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Waitresses who wear red get up to 26 per cent extra in tips than they would wearing other colours, researchers claimed today. However, the team that the sexes tip very differently - with the bigger tips coming only from male customers. No matter what colour they wear, female diners will give the same kind of amounts for service every time.
Yet men, whether they realise it or not, add anything between 15 and 26 per cent more to a waitress in red than they would if it was the SAME waitress wearing a different colour. The test was simple. Take 11 waitresses in five restaurants over a six week period and ask them to wear the same kind of tee-shirt every day but alternate the colours.
Previous research has suggested waitresses could earn more if they acted provocatively or wore more make up than their colleagues. But this study, by the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research, only changed the colour of the tee shirt. Every other aspect from make up to behaviour remained the same. When wearing either black, white, green, blue or yellow tee shirts, the size of the tips from both male and female customers was almost identical.
The sociologists from the Universite de Bretagne-Sud, France, tracked the tips left for seven waitresses over two months against the variously coloured lipsticks they wore. In almost 450 transactions, waitresses wearing pink or brown lippy, or none at all, got tips on average about 30 per cent of the time. But when the waitresses put on red lipstick, male customers tipped half the time - and left more money.
