Posted on 11/30/2009 10:29:46 AM PST by big black dog
You’d think with all their money, celebrities would be good tippers. This isn’t always the case. Certain celebrities are notoriously bad tippers. Check it out:
1. Madonna - Doesn’t always leave a tip, when she does it’s a cheap one.
2. Kelly Presten – Notoriously bad tipper. Most of the time she doesn’t leave a tip at all.
3. Gwyneth Paltrow – Doesn’t leave a decent tip. It’s speculated she has trouble calculating the proper percentage.
4. Barbra Streisand – Doesn’t always tip. When she does it’s $10 for a bill of over $450. She’s very high maintenance and demanding and no one ever wants to wait on her.
5. Tobey Maguire – Doesn’t always leave a tip, and when he does it isn’t generous.
6. Bill Cosby – Once left a $3 tip on a $350 order. He probably thinks the waitstaff needs to stop taking from others and get a real job.
7. Ricki Lake – Once left a tip of $8.00 on a $142.44 bill. This after she let her young son run around the restaurant unattended – and he supposedly made a big mess.
8. Bobby Brown – Rude to wait staff, lets his kids run amuk and left a $10 gratuity on a $250 restaurant tab.
9. Sean Penn - He and three others had New Orleans waiters waiting on them hand and foot. The tip left on a $450 tab? Absolutely nothing. There are lots of instances of Sean Penn stiffing waitstaff. How many people do you think have spit in his food by now?
10. Kirsten Dunst – According to one server she’s whiny and smells bad. Left nothing behind after racking up a $223 bill.
11. Dan Marino – Wouldn’t talk to server directly, had to have a member of his entourage handle it. Tipped $10 on $210.
12. David Lee Roth – Is known to be demanding and send food back. Tips 10%.
13. Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman – He and his wife are considered to be very high maintenance. They expect the VIP treatment and only tip %5. At a TGI Fridays in Waikiki they paid $10 for a $250 tab.
14. Rupert Everett – Listed as one of the worst tippers ever.
15. David Byrne – The Talking Heads frontman is considered one of the worst tippers ever because he doesn’t leave anything, ever.
16. Molly Ringwald – Bar tab was the equivalent of twenty-five cents for each round of drinks her large entourage consumed.
17. Diddy – Left a $40 tip for his meal – a dinner for 15 people.
18. Richard Dreyfuss – Bad tipper and high maintenance “whiny” client.
19. Michael Moore – Once left less than $20 on a bill totally $452.52.
20. Jesse Jackson – Left $20 on a $228 tab.
21. John Kerry – Left $20 on a tab of over $700!
22. Britney Spears – Once tipped a valet by dropping change on the ground and telling him “there’s your tip”. Also paid a $26 tip on a $500 tab.
23. Tiger Woods – Doesn’t tip because he says he doesn’t carry cash.
24. Usher - Never tips and always tries to get someone else to pick up the bill.
25. Rachel Ray – Tipped $1 on a $10 tab. Probably didn’t want to go under her $40 a day allowance.
26. Victoria Beckham and Katie Holmes – Dined together in an upscale restaurant and didn’t leave a tip.
27. Tom Green – Once left $15 on a $175 tab.
28. Paul McCartney – Once left a restaurant too drunk to leave a tip.
29. Regis – Once left cruise staff a $60 tip for an entire week’s worth of personal service. His wife is said to be very high maintenance and the ship’s crew was happy when she left two days early.
30. Marty Stuart – Leaves 7% – his wife is very demanding.
31. Don Henley – Very demanding, keeps staff members on their toes, tips 15%.
32. D’Angelo – Once left $7.00 on a $250 tab. The tab should have been over $500, mind you, but the r&b singer and his entourage nagged until they got a discount . 33. Mariah Carey – Once had her people call ahead to a restaurant to let them know she was arriving with a very large party. The restaurant stayed open late, and Mariah and crew were very diva-ish with their demands. Despite keeping staffers jumping and a high tab, no one left a tip.
