Jay-Z went out and spent a lot of money on Sunday night, as you may have read in Page Six or seen on social media. For the birthday of his friend and Roc Nation Sports president Juan “OG” Perez, Jay ended up at the uptown Manhattan nightclub Playroom, where he ordered 40 bottles of Ace of Spades champagne, according to a receipt posted on Snapchat by a waitress named Dayhana. (Jay-Z owns the Ace of Spades brand, which is formally known as Armand de Brignac.)
He tipped $11,100 on this $80,035 tab—which, depending on who you follow on Twitter, is either the greatest gratuity ever offered to a server or a loogie in the eye of working people everywhere. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to get so riled up either way: Jay-Z tipped the most ordinary possible amount on his very big check.
Jay Z tab at Playroom last night. I’m just gonna cry in poor for the rest of the day. ? pic.twitter.com/q2OhOoi3YS
— Chuck Bass (@MisterClasico) February 19, 2018
Jay’s $11,100 tip is exactly 15 percent of his pre-tax total of $74,000. Normally, tipping on pre-tax is pretty stingy behavior, but given the $6,000 difference between the subtotal and total, it’s understandable in this case. You might be asking why he didn’t just bump Dayhana to 18 or 20 percent, which is a fair point. He can obviously afford it. But also, $11,100 is enough money to put a down payment on a really nice car, from a single table on a single night of work. On the other hand, he shouldn’t get any special credit for leaving the minimum socially acceptable amount for the waitress. It’s not an “epic tip,” as Page Six called it, it’s a normal tip on an epic tab.
Besides, he probably didn’t even pick the number himself. According to Page Six, he was with a group of six friends, which is enough people to trigger an auto-gratuity policy at plenty of places. Given the precise percentage he added and the fact that the gratuity line on the receipt is labeled “15% TIPS,” it seems likely that this is the case. Or maybe Playroom gives you those 15/18/20 percent boxes to check at the bottom of your bill rather than doing the math yourself. Again, he could have always elected to add more, but given the size of his champagne order, he was probably drunk and didn’t give it much thought. In any case, Dayhana seems pretty pumped about it, as she should be.
