Japanese Travel Tips for Visiting America
mentalfloss.com
mentalfloss.com
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."
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:
$17.... 5.5%
$18....11.7%
$19....18%
$20....24.2%
$21....30.5%
Also, never use the pre-tax amount, cheapskates!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[Yes, it was Olive Garden - more breadsticks?]
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
Gross generalisation time: I've met very few Americans I disliked as individuals, but an awful lot that in groups become intolerable. A lot of it seems to be that the barrier for nonsensical optimism creeps lower with each extra member added to the group until absolute irrationality reigns supreme. If you try to burst this bubble you are screwed, and the only thing to do is walk away and hope to be far enough away that when it blows up you're not in the blast radius.
The thing is one time out of ten they're right and the cynics among us are wrong, and you have to love them for that. As Churchill is often quoted as saying you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing, once they've tried every other possibility.
EDIT: So is the third link. Well not entirely, but the first half.
[1] http://freakonomics.com/2013/06/03/should-tipping-be-banned-... (or more directly, http://tippingresearch.com/uploads/customer_racial_discrimin...)
b) Employers are required to make up the difference if you don't make the real minimum wage (7.25) with your tips.
c) In practice, waiters do much better than the rest of the kitchen. I worked as waiter and kitchen staff for six years at a cheap buffet. Servers pulled $150 for a five hour shift, on average. Everybody in the kitchen made minimum wage.
I have to add though, the serving and attention to customers was much better than over here. You're frequently out of drink in restaurants/bars over here, and the serving personnel doesn't seem to have the time or will to take care of that. Which is a missed sale, of course; over the course of an evening out, that adds up to 1-2 lost drink sales.
And also because a lot of people just can't get a job in the area they want. I know of a lot of people online that went for a degree in game design, but the jobs just aren't there. If they do get a job in the game industry, it's often as tester - bottom of the ladder.
Uh, is it really that bad to start your career at a junior job?
Besides, graphics/game developers in my experience know a lot about math, algorithms and fast implementation. They should be able to get jobs somewhere else?
Do you think you'd have a whole lot of ability to be picky?
There are the rare few that select service work over better paying work (CS/Engineering grads choosing to serve, bar-tend, barrista, etc. This is an accepted identity among people in Austin, TX and I'm sure other areas). Some of this may be under-performance, but I think it is more a respect for simplicity and a desire to appreciate life and people: they do it because the want to.
More often than not, service work is filled by people with a need for any job at all.
Minimum wage jobs, on the other hand...
I had zero choice for jobs. I competed with many other desperate kids for that job. In the end my choice was to leave the area, but I was smart and burdened with a teenage pregnancy or the massive family responsibilities of some of my peers.
I'd rather they just be paid a livable wage and tips be optional.
Honestly, though? I worked at a restaurant ($10 buffet) for six years and most of my friends work in the industry still. Almost all waiters make out much better than the rest of the kitchen staff. Additionally, many establishments (especially mom and pops) encourage waiters to report the minimum amount necessary (whatever works out to minimum wage) for taxes.
I wouldn't feel any worse for your waiter than for the guy who cooks your burger.
Bizarrely, though, waiters are much more vocal than the rest of the staff about their wages.
I don't know how kitchen staff don't go insane. Or maybe they do. Which is why I am always super nice to the staff at restaurants.
Remember that "tips" is an acronym for "To Insure Prompt Service".
No it isn’t.
- person taking the tip takes it all
- tip goes to the pool and everyone (including people not involved in your case at all) get the same amount
Neither one is fair for people involved. (And that's assuming staff gets any of the tips at all)
I love a lot of things about the US (I'm european) and I'd love to go back there soon, but the tipping system is annoying none the less.
I've decided that it's a peculiar form of North American efficiency: part of management and monitoring the service worker has been delegated to the client. If someone's working for tips, less supervision is needed to ensure they are providing great service. As long as everyone obeys the cultural norms, it's a win for the owner, customer, and service worker. For those who don't obey the cultural norms, well, at least the service worker has a base salary.
