Bill Spohn wrote:Not at all. On that weekend, she was offering a different service than her normal take an order, bring the food routine. Obviously (and I'm sure to no one's surprise) that additional service offered was much appreciated by a certain segment of the patrons, and tips followed.
On 'normal' business days, she would be relying on her cheerful personality, and effective service, and if that didn't result in better tips than someone giving ill informed sullen service, then there ain't no justice.
While I can agree with you that to an extent that there was a different service being offered, it does go to show that the value placed on service and doing one's job well is subject to many more factors than just direct food service such that tips really can't be an honest method of determining who is a good wait person. Many women patrons that weekend tipped much worse than normal. It could be because the service was worse or it could be because of the way they viewed college age bikini clad waitresses. I believe you will find that in most places the more physcially appealing the wait person the better the tips overall. At least that was my experience almost 20 years ago now. Is it safe to assume that because someone is better looking they give better service because that is the conclusion one would get just from counting tips.
Believe it or not I actually agree with you regarding tipping in accordance with the service you receive. I just also think that most servers will not correlate your tip to the job they did since they do not know
1. If you are having a good or bad day
2. What you normally tip
3. If you are judging their service or some other quality such as their apperance/race/gender.
4. If you did not like the food
5. Is the place too hot, too cold, too loud
People are very good, amazingly good in fact, at finding reasons at why you tipped poorly that have nothing to do with the service they provided. You know the old study that showed that something like 93% of the people surveyed thought that they were a better than average driver.