Shoe by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly for August 26, 2022

Here’s a hot tip…..Shady Lady in the 5th at Hialeah.

Oh, he figured it out alright. Then he deducted some for the lousy food, and more for the questionable service.

If it is a given that you MUST pay 20%, why is that not included in the cost of your meal?

In the Los Angeles area, state & local taxes combined are near 10% (or over, depending on the part of the county you’re in). So, I just look at the sales tax and ‘double’ that, for the tip.

The mathematician was brilliant, he calculated that a tip over 3.14125% was too high for the quality or Roz’s cooking!

Are you sure that wasn’t Jack Benny rather than a Princeton mathematician?

A tip for figuring a tip — just double the sales tax. Close enough.

Ask the wait person to add 20% to the bill. The response was “I don’t know how to do that” Sigh

20%? What happened to 15%?

Just because he didn’t leave it doesn’t mean he couldn’t or didn’t figure it out.

He was struggling with the integral of e^(-x) from 0 to the day of the month…

He wasn’t smart enough to avoid that place

He could figure it. He figured the service was not worth 20%.

Maybe the mathematician is better at math than she is at service?

I heard the worst tippers are the post-church crowd on Sundays. (Those fake $20 that are really prayer cards should be illegal.) Servers told me about how a pastor or equivalent would come and expect to not pay at all. I go with friends occasionally out to lunch on Sunday and I always make sure to tip at least 20%. It’s simple, $1 for each $5 or fraction thereof of the meal pre-tax. It’s all there on the receipt.

I don’t understand why the tip should be based on the dollar amount. If I order a bottle of wine, is it really harder to open a $30 bottle than a $15 bottle?

That’s the general joke about mathematicians that they can’t do simple math. But, I don’t think its all that warranted.

Some restaurants print out tip amounts (18%, 20%, 25%) on the bill so you don’t have to do the calculation. I’ve never seen one show less than 18%, though.

Roz, maybe better food and better service would have would have made it a lot easier for him to figure out a 20% tip.

Being able to calculate 20% is very different from being willing to pay 20%.

Different college, but the practice at my alma mater was that when dining with undergraduates, the youngest non-mathematician had to figure out the tip.

Bet he gave the paramedics 20%!

I am retired, but usually leave 20%+ — if I can afford to eat out, why not, can’t take it with me.

As many folks here are observing in various ways, figuring it out and deciding whether she actually deserves it are two entirely different things.

In real life, Ivy League graduates aren’t always smart. I once had a customer at the drive-thru in my bank ignore 3 “Do not enter” signs and come up to the window by the wrong way. When I mentioned to him that the next time he came he should go the correct way to avoid accidents he said he found it confusing. I told him that there were signs showing the way. He responded, “I have an MBA from Harvard and a pilot’s license and I found it confusing.” Anybody want to fly with this guy?

Another joke about a Princeton professor: While teaching at Princeton Albert Einstein joined a professorial string quartet. One particular day he had more than his usual difficulty staying in rhythm with the rest of the group. Exasperated, the leader said at another beak in the music, “Albert, the problem is obvious, you can’t count.”

Calculating is easy – 10% of $25 would be $2.50, double that is 20%. I tip somewhere in between.

Jethro Bodine must have shown up at Roz’s Diner and volunteered to help with the accounting!

Figuring 20% is easy: move the decimal one place to the left, then double the result. (And yes, I used to be an Algebra teacher.)