[larrymcg421]

Originally Posted by Ghost Econ

So I have a tipping question.

Wife and I went to a local sit down BBQ restaurant last night. Sat at the table about 5 minutes before someone came over with the free water. About 5 minutes later the manager comes over and gets our drink order. Evidently our waitress was busy with a large group.

Manager brings our drinks and we order since we know what we want. 10 minutes later, not-our-waitress refills my drink. Waitress then pops by to check.

5 minutes later our food is brought to the table, again not by our waitress.

Over the next 20 minutes our waitress checks on us once with quick "everything ok", then grabs a box and the check for us. She then clears the table and takes the payment.

That's all she did. She didn't take the order, get or fill drinks, bring food. She was basically a glorified busboy.

My question is, what should we have tipped?

My argument is the service as a whole was fine, but it's also not my job to tip her for fine service when her particular service was bad. If she was busy with another table to provide them adequate service, it's on them to tip her accordingly and not me.

I also understand some places pool server tips, so if service was adequate then the tip should be adequate. But I don't think that should be up to me to figure out how they distribute tips.

What say the fof intelligencia?

I have no idea what we tipped btw. I left my wallet in the car so my wife paid and I left it up to her.

I would probably still tip normally (20%), but depending on how bad, maybe go down to 15%. It would take something extreme like outright offensive and aggressive behavior for me to stiff a server. My thinking is that servers are paid less than minimum wage. I've had many days in my life where I've screwed up at work and I've never been docked pay for it. No one deserves to make less than minimum wage, even if they did a bad job on what could've just been a really bad day.