In the USA we love to make things complicated, tiping, taxes, wages, laws, healthcare ..etc.

To add to the confusion we now have this….

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-05-16-panera-pay-what-you-can_n.htm

I believe federal employees will not see lower than that limit.

The Federal minimum wage has priority. State minimum may be above, but not below, the Federal minimum. Likewise with local area minimum wages.
For example, the minimum wage in San Francisco ($9.92) is higher than the minimum wage of California ($8), which is higher than the minimum wage of the USA ($7.25).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._minimum_wages

edit:

Oh my!
Seems I have a false impression of how this stuff works!
http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm
Some states do indeed have minimum wages that are lower than the Federal minimum.
edit again:
...and yet: "Note: Where Federal and state law have different minimum wage rates, the higher standard applies."
So, the states with lower than Federal minimum wages are probably just behind in their bookkeeping.

They can't, the employee always gets the higher of state vs federal.. But Federal minimum wage is different for wait staff. Read here.

Ah, ok, so we're back at the beginning of this discussion where someone said they should get rid of this system and also pay wait staff a decent wage to begin with. After all, why should an exception be made for them. To me, it seems they get the short end of the stick anyway that way.

I will agree that the situation is a little ridiculous. However, at least in the US, the general expectation is that this is how it works, and failing to account for and including that additional 15% is cheating the waitstaff. Would it be easier if the food were just 15% more expensive? Sure, but it's not.

That said, most of the waitstaff I've known would rather get tips than work for a base salary. Customers are, generally speaking, going to be more generous than employers.

Traditionally, in Italy Tip is just meant to be a sign of appreciation, and most times just symbolic. Waitstaff are supposed to have their own salary just like any other restaurant employee. Even so, however, it gets a bit confusing here as well. While in a basic restaurant you may just not leave any tip, or tip with a couple of Euros just to say "thanks, you were nice", if you are in a more expensive restaurant, tradition is to tip more, and, in some occasions, up to 10%. Some would say that % also depends on the number of people in the party (the more, the higher the tip).
Which is why waitstuff here tends to love US tourists who don't know or happen to fail in adapting to local customs.

But, I have to say that quality of service in Italy is, on average, not nearly comparable to that in the US. So far, US waiters are in my personal experience the best trained, nicer, and most careful I've met. Not that here servie is particularly bad (and I find it improving, fortunately). Just, not as good, at all. Most times waiters's kindness or care is part of their own personal people skills. They don't get trained, they don't get told what customers like and dislike, and there's just a less developed culture of customer care.

And your average waiter is going to be less than honest with the tax man ??? Getting paid cash in small coin sounds pretty good to me!

Is the food in a US restaurant 15% cheaper than in Belgium then ??? It should be !!!

Cheers

Cris

That's a good question. Based on a little research, I'm going to say yes; it looks like restaurants in Belgium do charge a little more than similar ones in the US, but it's very hard to compare.

Of course it is. The USA has very little in the way of food safeguards compared with the EU, and the EU lacks "illegal immigrants" (mexicans) to pick crops for next to nothing in wages.

Cheers

15% minimum tip on the before-tax amount. 20% quite often. For restaurants. at a bar where I walk up and order a drink it's always without calculation for me. It often just depends on what kind of money I have on me if I'm paying cash. It's a good idea to separate kitchen performance from wait staff performance. There have been situations where the waiting experience was totally and completely to blame for a terrible experience and I've left 0. It's only ever happened once or twice in my life.

I don't believe that cash tips should be included in reported income and don't expect that any server should declare such earnings. It *is* supposed to be included. But then you're also supposed to declare all purchases, even of used items, at the end of the year to pay sales tax on them.

Store clerks get paid more than waiters pretty much... Everywhere. Some also make commission, as do many other sales jobs. That's their incentive.

When I worked at a restaurant, the kitchen staff all made a higher base wage than the wait staff.

People do also tip self-proprietors like photographers. That's not something I really do though unless they've brought along some underlings, in which case I may tip those employees.

There's a big difference between a tip and a bribe, but I don't like situations where the lines start to blur, which is the case in many places like Cuba. Nor do I like situations where someone throws themselves into the mix in order to squeeze a "tip" from you when in fact it's thinly disguised extortion. Example: parking your car downtown Lisbon and some guy will jump out as you're approaching a spot and point at it as if helping you park, afterwards expecting, and sometimes demanding some kind of compensation.

But as Doug mentioned I try to be respectful of local customs so as not to insult anyone, even if that means tipping lower than I normally would otherwise or perhaps not tipping at all if that's going to make them happier. Though I haven't yet met anyone that wasn't made happier with just a tiny bit of extra compensation.

My current favorite "jumping out to get a tip" sort of thing that really bugs me is a practice of Washington D.C. cabbies. They're allowed to charge you extra for helping you to load your bags into the trunk. Okay, you're arriving at the airport, carrying your bags yourself, and the cabbie offers to grab your bag and move it the last meter into the trunk, which you could well have done yourself. Extra charge on the meter.

