Your server is not your servant. The person who brings your food to you shouldn’t have to grovel. I have heard of people who will put out twenty one dollar bills on the table and tell the waitress that if she performs to their happiness this will be her tip. Every time something doesn’t happen the way they think it should happen, they take a dollar away. They think they’re encouraging good service, but they are really simply promoting servitude.

When you go to a restaurant you have not hired someone to be your slave for the evening. If you want that kind of attention then you need to hire a butler or a prostitute. When you go to a restaurant, there are at least 20 other people the server has to wait on. You are not her only customer. It is not the waitress’ fault if the cooks are slow. It isn’t her fault if the food does not taste like you wanted it to. It is not her fault if the cooks mis-read the order and gave you the wrong thing. Don’t punish her for things that she has no control over.

Heck, don’t punish her at all. Remember that “treat others like you would like to be treated” thing? If you want to see how someone really is, watch how they treat the server at a restaurant. How they treat someone who can’t defend themselves says a lot about them. Don’t be that person. Treat the server as if she is your daughter. Be kind to her.

Ideally, we wouldn’t have a tip system for servers. They’d be paid a good wage to start off with. They wouldn’t have to do extra to get paid. The way the current system is set up, they are paid below minimum wage and they have to get tips to make up the difference. Tips aren’t extra. They are everything. Until that changes, you can make it easier on your server by just tipping well and not expecting her to do tricks for you.