In late February, the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the oldest African-American athletic conference in the U.S., held its annual basketball tournament in Charlotte, where visitors to the Ritz-Carlton found that they were being subject to an automatic 15% “CIAA Service” surcharge on their bills at the lobby bar. [More]
automatic gratuity
Are These The Final Days Of Automatic 18% Tips At Restaurants?
By 9.5.13
Many restaurants have a policy of automatically adding a 15-20% tip for large groups of diners, but that practice may be going the way of the dinosaur as a new revision to IRS income tax rules will make such auto-gratuities less attractive to servers and management. [More]
Automatically Adding Gratuity Only To The Bills Of Foreigners Is Pretty Much Discrimination
By 8.23.12
If you’ve ever traveled abroad, surely you’ve been told things like, “You don’t have to tip at restaurants in Europe” or other local customs you can expect to encounter. But servers at restaurants in Burlington, Vt. aren’t so sure an influx of travelers from Quebec are clued in to how tipping works, so some are just adding gratuity automatically to those bills. Awkward. [More]
Diners Say They Were Locked Inside Restaurant For Refusing To Pay Automatic Gratuity
By 5.3.12
It’s a common policy at many restaurants in the U.S. — if you have a party of a certain number or more, say, five or six, gratuity will be automatically added to your bill. But should you be able to refuse to pay that gratuity, if the service wasn’t so great? One group of friends thought so, and ended up locked inside a restaurant until the cops arrived. [More]
