Should you tip the same for delivery as for sit-down?

In My Humble Opinion
21

When I worked at Wing Zone (man, that job sucked) as a delivery driver, I also had to take orders, do prep work (chop veggies, make tea, and make salads), and cook food in the kitchen (not to mention cleaning up afterwards). Pretty much I had to do everything except actually be a manager. On top of that, I had to drive out in my own car to make deliveries. Generally speaking, most folks seemed to tip around $2. Sometimes they’d tip more, sometimes they’d tip less. On rare occasion, people wouldn’t tip anything.

I’ve actually been chased by a one-legged drunk man who wanted pizza from me, in a rather bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. That was freaky as hell. :smiley:

But yeah, there was a $1 delivery charge, 70 cents of which went to us (the other 30 cents went to… uhm… I dunno, the phone company maybe?). We also got paid $5.75 an hour, which at the time was some small amount above minimum wage in Texas. No idea how much I spent on gas at the time, but I also had to provide and maintain my own vehicle. While I worked there, I had to get an oil change, replace a flat tire, and replace a missing oil cap that they forgot to replace after the oil change, all in a one month period.

By far the best people to deliver to are delivery drivers from other restaurants (For some reason, none of us ever ordered from Wing Zone when we were at home). Met a great bunch of Dominos delivery guys one night who told me the best way to get through their crazy labrynth-like apartment complex and tipped me well. We also got into a debate over which place treated us better. In College Station, TX, Dominos paid better, but Wing Zone got hot bags with handles.

So yeah, tip what seems fair, but certainly tip. $2 is a bare minimum IMO, but then that was my opinion before I worked as a delivery boy. I usually tip the pizza guy $4 (in advance normally, since I pay online) when I order, usually a medium pizza and some cheese bread and a drink. Comes out to about a 13 percent tip if my math isn’t all wrong.

22

Former pizza guy here.

Personally, I wouldn’t have expected the same % tip as you’d normally give a waiter in a restaurant (15-20%). If you were ordering $25 of pizza (probably 2 pies), I’d have been happy with a $3 tip. If it’s just one pie, then $2 is acceptable, as long as you’re not too far from the restaurant.

I made an OK living averaging around $2.80-$3/per tip. Of course, that was when gas was $2.50 a gallon or so.

That said, I was very grateful for those who tipped $5 or $7, because they helped make up for the cheap assholes who stiffed me, so that the average tip settled in the $3 or so range.

And Hostile Dialect? Well said, sir. Well said. <golf clap>

23

Does inflation and the rising cost of living enter into your tipping calculus at all?

$2 in 2005 ain’t the same as $2 in 2008, and $2 in 2010 is likely to buy even less.

24

I’ve done both. When I delivered pizza, I spent the majority of the night in the shop or in my car. When I waited tables, I spent the majority of my night in front of a customer trying to make them happy. I would submit that anyone who describes waiting tables as “walking 30 feet from the kitchen with food” is being deliberately obtuse & isn’t worth engaging in discussion.

I never expected to average 15% per delivery, and I don’t know a single driver who did. Heck, I don’t even know what kind of percentage I made. Most people tip 2 or 3 bucks on the delivery, and that’s about what we expected to average in a night.

25

I’m perfectly fine with the tipping system at restaurants: I know what’s a reasonable tip, any non-insane wait staff knows what’s a reasonable tip, and everyone can behave reasonably to make everyone happy.

I hate delivery tipping. There’s no standard.

A couple of years ago I worked a delivery job (for one of those services that signs up with a lot of restaurants, so folks can order delivery from any of two dozen different places through this service). It’s the only job I’ve ever quit without notice. My pay consisted of four bucks per delivery, plus tips. If I was delivering to some place way out in the boonies, sometimes that would be doubled to eight bucks.

It sucked. I kept a spreadsheet tracking my nightly earnings, my mileage, and the IRS-suggested cost-per-mile for operating a vehicle for business use. When I subtracted the cost from the earnings, there was one night when I cleared minimum wage, one night when I ended up paying for the privilege of delivering food, and a lot of nights where I was taking in $2-3 per hour.

Part of the problem with delivery tipping is that you don’t know what system the restaurant is using. Is it an independent contractor scam like that one? Do the deliverers get some or all of the delivery fee? Who pays for gas? If you don’t know the physical location you’re ordering from, is it taking them two minutes or 30 minutes to drive to your house? If you’re the only tip they’re getting all hour, should you be tipping more than if you’re one of four tips that hour?

