The Tipping Point

"Tipping is an interesting behavior because tips are voluntary payments given after services have been rendered. Consumers rarely pay more than necessary for goods and services. Tipping represents a multibillion-dollar exception to this general rule. It is an exception that raises questions about why people tip."

Many restaurants have now started levying an “automatic gratituity” on every in house order. In staid, statist Europe, that’s par for the course. In America, you see it on cruise ships, in tony establishments run by celebrity chefs such as Thomas Keller, and in less luxe setting when parties of six or more are involved. But for a lone diner, grabbing lunch? Really ?

Of course an “automatic gratuity” is an impossible proposition. “Gratuity” has roots in the Latin word gratutus, which means voluntary. A gratuity, or tip, is a gift or reward given freely, without compulsion. There’s nothing automatic about it.
 Except of course that there is, even when it’s not described as such.

Then there's the business side of tipping: Restaurant patrons in the United States fork over approximately $16 billion in tips a year. Many restaurants introduce this new policy because they want to ensure that their waiters earn at least $7.50 per hour. The automatic 15 percent tip is supposed to help the restaurant achieve that goal, but there’s obviously another way to generate the necessary revenue — it could simply raise prices. Of course an automatic gratuity isn’t legally enforceable — if you don’t want to pay it, you don’t have to. But apparently the restaurateurs believes the bulk of its customers are likelier to comply with a fake mandatory increase of 15 percent than an unavoidable price increase of 10 percent! Which says something, no doubt, about how compulsory the average person now considers the once-voluntary act of tipping.



But is it any wonder we feel this way?
 There’s a tip jar on every retail counter these days. We give our spare change to baristas, pedicurists, dog groomers, massage therapists, grocery baggers — no wonder the homeless go hungry. The 20 percent tip, once the exclusive domain of the generous spendthrift, is now presented as the expected amount, even when the service is merely OK. According to The New York Post, the average New Yorker doles out over $ 3300 in tip per year.

These days, the idea of not tipping is almost as impossible to comprehend as the idea of paying for news. Who does that? Crazy people? Criminals? There isn’t any law against not tipping. Not yet anyway.



Things were much different a century ago. Between 1909 and 1926,six US states actually passed laws that made tipping illegal. Indeed many restaurants posted “Tipping is not American!” signs in their dining rooms. In a republic where the waiter was the political and moral equal of the millionaire factory owner, each endowed with the same essential rights and freedoms, tipping was seen as “a hangover of Old World flunkeyism” as one New York Times editorial opined. It divided a classless society into servant and served.
 But even when the practice was illegal in six states, it never fell out of favor, perhaps because it also helped servants achieve a level of prosperity few had ever achieved. A 1907 article from the Times reported that many of the city’s top waiters had earned enough money to become homeowners and landlords. One even bought a racehorse with his tips.



Michael Lynn, a professor at Cornell, has studied tipping for decades. “There is a rather weak relationship between the size of the tip and the level or quality of service one receives from their waiter or waitress," he concluded in a 1996 study.

Also the amount left as a tip by diners is influenced more by bill size and the fear of disappointing the server than by good service. Four years later, he determined that we tip better when a server crouches to take our order or lightly touches our shoulder. In May 2010, he confirmed what our wives have always asserted till today without proof that we tip better when a server has large breasts.
His results indicated that waitresses with larger bra sizes received higher tips — as did women with blonde hair and slender bodies. He referred to the popularity of Hooters and other similar “breastaurants” that openly capitalize on men’s affinity for “attractive” — and in particular, busty — servers. Ugly people are not a protected class, legally,” Lynn said. “It is not in fact illegal to hire only attractive waitresses.”

It now seems clear from all this research that :

1) Restaurant tips are poor measures of customer satisfaction with service and that they provide weak incentives for delivering good service.

2) Nonverbal server behaviors that communicate liking for the customer, such as lightly touching the customer and crouching next to the table when interacting with the customer, substantially increase the tips restaurant servers receive. Also it helps if you have big breasts!

3) Tipping is more prevalent in countries whose populations are achievement-oriented, status-seeking, extroverted, neurotic and tenderhearted.

And the rate of tipping keeps going up even if quality of service does not. Here are the latest guidelines from Emily Post no less:

Wait service (sit down)	15-20% pre-tax
Bartender	$1 per drink or 15-20% or tab
Restroom Attendant	$0.50-$3, depending on service
Valet	$2-$5
Skycap	$2 first bag, $1 per additional bag
Doorman	$1-$2 for carrying luggage $1-$2 for hailing cab $1-$4 beyond the call of duty
Bellhop	$2 first bag, $1 per additional bag
Housekeeper	$2-$5 per day, left daily
Concierge	$5 for tickets or reservations, $10 if hard to get; no need to tip for answering questions
Taxi driver	15% plus an extra $1-$2 if helped with bags

Improving Creativity

We have all been told when young how all great achievements were 99 % perspiration and 1 % inspiration and creative ideas. Everyone has suggestions on working hard, but few can tell us how to find inspiration or become more creative. Till now.

