1. Prices of food.
While your service is very important, so is the menu price. When many people tip 18% you want the check to be expensive as possible. The more expensive the meal, the larger the tip. So look for a waiter job at an expensive restaurant. It will be a lot easier to make money as a waiter at one of these places. Also it is important for the restaurant to be busy, because without people eating at the restaurant you cannot make tips.
2. Some of the techniques seem to make intuitive sense, studies or no, if only because they genuinely can improve customers' overall experience.
3. Some, however, are baffling since they seem either to be annoying or just plain silly.
4. Most of the studies Lynn cites were all conducted in low- to mid-priced casual dining restaurants such as Applebee's, Cracker Barrel, Olive Garden and Outback Steakhouse.
5. He acknowledges that if some of these techniques were employed at more formal, refi-your-house-to-pay-for-dinner restaurants, they might actually decrease tips.
6. But in the restaurants they were tested in, each of the moves below had the effect of raising the average tip by anywhere from 10 percent to over 100 percent.
7. Here's a sampling:
Smile at the customer. Fair enough. High-end or low-end restaurant, who wouldn't prefer dealing with someone who's pleasant rather than door?
Hello, my name is ... If I had my way, I'd ban this technique. I'm bad with names. So a waiter who tells me his name just obligates me either to remember it or feel bad if I don't.
8. But it makes the wait staff seem more friendly and polite (assuming the introduction is genuine and not done in automaton fashion).
9. Plus, it makes the customer feel more empathy for them. So I guess my guilt means more gold for them.
10. Squat next to the table. Waiters and waitresses who crouch down mimic our posture, establish better eye contact and bring their faces closer to ours - all behaviors that we associate with greater rapport.
