What Is Your First Memory Of Money?

[Almighty Colin]

From the journal of socio-economics:

1) Tip percentages are only weakly related to customers' ratings of service quality in restaurant settings. This finding suggests that restaurant tips are poor measures of customer satisfaction with service and that they provide weak incentives for delivering good service.

2) Nonverbal server behaviors that communicate liking for the customer, such as lightly touching the customer and crouching next to the table when interacting with the customer, substantially increase the tips restaurant servers receive. These findings suggest that managers can significantly increase their employees' compensation without adversely affecting the company's bottom line by encouraging their servers to touch customers and to display other nonverbal signs of liking for the customer.

3) Tipping is more prevalent in countries whose populations are achievement-oriented, status-seeking, extroverted, neurotic and tenderhearted. These findings suggest that tipping exists to serve several functions, i.e., to increase the social attention/esteem that servers give customers, to reduce consumers' anxieties about being served by others and to allow consumers to financially help servers.