34. Marion Jones – Left $3 on a $45 tab.
A restaurant owner in upstate NY told me the following joke:
Q: What's the difference between a canoe and a Canuck?
A: Canoes tip.
Again, how is it not true? It is the same physical act of work performed in 2 different places. Outside of the food, which is prepared by someone other than the waiter, there is no difference.
If I do patronize a high end restaurant I will leave a decent tip, but I won't be fooled into thinking that more work was done to deserve such a tip than would have been done in a low end restaurant.
Hit the buffett and don’t dine at nice places if that’s for you. But don’t try to determine what is “fair” for people’s whose line of work you think is worthless.
LOL. Please tell me where I stated that waiters should work for free.
Implied contract?? What the heck is that? Which law school did you attend? There is no such thing as an implied contract. Waiters are independent contractors?? Waiters are hired flunkies doing low-end labor, nothing more.
Marketplace relationship? I enter a restaurant my relationship is with the owners. Their employees are of no concern to me.
No respect for what makes a good waiter better than a bad waiter. You think the job is easy and deserves no more than minimum pay.
And quite a few people who put in well over 40 hours a week at the office will tell you the same thing.
When they do decide to serve you, it's often with a deliberate professionalism that can say "unhurried competence" or "studied indifference," depending on your perspective (I base this impression on numerous fine dining experiences throughout Europe, specifically).
Yes because the same thing never, ever happens in the USA. /s
I haven't seen such elitism since John Kerry said that you needed a good education so you didn't end up in the Army and get stuck in Iraq.
Come on quests, you got your meal paid for, pony up for a tip without comparing with others at your table. Of course it could just be the mindset....
And you have failed to tell me why a good waiter at a low end restaurant should make less than a good waiter at a high end restaurant. If both people perform the same job with the same level of proficiency then why should the latter get far more money?
You think the job is easy and deserves no more than minimum pay.
I think the job is easy? Really? Wow. I never knew that. And minimum wage? If that's what employer feels someone is worth then sure, but where have I advocated a fixed maximum wage for any employee? Employees should be paid what the employer thinks they are worth. What is wrong with this line of thinking?
really? please show me where i used even one exclamation point in any of my posts. you certainly seem to be reading into my tone.
in my younger days i was a bartender at a bar near an airport that serviced some Canadian cities. every single waiter dreaded when Canadians (especially French Canadians) would come in and sit down. for good reason. these patrons would continually pretend they couldn't speak English very well and would leave change as tips.
so you'll forgive me if i don't put too much stock in your opinion regarding tipping.
Just do what I do - don’t go out to sit-down restaurants. Eat at home. Too many restaurants in US. No need for it. We aren’t going to be needing as much retail and we aren’t going to be needing as many restaurants.
I don't mean to demean waiters, but in the context of my reply, I'm trying to point out that they are not business owners, and I certainly do not contract with them simply by having a meal they happened to serve.
Some folks have trouble connecting the dots.
My main gripe with tipping is that it has just become so pervasive in recent years. Not only does everyone in just about every service industry expect a tip, that tip had better be no less than 20% or you'll hear complaining.
I have no problem leaving a good tip when it is customary, but that doesn't mean I can't question how much I feel that the services funded by my tipping are worth.
Never occurred that way in the several restaurants I cooked in over more than a decade working in kitchens in MN for this cat.
Cooks never got gratuity unless they worked functions that served several hundred and at that it was a pittance (3% is what I recall). The setup crew got a lot more in tips than did the cooks for functions. I never had any waitstaff offer to split tip money with me, nor did I see them do it for any other cooks/chefs anywhere I worked. Most places I worked at I built up clientele that dwarfed what had been the norm on nights I cooked (a normally dead Sunday night of 10 people max would be 60 - 100 within a month to six weeks of my regularly cooking that shift). That made the waitstaff very happy and a lot of extra tip money, but I never once saw any gratuity for it.
