My travel agent once gave me a guide for visiting the US. I wish I had saved it. It was a combination of decent advice, keen cultural insight, and utterly whacked-out ravings. (Relatedly, this is broadly true of much writing about Japan in the US.)
The thing which sticks with me most is, in a note about US tipping culture (an utterly foreign concept in Japan), the line "Many Americans may require a calculator to determine what 20% of $18 is. It is unwise to offer to assist."
It is so very true, though. Over the years I've had to teach my "trick" for figuring out tips without a calculator to pretty much all of my friends (the spiel: 'move the decimal one place to the left; double that number'). I was always surprised by how magical it appeared to them :|
I watched an American gentleman helpfully suggest that to a Distinguished Professor of Statistics from a top 10 university in Japan. It took me 10 minutes in the car ride home to assure him that it was not an insult to his intelligence.
It's painful to watch an otherwise successful person whip out a calculator to make sure they don't accidentally give their server an extra 30 cents on an ~$18 lunch bill. Just round up and move on with your life. Everybody wins.
Tip calculators all go the wrong way (well, all the ones I've seen do). Suppose I order a pizza and it comes to 16.12. A typical tip calculator will tell me that with a 15% tip, this would be 18.54, and with a 20% tip it would be 19.34.
I don't want to screw around with that .54 or .34. I want to give the delivery person an integral number of dollars. Probably hand him a $20, and tell him how many dollar bills to give me back.
I made a tip calculator Dashboard widget to calculate tips from that perspective. With this widget, I enter 16.12, and it gives me a little table that looks like this:
I can glance at that, and see that $19 or $20 for combined $16.12 pizza plus tip are reasonable options. If it were summer, I'd probably go for $19, especially if I could do that without breaking a $20. If it were winter, I'd probably just go with a $20 bill and no change, to get the transaction over with as quickly as possible so I could close the door and stop losing my precious heat.
Even easier (and better for your karma and the server's budget): round the bill up to the next 10 dollar increment, then do this trick (and add a buck).
You're supposed to use the pre-tax amount, and doing what is normal, paying 15% of the pre-tax amount, doesn't make you a cheapskate, it makes you normal. You don't get bonus points for paying extra money to someone you'll likely never see again.
Well, it may depend on where you're eating, but at many restaurants, the wait staff is paid well below the normal minimum wage, and your 15% tip on the pre-tax bill is supposed to make up the difference. And it often does.
However, personally, I believe that the minimum wage is far too low, and that wait staff in particular should be paid more than my notional "correct" minimum wage as a base rate. So the way I look at it is that if I had my way and the staff were paid appropriately, the cost of eating at the restaurant would necessarily go up. If I truly believe what I say I believe, then I should be willing to pay more for the same product. And I am. So I do.
This is one of just a few areas of American's lives where we have some power over how well the service workers we rely on are paid. And so I tip according to how I believe they should be compensated.
The difference between 15% and 20% on a $15 bill is 75 cents. The difference between pre- and post-tax is even smaller. You might not get bonus points for ignoring that, but you'll definitely lose points (in my eyes, at least) for fretting about such a small amount of money.
Anyone loses points (in my eyes) for tipping an exact amount regardless of the quality of service. It's a tip, it's supposed to reflect how well you were treated. If you do 18 or 20% no matter what, you're missing the point of tipping. If I'm eating spicy food and my glass is empty for the entire duration of my meal because the server is not paying attention, you're lucky to get a tip at all. I've left 50% tips, I've left no tip, and I've rounded $9.99 to $10 and called that a tip.
Anyone working in a restaurant expecting a tip for bare minimum service has my pity, but not my money. You get my money by doing a good job.
It's a tip, it's supposed to reflect how well you were treated.
That may be how the practice started, but that's no longer how it works. I mean, you can clearly tip however little or much you'd like, but, culturally, the tip is nothing more than a formality. And like any formality, you're free to ignore it, but you should be aware that that's what you're doing.
The idea of a tip is to compensate service based on quality. If that's not the goal, then the cost should just be integrated into the price of the meal. Since it's not, that means tipping should be reserved for compensating service based on quality. Restaurants are free to set service fees (and many do, "A fee of 18% will be imposed upon parties of 10 or more"), but a tip is still a tip.
You give me poor service, you get a poor or nonexistent tip. If the server doesn't like that, then they should provide better service. If the restaurant doesn't like paying their staff to make up the difference between what their wages and minimum wage, they're free to take action against that server (from more training to just firing them). That's the behavior that tips are meant to encourage. Either you're a good server and you make more than minimum wage, or you're a poor server and you don't have a job anymore. That's how the entire economy works.
At any rate, a tip is not a formality. If people are treating it as such, I have a problem with that. Either do away with tips and pay the staff what they're worth or make tips based on quality of service.
Of course and I said as much. Whether or not to shake the hand of someone you meet is also up to the hand-shaker, but, again, you should just be aware that declining to do so bucks convention. You're talking about what you think tipping should be; I'm talking about what it is.
Where are you that workers have to pay a sales tax on their tips?
On the question of USA-ian innumeracy, I noticed recently that a
Darden restaurant had provided some pre-calculated tip amounts on
the bill (just displayed, not added to the total). The tip levels
were 15, 18, and 20% - and they were calculated from the pre-tax total.
Convenience, good or bad customer relations, good or bad staff
support, slightly more useful than some toll-free survey number, or
sign of the coming info-pocalypse due to lack of STEM students?
I've taken to tipping 18%, and the process I use to calculate that mentally starts with what you mentioned, but with one more step:
Divide by 10 for 10%; double that number for 20%. Take 10% away from that number to get 18%.
E.g.
100 check
move the decimal => 10
double that => 20
move the decimal => 2
subtract previous value from the one before (thus 90% of 20%, or 18%) => 18
This feels like a good mental math exercise to me on a 4- or 5-digit number since it requires a couple of values to be remembered while you're calculating. Gotta stay sharp!
Do you eat out enough that tipping is a significant expense? I just estimate 20% and round to the next dollar, $0.40 isn't going to bleed me dry and most servers make crap anyway.
The thing which sticks with me most is, in a note about US tipping culture (an utterly foreign concept in Japan), the line "Many Americans may require a calculator to determine what 20% of $18 is. It is unwise to offer to assist."