Narrative Essay about The Customer Service Voice

My mother has worked in restaurants since before I was born. It was only natural for me to follow in her footsteps. I work at a breakfast place called the Omelette and Waffle Shop and have worked there for about 8 months now. I climbed the ranks from hostess to front hostess, and now to training server. 

My question concerns my job and the atmosphere of culture it creates. The question I am asking is how do changes in server or hostess’ behavior affect their tips. Since I’ve started working there, I’ve developed what the industry calls “the customer service voice”. My voice becomes extra cheery and I appease the customer in any way possible. So, to see how the changes in my behavior affected the tips customers would give me, I worked one day as a super nice server and hostess who made everyone happy. The next day, I worked “normally”. I didn’t raise my voice multiple octaves to sound more pleasant, I just raised it the normal amount. I didn’t do all the extra pleasantries most restaurant staff do to make tips, in character with laughing at jokes that aren’t funny or raining customers with compliments to lighten their mood and increase the likelihood of gratuity.  Since I actively work at a restaurant, I used participant observation to conduct my research to determine whether I would see any contrasts in tips. 

I work from 7 A.M. to around 2 P.M. on Saturday and Sunday at the moment, since I attend university. As a front hostess and a server in training, I take care of take-out orders, inside hostess duties, and pick up a couple of tables that servers are too busy for. The weekends are the busiest days for the restaurant, so my observations had the perfect opportunity to see multiple contrasts. I viewed tips from the beginning of the day till the end. I also accounted for rush hours and slow times to see the differences between the number of tips and how many orders I took for take-out or serving. Furthermore, I considered other aspects such as race and gender to see if there were any drastic differences between the comparisons of kindness and those characteristics. 

With my “normal” behavior with no ultra kindness, I make about 50 to 80 dollars in tips a day. This was depending on some variables like the number of customers, the busyness of rush hour, and even nonsensical factors such as the weather that played a part. There are a few exceptions such as holidays or terrible weather that construe the average, but my research has avoided both of these outliers in data. Knowing my average, give or take a couple of dollars, is going to help me determine if my change in behavior will have an extreme effect on my tips. 

My feedback from this experience was that I did get tipped more for being extremely kind. The day I was normal in my behavior, I made $58 in tips. On the other hand, when I was exceedingly nice, I made $121.10 that day. I chose my research to be conducted on the busiest day of a breakfast diner week, Sunday. This allowed me to see that in the morning, more people were willing and more likely to tip because the rush hour had not hit and so our service could be exceptional. Once rush hour hit, even on my day of extreme kindness, I did not make up for the fact that the kitchen was behind on orders and the waitlist was continuing to grow. 

When I was nice, during slow periods it was easier to connect with the customer and so on average, the tips for slow times were higher when I was nice than when I was normal. Rush hours had almost no difference in the amount of tips, with nice barely beating normal, which is probably just a coincidence. I noticed when I was nicer, men tipped more on average, while women tipped a very similar average with very little to no basis on my behavior. With race, it was complicated because the races we cater towards are white, Latinx, and black people the most while other races are the minorities. There wasn’t much comparison, but there were still some outliers like black women tip the least, Latinx men tip the most when being nice towards them, and white women tip the most on average. 

 With all of this information, I believe that if I were to show extreme kindness to each customer I had, then the amount of gratuity I would make in a day would increase. After conducting my research, my hypothesis was proven correct. I made more when I was nicer than when I acted normal. Some considerable factors that influenced this were gender, time of day, and, obviously, the independent variable, my behavior. 

In general, when I was particularly nice men tipped me more than women on average. The opposite was true for when I was normal; women tipped more. Overall, women tipped a more consistent amount, while my behavior seemed to affect the tips I received from men drastically. When I act nice to these men, some of them seem to assume I am flirting with them, especially those around my age. They get bolder with their comments, seem appeased with my service, and give me a larger tip than when I act normal. I believe this occurs because the restaurant industry in the United States has set the standard that you are going to be waited on hand and foot. Adding onto the sexist values that underlie that standard, when I meet the expectations of the men who want the typical full-on experience of a woman waiting on their every command, I usually get tipped more. When I acted normal, most men tended to ignore me or act as if I was being disrespectful when I was just not being a high-pitched, 100-watt smile version of myself. On the flip side, women tended to tip the same on average between my normal and nice behavior. This could delve deep and demonstrate how women perceive other women as human instead of how men see women as an object of their pleasure first and a person second. 

The time of day affected the number of tips I got and the amount in which those individual tips were every day. Yet, when I was being extra nice in my behavior, I made almost the same and sometimes more during the slow times of the day. When I had normal behavior, I made more during rush hour, and the slow times I got a couple of tips, but nothing that could beat the quantity of tables I get during rush hour. Having my behavior change made these people during slow times give me more gratuity. I was not expecting this because I usually get most of my tips from the amount of tables I get during rush hour, the small amount of tips I get from each table add up. This surprised me and made me think that maybe the stereotype of restaurant service always being so perfect for the customer could be something I could benefit from financially.

I forgot to incorporate an important part of this observation that affected my research more than I thought it would. Which, in turn, could have proven my hypothesis as false. I live and work in a town called San Pedro. We are almost totally financially supported by the Port of Los Angeles that is located by our town. A lot of our workforce goes and works in the port for a union called the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU). This union supports our community financially by facilitating business and the people who work there, including my father, make a livable wage above the minimum wage with benefits. A stigma around these longshoremen and their families is that they tip extremely well. So, whenever a customer came up with an ILWU credit union card, it was almost a guarantee of getting a tip. This skewed most of my research towards showing how these longshoremen tip more than the average person. It also made my normal and nice behavior tips closer than I thought since longshoremen tip almost no matter what. 

Overall, I have learned that the culture of the restaurant industry can be seen as destructive towards the respectability of the employees. On the other hand, I have learned that kindness can go a long way. Being kind to people can bring positive karma back towards you. This dilemma is a double-edged sword. The industry is seen from an outsider’s perspective as an “easy job” and the servers have to “earn” their tips in the United States. Looking at other countries, it is seen as disrespectful to tip restaurant employees because you are insinuating that they do not make a respectable, livable wage. Here, it is almost expected to tip servers because of how little money we make. Not necessarily in California, but when I traveled to Idaho in 2019, the server was making $2.35 an hour and had to solely rely on tips. This industry is not respected in this culture and I believe there should be something done to change that mindset.