Gather round children, I’m going to tell you a story.
Some of you may have heard this tale, but sit your asses down anyway. The younger kids may not have, so you need to shut up and let them marvel at the way things used to be - in the U.S. anyway.
Many of you have heard me say that gratuity should not be included automatically with the check. But there was an exception, not that long ago.
You see kids, when you’re dealing with small parties all night it doesn’t much matter if one table is filled with bad people who don’t tip. They’re as insignificant as a fart during a hurricane, and will be missed even less once they blow out of there. You have other tables that shouldn’t be filled with the turd of humanity, and you can still make good money.
But what happens when you have a party of 21 people, and the manager tells you that’s your only party? And you have to split the tip with another server because of an ignorant corporate policy?
Well, right now it’s a crapshoot. You could make great money off the table, or you could get stiffed, same as with a small party. Only it hurts a hell of a lot more to have a $400 check leave you nothing, especially if you couldn’t take other tables with it.
Not so long ago, at a restaurant near you, there was this thing called “automatic gratuity.” It was typically 18% added on to parties of 8 or more.
Automatic gratuity, or auto grat, was your friend. It protected you from large groups of stupid people who decided to be worthless in your section. Often, the server could decide to waive auto-gratuity if they knew the group would tip better than 18%, or wanted to take a risk. I myself did this on occasion. So when you got that party of 21 who racked up a $400 tab you were guaranteed to get at least $72 (which you may or may not have had to split with another server, but that isn’t the point.)
When you got stuck with a party of 12 teenagers you knew you’d be taken care of because the little bastards had no choice but to tip you.
Exciting times we lived in.
Take a moment to appreciate how good we had it.
Sadly, the Internal Revenue Service decided that auto grat wasn’t a tip somehow, using their convoluted and corrupt logic to decide it was a wage instead, and should be put in the paycheck.
Well kids, that caused the death of auto grat. Now restaurants that made about 4% in profits (on average) had the additional administrative cost of adding automatic gratuity to a paycheck instead of the server getting it right away. It was more cost-effective for them to simply stop using auto grat. And as for the server, they never really saw that money anymore, since taxes took most (or all) of it. And as an employee that takes home their pay every night, that one hurt.
That concludes today’s story of a time when idiots didn’t fuck with things that were nice. We should have nice things, and auto grat was perhaps the nicest thing of all.
This was prompted by a friend of mine texting me last night about the table she had to split with another server. A table that could afford $415 or so worth of food and drinks, all on one check. A table that left $8 for those servers to split. Bastards. -J