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).



Scholars, like Torrance, have been tracking a group of children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed. Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measured creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.



To understand exactly what should be done to improve creativity requires, first, understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.
 When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.
 Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.



Is this learnable? Yes. There are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. A lifetime of consistent habits can gradually change the neurological pattern.



Here is an interesting real life example: the National Inventors Hall of Fame School, a new public middle school in Akron, Ohio came up with a project for the fifth graders: figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. Its windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The students had four weeks to design proposals. Working in small teams, the fifth graders first engaged in what creativity theorist Donald Treffinger describes as fact-finding. How does sound travel through materials? What materials reduce noise the most? Then, problem-finding—anticipating all potential pitfalls so their designs are more likely to work. Next, idea-finding: generate as many ideas as possible. Drapes, plants, or large kites hung from the ceiling would all baffle sound. Or, instead of reducing the sound, maybe mask it by playing the sound of a gentle waterfall? A proposal for double-paned glass evolved into an idea to fill the space between panes with water. Next, solution-finding: which ideas were the most effective, cheapest, and aesthetically pleasing? Fiberglass absorbed sound the best but wouldn’t be safe. Would an aquarium with fish be easier than water-filled panes? Then teams developed a plan of action. They built scale models and chose fabric samples. They realized they’d need to persuade a janitor to care for the plants and fish during vacation. Teams persuaded others to support them—sometimes so well, teams decided to combine projects. Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing.

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function. Some scholars go further, arguing that lack of creativity—not having loads of it—is the real risk factor. In Runco’s subsequent research, those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.



Highly creative adults tended to grow up in families embodying opposites. Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished. It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.



“Creativity can be taught,” says James C. Kaufman, professor at California State University, San Bernardino.

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.



But not all techniques for improving creativity work. Take brainstorming. Brainstorming in a group became popular in 1953 with the publication of a business book, Applied Imagination. But it’s been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together. In fact, according to University of Oklahoma professor Michael Mumford, half of the commonly used techniques intended to spur creativity don’t work, or even have a negative impact. As for most commercially available creativity training, Mumford doesn’t mince words: it’s “garbage.” Whether for adults or kids, the worst of these programs focus solely on imagination exercises, expression of feelings, or imagery. They pander to an easy, unchallenging notion that all you have to do is let your natural creativity out of its shell.

So what is one to do? There are, however, are some techniques that do boost the creative process:

Don’t tell someone to ‘be creative.’ Such an instruction may just cause people to freeze up. However, according to the University of Georgia’s Mark Runco, there is a suggestion that works: “Do something only you would come up with—that none of your friends or family would think of.”

Get moving. Almost every dimension of cognition improves from 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, and creativity is no exception. The type of exercise doesn’t matter, and the boost lasts for at least two hours afterward. However, there’s a catch: this is the case only for the physically fit. For those who rarely exercise, the fatigue from aerobic activity counteracts the short-term benefits.

Take a break.. Those who study multi-tasking report that you can’t work on two projects simultaneously, but the dynamic is different when you have more than one creative project to complete. In that situation, more projects get completed on time when you allow yourself to switch between them if solutions don’t come immediately.

Reduce screen time. According to University of Texas professor Elizabeth Vandewater, for every hour a kid regularly watches television, his overall time in creative activities—from fantasy play to arts projects—drops as much as 11 percent. With kids spending about three hours in front of televisions each day, that could be a one-third reduction in creative time—less time to develop a sense of creative self-efficacy through play.

Explore other cultures. Five experiments by Northwestern’s Adam Galinsky showed that those who have lived abroad outperform others on creativity tasks. Creativity is also higher on average for first- or second-generation immigrants and bilinguals. The theory is that cross-cultural experiences force people to adapt and be more flexible. Just studying another culture can help.

Follow a passion. Rena Subotnik, a researcher with the American Psychological Association, has studied children’s progression into adult creative careers. Kids do best when they are allowed to develop deep passions and pursue them wholeheartedly—at the expense of well-roundedness. “Kids who have deep identification with a field have better discipline and handle setbacks better,” she noted. By contrast, kids given superficial exposure to many activities don’t have the same centeredness to overcome periods of difficulty.

