Restaurant Tipping: 15 or 20 Percent?

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LA Weekly’s Jonathan Gold has some advice about tipping:

Tip 20 percent. Every time. Pre-tax? Post-tax? In practice the difference is no more than a buck or two….Yes, I know your parents still talk about when the recommended percentage used to be 15 percent, and that the practice is considered barbaric in Japan. But it’s not 1973, and you’re probably not in Osaka at the moment. 20 percent.

I figure this is something readers might know something about, so: When did this change? After 1973, apparently, but that’s a little vague. And why? Do food servers make less in ordinary wages than they used to? I don’t think that’s the case, though I might be wrong. And just generally, tipping seems like it’s perfectly designed to keep up with the cost of living. And it has: To geek out about this a bit, the chart on the right shows headline inflation vs. the inflation rate for “food away from home.” There’s a slight divergence during the recent recession, but that’s it. Overall, the rate has been pretty much the same. Restaurant bills have gone up as much as everything else.

Anyway, I’m not trying to campaign for stingier tips for food servers. I’m fine with 20 percent, and it’s certainly easier to calculate. But I’m trying to distract myself from the grim political news of late and just sort of curious about when and why the recommended practice changed. Or is Jonathan Gold wrong?

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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