By tipping your simply encouraging restaurants to not pay their staff properly, it’s their responsibility not THE PERSON BUYING SOMETHING FROM THEIR BUSSINESS.

I do loathe budgeting (thanks for reading that one), but often these rules are similar to the idea of “focal points”–a way to converge on agreement or start out with the right frame.

You raise a question about the practice of tipping. I’ve heard interviews with managers that tipping isn’t about money but rather giving an incentive for service. I wonder if this is really true since there are many jobs people seem to work out of duty and they don’t need a tip to perform better.

Tipping also creates problems for people unaware of the customs. Who do I need to tip, and how much? I never know. Nowadays, I’m going to nicer places and finding I need to tip someone to get a towel after I wash my hands. I don’t always have singles, so I feel out of luck. I see many men just run out without washing their hands to avoid the awkward interaction. What a strange result of tipping.

Seriously though, I absolutely hate tipping. I would very much like to see wait staff paid a living wage. Maybe a “government health warning” like, “We pay our wait staff so little that they need tips to survive at all” required in large letters on the fronts of menus at places that don’t pay a living wage. One dirty little secret is that at some of the higher end restaurants the waiters are paid pretty well, and the tips are perks for them. At those kinds of places I generally tip less – at least when I can find out that the wait staff are paid.

To help the kids, I developed a rule of thumb, when dining out at a decent restaurant for 2 including wine, the final bill will be approximately 6 times the cost of the more expensive main course. This is a wildly inaccurate approximation, but does allow me to do a “budget” (yeah, I know I have read the budgeting blog posting)or to make a decision on how much I want to spend, if that is more appropriate in here, for the dinner. I have used this without fail for more than 30 years. It doesn’t help with the tip though

@David: Another fun game is to pit your children against each other by letting them guess the total bill (without seeing the receipt). It’s amazing how quickly a child can learn a $100 is really not that much money.