When machines prompt for tips before service, people feel manipulated, recent research shows, and that perception leads to lower satisfaction.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
I used to lament merely being asked “how are the first few bites?” before even grabbing the cutlery to start enjoying a meal at a restaurant. Now I’m being asked to tip before my food even arrives?
Would you tip a server in advance? If you believe tipping is simply wage subsidization, maybe. But if you believe tipping is a reward for good service, you’d likely balk.
Tipping tends to follow local norms more than logic. My own upbringing defaults me to 15 per cent, jumps to 20 for great service and drops to 10 for poor.
While I can’t quite get behind the “if I’m not sitting, I’m not tipping” movement, my framework generally shifts lower by about 10 percentage points for counter service.
The 15 per cent default seems to be in line with readers who weighed in on Rob Carrick’s newsletter question about tipping practices in Canada. But this doesn’t line up with suggested tip prompts on payment terminals. As Rob points out, they don’t even start at 15 per cent in many cases.
Once a simple gesture of gratitude, tipping has morphed into a psychological toll booth engineered to drain us at the end of every meal, both financially and emotionally.
The divergence from a reward for service to a wage subsidization tactic struck me years ago at Pearson Airport when they introduced iPad menus at restaurants by the gates that let you order and pay before any human interaction. The tip prompt also came first. Before coffee, before service, before even a “hello.”
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The experience left me with a bad taste and a lot of questions. Would a higher tip mean faster service? Better prepared food? Or, with the tip already locked in, would effort vanish altogether?
And who actually gets the money? The staff preparing and serving my meal, or the management that programmed the guilt machine?
Recent research in the Journal of Consumer Affairs backed up what my gut already knew: When machines prompt for tips before service, people feel manipulated. And that perception leads to lower satisfaction and, ultimately, to negative word of mouth.
Interestingly, the authors found that if a human passes over a terminal with the same tipping suggestions we find it far less annoying. Not to mention it is far less likely to happen before service is done.
The sense of being played isn’t unique to iPads. On a recent trip to France, where tipping is rare, a server spotted that I was a tourist and asked if I’d like to leave “something for service.”
A local at the next table scoffed on my behalf. What began as a pleasant night out ended with an awkward sting. Once again, a tip prompt, delivered with manipulative intent, undercut the whole experience.
Tipping manipulation to keep menu item prices lower is increasingly a payroll transfer strategy designed by consultants. (The same ones who got every restaurant chain to prod servers to ask about those first few bites before you’ve taken any.) Rather than raise menu prices and pay staff more, tipping manipulation shifts that burden to you.
While some restaurants have tried to take tipping off the table altogether, folding service costs into menu prices, this may be harder to do in cultures where tipping is the norm. Some reversed course and went back to tipping models partly because diners compared entree prices without noticing one included a living wage and the other didn’t.
We favour the illusion of lower prices, even when the final total is the same. It’s the same logic that makes people pay more for a product with “free shipping” versus a lower product price with a separate charge for shipping.
The researchers paint a picture where the further weaponization of tipping is ultimately bad for the bottom line. That’s certainly true for me. I now avoid those menu tablets at Pearson because there is no viable option that would make eating there and tipping appropriately work for me.
I’m not going to enter a zero tip up front and choose to leave a cash tip after service because I don’t carry cash anymore. I’m also not going to preselect a tip amount because that’s just not aligned with how I’ve always done it. So to avoid the emotional discomfort, I choose not to play the game at all.
I’ve hit my own tipping point (sorry). I’d rather spend my money where I feel like a guest, not a mark. Until then, I’ll keep walking past the iPads and looking for service that still feels like service. That alone seems exceptional enough that I’d tip 20 per cent.
Preet Banerjee is a consultant to the wealth management industry with a focus on commercial applications of behavioural finance research.