I probably overtip on deliveries, but usually I just don’t get delivery.

Daniel

26

Sure. When a pizza was $8 (when I was a kid/teen), $1 was the standard tip. Now that pizza is $12-$15, the tip has gone up to $2. When the price of a pizza makes a significant jump again, then maybe I’ll tip more.

Though I ask you, why should I tip more just because the driver wants more?

27

Well, as we both seem to recognize, if you want to keep the real dollar amount of your tip constant, you will have to adjust the nominal dollar amount of your tip upwards over time to adjust for inflation.

If you want to tip at a below average rate, that’s fine by me. Just don’t expect to get your pizza as fast as the person who tips at an above average rate.

28

I have never had a pizza arrive after the quoted time. So keep telling me delivery guys have some ridiculous memory keeping track of all the bad tippers.

Of course, usually I pick it up because the extra five-ten minutes it takes for delivery is annoying.

29

Here’s the thing: I tip delivery people, probably more than most. I do this because: (1) it strikes me instinctively as the “right” thing to do, and it brightens the delivery person’s night a bit, and so both parties end up happier if I tip $8 than if I tip $3; and (2) I recognize that there are folks with relatively little ethics who will deliberately do their jobs more poorly if I don’t tip (you can see a few of them posting here and in the pit thread), and if those folks’ professional ethics are bought that cheaply than it’s better all around to appease them.

But your paragraph above disguises the issue, because anyone with a job can describe their job in a way that makes it sound like it deserves a tip. My mother is having an addition put on her house. Because she and my stepfather are too lazy to do it themselves (this isn’t as absurd as it sounds; he’s a contractor by trade and put the last addition on their house himself), someone–possibly a college student who, after textbooks and registration fees, can barely make rent–will drive to their house, shuttle back and forth to Home Depot, using tools that he might have to purchase and maintain himself, climb a rickety extension ladder at a significant risk of injury or death, and work all day in 90+ degree heat . My stepfather will tip those guys, because he knows, but most homeowners won’t, and that’s OK. Know why? Because they get paid.

Every job in the whole world sucks sometimes. Every job has characteristic inconveniences, frustrations, dangers, and adverse effects on health and well-being. Determining which jobs deserve a tip is not a function of determining which jobs suck the most.

That said, I do tip delivery drivers, and I don’t really think I can explain why. In particular, they are making a minimum wage, which is not true of the servers in a restaraunt. If they are making minimum wage, then they are getting paid as much for their services as any number of other service professionals who do not expect tips. So while I do it, I won’t judge negatively anyone who doesn’t, and I definitely don’t think drivers have the right to demand a tip in the way that restaurant waitstaff do.

30

Unless I’m paying by credit card, I usually tip deliveries or drivers based on “convenient rounding” to whatever change I happen to have in my pockets. If the tab’s $12 and I have $15 in my pocket, he’s getting $15 and keep the change. If I only have a $20 bill, then it’s $20. Of course, I check my cash position before ordering to make sure that I’m not going to be caught short! And if I see that I have a $20 bill, I may up the order another $5 or so to bring the tab up to $17 (or I may not). I just don’t like waiting for change.

31

Yeah, this. If the pizza guy says 30 minutes and it gets here in 30 minutes, great. If not, and it’s once, no problem. If three or four times in a row they say 30 minutes and it ends up being fifty minutes, then I’ll stop ordering from them and I’ll tell them why. If the delay turns out to be caused by delivery folks “punishing” me because I’m a bad tipper (this is hypothetical me, who tips badly), I’m guessing the pizza guy won’t continue to employ them as delivery folks anymore. I’m guessing the delivery folks know this, and empty threats like the one you’re referencing are just false bravado.

32

Perhaps at your particular joint, there’s a high turnover rate, so that the drivers don’t last long enough to observe a pattern of substandard tipping. Or maybe they’re a bunch of meatheads. Or perhaps some combination of the two.

I can certainly tell you that where I worked, most of the full-timers knew damn well after a few deliveries to an address if they were good or bad tippers. I don’t know why this is hard for you to understand. It’s their job - of course they observe patterns and try to maximize their revenue to the best of their ability.

