Have you ever been enjoying a relaxing dinner out on the town when all of a sudden the check comes, and you find yourself practically fighting with someone so you can pay the check? This happens to me all the time. What is worse, so much attention has been drawn to the drama of the check, that it is now apparent to everyone that I take forever, and I mean forever, to figure out what the tip is.
This is almost as bad as when I take out a calculator or one of those nifty tip cheats the size of a playing card. I used to feel anxiety about this until the night I had dinner with my friend Maurice, who was visiting from the East coast.
Maurice and I had just left the Safe House restaurant in Milwaukee when he asked me what kind of tip I left. I told him I always tip 15% unless the waiter spills the food on my pants. Maurice said, “I thought it was something like that, because it took you so long to figure out.”
I said, a little miffed, “Well, I’m sorry I didn’t bring my calculator, so it took me a minute to multiply the $32.40 tab by 0.15 in order to know the tip was $4.86.” Maurice pointed out to me that sometimes it was a lot faster to divide and then add.
Here is how he does it. Take 10% of the $32.40 by just moving the decimal point over to the left one place. You now have $3.24 to work with. Maurice told me he knew I did not leave a 10% tip because it took me a while to calculate it, and also because, as he put it, “I know you’re not that cheap!” Anyway, the next step is to divide the $3.24 in half, giving you $1.62. Now just add $3.24 and $1.62. This gives you $4.86, the 15% tip. Voila!
Once he explained it, I saw the light. Moving the decimal point over one place accounted for 10% of the total bill. Then taking half of the 10% figure resulted in the other 5% of the restaurant tab. Now all I had to do was add the two dollar amounts together, and this total was the long sought after 15%!
So, as an example with a larger number, if I picked up the tab (no sarcastic comments here, please) for a group of folks, say for $102.60 (whew!), the math trick for 15% would go like this. 10% of $102.60 equals $10.26 with half of that being $5.13, for a total of $15.39. I said, “Maurice, you’re a genius. I think I can do this in my head!” He glanced at me slyly. “No, my friend,” he said. “It is Monet Lajuice who must be the genius.” It feels good to have a wonderful friend.
