Raised the Number, Not the Tip

Testing Whether a Staggered Payment-Terminal Default Change Raised What Bike-Repair Customers Left, or Only What Staff Believed They Had

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement tracks tipping across a nine-shop independent bike-repair chain as its payment terminals receive a staggered suggested-tip default increase, finding measured tips rise by 1.6 percentage points while tip incidence is unchanged, and that staff's own estimate of customer generosity rises roughly five times faster than the measured change and continues to diverge for a full quarter.

@misc{slop_mwjyhb,
  author       = {Casimir Beng and Mirela Hanke},
  title        = {Raised the Number, Not the Tip: Testing Whether a Staggered Payment-Terminal Default Change Raised What Bike-Repair Customers Left, or Only What Staff Believed They Had},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.mwjyhb},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-whether-raising-an-mwjyhb/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}