So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[p51]

My wife and I do tip well when we get good service that calls for it. There's a local dive we go to for a trivia night every Tuesday night. One server there has our drinks when we walk in the door and we never have to tell her how we want a certain dish prepared more than once. Her, we tip really well, usually somewhere around 40-50% and sometimes even more. There are other servers at places we've gone to where we tip even better.
But you gotta work for it.
We don't abuse servers or anything, they've just got to do their job well.

I won't ever stiff a waitress on a tip, no matter how slow the restaurant. She has no control over what happens in the kitchen, and is probably being paid squat besides.

I get the argument but have never bought into it. I worked in a Kinko's copies and loved the job, but it didn't pay squat. So one day I decided to do something; I went back to school, worked full time (with a full class load) and Army ROTC on top of that (I was over the cutoff age for scholarships, so I didn't see one cent of scholarship money in spite of getting better graders than many of the ones who were getting it all paid for). I also lived with parents during that timeframe to save money.
In short, I literally worked myself to the bone. To this day, I recall very little about those 2 years because I was on the move all the time.
My point? If you're not making enough, go get another job or do what you must to better yourself to get that better paying job you want.
If you don't want to do that, fine. But it isn't my responsibility to fund you otherwise. This isn't a socialist country for a reason.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We have those jars at the theatre -- before we had them, people were just dropping their change on the counter. Apparently they don't want to be bothered with loose quarters nowadays.

I don't make the kids pool the tips, either -- they keep what's made at their station. An incentive for snappy service. We have one employee who refuses to accept tips, and after yelling at her for putting them in the till and messing up the count, I just throw hers in a bag and use them to buy pizza for the staff during extra-long shifts. I'm not authorized to pay them what I personally consider a decent wage, so I do everything possible to make it up to them in other ways. (I *am* an actual Socialist, after all..)

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

In the news, I actually side with the person who didn’t leave a tip: http://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/customers-tip-server-with-lol-instead-of-actual-money/ar-BBm3hrJ?ocid=ansmsnfood11 The diners had to wait an hour for food and she expects a tip, still? She should consider herself lucky that this is all they did. “Hey, I gotta pay my bills,” huh? Hey, not my problem. I once got service so terrible (and food to match) at a restaurant in Pennsylvania, that I went to the manager and explained that I wouldn’t paying at all for those reasons and that he’s lucky I wasn’t asking him to pay me for having to endure it all. Really, it was that bad.
I'm sick to death of the tipping mentality people have these days. I work by backside off and have worked in the service industry when I was younger and in all that time, I've never gotten a tip of any kind.
I think this says it best for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-qV9wVGb38

There's always this way.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Somebody did that to my grandmother once when she was waitressing. Next time that person came in he got a bowl of hot soup in his lap. "Oooops! So sorry, sir!" Moral: Never be an a-hole to service personnel if you live in a small town.

 

[2jakes]

Somebody did that to my grandmother once when she was waitressing. Next time that person came in he got a bowl of hot soup in his lap. "Oooops! So sorry, sir!" Moral: Never be an a-hole to service personnel if you live in a small town.

lol :thumb:

 

[p51]

There's always this way.

A friend of mine used to do this all the time. He stopped once I told him that the busboys were probably the ones who had to take care of them. For some reason, he didn't want to tick those people off.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

The International Workers of the World are quite involved right now in organizing waitstaff in a number of cities to put an end to this nonsense. More power to them, ...

Wow! I had no idea the "wobblies" were still around! I figured they disappeared with Eugene V. Debs!

 

[Zombie_61]

Somebody did that to my grandmother once when she was waitressing. Next time that person came in he got a bowl of hot soup in his lap. "Oooops! So sorry, sir!" Moral: Never be an a-hole to service personnel if you live in a small town.

Or anywhere, for that matter. Hot soup aside, there are all sorts of undesirable things that can mysteriously find their way into your meal.

 

[sheeplady]

I'd never stiff a waitress or waiter, barring an extreme circumstance that WAS their fault. Like if they swore at me or something.

If you don't like tipping, don't eat out at a place that waits on you in a country where tpiping is expected. Or demand servers get minimum wage.

The local ice cream place has a tip jar, I always leave my change. They are college kids and they do a good job. This year I witnessed two of them serve up over 50 ice cream orders for a baseball team and parents in under 30 minutes while also working the drive through window. They were professional even when some of the kids were I'll mannered. The bill came to close to $200 (lots of the kids ordered huge sundaes and splits) and no one left a tip. Not the adult buying it and not any of the kids. (I was taught that if I was treated out as a kid that I left a tip, especially if I was a part of a large group.)

