There have been many comments on the logistics of tipping on this board, but I would welcome hearing from wineries that have added the WD tipping feature to learn (1) did you see an impact (positive or negative) on Club Signups, (2) how do you allocate tips (per individually earned tips vs team sharing of tips), and (3) customer reaction to the tipping screen?
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We started using tipping with square before moving to wine direct. No impact on club signups for us and only 2 people complained to me in the last 24 months about tips. We allocate tips across the team because we do not make each person login to check out and often has someone who is running register. We do it as per hour per day amount. So if Jim works 8 hours and Jane works 4 hours and tips were $24 for the day. Then we take total hours (12) and divide that into tips for the day ($24) for $2 per hour. Then multiple by hours worked - Jim = $16 and Jane = $8.
When we finally got our tipping feature activated( problems between WD and our payment provider) our tipping to our staff increased probably 300%. There was no noticeable change in wine club sign up and customers responded favourably to the tipping screen. As for the tip sharing we do it based on hours per worked in the pay period.
Thank you!
Jeffrey Maltzman
Proprietor & Winemaker
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE WINERY
World’s Highest Altitude Winery
Email: jeffrey@breckwinery.com
Breckenridge Tasting Room
505 S Main Street #A4
Breckenridge, CO 80424
970-771-3443
South Park Tasting Room & Production Center
331 Hwy 285 #D
Fairplay, CO 80440
719-838-2349
I thought I would give everyone an update as we activated tipping on January 1 and have now run with tipping for a full quarter. Staff love it and tips to employees have skyrocketed compared to what they received when we only allowed cash tips. Currently tips average about 10% of revenue. On some shifts employees are seeing their effective wage nearly double because of the addition of POS tipping. We thought the pre-programmed tipping options (15%, 20% and 25%) were too high so we changed the default tipping amounts to 5%, 10% and 20% and that seems to work fairly well. So far not a single customer has complained about the new tipping option on the checkout screen. When customers just buy bottles (no tasting) our staff are trained to click the no tip option before handling the ipad to the customer since I do not believe it is appropriate to ask for a tip on a simple retail sale.
Our wine club signups are down this quarter compared to last year, but I honestly do not attribute that to our addition of POS tipping. I think the wine club signup decrease is more likely attributable to the fact that we have now been open three years and we are hitting a saturation point where we are seeing less first time visitors and more repeat customers (who have already made the decision to either join the club or pass on the club). Our club is still growing - just more slowly than it did during our first two years in business.
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