Economist's Notebook: Notes From Atlanta

I have written many times on the labeling of glassware for beer, but here is a new one - clearly marked wine glasses! Well done.



I also wrote on the curious tip guide on the bottom of my receipt at Kenny & Zukes. Well at Legal Seafood in Atlanta they go one better. They bring the card reader to your table, European Style (though we still are in the dark ages of magnetic strips), and then this screen appears. You have the option of entering your own percentage or amount, or you can choose one of the three convenient options: 15, 18 or 20%. (Note to K&Zs: even at a fancy Atlanta restaurant, they are not bold enough to go to 25% and they can pay the wait staff less than minimum wage) I got out of the waitress that she doesn't have to use the machine and for her regulars who give her good tips, she goes the old manual way because that induces more generous tips, but for irregulars, so to speak, the machine yields better results.

Economist's Notebook: Tipping

I was working at the OSU Portland Center offices yesterday and decided to lunch at the nearby Kenny & Zukes. When my credit card receipt came I encountered something new: a handy-dandy guide to help me calculate an appropriate tip. (Blurry photo provided above) Tipping after a meal is a well-known economic paradox: if you are not a regular there is no incentive to reward good service after the fact (this is the subject of one of my all-time favorite New Yorker cartoons). But in this case I was more amused about the decision to include the guide on the receipt and the particular choice of which percentages to list.

First, the decision to include the guide is an interesting one. My guess is that people who have difficulty calculating tips will deliberately err on the side of generosity, and so it is more likely that people will tip more, not less, if they are not mathematically inclined. So putting a guide on the receipt may in fact reduce tip income all else equal.

But all is not equal. In the US 15% is considered a pretty standard tip, a default if you will. My personal default is closer to 20% because I have lived on tips before, but I am also a believer in incentives and even if it is only to help the next customer rather than me, I will signal good and bad service through my tip. So if the service is really bad, I will tip 10% - which is a generally accepted bad tip. So it is interesting that they do not calculate 10% for you, they start at 15% and go to 25%. I imagine that this serves to reset customers expectations about what a good and bad tip is. It resets the equation in your head and gives you the idea that 15% is a low tip, 20% is a average tip, and 25% is a good tip. I also imagine that it works pretty well.

So the net effect is, I would guess, an increase in the tip income of servers at K&Z. Nice.

By the way, I had already calculated my tip before I realized the little guide existed (the picture is of the customer's copy) - my tip: $2.50.

As another aside, this is probably much more effective in Oregon where the sales tax does not provide a guide. In states with an 8% sales tax, say, doubling the tax is a pretty handy way to figure it out.