To Insure Prompt Service.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has spent many enjoyable hours in the company of friends eating in restaurants. Sometimes your Maximum Leader goes with a large group to a restaurant. He has always been dismayed by restaurants that automatically add a 15-20% gratuity to the bill of larger parties.

(Aside: Dismayed because if the service is good, your Maximum Leader tends to be a good tipper. And if the service is good, and the waitress is a hottie; then your Maximum Leader is a very good tipper. Of course, when your Maximum Leader and the Foreign Minister go out to eat - they are inevitably given the table with the server-in-training, or the only waiter in a restaurant full of hot waitresses.)

Now your Maximum Leader understands why an eating establishment should do this. Generally a server (waiter/waitress) will work a single large party table (room) and not work multiple small party tables. The automatic gratuity is a means by which the server is assured of making a significant tip for sacraficing his chance to earn mulitple smaller ones.

But then again... What to do when you are with a large party and your service sucks?

Your Maximum Leader is mindful of the fact that the term "tips" comes from the coffee houses of Georgian England. During the 18th century, London was rife with non-Starbucks coffee houses. Businessmen would frequently sit at a booth for hours on end meeting with other businessmen and making capitalism work. The waiters at these coffee houses wouldn't want to waste their time on customers who would order one cup of coffee and sit for hours. So they put little coin boxes on the ends of the tables and labeled them "To Insure Prompt Service." When customers put money in the box, the waiter would serve them. The more money you put in the box, the better service you got. Your Maximum Leader isn't certain when the TIPS were moved to the end of the visit, but he likes to think it was some enterprising young capitalist trying to gague the market before shelling out his hard-won cash.

So, what to do if you are in a large party, your service sucks, and you are faced with an automatically generated 20% tip charge?

Don't pay.

Of course, you might be sued by the restaurant for theft.

But then again you might go to court and win. Your Maximum Leader applauds Humberto Taveras who recently won his court case for not paying that automatically added gratuity.

Carry on.