Tip20! Original Article
by Tom Mason, Founder Tip20!

There was a lot of buzz and excitement centered around Denny’s Super Bowl free breakfast promotion this week.
Denny’s reportedly spent around $5 million on the promotion and gave out 2 million free breakfasts. Aside from being a brilliant marketing ploy generating public awareness of the company’s product, I’m sure Denny’s sold a few other things that day as well.

Of course this promotion kept the servers and entire restaurant staffs incredibly busy in locations across the nation for the length of the special. Free food is a great thing. Food is what was being offered for free, not service. Servers worked very hard delivering tons of free breakfasts and keeping coffee fresh in the cups of millions of diners. How did they fare in tips?

Whenever a restaurant offers a special, coupon or comps a meal, it has an impact on the total of the bill. The bill total that you are presumably basing your tip on. If you get a free breakfast at Denny’s your bill (if you ordered nothing else) would be zero.
Tipping any percent of zero is zero. So you must base your tip on what the meal would have cost you if you had paid full price.
If you had great service and would normally leave 15-20%, check the menu and add up what your bill would have been and tip based on that.

Please keep in mind that the servers rely on their tips as a significant portion of their income. In most cases servers work hard to earn their tips. If you do not tip on a free or discounted meal, you are taking away from what they could have earned on a table paying full price. The same applies to buy-one-get-one-free offers and discount coupons.

If you get food comped off of your bill because the kitchen screwed it up, yet your server did the best they could to give you good service and rectify the problem, please don’t punish the server. They worked hard to create a pleasurable dining experience for you.

Groceries are going through the roof – along with everything else! We have found a few ways to start saving a little cash when your out shopping or dining. You may have seen ads on the internet before for online promo codes and printable coupons and brushed them off. We would encourage you to give them another look. The technology has come a long way and the process of print at home coupons is much more organized than it used to be. The best we have found is Coupons.com

Another great site that we have featured for years here on Tip20! is Restaurant.com.

Often overlooked the savings are remarkable and they have deals on great restaurants right in your home town.

If you have the foresight to think ahead before you go out shopping or dining, you can save a bundle! Do some homework and check out the savings today. You’ll be glad you did!

Even though it sounds like a dream come true, you can actually get paid to eat out. That’s right, not only is your meal covered, but you get paid on top of it! It happens every day all over the country. Businesses have found secret shopping (sometimes called Mystery Shopping) to be an effective way of finding out how their business really runs when the big bosses are away. They need people like you and I to do this work because we are real consumers with a generally unbiased opinion of the place being shopped. Secret shopping is fun, educational and profitable. You can mystery shop part time or even make your own business out of becoming a professional secret shopper.

Shopping Jobs Net

Shopping Jobs Net offers an incredibly well organized directory. It provides plenty of resources to help newcomers get started. Detailed information & links to mystery shopping companies are easily accessible.

Their mystery shopping directory includes listings of 400+ companies and is easy to navigate. Offers a 90 day, no questions asked, 100% money-back guarantee.

Go To Shopping Jobs Net

Shop Until You Drop

Shop Until You Drop is a new mystery shopping service that offers a quality directory of job sources, and has a fancy, easy to navigate site. Very nice people running this site, and top quality information. Offers a 90 day, no questions asked, 100% money-back guarantee.

Go To Shop Until You Drop

Updated 8/3/2010