Tipping when checking coat?
 

When there is no checkroom at a restaurant, does one tip a restaurant hostess or host who takes a coat and later returns it? If so, how much, please?

This is more than you asked but others might find it helpful.

Tip when you get it back.

Restaurants where they whisk your coat away when you arrive? Nothing, I think, because you are doing them a favor by keeping the aisles clear. If you have a lot of stuff or it's all wet, then a couple of $.

Places with check rooms:

Museum and theatre check rooms, maybe $1 per item checked.

Restaurant check room, depends on overall price of food, how many items you check (coat, packages, umbrella, briefcase).

As Ack notes, it depends. Lots of restaurants don't want patrons slinging their coats over the backs of their chairs, so the hostess will offer to hang it up. I think in most places where that's happened to me, they hung the coat on an easily accessible rack near the front of the restaurant so that you could retrieve it on your way out. No tip then, IMHO.

Or the hostess puts the coats in a coat-check room that's not staffed. Then she might go into the room when you leave and get the coat for you. A tip of $1 should cover it in that situation.

You tip only if there is an official checkroom with a person that does noting but take and hand out coats - $1 or $2 depending on the place.

If there is just a closet where you put coat - or a host just slips your coat inside you do not tip for that - unless they both take the coat, return it and help you into it. (Many places just deposit the coat there and leave patrons to get their own when they depart.)

Any second now there should be some non-US posters telling us how tip crazy we are. Other than that, I agree with the advice that the other posters have given you.

It just occurred to me, I was tipping $1 per coat at restaurant coat checks in the 1960's. No increase in 50 years? Seems surprising.

I agree Patrick. I was a coat check girl back in the 80s and depended on those tips...

tom42, I'm a US poster and I think we're tip-crazy!

I hope DebitNM doesn't see this thread.

>> I was tipping $1 per coat at restaurant coat checks in the 1960's. <<

You were the last of the big spenders. Everyone else was tipping 25 cents. (In truth, I have no idea what everyone else was tipping, so please, no rejoinder required.)

<You tip only if there is an official checkroom with a person that does nothing but take and hand out coats - $1 or $2 depending on the place. >
I agree. I don't tip the host/hostess in a restaurant for taking my coat.

NewbE, does that include when the host gives you a claim check for it, takes it away somewhere, then retrieves it later and perhaps even helps you on with it? Just curious, as that seems to happen a lot lately, at least in NYC. And usually it is one of the two, three, or four assistants to the host, not the actual host who probably stays behind the podium.

Neo, hmmm... maybe in that case I would tip. Perhaps it's more accurate to say, if I get a ticket, I will tip whoever retrieves my coat. No ticket, no tip. Maybe??

I get why visitors to the US find our tipping culture tricky to navigate--it is tricky!

The complicated tipping customs are in place to keep out the riff-raff. It doesn't always work.