Tipping servers and other job items with money motivation.
Inimalist and I have been discussing this and we each bring up some good points on motivation for tips or other services. I don't care if this thread goes off on tangents, as long as it focuses on motivation for money.
What is the motivation? What is the best way to go about tipping and why? Keep in mind cognitive evaluation theory and other theories on economics. Some of these theories do have empirical efforts, so they should all be brought up.
I hear from some that tipping in Russia might embarrass your server. Is that really true?
Re: Tipping servers and other job items with money motivation.
The basic motivations would be to ensure your service is good in the future if you return and secondly that empathy will, for lack of a better word, hurt you if you don't tip someone when it's socially appropriate.
The best way to tip is to offer goods or currency equal to a percentage of your meal's value relative to the server's subjective quality, local customs and personal economic factors.
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Last edited by Symmetric Chaos on Aug 6th, 2009 at 09:40 PM
The whole tipping business is bullshit. In Japan it is offensive to tip a taxi driver, because he works for his money and does not take charity.
When I go to the bar or a restaurant, the waiter/tress there has been employed to do a job of serving and giving me a great service. It is in their job description to give a good service and that is what the employer pays them to do.
So, what is tipping? Giving them money for doing what they were supposed to be doing anyway.
If the wage is too low, that is nobody's problem - get another job where the wage is higher.
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you should tip based on how good your service was not how much it was.
like i mentioned in the other thread a family can order over $100 in food and get slow and bad service.
while another family eats a meal at a restaurant for $40 bucks and they got better service and the waiter or waitress was more kind than the other one at the more expensive restaurant.
just cause you purchased more of something doesnt do any changes on the performance of how good a waiter or waitress served you.
The point of tipping is to subsidize the wages of the waiters. In fancy restaurants the tips are more because they serve fewer people and thus get fewer tips.
This is not good. When I went to Japan, you never tip anybody anything, and it made my food and taxi expenses nearly 20% less.
No, they get paid to do the job. That's it. Their salary doesn't change for "great service" or "awful service" unless someone tips them better or worse.
People typically don't end up as waiters due to their huge number of job options. The wages are low because of tipping in the first place.
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Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
Last edited by Symmetric Chaos on Aug 6th, 2009 at 10:43 PM
I don't tip unless I'm afraid to piss of my company. I look towards Steve Buscemi's lines in Reservoir Dogs as inspiration.
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It's an unwritten rule that bad service affects a tip, so if the server is an idiot or rude, then it's fine to modify the gratuity. Personally, It's extremely rare that I ever leave less than 15%, usually 20%, but I don't go back if the service was that bad.
I've never heard tipping at a buffet, it's rare I eat a one, so I'm ignorant here.
ive been to many buffets where on there tab to sign after paying theres a blank spot for tip. i never put an amount on those. and if they spit on your food then everyone else would eat it as well cause the trays are open to everyone.
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Last edited by chomperx9 on Aug 7th, 2009 at 12:18 AM
Re: Tipping servers and other job items with money motivation.
not capitalized
the point was about whether under-tipping/not tipping for perceived poor performance would be an effective tool of motivation for people to become better waiter/waitresses.
Given you seem to have devoted a thread to it, I may as well give it an honest effort. Learning is probably my worst area of psych...
I'll give it a look, but what about this: as a concept, "over" and "under" tipping are relative to the person. in the thread that spawned this, chomper said he only paid in accordance with performance, indicating that he would never "under/over tip". The amount he paid, regardless of the standard, was the proper amount, regardless of the perceptions of the waiter/waitress. Additionally, some people standardly pay more or less than the social norm for tipping, meaning that some cases may appear to be an over/under tip even though there is no intent on the part of the customer to communicate this.
Additionally, many factors other than performance would affect how much you tip. Whether there are social influences, if you with family or with people you hardly know, if you are drunk, the physical attractiveness of the server, you current economic situation or how much money you have on your person, and even just your overall mood irrespective of the meal/service. These things would not only affect how much you would be willing to pay, but also how you perceive the service and the experience. If you are broke, just had a fight with your wife and get some guy who didn't have time to shave before going into work (assuming you aren't into the rugged type) serve you, you might not realize he got called in on his day off when they were understaffed, and he is working the load of 3 people. He gets your order wrong, your mood presets you to under-tip to "teach him a lesson", whereas all it is communicating to him is that you are cheap and ignorant.
For what you are saying to be correct, there would have to be a stronger link between performance and tip than any other factor, including how much a customer normally tips. For a person to effectively learn to perform better, they would have to believe they performed poorly and know that this was the specific reason that they were tipped at a rate lower than standard, and that would have to be the actual motivation of the customer. This is similar to how, when punishing a child, one should attempt to use a punishment that is related to the wrong activity the child was doing. Hitting someone with a toy is better controlled by taking away the child's toy privileges than by sitting them in a corner, I guess iirc.
However, one might not need tip and performance to be the strongest correlation of variables for performance to impact tip in a significant way, and the cultural standard is such that there is enough regularity in tipping to account for people who tip based solely on performance and those who regularly over/under tip. It might be argued that some social pressure to over-tip might force the real average tip above the standard, but that is sort of irrelevant, as I would give you that over-tipping would improve performance (though relative to the caveats I gave).
The reason why over tipping might improve performance but under tipping would not comes from Skinner, and a lot of other learning research. Skinner, at the end of his career, got into the psychology of rehabilitation and the prison system. Basically, he said that prisons failed because they punished people, they gave them no motivation or incentive to get better.
Now, personality differences are important, and as you said, to you getting what you perceived as an "under-tip" made you try harder. That is awesome. However, I know for a fact it doesn't work that way with me [and I am NOT saying that this is better by any means...], and, not to sound all pompous, that might say more about how you rationalize failure to yourself than about any real behavioural changes.
any buffet I have ever gone to has had servers getting drinks and fairly constantly clearing/replacing dirty dishes from people's tables.
I don't think I'd tip if they didn't do that, its not really much more than a cafeteria at that point (though, I guess I throw my change in their tip jars all the time...)
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Aug 6th, 2009 09:32 PM
i agree 100%
so good eh?
