Een Fooi - n. - A Tip

The Dutch are not big tippers. This will be no surprise to anyone who lives here, but it still shocks me how little will get a slight nod of appreciation. The picture above has twenty-five cents in it. That's acceptable. In NYC that would get you chased down the street. (I had a friend who claims to have once chased someone down the street waving his one dollar tip saying, "Did I do something wrong?")

I was a waiter in Manhattan for about five years. A couple of years exclusively, one year while going to graduate school and one year to supplement my "real job" and because it was easy money two nights a week. See how I still have to justify it a bit? Normally, I talk about my waiter experience like I'm talking about having been in the armed services. But then I think about just waiting tables and just living my life and I have to shorten that time served in some way.

After about six months of waiting tables, I happened to be talking to a guy in his forties who was a "cater waiter" - slightly different than a regular waiter. I was in my mid-twenties. He said, "At some point, you'll want to be able to do something that not everyone can do. Now, not everyone can wait tables, but almost everyone thinks they can." That moved me towards finding the way out of the waitering business. (Okay, do the math. I didn't do it immediately, but it was always on my mind.)

I believe that part of the reason waiters here don't get tipped is because the service generally sucks. And I believe that the reason that the service generally sucks is that waiters don't get tipped. It's a circular thing. If waiters depended on tips, they would give much better service. But they get a salary here and tips are just an extra bit of money in their pocket. It doesn't represent the rent, the phone bill and the student loan payment.

I've had waiters stand three feet from me and look right over my head before they head back to the kitchen to emerge whenever they feel like it. That's not the way it's supposed to be done. You're supposed to look at every table and see if the customers need anything. Are they trying to catch your eye? Are they all sitting with empty glasses? And waiters shouldn't roll their eyes when the customer wants something. Or take one drink order from a full table and walk away.

Strangely, in New York, if we heard English accents, we knew we were going to get ten percent. If it was a French or German accent, we knew we were just screwed. No one talked about the Dutch accent - because no one knew the Dutch accent. They probably fell into the latter category.

One of the first times Fred and I went out, I left a NYC tip on the table. He said, "Don't leave that much! They'll start expecting it." He's all for keeping the tipping down and putting up with crap service. The Dutch - as a people - have a lot of strengths. Service is not one of them.