Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress Read online

  Petit Morsel was very dark, in terms of both its design and the mood of its owners, a young couple who took turns cooking, cleaning, and managing. The tables were made of varnished tree stumps, and the counter area, where guests ordered their food, was framed by a series of heavy wooden beams. The ambience, complemented by rough-hewn candles on the tables, was cave-like. The menu followed along similar lines. Most of the dishes contained either tofu, millet, or sprouts. Vegetarian fast food was still considered fairly revolutionary in those days and had none of the flair or lightness of the current “spa cuisine.” And so, despite their meatlessness, those plates weighed a ton once they were piled with this “healthy” fare.

  The owners of Petit Morsel hired me grudgingly. They didn’t really want to spend extra money on labor, but it was impossible for the two of them to do everything. I was interviewed by the wife, who made the job seem as unappealing as possible. “You’ll have to do a lot of cleaning up,” she said. “You’ll be responsible for keeping all the tables wiped down and you’ll have to carry lots of dishes.” When I told her that this wouldn’t be a problem, she sighed. “OK,” she said, “then I guess you can start at the end of the week.”

  My job was to take orders at the counter and then deliver the food to the table when it came out. Because I went to school during the day, I could work only the dinner shift, which usually began at 5 P.M. and ended by 8 or 9 P.M. I rarely worked with the husband. Most often I worked alone with the wife. On those nights, she prepped and cooked all the meals and then washed all the dishes. Although I could see that she worked very hard, I found her to be an absolute misery. She was worse when her husband was around, bitching almost constantly about how horrible everything was. At least when he was absent, she frowned in silence.

  After my second or third shift I became aware that Petit Morsel had a totally inadequate ventilation system. When I left the restaurant, the smell of fried tofu clung to me like white on rice. Fried food, I learned, is singularly smelly when its odors linger in the air or on an individual. I smelled so bad after my three or four hours there that my father, who usually picked me up from work, had serious qualms about even letting me sit in the car. He would hold his nose and complain the entire way home, saying things like “Don’t they notice how it stinks in there? It’s almost unnatural.” My mother complained even louder when I walked in the door. She couldn’t stand it, she claimed, and I was going to have to do something about it or quit the job. The compromise, such as it was, involved me shedding my clothes in the garage before I had a chance to pollute the house. I was treated like a walking biohazard, and while I can’t exactly blame my family, their attitude didn’t contribute to the rapidly dwindling appeal of my job.

  Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the bad ventilation or the debatable food that finally made me throw in the towel. It was, rather, the tipping situation. When I first started working at the restaurant, the owners informed me that the tips would most likely be nonexistent. They had placed a jar on the counter for patrons to toss in the odd dollar or change when they saw fit, but since there was no regular table service, they reckoned there would be no regular tips. The guests, however—at least the ones I waited on—had other ideas. The flow of cash was light when I first started working at Petit Morsel, but soon I started receiving rather generous tips, left on the table instead of in the tip jar. The first time I saw a five-dollar bill left under a plate, I actually thought the customer had made a mistake and left his change on the table. I’ve often speculated on the reasons why this happened. Perhaps the customers felt sorry for me. When the restaurant was busy, I ran around like a headless chicken, managing up to ten tables at a time. It was obvious that I got no support from my surly bosses, neither of whom could ever be accused of cracking a smile. Perhaps, too, the many families who came in to eat liked the way I treated their children. I’ve never been one of those waitresses who hated having kids at her tables. Even before I had a child of my own, I’ve always felt that kids are a little more interesting than adults and, as the eldest of five, understood that taking a passel of kids out to a restaurant wasn’t always the easiest situation to handle. A final possibility was that I simply gave good service to these people and they sought to reward me for it (this option, so many years later, is still my favorite). Whatever the reason, after a week or two I was regularly stuffing bills into

  my apron pocket as I cleared and wiped down the tree stumps.

  My joy in this newfound wealth, however, was short-lived.

  My boss called me aside after my shift one evening and spoke to me as she chopped vegetables for the next day.

