Like Voltaire said - I always get swift service (even on Friday and Saturday nights.)
What if the guy does not have a 2 pound coin? I have been given 5-$1 bills instead of a $5 in change occasionally, or 2-$5s, instead of a $10, because the person making change did not have a larger bill to give me. Not his fault.
Also, wow. I’m beginning to understand why cab drivers in London whom I tipped a 1 pound coin looked at me and asked if I knew it was a pound.
20% is totally normal for competent wait service. 20% rounded up to the nearest dollar if you got exceptional service (or had a small child who left a mess, or had a very complicated order with lots of special requests and substitutions). Lousy service that still resulted in you getting all of your meal gets 15%. The IRS assumes that waiters got at least a 15% tip on all wages, and taxes them thusly. The waiter has to call me an ethnic slur or something to get a >15% tip (and I have a conversation with the manager).
But pizza delivery guys are not waiters. Other than the fact that they both transport food in some manner, the two jobs are unrelated.
Did you not tip to begin with or did you always tip?
Around here delivery guy runs are imposed upon them, they don’t choose.
I really can’t get worked up too much about the other stuff, but whenever a cashier keeps part of my change, even if it is a single penny, it really does bother me. They are being presumptuous and taking what doesn’t belong to them.
Far worse is when a service person simply keeps all of the change, presuming that it is their tip.
I had a cab driver in SFO do that to me once, and I explained to him that the way it works is “I pay you and say keep the change, or I pay you, you return my change, and I tip you” He didn’t get a tip, and we almost got in a fistfight. He grabbed my laptop bag and started tugging on it, then he snatched the receipt he had handed me and filled in the fare (they usually leave them blank, but I would have written the exact fare, so it wasn’t a problem).
The pizza guy likely travelled an exponentially farther distance to bring you food, and doing his job is probably actually costing him money. I don’t know how it works outside the US, but here, delivery drivers almost universally use their own vehicles and generally are never compensated for fuel and maintenance. Your car dies, tough titties, you’re out of work.
No it doesn’t.
How would the IRS know which checks were handled by one server and what the total was of those checks?
There are fairly complicated rules in which the server must report the tips to the employer. If total tips are not at least 8% of the employer’s tippable sales, then the employer allocates the difference back to the tipped staff and it is reported on their W-2. The server doesn’t get any extra money, but has a higher income reported to the IRS and will probably pay more taxes.
So in a way you are right, but the amount is 8%, not 15%, and it is 8% of the server’s share of total restaurant sales. An honest server can get screwed if lots of other employees cheat on their tip reporting. For example, if a server reports all 15%, but five other servers report only 5% each, the resulting shortfall is likely to be distributed among all six servers.
In this case the driver probably spent longer waiting at the one set of traffic lights along the way than actually driving and could be back ready for the next job - and the next tip - within 5 minutes. I could have walked round. But the distance doesn’t really matter: the delivery drivers are paid to do their job and they get the tip for good service. Poor service means no tip.
(I guess I am in a nitpicky mood tonight; this is my second nitpicking comment this evening 
)
You give more than 15% when a waiter says nasty things about you parentage??
By being “kind” to certain workers in service industries, the US has gradually turned them into buskers.
It is IMHO a point to bear in mind for those outside the US who proudly pronounce that they tip even though their culture doesn’t generally require tipping; the gradual end result will be that employers will come to take it as standard and drop pay to take tips into account, till you have the situation DCnDC describes where employees are paying out money to get an opportunity to earn tips, like a busker fighting over the busiest corner on which to play.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what it’s become in North America. We’ll never change that culture now.
When I delivered pizza for Domino’s, we knew who the good and bad tippers were and tried to arrange to get the good ones. And we shared stories about both kinds. I had a delivery once that came to 8 dollars & change. A woman opened the door, I handed her the pizza and she handed me one bill and said keep the change. Almost reached my car and saw it was a $20. :eek: So I went back up and rang the bell, to be certain she meant that I should have a top of $11. Nope, she thought she had handed me a ten. She thanked me for checking, waited for me to give her all of her change, $11+, then closed the door. 
Yay for honesty.
But that’s not my problem.
I didn’t call the pizza delivery guy - I called the pizza place. That who I made an agreement with. If they want to subcontract their deliveries, that’s their issue, not mine. The delivery people, in turn, work for pizza place, not for me, and I’m not responsible for paying their salaries. How much their employers want to pay them is their own business.
Personally I tip because it’s the custom and because I’m a nice guy. But I don’t *owe *the delivery people anything. If I hire someone to provide a service, and that person hires someone else to help them, I don’t have to pay that other person too. That’s not how it works.
This. I delivered for a couple of years and we all fought over who got the good tippers and who got the bad/no tippers. For the good tippers you make damn sure the order is right. For the bad/no tippers not as much care was taken. And if we had multiple orders then the good tippers got their order first even if the bad/no tippers had called first.
Which just goes to show why a “no tipping” rule would be better for all parties concerned.
By your own admission, you were purposely screwing over certain customers based on your own arbitrary rules on what constitutes a “good” tip.
Well done.
So if you ordered £25.00 worth of pizza, you’d give the delivery guy a fiver just for turning up with it? You know he’s getting minimum wage, right? It’s not like in America where these guys live and die on their tips.
I live in the US (upper Midwest). I very rarely order delivery. A few months back, I was in the mood for pizza and feeling lazy, so I called Pizza Hut and ordered a medium supreme. The person on the phone was a bit apologetic when he said that it would take about 39 minutes. I told him I didn’t mind (39 minutes is still pretty quick.) 25 minutes later, the delivery guy shows up. The bill was $17 and change. I gave him a 20 and he started to reach into his pouch for change. When I said,“No, no - keep the change”, he looked at me a bit surprised, then he smiled, said “thank you” and left. I have no idea what people tip around here, but it seemed fair to me.
Maybe we also need a rule that strippers have to jiggle their boobs just as long for the guy sitting there with his arms crossed as they do for the guy peeling off bills.
Don’t delivery drivers in the US also get paid at least minimum wage? I certainly did, but then again, I also had to pay for gas, upkeep of the car, any tickets I may have acquired in the course of my duties (OK, only happened once), etc.
Exactly, minimum wage should cover all that. And since the driver works in a pizza shop, he doesn’t even need any money left over to buy food!