When Thomas Keller, one of America's foremost chefs, announced that on Sept. 1 he would ab
olish the practice of tipping at Per Se, his luxury restaurant in New York City, and replace it with a European--style. service charge, I knew three groups would be opposed: customers, servers and restaurant owners. These three groups are all committed to tipping—as they quickly made clear on Web sites. To oppose tipping, it seems, is to be anticapitalist, and maybe even a little French.
But Mr. Keller is right to move away from tipping—and it's worth exploring why just about everyone else in the restaurant world is wrong to stick with the practice.
Customers believe in tipping because they think it makes economic sense. "Waiters know that they won't get paid if they don't do a good job" is how most advocates of the system would put it. To be sure, this is a tempting, apparently rational statement about economic theory, but it appears to have little applicability to the real world of restaurants.
Michael Lynn, an associate professor of consumer behavior. and marketing at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, has conducted dozens of studies of tipping and has concluded that consumers' assessments of the quality of service correlate weakly to the amount they tip.
Rather, customers are likely to tip more in response to servers touching them lightly and leaning forward next to the table to make conversation than to how often their water glass is refilled—in other words, customers tip more when they like the server, not when the service is good. Mr. Lynn's studies also indicate that male customers increase their tips for female servers while female customers increase their tips for male servers.
What's more, consumers seem to forget that the tip increases as the bill increases. Thus, the tipping system is an open invitation to what restaurant professionals call "upselling": every bottle of imported water, every espresso and every cocktail is extra money in the server's pocket. Aggressive upselling for tips is often rewarded while low-key, quality service often goes unrecognized.
In addition, the practice of tip pooling, which is the norm in fine-dining restaurants and is becoming more common in every kind of restaurant above the level of a greasy spoon, has ruined whatever effect voting with your tip might have had on an individual waiter. In an unreasonable outcome, you are punishing the good waiters in the restaurant by not tipping the bad one. Indeed, there appears to be little connection between tipping and good service.
It may be inferred that a European-style. service ______.
A．is tipping-free
B．charges little tip
C．is the author's initiative
D．is offered at Per Se
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