Jason Sudeikis is sparking some serious debate after a resurfaced convo he recently had on the ethics of tipping waitstaff.
The chat went down last month during his appearance on Benny Blanco's Friends Keep Secrets podcast, alongside Lil Dicky and his wife Kristin Batalucco — and it all started with a casual, if slightly strange, admission from Benny: "When you're tipping at a restaurant, it's an interesting world to be in."
"How do you do the math for 12%?" Jason joked, before Kristin said, "I get too scared to do anything other than 20% or above."
“You know what the worst thing is?" Benny followed up. "When it's an automatic gratuity at 18%, because then you're like, how do I even add a percentage? Then I'm like, oh, it's too low.”
"He criticizes me for tipping 20%!" Dicky exclaimed, gesturing to Benny. "Instead of what?" Jason asked. "30%, 35%," Dicky responded.
“I don't think it teaches anything, tipping poorly," Jason said. "Because if someone is not good, like a waiter or waitress at a diner type place, and they're just brusque and not checked in, and you wanted to be there for 45 minutes, but you were there for an hour and a half because they were just not there — that's kind of nuts that would happen."
"But if you only tipped 10%, they're only going to walk away from there going, ‘What an asshole,’ versus if you're going to tip 10%, I think you got to give a note saying, ‘I normally tip more, but you were so...’ or say it to them.”
If you've ever been online at all, you know tipping discourse is always all the rage, so of course people had some strong opinions on this one:
"There is probably close to $100m in that room and they upset about tipping," one person observed. "Goes to show how wild everything has gotten."
"Imagine having $25-50M in the bank and a $5-10M home, your pay works out to something like $500-1000/hr and you work eight months of the year... and you're not handing out $1k tip every time you go to dinner or just doubling the check?" another person wrote, before adding, "This is sone kind of sociopathy..."
"I agree on some points," one commenter conceded, "but millionaires (from Hollywood… not actual business entrepreneurs) talking about tipping culture is not a good look."
Another person pointed out that Jason's "fix" for reasoning a 10% tip isn't exactly the best way to handle things. "unfortunately you ask for a manager and tell THEM your service was poor," they wrote. "the only way waiters will change unfortunately. i tip the base even with poor service because i just can’t be bothered to complain at all."
This person, however, summed things up quite perfectly: "MILLIONAIRES BITCHING ABOUT TIPPING??? THE WRONG PEOPLE ARE WEALTHY."
Can't argue with that! Watch the entire episode below:
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