Study: To battle tip fatigue, businesses should make their service efforts visible

(Press-News.org) PULLMAN, Wash. -- As customers face more and more prompts to add a tip to the bill in places where gratuities were not customary only a few years ago—and often before any service has been rendered—their attitudes toward the practice have turned sharply negative.

“Businesses should seriously consider whether they want to offer that tipping request,” said Ruiying Cai, an assistant professor in the WSU’s Carson College of Business and co-author of a new study published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management. “We know that down the road it might have a negative impact on the business because customers generally don’t like it.”

The study adds empirical detail to the widespread conversation about “tipping fatigue” and “tipflation”—but it also found that businesses can help offset those reactions by rethinking when the tip is requested and making their customer-service efforts more visible.

“Showcase the effort you have provided,” Cai said. “Make sure it’s visible to the customers. That can alleviate the negative feelings about a tipping request.”

The new paper surveyed the attitudes of hundreds of consumers about gratuity requests in “emerging tipping contexts”—i.e., establishments where tipping is relatively new, such as counter-service businesses like coffee shops or bakeries, fast-food restaurants and self-service kiosks. The expansion of tipping into these new contexts is a trend that was fueled initially by generosity toward service workers during the Covid-19 pandemic and driven by point-of-sale technology that makes it easy to add a tip request to payment screens.

Overall, the participants in the study had a negative reaction to the tipping requests, especially those made prior to service, and their emotional response made them more likely to question whether a tip was deserved and to regret their purchasing decision. 

The idea for the paper originated during conversations among Cai and her two co-authors—both of whom earned their doctoral degrees at WSU—when they were catching up at a conference last year. The subject of the ubiquitous digital requests for tips came up and soon evolved from conference chit-chat to an experimental study.

Cai’s co-authors were Demi Shenrui Deng, an assistant professor of hospitality management at Auburn University, and Lu Lu, an associate professor at Temple University.

              The researchers ran two scenario-based experiments, asking respondents to evaluate their response to tipping requests when ordering a cup of coffee at a coffee shop against several variables—including whether they had negative or positive reactions to the request, felt the tip was deserved and were satisfied overall with their decision in the interaction. The participants were identified through an online-crowdsourcing platform frequently used in experimental market research, Prolific.

In the first study, 320 participants responded to scenarios based on whether an employee was present during the request. While the results did not show a significant impact from the presence or absence of an employee, they did show a significant negative effect on decision satisfaction and a negative emotional response to the tipping request.

A second study, with 414 participants, gathered responses to tipping requests based on whether they were made before or after service was delivered, and whether there was a visible service effort. Overall, the presence of the tipping request resulted in negative emotional reactions from participants, driving down the likelihood that they would feel the tip was deserved and that they would be satisfied with their purchasing decision. The presence of visible service efforts, however, tended to improve satisfaction.

              The paper suggested that further experiments in the field would be useful to identify distinctions in different settings and among different populations. But Cai said these initial results are a sign that businesses that employ tipping requests in the emerging tipping contexts might either reconsider them—or when to use them during the customer interaction—or find ways to demonstrate how much effort they’re putting into providing the service.

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