How To Tip When You're Drinking At Home

It’ll be a little time before we can head back to our favorite bar, and we’re finding it’s not just our friends we miss. It’s also the familiar faces of the folks who work there—the amazing people who offer us refuge from real world responsibilities. After all, if they can serve it, we don’t have to cook it!

But during these particularly hard times, we’re cut off from many of our normal escapes. It’s hard to find your oasis when they’re closed for business. We can make our own food and drinks, but it’s just not the same. We can cut our own hair and do our own nails, but aesthetically…we probably shouldn’t.

Last night, as we struggled to make a perfect cocktail, we kept wishing we could just walk down the street and visit a certain bartender who has always treated us right.  We’d have happily tipped handsomely to have our old fashioned muddled and stirred just right. And that got us thinking. We grabbed a few empty mason jars and wrote our favorite bartenders’ names on them.

Now, for every drink we make at home, we’re throwing a dollar in one of these jars. We call it the Tip Jar Project. They kinda look like swear jars, but better! Once this is all over, we’re going to go back to the bars we miss so much, the salons we’ll desperately need—honestly, anywhere the workers rely on tips for income—and hand those tip jars over as one massive “thanks for riding out the storm” tip.

Right??

If you have a restaurant where the staff knows you to a cussin’ level*, consider saving up the tips you’d normally give your servers and putting them aside until this is all over. The stylist who manages your unruly hair, the person who does your nails just right, the hospitality workers who anticipate your every need…how great will it be when on your first day back, you can find your favorite workers and hand them a jar full of cash?

Even for local bars and restaurants offering curbside pickup, business has been extremely slow. A lot of places are on skeleton crews, with servers, hosts, bartenders, and cashiers laid off until their dining rooms reopen. Salons and barber shops are shut. Any support we can give them will help a lot.

If you want to help tipped workers in central Wisconsin right now, check out Compass Properties’ Virtual Tip Jars, where you can donate directly to area tipped workers via Venmo and PayPal.

Obviously, not everyone is in a position to throw a dollar in the jar for every drink (for us Wisconsinites, that can add up quick). If it’s not every drink, maybe it’s every weekend drink. Or the first drink of the evening. Or the first time you get your cowlick tamed. Or even just a bit of change. Whatever works for you. Take care of yourself and your family—we don’t know how long this will all last. But if you have the extra cash, and maybe a couple mason jars, we guarantee your favorite bartender or server will love you for it forever!

* Scale of Server Familiarity:
1 – Recognizes you
2 – Automatically writes down your “usual”
3 – Sometimes adds an extra piece
4 – Hangs out just to catch up
5 – Conversational cussing
6 – Stays after shift to hang out
7 – Meets you elsewhere to hang out
8 – Invited to your birthday/wedding/etc.
9 – Godparent
10 – Organ donor