Lane Cardwell

Witless Protection Program

As chain restaurant owners/operators, we go to great lengths to create a system that operates the same in Miami as it does in Seattle. Ideally, it should operate the same whether your newest manager or your most seasoned general manager are pulling the shift. Experienced chain leaders leave nothing to chance. There is a procedure for almost anything that can happen, and a policy for everything else. After all, what good does it do to invest heavily to open and operate as a chain if all of the customer touch points aren't polished and professional? One area that seems to be tripping up many chains, no matter where they are on the industry ladder, is the lowly tip jar.

Things used to be so simple. Someone waits on you, you tip. No one waits on you, you don't tip. QSR always made things easy for us. For many years they didn't take credit cards and they didn't put tip jars at the counters for the cash paying customer. They conditioned the customer that there were certain types of restaurant visits that did not require a tip. Whether the meal was ordered at the counter or drive-thru, tipping was not a part of the experience. Except at Sonic, where someone brought your food to the car.

As the categories began blurring, things got confusing. Starbucks arrived on the scene, and so did those tip jars. They were pretty innocuous. Put some change in them or not. There was not a lot of pressure, and people responded according to their hearts and consciences. However, this led to tip jars in a lot of other restaurant venues that previously had been free of tipping. Are tip jars initiated by managers, or by employees? The answer to that is the answer to whether you are setting the policies for your chain, or whether you are letting policies be set by default.

Fuddrucker's was always a mystery to me. I order at the counter. I return to the counter to pick up my burger. I top my burger at the produce bar. I fill up my drink. But pay with a credit card and that pesky old tip line is left open for you to ponder what is right, as the employee waits to see what you will decide. They are not alone, they were just one of the first concepts of their kind.

When the fast casual restaurants arrived on the scene, it seemed only natural that they would claim the advantage they had over full service restaurants. Ordering at the counter meant you could save 15-20% on the meal by not having to add a tip. The real value was that many of these places would also bring your meal to you after you had ordered and paid. Noodles & Company posted signs throughout the restaurant that it was a "No tipping zone". Pei Wei eliminated the tip line on the credit card charge slips. Many others followed suit. But not all.

Over the past few years I have been watching the emergence of tip jars in some of the most unlikely places and have tried to figure out the motivation of management for their placement. I have concluded that in many cases management is abdicating their role of setting policy, and allowing employees who request a tip jar to be put out to do so. After all, the employee tells the manager, the customer won't tip if they don't want to.

I want to close with a recent experience that I believe lives up to the first word in the title: Witless. Six of us were eating in a Mexican restaurant in Dallas. It was a high volume chain in a company with other concepts, owned by one of the savviest restaurant families in the country. They had recently started doing tableside preparation of guacamole. We ordered some and watched as a cart approached the table laden with all of the goodies for making guacamole. The cart was set as attractively as a table top with colorful dishes and serving utensils.

Positioned front and center, in the most prominent place on the cart, was a tip jar. It had the handwritten word "Tips" placed right on it. We asked the guacamole maker, who was not our server, if she got a lot of tips and she assured us that it was a very profitable job. She said that after the manager had decided that there would be a guacamole specialist, rather than the server making it, that a tip jar on the cart seemed to be the only fair way that they could receive their share of the tips. Of course we tipped, and then tipped on the guacamole again when the guest check arrived.

This particular restaurant does over $8 million per year in volume. It's reputation as a purveyor of quality products in a quality atmosphere has been finely honed over the years. I wonder how far up the ladder the awareness of a tip jar on the guacamole cart extends? Hopefully, not very far. When thinking about your own operation, don't forget to be explicit in what you want to happen in regards to tipping. It might be time to implement your own Witless Protection Program.

Posted by Lane Cardwell on May 5, 2008 | Comments (13)