Thomas Keller is one of the world’s most respected chefs, a best-selling cookbook author, and the owner of four successful high-end restaurants. Until a few weeks ago, he seemed a model of entrepreneurial rigor. Then news broke that Keller had decided to abolish tipping at his New York restaurant Per Se, starting this month, and replace it with the kind of fixed service charge that’s common in Europe. Now some people are calling him un-American for scrapping a system in which waiters are rewarded on the basis of their individual performance.

Restaurant workers in the United States make more than twenty-five billion dollars a year in tips, so it’s natural that people think of the custom as quintessentially American. But it wasn’t always. Tipping didn’t take hold here until after the Civil War, and even as it spread it met with fervent public opposition from people who considered it a toxic vestige of Old World patronage. Anti-tipping associations were formed; newspapers—including the Times—regularly denounced the custom. (…) The anti-tipping campaigns were so effective that six states actually banned the practice. (…)

People tip even though they don’t have to. Since they tip after they’ve been served, they’re not buying good treatment in advance. Nor are they just buttering up their regular waitresses—studies show that people tip about as well at out-of-town restaurants as they do at their local Bennigan’s. Americans are paying money that they do not have to pay, then, while receiving no obvious benefit as a result.

So why tip? When people are asked, they usually say that they tip to reward good service. Yet how much people tip is determined mainly by how much their meal cost, and the cost of a meal at a given restaurant is usually only tenuously connected to the work required to serve it. (It’s just as easy to open a hundred-dollar bottle of wine as it is to open a thirty-dollar bottle.) In an extensive survey of tipping studies, Michael Lynn, a professor at Cornell, found only a weak correlation between the quality of service that people report receiving and the tips they give. On average, exceptional service raised tips by about 1.5 per cent, which, Lynn argues, is too small for waiters to notice. And countries where there’s no tipping—like Australia and Japan—don’t have worse service than the United States.

It’s instructive to consider the sort of things that tippers actually respond to. In one study, a waitress received fifty per cent more in tips when she introduced herself by name than when she didn’t. In another, waiters sharply increased their tips by giving each member of a dining party a piece of candy and then, seemingly spontaneously, offering each person a second piece, too. Squatting by the table instead of standing, writing “Thank you�? on the back of checks, and touching customers on their shoulders all measurably improved tips. And waitresses at an upscale restaurant who simply put flowers in their hair boosted their tips by seventeen per cent.

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

One thought: when you tip EVERY waiter the same, you’re treating the nice waiters and the jerk-waiters the same, basically saying the nice waiter and the jerk deserve the same tip.

READ MORE >> ideas, economics | October 26th, 2007