Tipping for Growlers

I'm tickled that I have a new meme from this thread - Gratuity Profilers & Gratuity Profiling. Love it!

 

E.g. Barley John's.

 

Make sure to tip 20% on that Dark Knight growler.

 

Needs the context of:

in order to provide relevance.

Also, we're now delving deep into the realm of thread hijacking

If I'm serving a group composed of adults with a child (or more), its actually more relevant to my bottom line to make sure i'm engaging the child more than the adults. There's a fine line between engaging and pandering, but again (based on personal experience) anyone with sufficient experience should know where that line is, and know when they're in danger of crossing it.

Clearly our differing regions may skew things as there are three brewery restaurants i can think of in the greater SoCal area (Stone, Pizza Port, and to a lesser extent beachwood bbq), but I would be surprised if the service staff at those venues found that tables with kids demand more effort and tip less than, say, out of towners visiting for a 'beercation', or the tables with unnecessarily complex orders. The venn diagram overlap is probably the worst of all tippers, tbh. Further, none of the brewery restaurants i've provided as examples offer kids eat free nights (we typically see those sorts of offers at places where the serving staff should be expected to operate significantly below what would be an acceptable level).

And, with all honesty, i'm a little perplexed as to how you can maintain the stance you do on tipping while knowing servers, unless they are the sort of servers you've described as being part of the problem.

But hey, if honest insights

 

As a beertender in a craft beer bar it's my goal to give you good enough service to where it makes you wanna tip. It's already been said, but we also sanitize your growler, change caps if necessary, mark which beer is which on multiple growler fills, sample you up without complaint( even when you're on your fifth sample), and even tell a bawdy joke or make for some witty banter when th situation arises.

As a whole in the craft beer bar scene the Benefits of being a reg and tipping are plentiful(not saying you gotta be a huge tipper). We run across sporting/concert/food and beer festival tickets that we love to give out, put people in contact for business gigs, seem to give food mistakes(and beer pour mistakes) to tippers, the semi occasional free beer, a great birthday, hand out free brewery schwag and samples, extra pours or growler fills of stuff that normally wouldn't go out in growlers, etc etc etc.

I don't expect a tip but I sure do appreciate em and I like to think I earn them with at least semi extraordinary service.

 

I need to know abv, ibu, location of brewery, production capability of said brewery, special ingredients, variety of hops, any awards the brew has won, similar brews of that certain style, draft system repair, explanation of glass styles, not to mention being able to describe each beer style in a way that even joeblow can understand. Hell I get asked about OG even. If someone asks me when Abyss is going to be released, I like to say....why, November 15th. It's a lot of research. I often call breweries to ask questions about the beers.

Man, all the sampling I have to do is just horrible. It's a rough job, but someone's gotta do it.

 

When did the "societal norm" for tipping creep up from 15% to 18%, and now apparently 20%? Sometimes people act like I'm cheap if I tip 15% for standard service, which is pretty confusing since that's what my parents taught me to do growing up. Of course, for certain people like my favorite bartenders, I'll leave much larger tips sometimes (25-33% is not uncommon).

 

Guilty here. Short of spitting in my food in front of me or punching me in the face when I ask for more napkins you're getting 20%. I've never had an outright rude server, but I do have slow/inattentive ones, but I always tend to make up excuses in my head as to why they aren't doing a great job and it usually involves them being down on their luck and really needing my tip money.

 

Still not quite the same in MA. Even at brewpubs, growlers are prefilled.

 

As a server myself I am often surprised how well some people tip. As YemenMocha stated above I earn ~11 dollars an hour with tips alone, and ~15/hour with my hourly wage factored in. On topic, I always tip for a growler fill just as I would for a pint that I was staying there to drink. I still took some time away from the bartender (or whomever) that they could have spent with customers sitting there. That being said, it's usually $1 or $2 unless the person was super friendly and went way above and beyond.

 

Assuming restaurant pricing has kept on par with inflation. However I'm fairly certain it has exceeded the rate of most goods & services. So, the 16.8% is actually on a higher amount than in the past. I've posted charts in the past but lack time at the moment. Most of us are aware of this from personal experience too, especially with appetizer prices, soft drinks, and alcohol.

It's hard to pin down the exact year(s) the change occurred, but we also switched from tipping on the tax also instead of the pre-tax total. Tax at restaurants is basically 10% here, so that's not insignificant.

This is very relevant to the growlers topic at hand. While I obey the tipping customs nearly all of the time and hand over $2 for a typical $10 growler refill, I think many of us are going to stick to the lower end of the tip amounts when those growler prices creep up, or when the growler happens to be $25 for Tripel Karmeliet.

 

With great frustration I obey the social norms for the most part. Only exceptions are that unlike most people I know, I will leave a really low tip or no tip if the service is absolutely atrocious. I tip above the norm to my most regular bartenders and servers who know us by name and know our orders before we sit down. I refuse to tip at areas of retail that are starting to put out tip jars because I want to stop the spread of this horrible tradition.

 

If I'm going to tip a dollar to fill a pint glass, why wouldn't I for a growler -- especially if they do a good job of it?

 

The brewers make a monster profit of these growlers - no tip. They're doing just fine.

I don't tip my grocery person for selling me beer that I bag myself and carry to my car, either. That person makes much less than the tattooed hipster filling a jug and has no tip can sitting at the exit.