Tips on Tips

Image by avlxyz via Flickr

Why do we tip? And how could someone who earns their living on tips get more tips?

Tipping is a bizarre custom, one that cries out for explanation. We don’t need to hand over this extra money, yet we often do. One theory is that we’re looking to get better service the next time we come to an establishment — but that hardly explains why we tip when, for example, we go to a restaurant we’ll likely never visit again.

An interesting study out of South Africa gives us a little insight, and throws a little extra cold water on the better-service explanation:

In an effort to explore our motivations for tipping, Stephen Saunders and Michael Lynn sent out 29 fieldworkers to survey 530 South African citizens after they’d had an encounter with a car guard. These unpaid workers are a common sight in South Africa at shopping centres, hospitals and schools. They help with parking, protect the car from vandalism and assist drivers with loading shopping and luggage.

One explanation for why we tip is that we’re trying to encourage good service in the future. However, Saunders and Lynn found no evidence that people who used a car guard more were more likely to tip, as you’d expect if this were their true motive.

So, if we’re not tipping to get better service in the future, why are we tipping? Perhaps as a reward, and perhaps because it’s expected of us, socially:

[P]erceived service quality was associated with both the likelihood of giving a tip and the amount tipped, thus suggesting that participants were using tipping as a form of reward. Similarly, those who said they thought it was important to help others in need tended to tip more (although they weren’t any more likely to tip), suggesting altruism was another motive. Finally, social norms were a key factor – participants who said their friends and relatives thought it was important to tip were more likely to tip themselves, especially if there were more people with them at the time of questioning. Size of tip was not associated with this factor, perhaps because it’s only the act of tipping that’s visible to others, rather than the amount tipped.

Another study, conducted in Utah, looked at how one might increase one’s tips. For the experiment, they tried out abject flattery:

In a separate study, based in Utah, John Seiter and Harry Weger tested the effects of ingratiation on food servers’ tips. They had two waiters and two waitresses go about their usual duties but with a twist: for half the parties they served they were instructed to compliment the customers, telling them that they’d made an excellent choice in what they’d ordered. Counting the tips received from 348 dinner parties showed that complimenting customers on making a shrewd order led to tips that were three per cent greater on average than when no compliment was made – a statistically significant boost.

So, it worked. The effect, however, disappeared for parties larger than three — perhaps because the compliments began to seem pretty insincere.

What else do we know about how to increase tips? Well, be an attractive woman (obviously). Draw a smiley face on the back of the check (but only if you’re a woman — if you’re a guy it will just seem weird). Touch the customer lightly on the arm. Squat down to the customer’s eye level. Wear makeup (again, probably only works if you’re a woman).

So, the bottom line — at least when it comes to men’s tipping behavior — would appear to be that men really want to sleep with waitresses. Less of this research seems to focus on how women tip male waiters, but I’d be pretty interested to see a study on that.

Another question I’d love to see answered: Do men tip like this when out to dinner with their wives or girlfriends? I’d guess the effect isn’t completely wiped out — since most of this is subconscious — but I’d bet it’s curtailed a bit. And for men whose wives are familiar with the social science research on this subject… well, I’d suggest under-tipping, just to be safe.