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Brick No160: Happy Birthday :-)
15 September 2005
By Matt Weston, Thursday 15 September 2005 Happy birthday :-) On Monday, it's the twenty-third anniversary of :-) In a message time-stamped at 19-Sep-82 11:44, Scott E Fahlman, a computer scientist from Pittsburgh, USA, first proposed the use of :-) to flag jokes in emails. "Read it sideways," he explained. And 23 years on, :-) has given birth to a whole smiley language - see David W Anderson's 93-page emoticon dictionary As we're all business people, it's probably worth noting that Fahlman never made any money from his invention. :-( In fact, did anyone? Well, maybe . . . An extra 7 or 8p Mike Lynn is probably the world's leading academic authority on tipping. A former bartender, busboy and waiter, he's written over 25 papers on the topic. According to Lynn, the amount people tip has only a weak correlation with the quality of service they report. On average, exceptional service only raises tips by about 1.5 percent. So, for service we think is ordinary, we might tip a fiver on a £50 bill. But if the service is exceptional, the server only gets an extra 7 or 8p. But here's the scoop. Whereas Lynn's studies show little relationship between high tipping and exceptional service, they do pick up something else. Apparently, by drawing a smiley on the bill, waitresses increase their tips by an average of 18 percent. (Waiters who do the same, by the way, decrease theirs by 9 percent.) 18 percent?! It's easy to jump to the wrong conclusion, i.e. if exceptional service lifts tips by 1.5 percent, and yet a smiley lifts tips by 18 percent, surely we just hire waitresses who can draw good smileys? And, surely we employ people who also know how to broadcast one of those professional smiles I wrote about last week, as they too have a positive effect on the amount people tip? Well, no . . . Abolish tipping What Mike Lynn's studies really prove is that the very idea of tipping is broken. (That's my conclusion, not Lynn's, by the way.) Just because tipping is a system that has been around for hundreds of years, doesn't mean it works. The original point was to reward exceptional service, but as we've seen above, most people don't actually tip because of that. In fact, tipping just rewards ploys - like smileys on the bill and professional smiles. And such ploys, unlike exceptional service, have very little to do with whether a customer returns to a place, or tells a friend about it. Tipping also puts the onus squarely on the shoulders of your customer. Tipping is supposed to empower the customer, and to keep your waiters/ bartenders/ drivers on their toes. But in reality aren't you just shifting responsibility for paying your staff's wages onto your customer? Most customers tip because they feel guilty not doing so - by drawing a smiley on a bill, a waitress is playing on that guilt. A tip used to be a gratuity, now it's expected. A case in point - the Shitty Tipper database. What if your local restaurant abolished tipping, and started paying staff a proper wage? What if, instead of "service charge not included", they printed "no service charge - if you enjoy your meal we'd much rather you show your appreciation by coming again soon." And what if, instead of the customer tipping the restaurant, the restaurant unexpectedly tipped the customer (after the bill has been paid)? Say, a take-home jar of Mama's pasta sauce, or a bottle of house red. Remember to sign up: back to top |
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