Customer says they paid $400 on a $310 bill with 20% gratuity included, then the server asked a question that left them furious: ‘Seriously?!?’
A customer says the tipping entitlement is “getting absolutely ridiculous” after a server asked about their $90 in change.
A customer says a server asked whether they wanted $90 in change after a 20% automatic gratuity was already built into a bill of about $310. According to Upworthy, the customer described the exchange in a post on r/tipping.
Paying with four $100 bills, or $400 in total, the customer expected $90 to come back to the table. Instead of returning the money, the server posed a different question, the customer writes: “Do you want change?” The coverage states that the question left the customer furious. The customer also sees a second tip as unreasonable when a gratuity is already on the bill, and says so in the post.
The customer opens the post with “Seriously?!?” and asks, “Since when did it become normal to assume that a customer would leave behind another $90?” They describe the tipping entitlement as “getting absolutely ridiculous.”
The customer wonders what the server was thinking
The customer says they cannot work out what a server hopes to gain from asking that. They suggest some diners may answer “keep it” just to avoid looking cheap. The customer asks whether the aim is to “put someone on the spot and hope they’re too uncomfortable to ask for their own money back.”
No other explanation comes to mind for offering $90 back as an option, the customer adds, given the gratuity already on the bill. Money questions at the table can turn uncomfortable fast, as when a server returned $20 of a $100 tip on a $60 bill. All details are based on the customer’s Reddit post.
By that math, a 20% gratuity on a bill that size comes to roughly $52. Had the customer answered “keep it,” the total gratuity would have reached about $142, or around 55% of a pre-gratuity subtotal near $258. The $90 in question is larger than the gratuity already on the bill, and it equals about 29% of the printed total. Both figures are approximate, since the post gives the total only as around 310.
A Washingtonian guide to tipping on top of a service charge states that most diners add nothing extra, and most restaurants do not expect it. For those who still want to, it calls 5 to 10 percent a nice gesture. Such a charge does not have to go to servers, it notes, and one owner quoted says hers funds base wages and benefits.
The Takeout’s Salty Waitress column states that a restaurant should be clear about how its automatic gratuity or fee works, since vague wording leaves diners unsure where the money goes. A restaurant admin fee added to a bill can blur that picture further. The column adds that a restaurant saying it has done away with tipping does not want customers to tip on top.
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