Hell, I haven’t schlepped a pie since '05 (and now live 3000 miles away), and I can still remember some good and bad tippers and what their addresses were. 41 Ash Street - you suck!

33

I hope you’re not referring to me, because I see nothing unethical about rewarding better tips with better service.

If I am mistaken, my apologies.

34

Not at all. If I leave the store with 3 or 4 deliveries, the management understands that someone will have to come first, and someone will have to come last.

35

That depends. Are you deliberately providing poor service to the poor tippers? Or just not going out of your way to provide exceptional service? These two things are fundamentally different, I think.

36

I am deliberately providing better service to better tippers. The fact that the converse is also implied makes my behavior in no way unethical, as I see it.

37

Well, so far I’ve seen nothing to change my mind about tipping delivery drivers the way I do. I think if I order $25.00 worth of pizza, and tip $4.00-$5.00, that’s plenty. And if we order Chinese (which never costs as much because our kids wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole) and the order is $11.00 and I tip $3.00, that’s plenty, too. It’s never occurred to me to tip less based on the restaurant having a “delivery fee”. I always assumed that the delivery fee is a fee I pay for not being able to be bothered to go get the food, but that the delivery person does not get that money. As with everything else in life, I may be wrong. And I’ve never fancied myself the decider of what’s right and what’s wrong. Everyone has to make their own decisions, we’re all grown-ups here, etc.

Thanks for your input, though. These discussions are always fascinating to me.

38

The converse is not implied.

I don’t know much about the delivery biz, but I worked for a general contractor (my aforementioned stepfather) for ten years through high school and college and slightly beyond.

Some people tip a contractor’s employees, and others don’t. Whether or not a person tips, I considered that I owed them a specific level of service. I worked quickly and cleanly, did my job with as much precision as I could, worked steadily from 8:30-4:30 with a forty-five minute break for lunch (that was the deal), was polite to the homeowner(s) if they were home.

We had many repeat clients; some were tippers and some were not. More importantly than the tips, though, some homeowners treated us well - offering drinks, buying us lunches, putting an afternoon baseball game on the televison, or just generally being a decent person and not treating us like worker ants.

For those homeowners, I might work an hour or two past my usual quitting time, to make sure a particular job was done earlier than promised, because they were having friends over. I might offer help beyond the scope of my job - help with moving furniture that wasn’t in the room(s) we were working, carrying yard debris to the road for trash pickup, or whatever. There were dozens of ways to provide what I regarded as exceptional service.

If a homeowner that treated us poorly or just flat out ignored us had friends coming over, but the job wasn’t scheduled to be finished until tomorrow night and it’s 4:30 and I have a date or homework or whatever? Sorry, sir, I have another commitment, but I’ll be back tomorrow morning at 8:30. Need trash carried out: sorry, ma’am, but I have to finish spackling and head over to another job site. But even that homeowner got good, professional service.

If I had loafed, taken extra breaks, failed to clean up any mess we made, cut corners on the quality of the work by not priming, or in any way compromised the service I was providing in order to punish the homeowner for not tipping (or whatever): then, yes, I’d have considered that to be unethical.

Is that distinction clearer?

39

I totally get what you’re saying, and now that I’m doing semi-professional work, I follow a similar code. In fact, I was supposed to leave work over 20 minutes ago, but I’m staying late to finish up a laptop install for someone.

I think you don’t get what I’m saying about pizza delivery because of the imprecision of the word “service”. There are in fact two primary components of pizza delivery service: speed of delivery, and customer relations. When I say that better tippers get better service, I am primarily referring to speed of service, not how I personally relate to them in my job performance. And whereas there is an infinite supply of “please” and “thank you” and the like, there is only a finite amount of time available for me to get you your pie, and I can’t be in two places at once.

As I said earlier, when I leave with more than one delivery in my car, some people will get their food before others. This is unavoidable. As such, I allot priority to better tippers. This is what I mean by “better service”.

40

Yes, I don’t think the converse is implied either. You know, sometimes I don’t actually expect anyone to go above and beyond on my account, all I ask is that they are not rude to me and provide more or less the service that is advertised, which is get the pizza to me warm and within the window quoted when I ask on the phone, “How long is deliver right now?”. If Mr. BigTipper is on the route then by all means he should get a visit first. Really, I’m happy to know the restaurant has such loyal customers, if I were regularly giving out $10 delivery tips I’d expect VIP service too.