I tip everybody. Even my pest control guy. The IT guy at my job.
Valets. Tip them when you drop the car off and they leave it up front .I have a decent ride so it’s not an eyesore. I really try to make people feel good. I smile, I joke with them , shake thier hand give compliments . They see me and know I’m going to give them a good tip . I guess it is a Vegas thing. You know, It could be a Jesus thing. I wear a 4 inch crucifix around my neck all the time too . Who knows? As long as it makes people feel good I’m all for it . I don’t care why.
I deliver pizza currently. The driver uses their own car and doesn’t get paid for gas. We do get the delivery charge, which is $3 to $5 depending on distance. The farther deliveries are 10-15 miles each way. An average tip is $3. I end up averaging around $12 an hour after gas is deducted.
Brilliant! I’m sure that will sway everyone here who has a problem paying you extra to do your job.
Bravo.
I’d say $2-$3 an order is more than fine. I used to deliver (for Jimmy John’s) in college. Gas was only about $1.25 a gallon then, but I averaged something like $15/hr with tips (in 1997). That was more money than my mom or dad made hourly and there’s no way I spent more than a buck on gas an hour. For a college job, it was easy and very good money. I worked at a coffeeshop previous to that, where I made $8-$9/hr with tips.
If some people didn’t tip, who gives a shit? The people who tipped well made up for them.
While I do tip well, in the end, I really don’t really pity tipped delivery drivers. Unlike servers, you do get paid a real wage and you don’t do anything except go from point A to point B. I’m sorry, but it’s a relatively easy job that pays more than a lot of manual labor. And most people do tip and you end up with an hourly wage which, even minus expenses and automobile maintenance cost, really isn’t that bad considering the work.
I get a flat 80 cents per delivery to cover gas.
Wait, the delivery charge doesn’t go to the driver as tip?!?! I have learned something today. This thread probably made quite a few future pizza delivery guys a little richer.
$1+ change for a small order. More if there are special circumstances (stairs, crappy parking, dirt road, etc.)
My SO is a former pizza delivery guy (for a large chain, and also a small local place). I often asked him what he thought of people who don’t tip. He said (paraphrased) “People who don’t tip, I don’t get angry at. Other people tip well and make up for it. It’s the ones who ask me to cover part of the bill that piss me off!” :eek:
Apparently he would be delivering and someone would say “Oh man, i’m just 50 cents short… you can cover it right??” WTF?! This happened more than once. No tip plus he gets to pay for part of the pizza!
He always told me, for a normal pizza order, $2-3 would cover the tip. He always seemed to remember the good tippers, making sure the order was just the way they liked it. He often cooked his pizzas before delivering them, so he did have a bit more of a part in the service aspect.
Of course the tip is not necessary or required, and he would never have defiled any food in any way. It was his job, and he had to make everyone happy, and he had to deliver promptly regardless. But he did make sure the people who tipped and helped him pay his monthly bills (that he was struggling to keep up with), got extra good service. (And no, not in the porno style 
) Is that right? I don’t know, but that’s the way it works.
Colour me confused: if you’ve not got the money, you don’t get the product. Simple as that. The delivery guy returns the pizza to the store. Or am I missing something?
Well, as I understand it… he can either be a nice guy and eat the difference (but not literally), or he can take the pizza back where it will most likely be dumped. I’m sure if it was more than a dollar he’d take it back out of spite! 
Basically, if you did the 50 cents thing once, he would take pity on you and pony up the difference. Once more, no dice, pizza sent back.
I’ll have to ask him about this again…
As to the delivery charge: The Domino’s that I used to work at charged $1.50 delivery charge, which was to offset the increased cost of getting supplies delivered to the store, not from store to home.
But then, we didn’t charge that $1.50 to carry-out orders, which enforced in people’s minds that the money went to the driver.
When we first instituted it, tips did go down. Not by people deliberately subtracting $1.50, but just standard “keep the change” mentality. A customer whose usual order came to $16.04 would give a $20 bill and say, “Keep it.” But afterwards, their new total was $17.54, and they’d still just pay with a $20 and say, “Keep it.” Viola! My tip went down from $4 to $2.50.
Over the next couple of years, people slowly realized what they were tipping, and would give an extra dollar or two to their $20.
I didn’t like the delivery charge because
- there were those that thought the drivers got the $1.50. (If asked, I [truthfully] told them we got 3% of it, or $0.045.)
- the store would give us $0.25 per order on top of the 3% commision, but only when gas was over $2.50/gal. When it went under, we didn’t get the quarter per, but the store still collected $1.50
- the store was getting income, but not paying sales tax on it. (They would pay income tax on it, I suppose.)
