Tips for better Tips

I joined a friend of mine for lunch today.

We had a very nice meal and the service was just fine. Nothing extra special and nothing horrible. The service was perfectly fine (I know that the word 'fine' can be dangerous in certain situations, but here I mean it was just fine) and the tip I intended to leave would have been the typical 15%.

The problem was that the bill came to $29 and I figured 15% would be about $4.5o and I was willing to give the server $5 for the tip. I placed $40 in the check presenter and waited for change. She brought the check presenter back with a $10 bill as change.

If it wasn't for the loose change in my pocket and my friend's pocket she almost had no tip at all. Between the two of us we came up with the $4.50 from our pockets. I was not about to leave a $10 tip, that would have been a little over %30. That was too much for service that was just fine.

If the server had brought me two $5 bills instead of the $10 bill she would have had an extra $0.50 in her tip. If she did that with every customer and if she had eight tables per hour, I would estimate that during a normal lunch period (two hours) she could have made an extra $8. Spread that over a regular work week she would have $40 extra per week, $2,080 extra by the end of the year. This is just based on lunch time only, think what more she could make during a dinner shift as well. $2,080 would pay for a pretty nice vacation, all for an extra $0.50 per table on her tips.

When making change for your customers in restaurants, servers need to make change with the lowest denomination as they can without going so low that they might get a slightly lower tip. The average customer will be willing to round up to a dollar if the service was considered slightly better than average, and it is not hard to be better than average when the average service these days is as bad as it is in most places.

Give change that makes it easier for the customer to leave a slightly higher tip, but don't over do it. Think if the customer rounds up the tip to the nearest dollar, what change would be best to make that amount, and make sure they have that in the change, perfectly.

Look at the Tip Chart on my website to see what customers may leave for a rounded tip.