I'd Auto-Grat My Own Mother

EXHIBIT A :
This doesn't happen every day, but every now and then an
Auto-Grat gets smothered with a little extra Awesome Sauce!

My blogs have been rather lengthy of late, so I left this story out of the last one... 

But I really have to let you know about one of my all-time personal favorite "Hall of Fame" actions that any server I've ever worked with has ever pulled.

It won't be that big of deal to you really, but it does perfectly illustrate the point I was making in my last post (on Why Restaurants Add Automatic Gratuity and especially, HOW this either attracts or repels superior waiters to or from working for those that do)...

On my way up to "the bigger leagues" of more expensive fine dining (i.e., higher tabs and higher-end clientele, for whom tipping 20% and above is their norm, when service warrants) I quit the local Olive Garden and worked for about 3 years at "The Prime Cut" Steakhouse located near 2nd & Broadway in the heart of downtown Nashville, Tennessee.

The steaks there were around twenty 1997 dollars, and for me this was the big league finally. That's one thing I learned later in life than I wish I actually had - that like all sales jobs, if you have the skills to do the job well, you need to be where the big tickets are. It's simple math my young Waitron friends .. you will earn more money serving up $20-$50 dinners (where salads and sides may even cost extra) to people who can actually afford such, than you ever will running back and forth re-filling $8.99 Soup & Salad combos to people who struggle with tipping 15%.

Well "TIMMY!" joined our wait-staff at The Prime Cut at some point after I'd done so, and by then I was one of the servers who helped to train him. Turns out TIMMY! had also worked for an Olive Garden before, and I remember telling him about the differences in what to expect, especially in relation to our clientele.

"At lower-end places," I snobbily pontificated "it sometimes seems like YOU are "the entertainment for the evening" for a lot of the people that you're waiting on, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. Dining out's a big expense for some, maybe they don't get out that much, and they're not so much going anywhere else this weekend. So for them, the waiter is "the big show" for the weekend."

(As a note to my readership - some of whom I can feel myself quickly alienating as I type this - I have since repented of and long ago gotten past my elitist-snob waiter stage ;)

"But here it's different in lots of ways. We gets lots of business travelers on the weeknights who are on their company's credit card, and mainly they're talking to each other. It's not like you have to entertain or impress them with your life story and tell them all your dreams and desires to pass the time. You tell them what's good, bring 'em their food, be polite and professional, and they're happy.

"And even our two-tops who are here on a date : generally speaking, they're on their way somewhere else after this... dancing, a concert, a play or an opera maybe. Point is, their waiter's personality is not really supposed to be their evening's highlight either. Plus, if some guy's dropping a hundred (1997) bucks on dinner with a lady, the last person he wants to talk to for any length of time is YOU. He's dropping that hundred bucks for face-time with HER. A lot of chit-chat from you can actually be annoying, and hurt your tip. So, you basically just serve them well, and you're good."

Man, did I really think I was the stuff back then or what? Haha!

So anyways, TIMMY! proved himself be an excellent server for us. He always remained very polite and professional even with his more "troublesome" guests, and only ever talked about them behind their backs, not to their faces. As far as facial expressions, body language, and the words he said at his tables went, he was among the best I've ever witnessed in the business about not letting his guests have a clue as to what he really thought or felt about them. What a champ, huh?

And apparently TIMMY! was on his way up the food chain (get it?) much more quickly than I, because when

Oops, I'm getting ahead of myself.

At The Prime Cut, we added 15% gratuity on parties of 6 or more. Yeh, that's important. 

It's also important to include that in addition to the higher-end folks we sometimes catered to, the place also had live music and a fairly hopping lounge on weekends. It was something of a local hot-spot in the 1990's, and therefore we certainly received our fair share of local rednecks who came out more for the great steaks and cold draft beer we offered, not so much for the fine dining ambiance we tried to pull off downstairs, when things were quieter.  

The 15% auto-grat was perhaps a little radical back then I suppose. While I can't remember for sure, it was maybe there that I first heard the words "Well, Id've probably left you a lot MORE if you hadn't already included the tip!"

Yeh right buster. We've all heard that one before.. and a few times since. And we know darn good and well that you're lying. 

We know (and these days, I even empathize) that the truth is you're suffering from sticker-shock at the price of the tab you just picked up for all of your buddies, business associates, or extended family. They maybe ate and drank more than you anticipated, and who knew that three $40 bottles of wine would come to $120??? Maybe the martinis you started with clouded your judgment on exactly how much food and alcohol was actually "in the budget" for you to order, or maybe you just fell for our finely-honed sales tactics where we get you to order way more than you would have on your own.  

This can happen - especially when we know you're being auto-gratted - and personal income aside, it actually turns into an internal competition for bragging rights with the other waiters over whether or not we can get you to order the hugest appetizer platter (or three) and some expensive wine. Waiters are by no means Real Estate brokers or car salesmen, but sales is a huge part of our culture, and just like those hard-workers from the last post, restaurant managers will also default to turning their best sale-people loose on the larger tables too!

