Dressed-up Tipping

Tipping concerns are sometimes a big deal to India beginners (old-times too). The exchanges below concern tipping but are Off-Topic in a useful thread on clothing, Dressing Up.

Not wanting this information to get lost, and wanting to make it available to searches on the title Tipping, I thought I'd cut-and-paste it as a separate thread. Hope the gods and mods and powers that be will smile on this endeavor.

Cutting and pasting, thats one way to increase your post count, and catch upto Nick.

Good luck with that!

With me it's very simple as far as tipping is concerned: in a restaurant if there's a service charge they get no tip. Else 10 pct if I'm happy with the service, if the service was so-so or I had to wait half a day they get nothing. Outside restaurants I only tip when someone does something for me beyond the service I pay them for. For instance, I don't see the need to tip a cab or rickshaw driver just for bringing me from A to B, I already pay the fare. If they help me carrying my luggage for more than a couple of meters then I give a small tip. Bellboys etc get nothing, they merely do their job. If I take a trip of a couple of days then the driver gets a good tip if he was on time, no hassles, didn't want to convince me to see three emporiums etc, but I pay him directly, not the agency and tell the agency that they don't have to bill me separately for drivers' allowance etc.

Summed up: no free lunches in my universe, if they want a tip they have to earn it. Just smiling and asking yields nothing.

Look at our post count, then look at his.

Ain't no way we gonna catch up to Uncle Nick, no way.

Just trying to get the discussion out there where it might do someone some good.

Tuning in to dillichat's point: I have never been to Europe, so I don't know what the tipping culture there is. What I practice in India is exactly what I practice over here. The cab fare from my home to the airport is $40. Does the cab driver need it? Heck no. Does he demand it? No again. But, it's expected (assuming of course, he came on time, etc.), and the rates are kinda standard too.

Same goes with restaurant servers, bell boys and pizza delivery men(women). All these folks are paid by their employers, and yet tipping is appreciated, expected and custom (assuming the service was acceptable).

I'm not speaking for all of Europe but in my country it's not customary to give a tip beyond rounding of the bill if you're happy. Besides, by law all prices (restaurants, shops...) there have to be inclusive of VAT and service. That being said, the difference with the US is that staff get paid a decent wage, not the rock-bottom legal minimum and (through social security) enjoy full health benefits.

I was joking.

Excellent, this is the same as what I do.

Oh, I know. But look at it this way: we've each gotten a couple of posts out of the interchange.

Hey, I'm watching!

And this is one more post for me! <Wicked Laugh>

44 892 and counting ... I really don't know how you do it. Eighteen posts per day or so. I can't think that much let alone post that much. Its absolutely amazing or disgusting in "Get a Life, Man!" which of course may be an opinion expressed by some.

Re tipping - Just be yourself. Do what feels right. There is no standard. Either that or go back to your hotel every night and rethink or meditate on all 20 transactions. Then the next day, on all those you think you overtipped, go find the guy and ask for some of it back, and then on all those who you think undertipped, go and give more. But just remember you are only one guy or gal in one situation of somewhere near 44 892 transactions that waiter or driver or door opener has had in the last 7 years. Your impact is next to nil. However, I do remember my single biggest tip as a youth in a bar. Twenty bucks ... day before Christmas, about 1972.

if i am going to the same restaurant for a week or so, i don't tip every time, i give a nice tip at the end of my stay. then you know if someone is being genuine and not just sucking up for the tip
i usually get the same waiter each time.

We do something like that in hotel breakfast rooms.

Where breakfast is included, most people don't tip at all. But if we've stayed for several days and made pests of ourselves asking for masala chai or specially cooked eggs or something, we feel a tip is in order.

On the rare occasions when only one waiter has helped us, we tip him about Rs 10/day. More often several waiters have got involved, so we give the total tip to the most frequent attendant or to the head of the waiters, with instructions to share it out – taking care to do it within earshot of at least one of the other waiters so the sharing might actually happen.

If you are a visitor to India who works in the wealthy world, say from Europe or the USA, for example, you could think about putting tipping in a context. The chances are strong that the person you are tipping comes from the poorer part of the economy. And just how poor is that? Despite the stunning post-Independence advances Indians have created for themselves, over 40% of people still scrape by on $US1.25 a day or less. India has the largest concentration of poor people in the world. If you're travelling in a poor state, the per capita income is over 3 times less than in an advanced state. About half of India's kids are underweight, and nearly that many kids under three suffer from malnutrition. The hand in front of you extended for a tip has a really high likelihood of being the hand of someone with few valuable job skills, many relatives back home in villages, and kids. The rules that are useful in thinking about tipping a waiter in a Geneva restaurant, where the meal just cost an Orissan tribal family's annual income, don't make much sense in India. This isn't guilt-tripping, just common sense.