Originally Posted by Bleys
It finally hit me today how absurd Canadian tipping customers are. I'm not sure how things are in the States or A/NZ, but here there are some completely silly rules:
In a bar, it's perfectly acceptable to make games out of tipping. Where I go, there's a groove cut in the back of the bar with holes drilled into it, and glasses under the holes to catch the tip, and the customers make a game out of trying to slide the tip into the holes and observing as the night goes on how our accuracy varies in a manner that is inversely proportional to our blood alcohol content. This is not the silly part.
This is: in restaurants and diners--fancy or not--everyone knows tipping is a custom that is only really optional in theory, as waitstaff are paid a criminally low wage and require tips to make ends meet, let alone purchase motor vehicles and high definition television sets. However, the customer is obliged to leave the tip on the table and pay at the counter, and the waiter/waitress has to wait until the customer has left the premises to collect their tip, as if at any moment, J. D. Rockefeller might spring out of the back room, snatch up the tip, and do a merry jig between the tables chortling "Mine, it's mine now, all miiiiine"
I've always had a (perhaps irrational?) anxiety that in it time it takes me to get from the table to the exit, some light-fingered jackass is going to purloin the tip, leaving the waitstaff to think that I'm a raging douchecannon.
What's the point to customer and waitstaff alike pretending the tip isn't really there? It's not like it's happening on the sly. It might have been in the dirty thirties, but we're more civilized now.
