After working in a restaurant for the majority of her junior year where she received tips as part of her salary, Lauren Medich became interested in learning ways that she could earn more in tips. When making conversation with the customers, the first thing that she would always learn was whether the customers were locals or tourists. After further research, Lauren realized that there are no studies relating locality to tipping wages which led to her governing question: How does patron locality affect tipping patterns in restaurants of a specific community?

In her thesis, she examined local and tourist tipping patterns in order to see if one had higher percentages than the other. Since locality was one of the first things that a server learns about a customer, the servers could choose to put in extra effort to their serving performance to the higher tipping group if there is data showing if either the locals or tourists tip higher. Lauren collected her data by surveying random people on King Street during Second Sunday and asking them questions about their tipping patterns.  In order to analyze the collected data, Lauren ran a T-test and found that although there were slight changes in the means of data, with locals tipping 22% and tourists 19%, these results were not statistically significant. Even though there was not an apparent difference between locals and tourists with their tipping patterns, Lauren now knows the best tips about tips!