I understand the 15-20% thing but with the smaller shops (and most chain pizza places) I factor in the “do I really want to go out and get the damn thing” factor. Plus in our area we have delivery guys shot now and then and robbed fairly often. I figure going 50% or even better as a form of “combat pay”. Plus, at my regular place, even though I’m like a once-a-month customer, I have enough of a “reputation” that my pies get to me fast and steaming - worth the little extra tip.
Former driver checking in…
$3 is the standard/average/mean.
$5 makes our whole fucking day.
$10 is extremely generous. Don’t worry about tipping for bad weather. Almost no one does. $3-5 is sufficient.
I’ll never forget driving to someone’s house in a rainstorm (3 inches in an hour or something?) and their gutters were busted, so there was a waterfall pouring over their front door. No protection. I was soaked, standing there. Couldn’t even see my car 10 feet away. I got like, $1. Thanks so much!
Remember, the price of the bill is the cost of the food. The delivery is an outside contract between you and the driver to bring the food to you, and doesn’t factor into the price. (The $2 delivery charge is actually to offset the cost of cheese.)
Biggest tippers? Strippers. Getting to deliver to the titty bar down the street was hitting the jackpot.
I tip 20% plus whatever rounds up to the next dollar. If someone had to walk through deep snow, I’d probably go 30%, but not higher, unless it were also very cold.
I also never tip less than $2, so if someone actually delivered a $5 order (most places have a $10 minimum), I’d still tip $2, because no matter how big or small my order, gas still costs the same.
You were really generous, but there’s no waste in building good will. That driver will remember you. If he has four pies to deliver, and one is yours, he may go out of his way to deliver yours first, even if that’s not the most convenient thing to do, so you get yours hot.
For example, I tip my mail carrier at the end of the year every year. I tip her $20. Then, the whole rest of the year, she brings my packages to my door if they don’t fit in the box, instead of leaving a slip requiring me to drive to the post office. I don’t tip her for that purpose-- I tip her because I get more packages than most people, which makes her job hard, and because she never makes a mistake (I never get my neighbor’s mail, for example), and she delivers at the same time every day, so I can plan. But I also get the gold-star service as a result. She remembers me. I also get a nice thank-you note after I leave the tip.
I’m generally a generous tipper, and a “when in doubt, do it,” tipper, in regard to people like the mail carrier, mainly because I worked in a restaurant for several years showing movies (art films, get your head out of the gutter), so I observed waitresses getting treated shabbily, tipped poorly, and smiling their way through it.
$10 is a good tip because it makes up for his last two customers who didn’t tip anything. A lot of people don’t tip.
If a pizza delivery driver could get $3 per run, that would make up for the uncompensated expenses of the job.
If you tip the pizza guy $5, you’ve helped cover the cost of some other customer not tipping the pizza guy.
If you tip more than that, you’re being generous and you might have just made this person’s night.
On large orders which require multiple trips to the car, you should tip more.
A percentage like what a waiter would make is a nice idea, but that doesn’t usually add up to very much on a 13 dollar order, and it adds up to frankly too much for most folks to afford on a large order.
But my only argument is that the folks who tip a very small amount, or not at all, need to go get the food themselves, because they are draining this person of the opportunity to actually pay his bills, when he’s on the job. He can’t always just work more hours to make up the difference, and it’s really cruel to force someone to work for you for less than minimum wage when the understanding is you’ll pay them for their time at the door.
I’d rather tip an extra couple of bucks and be remembered as a good tipper, than tip a couple bucks less and be remembered as a so-so or cruddy tipper. That couple of bucks will matter more to him than to me.
Thursday night, we had a ‘wintry mix’ coming down - cold rain mixed with sleet and wet snow. My least favorite weather. We’d planned to take the Firebug out for pizza because he’d won a pizza coupon for something he’d done at school, but the weather being what it was, we decided to order in, instead. I gave the driver $30 on a $21.35 order. Seemed about right to me.
Yep. 20-25%. And I try to tip in cash, even when I’ve paid for the order on line by credit card. And we seem incapable of placing an order under $50. So I think our pizza deliver guy is pretty happy to come to our door.
I need to move to wherever you guys live.
I haven’t delivered in a while, because I finally put my foot down, made zero sense to give up management hours for driving hours and pay an extra several hundred a month in insurance and other costs.
What I hear from my drivers and see on their credit card slips is that more than half of my customers don’t tip at all, and the ones that do, tip 2 dollars or less.
Of course, we’re getting a sample in this thread of people who have (a) heard of tipping or learned it from their non-deadbeat parents and (b) give two shits about the subject. So it’s a skewed sample for sure.
