Sunday 10 April 2011

Service charge or tipping?

If I sit at one table and order a burger and fries and you sit at the next table and order a lobster meal we will both be expected to leave a 12.5% service charge. How is this sensible? The same amount of work may have gone into the preparation and the waiter's job was no more difficult for you than me, so why should you have to pay more service charge than me?

Since when did we live in a world where it was perfectly acceptable for restaurants to merrily add anywhere between 10 and 15 percent to the bill and call it service charge? As far as I am aware this is the UK, not the USA: waiting staff are paid minimum wage (whether or not minimum wage is a living wage is an another argument entirely) and the government doesn't tax them on assumed rather than actual wages.

So why do we have this charge snuck on to our bills? Why is it no longer acceptable to give customers the choice whether they tip or not? Why does the restaurant get to decide how much we should leave as a voluntary payment? In fact, why is it no longer even called a 'tip' but a 'service charge'? It sounds so much more official, so much more of an obligation that comes with eating out and now we're being either bullied or eroded into coughing up. British people are known for their reticence and their preference for shying away from an argument, which makes the insidious charge

If a meal is truly excellent or the waiting staff helpful and kind then I am delighted to leave a tip, but a tip of my choice, in cash so I know it goes straight into the hands of the individual at whom it is directed (and yes, you can ask for a tip to go to kitchen staff). But every time I receive a bill with a 12.5% service charge added to the total I want to rage and yell and not leave a tip at all, no matter how outstanding the dining experience might have been. If restaurants really think it is legitimate to add such a hidden cost to the price of a meal, then why is the disclaimer always hidden away in the menu in tiny, faint writing designed to be missed?

We thought we had come up with a way around this nonsense. As soon as the bill arrives we ask for it to be recalculated without service charge and we explain that we will leave a tip on the table instead. Until recently this was received with gratitude by waiting staff who appreciated customers wanting to ensure the restaurant owners are not able to consume their hard earned tips. Suddenly this has changed. Instead of gratitude the response is a panic stricken look and 'why? was something wrong? I have to ask my manager'.

No. No. No. Listen to what I am saying: 'I. Will. Leave. A. Tip. On. The. Table'. Even in restaurants that claim to give all of the service charge to staff I hear this response. The only reason for this can be that restaurants include service charge in their profit calculations. Why not simply charge more for the food and be done with it, customers would be none the wiser?

It is telling that some foreign waiting staff in the UK have no clue that service charge is not obligatory. In one restaurant my friends and I were actually shouted at and told we were obliged to pay the 12.5% (again, we had said we wanted to leave the tip in cash rather than pay on credit card) on the bill and that we couldn't leave until we had paid it! In another restaurant a waiter told us that if we refused to pay the service charge then it would come out of his wages. Either he was extremely cunning or he was being taken for an incredible ride by his boss.

People of Britain, stand up and take back the right to tip or not, join my call to abolish the service charge and bring back tipping.

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