After restaurateur Danny Meyer decided to stop tipping at his restaurants last week, the question of whether or not tipping should be banned has been pushed to the forefront in the mainstream media. So, should restaurants ban tipping? Apparently economics journalist Stephen J. Dubner thinks so, citing everything from economics to racism as to why tipping should be done away with all together.
Time magazine published his commentary under the headline, "Tipping Was Always a Bad Idea."
Dubner argued that people view tipping in three ways: a reward for particularly good service, a restaurant’s way of getting customers to pay the restaurants employees, or a virtually inescapable tax on dining. Dubner complained that restaurant tipping is something that makes employers, employees and customers awkwardly co-dependent, potentially discriminatory on several dimensions, and it’s a bad idea in general.
Recalling an interview with Cornell researcher Michael Lynn on Freakonomics Radio, Dubner wrote:
Blondes get better tips than brunettes. Slender women get better tips than heavier women. Large-breasted women get better tips than smaller-breasted women. Surprisingly, at least in the studies I’ve done, women in their thirties get better tips than either younger or older women.” Lynn also found, “women and men earn roughly the same in tips. But white servers earn substantially more than blacks (even with black customers).
Dubner believes this discrimination should be argument enough to stop tipping because, as he writes, “…as a society we profess to require equal pay for equal work. Isn’t it patently unfair for one employee to earn less than another because of the color of her skin (or even her hair)?”
Citing Meyer’s approach as an example of what can take the place of tipping, Dubner says the key to setting a fixed salary for a server and getting rid of all those pesky dining taxes would be to increase menu prices.
Dubner asked if it’s unfair for one employee to earn less than another because of their skin color, yet he mentioned no study or research about the tipping behaviors of customers, such as the difference between white and black customers’ tipping behavior.
In January of this year, The Washington Post ran an article that tried to answer the question, “Why do black patrons tip less, on average, than whites?” As it turns out, racism couldn’t be the sole reason as to why blacks tipped differently than whites:
This widespread negative perception of black peoples’ tipping practices cannot be attributed solely to racism because it is consistent with a substantial body of empirical evidence. A number of different studies using different methodologies and different geographic samples have found that, on average, black people do indeed tip less than whites in U.S. restaurants.
Some may feel that the economic status of that of a black patron versus that of a white patron may be to blame. Not so. According to The Washington Post:
…studies have consistently observed a reliable black-white tipping difference even after controlling for consumers’ socioeconomic status, including income and education, and after controlling for perceptions of service quality. This race difference in tipping is also observed regardless of whether the server is white or black.
If Dubner wants to use racism as a reason to end tipping, he may want to find another reason.
