The Economics of Being a Maid Versus a Room Service Waiter/Waitress
I don't know why (I never do, really), but I started thinking about maids and their jobs while we were staying at the hotel in Shreveport.I do not mean French maids, although if that image makes this post more bearable, please feel free to use it as needed. Thank you.
What I was thinking about, specifically, involved tip amounts for maids versus the room service waiters who bring food and whatnot to your room.
To me, cleaning people's rooms would be an awful job. God knows what those maids find in rooms, particularly on the day that someone checks out. There are worse jobs, obviously, but it's got to rank pretty high on the gross scale. And it's hard work, too--there are many steps involved in cleaning a room.
Being a waiter for room service, on the other hand, doesn't seem like it would be that bad. I'm sure strange things would happen at times, but it's generally a 1-2 minute personal interaction, and then it's over.
So, on the one hand, you have a really disgusting, difficult job that requires lots of hard work. On the other hand, you have a mildy annoying job where you're doing much less work.
And yet, I bet the waiter gets much, much more compensation in the form of tips than the maid.
Really, a room service waiter job, if the hotel is busy, should be a tip earner's dream. One, if you don't trip while you're carrying the tray, your percentage of satisfied customers should be very high, and if the kitchen fouls up the food order, being the person who makes it right probably increases your chances of getting tipped. Two, the interactions are brief, so you could have a very high number of contacts on a busy night. Three, you're face-to-face with the customer, so many people will feel an obligation to give you something.
That seems like an ideal setup for making decent money.
Compare that to a maid's setup. If she does anything wrong in terms of cleaning the room, the customer might complain, and given all the things that have to be done to each room, accuracy is probably lower. The interaction with the room is lengthy, so your daily pool of customers is smaller, but you rarely see a customer face-to-face. It's a terrible scenario for tips.
I'd even be willing to bet that the average tip for a room service waiter is higher than the average tip for a maid, even though they do so much less, seemingly.
I tend to tip more for jobs that I don't want to do, so I always leave a larger tip for a maid than I do for a room service waiter. For me, the utility of the waiter is marginal, at best--it wouldn't kill me to walk downstairs, pick up dinner, and go back to the room. Having to change the sheets, towels, glasses, and everything else, though, would take forever, and I'd do it poorly, too.
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