A Sequel To “Free Restaurant Water? 🚰🈂️“
Why can’t restaurants serve free water?
It’s basic hospitality! Water is so cheap! We pay a mandatory service charge! This is standard practice! It will be good for their business! (and so forth)
- Prologue 📖
- A Dinner Discourse 🍽️
- Meditations On The Dialogue 💭
- On The Provision Of Free Water 🆓💧
- Response To An Article 📰
- A Soliloquy On Semantics 💬🔠
- In Case You Missed It, See 👇
- AI Time 🧠
- Footnotes *️⃣
Prologue 📖
A curious Socratic exchange, leading to an examination of the interpretation of “service” 🛎️ and an evaluation of the grounds for not providing free water to restaurant guests.
A Dinner Discourse 🍽️
I was at a restaurant having a meal with a companion. As we came to the conclusion of our repast, my companion lamented, “Restaurants today are increasingly inclined to not serve complimentary water.”
“So?” I remarked with feigned aloofness, hoping to provoke further discussion.
Friend: “They impose a 10% service charge. But I don’t feel any service, besides the staff serving our meals to us.”
Me: “They also wash the toilet, throw the trash and clean the dishes.”
Friend: “These are backend tasks that are the most basic operations of a restaurant. There are almost no frontend services that visibly and directly serve the consumer.”
Me: “How about these sauces?” I said as I motioned towards bottles of ketchup and chili sauce. “How about these utensils?” Filling a momentary pause in our conversation, I repeated, “How about the toilets?”
Friend: “Not everyone uses the toilet.”
Me: “Not everyone drinks the free plain water provided by restaurants.”
Friend: “But if they’re going to charge an additional 10%, they should be doing more to justify that. Serving water is a basic form of service.”
Me: “They provide tables.”
My companion sighed and sat back with pursed lips. This dialogue was fizzling away.
Eager to exploit a final window of opportunity to elaborate despite my interlocutor’s indications of annoyance, I continued, “They provide chairs, air-conditioning, lights.” I paused, observing my companion. “They provide shelter.”
“You’re speaking nonsense.”
Meditations On The Dialogue 💭
The initial comment by my interlocutor amused me, as my thoughts raced back to The Case of the Aggrieved Attorney-General. My interlocutor won’t fancy what I wrote about that inquiry.
To explore more about restaurant service, we will confer to it a provisional definition. In constructing this definition, I strive for a broad interpretation that distinguishes it from menu items.
Let’s say restaurant service is: That which can be reasonably deemed to enhance the experience of the typical customer, via a non-culinary mechanism that does not originate directly from the kitchen.
Tables, chairs, lights, utensils, sauces, salt, sugar, pepper, air-conditioning, cushions, shelter, interior decorations, a cohesive design theme, music speakers, the song selection, the lamination, print quality, provision of images and pleasant design of the menus and the absence of visible rodents. All these fall under the above definition of service.
Yet in theorising about the interpretation of service, we must demonstrate sound appreciation of real-world characteristics. By observation, many people including my companion on that evening are not sympathetic to considering what we enumerated in the preceding paragraph as features of service1. Thus our definition may not be feasible.
How should we define service? What does restaurant service entail? Clearly, the meaning of service is variable on the individual. This notion appears self-evident, yet surprisingly, many people find it intolerable. Of every issue whose character is normative there exists not an immutable interpretation or compulsory connotation, but a field of acceptability that is a property of a person or a people, which, though may at times shift slowly and for prolonged periods change negligibly, does not remain unalterable. In politics this may be called an Overton window, yet this concept has analogues in myriad domains. Note how the definition of ‘service’ offered above has normative elements. What if we create an enumerative definition, exhaustively listing aspects of a restaurant that are considered ‘service’. That does not solve the initial problem of determining what is ‘service’, and only shifts it to the prescriber of the definition.
