It is hard not to wonder if they are merely putting on a front. They know, after all, that you are spending more on one night than they earn in a week.

I looked into that question during the year I spent conducting field research in two luxury hotels located in a large U.S. city. Although the staffers knew I was a sociologist, I worked as one of them, mainly in face-to-face jobs such as concierge, front desk agent, reservation agent, telephone operator and bellperson. I saw that workers find many ways to gain the upper hand, sometimes only symbolically, but nevertheless in ways that can affect a guest’s comfort.

According to an unspoken contract, guests should treat workers with respect, say please and thank you, and tip appropriately ($5 to $50 to the concierge, $5 to $10 to the bellperson and doorman for carrying luggage, $2 to the doorman for a taxi). In my experience, guests generally fulfilled their end of the bargain. Sometimes they even brought workers small gifts, such as a bottle of wine or a baseball hat. Staff members often went out of their way for "nice" frequent guests, sending them special treats from room service or letting parking charges slide.

But workers took subtle revenge against guests who failed to show appreciation or acknowledge the workers’ presence. In these cases, workers acted what they called "fake nice," while rolling their eyes behind the guest’s back. They also found barely perceptible ways to give inferior service: They might put a guest on hold for no reason; doormen would send the guest’s car to the garage rather than leaving it at the curb.

My favorite story of revenge concerns a guest who arrived before check-in time and was angry because his room was not ready. He practically threw the registration card at Annie, the front desk agent on duty. What he never knew was that before his arrival, he had been upgraded to a nicer room. Annie just smiled and gave him the room he had originally booked, which was available. He hated the room and ended up paying $100 more for the room he was supposed to get as a complimentary upgrade.

Workers were likely to make fun of guests who were rude and pass judgment on their intelligence, attractiveness, cultural sophistication and morality. Guests were known as "Ms. Face-Lift" or "Dr. Crazy"; more than one was referred to as "trailer trash." An assistant manager told me that "the more money they have, the less common sense they have."

Pillow Mint Talk
The access workers had to intimate information about guests gave them a sense of power. I witnessed their laugh fests over guests who stashed pornographic magazines in "their" room for the next visit, locked themselves out of the room naked, dropped the telephone out the window, or used the wastebasket as a latrine after one too many martinis. But they also felt sorry for guests who had to spend all night working in the business center or who were staying in the hotel because they were getting divorced. They were genuinely eager to provide guidance to a guest unschooled in luxury consumption, as long as the guest was willing to defer to workers’ knowledge.

Friendly relations allowed workers to establish a sense of equality with guests. Judging guests, learning about their problems and helping them enabled workers to feel superior. Workers rarely talked about wanting or expecting to have the jobs, possessions or lifestyles of guests. Instead, they reduced affluence to just one of many possible individual characteristics, and not always a positive one. They philosophized that "having money doesn’t make you happy."

Guests also preferred not to think about the obvious inequality, and, for the most part, wanted to be nice in order to see themselves as meriting friendly treatment. Both workers and guests upheld a long-standing American principle of reciprocity. But at the same time, they reinforced another cherished American custom: pretending class differences do not exist.

Rachel Sherman is an assistant professor of sociology at Yale. This article is based on findings developed in her new book, Class Acts, to be published in January by the University of California Press.