African Americans, on average, leave smaller tips for servers than whites do and they're more likely to leave nothing

Jane Engle:

Professor Michael Lynn's latest report on this topic, "Race Differences in Tipping: Questions and Answers for the Restaurant Industry," issued in January, cites more than 12 studies by himself and others, most of them done since 2002.

Discriminatory service may be a factor, but there appear to be many others.

Poor tips, Lynn says, may contribute to black diners getting poorer service and to companies' reluctance to open restaurants in predominantly black communities, not to mention angering servers and customers alike. And it fuels yet another debate about tipping, always a hot-button topic for travelers.

Lynn doesn't discount the role of anti-black bias in any of these problems. But he mainly sees this cycle at work:

Expecting skimpy gratuities, waiters resist serving African Americans, or they provide poorer service, which discourages blacks from patronizing table-service restaurants. Low tips also make it hard for restaurants in black neighborhoods to attract and retain staff, causing turnover and decreasing profits.

Six years after Lynn, a respected expert on tipping at Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research in Ithaca, N.Y., began to study the racial gap in gratuities, the topic remains taboo, he says.

"It's a problem the industry knows about," says Lynn, who is white. "But the big players with money are afraid to address the issue. They're afraid of being labeled racist."

In an e-mail response, the National Restaurant Assn., an industry trade group in Washington, D.C., issued a statement saying it "commends" Cornell "for addressing disparities in consumer tipping behavior," but it did not specifically address the question of race.

Sue Hensley, spokeswoman for the restaurant association, said the group hadn't researched this issue.

But she said it offers cards to restaurants, for distribution to customers, that calculate 15% and 20% tips for bills of various sizes. When that range became customary is not clear, but it was recommended by travel magazines as early as the 1950s, according to the association.

Gerry Fernandez, president of the Multicultural Foodservice & Hospitality Alliance, a nonprofit group in Providence, R.I., that promotes diversity, finds merit in Lynn's findings.

"There absolutely is a perception that certain groups, African Americans in particular, do not tip as well as whites," says Fernandez, an African American whose grandparents hailed from Cape Verde, an island republic off Africa.

Why black people may tip less is not clear.

Income disparities and discriminatory service may play roles, Lynn says.

But even when black and white customers are in the same socioeconomic class or rate the quality of service equally, he says, several studies by himself and others found that they tip differently. Black diners average 10.9% to 14.7% of the bill, and white diners average 16.6% to 19.4%, depending on the study. The server's race didn't matter.

Black subjects are also more likely than whites to say they never tip servers (6% versus 2%, in one study) and to leave tips as flat-dollar amounts instead of percentages of the bill (50.7% versus 19.4%, in one study).

The Tipping Divide

Race Differences in Tipping: Questions and Answers for the Restaurant Industry