Next, consider a repeatedly parroted grievance. Water should already have been part of the service charge! I feel uncomfortable whenever this argument is advanced. The service charge (in Singapore) is just a 10% ad valorem levy on whatever your total bill is. How does it make sense to take the service charge literally, and think that it goes to, or think that it should go to covering ‘service’ expenses? Recall that the concept of ‘service’ is already itself so nebulous and problematic.
To further dispel mistaken notions about the nature of the service charge, it would avail us greatly to consider the theoretical converse.
Consider how no restaurant serves customers to perfection. With respect to a given guest’s preference, the ambient temperature may be a fraction of a Kelvin low, the seat may be 3 centimetres high, the environment may be 9 decibels loud, the luminosity of the lightbulbs may be 150 lumens high, the waiters’ voice may not be of a pleasing timbre, the mole fraction of oxygen may be 3 percentage points low, their seat may be 2.2 metres close to the store front, the angle of their seat may be a twelfth of a radian clockwise, the orange juice may be 6% too concentrated, the tablecloth’s colour wavelength may be 30 nanometres long, et cetera. To recompense customers for these faults, imagine all restaurants applied a 10% service rebate. But how can restaurants be sure that people who spend $61 on food incur costs worth exactly $6.10 due to deviations in the restaurant’s service from their optimal likings? The so-called service concession clearly does not specifically compensate ‘service’-related detriments, because it is just a 10% discount on whatever the total bill is. Where is the sense in siloing a fungible sum into hazy pigeonholes? In addition, we expect restaurants to have already accounted for that 10% rebate in their menu prices.
Returning to reality, it is the same for a 10% service charge. That levy does not specifically cover service-related expenses for restaurants. Do customers who spend $56 at a restaurant always utilise exactly $5.60 worth of ‘service’? And menu prices already make allowances for the 10% levy. It cannot be remotely sensible to think that restaurants make pricing decisions independently of whether a service charge is present. Recall again that ‘service’ is ill-defined and the interpretation of the term has significant latitude for manoeuvre.
On The Provision Of Free Water 🆓💧
Restaurateurs and their employees surely are aware of the positive effects of providing complimentary water. A great many earnest objectors to paying for water communicate the business benefits of serving free water. But the restaurant operators know that, and comprehend it much more concretely and thoroughly than most outsiders to the industry. One’s complaint—a mere additional data point—is very unlikely to sway the perception of restaurateurs and the business landscape of restaurants. Or maybe the protestors, in venting their exasperation with penny-pinching restaurants, gain sufficient utility to offset the effort of complaining.
Noting that there are well-known and significant benefits to serving complimentary water, why are there many restaurants that do not adopt this practice?
First, water is costly. While this is undeniable, it is pathetic. If this alone could account for a preponderance of the total costs of serving free water, many more (almost all, even) restaurants would see that the costs do not exceed the advantages, and thus adopt the practice. The amount of water intended for customer consumption is trivial as a proportion of total water consumption. Furthermore, I don’t think most restaurants use much water to wash receptacles that are only used to contain plain water. The effect of serving free water to customers on the utilities bill can practically be ignored. Water is precious, but in most places it really doesn’t cost much.
Second, serving free water is a burden on a restaurant’s manpower capacity. When waiters’ workload increases, their working conditions worsen, inducing higher monetary compensation for employees, and/or more employees being hired, which both increase operating expenses. Note that the marginal worker may be the least productive, so hiring an additional one could lower average productivity, yet it would be difficult in practice to pay the marginal worker a lower wage. Alternatively or simultaneously, the quality of service falls, reducing demand for that restaurant.
