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I've just recieved an offer in a Groupon mail listed as: £69.95 instead of £239.00 - Classic Black Pentax I-10 Digital Camera with Kodak Portable Charger at Teqport A quick search on Amazon shows it available at £74.98.
>Bad restaurants use Groupon because they have to - and any place that can discount so much for their customers makes me question how ridiculous their prices are to start.
In my experience, the restaurants that use Groupon are mediocre to good. Maybe it's a regional thing, but there are so many restaurants here that even many good restaurants aren't very busy.
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Yeah, it's already common to not tip anyway. Sometimes I tip, sometimes I don't (though when I do, I'm more generous than the standard 10%).
FYI: 10% isn't standard: 15% is standard, 20% is good, and 25% or more is for great service.
I had a similar terminal groupon experience: I had meal of really, really bad indian food, at a restaurant I would never have tried otherwise and when I mentioned I was going to use a groupon I was told that my bill now included a 15% non-negotiable "service charge". In fact, my bill was taken back and changed so it was clear that the "tip" was compulsory.
I wasn't aware tipping was all that common in the UK but here in Canada I would be wary of using Groupon for that exact reason. Personally I find tipping to be a nearly meaningless exercise (nearly because occasionally great service deserves a bit extra). Because I live in a country where we are expected to tip, restaurant owners do (and are allowed to with lower minimum wages) expect to be able to underpay their sta…
I agree, I think mandatory tipping is absurd. I think people partially disassociate tip with their assessment of a restaurant's cost, so is a way for restaurants to appear cheaper. I think wait staff should perform to the best of their ability or be fired. I find it ridiculous to pay someone $1 to open a beer for me (ie. a bartender) or spend 30 seconds taking my order and then bringing my food out to me. Other times you are expected to tip maybe $1 for someone rigorously drying my car after a car wash. Seems disconnected. I hope technology helps offset this cost (automatic bartenders/ordering machines).
I'm also not sure why some restaurants have not tried to create a model of anti-tipping. I know many people that would like to go to a place that essentially says: "We pay our people well, if you feel that you have gotten a great experience, please tip by sharing us with your friends or donating to this charity."
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IAmerican tipping culture: there is a near-involiate presumption that wait staff gets tipped N% of the order. Customary practice recently is N is 20. Theoretically, tips are tied to service received. In practice, variation from societal norms is vanishingly rare in polite company. Waiters in higher priced restaurants do make better tips as a consequence of this. That might matter if the culture were designed. It was…
Side note - in California 18.5% is the customary practice for tips, though, to make it easy, you can round up to 20%. No service person will complain. If you get lackluster service, you can point it out with a 15% tip. Poor service gets a 10% tip, and, will make it clear you are unhappy. After 15 years of doing this (I'm from Canada, where tips aren't as proscribed, though they are still expected) I find it awkward a…
Do you really not understand why the waitress's demeanor changed the moment you mentioned using a coupon? Seriously? You know wait staff live on tips right? You know that people who use coupons are notoriously bad tippers right? There are very, very few people who feel they got a deal so leave a bigger tip. Most leave a tip based on what they paid, not on what the meal should have cost and people that use coupons tip…
If this is the case, then as far as my reading of the story goes, upon discovering that she was serving people who she believed would be stingy tippers, she behaved in a way that would make even a generous tipper leave nothing. This seems counterintuitive.
Worse, it creates the results expected, reinforcing the bias, leading to more bad service because the worst suspicions have been "confirmed."
Now everyone is screwed.
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I agree, in the internet age I was hoping searching would become more efficient so that 'find good restaurant in xxx' was a sensible thing to type into a search box. Currently there's too much noise so places like yelp are a much better option. Interestingly Yelp hasn't taken off here yet.
To me sites like Yelp and Urban Spoon have too much signal to noise ratio as well. I readily admit I am a food snob. And not the tasteless, this place is expensive so I have to be seen here type. I am very critical of food. I have a culinary degree and I have a refined pallet when it comes to food. I eat at hole in the wall joints as well as 5 star restaurants and the only thing I care about and judge a restaurant by…
Some people will always knock down any place, no matter how good the food is, on price alone. That 5-star french place? Terrible! They charged $8 for a side of something!
You learn who reviewing you can trust and who you can't. I've recently moved to Columbus Ohio and I've found that people here have no taste for Sushi. You could take some gum off your shoe, put it on some rice and they'd think it was good and exotic. Places that have solid 4-star reviews here for sushi taste worse than stuff I'd get from random Trader Joe's in Boston that had been sitting there for 2 days.
So it goes both ways. I generally look for things about the service (a big one to me, and something that this down just doesn't know anything about either it seems), plus a little about the food quality. I wish it was the other way, but generally except for the basic description of their varieties and pricing I can't trust the reviews.