DON'T FORGET TO TIP YOUR WAITRESSES.
Why is it that restaurant waitstaff aren't paid a living wage?

One of the basic foundations of our society is equality. We have historically gone to great pains to promote the ideal that no class of citizen is inherently superior or more entitled than any other. (We're still, obviously, working on this.) We have no hereditary aristocracy, and social mobility is much more a reality here than in many other countries.

And still, the idea that a tip is a gratuity is a semantic fiction. A waiter's income is determined every day by people who are not his employer. If he happens to have many (or generous) customers, he can pull down quite a bit, but if his customers are few or stingy, he's up a tree. It's a steady, honest job, but not one with much financial security. Wouldn't it make more sense to pay servers a living wage, like other working people? Quality control, that's what I'm saying. Let people tip if they want, but make a tip an actual reward for exceptional service, rather than a carrot on a stick.

Alternatively, we might reach the point where servers prefer not to be tipped. When I was studying in Edinburgh, a group of fellow students assured me that leaving a tip was entirely unnecessary because the waitress was paid by the restaurant and would be fine. In other European countries, the bill is itemized to include "service charge," but that's non-negotiable, just part of the price of the meal. I'm told that in Australia, offering a tip (to a cab driver, I believe, in the advice I was given) is quite an insult.

In the meantime, though, servers depend on tips. So allow me, please, to offer Fox's Three Rules of restaurant dining:

1. Overtip at breakfast. It's a lousy shift, for a start, but more than that, the food is cheaper. Even twenty percent of the price of cheaper food isn't much of a tip. You make less money at breakfast than at dinner, but you work just as hard (if not harder). But if every breakfast table leaves an additional dollar, that's only another buck out of each customer's pocket -- and it can be another twenty the waitress takes home. (This applies in general to lower-priced meals.)

2. Tip in cash whenever possible. If you charge your meal and add the tip to the charge slip, there's a paper trail. They know exactly how much the server got, so he pays tax on all of it. If you charge your meal and leave the tip in cash, he pays tax on what they assume he got, which is less than most decent people leave as a tip -- in some states, it's as little as eight or nine percent of the check. Again, this job is not a huge money-maker. Especially if you get particularly good service, do the waiter a favor.

3. If the food takes forever to get to you, but it's hot when it arrives, don't blame the waiter. Odds are it's the kitchen's fault -- and those guys don't work for tips. Screwing the waitress because someone else fell down on the job isn't nice, and it isn't appropriate.

Better yet, though, people should be paid enough to live on for doing a full day's work. This applies as much to waitstaff as it does to police, firefighters, and teachers -- people we depend on, and who are almost never paid even a fraction of what they're worth.