Quote:
Originally Posted by casita37
Here's another hint. If you are a party of 6, or more, often restaurants add the gratuity to the check. Quite often, it is left to the discretion of the server, whether to add the grat or to leave it to the customer to add whatever they want. Usually it's 18%, but that varies.
Most people know to look to see if the grat has been added, but here is how the servers can scam you....Say the check for food and drinks is $100. That makes the grat $18. The server might go ahead and add the $18, and present you a check for $118, they will then run your credit card for $118, leaving the tip line as blank. If you aren't paying attention, you think your f&b bill is $118, so you then add an apropriate tip. So, if you add about $20+, you've just given a $38 tip on a $100 dinner.
When I was in the restaurant business, we used to dock the server if we found a such a check. Invariably, when reprimanded, they "forgot".....over and over and over....until they got let go.
Now, you may really want to add more tip. I suggest that you initial the added tip and the total, if that's the case.
Obviously, this type of thing doesn't happen very often, but with several threads on credit card scams started recently, I think we'll just pay cash.
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Let me get this straight. Diners know that restaurants add the gratuities for dining parties of six or more. The restaurant—or the server, whoever—adds the gratuity to the bill. The diner paying the bill, knowing the gratuity policy, doesn’t bother checking the bill and ends up leaving a second (unintentional) tip, and that’s the server “scamming”?
Since restaurant credit card machines are set up to print a gratuity line routinely, as in most instances diners pay their own gratuities, it seems to me that it’s the responsibility of the person signing the credit card slip to check. Blaming the server for this is just plain wrong. Even with the gratuity charged in this way, if the dining group received exceptional service, they might indeed want to add an additional tip on that line.
However, a server doing what this thread opened with is far from the same thing. In this instance, a server who increases the amount of tip left by the restaurant patron is a completely different story and indeed sounds like theft—grounds for being fired.