Quote Originally Posted by spoonitnow View Post
I stopped by a Waffle House a week or two ago to grab some lunch while I was running errands. I ordered a chicken sandwich, hashbrowns and a drink for a total of about $8. The restaurant was not busy, and I was one of maybe four people in the place. Here are two extremes on what could happen:

Scenario A: If the waitress brought me more drink when she needed to, brought my ticket without me having to sit there with an empty plate for several minutes, offered me a to-go cup without me having to ask for one and acted polite, I'd easily tip her $5 or more.

Scenario B: If my drink sits empty for a couple of minutes while my waitress sits on her ass on the phone, she's probably getting a tip in the range of $0.03 so that she knows I did it on purpose.

Thoughts?
My thoughts, again, are that tip is a charge that is implicitly added to every bill, and if you don't feel that this establishment is worth their service charges, then don't go there to eat. I mean, Waffle House is pretty fucking infamous for having horrendous service, so if you weren't interested in getting $8-worth of food for $10 because the service there isn't worth the $2, then I would suggest going somewhere else to get your waffles.

I mean, hell, to extrapolate it even further, you could make waffles at home for the price of like $1 per waffle, but clearly the Waffle House dining experience appeals to you so you can sit on your ass and do nothing but point at a picture and you'll get it brought out to you (also, the cost of overhead and all that). I'm sure that cooks at Waffle House are also terrible at their job (helping to contribute to how slow the food comes out, btw), but if your eggs come out with runny yolks when you asked for over-hard and your waffles are a little chewy from being undercooked and all that, you can't really negotiate how much the cooks get paid. You can decide to not eat there anymore, you can decide to complain to a superior about the quality of their work, in extreme cases you can urge to not pay at all if it is completely unacceptable/inedible/etc, but directly docking their pay isn't an option you have.

We only get into these considerations of "well ANYone could of done what he/she did" or "they're not good at what they do" or "it all evens out in the end" when it's this strange implicitly built-in price that restaurants have.