Say It With Cash

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Jan, 2001 by Catherine Siskos

SERVICE | How to make the RITUAL OF TIPPING not just a reflex, but a way to get better service.

CRAFTY maitre d's manning the entrances to Las Vegas nightclubs used to resort to a ruse for lining their pockets: As patrons stood at the door, the first person in line would pull out a crisp twenty, noisily snap and fold the bill, and in a grand, ostentatious gesture tip the maitre d' on the way in. "The rest of the people in line would follow like lemmings," says Adam Carmer, a maitre d' at Kokomo's, a steak and seafood restaurant at the Mirage Casino Hotel in Las Vegas. "They'd see the first person tip and think, `I guess I should do it, too.'" What the suckers, uh, onlookers didn't know was that the big tipper was a buddy of the maitre d', and that the handsome gratuity had been carefully staged to persuade others to follow suit.

Those maitre d's understood tipping psychology and used it to play their customers as smoothly as the lounge singer inside crooned Misty. "Ask people why they tip, and they'll say it's to reward good service," says Michael Lynn, a psychologist and professor at Cornell University's Hotel School. "But mostly, people tip because of social pressure."

Lynn's research found that a measly 2% of a restaurant server's tip reflected the quality of service. Most people left a flat percentage of the total check as a tip no matter what the service was like. The pressure to tip is so strong that tipping has become little more than a reflex action, with people usually tipping whatever the social norm dictates, says Temple University psychology professor Bruce Rind.

While most research has been conducted in restaurants, people often tip automatically in other settings, too, without considering how they could leverage their tips. Instead of viewing a tip as an obligation or a reward, think of it as an investment, suggests Joel Widzer, author of the Penny Pincher's Passport to Luxury Travel: The Art of Cultivating Preferred Customer Status. Tip the right person well and that investment will pay dividends in the form of preferential treatment. Suddenly, the desk clerk at a crowded beachside resort can upgrade your cramped room overlooking the Dumpsters to a suite with an ocean view. Tip the wrong person, leave a stingy tip, or come across as a palm-greasing extortionist and the gesture can torpedo your chances for getting any service, let alone that reserved for VIPs. "Tipping is a pretty delicate issue," says Widzer. Because each party wants something from the other, he says, "there's a lot of gamesmanship."

Slaves to culture

TIPPING IS also an American thing to do, as much a part of our culture as baseball and the Stars and Stripes. As a nation, we tip more occupations--33 in all (from shoeshiner to casino croupier)--than any other country. By comparison, New Zealanders tip just three jobs: waiter, cab driver and tour guide.

And good economic times have loosened our wallets so that we tip more generously than ever. Nationally, the average restaurant server's tip is nearly 18%, according to a recent Zagat survey, with many people reporting that they usually tip at least 20%. Bostonians, usually models of Yankee thrift, are either the best tippers or the biggest liars in the country, with 55% of them claiming that they regularly tip servers 20% or more. Only 37% of the cheapskates in Los Angeles say they tip that generously on a regular basis.

Still, faced with abysmal service, most diners reserve the right to stiff a server. But unless you're prepared for the server to ambush you at the door, says etiquette expert Peggy Newfield, speak with the manager first and then leave only 10%.

If you don't tip, don't plan on dining in that restaurant again because servers have their own methods for exacting revenge against stingy patrons who return, says Debra Ginsberg, a former waitress and author of Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress. Ginsberg, who has waited tables in greasy diners and exclusive clubs, has seen angry servers in restaurant kitchens retrieve bread out of a garbage bin to serve to a customer or deliberately drop food on the floor before plopping it on a plate. Some patrons who don't tip are automatically given special dispensation, such as senior citizens on a fixed income. Those people, says Ginsberg, are a waiter's pro-bono cases.

VIP treatment

WHY ALL THE FUSS over a tip? In many states, restaurants may pay their servers less than minimum wage because they earn tips. Even people who work in other service-industry jobs, such as hotel personnel, depend on tips for a major part of their income.

What often works best is to subtly promise a good tip in exchange for a specific favor. Widzer does this when he travels, and sometimes the results astound him. Once, while making a hotel reservation over the phone for a trip to Puerto Rico, Widzer told the desk clerk that he appreciates good service and shows it. When Widzer arrived several days later, he had been given an upgraded room, ten free passes to use the hotel's golf course, two free passes for breakfast, and a bottle of champagne. In exchange for tipping the desk clerk $100, Widzer estimates he got more than $1,200 worth of VIP treatment.