So the delivery charge:
- doesn’t pay for the delivery (drivers use their own gas, with minimal compensation)
- doesn’t pay the delivery person (they get crappy wages, but more if they have additional jobs)
- takes away from the tip the delivery person would receive originally (people think they are tipping via the delivery charge)
- pads the pockets of the owners (consumers don’t know the above, so they think the delivery charge is all they have to pay, which goes to the owners)
…Interesting.
I’ve had many a friend work in the delivery sector. They see it as they deserve a tip more than waiters do, because waiters only have to bring your food to the table whereas they have to drive all the way to your house and walk to your front door. My pizza delivery friends have typically not been waiters, and my waiter friends have usually not ever been deliverymen, so I’m still waiting to see how the delivery/waiter fight ends, but while drive delivery does have its slacker perks it is still not an especially cushy job or one that gets much compensation. Usually there’s no tip at all, a couple of bucks tip isn’t great but “at least they tipped and didn’t slam the door on my face”, and a fiver is makes you feel like a king.
People who don’t tip are socially dip-shittified. I tip the pizza dude the same percentage I would tip in a restaurant. $6 on a $30 order (subject to reduction based on quality and level of service). I realize some people hold different services to different tipping standards, but I do 20% across the board. If no one tipped, no one would perform the tasks that we tip on. Unless their bosses suddenly had a stroke and started paying a living wage. And I’m guessing that ain’t happening.
I’m sorry I didn’t really reply to your post exactly. I haven’t worked in a service industry job since I was 16 so I’m kind of out of the loop as far as getting tips. But I think you may have point about the cashed-up holidaymakers giving up the money freely. Be sure people who act like asses don’t get tipped. I guess it’s the ones who try and don’t get tipped that I feel for.
On a side not I dig how you guys across the pond(s) use the word holiday. One of my favorite tunes is Holiday by the Scorpions. Just had to share that 
Yeah, but delivery people get paid at least minimum wage (at least they do here), and not the $2/hr or whatever that waitstaff do here. And it’s a lot more hands-off than working in a restaurant. When I worked delivery, it was basically this: wait around for an order to be ready, sit on your ass in the car and crank the music up while driving to location, walk to door. Perhaps 5% of my day was spent on my feet. My job at the coffeehouse required more attention, service, and skill, I was on my feet the whole shift minus 15 minuts, and paid about half of what I got doing delivery. And proper waitstaff are expected to show even more attention and service.
Well first, as pulykamell notes, drivers ge a considerably higher hourly wage in most parts of the US than waiters.
But more important is the level of service required. Delivering pizzas requires an ability to drive, to read a map (or know your neighborhood), and to knock on a door.
A good waiter can converse knowledgeably about the food in the restaurant, can recommend wine or other drinks, can talk about the specials, can make sure that everyone at the table has what they need during the course of the meal, and will generally try to ensure that the dining experience is a pleasant one. When i was a waiter, i could do all this, i could carry and deliver multiple plates of food, and i could also clear a table of eight (main course plates, side plates, and cutlery) in one visit to the table.
I’m happy to tip pizza delivery people, and i think they deserve a tip, but they also shouldn’t kid themselves that what they do involves more service and more skill than what a waiter does.
The concept that pizza delivery might not get paid gas is utterly foreign to me. 
As I mentioned, they definitely get paid for it around here. Plus, the delivery staff makes almost as much epr hour as I do, before tips. I’ve seen delivery wages as high as 9-10$ per hour, round the clock.
If they were paying gas out of their own pocket, I’d be willing to pay a little more. Of course, I don’t really like paying 2-3 dollars extra, so I’d jsut run down to the Papa Johns 10 minutes way and get it myself.
I would agree with tipping the pizza delivery guy the full 15-20% if they shared tips with the cooks. I don’t believe they do (though I think there were times my delivery guys did… it was a fun place to work - free beer after work, too!). Do any current delivery guys tip the cooks?
It hasn’t been “my job” for many years, so I really don’t give a damn. But delivery drivers do develop an eidetic memory for who tips well and who doesn’t, and you can be sure that nobody’s going to break any speed records to get Joe Cheapskate’s Saturday night pizza to him, knowing that the past ten times he ordered he stiffed the driver. Might even take the long way around, stop and get gas, drink a Slurpee, etc.
As for the “paying for gas” thing, when I started delivering we got paid 70 cents per delivery to cover gas and vehicle maintenance (using your own car exponentially increases the mileage and wear and tear you suffer, so you eat through tires, brakes, oil, etc., in no time flat). It didn’t even come close to covering all those expenses, and from what I’m reading here, this reimbursement payment has barely increased at all, though the price of gas has tripled since then.
Add to that the “delivery charge” most places now include, which only serves to detract from the driver’s potential tip, and it’s clear there’s no secret league of pizza runners out there amassing effortless wealth. If you think “as high as $9-$10 per hour” is an extravagant wage for someone in his 20’s (on average) to be earning these days, I shudder to imagine what you think they deserve to be making.