In any event, you asked me what I thought was good, and I told you. You all loved it and now here's your check. Maybe back when you arrived sober you were hoping to make everyone happy and get out for $250, and now you're stuck taking deep breaths while staring closely at the $600 tab you ran up, wondering how it all went so wrong. And in this moment, the fact that $100 of it is gratuity, well, erks you a little bit, and that's understandable.

Not to be harsh, but that's also not my problem. My problem is rent. That, and the fact that the manager sat me down last night with a long computerized print-out of my sales report from last week and talked to me about how I'm not selling half as many appetizers as "corporate" projects that I should be, and asks me do I want more shifts or less next week? Hint, hint. So I sold you some. And because of the situation you're now finding yourself in, if the tip isn't automatically added to your bill at this important juncture, human nature dictates and my experience shows that tipping 10% is about the only way some people have left to feel okay about what just transpired here.

So you're buzzed and feeling remorseful about how much you just spent, and NOW you're telling me "Well I woulda left you more if you hadn't of added the tip."

Uh-uh. Sorry. We're just not buying any of that today. You're not the first to tell me that and you won't be the last. However, in your passive-aggressive fog, you don't realize that the only worthy response to that is "Well you still can. There's an empty blank on the voucher we leave just for those who feel the service was better than the __% minimum."

Bluff called. 

You see, we in the business have learned that people who are prone to tip more than 15, 18, or 20% when service is excellent, still will. (See Exhibit A, above.) But leaving off the auto-grat in hopes that you'll tip more, just because for some reason I'm convinced that you're "really cool" and that we're such good friends now and that you just loved me so-o-o much... therefore it would somehow be WRONG of me to include the gratuity... is a total fool's mission, I've found. 

It generally takes a few trials and errors before a server finally figures out that doing so will back-fire wayyyyy more often than it's worth when they don't auto-grat, but we all eventually get it. The last time I "gambled" and left the auto-grat off of a check was circa 2001. I even knew better by then, but I was just so convinced that these people loved me and they were awesome. We connected, we laughed together, they told me how great a server I was, and when it was all said and done they left me $15 on a $400 tab.

Maybe they thought the tip was included already, and the $15 was meant to be a bonus for me. I'll never know. But ever since then, I've always told my fellow (younger or less experienced, that is) servers who are thinking about leaving the auto-grat off of a check, "Nope. I'd Auto-Grat my own mother if she were in here tonight." They usually laugh, then I'll finish with "And she WILL still tip me extra."

Sometimes they go ahead and gamble anyways. 3 out of 4 times they come walking back into the station, with the little credit card book in hand and with this look in their eyes that tells me the story before I even hear the same words come out of their mouth that I spoke in 2001 ... "Never again."

Folks it's not personal when you see the tip included on your bill, mmmm-kay? First and foremost, lets not ever forget that this is a business transaction for starters, mmmm-kay? Most of us have tried it the other way, and we've just been burned - burned badly, and too many times. That, and these days the server may not even have any choice in the matter. At my last job we got some serious "memos from corporate" that we servers were not ever allowed to pick and choose which large parties to auto-grat or not. They were smart enough to know that some type of ethnic, racial, or other types of "profiling" could come into play, so they nipped it in the bud. 8 people, 18%, period. That's what the menu said, that's the policy and we were to stick to it. Yuppers, if you and seven of my best friends came in together and I waited on you, I'd actually be written up if I DIDN'T auto-grat you.  

I'd auto-grat TIMMY! if I waited on him and all of our old friends from The Prime Cut tomorrow night, for that matter.

Were you worried I was going to forget to get back to the story?

Well at some point we at The Prime Cut learned that the owner had decided to reverse our auto-grat policy. As in eliminate it, entirely. We weren't told why - maybe someone called him who thought the service was bad one night and resented the auto-grat, I don't know. But there we are closing up on (let's call it) Wednesday night, and out of nowhere we have to stuff new inserts into the menus that no longer mention the auto-grat. The policy has been changed and none of us feel good about this at all.

But what can you do?

Thursday rolls around. It's almost 5pm, and TIMMY! hasn't shown up yet, which isn't like him. We find out he no longer works here? Huh? Why? We're not told.

I get TIMMY! on the phone the next day. That son of a buck had the cojones to do what none of the rest of us did. He called the owner, and quit via voice-mail!

TIMMY! told me exactly what he said too - that he wasn't going to work for someone that didn't value his services enough to pay him what he was worth, and so he wouldn't be back in tonight, or ever.

My hero.


Remember my argument that good servers gravitate to places that have auto-grats, and away from those that don't? Well, non-related, but about a year later I moved away from Nashville. Approximately two years later I was back visiting, and went downtown to meet my brother for dinner at The Prime Cut. When I got to the front entrance, there were chains and a padlock on the door. 

According to the Public Notice taped inside the window, they'd been evicted for failure to pay their rent.

Coincidence?


You've just enjoyed Part 10 in my series on restaurant tipping and auto-gratuity. Here's links to Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 and Part 9 so you can catch up. Part 11 is either the conclusion, or the penultimate installment. Either way, you won't want to miss it! Subscribe for the last chapters via the e-mail link below, or the box at the top of this page.