  “It’s come to our attention that you’ve been getting tips,” she said sourly.

  “Yes,” I answered perkily, “people have been great. They must love the food.”

  “Well, anyway,” she continued, “you’re not supposed to be keeping those tips for yourself.”

  “I’m not?”

  “We don’t really have tipping at the table here. If you get a tip, you need to put it in the tip jar”—she gestured to the counter with her butcher knife—“and it will get divided up amongst all of us the next day. That way it’s fair for everybody.”

  The “all of us” she referred to consisted of her (the owner), her husband (the owner), the day waitress (her sister), and myself. I had real difficulty conceiving how splitting my tips four ways with that group could be considered fair.

  “But I think they mean for me to have those tips,” I said weakly.

  “Well, that’s not the way we do it here,” she said. “Since you didn’t seem to understand that, you can keep what you collected tonight, but starting tomorrow, you need to put everything extra you get into the jar. Good night.”

  I was stunned. Everything I knew about truth, justice, and the American Way dictated that I should keep my tips. Had I fallen into a parallel universe where this was no longer the way things were done? When my father arrived to pick me up, I told him what had happened. He laughed the kind of mirthless but explosive laugh I’d come to know meant he thought a situation was particularly ridiculous.

  “What, is she insane?” he said. “She wants you—a little girl—to give your tips to her—the owner? Ha ha ha. That’s beyond absurd. Ha ha ha. I think she must have been kidding.” He rolled down the window to breathe in some fresh air since I was starting to stink up the car. “You’re not actually going to do it, are you?” he asked.

  My boss had put me in an awkward position. I was faced with a couple of grim options. I could continue to keep my tips as I received them, risk the wrath of my bosses, and possibly get fired. If I did this, I’d have to watch over my shoulder constantly and feel like a fugitive. The other option was to tow the line and dump all of my earnings into the tip jar. Somehow I couldn’t even visualize this scenario. The situation did seem, as my father had put it, absurd. Although I’d had very little direct experience working in restaurants at that point, I knew instinctively that there was almost no point in donning an apron and schlepping plates without the promise of a tip.

  Waiters and waitresses come into the business for a variety of reasons. How long they stay in it is also determined by a number of factors. But I can almost guarantee that all of them would agree that while they are there, their major motivator is the tip. Tips are not just a side perk. They are not an added bonus. For a waiter or waitress, tipping is the raison d’être of a restaurant, considered an absolute right by those on the receiving end. Thou shalt not fuck with the tip. The tip is everything.

  Tipping has a long and colorful history in this country. Although the exact origins of tipping are lost to the distant past, there are a couple of different theories on how it all began. The most commonly accepted tale is that tipping began in England hundreds of years ago. In order to provide some motivation for faster service, the story goes, coin-filled boxes were placed on the tables of eighteenth-century coffeehouses (some say sixteenth century, but who’s counting?) and marked with the words “
to insure promptness” (or promptitude). Thus, the acronym TIP. There is some quibbling over the details of this particular theory. For one, acronyms themselves didn’t exist until the twentieth century. For another, English etymology tells us that the the word tip was actually a medieval term meaning “give it to me” (although it sounds crass, this theory seems to hold the most weight, for me at least). Still others (who have time to think about these kinds of things) claim that tipping began in the Roman Empire—stips being Latin for “gift.”

  Regardless of which theory, if any, is the true one, the custom of tipping obviously found its way to the United States and remains, for better or worse, a firmly established social ritual. Public misunderstanding of exactly why, how much, or whether to tip leads to some very interesting interactions between patron and server. On a small scale, the customer literally holds the server’s fate in his pocket. This imbues the customer with a certain amount of power as soon as he sits down at the table. And power, as the saying goes, corrupts. In a way, the server is immediately placed on the defensive. Her livelihood is not determined so much by whether or not she takes an order correctly, brings the food on time, or smiles often. Rather, she must gauge a customer’s mood, pick up cues as to his background, and based on all of this, anticipate his needs and wants. The server is, effectively, the customer’s private dancer for the two hours he sits at her table.