But I also realize I’m in a particularly ghetto hood.
Former delivery driver here. This is worth emphasizing; they have memories like elephants.
I was a waitress during college. While I was still teaching, I mentioned to my coworkers that in many ways, waitressing was more difficult.
I worked as a pizza delivery driver for a long time. One thing that people tend to overlook is the fact that you don’t really ever have to tip the pizza guy. As long as you don’t mind driving to the pzza joint to pick up the pizza yourself. In those terms, the drive itself takes on a certain value.
What if the pizza place told you that your $20 dollar order would only cost you $10? If you picked it up instead. Is the drive worth $10 to you?
What if your $20 order would only cost $15? Is the drive worth $5?
I would advise thinking in these terms when dealing with the person who rings your bell with hot food to deliver.
$5.00 minimum for up to a $15.00 order, then around 25%.
Why stiff the guy on a $16 order?
Why should we tip them at all? The store pays them minimum wage, which I’ve been told many times is enough to raise a family on. And the driver can write off his mileage and expenses from his taxes. :mad:
d&r
Ha. Math. I should have said five dollars or around twenty-five percent, whichever is greater.
Probably not for adults, but when I was a teenager, I fucking LOVED my pizza delivery job. No boss around, got to listen to the radio, the occasional eye candy…
Is it true that delivery people buy their own gas? I heard that (something I’d never thought about) and decided that from now on my minimum tip would be $5. Otherwise, I’d only be covering the cost of their fuel so they really wouldn’t be getting anything extra. Circumstances and the bill total will up it accordingly.
They get a commission for every pizza delivered to cover gas.
Re: The commission?
Depends on the chain.
Pizza Hut, to name names, because this pisses me off to no end, switched several times over the past several years how they compensate the driver.
In 2004, they paid the drivers minimum wage, plus 50 cents per delivery, and the drivers earned tips.
Which is good, because back then, the 50 cents covered the gas, and the minimum wage paid for my 200 dollar a month car note and my 200 dollar a month insurance rate and my hundred or so dollars a month in tires, oil changes, brakes, etc.
That was a reasonable amount of money, and it was profitable for pizza hut and profitable for the driver, and not so profitable for the driver that they couldn’t find people to manage the store for a flat 9 dollars an hour. That was still a pay increase when you factor in expenses.
Then, they started charging for delivery. 75 cents. Then a dollar. Then a dollar 25. Buck fifty. Buck seventy five. Two dollars. Two fifty. Three bucks for delivery.
Meanwhile, the driver got 75 cents a run. Then 85. Then a dollar, then a dollar 25 at peak gasoline prices, several months after it hit that price, so the driver ate all that price difference for months.
And he saw his tips shrink, and shrink, because “The delivery fee goes to the driver”. So people think it’s the tip.
Next, they cut it back down to a dollar per run, while charging three dollars per delivery. So, I’d make the company 12 dollars an hour in delivery fee, and they’d pay me 4 dollars for gas. A net of 8 dollars. Which means they aren’t paying for my hourly rate.
Also, they cut the hourly rate to 4 dollars an hour after 2004. Real swell of them.
Next, they cut the driver reimbursement from a dollar per run, to “cents per mile”.
So, if I deliver three pizzas in a single run, I used to earn three dollars for my time. It would take me 25-35 minutes to take that run, because people take five minutes at the door, so even if it’s a close run, and I move fast, that’s the better part of an hour. Since I spent 20 bucks a day on gas, I needed that three bucks.
Then, they started paying by the mile. A close triple can earn you under a dollar. A long triple will earn you what a long single would.
So, they cut the wage in half, the reimbursement into one third, and jacked up the delivery fee, so the tips went down as well.
Pizza Hut stole the driver’s earnings, on every single stage of how he gets compensated. Literally stole it.
Gone.
**TL;DR version: I wouldn’t count on there being a substantial commission if I were you. **
*With *the commission, the driver is earning approximately minimum wage. He should be earning well over that to pay for his 500 dollars a month in unskippable expenses plus the depreciation of his car which is in the hundreds per month, or a car note, or extra car repairs for driving a clunker.
Stiffers used to be annoying, now they’re the reason why I have 10 drivers, and I need 20, and unemployment is high, and I still can’t keep drivers.
I told you all about Pizza Hut’s unforgivable crime, but don’t look at Dominos and Papa Johns like they are saints. They both screwed over their workers in their own way. Ask the Dominos or Papa’s guy about it.
As much as I rag on Pizza Hut for that? Schnatter is worse. Schnatter is a jackass of epic proportions. That’s Papa John himself.
That’s fucked up.
I remember I used to get 75 cents a pizza. And that was back in '85!