NEW YORK - After finishing dinner at a Connecticut restaurant, two diners got more than a butter mint when a waiter, apparently miffed by a $2 to $3 tip left on a $50 check, attacked them with a knife. They only suffered minor injuries, but no doubt tipped much better after that. (Probably not - those kind of people never do.)
While violent cases of waiter rage are rare, the 1989 incident points to waiters' sticky reliance on tips for income. In some states, restaurants are only legally required to pay as little as $2 or $3 an hour. So if a server earns $30 in tips on a bad night, he could feasibly walk out having earned less than minimum wage after tipping out the bartender and busboys (a common practice in most restaurants).
To level the playing field, waiters are taking action. Some are resorting to guerrilla tactics — it's not uncommon for waiters to personally confront stingy tippers, or to blog about them on sites such as WaiterRant.Net.
(I'm a good tipper, hopefully I'm not on that site.)
One former waiter, Yakup Ulutas, is proposing restaurants change the system. Ulutas, a 36 year-old restaurant manager in Atlanta, founded a nonprofit organization, Fairtip.org, to persuade restaurants to implement an automatic 20 percent service fee on every check. He estimates 2,500 waiters have joined.
Which, in my opinion, is a shitty idea. When you go to places where they automatically charge the 20%, the waitstaff has absolutely no incentive to earn it. You will never get a second (or maybe first) glass of water, cup of coffee or anything. Plus it takes away the ability to stiff a particulary shitty waitperson. Which we've all had. I've never actually stiffed a person, but I will leave an unusually low amount if I'm mad. I have a friend who used to date this guy who never left a tip on the premise that "they get paid to work here, nobody tips me at work." She couldn't take it, she used to sneak money under the plate and stuff, but eventually she ended it with him. It's a bad precedent for other things, like Christmas and birthday presents. He was opposed to buying flowers too because it was just a ruse to spend money on dead plants.
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