On an extremely rare occasion a patron would send a tip back for the cook/chef, but I suspect a lot of that was pocketed by waitstaff as well. Waitstaff got minimum wage plus tips (which they had to declare as income - 15% at tax time of their wages was assumed in MN), while cooks got a considerably better wage (usually a few dollars per hour over minimum wage). The cooks worked a lot more hours (60 - 70 hours a week or more was not uncommon, especially during the holidays), so I’d say we got the raw deal there. Waitstaff can easily make up a few dollars per hour in tips and usually more than doubled their income, so I never understood why they got all of, or at least the lion’s share of the gratuity... In most cases a good cook will make the tip for the waitstaff as long as they aren’t slow, while a bad cook will wreck it for the waitstaff no matter what (in most cases anyhow).
First, I didn’t say minimum wage, I said minimum pay. A big difference.
The computer programmer who works in-house at a small firm will make less money with the same talent as a computer programmer who works at Microsoft. So why is that fair? Because he is playing in a different arena. But if he is talented, he will be able to move up to bigger and better arenas and use his skills to make a bigger salary.
Likewise for a waiter. He starts at Applebee’s, moves up to Houlihan’s, then to Rodizio’s and then to a lower tier fine dining restaurant in town. At Applebee’s he earns $8 an hour in tips, $10 an hour at Houlihan’s, $14 at Rodizio’s and finally $20 an hour at the fine dining restaurant.
Why should the starting waiter at Applebee’s earn the same? Why should a programmer at Microsoft earn more than someone who programs code and scripts for a small printing firm?
You don’t mind employers paying more for their employees, but you don’t like that the employees make money based upon their performance of their job or how well they do it. Seems odd from a capitalist’s viewpoint.
If a waiter is just a waiter, then a programmer is just a programmer, an engineer is just an engineer, a teacher is just a teacher. Right? Of course not.
But you have made it clear that you think that waiting tables is simple work that isn’t any different at one establishment over another.
I did not go to law school.
In United States law, an implied-in-fact contract (a form of implied contract) is a contract agreed by non-verbal conduct, rather than by explicit words. The United States Supreme Court defined this in its decision Baltimore & Ohio R. Co. v. United States, 261 U.S. 592 (1923).[1]. That decision described "an agreement 'implied in fact'" as "founded upon a meeting of minds, which, although not embodied in an express contract, is inferred, as a fact, from conduct of the parties showing, in the light of the surrounding circumstances, their tacit understanding."
Such contracts are formed when one party accepts something of value knowing that the other party expects compensation. For example by visiting a doctor, a patient agrees to pay a fair price for the service. If he refuses to pay after being examined, he has breached a contract implied in fact.
I used it as a turn of phrase. If it somehow does not correspond to something within the glorious history of Canadian jurisprudence, please accept my apologies.
Marketplace relationship? I enter a restaurant my relationship is with the owners. Their employees are of no concern to me.
Well, this whole thread is about their employees, so I think you're just wasting your time here.
Most waiters/waitresses are paid sub minimum wage (something like 50% of current minimum). They work for tips.
Also, 'upscale' places (where you could spend $200 for lunch) usually add 15% to the bill for gratuity.
Generally, at you local 'family restaurant,' a server handles more tables and has more tables turn over during a shift than at 'upscale' places where a server has fewer tables, devotes more time per table, and has fewer turns per shift because serving and eating the meal/after dinner desert and drinks takes twice as long as the meat loaf special at Denny's.
If a waiter gives you bad service, do you go back to the restaurant?
If the waiter makes your meal a much more enjoyable experience, would you be likely to go back to the restaurant?
It seems to me like there is a social contract involved in that interaction. A waiter who encourages you to return helps the restaurant, but also provided a service to you (a pleasant meal).
As such, the gratuity is a reflection from you back to the waiter as to how much you valued his work.
Waiters who encourage more patronage are not just working for the restaurant, they are providing a service to the diner beyond “just serving food”. A waiter can make or break a nice night out, and I think it is horribly elitist to say “they are just doing their job” and “Waiters are hired flunkies doing low-end labor”.
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