THAT'S a situation for the tip jar.

Those girls deserved a tip for that kind of work, not snotty comments from the kids about "how long it took" to get their ice cream.

 

[p51]

Another thing that ticks me off these days is how kids are treated in schools. They're expected to be almost adults from birth. When I was a kid, we had recess and were, to a degree, allowed to be kids. I keep hearing horror stories from a teacher friend of mine where kids are expected to maintain control to a degree you couldn't possibly have expected from kids in my generation.
They don't even get recess anymore, I just found out! :eeek:
That's right, I've been told that elementary school kids often don't get recess. How they're expected to expend that energy from sitting there all day, is beyond me.
In my mind, this could only make the childhood obesity and ADD issues kids have far worse. If parents are going to jail for letting kids go to the local park (and do all the other things every kid did when I was young), how in the name of heck are we to expect them to turn out any different?
I think this is the first generation where older folks are seeing the kids and making comments that kids don't have it better as kids than they did when they were young!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Wow! I had no idea the "wobblies" were still around! I figured they disappeared with Eugene V. Debs!

Oh yes, and they've been very successful in organizing, among other things, Starbucks workers in several cities.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

I've been in any number of Starbucks. I've never seen a pipe wrench in use. Learn something new every day, don't you?

 

[LizzieMaine]

That's what they use on the people who don't tip!

 

[LizzieMaine]

As for the recess question, I remember when this issue was being debated at one of our local districts in the mid-90s -- the main issue was one of liability if a kid gets hurt. There was an incident where a kid fell off one of those playground merry-go-round things and his parents sued the district for a big hunk of cash, and on advice of their lawyers they first got rid of any hazardous playground equipment, considered offering parents releases to sign allowing their kids to participate in recess, and finally just eliminated recess altogether. Not every district does this, but that one did.

 

[HudsonHawk]

That's right, I've been told that elementary school kids often don't get recess. How they're expected to expend that energy from sitting there all day, is beyond me.

Around here, kids aren't there exactly "all day". School starts around 9:00 and is over by 2:00, with 45 minutes for lunch. They're in class about 4 hours a day.

 

[p51]

But think on his: Parents get put in jail sometimes f they let kids go down to the local park. And now they can't have recess at school. And in this era where it's considered child abuse to let kids go and play on their own, can we be shocked that so many are obese? People talk about kids like they all lazy. Some are, no doubt, but can this possibly be a reason why we have generation of kids who are already obese? What options do they have to exercise anymore?

 

[Fading Fast]

Tipping of waitstaff is an - IMHO - understood part of the way they get paid and an understood cost of eating out. I have no issue with tipping and have only withheld a tip a few times in decades of eating out when the waiter or waitress was proactively and consistently rude (so not the kitchen's fault, not blaming him or her for the restaurant being busy and not talking about someone not be friendly - I'm saying outright and consistently rude). As long as something like that doesn't happen (which, again, has happened a total of two or three times in decades), I will tip 20% (which seems to be the high-side of fair in NYC today).

What I don't understand is why the tip percentage which was 10-15% in the '70s and '80s went to 15-20% in the '90s / '00s. Since food prices go up with inflation over time, why should the percentage of the tip have changed? I tip the higher percentage because it is a social convention that, IMHO, is what you implicitly agree to when you go out, but I don't under why the percentage increased?

 

[tonyb]

Around here, kids aren't there exactly "all day". School starts around 9:00 and is over by 2:00, with 45 minutes for lunch. They're in class about 4 hours a day.

It's been so long ago now that I don't trust my memories of when my school day commenced and when it ended, although I do recollect that in my senior year of high school having an arrangement whereby I came to school an hour late and departed an hour early. I had a "grownup" job at the airport (graveyard shift) and sufficient academic credits to attend part time. Such arrangements were not unusual then.

Which points to other little grievances others have alluded to recently in this thread -- the micromanagement of kids' lives and our fears of leaving them unsupervised. My siblings and I and most of the kids we knew were what would be called "latchkey kids" these days, meaning that we came home to empty houses when school let out for the day and fended for ourselves until our working-class parents came home from their workaday jobs (except we didn't have keys, leastwise not in the Upper Midwest of my early childhood years, where people didn't lock their doors). There are things to be said against that way of doing things, for sure (kids tend to get into all order of mischief during those hours), but there are things to be said for it as well, such as learning that you are capable of taking care of yourself, as will be expected of you before long. I don't recall when I learned basic cooking skills, for instance. Just kinda always knew how to do that stuff, and assumed everybody else did as well.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was pretty much on my own in the streets by the age of five. My mother worked at the time as a cook in a nursing home, and when I got out of school I walked down to my grandmother's house, and she'd make me supper, and then I'd goof around outside until my mother got off work at six.

