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Bitter Weather, Sweet Tips

Casey N. Cep

The New Yorker

We think differently in bad weather. It makes us less optimistic about the present and the future; it reduces voter turnout, specifically benefitting Republicans; it results in more pregnancies; and itreduces the number of traffic accidents. Less surprisingly, it may also make us more generous with tips for restaurant delivery.

GrubHub Seamless, the food-ordering company, told me that it sees a surge in business during inclement weather. Take this month’s polar vortex, which whirled and whipped cold arctic air from the North Pole down into central and eastern United States—making it colder in Florida than in Alaska, sending a polar bear indoors in Chicago, and freezing Niagara Falls. GrubHub Seamless’s figures also show that people tipped more generously during the polar vortex—in some areas, by quite a bit. (See our interactive of how New Yorkers tipped during the weather.)

GrubHub Seamless compared tipping (by credit card on Seamless and GrubHub, and using PayPal on GrubHub) during the recent polar vortex to other weekdays since December 1st. The 10037 Zip Code—a corner of East Harlem—saw the greatest increase in tipping: twenty-four per cent on January 7th, when the day’s low hit a frigid four degrees. The second-greatest increase was on January 5th, when the residents of 07304, in Jersey City, New Jersey, raised their tips by fifteen per cent. But not every Zip Code participated in the tipping bonanza. Pity the delivery staff who got summoned to 07307, in Jersey City, on January 9th: the tips there were down by more than twenty-two per cent.

Natureworks Restaurant saw more Seamless and GrubHub orders on the coldest day of the polar vortex than any other New York establishment. (In Boston, Montecristo Mexican Grill, Siam Bistro Thai Cuisine, and Punjab Palace were most in demand, while leaner appetites—or, perhaps, healthier New Year’s resolutions—prevailed in Washington, D.C., where Chop’t Creative Salad Co. was the most popular.)

Eric Toribio, a shift manager at the Natureworks on East Thirty-first Street in Manhattan, recalled the snowstorm during the polar vortex, when, even before the roads had been cleared, Natureworks was already making deliveries. “Some of the delivery guys abandoned their bikes and walked the rest of the way,” he said. “People were definitely thankful that we didn’t give up, but did whatever it took to get them their orders. That’s when you get a big tip.”

That’s not surprising: tips, after all, are meant to be an expression of appreciation for especially great service. On January 3rd, the day that Toribio remembers his delivery staff abandoning their bikes in the three inches of snow that blanketed Manhattan, the residents of 10020 rewarded delivery staff with a fourteen-per-cent increase in tips.

In general, the relationship between tipping and weather doesn’t appear to be well understood by researchers. Michael Lynn, a professor of food-and-beverage management at Cornell, has researched how tipping is affected by everything from the attractiveness and gender of the server to the race, religion, and socioeconomic status of the patron. He has studied tipping for decades, ever since he waited tables and tended bar during college, but told me that “very few studies actually look at weather, and they’ve produced mixed results.”

Lynn and other researchers were reluctant to try to explain the tipping variations from one Zip Code to the next. But they speculated: maybe people who order from restaurants located farther away feel compelled to give bigger tips, to make up for the greater distance travelled by the delivery person.

There may be demographic influences on tipping, too. Adam Greenberg, a graduate student in economics at the University of California in San Diego, who has also studied gratuities, pointed to a study by Lynn that found that black patrons tipped less than white patrons—a provocative finding, to be sure—and to his own research, which found that people using American Express cards, who also tended to be wealthier, tipped significantly more than people using other cards. Greenberg said that, generally, “knowledge of tipping norms depends on socioeconomic status, so demographic variation across Zip Codes could make it appear as if certain Zip Codes are less generous.”

Greenberg and Sean Flynn, an economics professor at Scripps, worked together on the most thorough study of gratuities and weather, relying on receipts from when customers dined out at restaurants. The pair analyzed two years’ worth of data, partly in an attempt to test the results of an earlier study, which suggested that tipping increases on sunny days. But they found no correlation between weather and tipping, only a strong correlation with the time of the year. “Tipping rates go way up during the holidays, especially right before Christmas, so people clearly modulate their tipping intensity based on social factors,” Flynn said.

Lynn contrasted the study by Flynn and Greenberg on dining-in habits with some of his own research on food delivery, specifically pizza delivery, in which he found that early or on-time delivery was rewarded with higher-than-expected tips—“But only when the driver ascribed the delivery to their own efforts,” he said. “Drivers had to make clear that they were the reason deliveries got there ahead of schedule.”

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Leaving a Tip: A Custom in Need of Changing?

At Sushi Yasuda, a 40-seat Japanese restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, owners include the cost of service in the price of the meal.

By PETE WELLS

Try one of these techniques if you want better service in restaurants:

1. Become very famous;

2. Spend $1,000 or more on wine every time you go out;

3. Keep going to the same restaurant until you get V.I.P. treatment; if that doesn’t work, pick another place.

Now, here is a technique that is guaranteed to have no effect on your service: leave a generous tip.

I’ve tipped slightly above the average for years, generally leaving 20 percent of the total, no matter what. According to one study, lots of people are just like me, sticking with a reasonable percentage through good nights and bad. And it doesn’t do us any good, because servers have no way of telling that we aren’t the hated type that leaves 10 percent of the pretax total, beverages excluded.

Some servers do try to sniff out stingy tippers, engaging in customer profiling based on national origin, age, race, gender and other traits. (The profiling appears to run both ways: another study showed that customers tended to leave smaller tips for black servers.)

