[rant]
It occurs to me that this post won't make much sense to anyone under the age of about twenty-five or not in the military.
How much do you tip a bagger at the grocery store? I would like to tip zero. Here's the deal.
AAFES, the Army/Air Force Exchange Service, runs the BX and Commissary at Air Force bases. AAFES (also sometimes known as the Asian-American Female Employment Service, since most of the employees are servicemen's Korean wives (no exaggeration)) is one of the last grocery chains to employ baggers who actually take your groceries all the way out to your car. Most other chains--every chain I've shopped at in over a decade--eliminated this years ago. There was a time when the baggers in the store, the ones who actually bagged the groceries, still accepted tips, but even most chains now advertise that baggers don't take tips. Of course, this means baggers now earn minimum wage.
I'd like to know whether the baggers are doing better now, with minimum wage, than when they worked for tips and thus got paid less (like the two-bucks-and-change waitstaff at restaurants get).
At AAFES, the baggers work for tips only; therefore tips are expected. The baggers work in groups, three or four to a station at times. When all of the baggers in a cluster are middle-aged Korean women, they engage in noisy conversations in Korean while bagging your groceries. Then through some mysterious calculus one of them is chosen to wheel the funky vertical cart out to your car and put the groceries in your trunk.
After she puts the groceries in the trunk, you give a tip. I try to tip two to five dollars depending on the number of bags (I've read you tip porters at nice hotels a dollar a bag, so I use something like that).
But I'm tired of it. I don't want to tip baggers any more. I can carry my own damn bags to my car. On a normal weekly grocery run, where I spend about $40, tipping two bucks eliminates most of the savings I get by shopping at the commissary in the first place. But I can't just stop tipping.
Can I?
I mean, I get the impression some people don't tip the baggers (I have to resist the temptation to call them bag ladies). And there are some baggers I don't mind tipping, like the retired guys who fought in Korea (as opposed to their Korean wives) who like to tell you a war story while they cart your groceries out to the car. That's entertainment value; I enjoy storytellers and gladly tip those guys. But on the whole I'd give up the good baggers to be rid of all of them.
[/rant]
8 comments:
I think you tip way too much. $40.00 worth of groceries is probably 2, maybe 3 bags worth. Worthy of a one dollar tip. I come away with 15 bags or more and there is no way I'm tipping $15. $4 is my ABSOLUTE max and I consider that alot! If you can fit the 2 bags in your hands tip them pocket change .25-.50 and walk your bags out yourself. The secret of the baggers is to work the express lane. People usually tip at least a dollar sometimes 2, they don't have to walk outside and many more people come through those lanes in a given time period. This means lots o'money for the express ladies. Check out who works those lanes next time. It is usually an older lady and never a teenager, so seniority is the key there.
I try to imagine how many times an hour a bagger walks out with groceries and recieves a tip. If they are getting more than $10-11 an hour based on how much you tip x how many times they can make the same trip in that hour then you tip too much.
Service certainly doesn't get better with a bigger tip and you are driving up inflation so please try to keep your tipping down!
O'B
Tipping at the commissary-the age old quandary. I tip 50 cents a bag, up to 10 bags. However, they better be full bags not just a couple items to bring the bag count up. Always tip teens a little more because there are usually more kids wanting to bag than there are available spots. Bagger demographics vary widely by location. Carlisle Barracks PA-almost all teens on the weekends. Hickam AFB-lots of after school teens. Quantico MCB pretty evenly split between men and women, have never seen a kid bagging there.
You must not have too many pets Smitty because I could tip twice as well and still not spend as much as I would off base.
By the way AAFES does not run the commissaries, DeCA (Defense Commissary Agency) headquartered at Ft. Lee VA does. You can visit their way strange website at www.commissaries.com Here you can find out which aisle the peanut butter is on in any commissary worldwide.
That is a really weird quandry, and I'm going to leave it to your millitary friends for advice. But I think it would be weird, as a guy, to have a lady cart my groceries out. See, now where I would pay lots is if there were people at my house to take the bags back /out./
See, that's the thing, it's really much worse for me at home than it could be at the store. I have to get the groceries up 8 flights. We have a shopping cart in the lobby but it's usually missing.