This explains why it's more normal to tip a waiter, but not so for a fast food restaurant. In fast food, the workers are staying put behind a counter, and the manager is just a few steps away anyway. The more mechanical your job is, the less sense tipping makes. Maybe this is crazy (and if you're a service worker feel free to say I'm stupid), but perhaps we should look at tippable jobs as being good, because it proves that the worker also has some autonomy and has to be acknowledged by the customer as more than a serving unit.
I worked as a delivery driver in Boulder, Colorado for a year. They paid me $4.00/hr because they expected me to make up the difference in tips. Though I often did, not everyone does and the accepted practice of tipping temps employers into thinking they can get away with paying ridiculous wages.
Formulas for tipping can be used to raise a wage above minimum wage, but not drop it below minimum wage. Employers are consequently not paying unlivable wages (or not below the minimum). They are just advertising formula for how you can get a bonus beyond the minimum wage.
Source: http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/q-a.htm
(If employers are breaking the law then that is an entirely different matter.)
Instead of thinking of it as an annoyance, think of it as a pleasant opportunity to improve the day of your server by tipping 25% or more. If you're a regular somewhere, being a good tipper is also a great way to become the servers' favorite customer and get outstanding treatment, favors, extras, and more, for what amounts to an extra buck or two per meal.
The idea that I am getting "a nice treatment" because I pay more makes me a little uncomfortable. I'm ok with, let's say, discounts or anything that could be considered "commercial services" (like a gift or an extra), but knowing that someone is nicer to me because I pay extra makes me feel weird...
All the "we're spending an obscene amount of money, so we're going to need a lot more help sucking up to us" kind of thing is something that baffles me, as it obviously fake...
I've been to many places where even tipping higher does not give you better service. I think its a case-by-case thing; some waiters/baristas/bartenders accept it and others don't.
On a more personal note, a minor annoyance is on small purchases (like $2.50 coffee), how much can I tip?
(Anyway, I understand is mostly a cultural thing)
There are many places in the US where it is legal to pay people $2.13 an hour (for the past 20+ years).
Of course we leave millions without healthcare too, so don't look to the US for sane, humane economic practices.
I'm not objecting to this stuff, but it does happen. Still I'd like the few grand I'd have if I didn't pay taxes either, but I suppose we have QN obligation to subsidise those who can't make it on their own.
And my version of that is:
* Tip 20% at restaurants if you have a waitress.
* Round taxis up to the nearest $5.
* If someone handles your bag or car, give them a $1.
Tips for other services should be based on what you would be paid at your job for the amount of time they are saving you, with a minimum of $1. If you would prefer not to tip the valet, park your own car.
If your service was more than a standard deviation better than the median, pay more. If it was more than a standard deviation worse, pay less. You shouldn't pay 0% without also considering a complaint to the management.
Only recently have our American vending machines added some variety. I still miss the extreme selection available in Japan.
Actually that list was somewhat educational- makes me consider how many times I may have baffled somehow due to the manner in which I laughed. I wouldn't have thought to ask anybody about the strangeness of my laughing habits.
How is American-style tipping different to, say, German? Being from neither, but having visited both... did I do it wrong?
In Switzerland, it's okay to not tip. You would usually tip at a restaurant though if the service was good. At a bar, you might opt to tip to round up the price, so say a beer costs X.70 CHF you'd pay X+1 CHF. If service was bad, I wasn't happy with the food, or anything else bothered me, I won't tip.
I wouldn't tip anywhere else other than a bar or a restaurant, except very occasionally a taxi driver if they did an absolutely amazing job (this happened maybe once, twice in my life).
(and there are probably more people taking a share of the larger tip)
I really don't mean to come off as snobbish, but, what kind of beer is worth drinking that comes in 18 packs? I'm not sure I've ever seen anything but cans of alcoholic water in that configuration.
Pick a few things and maximise those. Presumably the guy buying the 18 pack of beer chose something else.
