I guess you can make a distinction between being frugal vs. being cheap/miserly, in the sense that being frugal may mean you’re don’t spend much on yourself, but may still be generous to others or in a charitable sense.
Or as I saw someone on a Redditt thread about tipping say,
Thank you for sharing, I did not know the origins.
Hard to believe how entrenched the practice still is given its roots.
The two tiered wage in the US has its roots in slavery like so many awful things (the electoral college, for example).
Thankfully I live in California where employees must be paid minimum wage by their employers regardless of their tips.
For this particular person, I wouldn’t be too surprised.
I’m going to remember this saying, because it’s so true.
I agree- my stylist is truly gifted and charges a lot. Sometimes somebody else washes my hair, but i’ll be damned if I’m giving a tip over the 20% I pay for a haircut, which I think is really spendy. My stylist is the owner, she can divvy up the 20% however she wants.
I think that’s a feature of a lot of people here, and I’m trying to figure out whether it’s personality, or the form of communication that comes in a “specialist” forum.
I’ll stop here before thinking out loud gets me into trouble.
What about “cakeage”?
Restaurants routinely will charge you for bringing your own cake for a celebration, or even a non-celebration.
I’ve never been charged to bring in cake in many years of many birthday dinners at restaurants.
I do remember one restaurant years ago saying they didn’t allow outside cake, but that was because they would bake you their own. (We didn’t go there, because the birthday person wanted a specific cake, and there were other restaurants on the short list that didn’t have an issue with the cake.)
I could see it as a problem if the restaurant served cake or offered a birthday option. I mean — we don’t bring other food in, right?
Good. Continue to make a broad generalization baaed upon a flawed assumption.
That will win you lots of friends here.
I can’t count the number of restaurants I’ve been to that either
Very often, local health codes prohibit outside food.
I don’t have a problem paying cakeage. I’m using their staff and their dishes. Where I worked a zillion years ago, we originally didn’t charge cakeage, and gladly lent out a kitchen knife so the birthday party could cut their own cake. After losing too many knives to theft, we started charging, and had staff cut the cake. Those knives weren’t anything special, just decent kitchen workhorses that could be had relatively inexpensively at the local restaurant supply.
My point about corkage was about tipping on bottles of wine, and that if they expected to be tipped on wine markup (especially for expensive bottles), the concept of corkage wouldn’t exist.
Were you making a related point about cake? Because I’d expect to tip on birthday cake if the restaurant made it, as indo on any other food. But again the scale doesn’t match alcohol spend.
OK then. However, nothing I said was based on a “flawed assumption” but on a repeated and shared occurrence here (and before on Chowhound). The people who participate in these boards are knowledgeable (likely more so than their IRL peers which is why they come here) and passionate (ditto) and that leads to a manner of expression that can sometimes appear like the self-proclaimed authority on a topic rather than their experience of said topic.
It’s about communication and the challenges of boards in both the expression people use whose inflections and nuances differ, and in the platform itself (which is a bunch of food geeks getting together geeking out, although some possibly embrace the “geek” less).
The post I’m responding to now, though, that leaves far less room for interpretation. But I’m ok with that. Losing you (or not getting to have you) as a friend won’t affect my weekend plans.
I believe it, where I live everything food wise for sale offered to the public is health department’s inspected. All fundraisers are inspected and food items must be prepared in a professional, HD inspected kitchen. I understand; one of my family members picked up the baaaad ecoli from a school fundraiser.
This is why I always ask about the cakeage.
There’s an article I read that summarizes a recent survey about tipping.
One recap stunned me -
65% of U.S. adults who dine at sit-down restaurants always tip their server, making it the service that Americans are most likely to always tip. But that figure is down year-over-year: 73% of U.S. adults who dine at sit-down restaurants always tipped in 2022, compared to 75% in 2021 and 77% in 2019.
So nearly a third of diners think its ok to leave no tip at all. 0. All the time regardless of service quality. Amazing.
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…they which have no class…
Obviously the non tippers have no respect for themselves or others.
A long time ago we had a group of three couples that would go out to dinner about once a week or so, usually on a Friday to wonderful, hectic, casual fish restaurant. One member of one of the couples would excuse himself as we were all leaving the restaurant to go and use the rest room. He, in fact, went back to the table on the ‘way’ to the restroom and pocketed the tip. This happened many times before he was found out and that was the end of our dining out together, as well as the trust of the trust of us. Shameful!
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