It is weird to have some four foot Korean woman push my cart out to the car. Makes me feel like a damn plantation owner or something.
My problem is actually less a matter of tipping too much--though I'll certainly cut down on it based on y'all's comments. My problem is I don't want any tipping at all, because I don't want anybody to take my groceries out to the car for me. It's almost enough to make me start shopping at the Kash & Karry, except that I also have a strong aversion to deliberate misspellings in store names. And the Kash & Karry closed down anyway. There's a Sweetbay opening up downtown. Next year. I bet two bags of groceries there cost as much as four at the commissary.
Maybe I'll just start growing my own food.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Substituting Ks for Cs doesn't improve the alliteration one bit and just looks stupid. It's enough to make me pass by the "Hot Now" sign at Krispy Kreme (but in my mind I'm secretly painting over the Ks with Cs so it's sort of OK).
Does Chick-Fil-A bother you too? Besides the terrible made up spelling of the name, the cow billboards kill me. I mean if you're going to anthropomorphize cows, who's to say they can't spell. I asked one of the women working their booth at the Gasparilla Distance Classic about this and she just looked frightened.
Oh, I went to the commissary today. Bill was $31, ended up tipping $2.00 based on my estimate that the 6 bags really should have been 4.
I thought it was really weird (not to mention very 60's) that they had someone carry your bags out for us (that would be me and Dan) when I was over there. Because they're all Japanese, I sort of figured it was a way to give more locals work, a political move. I didn't really think about the fact that they'd do it in the states.
After using the Quantico commissary for 5 years, I finally decided to check out the "tipping rate". (I loved your AAFES observation.)
Having been an Army Brat eons ago, we tipped 10 cents a bag. All were students (my boyfriend would pay for our dates with dimes and quarters!)
I have been tippng $1 per 100 (hoping I wasn't being too cheap). It looks like that is the going rate from what I have been reading. I'm sure they share the tips, but I pretend they don't and tip an extra dollar for the teenagers.
Today I had a nice surprise. My bagger sorted my groceries for me - freezer items together, bathroom things together. etc. I wish I had paid attention, I would have tipped a little more. Oh well!
so i’m a bagger at a commissary and i have a feeling everyone replying is under the impression baggers make more than they actually do. So first i will explain how the order of who bags you and takes your groceries out for you works i’ll try to simplify it. So let’s pretend there are 6 baggers working then whoever is at the top of the list of names is the bagger who bags the first costumer and is the main bagger of tht order and the 2nd person on the list helps. After the main bagger of tht order takes u out the 2nd bagger is the main bagger of the next order and the 3rd person on the list helps them and so on and so forth. when u get to the 6th bagger the very 1st bagger helps the 6th bagger so it’s one big circle therefore your only making tips after the five people before you have gone. And idk abt your commissary but ours has a self checkout that most people go to making it where we don’t have many people to take out and only take about 2 costumers out an hour. So if a bagger takes you out you should tip 5 if they bag you and you take you own out you should tip 2. if you have more then one cart full of groceries you should tip 5-10. If you have a big order then your going to keep the bagger out for a long time which is time they could of been bagging other people making money so you should tip more. If you go to the commissary between morning hours to about 2pm you can tip a little less because the commissary is always more busy in the morning but if you go in the afternoon or at night tip more because there isn’t as many costumers especially if you go right at closing because your keeping the baggers there and they can’t go home till everyone’s gone so if you go last minute PLEASE don’t go to self check out! Also you can tell the cashier you don’t want a bagger and can bag your own groceries if you don’t want to tip or you can have the bagger bag your groceries and if your not going to tip take your own groceries out because if you let the bagger take the groceries out then their turn gets skipped and they make no money that round! and if you mistakenly let them take you out and you have no money please just apologize when a costumer apologizes to me it shows they care and i wouldn’t be mad either way because you technically don’t have to tip but it’s the nice thing to do! that was so much typing i just think of people understood how tipping worked i wouldn’t have to go home making under minimum wage some days lol like the time i only made 16 dollars and that’s only because someone gave me a 10
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