Ditch the suggestion box. If you want to increase innovation within an organization, one of the first things to do is tear out the suggestion box, advises Isaac Getz, professor at ESCP Europe Business School in Paris. Formalized suggestion protocols, whether a box on the wall, an e-mailed form, or an internal Web site, actually stifle innovation because employees feel that their ideas go into a black hole of bureaucracy. Instead, employees need to be able to put their own ideas into practice. One of the reasons that Toyota’s manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Ky., is so successful is that it implements up to 99 percent of employees’ ideas.

For the longest time, creativity was considered the work of a genius operating on his own. The cult of the designer held sway, with little attention being paid to the system that supports the creative genius. The perception still exists that creative businesses can just start up, when in fact it takes a while for an entire ecosystem to actually generate an industry. Creativity does depend on the intelligence, expertise, talent, and experience of an individual. But it also depends on creative thinking as a skill that involves qualities such as the propensity to take risks and to turn a problem on its head to get a new perspective. And that can be learned.

A premature obituary

In the summer of 2010, though the specifics may have differed from left to right, the political class in the US had reached a consensus - Obama's presidency was, in a word, doomed.

But if you examined the facts in some depth, the reality is quite different. Two recent pieces provide a more consistent and balanced view of just what Obama has achieved when you get away from the daily hysteria. It is true that the common man is frustrated by the lack of progress in the economy. But they are still looking for solutions more than someone to blame. What has passed under the radar are the very substantial achievements that Obama has had just in the past two years.

He and his team have helped avoid a second Great Depression. The bank bailout, however noxious, worked. The auto industry is now making profits for the first time in five years. Two new Supreme Court Justices are in place after failed attempts at culture war demagoguery. Crime - amazingly - has not jumped with the recession. America is no longer despised abroad the way it was; torture has been ended; relations with Russia have improved immensely; Iran's regime is more diplomatically and economically isolated than in its entire history; even the Greater Israel chorus has been challenged. Despite continued violence and political stalemate in Iraq, he is on track to withdraw combat troops by his stated August 2010 deadline. He scrapped the F-22 fighter, ended Homeland Security pork in states where terrorist threats are minimal, attached strings to US military aid to Pakistan. He pushed the Pentagon to abandon “don’t ask, don’t tell,” expanded AmeriCorps, increased funding for national parks and forests, and “overperformed on education”. And then there’s the piece de resistance, the health care bill, which among other things will extend Medicaid to some 16 million relatively poor people. Health insurance reform will stick despite the recent legal challenges and, with careful oversight, could even begin to curtail runaway healthcare costs. Another recent legislative victory for Obama’s domestic agenda was the enactment of what he has called “the toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression.”

In all of this "he had won ugly—without a single Republican—but won all the same,” writes Jonathen Alter in his book The Promise, “Whatever happened next—however bad it got—Barack Obama was in the company of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson now in terms of domestic achievement, a figure of history for reasons far beyond the color of his skin.”

The Progressives seemed disappointed that he had met all the promises he made during the campaign. Yet even here the facts are quite different. PolitiFact.com, a database of the St. Petersburg Times that won a Pulitzer Prize for its fact-checking of the 2008 campaign, had catalogued 502 promises that Obama made during the campaign. At the one-year mark the totals showed that he had already kept 91 of them and made progress on another 285. The database’s “Obameter” rated 14 promises as “broken” and 87 as “stalled.” With promises ranging from “Remove more brush and vegetation that fuel wildfires” to “Establish a playoff system for college football,” PolitiFact selected 25 as Obama’s most significant. Of those, an impressive 20 were “kept” or “in the works.”

And these were accomplished in spite of obstacles that would fell most mortals—the almost uncountable messes he inherited from Bush-Cheney, a cratered economy, a sclerotic Congress in thrall to lobbyists and special-interest money, and a rabid opposition underwritten by a media empire that owns both America’s most-watched cable news channel and its most highly circulated newspaper.

Of course Barack Obama was too hot not to cool down. He was the one so many were waiting for—not only the first African-American president but also the nation’s long-awaited liberator after eight years of Bush-Cheney, the golden-tongued evangelist who could at long last revive and sell the old liberal faith, the first American president in memory to speak to voters as if they might be thinking adults, the first national politician in years to electrify the young. He was even, of all implausible oddities, a contemporary politician- author who actually wrote his own books. Most people thought, correctly, that the Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama, a mere chief executive, to follow.

But the facts here too show that despite the hysteria, his achievements have been substantial. Indeed they far outstrip those of his recent predecessors. And there one contradictory footnote to the many provisional Obama obituaries of early summer 2010. For all the President’s travails, his approval rating, somewhere between 45 and 50 percent depending on the poll, still made him the most popular national politician in the country.

And as Andrew Sullivan cannily observes in this piece on Obama's long game. "I've learned over time", he writes, " to respect the canniness of this president's restraint. His gift is patience and perseverance and allowing his enemies to destroy themselves."

