Belligerati

I agree with what he says about tipping on things that you get comped. And of course, tip huge if you want to. Especially if you like to return to restaurants and be treated especially well. But don't pretend as though enormous tipping is in any way morally required. While it may be more difficult to serve in a more expensive restaurant, it certainly doesn't scale the way the price does. And if we are debating the restaurant business, tell me why the waiters of fancy restaurants deserve huge salaries while the kitchen staff, who have a much harder job and have at least as much impact on your overall experience, deserve a salary that scales very little with restaurant price compared with the waitstaff. It doesn't have a moral explanation, it is just the anthropology of the restaurant business.

My experience in discussing whether to tip on the pre- or post-tax bill with current and former servers is there certainly is dispute. Many consider an 18% tip on a pretax amount an good tip. But big tipper beware, as tipping is an arms race for a limited supply of special attention.
Tipping simply has major problems. First, why should your staff treat customers differently depending on how well your customers bribe the staff? Second, Why should we provide such a convenient method of tax evasion to waiters? Third, if we agree that wait service is something worth paying for, why allow people to shirk and avoid paying it at all? I think that we can all agree that tipping is a stupid, sub-optimal way of paying for restaurant staff. We'd all be better off with staff wages built into the menu price. Chez Panisse, a fancy restaurant in Northern California shifted to this model because they thought a 15 percent service charge was more fair because it both created more money to pay support staff and provided more even service to customers.

We got to this situation from rich Americans in the late 19th century throwing their money around. And certainly that was their right, as I said before, if you like it, and the restaurant allows it, feel free to tip (if they don't, it simply is a bribe). But why does it remain? It may have to do with tax treatment differences. Mandatory service charges are subject to sales tax and tips are not, but both are subect to income tax. Net margins in the restaurant business are about 3.5%. Median US sales tax rates are 6.4%. If the average restaurant tip was 18.7% for 2006. That means that a restaurant shifting to a service charge of 18.7% from an average tip of 18.7% is facing giving an additional 1.2% of the gross to the tax man. That's a third of net margins and for many restaurants, the difference between profitability and failure.