Anti-Climacus

I am in partial sympathy with Mungowitz over his bad experience at Ray's Hell Burger. Short version: he's at Ray's with a large group of people, gets the bill, pays and adds a tip, only to discover later that the bill already included a gratuity; the server folded the bill in such a way as to obscure this fact, leaving only the 'tip' (not 'additional tip') line visible.

There were two etiquette violations here, I believe: Mungowitz should have at least looked at the bill to ascertain that it was in the ballpark of the correct price, and Ray's should have made clear that the bill already included a gratuity. First, Mungowitz: he might frequent vastly different restaurants than I do, but I almost never go anywhere that I trust so much that I don't scan through the bill to make sure there were no extra charges. Partly this is from the experience of people regularly screwing things up, and partly this is a carryover from that eight months or so when I had no income and so every dollar spent had to be carefully scrutinized. I also function on the assumption that a large group will always get a gratuity and so check to confirm this before paying. It's a relatively simple and reasonable-to-expect step on Mungowitz's part to prevent this from ever happening.

On the other hand, the restaurant shouldn't even be putting him in a position for this to happen. The bill is long: there's not much that can be done about that. But the gratuity policy should be clearly labelled on the menus (I'm assuming based on the size of the group and the fact that he paid with a credit card that he was in the sit-down side of Ray's, which has slightly different menus than the other one), and the combination of not mentioning it there and not making it abundantly clear at any point after sitting down is asking for trouble. Also probably worth mentioning in this context (not as an excuse, but as an explanation): as of the last time I was there, the sit-down side didn't have dedicated waitstaff--service was poor, but that's not surprising given that they were treating that part as an extension of the regular restaurant.