Racism In Restaurants

In the article “Different Service, Same Experience: Documenting the Subtlety of Modern Racial Discrimination in U.S. Restaurants”, the authors Zachary W. Brewster and Jonathan R. Brauer report on the subtle racism found within the restaurant industry. They focus on the racism found between African-American and Caucasian consumers of full-service restaurants at the hand of the wait staff, hosts, managers, and other restaurant employees. Brewster and Brauer used previous studies on race-based customer service conducted by various authors before discovering their own method for finding empirical evidence. Their study “analyzed anonymous survey data collected from an online sample of Survey Sampling International’s (SSI)

U.S. consumer panel”. (Brewster

The participants were asked 66 questions asking about their participant's attitudes and experiences with dining in full-service restaurants. The 66 questions pertained of the following: general dining experiences, quality of service received during their last visit at a full-service restaurant, the frequency of positive or negative experiences at full-service restaurants, and the participant’s confidence level of being a recipient of high-quality service when visiting a restaurant for the first time. Brewster and Brauer discovered that “Black respondents are significantly more likely to report being confident that they will be the recipient of high-quality service when visiting a restaurant for the first time, being the recipients of standard markers of quality service, experiencing positive emotions when dining out in full-service restaurants, and are significantly less likely to report receiving inattentive/poor service compared with whites when dining in full-service restaurants.” (Brewster & Brauer,

One of the most obvious weaknesses are the ways that they got their group of participants. They got their groups through an online survey that did randomize the selection of said participants. However, some of these participants were invited to be a part of the survey only because they had already been registered at the said surveying site. Some of the participants would have never been part of the survey if they had not been preregistered on the website. Brewster and Brauer said themselves how they were limited to the accessibility of valid statistical evidence. “As SSI’s sampling frame draws from a study population compromised of voluntary participants…this limits our ability to draw valid statistical inferences from these data to the general population.” “Nonetheless, this methodological characteristic is less likely bias statistical descriptions of group-based differences in dining experiences within our relatively large, demographically and geographically diverse (representing 48 states and the District of Columbia) sample of Black and White U.S. consumers.” (Brewster & Brauer, 2016) One of the strengths of this article is the way that this study was conducted. Brewster and Brauer inform the readers of all the questions that were asked during the survey and the other ways in which the group of participants was separated. “Respondents were asked 66 questions soliciting nuanced information about