You're factually correct that it is like premature optimizing code, but it is a hobby for quite a few people to optimize their lives. Others collect money. Some friends do board games. Or sport. (Personally, I spend a lot of time learning about some odd interests.)
I get my olive oil from an electrical hardware store around the corner from where I work - http://mroliveoil.com/page19.htm - how far do you go to get yours?
Lots of things are worth doing - often unavoidably so - but that doesn't mean you need to optimize each and every one of them until they're "right".
No, I don't "optimize" everything, but I do optimize a lot of stuff. If you like beer enough to consume 16 cans a week, then it sounds like something worth optimizing.
In general most things diet related are quite important to leave to chance. And if fun is involved too, then optimizing them can be fun too. You don't have to be OCD about it, just to try different brands and experiment.
>I get my olive oil from an electrical hardware store around the corner from where I work how far do you go to get yours?
Hmm, that's a bad example, as we value olive oil very much in my country, so I even have my own olive trees and produce my oil in cooperation with the village mill. Well, my parents do at the moment, as I live abroad now.
Despite its (unavoidable?) snobbishness, it really was the bare question itself, "what kind of beer that comes in 18 packs is worth drinking?" A few responses actually answered that; "beer that I can, or choose to, afford" was the essence of many of those. Or "because I like it" were some others.
Interesting, and probably not surprising, that most responses addressed the snobbishness behind the question, and that was as valuable to me as the responses that addressed the question.
Cheers!
Plenty of good session beers are coming in 12 packs these days too.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, necessarily, but at least be honest with us (and yourself).
EDIT: What's wrong about it is classism, though. Not everybody can afford premium microbrews.
sometimes I wish I had the gif "stop liking what I don't like" on a hotkey.
But if you're talking about American beer overall, Budweiser is much more common and therefore a better indication of mass-market American culture.
That is absolutely absurd no one shops at the grocery for a whole months worth of food. Most perishable items like meat and produce will barely survive a whole week. Everyone I know usually goes once or twice a week.
But, I am not sure I buy that this is the reason. I don't even know if the report is accurate. Are we really (on the whole) slower than the average Japanese market? I know we have a culture of 'friendliness' at the check out - lots of 'hi, how is your day going' nattering, and if you have a club card they peer at it, mangle your name, ask if they got it right, insist on you giving the correction, then say 'good day Mr Xybpppphhht.' All that slows things down a bit. But laser scanners are pretty fast, and a lot of cashiers really rip through very quickly.
It also might be regional. Thinking about it I think the grocery clerks where I grew up all went hell-bent, and things seem more laid back here in CA.
It's challenging to make pronouncements about an entire country as large and culturally diverse as the US.
Friendliness is definitely something that people come to expect from retailers. Could that be why Japanese lines are so fast. Maybe since they are only buying a few goods at a time the lines go quicker.
I didn't realize how second nature it was until I used it in Japan a few times- and noticed the usual effect was not achieved. I don't think I ever tried explaining it to anyone though.
Remember the USA produces a lot of TV & film that's watched in the rest of the Anglosphere, so we'd be familiar with US speaking patterns like that.
Similarly, I visited a friend in France once. On the way there, I took the TGV from Paris. I don't remember anything special about that leg of the trip, and learned nothing about France. On the way back, we drove, and passed through a bunch of little towns. I have a fond memory of helping a boater open a gate to a canal lock, and I still have a strong impression of how contained French villages are compared to American ones.
But, Americans aren't into subtlety...
Go to U.S. supermarkets or restaurant chains, you will find this is mostly correct.
Went to Olive Garden a couple of days ago, had some pork that was nicely cooked, but drenched in some kind of sugary syrup. It would have been much improved by eliminating the sauce entirely.
You even have to look closely at the ingredients when buying "Mexican" salsa or hot sauce. I sometimes get these home before discovering sugar on the ingredient list. Adding sugar to something meant to be hot and spicy totally perplexes me.
