You know what? Sometimes waitresses have bad days, too. And
you know how you have personal days you can take when you're sick or sad or your mom died? As hourly employees, waitresses don't have that. They miss a shift, they miss a paycheck. Because they're so reliant on their personalities to earn tips — aka almost their entire damn salary — they have to show up, rain or shine or swollen ankle.
Just because she didn't tap dance for you enough — or, heaven forbid, didn't laugh at your jokes — you have no right to withhold her salary. Well, you technically have a right, but you're a terrible fucking person if you do.
Let me repeat:
Even if the service was slow, your order was messed up, or all your dishes didn't arrive together, you still tip. Oftentimes shitty or slow service has to do with
inept management, overworked employees, poor coverage (due to no shows by fellow employees), or an overwhelmed kitchen. None of that is your server's fault,
so don't take it out on her.
And if you're the person who always gets terrible service, who always finds something to complain about at dinner, you need to look in a mirror. As the saying goes:
If you meet five assholes in a day, you're probably the asshole. And still you rise. To dine out and make everyone else's lives hell. Then there's the people who don't think it's their responsibility to pay for service, and that the restaurants should cover it. My best advice to you is to boycott restaurants then. Because it's not your waitress's fault the system is jacked.
I'm not sure what the answer is to ensuring that servers are paid the wages they deserve.
Abolishing tipping seems to be the obvious answer, but these jobs would surely just become regular minimum wage jobs then. The hard work of a largely female force would continue being undervalued. The only possible solution I can think of is to make people understand that
not tipping is not an option; it is a requirement.
Being a waitress is yet another job where skills and talents supposedly associated with women are underappreciated and exploited. As Welch points out, serving people is very hard work; you're emotionally taxed from the constant smiling, and physically taxed from the constant movement.
And through it all, you're expected to meet the needs of a constantly changing array of customers and their various quirks.
As Sarah Jaffe says in her essay in In These Times, perhaps what Welch "was fired for was daring to publicly express dissatisfaction with her job." She continues, "even outside the workplace, emotional labor doesn't stop. (Just ask any woman if she's ever been told to 'smile' by a strange man on the street.)"
Perhaps withholding tips for perceived bad service is the equivalent of being told,
"Fuck you, you're ugly anyway!" when you don't smile back on the street? Maybe it's another way to keep women in positions of physically and emotionally draining service in return for earning 70 percent of their male counterparts.
Whatever the case, the moral of this story is:
Tip! Tip as if your life depended on it, because even if it doesn't, some woman's probably does.
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