Showing posts with label tipping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tipping. Show all posts

Sunday, May 29, 2022

Tipping in taxis

 The WSJ writes about a working paper about tipping in taxis by my Stanford GSB colleague (and taxi driver emeritus) Kwabena Donkor.

Here's the WSJ article:

When Given a Menu of Tipping Options, People Tip More  By Lisa Ward

"People tend to use tip menus as a reference point or anchor, interpreting the options as indicators of what they should actually tip, says Kwabena Donkor, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s School of Business, the paper’s author and a former New York City taxi driver.

"The study found that 58% of riders chose to use the taxi cabs’ tip menus, though riders tended to opt out of using the menu when the calculations were easiest."

********

And here's the working paper:

The Economic Value of Norm Conformity andMenu-Opt-Out Costs

Kwabena Donkor, Stanford GSB December, 2021

"Abstract: This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes trade-offs between consumption versus norm-adherence and choosing from a menu of default options versus computing a non-default choice. In the theoretical model, peoples’ choices depend on consumption, norm conformity, and menu-opt-out costs. Using passengers’ tips sampled from a billion NYC taxi rides, I empirically estimate the model parameters.I find that the cost of deviating from the norm tip and opting out of the default tip menu are both high relative to the taxi fare. I then examine the welfare implications of norm conformityand the positive and normative effects of default menu design."

Friday, January 27, 2017

Restaurants without tipping

The NY Times has the story: Year of Upheaval for Restaurants That Ended Tipping

"A rational system is exactly what he was hoping for when Huertas joined several restaurants in Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group — Maialino, Marta, the Modern, North End Grill and (as of last week) Gramercy Tavern and the newly reopened Union Square CafĂ© — that have stopped accepting tips. The switch is part of an effort to bring the nation’s roughly $800 billion restaurant business, with its frequently chaotic and unprofessional practices and traditions, in line with modern workplace standards.
Continue reading the main st
Instead of expecting customers to tip the people who wait on them, tip-free restaurants pay all employees wages that reflect their skill and seniority. The customer pays a fixed amount, stated in writing (in menu prices), as in virtually every other kind of consumer business, from Nordstrom to Netflix to The New York Times.
This service-included system — also called gratuity-free, tipless and, within the Union Square group, Hospitality Included — has been in place for several years at expensive restaurants like Per Se and the Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare. But this year, influential restaurants up and down the price scale and around the country signed on, including Le Pigeon and Park Kitchen in Portland, Ore.; Dahlia Lounge and Canlis in Seattle; and ComalCala and Petit Crenn in the Bay Area.
It is too soon to tell whether the no-tipping model will become the standard, or simply an option for a few restaurants that can make it work. What is clear after about a year is that it has forced a number of unforeseen changes, large and small, in the places that have embraced it.
...
"Mr. Adler of Huertas, and others, say that one big reason to end tipping is the need for more equity between those who work in kitchens, who earn straight wages, and those who work in dining rooms, who receive tips.
A more immediate motivation, local restaurateurs said, was the approach of the $15 minimum wage in 2018, proceeding in New York City on Dec. 31 with a raise to $11 an hour (from $9) for nontipped workers. “Labor is just going to cost more and more, and all restaurants will need to rethink how their people get paid,” Mr. Lavorini said.
As the dining business, especially at the high end, attracts more educated and skilled workers, there is increased pressure to treat them fairly, professionally and predictably.
With tipping, chaos is a consequence. Servers compete ruthlessly for Saturday night shifts, when tips run high, but many are no-shows for Monday lunch. An experienced line cook who carries $40,000 in debt from years of culinary school earns $12 an hour, while a new server can reap three times that much.
...
"The “automatic service charge” imposed at many restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and Alinea in Chicago, can redistribute money the same way a no-tipping policy does, although states treat that revenue in different ways.
Tips are also handled differently in different states, but in New York, by law, they can be pooled and distributed only to “front of house” employees: those who work in the dining room, like waiters, bartenders and backwaiters (formerly known as busboys).
...
"One clear lesson: “There are certain fixed items — a glass of wine, a bar snack, a cup of coffee — that affect how guests experience the welcome of the restaurant,” Mr. Lavorini said. The prices of those items stayed where they were, even as others, including those for many bottles of wine, rose by as much as 20 percent.
...
"From 2015 to 2016, the payroll for the Modern’s two dozen front-of-house employees’ hourly wages rose to as much as $30 an hour from $5, through a combination of the rising tipped minimum wage, paid overtime and revenue sharing.
Also, restaurants pay taxes on their revenue, but not on income from tips. When service is folded into the price of the meal, the restaurant is taxed on that “additional” revenue.
...
“It took hundreds of years to build up the traditions of how things are done in restaurants,” he said. “We can’t expect to change all of that in one year.”


Monday, January 10, 2011

Tips, Tip Pooling, and Tip Credits

Restaurant wait-staff in the United States make a significant part of their incomes in tips left by satisfied or habit-driven or social-norm-conscious patrons (but this isn't a post about the large behavioral literature on restaurant tipping, e.g. here). A consequence of this is that restaurants and certain other employers can receive "tip credits" that release them from the obligation to pay the minimum wage, since their employees will be having part of their wage paid by their customers.

There's a body of law about what employers can and cannot do with tips (e.g. require them to be pooled, shared with non wait-staff, etc.), and about what constitutes a tip (e.g. not all "service charges" go to the server): see e.g. NoLo.com's  Tips, Tip Pooling, and Tip Credits: What Service Employees Need to Know

There are presently a number of lawsuits going through the courts about this, and some new legislation, discussed in an op-ed in the NY Times by Tim and Nina Zagat of Zagat's fame: Adding Fairness to the Tip

With the new year have come some new regulations in NY: New Rules Impose Systems for Sharing of Tips
"The new regulations apply to workers in restaurants and hotels and cover a number of issues, including who should pay for laundering “wash-and-wear” uniforms, like special T-shirts. The rules also raise the minimum wage for tipped employees, to $5 from $4.65 an hour for food service workers and to $5.65 from $4.90 an hour for service workers, a category that includes coat check workers in a restaurant or porters in hotels. (There is a separate minimum for workers at resort hotels.)


"The new rules also define the job categories that are eligible for shares in tips from the dining room: food service workers only, including waiters, bartenders and bussers, as well as sommeliers and hosts, provided they are not managers.

"The new rules allow restaurants to dictate both the system and the percentage allocated to each job category. Gratuities can be combined in a pool, to be divided by all the staff members who have helped a team effort. Or, individual servers can collect their own tips and give portions, or shares, to members of the team.

"The Labor Department will require that employers keep records of tip pools and shares; the records could be examined during investigations undertaken by the department on its own or in response to complaints.
...
"Higher-end, full-service restaurants tend to favor the pooling of tips, because it breeds less squabbling over stations and shift assignments, provides an incentive for teamwork and encourages the servers to police their own performance.


"The new regulations generally limit the pool to service workers in the dining room who interact with customers directly — like waiters — or indirectly, like servers who ferry plates from the kitchen to a station where another server picks them up and delivers them to the table. But bartenders, who prepare beverages for the dining room in a role analogous to that of a cook, can also share in the tip pool, even though kitchen staff members cannot.

“A lot of this arises from custom and tradition,” Ms. Lindholm said. “If you’re looking for perfect logic in this, it isn’t there.”