  Food servers depend on tips for their living more than those in any other tipped profession. The reason for this is simple: waiters and waitresses are the only employees who can be exempt from the minimum wage. Although this varies from state to state, it is rare to find a restaurant that pays its servers more than the minimum wage. The theory for this is that servers will more than make up the difference with their tips. This win-win equation is further emphasized by the notion that should employers pay their servers adequately (and this would have to be a pretty penny to convince servers to put up with the vagaries of the business), they would have to raise the prices of their menu items to make up the cost, making dining out much less affordable. Tipping is still optional, after all. Unless a preset tip is worked into the bill (usually for large parties or banquets), the amount of extra cash a patron leaves at the end of a meal is up to him and based, supposedly, on the quality of service rendered. Sounds reasonable. However, there are many variables that interrupt a seamless implementation of this fairly simple notion.

  One such variable is the tip-out policy. Almost every restaurant I’ve worked in has required that servers tip out a certain percentage of their tips to other workers. The tip-out where I work now is as follows: 15 percent to the busboy, 8 percent to the bartender, 5 percent to the hostess, 5 percent to the food expediter, and 2 percent to the extremely underpaid wretch who makes coffee drinks. The math is easy to do. In order to walk out the door with $100 in tips, I have to earn $155 (and when I do tip out, I am sure to have detractors, my busboy chief among them, who will claim they did all kinds of work for me that they didn’t get paid for and curse me on the way out). On some nights my busboy, who services three waiters at a time, will actually make more than me (and this after he tells me, “Listen, I take care of you tonight, make all your tables happy. Twenny percen’ tonight, chapparita, OK?”). The bartender makes more than me every night.

  The tip-out doesn’t really end there. Because as we all know, one of the two sure things in this life is taxes—and we do pay them. Servers are required by law to report all their tips. Before the use of credit cards exploded (and I am actually old enough to remember such a time), waiters and waitresses barely declared anything. Sometime during the Bush administration, the IRS decided to crack down on these scofflaws (after all, everybody knows waiters make six-figure incomes, right?). I know several waiters who got busted for back taxes this way. Regardless of whether or not a server declares all of her tips, the government knows how much she has sold during the course of the year because her restaurant is required to report it. In the old days, 8 percent of what you’d sold was considered taxable income. That figure has since gone up. The last time I tried to calculate, it was hovering between 10 and 15 percent, but these days I prefer to give all my paperwork to an accountant and let him figure it out.

  To illustrate how this all plays out, I’ll offer an example. Say on a given night I sell $1,000 in food and beverages. Say it’s been an average night and I’ve netted $150 in tips. After I tip out, I have $97 left in my pocket. But shortly I will owe more of that $97 to the IRS, and that will be subtracted from my hourly wage. In fact, the more I sell, the more I will owe, regardless of whether I’ve made any set percentage or not. If I am not tipped, or tipped badly, I will still owe a percentage of my sales. Guests who don’t tip, therefore, are effectively costing their server money.

  I am sure most diners are not aware of these complexities, nor should they be. Their responsibility is not to calculate how well their waitress is doing financially but rather to realize that tipping is a fact of dining (at least in this country) and deal with it accordingly. There are certain agreed-upon percentages at this point. On the East Coast 20 percent has become the norm but is still considered a good tip; less than 15 percent of the total bill implies that your service was lacking in some way (not liking the waitress’s hairdo or eye makeup shouldn’t really be a factor); 10 percent or less is just insulting and implies that you have been grievously wronged by your server. I have heard many servers say that they’d rather get nothing than a 5 or 10 percent tip. At least that way, they can lull themselves into believing that the diner just forgot.

