Tag: dining out

If You Can’t Afford to Tip 20%, You Can’t Afford To Dine Out

Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 68 Comments

The tipping system sucks. It should be eradicated. But it’s the system that servers are stuck with to pay their rent this month, so we are where we are.

"We don't have any."

In the United States, we’ve built a tipping system that is designed to replace employer-provided wages with customer-provided tips. This is in opposition to how tipping was originally intended: as a merit-based reward system for service above and beyond the norm. Under this tipping reality, the amount of your tip isn’t a whimsy, but a necessity to servers.

So if you don’t tip 20%, your server isn’t getting paid even close to a living wage. And if you can’t afford to tip 20%… then you sure as hell can’t afford to dine out.

The power dynamics of tipping

There’s a perfect phrase to describe someone who tips low, or not at all: “garbage person.”

Read More
S2 E8: "A fancy restaurant mislead me! Was I right to refuse to pay the bill?"

Season 2, Episode 8: “A Fancy Restaurant Misled Me! Was I Right to Refuse to Pay the Bill?”

Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 17 Comments

We Bitches are many things—king makers, trendsetters, practitioners of all the best grandma hobbies. We’re also unapologetically obsessed with r/AmItheAsshole, Reddit’s glorious channel dedicated to the important and if-you-had-to-ask-you-already-know question “Am I the Asshole?”

This week we just could not fucking resist pulling a money-related question straight from r/AITA. Trust me: it was worth it. Dedicated readers and listeners will recall just how strongly we feel about the etiquette of tipping servers in these United States. So naturally, this one got our hackles up. Hopefully it will get your *cackles* up!

Read on for a phonetic spelling of gnocchi from an irritatingly oblivious guy who “likes to eat,” but only if the food is stolen and/or McDonalds. And ladies (just making an educated guess here), he’s recently single!

Read More

You Should Learn To Cook. Here’s Why.

Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 15 Comments

I take cooking pretty seriously. The fact that I catered my own wedding should give you a pretty good benchmark for just how seriously. I’m in the background of most of my own wedding photos as a blur in a white dress and a stained apron.

Nobody taught me how to cook. I taught myself the moment I realized the extent to which buying premade food instead of cooking killed my budget.

The amount of money you can save by preparing your own food is staggering. But as cooking became my habit, I discovered all sorts of unexpected additional benefits to my social life, physical health, mental well-being, and even my sex life.

Please go into this article with a basic working knowledge of the works of Frank Herbert, as there is a joke later that I think is really funny.

Read More