Pre-Meal, The Newsletter by Will Guidara

Happy (almost) Halloween!

Every so often, a comment completely changes how I behave—like when my friend Mark Canlis said: "The difference between a good tip and an extraordinary tip isn't actually that much.”

I think about it every time I go out to dinner. Unless you’re eating at a really expensive restaurant, the difference between 20 percent (solid) and 30 percent (amazing) may only be fifteen or twenty bucks. For most of us, that’s manageable. For the person receiving that thirty percent tip, though, the difference is huge—not just in terms of what they take home at the end of the night, but in how you’ve made them feel.

It’s a small gesture with an outsized impact, and it has completely changed the way I tip.

I thought of Mark’s comment last Halloween. I was waiting at the bottom of a driveway in our neighborhood with another dad as Frankie and Sonny approached a friendly front door by themselves.

Then they were running toward us, screaming with excitement, expressions of pure joy and disbelief on their faces. In their outstretched hands: FULL-SIZE Snickers bars (!!!!!)

Of course they were going nuts; every kid coming down that driveway was going nuts. I went nuts over the “full-size candy bar house” when I was a kid, too. To this day, I have no idea what that family on Hemlock Drive did for a living, but to a pint-sized Luke Skywalker, they might as well have been Rockefellers, dedicating their vast fortunes to the noblest cause I could imagine.

That night, after we’d finally gotten our sugar-crazed children into bed, I found myself doing the math. How much more does it actually cost to become a full-size candy bar house?

I figured on 250 kids coming through—a lot, but it’s no fun if you run out of candy by 7:30. Then a quick internet search, and I had my answer: buy in bulk, and the upgrade costs about two hundred bucks.

So: not nothing, but not Rockefeller money either.

And if two hundred dollars is all it takes to give a neighborhood full of kids a memory they’ll grow up to tell their own children about, then I’m upping the ante. No more fun-size. This year, I want to win Halloween.

More broadly, I want to look for more opportunities to make small gestures with outsized impacts. Where else can I spend a little more money or invest a little more effort to create disproportionate joy?

Have a good service,

Will