Did You Tip Vendors Who Own Their Own Businesses?

1. Yes, if they provide exemplary service.

Gratuity/tips are an additional monetary value paid to a service worker on top of the cost of the service they provide. American wage policies have allowed employers to make customers subsidize paying their employees poorly, leading people to believe that you only pay a tip to make up for an employee being underpaid. Obviously, someone setting their own prices for service is not under-paying themselves. However, a business person (generally) sets a fair price based on their time, labor, equipment, etc.

There are photographers who provide their service and you get exactly what you pay for and nothing else - photos of your wedding. And there are photographers who work very hard to ensure your wedding day goes smoothly, they show up dressed professionally, they coordinate with your DJ and other vendors, and they are kind, professional and courteous to everyone in attendance. (If you think all of those things are part of a "base service" of a photographer, you are wrong. The base service price of a photographer includes their hour coverage time, photos taken, and photos edited and returned to you.) Yes, you should absolutely tip the latter.

2. Absolutely tip your officiant.

3. If your florist is not setting your flowers up, tipping is at your discretion. It is certainly more difficult for them to provide exemplary service if they are not delivering or setting up. To me, exemplary service from this vendor is like at a wedding where I saw a florist stop, evaluate the room, and promptly move a bunch of centerpieces around when he saw the room design was lopsided as originally planned. But you may find they went above and beyond even so (like filling in a few extra flowers at no charge to make your bouquet fuller or something) and so again, this is at your discretion.

4. Ask the venue about the service charge. Many places will say "service charges are not gratuity." Just as a delivery fee you pay on a pizza delivery is not a tip to your driver.

At many venues the service fee is NOT a gratuity for the staff, so you need to confirm how your venue does it. Daughter's venue had a 20% service fee that did not include gratuities. We absolutely didn't want any "tip jars" out, so we told the event manager that. The night of the rehearsal, we gave her a set of envelopes for the tips for all of the staff for the wedding & reception; it's been a couple of years but I think, on her suggestion, we did: $50 per valet, $100 per bartender, $250 total for the servers & banquet captain (which the event manager offered to distribute as she "knew who put in a lot of effort and who didn't" [she had 20 yrs experience and daughter loved her, so we did as she suggested]), $100 for the "bridal attendant" assigned to follow daughter around for the 10 hours we were on site and make sure she never needed for anything, and $200 for the event manager (who absolutely did not suggest that, but she was awesome so we chose to do it). We also gave her a tip envelope with $25 for the cake delivery person. Both the DJ and photographer owned their own businesses, but they were each so awesome throughout the entire wedding process that we also tipped them; I think we tipped the DJ $100 and the photographer $200 (he had an assistant, but we left it up to him to distribute as he saw fit). The officiant was SIL's long-time youth pastor and he refused to give them an amount for a fee, so we gave him $300 in a card. I can't remember what we tipped the florist, but she also served as daughter's day-of-coordinator, and we paid her well for that.

All vendors should be tipped regardless of if they own their own business or not. They are providing a service, so it is customary to tip. Now, if a vendor did a poor job or did not deliver what was agreed upon, that is a different story.

A service charge does not always go to the staff as a tip. Ask that vendor what the service charge covers. I typically tip on top of service fees.

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