Tipping is the curse of the fiercely polite and occasional traveller, as the only sure fire way of avoiding offence is to hand over all you have to whoever you meet. It has subsequently become something of a social science, with it's own etiquette attached to it. Seems the receiver has somehow managed to engineer themselves the position of calling the shots
Now there was a time when tipping was considered a reward for an appreciated level of service, (The Cambridge Online Dictionary, defines Gratuity as a sum of money given as a reward for service), but not any more it seems, as this thread on the topic demonstrates. You are just expected to give it anyway. Two dollars per drink served? If we could do (say) even two a minute, that is one nice hourly rate! If we were a bar tender that would get us serving at a pace that would make Tom Cruise look like George Burns. Do the maths. Twelve months then retirement!!! No wonder Vegas has the highest High School drop out rate in the US
And now it seems there is Christmas tipping. It appears you don't just tip at the point of delivery but also at certain other more arbitrary points in time, presumably on top of any earlier tips given. Although this would depend on the religion of the server, surely? No wait, it's holiday tipping
But is this any good for customer service? Does the frequency and size of the tip affect the quality of service? Well Deming would appear to suggest not, as explored in our earlier post on motivation. The great man (we're sure) would have suggested that as soon as it becomes an expectation, any positive long term effect would disappear. Is this an observation shared by anyone else out there? This timeout article highlights a growing expectation within London bars that staff are allowed to keep the change. It says "don't feel pressurised, if the staff are underpaid, it's the management's fault, not yours". More about this later
We hunted around on the internet for ages until we found a semi-scientific study that examined the relationship between the tip and the quality of service and it made some interesting points. From the server's perspective, it says they could maximise their tips by concentrating on a particular type (the size of the tip is affected by factors other than quality of service, it seems), namely, to concentrate efforts on regular male weekend customers who have been consuming alcohol. Ideally they should be executives discussing business or a group of men before or just after attending a sporting event. Seems you are more generous/less discretionary when you're sozzled and in the company of peers you're trying to impress. However, most notably, from a quality of service perspective, tipping, it suggests, only serves any useful purpose when it is used as a form of service monitoring (that is, management look at the level of tips and use it as management information to identify good and deteriorating practices). It also suggests that tipping is only instrumental in driving service improvement for activities where a degree of subtlety in delivery is required. This is consistent with the intuitive statement within the Timeout piece that it should be reserved for decent table service and not for sliding a lager across the counter. So we should not be tipping door-openers. That settles that point quite nicely
This would suggest that to embed the tipping culture within our culture by setting and publishing guidelines and so on irrespective of the nature of the activity or the quality of it is no more than a hidden tax on the individual and an institutionalised supplement to the earnings of workers with a relatively low basic pay. It's even taxable for god's sake. So who does that help? Now if we were conspiracy theorists ...
