I only rang just over $1100 tonight, but going over what my take home was, $180, and what I'd tipped everyone out, I realized that I'd made $245. It hadn't seemed like a particularly generous evening - one $50 tip on a $222 bill, but a lot of 15% tippers, a large table of non-diners (it's interesting that that term is sometimes used almost synonymously with African American diners - primarily because I think it probably parallels general socio-economic demographics, in a segregated urban area where a proportionately consistent percentage of the population is poor, and also happens to be black, but partially because African American diners have any easy marker to affix. I myself dread, most of all, serving Brits, who generally know very little about food, insist that they do, and that we, as colonists, have just lost our appreciation of our fine English dining heritage of things really, really overcooked, underseasoned, and served so blisteringly hot, over time, as I understand statistics show, the English burn the damn enamel off their bloody teeth - I can't imagine what happens to their tastebuds, and even if they are the sweetest most charming of people, generally tip, consistently, even after an evening where they hug you and want you to marry cousin Myrtle (I wish I could say that's a true story), 10%. We may be loathsome imperialists, and are hated rightfully by many Europeans for our present foreign policy, as if policy itself if foreign to it, but there seems something really, really chintsy and insulting at the basic level of human interaction, over food, of going in and tipping European percentages when you're not in friggin' Europe - it would be like meeting with a tribal elder of some nomadic tribe where you had explicitly been instructed that it is a huge insult to them and their culture if you eat food with your left hand, and yet you choose to blithely do so anyway, not really noticing the hosts dismay because they are being respectful of you by not making an issue of it. ), and just inexplicable bad tipping percentages. But while doing $50 instead of $44 was a big chunk, with a solid 20% post tax base on the $400 table ($80), that I didn't grat, which wouldn't have made me roughly $69 (18% pre-tax), the big differences came in the cash payers, $3 here, $2 there a few times, over a 20%, especially on a smaller bill, where someone tips $8 on a $32 bill (these were two young black women, whom I assumed to be prospective med students - one of whom was already in med school, the other had just returned from teaching English in Japan for 13 months - stereotypes become tougher and toughter to hold onto about anybody once you get to know an aggregate diversity), or even $60 instead of the acceptable $58. Sometimes I can almost predict my tip based on the bills that someone will likely use to pay (much easier to predict for cash - people generally don't want to ask for ones back, so if you're within a $4 range, you're good. I've actually had some experiences where someone who gets $8 back on $22 check will leave less than the person who pays for a $16 check with a twenty.