Now I feel like I should brush off their offer to be helpful, and that's seemingly not right.

It's possible, but who says so? It is indeed not at all easy to determine. Sources?

No, actually. Though the specifics do depend upon the province/state in which one does business.

Here in Ontario, sales tax registration/collection/etc is not required on the first (from poor memory here..) $30K of personal sales. Businesses have no such exemption, except for Sole Proprietorships.

EDIT: Oh, that was pre-HST. Things may have changed as of last year.. dunno.

Cheers

Mark, I was talking about individuals paying former PST, not a seller collecting. I don't know what's up with the HST in this regard now.

One unfortunate part of the HST however is that other provinces are now responsible for collecting it from Ontario buyers. So there's no more escaping the 8% PST portion when buying retail from out of province. Previously it was up to the individual to remit payment directly to the Ontario government.

As far as I'm concerned a tip is a gift.

.. and gifts are considered taxable income in this country.

I just made a quick perusal of some online menus for Belgian restaurants.

Using currency exchange rate is not a good way to determine where food is cheaper. You should be looking at purchasing power within countries. Exchnage rate is determined by money market, and may mislead you. If I make 2K Euros a month in Italy, and a friend of mine makes 2k $ in the US, given current exchange rate you may assume that I make more, which may not at all be true if goods costing 1 $ in the US cost 2 Euro here - as it often happnes, being esxchange rate unrelated to that to a large extent.

To go back to tipping, I am really not usre that tip culture has an impact on cost of food. On the other end, personally I think it is indee possible that it does cause low wages for waitstaff. Clearly, as a waiter you'll be willing to accept a lower wage if you know customers will tip a lot. BAsically, tipping alters the labor market. I don't say it is necessarily bad, but travelling would be easier if tip culture did not vary so much from country to country.

Yes, but experiencing different culture (including tipping) is half the reason to travel. If homogeneity is what you're looking for, staying home is good. Or come to the suburban USofA, land of the strip-mall and franchises run amok.

I agree on the value of learnign about different cultures. But I don't think knowing tipping culture differences is culturally or humanly particularly enriching, though. But maybe I fail in seeing the implications of that.

Not so much in knowing what the tipping culture is, but why. And, just as interesting, when different cultures intersect, how they approach things. In one, a "normal" American tip is considered extravagantly patronizing, while in others, it's more "let's get all the money we can from this idiot."

Indeed, "why" in some culture tipping is more important while in others it is not could lead to very interesting historical/cultural considerations.

So, what are the reasons why tipping in the US is considered important and why the amount is such? I just assumed it is a tradition which simply resisted to time changes, since when waitstaff were in fact living only/mostly on tips from customers, and were not regulated by a more formalized and structured labor law and "real" salary. And, my assumption was such because that's what happened here as well. For some reason, the idea that waitstaff was in fact regularly employed by restaurant owners (with salary and benefits) made its way into people perceptions here and tipping slowly decreased in importance and amount. Today, all it really means is: leave anything as a sign you're happy, but if you don't it is still perfectly ok". That's it.

On the other hand, many people, including me actually, tend to tip, or tip more, if they are particularly happy. I am personally all in favor of positive reinforcements, and if I think a waiter was particularly good and careful, I tend to tip significantly more.

I am also thinking that tipping here is considered appropriate in more formal situations. For example, if I eat in a restaurant for my usual 1-hr lunch break fromt he office, tipping is really not expected (but always welcome, of course), because it is not considered a "formal" lunch. On the contrary, usually it is a restaurant here that may give you a little discount (!!). Probably this is a consequence of the competition standard restaurants had to face against fast-food ones, or bars or standing pizza-places, or other types of places where you don't actually sit to a table to eat - which tend to be significantly cheaper.

I haven't read every post in this thread, but one thing that actually bugs me today has to do with dipping for carry out at the grocery store. That is, when I was in high school and worked as a grocery bagger, I got tips. I was paid minimum wage, but earned tips on top of what they paid me, which would often end up at $10-$20 for a 5 hour shift. I think minimum wage at that time was $4.50, so that was a pretty nice boost (by comparison, the checkers got about .50 more than we did).

At some point after I left that job and went on to bigger and better things, grocery stores started mandating that customers should not tip for carrying out groceries. I remember feeling pretty embarrassed when I tried to tip one and he said he couldn't accept it. The result is that I NEVER allow them to take out my groceries because I feel bad not tipping them after how much I earned in tips doing the same service when I was younger.

So this is probably an example of an industry correcting itself (or I *think* it's industry wide- I haven't bothered even checking with our local grocery stores to see what their accepted practice is), and it probably just annoys be because of my past experience. I have to admit, being able to go after work to best buy and pick up a new CD after every shift just on my tips was probably a little bit much for the work I was actually doing.