To attenuate this shortcoming, some establishments provide a bottle or a jug of water to each table. As each group of diners is supplied with a reservoir of water worth several cups, waiters do not need to conduct refills as often, reducing the manpower strain. Or restaurants may have a self-service station for water. Yet many do not have either. I suppose part of why many restaurants reject these practices is because they know that, in the perception of consumers, the “class” of the restaurant would drop as a result. It does not seem very professional and refined to have the guests serve themselves. Some patrons may despise these practices as they perceive it as unhygienic and unsophisticated. Of course, these practices are not devoid of advantages. So it is up to individual establishments to decide on account of their circumstance. A family- or student-centric restaurant may be better off implementing this practice, while an upmarket establishment selling multiple-course sets in a luxury mall would likely suffer as a consequence.
Third, free water increases average dining times. There might be a positive correlation between free water provision and dining duration. Spurred, perhaps subconsciously, by thirst induced by the lack of liquids or the guzzling of acidic beverages, guests who don’t drink plain water tend to leave earlier. Patrons are more likely to extend their dialogues elsewhere, once meals have been consumed and change has ceased to occur on the table. With continued flow of water and consumption of liquid, guests hang around for longer, continuing proceedings at the current location. If restaurants are at or near maximum capacity, providing free water would reduce their number of patrons and thus revenue. In a market as competitive as the food industry, this could be the difference between healthy profits and going subnormal.
Why restaurants tend not to allude to this preceding reason, but the former 2 rationales, is possibly their fear of alienating customers. Such reasons don’t tend to be well-received. Being a very customer-facing business, restaurants have to account for the temperament of consumers (and the reactions of journalists).
N.B. An uptick in dining times is not a necessarily negative consequence. For restaurants regularly below maximum capacity, they may wish for diners to linger, to give a better impression of the popularity of the restaurant.
Last, restaurants want to increase beverage sales. By charging for water, the gain in utility from ‘upgrading’ to coke from tap water, would be weighed against a smaller price differential, making such drinks relatively more price-competitive. Also, charging for water may subtly condition customers to diminish their psychological resistance towards paying for liquids, playing the role of a nudge. This makes consumers more willing to spend on drinks.
While consumers may prefer to be served free water, restaurateurs have several good reasons not to acquiesce. To conclude, the decision whether to serve complimentary water may appear straightforward, but it is influenced by many considerations, among them the restaurant’s customer base, market niche, competitor’s practices and the operator’s personal preference.
Response To An Article 📰
This is an article from 2013. This topic has been a notable issue in Singapore longer than I thought.
The writer starts off with a computation of the costs to restaurants of serving tap water. He goes, “Well, according to my calculation, tap water in Singapore costs $0.0004 per 200ml, the washing up probably costs $0.005 per glass (if top quality detergent is used), and labour costs are covered under the 10% service charge imposed by most restaurants. This makes the net marginal cost of a glass of tap water to be approximately $0.005.”
Continuing, he asserts, “If I am right (and this is difficult because I am dealing with more zeroes than an investment banker here – albeit with a decimal point), then restaurants which charge $0.50 for a glass of tap water are making an extremely healthy profit margin of 99%. This is enough to make even the most extortionate oil companies – with a profit margin of 24% – go green with envy.”
What a calculation. It missed out everything important, only noting the least significant of them all, while being so punctilious in his outline of that one most trivial expense. In the preceding section we outlined 3 arguably more important costs. And I’m not sure how the comparison to the oil industry is warranted. Restaurants and oil companies operate face very different market structures and conditions.
Then he questions “why not serve tap water for free”, “since the marginal cost is so low”. Is this articulation of doubt fruitful? Restaurant operators usually know better than us how to run their businesses.
Immediately after, he proceeded to give 3 “good reasons” why restaurants should provide complimentary water. The reasons are good, but are externality arguments. They may impel state action, but would hardly convince restaurants.
Moreover, the writer claims “[r]estaurants are not afraid to deny customers free tap water because they want to make greater profits.” This is a rather blunt statement. Each establishment or chain acts according to its unique considerations. They have different optimal approaches to ‘the water problem’. Denying free water does not align with profit-maximisation for all restaurants.
