trying to flag down your waiter who is rushing around and NOT LOOKING while the gravy on your steak is slowly coagulating.
  
  
• Personality. If you’re good at what you do, and it’s a busy night, you won’t spend much time at the table with your guests. So you have a brief period of time to make your guests feel welcome. However, you’re not auditioning for a part in a movie, so know when to shut up. If you don’t have a personality, please don’t try to manufacture one, it’s always a horrible failure.
  
  
• Obsessive attention to detail. Nothing makes a better impression than a waiter who handles things you didn’t even expect them to handle. Once, while having coffee after a meal, I poured some cream into my cup. The waiter, rushing by with a tray of drinks for another table, ducked and grabbed my cup from me before I could stir it. He quickly returned with another cup of coffee and another pitcher of cream, because he had noticed that the cream was curdling in my coffee, indicating that it had gone sour. Now THAT was a waiter.

Even waiters who meet the minimum requirements and are able to excel at the intangibles run a risk of being stiffed by difficult or disgruntled diners, it’s just the way tipping works. So I propose a new system to replace our current, unreliable system. This system ensures that diners get the service they demand, and that waiters provide the service the diner requires. I call it Cumulative Tipping.

When diners are seated, they will find a slip of paper on the table, containing a list of service objectives the restaurant is trying to achieve, each with a little space to write in an amount. So a list might look like this:

Waiter arrived promptly__________

Drink order taken and delivered correctly__________

Waiter courteous and knowledgeable__________

Meal arrived within a reasonable time__________

Order accurate and complete__________

Extra service__________

As the evening progresses, diners write in small amounts for each service item, which are visible to the waiter with each visit to the table. Cheap diners will get less attention than generous ones, and can’t really complain about it (although they will). When the meal is complete, diners may add to the cumulative tally any additional amount they desire to further compensate the waiter, which will typically be a proportion of the total bill.

Oh, and there will be one last item on the list:

Guy who thought this up________