Why do people tip less on the weekends?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The waitstaff in restaurants should be aware: Patrons are less generous with tips over the weekend.That is the finding of a recent study that analyzed 68 million credit-card transactions at 47 restaurant chains operating in 41 states. Patrons, the study found, tipped their servers up to about 1% less on Saturdays and Sundays.The average tip for weekdays alone was 21.30%, with the highest tips on Tuesdays (21.45%) and Thursdays (21.47%).

But on weekends, tips fell to 20.25% and 20.44%, respectively. (The average for the entire week was 21%.)The difference can be substantial.

Servers might handle $1,000 to $2,000 worth of meals during a shift, says Chris Pantzalis, a professor at the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, and one of the paper’s co-authors. So a 0.75- to 1.0-percentage-point reduction “translates to $7.50 to $20 less per shift.

Over a year, this compounds to hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost income.”But those findings raised a big question: Why were people stingier on Saturdays and Sundays?For one thing, the paper says, weekends are associated with busier and rushed restaurant environments with larger volumes of customers, which means more impersonal service.But there might be outside factors at play as well, the researchers theorized. Maybe people were spending more money elsewhere on the weekends, so they cut down on tipping to make up for it.The authors tested their theory with two experiments.

In one, they examined whether diners were less likely to tip after attending church on Sunday—where, in theory, they had spent money on a donation. The other study looked into whether tipping rates were tied to moviegoing.For the first experiment, the