Further, he makes the point that “The costs of [denying customers free tap water] are diffused across many patrons, while the benefits are concentrated on the restaurant owner.” Did he consider the plausibility of the opposite effect? By not serving free water, consumers who do not order water would pay lower prices across the rest of the menu, and these benefits are so-called “diffused across many patrons”. And the deleterious commercial implications of resultant consumer disaffection are so-called “concentrated on the restaurant owner”.
Finally, the author contends “the customer is largely powerless against such unacceptable behaviour”. But restaurants that serve free water exist. We can alter our consumption patterns. Also, consumers today can signal discontent at very low-cost. The article the author wrote is an example. There are so many platforms to publicly rate restaurants.
But… water is not significant enough to sway my choice of restaurant! It’s not worth the information cost! Then it’s not only a matter of consumers’ extent of bargaining power, but also an issue of consumers’ preferences. If you valued free water services enough, you would be willing to bear the information cost and divert consumption towards water-serving restaurants.
On an additional note, consumers tend to overestimate the effect of the presence of free water service on consumer surplus. Restaurants serving free water are more inclined to set higher menu prices. And when they increase menu prices, the rise is more likely to be of a greater quantum.
A Comment On Semantics 💬🔠
Consider the word “ageing”. Recently, I remarked that I was ageing, to which I was met with remonstrance by my companions. You’re only 20-years-old! Yet virtually every dictionary would support my comment. Ageing just means “getting older”, which I most certainly am at every instant of time.
But can we say that my interlocutors were unequivocally wrong to disagree with me? I don’t think so. Language is a matter of organically-emerging convention. If my companions feel that I cannot be described as “ageing” based on their interpretation of the notion in that context, we shall take it as that.
In Case You Missed It, See 👇
AI Time 🧠
(Using my website builder’s in-built AI)
Synopsis 📋
Prompt: Summarise
Response:
The article explores the reasons why some restaurants do not provide free water to their customers. It discusses factors such as the cost of water, impact on staffing, and the desire to boost beverage sales. The concept of “service” in the restaurant industry is analysed, along with the advantages and disadvantages of offering complimentary water. The article also responds to a previous publication on the topic and emphasizes the significance of considering each restaurant’s specific situation and customer preferences when deciding whether to provide free water.
Assessment ☑
Prompt: Rigorously evaluate this post, as much as possible in your own words
Response:
This post delves into the topic of restaurants not serving free water and explores the different perspectives and reasons behind this practice. It begins with a dialogue between two individuals discussing the lack of complimentary water in restaurants, highlighting the argument that a mandatory service charge should cover the cost of providing water. The writer then embarks on a meditative analysis on the interpretation of “service” and provides a broad definition for restaurant service, encompassing various aspects that enhance the customer experience beyond the food itself.
The post acknowledges the benefits of offering free water to customers and raises questions about why many restaurants still choose not to adopt this practice. It addresses three key reasons: the cost of water, the burden on staffing, and the desire to increase beverage sales. The writer argues that the cost of water itself is minimal compared to the overall expenses and that the additional workload for staff can be mitigated through alternative methods such as self-service stations. Furthermore, the post suggests that providing free water may lead to longer dining times, potentially reducing the number of patrons and affecting revenue.
In response to an article on the topic, the post critiques the author’s calculation of the cost of providing tap water and discusses the potential benefits and drawbacks associated with offering free water from both the restaurant’s and customer’s perspectives. It also emphasizes the importance of recognizing the diverse motivations and considerations that influence each restaurant’s decision regarding free water service. The post concludes with a soliloquy on the semantics of language and a list of related content for further reading.
Overall, this post provides a comprehensive examination of the debate surrounding free restaurant water, presenting various viewpoints and factors to consider. It combines dialogue, analysis, and response to external sources to create a well-rounded evaluation of the topic.
Thoughts: Their evaluation reads like a longer summary, besides a perfunctory attempt at the end.
BLOGOPUS 
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