So, you’ve finished your meal in the restaurant. The wine was good and the steak was sublime, although maybe the soup could have done with a touch more salt.

As the brandy slips down and you contemplate whether you’re close enough to home to risk the car, you fumble for some change as a tip.

It’s not very much and the waiter looks down his nose at you.

Iz it ‘cos you is black?

Yes, probably.

A new study by Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration finds black Americans generally tip 20% less than restaurant diners who are white. Restaurant workers of all races dislike waiting on black people because they assume the tips will be less no matter how good the service. This in turn leads to poor service and makes for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

From NPR.org which reports on the survey,

“The study found that 63 percent of blacks and 30 percent of whites didn’t understand that the standard restaurant tip in the United States is 15 to 20 percent.

The difference between how blacks and whites view tipping has serious ramifications for restaurants, including lawsuits and lost profits, Williams reports

“The average tip from a black customer is about 13 percent of the bill. The average tip from a white customer is about 16.5 percent of the bill,” says Dr. Michael Lynn, the study’s author.

In some cases the difference in tipping may be the result of poor service, but blacks interviewed in one of Lynn’s studies rated the service slightly higher yet still tipped less than whites, he says.

He says cultural elements – blacks have avoided sit-down restaurants in favo(u)r of take out or self-service eateries – institutionalized racism that exists in the restaurant industry and education about tipping are all behind the discrepancy. “How do people learn about tipping? If you don’t go, you don’t know.”

Or you DO go out, but you go on a University-funded junket of a survey which probably gathered all the data whilst dining out on expenses. Almost MP-level in its inventiveness. You wait; it’ll be a quality assessment of brothels for their final year thesis.

This excuse for poor tipping is of course nonsense. The real reason is that black people have worked this scam out and know they can all save lots of money as long as no brother breaks ranks and starts to tip properly.