The waitstaff in restaurants should be aware: Patrons are less generous with tips over the weekend.
That is the finding of a recent study that analyzed 68 million credit-card transactions at 47 restaurant chains operating in 41 states. Patrons, the study found, tipped their servers up to about 1% less on Saturdays and Sundays.
The average tip for weekdays alone was 21.30%, with the highest tips on Tuesdays (21.45%) and Thursdays (21.47%). But on weekends, tips fell to 20.25% and 20.44%, respectively. (The average for the entire week was 21%.)
The difference can be substantial. Servers might handle $1,000 to $2,000 worth of meals during a shift, says Chris Pantzalis, a professor at the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, and one of the paper’s co-authors. So a 0.75- to 1.0-percentage-point reduction “translates to $7.50 to $20 less per shift. Over a year, this compounds to hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost income.”
But those findings raised a big question: Why were people stingier on Saturdays and Sundays?
Church matters
For one thing, the paper says, weekends are associated with busier and rushed restaurant environments with larger volumes of customers, which means more impersonal service.
But there might be outside factors at play as well, the researchers theorized. Maybe people were spending more money elsewhere on the weekends, so they cut down on tipping to make up for it.
The authors tested their theory with two experiments. In one, they examined whether diners were less likely to tip after attending church on Sunday—where, in theory, they had spent money on a donation. The other study looked into whether tipping rates were tied to moviegoing.
For the first experiment, the authors combined their restaurant data set with another set that measured religious adherence in different counties across the country. The researchers divided the data set into groups, ranging from counties where people were most likely to attend Sunday church services to counties where they were least likely. The authors then focused on the most and least religious counties.
In both groups, tips on Sundays were lower than tips on Mondays, but the drop was biggest for religious counties. In the most-religious areas, tips on Sundays were 0.62 percentage point lower than Mondays. The drop was less pronounced—0.44 percentage point—for the least-religious counties.
The authors dug further into the data, looking at tips specifically at lunch on Sundays—when churchgoers, presumably, had recently finished services. In religious counties, tips for Sunday lunch were almost 0.88 percentage point lower than tips for Monday lunch. But for nonreligious counties, there was no statistically significant gap for tips during Sunday or Monday lunch.
All of which means that weekly church donations seem to take precedence over tipping, says Pantzalis. “Tips and donations seem to come out of the same mental account.”
Reel changes
Next, the researchers ran a test to see if moviegoing expenses ate into tips. The result: On weekends where box-office revenue increased, tipping rates tended to decrease.
On weekends with low box-office returns—defined as one standard deviation below normal—tipping rates were 20.61%. On weekends with high box-office results—one standard deviation above normal—tipping rates dropped to 20.56%.
“This small percentage decline translates to approximately $3 million less in tips for servers across the country on that particular weekend,” Pantzalis says.
In short, “tips are lower on the weekend, when the bulk of consumer spending happens,” he says, adding that “Understanding factors that affect tipping rates is essential for restaurant operators aiming to establish consistent hourly wages for their service staff.”
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