Skip to main content

Tipping Right

As a consumer that started to re-engage with the food service industry coming of the pandemic, I can't say the ubiquitous tip options at every turn makes for delightful customer experience. The set of options remain about the same irrespective of the quality or type of service rendered. 

If it's a fast casual establishment making me a standard sandwich in the menu to go while I wait in line to pick up my order is not worthy of a 30% tip. That is not the customer's perception of value. Now if it were a party of twenty out for dinner with many folks having dietary restrictions or otherwise needing substitutions that's different. Add to that the party arriving at different times and being at different stages of ordering - some haven't figured out their drinks yet and others are close to ordering their entrees. 

It takes a lot of effort to keep all the balls in the air with such a group, get the orders right and deliver them in a way that makes for a seamless experience for the group. That is worth 30% easily. It has to be noted, the level of talent servicing the customers in these two situations is very different. I had a young woman at the local Subway scowl at me for asking her to toast the bread before she fixed the sandwich. It went downhill from there with her throwing stuff at the bread like she was attacking it. If 30%  was one of the options on the tip menu (in this case there was none), I am not at all sure if I'd be inclined. 

The idea of building the cost of tipping into the price of the service makes more sense. The customer still has a choice - they can take out instead of sitting down and not have to pay the premium. Studies show that greater the number of tipping options the higher the total amount collected. I must be an anomaly because I work with the dollar amount I have in mind and it is never one of the available percent options. I would imagine there are customers like me out there who resent being boxed in by pre-set numbers that do not calibrate the quality of their experience that the tip is meant to reflect.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more