And I've lived here pretty much my whole life.
fact is, violent crime is way down since the 1990s. Not saying current levels are acceptable, but it sure isn't as bad as it is perceived.
An entire order of magnitude makes one stop and think.
If I offered you a drive in two different cars, and one was an order of magnitude more likely to burst into flames - which one would you choose?
"Safe enough vs incredibly safe" isn't as interesting a comparison as we tend to make it out to be.
(But still, there are lots of U.S. areas where I would prefer not to live...)
I live in Oakland, CA. A very dangerous place according to statistics. In reality, much of the crime here is in the "bad" parts of town, which I rarely travel to/through. I said "much". There are occasional murders outside the bad parts. They're rare, though.
Even people that live outside of Oakland but fairly close (Concord, 40 minutes by car) have this idea that gunslingers run amok in Oakland and it's incredibly unsafe. That is, until they actually come here a lot (for work, say).
I walk about 1 hour per day in Oakland (that's my commute from home to work). I've been doing this for 13 years. I've never seen one act of violence.
So, statistics can be misleading.
I wonder why it hasn't caught on with other racial groups though.
I'm very curious about this one - I can see putting a foot on a nearby chair/table could come across poorly, but crossing your legs by resting your foot on your knee?
I might believe it of other Asian nations, where traffic lanes and rules are more suggestions than anything else, but I cannot believe that Japanese drivers are anything like the aggressive, presumptuous, arrogant, frankly insane drivers we have here. And I count myself in their number!
Haha. So, true.
It's absolutely and utterly untrue.
Japanese drivers are generally very good, and tend to be reasonably polite/easy-going (the notable exception being anybody in a Ferrari or the like, but that's universal I guess), both in the countryside and in big cities. There are some annoying ingrained habits in Japanese driving (e.g. there's always a car or two that drives through when the light turns red, they seem to ignore yellow completely), but by and large they're fairly law-abiding. As a pedestrian, one doesn't feel like a target / second-class citizen (I'm referring to driver attitude here, though of course better urban design also helps).
American drivers, welll....... ><
Unfortunately, this isn't the case in UK. People love to talk about how much they can drink, and love to reel off an exact list of everything they drank the previous night like a list of achievements.
(in my experience of my peers throughout my life up to and including the age of 32)
Binge drinking in the UK is a huge problem.
http://www.alcoholpolicy.net/2012/06/statistics-on-alcohol-e...
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/02February/Pages/Binge-drinking-...
https://catalogue.ic.nhs.uk/publications/public-health/alcoh...
Drinking a lot and drinking often is mostly frowned upon. Being drunk outside of a social engagement designated specifically for getting drunk is almost universally frowned upon.
Restaurants could pay servers a commission or bonus based on the bill total or for specific items on the customer's bill. Customers could be asked to rate the service they received on a scale from 0 to 10 instead of calculating a percentage of their bill total. But tradition is a tough thing to fight.
20% extra for standard service, though, is ridiculous, and I hate it. Nor do I do 20%--even fancy places only do 18% gratuity, at least, the last time I was at one.
Our medical care is of lower quality than in most OECD countries, inefficiently delivered, and catastrophically expensive. (Rates of medical error are quite high, because younger doctors-- esp. residents-- work extreme hours.) An ER visit can run you $5,000 or more. Appendicitis goes into the $50,000 range.
As one example, the Texas Medical Center, one of the best in the world, treats 18,000 foreign patients a year who've traveled there specifically for the quality of care.
"If you're going to get sick, make sure it's in a place like Austin, Cleveland, Rochester, Baltimore, or New York that has a great hospital. And make sure that you get taken to the premier hospital in the region (e.g. don't let somebody take you to Kings County instead of New York Presbyterian). Be prepared to pay considerably for care at these facilities. Quality and cost are highly variable overall."
They don't.
Absolutely no one comes "to the U.S." for medical care expecting superior treatment. Not since the 1980s. Some people, for whom money is no object, come to specific doctors. If that doctor's in Paris, you go to France. If that doctor's in New York, you go to the U.S.