A Tip For Waiters Sight Of Credit Card Logo Turns Diners Into Big Spenders

Your restaurant check has arrived on a tray decorated with a credit card logo. Do you feel an uncharacteristic twinge of generosity? An inexplicable impulse to give an extra dollar to your waiter or waitress?

If so, you’re not alone. Two new studies show that the mere presence of a credit card logo on that little plastic tray gets diners to leave bigger tips than they would with ordinary trays - even when they are paying with cash.

The researchers suggest that, with overdue credit card debts and personal bankruptcies reaching record levels in the past year, the finding that credit logos alone have the potential to increase personal spending raises ethical concerns.

“Society inundates us with these kinds of symbols,” said Michael McCall, a psychologist at Ithaca College who conducted the study with colleague Heather J. Belmont.

The new findings add to a little-known body of literature on tipping behavior. Previous work had shown that men tip more than women and individuals tip better than groups.

In one landmark study, waitresses who drew a smiling face on the back of the check consistently garnered higher tips than those who did not - but male waiters who drew the face got smaller-than-average tips.

Researchers have also found that although quality of service is only weakly associated with the amount of the tip, specific server behaviors influence a patron’s generosity.

A waiter or waitress who squats while taking an order, making level eye contact instead of looming from above, can generally count on bigger tips. Lightly touching the customer’s shoulder also tends to boost the gratuity, as does introducing oneself.

Nice weather also brings bigger tips, a study at a casino hotel in Atlantic City, N.J., found. On sunny days, tipping increased by as much as 60 percent compared with rainy days.

In fact, tips went up even when people thought it was sunny.

Although the hotel’s tinted windows prevented guests from seeing the weather, they gave higher tips to a phony room-service waiter when the waiter told them it was sunny out.

McCall and Belmont also knew that people tend to spend more - and tip more - when they use credit cards. But the researchers’ new work, published in the September issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, shows that even a vague reminder of the possibility of credit can increase people’s willingness to part with their cash.

McCall and Belmont came up with the idea for the two studies three years ago, when she was an undergraduate in his applied psychology course and a part-time waitress.

In the first study, conducted at a restaurant in the Adirondacks, the team arranged for restaurant checks to be delivered on tip trays with or without a major credit card logo and then kept track of how much diners tipped.

In that study of 77 diners, credit card trays drew tips of just under 20 percent compared with 15.5 percent on unadorned trays. McCall and Belmont (now at the University of Miami School of Medicine) then repeated the experiment at a restaurant in a different city in upstate New York, with similar results.

“It’s a surprising finding,” said Michael Lynn, an associate professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Management who has performed seminal studies on the science of restaurant tipping.

“We’re talking about some very subtle manipulations making a difference.”

Richard Feinberg, a consumer psychologist and director of Purdue University’s Retail Institute, said the work is consistent with laboratory studies that showed that people gave higher estimates of what they were willing to pay for an appliance, such as a toaster, when a credit card logo was visible somewhere in the room. They also made up their minds more quickly.

Psychologists suspect that credit logos increase tips by a mechanism known as “stimulus equivalence,” in which a neutral stimulus (the logo) has the same effect as a potent stimulus (an actual credit card, which tends to increase spending).

“Seeing the credit card logo reminds people that their spending power exceeds the cash available in their pocket,” Lynn said.

That message does not hold true all the time, however. Feinberg has shown that people with troubled credit histories react quite differently when a credit cue is in sight, downgrading their estimates of what they’re willing to spend.

For those in trouble with their credit cards, logo trays might have a dampening effect on tipping.