Last night, my wife and I had a wonderful dinner at our local Ruby Tuesday. We usually eat there a few times a month because it is currently the only chain restaurant in Thomasville, North Carolina that isn’t fast food.

I was rather surprised when I looked at my check and saw the following notice on the bottom:

The following traditional gratuity calculations are based on the total of the check including tax:

15%: $4.52
18%: $5.42
20%: $6.03

I’m sure that some people are offended by this, but I actually like it. I have no problem calculating a tip in my head, but it’s nice to see it right there in front of m. I’m sure that others appreciate it as well.

I wondered if others bloggers had written about this and I found a few that had (MoneyStuffed, Pet Peeving, and Steve Barnes). They seemed to mostly complain about the inclusion of tax in the calculation. I didn’t think about this because I’ve always included the tax amount when calculating tips. I’ve always considered myself to be a good tipper but perhaps I was just a little more generous than I thought.

For strict tippers that only tip based on the cost of food, not including sales tax, the guidelines on the bottom of the checks may cause tips to increase for some servers, but I also discovered that the algorithm they use excludes any other discounts or coupons. My wife and I had eaten lunch there the day before and I still had the receipt in my pocket. There was a note on the receipt stating that I could take an online survey and get a code to save $4.00 off my next meal there. While I was sitting at the table, I took the survey on my Samsung i760 and gave the coupon to our server.

You’ll notice in the scan of the receipt here that the tip amounts are based on the Total Due. Following those guidelines, the server would miss tips on $4 even though an extra amount had been calculated for the $2.16 tax. I checked and the tax is calculated correctly so it doesn’t exclude sales tax for the coupon–in North Carolina we have to pay sales tax on the price charged before any coupon discounts are applied.

So, the lesson learned here is even though the tip guidelines are helpful, you still have to be careful that you aren’t shorting your server if you have a coupon or discount.