BW Boutique Hotel

The social dynamics of the service encounter affect the tip, a critical economic consideration, given that the base pay in most restaurants is terribly low. The wage structure forces a reliance on gratuity, so the successful waitress soon learns how to play the dynamics to maximize her income. There is actually a fair-sized social-psychological literature on the factors that influence tipping. The shrewd waitress, for example, suggests items—appetizers, desserts, more drinks—that will increase the bill, and thus the size of her potential tip. She can also increase her tip by smiling, by touching the customer on the hand or shoulder, or by squatting or kneeling to get closer to eye level. This literature parses out the social skills and gestures learned in the context of restaurant work, the devices that can increase the amount of money customers leave on the table.
The reward is an economic one, but it is also one fraught with symbolism—at the least, a reminder of servant status—so the
reward structure indudes emotional factors as well. Customers, Lin Rolens observes, “tip in every spirit imaginable,” from a display of status, to an expression of gratitude, to an overture of friendship, to a sexualized gesture. My mother and the waitresses I interviewed and read about express a wide range of feeling about tipping. There’s eager anticipation (“You’re thinking, ‘Oh boy, I’m gonna hurry up and clear that table off… because that’s a good tipper’“) and satisfaction (“It’s fun to have a good night. . . all that cash in your pocket . . . it’s a very immediate reward”). There’s anger: “Something that really pisses me off is when people stiff the waitress because something happened in the kitthen.” And there’s a sense of injustice leading to action. Anthropologist Greta Pauff Paules writes of a waitress who “followed two male customers out of a restaurant calling, ‘Excuse me! You forgot this!’ and holding up the coins they had left as a tip.”
Though this field of customer-waitress emotion is shaped by the historical residue of servitude and by stereotyped gender roles, the waitress attempts to control it to her economic and emotional advantage. She does this by the way she defines the situation, by her manipulation of role and routine (“[P]lay the people and the tips will follow,” says one waitress interviewed by Lin Rolens), and by judgments that enable her to attribute a low tip to a customer’s personal situation, character, or ignorance. These judgments and attributions are part of the restaurant’s folk wisdom, played out continually in the talk among waitresses that customers don’t hear.
The service encounter provides the tips that enable the waitress to make a living, but in concert with the financial need, other needs of hers, depending on the waitress, can be met as well. Some waitresses gain satisfaction from contributing to a customer’s enjoyment: “You supply nurturing and sustenance, the things that make life pleasurable.” Some respond to the hustle and stimulation of a
busy restaurant, the sense of being in the middle of things. (This was a big one for my mother, and its loss has been difficult for her.) Some like the attention (“the spotlight’s on you”) and the safe flirtation. Some comment on the pleasure of the brief human interaction: “Though we’ll never get to know each other, there’s a really nice feeling that goes back and forth.” Some waitresses comment on the feeling of independence the job affords; anthropologist Paules characterizes the waitress as a private entrepreneur. And some gain satisfaction from the display of their skill (“I get to show off my memory”) and, as we saw, gain a feeling of competence by performing the job well.
Though perhaps obvious, it is worth stating that this array of feeling—like the cognitive processes detailed earlier—is situated in the restaurant; the various feelings are legitimized and shaped by the waitress-customer association. My mother developed a number of friendly relations with her regular clientele. But when I asked her to perform a thought experiment and imagine how those relationships might have changed if tipping were outlawed, she gave sharp expression to the situational nature of the restaurant friendship. “If you know they’re gonna tip you, well, then you talk about your flowers, or you have a son, or you have a daughter, or whatever. But if you know they’re not gonna tip, you’d be disinterested.” My mother got to know some of her regulars pretty well, would talk about their problems at home, worry over them, yet, at heart, the connection to their lives was restaurant-based, for everyone involved.
Waitress-customer interaction, then, is shaped by history and gender. it involves a good deal of economically motivated emotion management and interpersonal manipulation, all centered around the tip, which, itself, is laden with symbolism and feeling. The waitress-customer encounter also provides the occasion for the
fulfillment of other needs that are not directly economic, though that fulfillment is embedded in an economic context and defined and bounded by life in the restaurant.
As I talk to my mother and to other waitresses, I’m struck by the way cognitive processes and emotional dynamics are interwoven. Memory; for example, draws on emotional material to aid in storage and recall. Customs of service and social display incorporate the cognitive, certainly in one’s reading of people, one’s social savvy and one’s folk knowledge of the ways of the restaurant, but also in the very particulars of routine that create the experience of service. One waitress comments on her ability to recall little details about her regulars’ typical orders—that they don’t like pepper or they like extra horseradish_and, as well, comments on her vigilance: “Attention to detail . -. keeping water glasses full, keeping extra stuff off the table, just the little things that make it a more pleasant sensory experience … that’s why I like it so much that I’m a contributing factor in somebody having a good meal.” Memory, attention, the creation of service, and a waitress’s persorial satisfaction are all of a piece in the busy restaurant.

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