Diner leaves $10,000 tip at Florida restaurant

How wonderful! I am so happy for them. The person who left the tip was wonderful to do it.

Florida is a wonderful place.

Awesome :)

Always love to hear stories of free humans demonstrating their natural generosity.

Now tax this diner hard and make them pay their “fair share”!! (joking)

What makes only the staff in the restaurant get tips? Why not other field? Like why don't security gets tips? Or the cleaner? Anyway, it's good that Japan is against the tips for anyone.

Japan doesn’t do tips but sometimes in the news we hear about people donating big lumps of money to their local government etc.

Donating money to government seems like the worst use of money possible to me, but each to their own.

That's great!

The customer's largesse is to be praised but doesn't change the reality that charging customers for over-large portions and dispensing a pittance to the serving staff is the proven practice defining the bizness model of American restaurant racketeering.

Well done generous family. Thanks for sharing JT. More articles like this please.

Of course tips should be given out everywhere-then Japanese mindset is that tips should not be given is a big mistake!

What should be given is a decent minimum wage. Then, eventually, tips.

Unfortunately in the United States tipping is, like most things, deeply connected with the country’s history of slavery, racism and segregation:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/17/william-barber-tipping-racist-past-227361/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/16/fact-check-tipping-kept-wages-low-formerly-enslaved-black-workers/3896620001/

At the academic level there are also lots of researches on the impact of tipping and its perception has on different minorities still today, except in those few states that have a legislation imposing much higher - or rather decent - minimum wages in the restaurants sector (3$ and 15$ is not the same thing…).

What should be given is a decent minimum wage. Then, eventually, tips.

Just decent pay should be given. I used to work for tips, and it's humiliating when you think about it. It's forcing a hard-working person to be something like a beggar - relying on the kindness of strangers rather than just being paid for their work like every other working person. I had some massive tip days, like winning the lottery. Also had times when I barely made enough to pay the rent after working all month. But either way, it's demeaning. A worker should be paid for their work, not forced to do a song and dance in the hopes of a big tip to make up for all the small tips.

Florida is a wonderful place.

Florida is to the USA as Saitama is to Japan.

BTW I left the tip because the service was really excellent.

The person who left the tip was wonderful to do it.

Yep. The wealthy are truly wonderful people.

Where would we be without them?

Refreshing news, glad to read something like this, it's been a long time. enjoy every penny of it guys, we need more of these diners here too.

I hope japan will start allowing tipping, waiters and waitresses work so hard with low salary, tips are motivating and very helpful, but it seems that the owners don't really care.

Ha! For those who think this story is about tipping . . you've missed the point. It's about philanthropy.

Tipping itself is a nasty custom; I think most would prefer to have a system of pricing built into costs and do away with tipping. Why should customers have to step in where the owner of an establishment shirks responsibility to pay a reasonable wage?

I hope tipping doesn't become a custom in Japan, where virtually all min. wage workers don't think the job at that level is a permanent career.

I know from my parents in Florida that in good restaurants where you are a regular customer big tips are given. Dinner for four costing $300 with a $150 tip.

I know bartenders who earn more tips in one night that many people earn in a week

In some places in the US, they experimented with a no-tipping policy and instead raised the workers' wages but paid for by slightly raising the prices of the food

In many restaurants, that actually resulted in less people going into those restaurants vs. the competition, and the workers actually earning less than when they were tipped, with workers quitting those restaurants in favor of working in restaurants that have tips

"The Limitations of American Restaurants’ No-Tipping Experiment"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/the-limitations-of-american-restaurants-no-tipping-experiment

Restaurants that decide to eliminate tipping typically raise menu prices in order to cover the cost of paying their staff members a substantially higher base wage, or else they add an automatic service charge for the same purpose. In either case, the increase is usually less than twenty per cent, so that customers will end up paying around the same price for a meal that they would under a tipping system.

Restaurant owners can use this new pool of revenue to provide their employees with benefits, such as health-care coverage, retirement plans, and paid family leave, in addition to boosting pay for kitchen workers. This means that servers often receive new employment benefits as a result of the transition but that their cash earnings may shrink. One can understand why some decide to leave.

The backlash from restaurant patrons is somewhat more surprising. The cost of their meal should be about the same, with fewer steps in the payment process and no post-prandial math. So why should no-tipping establishments lose business?

New research by Lynn shows that when restaurants move to a no-tipping policy, their online customer ratings fall. One factor that explains that dissatisfaction is how we, as consumers, respond to “partitioned” prices versus “bundled” prices. A partitioned price divides the total cost of an item into smaller components—say, a television listed for a hundred and ninety dollars that has a ten-dollar shipping fee. A bundled price would list the television, shipping included, for two hundred dollars.

Consumers tend to perceive partitioned prices as cheaper than bundled ones. Lynn says that a customer who routinely tips fifteen per cent will see a gratuity-included restaurant as more expensive than a traditional restaurant with menu prices fifteen per cent lower. “In fact, a customer who routinely tips twenty per cent”—making her total bill higher than the gratuity-included alternative—“will still view the no-tipping restaurant as more expensive,” Lynn told me.

Lynn found that online customer ratings fell even more dramatically when restaurants instituted a mandatory service charge. People don’t like price hikes, he said, but they accept the logic of a restaurant taking on responsibility for its employees’ full wages and pricing its goods accordingly. They hate service charges. The underlying issue is that, while it is strongly encouraged by social norms, tipping is still notionally optional; being automatically billed for it feels like a “gotcha” moment.

In Lynn’s study of online customer ratings, mid-scale restaurants suffered more after instituting no-tipping policies than upscale ones, where, he hypothesizes, customers are less price-sensitive. This suggests that, for the time being, success with tip-free programs may be restricted to the very high end... The biggest thing holding them back is customers’ suspicion that doing so is a ripoff.

Thus, the no-tipping system does not work for everyone

There is an another NRA (National Restaurant Association) in the USA. NRA does not want to pay their employee a minimum wage rather left them to survive by throwing away money. I personally feel tipping is a bad culture. I find it is disrespectful, even when I pay for it. It is also a job like any other job. Sometimes people argue in favour of tipping for a better service. Their job is to serve you nor to entertain you. Just pay them what they deserve according to federal law. If it requires to increase in the food price, increase it.

I personally feel tipping is a bad culture. I find it is disrespectful, even when I pay for it. It is also a job like any other job. Sometimes people argue in favour of tipping for a better service. Their job is to serve you nor to entertain you. Just pay them what they deserve according to federal law. If it requires to increase in the food price, increase it.

This only works when all places have the no-tipping policy. Otherwise, as the study linked above shows, the no-tipping restaurants are losing patrons' business and workers to tipping restaurants

Your sentiment is good, but there's not enough of people like you to prevent no-tipping restaurants from losing out to their competition that allows tipping