Tipping Essay

746 Words2 Pages

A. Distributed Tips
The basic rule of tips is that they belong to employees, not the employer. Employees can't be required to give their tips or any part of them to the company, except as part of a valid tip pooling arrangement and even then, the tip pool must be divided only among certain other employees. Tip pooling between waiters means that they split their tips regardless of who earned them. The employer can't be part of the pool; only employees who regularly receive tips can be part. Employees can't be required to share their tips with employees who don't usually receive their own tips, like dishwashers or cooks.
The advantage from the management perspective of such agreement is that it encourages cooperation between the waiters, which …show more content…

In order for tipping to serve this function, consumers must leave larger tips in response to better service. (Lynn, 2010) Numerous studies have founded that tip size is only weakly related to service quality (Bodvarsson and Gibson, 1994). The weakness of this relationship raises questions about the efficacy of tipping as an incentive/reward. The highly personalized nature of restaurant services makes it difficult for management to monitor and control the quality of waiters’ and waitresses’ efforts to serve their customers, so these quality control tasks are left up to customers via the convention of tipping. In his article called “Restaurant Tipping and service quality: A tenuous Relationship”, Michael Lynn analyzed 24 correlations between tipping and service. While the studies found that, in reality, tips increased with the perceived quality of service, the relationship was weak enough to raise concerns about the use of tips to motivate servers, measure server performance, or identify dissatisfied …show more content…

Those findings have discouraging implications for restaurant managers who seek to use tips to measure server performance motivate servers, or identify dissatisfied customers. Even though gratuity levels generally did increase with service valuation, that increase was so small relative to the range of tips that in practice restaurant servers would be impossible to notice it. In other words, most servers won't be able to detect improved tips as a consequence of excellent service. Consistent with this argument, a survey of the tipped employees in an average restaurant found that 47 percent saw no relationship between the quality of their service and their

Open Document