Bunny Trail: Tipping
This is a rather long and convoluted set of links, but I thought it would be nice to put it all in one place.
The Prologue:
In 2006, Jay Porter took his not-quite-2-year-old restaurant in San Diego, called the Linkery, and changed the tipping policy: he banned tips. Instead, the restaurant charged a flat 18% service charge for dine-in service, and donated any extra money left on the table to a charity. This wasn't a new idea, but this was apparently the most prominent modern incarnation of the experiment.
Then in October 2008, Paul Wachter wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine, called Why Tip?. They focused on a restaurant in San Diego called the Linkery, which was run by Jay Porter. I didn't notice the article at the time, but it deserves its chronological place. :)
Then in June 2011, NPR's Planet Money had a 5 minute episode called Why We Tip (transcript available). My favorite factoid from it is that the word for "tip" in a number of languages translates to "drink money". The optimistic theory that is suggested is "We tend to tip in places where we're having a lot more fun than the people who are serving us". Which sounds fair and nice and stuff! And they also mentioned the Linkery.
In 2012, Bruce McAdams published a 20 minute TEDx talk at the University of Guelph, called Rethink Tipping. I wasn't aware of this either, but again, here it is! He gets especially focuses on "the transient nature of the US restaurant business", and the marginalization of cooks in favor of servers.
This year, on June 3rd, 2013, the Freakonomics podcast had a 40-minute episode called Should Tipping Be Banned (transcript available). It linked tipping to corruption and discrimination, and mentioned a number of ways that people use to get higher tips that have nothing to do with "good service". Also, it mentioned the Linkery, and talked about how they had banned tipping, and instead had just added a 18% gratuity to all dine-in checks. Any extra money left was donated to charity. There were also a couple of follow-up posts that contained reader responses, here and here. The second mentioned that the owner of the Linkery had started to post about the subject on his own blog.
And in July 2013, the Linkery closed. But shortly thereafter...
The Main Event:
The owner of the Linkery, Jay Porter, has written a series of blog posts about his experience there and the insights that he's gained from their no-tipping policy. There are 6 blog posts, plus 4 postscripts, and a final overview, stretching from July 25th to August 20th. But they are very well written, and worth reading straight through. He's also got links to some of the real research on the subject, and excerpts from some of his conversations with the experts.
Some of my favorite quotes:
The Epilogue:
Jay Porter also wrote a couple of shorter articles, one on August 9th, 2013 at Quartz (with a hilarious chart at the bottom), and then one on August 14th, 2013 at Slate.
The Prologue:
In 2006, Jay Porter took his not-quite-2-year-old restaurant in San Diego, called the Linkery, and changed the tipping policy: he banned tips. Instead, the restaurant charged a flat 18% service charge for dine-in service, and donated any extra money left on the table to a charity. This wasn't a new idea, but this was apparently the most prominent modern incarnation of the experiment.
Then in October 2008, Paul Wachter wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine, called Why Tip?. They focused on a restaurant in San Diego called the Linkery, which was run by Jay Porter. I didn't notice the article at the time, but it deserves its chronological place. :)
Then in June 2011, NPR's Planet Money had a 5 minute episode called Why We Tip (transcript available). My favorite factoid from it is that the word for "tip" in a number of languages translates to "drink money". The optimistic theory that is suggested is "We tend to tip in places where we're having a lot more fun than the people who are serving us". Which sounds fair and nice and stuff! And they also mentioned the Linkery.
In 2012, Bruce McAdams published a 20 minute TEDx talk at the University of Guelph, called Rethink Tipping. I wasn't aware of this either, but again, here it is! He gets especially focuses on "the transient nature of the US restaurant business", and the marginalization of cooks in favor of servers.
This year, on June 3rd, 2013, the Freakonomics podcast had a 40-minute episode called Should Tipping Be Banned (transcript available). It linked tipping to corruption and discrimination, and mentioned a number of ways that people use to get higher tips that have nothing to do with "good service". Also, it mentioned the Linkery, and talked about how they had banned tipping, and instead had just added a 18% gratuity to all dine-in checks. Any extra money left was donated to charity. There were also a couple of follow-up posts that contained reader responses, here and here. The second mentioned that the owner of the Linkery had started to post about the subject on his own blog.
And in July 2013, the Linkery closed. But shortly thereafter...
The Main Event:
The owner of the Linkery, Jay Porter, has written a series of blog posts about his experience there and the insights that he's gained from their no-tipping policy. There are 6 blog posts, plus 4 postscripts, and a final overview, stretching from July 25th to August 20th. But they are very well written, and worth reading straight through. He's also got links to some of the real research on the subject, and excerpts from some of his conversations with the experts.
Some of my favorite quotes:
- ... unlike those other places, and unlike every other sit-down restaurant in America, we refused to accept money beyond the service charge.
- The story of the server being motivated by the customer’s power to tip, is instead a fiction created to make the customer feel important.
- At this point I have to admit some uncomfortable truths. Before we switched to a non-tipping system, I was pretty much like these guys. Perhaps that just made me like most guys. I like to think I was generally nice to people, and I’m sure I always tipped way more than twenty percent. But I, like many males, loved the rush of having my needs attended to by young, attractive, female servers.
- ... it was clear that we were now the only restaurant in the US where, if a female server chose to look sexy, it was most likely because she felt like looking sexy. If a server flirted with you, it was because she wanted to flirt with you. Not because she wanted your money; but because she was enjoying flirting with you. It didn’t affect her night’s income at all.
- Yes, it’s disorienting at first when you perceive something as ubiquitous as tipping to be an actual civil rights issue; but then again I imagine most civil rights issues at some point were so ubiquitous they seemed normal. If we can verify with research that compensation by tips causes non-whites and women to be systematically treated worse in places of public accommodation, do we need much more reason to declare tipping a failed experiment and move on to a more proven method of compensation such as wages or salaries?
- The point is this - we know that tipping rewards employees for being white and for being attractive females, and punishes them for being otherwise. We know that compensation by tipping lets employers speciously punish employees by assigning them to low revenue shifts, while still maintaining the legal fiction that the employee is making a full wage.
Additionally, compensation by tips ensures that customers who are non-white, who are female, or old people, or young people, or foreigners all get a lower quality of service than medium-aged white men, in establishments that claim to welcome all peoples equally. - [From a food critic:] ... with your fixed service charge you didn’t give my any choice. I couldn’t give him a lower tip. How else could I punish him for his mistakes?
- [From their former Director of Operations:] I’m curious why it seems that nobody has a problem with “parties of 5 or more will be subjected to a 20% service charge”, but, in the minds of some people, “parties of 1 or more will be subjected to an 18% service charge” is heresy?
- I’ve also noticed that people in general turn their ears off once the subject of tipping comes up.
My Rule #1 in life is “never read the comments”, but as this blog series has become popular I’ve read through a couple forum discussions about it. One thing that really strikes me is how many people are compelled to share their personal tipping policy. A key point of this blog series is that most people have their own policy, and the difference in tipping practices among individuals is so big that any given tip contains no information. But I think that the people who can’t wait to tell you how they tip, are missing that point. They’re not listening; and from what I can see, they’re also not being listened to.
Tipping embodies a lot of messages - and no one is listening.
The Epilogue:
Jay Porter also wrote a couple of shorter articles, one on August 9th, 2013 at Quartz (with a hilarious chart at the bottom), and then one on August 14th, 2013 at Slate.