1. Crisis vs. recession. Via Felix Salmon, here is a wise account from India, it is still likely to be true.
2. Are tips discriminatory against African-Americans?
3. Money does make you happy — if you give it away (via Jacqueline Passey)
4. The economics of Gawker bloggers
Tips could only be described as discriminatory if it could be assumed that there are no relevant performance differences between the groups being compared – which apparently this study could not do, and the assumption is not reasonable a priori. So they have not demonstrated discrimination.
It is also difficult for external observers to capture and measure exactly what ‘performance’ entails in service industries. Appearance, manners, style – all might be regarded by the customer as a significant aspect of the service provided.
For instance I would be very interested to see a similar study done on tipping in relation to young attractive women – for instance in bars or waiting table. In ‘Why Men Earn More’ Warren Farrell describes how some extremely attractive women (he terms them ‘genetic celebrities’) can earn extraordinary sums in tips – orders of magnitude greater than their co-workers.
No, I just email Tyler links that I think he’d be interested in.
BGC,
Some quality of service measurement was done and it was opposite of the people that received higher tips. Granted, it was a limited sample size, but it seems that service differences were probably minimal, at worst.
†¦ subjectively rated the quality of service higher for black drivers than for white drivers (with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 for black drivers versus an average of 3.3 for white drivers).
The more I think about it, the more I think tipping is a bad practice for ordinary restaurants to employ. Not for racial reasons necessarily, but I think it has little connection with productivity, which is the opposite of what tipping is intended to do–incentive servers to do a better job at pleasing and attracting customers. Not nearly as many people give serious thought to how much they tip, lots of people don’t tip at all or give tiny perfunctory tips to every server. It leads to widespread undertipping in my experience.
I don’t see any connection between tipping and productivity until you get to certain restaurants, like Hooters, or fine dining establishments and the like.
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