Businesses ranging from restaurants to hair stylists suffer lower return visits under non-voluntary tipping than when decisions about who to tip and the amounts are in the hands of the customer. Even in industries such as cruise businesses where a mandatory tip is a common practice, consumers, when asked, say they’d prefer a voluntary system.
Is this because consumers resist being told what to do? Or is it because they miss the opportunity to reward the specific individual who served them rather than having the amount go into a general pool? A mix of those two, conclude the researchers, but much more the second motivation than the first. Giving the customer an opportunity to express gratitude to one or more staff facilitates loyalty to the service provider.
Woven into this dynamic is a desire to consider the service provider as subservient to the patron, at least for the duration of the service transaction. The notion behind leaving a tip is that the diner is judging the wait staff. When those role expectations of a superior judging a subordinate are violated, the consumer often becomes uncomfortable.
Researchers at University of North Carolina and Western Carolina University explored what happens to customer tipping when the server draws a smiley face on the check before giving it to the diner. Other research had found that writing a brief thank you note leads to higher average tips.
However, in this study, those patrons receiving a bill with a smiley face left a smaller tip percentage than did the patrons getting their bill sans decoration. The smiley face implied a level of informal familiarity which violated role expectations.
Studies at Academic College of Tel-Aviv yielded a parallel and equally surprising finding. The study objective was to explore interactions among rudeness of customer behavior, agreeable and friendly attitude of the service provider, and tip amount.
The overall finding was that server agreeableness resulted in greater tips. However, when highly rude customers were being served, friendly servers received lower tips than did less agreeable servers. An explanation is that the highly rude customers were made uncomfortable by a server who deserved sanctions for neglecting their place as a servant.
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