Related to the last 2%, I'm always shocked whenever a waiter balks at splitting up a check when multiple people are paying. I always think "Really, you are going to annoy me right before I decide how much tip I will give you?"
1. Some Point of Sale systems have a limit on how to split a check. I physically cannot split a check more then 6 ways and the customer is asking or 7 ways, then what am I suppose to do? Be "nice" and promise the impossible? So now I pissed off a customer who's about to tip me because I cannot reprogram the POS.
2. The more likely scenario is when a table of 7, who just had pre-fix brunch is asking me to split a $70 check 7 ways which takes my time away from my couple who just dropped $70 by themselves.
What customers in restaurants don't understand is that tipping might be optional but my time is money. As a customer is tipping on service, I'm also providing service comparable to the tip I receive.
Waiters are really good at "guessing" how much a customer will tip and will act on that belief.
Disclaimer: I worked with a ton of awful waiters who were straight up rude to good guests. No guest should ever be treated poorly.
Ive also served some awful customers:
Some of them tipped very, very well because they wanted to be awful. I loved those assholes and always welcomed them with open arms - money's green regardless.
Some were just awful and I tried to steer clear of them.
Now as an olive branch; all guests should be treated with outmost respect and all people in the service industry should be as well
#2 isn't very convincing on it's own. Your inconvenience is not the customer's fault and does not justify being rude to them. Splitting checks is part of the job just like refilling water is part of the job, even if it takes your time away from more profitable tables.
Argument #1 happens frequently at locations that host larger parties (steak houses, for example) while almost never occurs at local pub/restaurant.
I understand your point of view on #2, however, the job is to server food for the section, not a particular table. I understand its taboo to speak honestly about this - people don't want to hear it; A manager doesn't care that you had to split a check when a table walked out; A guest doesn't care if you have a 7 top when they're ordering a $300 bottle of wine.
Everyone has particular feelings about this situation and as a server you're juggling all of your tables, expectations, emotions, and different cost/reward scenarios.
Another caveat: when a table walks in and says, prior to ordering, "Can we please split the check 7 ways?" - freaking awesome! Now I know that my notes have to be extra neat and I'm going through steps of service being extra careful to place items.
Most people ask to split the check at the end when I rushed through the entire order and my pad is a total mess and I'm trying to decipher what happened so everyone is charged correctly.
Do you have to do the splitting? Just give the table the total check, give people a few minutes work things out, and then just go around the table and ask each person what they had/how much they want to pay. That seems to be the standard procedure at most places I've been to.
If that's the case, I doubt most waiters would have issues with check splitting.
Maybe after it happens a couple of times... you might learn to predict when a party will ask to split the check, and ask when you take the orders? That seems reasonable if you can predict how much someone will tip.
If you have a 7 top, you do your best to keep yourself as organized as possible to save as much time in the end.
After a while, most waiter who've worked a bit are trying to cover all their bases all the time.
Interestingly enough, the analogy of a good waiter is a good error checking strategy: expect everything to work but check every exception anyway.
I can "guess" if you'll tip 18% or not and if I'm wrong...I'm wrong. If I assume your relationship to another person you're dining with - I might get fired...
Hypotheticals are everywhere. Usually its easier when tables ask to split a check in the beginning, then the logistics can be figured out and you don't have a situation that OP mentioned.
Bit off topic: I had a table, I don't remember how many people but it was large (7-10). One guest joins late and quickly orders her food. Since the rest of the table is already on appetizers, I rush to place the order and get her salad as soon as possible.
Once the salad arrives, I check back and, after the guest is satisfied, go to take care of a different table.
Maybe two minutes later, the table franticly calls me over and asks if there are mushrooms in the salad, to which I reply "Yes". Calmly, the gentleman to the right of the lady with the salad reaches into his bag, grabs an EpiPen and stabs her.
My manager and I look at each other and are mortified - how did this happen? I quickly start to apologize but I had no idea that she was allergic to Mushrooms. While we're freaking out, the table is as cool as the other side of the pillow - everyone just continues eating and the lady is all smiles.
Turns out that the entire table are doctors and the lady routinely forgets to mention her allergies. The gentleman, her husband, explains the situation while the lady apologizes for creating a fuss (at this point my manager is as white as a sheet).
Even though everything turned out "ok" it was certainly a scary moment. It also relates to your comment - shouldn't I ask each person that comes in about their allergies or is it their responsibility to inform me of their dietary restrictions?
Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy :)
After a while, there are certain tendencies that are exhibited by guests which can be profiled. Just like a good electrician can tell if the lines in your house are "home runs" or daisy chained based on the gauge of wire and material, a server can "guesstimate" their tip based on the customer.
I'm not saying you KNOW this is going to happen but you know if you're getting 15% or 18%+.
Now there's a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.
What about looking at the menu and approximating how much something "should cost"?
What about seeing an product on the store shelves (like a sweater) and thinking being surprised by its cost?
The practice is flawed...so are humans - Sorry, I guess.
I was trying to provide the opposite point of view. The whole, there are two sides to every story and somewhere in the middle is the truth, bit.
OP/Guest has every right to be annoyed at the service, its their prerogative.
Second, time is a zero sum game. If the waiter has to spend several minutes wrestling with the POS to split a check, that's several minutes they can't be serving other tables, which if the restaurant is busy can mean a degraded experience for other diners (and of course if this leads to someone being unhappy with the service that will likely mean a reduced tip). Of course if the restaurant isn't busy and the waiter can afford to spend several minutes on this, then nobody else has to suffer, but if that's the case I wouldn't expect the waiter to balk at splitting the check (assuming they're capable of doing so at all, which as I said before may not be true depending on the POS or on restaurant policy).
A tip is fully extra incentive. The waiter is not my employee, and the social expectation of a tip is a horrible practice (imagine if we replaced the expectation with someone that wasn't financial in nature).
>And the kind of person that threatens to leave a bad tip if the waiter doesn't do something is the kind of person that probably tips badly to begin with.
This sounds kinda close to a personal attack. Not to mention there is a vast difference between threatening to not leave a tip ("if you don't split this check then I won't tip you") and what the parent post did (bringing up how refusing customer service right before a tip is given is likely to hurt the tip, never mentioning if this was a conscious or subconscious behavior change made by the tipper).
While typically irrational for the individual, anger can be rational for the selfish gene, thus be preserved in the species: angry bees are avoided by other animals even if individual bees are suicidal, thus making the suicide of an individual work for the group.
So whenever you feel the need to go on a rampage destroying yourself along with your archenemy, you should really ask yourself if you are still in control, or you are executing out a program developed 1 million years ago and designed to protect the occupants of your cave from attacks of rival hominids, even at the price of your life.
2. If a waiter spends 10 min at the POS splitting a check, other tables are being ignored and management might not like that.
Interestingly enough, a server works for three parties: guest, restaurant, and themselves.
Sucks but true. Gotta choose lesser of three evil sometimes.
http://www.zonal.co.uk/aztec-epos-solutions/
Not only does it split the bill N ways easily, it can cope with all manner of per-seat bills and shared items.
A friend of mine says typically when she splits a bill, both payees will assume the other is a crappy tipper/don't want to tip less, so they'll both tip a higher percentile and she'll occasionally get 1.5-2 times the tip money, so when people ask her to split a bill she just hears more money coming.
Purely anecdotal, YMMV, etc. etc.
EDIT: I'm curious if downvotes are due to people not wanting wait staff to get bigger tips or if it's because wait staff in my area don't gripe about splitting bills? I never expected this comment to cost me karma, but such it is.