I’ve got my first grocery delivery arriving tomorrow. About $80 worth of food. It’s the grocery chain’s delivery service, so presumably the deliverer wasn’t the person who packed up the order at the store. So I’m just tipping for delivery.
How much would you guys tip?
My habit has been 10% through the app, and an envelope with $20-30 waiting for them on delivery. During distancing, anyway.
I’ve been doing 15%. Our orders are large so the tip can be substantial.
About 30-40 degrees. Too far and they fall over and get hurt.
I’ve been doing a flat $20 at pickup. Pretty substantial orders. I would not tip that much in normal times.
20%: these folks are risking their own health to do this work, and I appreciate it.
But not as much fun as tipping cows.
Depends. Some places don’t allow it. Jewel/Osco (Chicago) doesn’t have a tip section on their order form. Since I don’t even see the driver, there’s no opportunity for an under the table cash tip. They drop the stuff off in the lobby and then I have to get it and bring it up. My apartment building has several luggage carts like you’d find in a hotel for hauling heavy and bulky stuff into the elevators.
None. Because I live in a sensible country that doesn’t purposely try to complicate its monetary practices.
Edit: I know, you North Americans are probably sick of hearing derision from the rest of the world for the whole tipping controversy. I just wanted to contribute to the conversation.
I’m North American and it didn’t bother me because this is one of our tipping grey areas.
My grocery delivery is handled by a union truck driver, making a living wage and holding a commercial drivers license. They could just as easily have a similar job delivering cases of beer to the bar across the street. They’re not in the same category as a restaurant worker making less than minimum wage and absolutely dependent on tips to survive.
I live in Romania and I was pleasantly surprised to see that certain food deliverers offer the possibility to tip the courier with a small sum or multiples of that sum (or other amounts, or not at all of course) when you pay by card. This is especially impressive because transactions in cash are still popular among a large part of the population here, but I guess the present quarantine is likely to cause a lot of people to prefer electronic transactions to cash ones from now on.
If it’s just the driver, an amount that works out into the $15-$20 range, which frankly is quite a lot for a 5 minute drive just to put stuff on the porch, pandemic or no.
If I’m using instacart and the driver also did the shopping, I’ll at least double that amount, if not more, because this person is dealing with the grocery store so I don’t have to. This was especially true when there was a long line to get in the store and the store was low on many items, meaning the shopper had to find substitutes. I think at least one order ended up with a tip over fifty bucks.
I wound up tipping 10% on the website, plus another $10 cash at delivery.
But I’m not doing that again any time soon. My order was massively incomplete - out of 40 items, they delivered 17. Another 2 items were out of stock, but that left 21 items that were in stock but didn’t get delivered.
And to let them know this, I had to be on hold for over an hour, waiting to talk to a customer service representative. Which is the #1 reason I won’t be doing this again.
There was no way to tell them via the website that my order was incomplete, let alone itemize what was missing. When I called the 800 number, there was no option to leave my number and have them call me back. So I had to pay attention to the phone for an hour, since their on-hold music would be interrupted for a repeating cycle of messages, and would frequently break off and resume for no apparent reason as well, so I couldn’t just put the phone on speaker and get some work done while I waited: it was constantly breaking into my concentration.
When I finally got through, I spoke with a pleasant customer service rep, who credited me for the items I didn’t get, and took away the delivery charge too. But even with going to the store being much more of a PITA in the covid-19 era than it was in the ‘before times’, I’d really rather just go to the store.
15%, same as in town.
For whatever it’s worth, I’ve had a lot more luck with curbside pickup than with delivery. It makes sense that I should do the drive part, which is isolated. Everywhere I’ve done it, I pull in, call or text someone, and they come out and load my car. No more contact than delivery.
I don’t know where you’re from, but you probably have a decent minimum wage and national healthcare. Your snobbery is misplaced.
I think it is bang-on to be honest, tipping is idiotic and the USA is the poster child for it.
I pay an extra amount whilst ordering to cover the cost of picking packing and delivery. No tip possible or expected. The company, in turn, pays their staff a decent wage.
Once I’m there, I’d be going in anyway, to be reminded of things that should have been on my list but weren’t, by going up and down the aisles and seeing the things I’d forgotten.
Also, because I’m such an early bird, and the grocery stores in my area all open at 6am (some with seniors-only hours that I’ve lived long enough to take advantage of), I’m there when the stores open, and can shop when there are only a handful of customers in the store.
I fully agree with the sentiment, however what you’re speaking about is based on the minimum wage of waitstaff.
Someone working at a grocery store makes a ‘regular’ wage (as opposed to what a waiter makes). However, for the vast majority of them, this is above and beyond what they were hired to do.