Not leaving a tip means you didn’t like the service. Never leaving a tip means you’re a deadbeat, plain and simple. Working as wait staff isn’t just serving you, its serving a multitude of people all at once while making each one feel ypu’re giving them personal attention, helping anyone and everyone of the restaurant staff who needs help or is falling behind, washing dishes or pitching in at the grill if that’s what it takes, and helping to clean the whole place down late at night. You go home, stinking, literally, from sweat and food and grease odors, like rolling around in a deep fryer sfter football practice, every day. And people who leave nothing or a penny on a table like it’s a joke, after an exhausted waitress makes herself look unexhausted and pleased as punch to see you and make you feel special, is ignorant of the job.
When I was young I cooked at a family owned bar and grill that left it totally up to the waitresses who they would and would not serve, and if a customer was a known deadbeat, they wouldn’t even acknowledge their existence. Some would raise a big row and insist to be served, and I would be called to drag them out by the belt and collar and dump their butt on the sidewalk. Some really thought it was their constitutional right to force someone to serve them, essentially for nothing. Ignoring them, the waitress was still working for the restaurant, she just wasn’t working for the non-tipping customer. Tips pay for service, and if they don’t tip, they shouldn’t be served.
But providing a floor show while they were dragged out by the heels evens the bill ;^)
Well said!