$100 between them + plus a couple of beers offered in the bottle. One should buy the sort of beer they might know and like, something local.

Ok - to clarify...............

How much am I expected to tip a Hairdresser? A taxi driver? A Pizza delivery person?

Who else might I need to tip? I so dont want to offend anyone, but it is so foreign to me - its a fine line isnt it.

I tip my hairdresser here in UK £5, taxi driver £2-£5 depending on how far i've travelled and pizza man £1-£2 ( usually the change left from a £20 note!)

When i eventually get to Canada ( visa's PLEASE hurry!) i will no doubt work on the equivalent amounts and hope thats along the right amounts!

I think we have only about twice not tipped at all and that was purely down to the staff service, if there is something wrong with the food i'll say so! ( although i do always worry that something untoward may have happened to it afterwards - i didn't look at the link above but i have a horrible feeling it was along my suspicions....!) if the waiting on staff are good - they deserve to be rewarded. we tend to be creatures of habit and do go back to good restaurants too and always hope they will go the extra mile for us.

Kind regards,
Tina

Did you tip after they picked up or delivered? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a truck with my stuff in it heading for the Rockies with alcohol involved.

Once they delivered. I settled the bill for cash and tipped them while paying it.

Hairdressers, taxis, porters, delivery men (food) etc are based on their performance how much you tip. If the hairdresser does an average job on your hair, basing this on just a wash/cut/set for women (long hair) I was normally tipping roughly 10% of the bill for a good job, usually was between $5-$10 CDN.... taxis is roughly the same, it depends on the distance driven (top tip, you can ask the taxi service for a quote on how much it will cost from point a to point b which will be a flat fee less the tip for their drivers to base your ride on) I rarely ever tipped over $5CDN unless they provided exceptional service... porters, depends on how posh the hotel is your staying at but normally a $5 is considered a decent tip if they've carried all your luggage up to your room etc. Delivery & restaurants serving food to your table is normally about 10%-15% (15% being exceptional service, 10% being decent/ok service) but if its food delivery from a franchise or small restaurant, they normally dont expect more the $5 tip for arriving on time... this is what I was told by my brother who worked in Montreal as a delivery man for a pizza joint. You'll find that most delivery places have a service boundary (where they deliver to) which pretty much excludes areas too far away that the delivery person will not make enough of a tip to cover the expense of driving there (alot of deliveries make their staff use their own car) so it's relatively safe.

So I guess the basics are, if your in a fancy/rich place recieving fancy/rich products and services, you'll be expected to shell out more by the service staff. If your in a bog standard middle classish establishment, you're not usually expected to tip more then $5-$10 and that is based on your satisfaction with the service provided.

Don't worry though, Canadians usually make alot of allowances and are quite forgiving of internationals/tourists, just put on your accent to make it evident your not from Canada... its the Yanks and/or locals they get annoyed at for not tipping correctly for services.

In Toronto it's very unlikely that the person you'll be tipping is an unhyphenated Canadian and it's doubly unlikely that a waiter would be able to differentiate unhyphenated Canadians from Americans. An immigrant is not going to forgive another immigrant's meanness just because the latter is English.

$20 each for removal guys.

Bars and restaurants, it's usually the combined tax, rounded up if the service has been above average. It's a good idea to tip properly in places you go to lots. I always tipped well in my local in Oakville. As a result, I got plenty of free drinks (not to mentional occasional off-sales - highly illegal).

This "you scratch mine..." policy works well with neighbours too. I've told the bloke next door to help himself to the raspberries, tomatoes and cucumbers I have growing up the side of my house. The plants are producing far more than we can eat. The guy is a hunter. He kills more than he can eat. My freezer contains moose and venison that didn't come from Loblaws.

LOL!! You are being quite pessimistic today DB... well on the 3 times my British partner visited Canada with me, he was given ALOT of allowances for being foreign. There's a difference between intentional cruelty and ignorance of customs, I like to think that most people hyphonated or not, tend to make allowances for this. It's not an invite to purposfully insult or rip off service workers, just re-assurance that most will be forgiving of these little mist-steps.

That's not pessimism. The best thing about Toronto is that no one here is from here.

I think I disagree, Peas... I consider it like this: when I go to a restaurant the cost of the dish on the menu reflects the costs of running the place, including overheads and profit, and what the owner pays his staff. Granted, that isn't a living wage for the waiting staff, but I am paying for the whole meal from buying the ingredients to the preparation and cooking and delivery to my table. To avoid the labour costs I could theoretically make the same meal myself at home.

Don't get me wrong, I usually tip around 15% or so, rounded up to the nearest convenient sum - but I always consider this as a discretionary payment that I could withold if the service has been crap (note, the service, not the food - if the food's crap I will have complained; if my server deals with my complaint well then the tip is likely to go up rather than down). I am explicitly paying extra for good service, not for what is already included on the menu price.

OK, find me a restaurant where the waitstaff are paid 50/hr as a wage and let me know how much a typical meal is. I'm sure such a restaurant exists but it is not the norm.

As an individual experience, people might think their tips are about service but open the books of most restaurants and they could not survive paying staff that nor would most people who wait tables do that job for just for minimum, or just above, wage.

FWIW, I don't tip if the food/service/entire experience was crap. I have even just walked out and not paid, full stop.

Ah... ok. Thanks.

Another question, especially for those who know the hospitality industry here... in the UK I tried to leave a tip in cash, even if the bill was settled on a card - that way the waiting staff get to sort out what they do with it rather than disappearing into some black hole of a cash register. From what's been said in this thread the whole setup of tipping out to the kitchen etc is pretty formalised here, so is there still an advantage from the waiting staff's point of view to being tipped in cash?

I did that at Captain John's, a seafood restaurant in a boat moored at the bottom of Yonge St. The waiter, wine steward, and two men in white clothes ran after us shouting "you stealing the money". We rode off in a rickshaw and they gave up after a block or so.