  There are some who steadfastly maintain that tipping is a form of extortion and refuse to do it on principle. In 1905, a large group of traveling salesmen revolted against the policy of tipping. Calling themselves the Anti-Tipping Society of America, this group actually managed to eliminate tipping in several states until anti-tipping laws were declared unconstitutional in 1919. Currently, there are a couple of national organizations that have selected tipping as their focus. Tippers International, founded in the late 1960s, is one such group. It seeks to educate members on how much to tip based on the particulars of the service. Those who join receive report cards they can leave at the table, grading the server’s job performance and explaining the amount of the tip left. While this ratings system is probably preferable to a message of displeasure scrawled across a credit card slip, where the manager and owner can view it later and possibly discipline or fire the waiter, most servers still take umbrage at being told how to do their jobs by someone outside the business.

  WANT (Wages And Not Tips) is a much more extreme group whose members leave business cards with their checks stating that they don’t believe in tipping. According to this group, employers should pay their employees fairly and spare the customer the agony of trying to calculate and then fork over a tip. Get a life, I say. And watch your back on the way out of the restaurant because those who don’t tip can expect unique repercussions from those they stiff.

  I’ve had some bad tips in my career as a waitress. I have occasionally been left with several pennies on the table (the universal symbol for “We hated you”) as well as being left with nothing at all. There isn’t much one can do in the face of this kind of disaster. Part of the problem is that it all seems so personal (and often it is). In the places I’ve worked, management rarely backs up the waitstaff, nor does the waitstaff expect such support very often. In most restaurants, middle managers, drunk with what little power they have, make a lower annual salary than the waiters they police and really couldn’t care less if a waiter gets stiffed. Usually, the recipient of a particularly bad tip can expect a gathering of his coworkers wherein everybody mourns the state of the world and curses the exiting diners.

  In my restaurant, servers are expressly forbidden to demand a tip or even question the discretion of the guest. I have therefore witnessed some very colorful curses from my waiter friends upon the discovery of a bad tip. One particularly awful night, a waiter launched into a five-min
ute spiel in Italian, complete with hand gestures, which he punctuated by spitting on the ground. When I asked him what he had said, he told me he had wished a curse on the customer that involved the guest getting into his car, becoming lost and disoriented in the fog, and then plunging off a cliff into the ocean. He also wanted the customer to die a long, slow, extremely painful death and if, by chance, the customer had any children, they too should meet a similar fate. It was so detailed and so vehement, I actually got chills. Why would anyone risk this kind of vitriol? I asked myself. Could it really be worth saving a couple of dollars?

  Occasionally, a waiter driven insane by his job will follow a customer out of the restaurant and demand justice. I watched a waitress do this once. It had been a very busy night and she’d been waiting on a group of ostentatiously wealthy young women who seemed determined to give her a hard time. The check was high and the waitress really worked hard. In the end, however, the women fled without tipping, taking the credit card receipt with them. The waitress followed them outside and began a heated debate. My coworkers and I watched from the bar, which had a large picture window facing out on the patio where they stood. We stood, bemused, until we saw one of the customers actually attack the waitress, pulling her hair and punching her.

  “Hmm, catfight,” mused the bartender, who disliked the waitress and refused to get involved. Finally, the managers pulled the waitress and the customer off each other. The end result? The lovely ladies got their dinner for free and the waitress sued (and lost) for assault and battery.

  There is, too, the case of recurring bad tippers. Regulars who tip badly don’t usually last very long. For one thing, one waiter after another refuses to wait on these people until they run through the entire staff. A couple who fits this profile comes into my restaurant now. Waiters scurry like rats off a sinking ship as soon as their faces appear at the door. Lately, these two have been forced to order from the chef while whatever sorry wretch has been assigned to them grudgingly fetches their bread basket. Tip-challenged customers who frequent the same spot get not only the worst service but leftover bread, dirty glasses, and plates that have been prodded at and sometimes eaten off. When a regular is high maintenance and a bad tipper, servers really lose it. And yes, I have seen servers spit in food and drinks. Occasionally, some kind soul will straighten the bad-tipping regular out as a public service and then adopt the customer as his own. The customer, believe it or not, is usually grateful and will reward that server (but only that server) accordingly.