I could go on against tipping, but let’s leave it at this: it is irrational, outdated, ineffective, confusing, prone to abuse and sometimes discriminatory. The people who take care of us in restaurants deserve a better system, and so do we.

That’s one reason we pay attention when a restaurant tries another way, as Sushi Yasuda in Manhattan started to do two months ago. Raising most of its prices, it appended this note to credit card slips: “Following the custom in Japan, Sushi Yasuda’s service staff are fully compensated by their salary. Therefore gratuities are not accepted.”

Sushi Yasuda joins other restaurants that have done away with tips, replacing them with either a surcharge (Atera and Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare in New York; Next andAlinea in Chicago; Coi and Chez Panisse in the San Francisco Bay Area) or prices that include the cost of service (Per Se in New York and the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif.).

The chef Tom Colicchio is considering service-included pricing at one of his New York restaurants, paying servers “an hourly rate that would be consistent with what they make now,” he said. “I think it makes perfect sense. I’m not sure my staff is going to think it makes perfect sense.”

These restaurants are numerous enough and important enough to suggest that a tip-reform movement is under way. On the other hand, they are few enough and exceptional enough to suggest that the movement may remain very small, and move very slowly.

Americans have stuck with tipping for years because all parties thought it worked in their favor. Servers, especially in restaurants from the mid- to high-priced, made good money, much of it in cash, and much of that unreported on tax returns. Owners saved on labor costs and taxes. And customers generally believed that tips brought better service.

The self-interest calculation may be different now. Credit card receipts and tougher oversight have virtually killed off unreported tips.

Another change is cultural. The restaurant business can be seen as a class struggle between the groomed, pressed, articulate charmers working in the dining room and the blistered, stained and profane grunts in the kitchen. The rise of chefs that are also owners has brought a few of the grunts to power. But as the average tip has risen to 20 percent or so from 15 percent, the pay for line cooks, dishwashers and others has stayed low.

At Coi, in San Francisco, Daniel Patterson, the chef and owner, levies an 18 percent service charge to be “shared by the entire staff,” the menu notes. One of his motives was to level out the income disparity that tipping creates between the kitchen and the front of the house, he said.

“Neither one is more important than the other,” Mr. Patterson said. “So it doesn’t make sense to me that servers would make three to four times as much as cooks.”

A second change has been howling outside the door. Front-of-house workers are suing one respected restaurant after another, including Dovetail, last month, accusing them of playing fast and loose with the laws on tips. The charges include sharing tips with workers who aren’t eligible for them and making tipped employees spend too much time on what is called sidework, like folding napkins between meals.

One such lawsuit was settled for more than $5 million. Some owners now think they can avoid the suits by eliminating tips.

“You abide by the letter of the law and do a service charge,” said Nick Kokonas, an owner of Alinea and Next. “That’s the only way you can take that income and spread it out to the staff.”

Restaurants that move to a surcharge or service-included pricing pay much more for labor, losing a sizable payroll-tax credit on tipped income.

Still, Mr. Kokonas said: “It’s worth it, because as soon as you grow to a certain size these days, and you’re high profile, everyone starts examining what you do. It’s not good enough to say, ‘These guys are making $100,000 a year and they’re treated really well and they have full health care.’ That’s irrelevant. It’s ‘Did they get paid overtime for their sidework?’ ”

Mr. Kokonas’s restaurants and others call the extra fee a service charge. The term is misleading if the money goes to workers who don’t serve, and lawyers warn that in New York State, that would be illegal.

Justin Swartz, a partner at Outten & Golden, a law firm that represents employees, says that in New York State, the fee should be called something like an administrative charge, or rolled into menu prices.

Even that won’t make restaurants entirely lawsuit-proof, particularly if some customers insist on tipping anyway. “You’re right back to square one,” said Carolyn D. Richmond, a lawyer at Fox Rothschild who advises many prominent restaurateurs. This summer, after consulting her and running the numbers, David Chang decided against service-included pricing for his Momofuku restaurants in New York.

“It’s a change in legislation that we need, and a change in the American diner’s view on tipping,” Ms. Richmond said. “And that’s even harder than changing legislatures.”

But the diner’s views may be changing. This is in part because restaurants like Per Se have taken the lead, but also in part because those lawsuits have corroded our faith that our tips will go where we want them to.

Even if we believe the argument that workers’ lawyers are going after technical violations of archaic, Depression-era laws, they have brought to light a major peculiarity of the restaurant business: they depend on tips to make their payrolls. The temptation to treat that money as general revenue can be hard for some to resist.

Since the suits began, “people think restaurants are just hoarding that cash,” Mr. Chang said.

But forget the cheats; the suits have also reminded us that many employees share our tips. So, if we leave 10 percent to signal our unhappiness with our server’s tone of voice, we may be hurting other workers, from the host who seated us by the window to the sommelier who suggested that terrific Sicilian white, to the runner who delivered the skate while it was still hot. How much longer can we insist that it’s our privilege to decide whether we want to pay these people?

“A service charge and a salary brings the profession back into the bright sun of the professional mainstream, instead of the murky half-light in which restaurants used to exist,” Mr. Patterson said.

He is a true believer, but he can’t convince everybody. In 2010 he tried an 18 percent service charge when he opened Plum in Oakland, Calif. Perhaps because Plum was less expensive and more casual than Coi, diners rebelled, and he dropped the charge.

The new system may not be right for customers at value-oriented places like Plum, at least for now. But it’s time for all of us who go out to eat to think twice about our habits. Tipping doesn’t work, and it doesn’t feel very good anymore, either.

New York Times