Battle of the Sexes: Who Tips Better?

Wow, it's been over a month since I posted anything-- sorry, loyal readers (all three of you)! I've been tied up looking for information on the cost of the equipment needed to counterfeit high-quality US currency, the suspected percentage of currently circulating US currency that's likely counterfeit, and the likelihood of getting caught passing counterfeit bills. Surprisingly, the US Department of the Treasury website is less than forthcoming with that information. Also, I think I'm on a couple government watch lists now. Sorry, Abhi. I'll keep working on answering your query about the expected value of a counterfeit dollar.

Lucky for me, my favorite coffee shop has provided an alternate subject to ponder: who tips better, men or women?

 

Back when I delivered pizzas for a living, my fellow delivery drivers each had their own convictions as to what kind of customers tip well, poorly, or not at all. Of course, their stories were based on anecdote rather than scientific observation, and anecdotal evidence is inherently biased. If you've convinced yourself that members of group X don't tip, your memories of X-folks not tipping will be more prominent than the memories of X-folks who told you to keep the change. It's confirmation bias: experiences that run counter to what we believe aren't as exciting or memorable as experiences which "prove us right." In addition to that, customers are naturally disinclined to tip if they feel their server treats them with contempt-- which is a likely side effect of the server convincing themselves that X-folks are no-good dirty-rotten non-tippers.

 

 

I was going to joke about "X-Folks" being a "What if the X-Men were Canadian?" alternate-universe spinoff. That would be so wacky! Then I image-searched "Canadian X-Men" and realized I was stupid.

 

The people who run my favorite coffee shop had their fair share of assumptions about the tipping habits of their customers, but they took their queries a step further by setting up an informal experiment: for three weeks, they put out two tip jars instead of one, labeled "Men" and "Women." At the end of each week, they would write up on the whiteboard which jar collected more cash. The women ended up winning. But is that win valid?

 

Their win was based purely on the amount of cash in the jar-- but if the coffee shop's clientele were mostly women, they'd naturally have an advantage in pure cash volume. The coffee shop might have concluded that the majority of their cash tips come from women, but not necessarily that women are more likely than men to tip. The simplest way for them to estimate likelihood would be to take a head count of how many male and female customers they get in a week, then divide each cash amount by the number of male or female customers. That would give you the average dollar amount that a typical male or female customer leaves as tip.

 

But even THAT isn't exactly sound! Tipping etiquette is less ridigly defined in a coffee shop environment than in a sit-down restaurant, so there's no clearly defined percentage that you're "supposed" to tip. I know I've skipped tipping at times when I was on the run, whereas other times I've tipped up to 50% when a kind barista took the time to inscribe a cryptic message in my cappucino just so I could send a photo of it to the one friend who would get the joke.



Did you see it, Zach? Clear as a crisp spring morning!

 

If ten women came in, ordered sandwiches and salads, and each tipped a dollar fifty, they would have $15 in their tip jar. And if five men came in, each bought a medium coffee, and tipped one dollar apiece, they'd have $5 in their tip jar. The women win whether you're calculating based on gross tips or average individual tips, but there's a clear difference between a $1.00 tip on a ~$2.50 cup of coffee and a $1.50 tip on a ~$15 meal. It's 40 percent versus 10 percent-- in some restaurants, that's the difference between cream in your coffee and "cream" in your coffee.



So, in order to get a rigorous answer to the question of whether men or women are better tippers, a barista would have to keep track of each customer's sex, total bill, and tip amount, and find the average tip for each gender based on both dollar amount and percentage of the total bill. That's a lot of work to pile on somebody who already has to whip up seventeen different fancy drink orders in five minutes.

 

When I brought up some of the issues with their sampling method, the employees at the coffee shop agreed that their "study" didn't really offer much insight into the tipping habits of their customers, and that it was just a clever way to encourage tips regardless of gender. Also, they indicated that the majority of their clientele probably is female: they get a lot of men in the morning on the way to work, but the rest of the day is mostly stay-at-home-moms out for lunch or dinner with friends. The women were bound to give more money, just because there were more of them present-- but it doesn't mean that the average female customer tips more money or more often than the average male customer.

 

So we're back to square one: there will always be inaccurate stereotypes about what sorts of people tip better or worse than others, mostly because it's prohibitively difficult to conduct an unbiased study on tipping behavior.