re: Yet another tipping thread

I usually don't include the tax when tipping.
Your step further though doesn't make sense. You could have easily gotten 2 salads as meals for cheaper than the chicken and pork chops, with all else being the same. With your logic, you should just find the cheapest thing in every category that you will order from and base your tip off this regardless what the actual order is.
This brings the point that tipping is flawed and will never be fixed.

20% of the pretax bill seems fine to me. I work in a restaurant and I would laugh in the face of any of my servers who bitched about only getting 20% pretax instead of a flat 20%. A $3 difference on a ~$250 meal is nothing either way; it'd be nice for them to get that extra $3 but it's not cheap to leave it out IMO. Personally I round up to the nearest multiple of $5 after 18%, it usually comes out to 20-25%.

Honestly I think tipping as a system is awkward. Not because the core concept is flawed - you're essentially giving a range of prices for all of your meals sold and tying payment to performance, which are both good mechanics - but because of the inevitable construction of a server's wages around tips. Once servers become dependent on tips to make money, and once conventions regarding how much is appropriate to tip arise, you lose both of those mechanics that make it good, because people are tipping out of obligation instead of reciprocating a good performance and people are effectively paying a set price (or close to it) instead of utilizing the range offered.

Speaking for myself, I'd rather the items on a menu were 20% more expensive, servers were paid their equivalent wages as a flat hourly rate, and I'd not have to worry about the tip question at all. What's the point in giving people a choice when deviating from a small range in those choices gets you ridiculed or insulted? Just give a set price and avoid all the bullshite from different expectations.