What price friendship?

Not so long ago, friendship belonged to a dwindling list of desirable outcomes – including happiness, wisdom and good weather – that money couldn't buy. In a cold and indifferent world full of cold and indifferent strangers, a friend was something you had to find yourself and cultivate over a lifetime. ( see my blog posts on "Friends and friendship" and " Circles of friends").

But no more: now you can purchase friendship at your convenience, by the hour. For a certain consideration, you can hire someone to go to a museum with you, or hang out at the gym, or keep you company while you shop. A stranger, you might say, is just a friend who hasn't invoiced you yet.

This disturbing development had its origins in Japan. There a new a new type of "social service" industry is helping folks fill their social void. Renting a friend, or professional stand-in, is a logical and effective Japanese solution to singledom issues -- particularly for those who prefer to keep their dirty laundry closeted, along with their marital status, sexual orientation and employment history. Ryuichi Ichinokawa, founder of one of Japan's first rent-a-friend agencies, says he feels Japan's traditions and formal culture drive many of its citizens to push personal problems out of public view. So even if keeping personal proclivities private requires hiring a professional to fill in the gaps, it's worth the price.

Ichinokawa has seen first-hand the growing popularity of the faux friend agencies since founding Hagemashi Tai (or I Want to Cheer You Up) three years ago. In the beginning, Ichinokawa played all the roles himself, but now he employs more than 30 "friends" who, for a pre-arranged rate, will fill almost any social role: friend, relative, colleague, spouse, parent, classmate, even best man. The roles agents are asked to play range from being best man at a wedding, to being a child's 'uncle' at a sports event, to being a parent attending a matchmaking party. They might be asked to be a husband at a social gathering, or even a rival suitor.

What each situation has in common is that the client wants the agent to fill in the gap in his or her life - a gap they feel unable to broach publicly. Behind the example of the 'uncle' watching his nephew's sports event, for example, is the fact that the child's mother is a divorcee, the father is absent, and the son is being bullied at school by his peers. It is clear that the divorcee is attempting to fill in the gap of her missing husband and her son's missing father in the hope, apart from anything else, that this will solve the problem of her son being bullied. The uncle is also a stand-in father and, at least in the mother's mind, will quite literally represent the protective authority figure that is missing in their lives. Another situation described is acting to rescue love affairs that are failing. A woman client employs an agent to act as a potential rival in order to re-kindle her lover's interest. When she is in public with her inattentive boyfriend, the agent is programmed to 'accidentally' turn up, show that they've met before and express overt interest in her. Here the agent is asked to collude with the woman in trying to cover up the fact that her boyfriend has lost interest in her, if he was ever interested in the first place. Whatever role the agent is asked to play points to an underlying emotional gap in the client that is too painful to know about - much less risk exposing.

Japan is a culture which has an extreme fear of vulnerability and defeat and that prides itself on the importance of form and structure ­ on putting on a good public appearance . Here it is perhaps especially shameful when the facts of one's life don't correspond to how they are supposed to be. For many people, these discrepancies convey a terrible sense of failure and inadequacy. Having to hire friends and relatives only highlights the isolation of these clients and how much intimacy is lacking in their lives. However, in helping clients cover up their problems, the agents or “friends”seem to be acting more in the role of social prostitutes, giving short-term relief that must be kept secret at all costs. Creating the façade of a life without problems is immensely seductive but it is the client who is fooled in the end.

But rent a friend has also become big in the US and is well on its way in UK. The website rentafriend.com maintains a database with 218,000 names on it, chums-for-hire from all over the US and Canada. Apparently, 2,000 people pay to subscribe in order to find friends to take to dinner or to invite round for some scrapbooking. It may all sound a bit suspicious, but Rentafriend founder Scott Rosenbaum insists that the service furnishes platonic friendship only. Those seeking or offering more are struck off. Rent A Friend is not an escort site. It does not proffer or offer "ladies of the night" or any form of salubrious services. Instead, it simply exists to rent out strangers who will be happy to be your friend. For a set amount of time. For money.

You can rent them by the hour for a social event, or simply to teach you a new skill. Indeed, there are a whole variety of things your (paid-for) friend can help with: "You can rent a local Friend to hang out with", states the website. "[Someone to] go to a movie or restaurant with, someone to go with you to a party or event, someone to teach you a new skill or hobby, or someone to show you around an unfamiliar town". After all human beings are sociable animals and needs companionship(real market demand).How companionship is priced(heart felt affection,money &/or time) is up to a mutual agreement between parties involved.

And how much does friendship cost. I bet you didn’t know. But the market rate for a friend is apparently around $10 per hour!