Tip! Tip! Double Tip! bar and restaurant patrons are asked to tip their servers well

APPLETON, Wis. (WBAY) - A year after the state’s initial stay at home order was enacted, some in the bar and restaurant business are still trying to bounce back financially. A campaign is underway in the Fox Valley to encourage patrons to make sure they’re tipping their servers well.

Servers and bartenders are paid per hour, but that’s not how they make good money. According to Kia Penglase, a waitress at Mad Apple Burger & Billiard Co., “Definitely the bulk of everything we make comes from tips. That’s what keeps us afloat, keeps us surviving.”

So, when the pandemic slowed the bar and restaurant business down, servers and bartenders weren’t doing as well. And while things have started to pick back up, servers say in some cases tipping hasn’t.

“It’s been a little bit of a struggle in the past year. It’s slowly climbing back up, but people are coming out and not necessarily, I don’t feel tipping as much as they used to or as well as they used to. Some people do, some don’t,” adds Aime Hutchins, also from Mad Apple Burger & Billiard Co..

Appleton businessman Carl Romenesko recently launched a grassroots campaign to help servers and bartenders. It’s called Tip! Tip! Double Tip! and the idea is to leave a little extra for your server if and when you go out to eat or to a bar. “In this time of what we’re going through because the restaurant industry got hit that we would help people by double tipping,” says Romenesko.

Romenesko teamed up with Fox Communities Credit Union and more than twenty bars and restaurants in the Fox Valley to promote this idea. Participating establishments each donated eight $25 gift cards that people who visit these places can be entered to win. Romenesko hopes the contest will bring more people in to bars and restaurants, and while they’re there, maybe they could leave a little extra for their servers.

Romenesko adds, “It’s more of a campaign of just spreading the word that the servers and bartenders need our help and that way they’d more or else join our campaign by leaving a little larger tip.”

Servers say while the extra tip money is always helpful, sometimes the gesture means so much more. “Sometimes when you seat a table and all of sudden you look at the tip at the end of the day and you see that they tipped a little extra it helps more than you could ever imagine,” adds Penglase.

Tip! Tip! Double Tip! runs for another five weeks.

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