I think I learned how to do basic cooking -- frying an egg, boiling a hot dog, cooking a hamburger -- when I was six or seven, and my grandmother taught me to sew when I was eight. By the time I was nine I could be left alone in charge of my sister and brother without any problems, and frequently was. There were no "after school activities" for anyone -- all the kids in the neighborhood roamed around outside until dark.

I should add, though, that our neighborhood was not like neighborhoods today. There were no expansive front lawns -- every house was within eight feet of the street, and no more than ten feet apart, and all the householders up and down the street kept a collective eye on the roving packs of kids. If anyone had gotten into trouble, and occasionally we did, someone's mother would see it and intervene. Parents were not territorial about their kids the way they are now -- it was not unusual for a kid to be yelled at, slapped, or otherwise disciplined by some other kid's mother, and nobody got into a snit over it.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...kills-dying-world-technology-convenience.html

If you can no longer remember how to darn socks, read a map or light a fire, it seems you are not alone.
A study has revealed the top 20 traditional skills that are dying out in a world of convenience and technology.
Using a compass, tying specific knots and even having clear handwriting also made the list.
A lack of interest from younger generations is another factor behind the decline of life skills once deemed vital.
The study of 2,000 Britons, by map makers Ordnance Survey, found other skills which could soon be a thing of the past include knitting and being able to change a tyre.

Instead, knowing how to use a Wi-Fi internet connection, navigate cyberspace and follow a sat-nav are now seen as essential abilities for modern life.
But 81 per cent of those surveyed said technology was leaving Britons less skilled than in the past.
An Ordnance Survey spokesman said: 'An increasing reliance on modern technology has resulted in some skills falling by the wayside.'
'In years gone by, these skills would have been considered essential for everyday life... Technology, however great it is, isn't invincible though and there are times when it can let you down.

'Even if it's a skill you think you no longer need, it's important to have at least a basic grasp of it - basic map reading skills are vital as sometimes, often when you don't want it, batteries and phone signals let you down.'
Using a compass came second followed by being able to tie specific knots, darn socks and look something up in a book index instead of simply 'Googling it'.
Correct letter writing technique, understanding pounds and ounces and being able to convert them into grams and kilos, spelling and grammar and being able to start a fire from scratch completed the top ten.
Handwriting, knitting and touch typing are also among the traditional skills which could be on their way out.
The study found almost eight in ten blame the decline of these skills on technology, while another 54 per cent think it's due to children no longer learning them at school.
Ninety-four per cent even believe there could soon be entire generations of people who have no idea how to do some of the skills once considered essential.

Another 81 per cent think technology is leaving people less skilled than in the past.
But 83 per cent wish they were better at some of the traditional skills with 16 per cent making a conscious effort to try and improve their knowledge in their spare time.
And a staggering 93 per cent think teaching these skills should be brought back into school so younger generations are taught them from a young age.
A spokesman for Ordnance Survey added: 'Map reading, whether on a paper map or digital device, is an essential skill which could save your life.
'In recent years the sales of paper maps and the number of downloads of mapping apps have increased and it is vitally important that people can use these correctly.
'The new videos provide easy steps to help anyone read a map. We are confident that these are skills which anyone can learn.
'Maps really are the passport to the outdoors and in Great Britain we are blessed with many amazing places to visit and explore.

SKILLS FALLING BY THE WAYSIDE
1. Reading a map
2. Using a compass
3. Tying a specific knot
4. Darning socks
5. Looking something up in a book using an index rather than "Googling It".
6. Writing a letter correctly
7. Understanding pounds and ounces
8. Spelling and grammar
9. Converting pounds and ounces to grams and kilograms
10. Starting a fire
11. Handwriting
12. Understanding feet and inches
13. Knitting
14. Remembering a friend or relative's phone number
15. Remembering a partner's phone number
16. Identifying trees, insects and flowers
17. Touch typing
18. Baking bread
19. Taking up trousers
20. Wiring a plug

SKILLS CONSIDERED ESSENTIAL IN MODERN DAY LIFE
1. Searching the Internet
2. Using/ connecting to WiFi
3. Using a smart phone
4. Online banking
5. Knowing about privacy setting online
6. Searching and applying for jobs inline
7. Being able to turn water off at the mains
8. Using and following a sat-nav
9. Updating, installing computer programs
10. Working a tablet