(no subject)
In a recent prospective study with n = 2, 100% of Israeli-owned restaurants in Brooklyn provided better service when the wait staff knew in advance that the customer spoke Hebrew. Significant changes were noted both in eye contact to non eye contact proportion of communication time, and in the rating of overall friendliness on a subjective scale of 1-5. The greatest magnitude of change, however, was seen in the area of total wait time, with the known Hebrew-speaking customer averaging a total time of 25 minutes between arrival and departure times, and the unknown Hebrew-speaking customer averaging about 90 minutes. The author also observed these changes in regards to other nearby Hebrew-speaking and non-Hebrew-speaking customers; however, more data is needed in order to quantify these changes. Future studies may undertake to incorporate Russian-owned Brooklyn restaurants as well. While this is a modest pilot study, the potential implications of these results for the field are noteworthy, and may in fact suggest that Israelis are snobs. More studies are called for in order to better characterize this important phenomenon.