Tipping

Merriam-Webster defines gratuity as something given voluntarily or beyond obligation usually for some service.

That being said, tipping is tricky.  There are some basic guidelines like servers usually get a 15% tip for average service. For the most part this is common knowledge.  But what to do if the service was truly horrible?

Recently I went on a dinner cruise down the Cincinnati. We were seated by 630 and we didn't see our server until almost 7. We placed our drink order at that time and we didn't get those for 45 minutes. My brother pointed out that the server forgot his drink and after that the server mostly paid attention to my brother (the server was obviously gay, maybe he was hitting on my brother).  It was like this the rest of the night, we basically had to hunt him down to get any kind of service.

This isn't the only time I've had horrible service.  Once our waitress told us she was new to this and would do her best. I would expect nothing less and I'm definitely OK with a new waitress in training. She proceeded to tell the next table she had been doing this for almost a year. Long and frustrating story short, it took us almost 3 hours before we were finally able to leave. Talk about a waste of time (and the floor manager was useless).

A google search reveals we should always leave something, anything.  Officially I find nothing that states what should be done in this situation. That's too bad because I think if service is more than lacking somewhere I should be able to withhold their gratuity.

During this google search I did find an interesting tip guide at www.tipping.org. It has quite a bit of tipping etiquette on services I didn't know had an appropriate etiquette (specifically speaking, I had no clue there was proper etiquette for tipping at an exotic club. Did you know you should pay $3 tip per song when you are sitting next to the stage? Not including a tip for any fun moves you see. And if you pay for a private dance you should still tip them after the performance).