What to tip the pizza guy

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

The pizza delivery guy is one profession that has been hit by inflation and wage decreases rather than increases.

Wages around the country have stagnated, but few have gone in reverse.

And few would be so crippled by a reverse as someone already earning a minimum wage. Don’t get me wrong, a pay cut sucks for everyone, but when you’re picking up coins you find on the ground and adding that mentally to what you made that hour, that’s pretty fucked up.

Because yeah, I find a quarter? That’s more than what the last house I delivered to tipped me. You bet your ass I looked for change on the ground, and I still made better time than anyone else on the staff.

Secret is to really do a good job sweeping at the end of the night. 35 cents easily.

42

I did not report that income to the IRS.

43

More pizza musings.

Long, rambly, boring, only tangentially related to this topic.

[spoiler]You’d think with things as bad as they are, the pizza guy would be looking to get ahead by any means necessary.

I know this is anecdotal, but this is how the delivery guys look out for each other, and the customer, in every pizza shop I’ve worked at.

A customer calls and says I think I gave the driver a 10, I meant to give them a 5, I simply ask the driver as soon as they pull up to check his wallet and see if he got a 10 or a 5 from the customer. Almost every single time this has happened, the driver says yeah, they sure did. Most times without even looking. And we’re happy to send the change back.

People leave wallets, credit cards in our store constantly. Goes directly into the safe. We try to figure out who you are, we try to find your phone number and let you know.

Guy leaves his cell phone, a very expensive one, at the store, on the counter. It’s there for a long while, person obviously isn’t coming back. Trying to be as un-intrusive as possible, I scan the list to see if it says “Home” on the list of contacts. If it says so, I call and let the person know where their phone is.

Found a guy’s cell phone on his front lawn one time. I deliberately waited until after the guy had paid and tipped me before telling him about it, because I didn’t want that good deed to affect how much he tipped me.

Customers sometimes give five dollars, and then write in five dollars on the credit card receipt, not understanding that they just charged their card 5 dollars, and just gave me five cash dollars, so they unwittingly gave me ten dollars. I have always pointed that out, even to rude customers, even on the shittiest nights I’ve ever had.

We handle a lot of cash. Sometimes I find a twenty just lying on the ground in the back of the house. This means a driver dropped some of his bank. I hold it and ask every driver at the end of the night if they think they’re short any money, and if so, by how much. 100% of the time, only one driver has ever thought they were short, and they always end up with the money. Because no one lies about that kind of petty crap.

Sure, there are some assholes in this world, and some of them have to be pizza guys. I can just say that it hasn’t been my experience.

We look out for each other, and each other’s money, and our customers, even if they don’t always look out for us. Because you bust your ass for 35 dollars in tips one night, and you’re missing twenty dollars?

That hurts.

We know it hurts.

We know it hurts to be missing your cell phone, or worry your card has been stolen. We know it sucks to think I gave the pizza guy 10 bucks when I meant to give him five, I guess I’m out five bucks.

No you’re not. To date, a delivery person has never refused my request to check and see if the customer has given them more money than they intended. And they could easily just say “No, I know he gave me a five.” or “Let me go check my car and see…” switch switch switch, look, it’s a five.

It would be *so *easy to lie. There would be no way to prove otherwise. It’s your word against the pizza guy’s word.

Except it never is. They always look, and they pull out their money *right in front of me, *and it’s almost always been extra money. And they take time out of their money-making job to bring you your money back.

They don’t need to. I can’t force them to. But they do.

But the folks in this thread, I don’t need to tell any of this to. You care enough to spend two seconds thinking about the tip as being a thing you might want to consider doing.

You guys are why I put up with it for so long. There simply aren’t enough of you.

It shouldn’t be on you to cover for the employer not paying us enough, or other customers not tipping.

You’re not the ones causing the problem. And you’re the only ones listening to it.

It’s completely ass backwards. It’s not on you to fix the problem, you can’t.

Even you awesome folks that tip 10 bucks when it’s a completely absurd amount of money to tip a guy. For every one of you, there’s ten stiffers, it doesn’t quite balance out to a livable wage for certain folks.

That’s why the wage should be the standard minimum, not the “tipped minimum”.

Better than a generous tip: Tell your friends the delivery charge goes to the company, not the driver, because it does. Let them know it’s not the tip. I never would have bothered to do all the extra work to become a manager if I got 12 dollars an hour in delivery fees, and that’s before wages and tips, too. What I make now is less than 12 dollars. It does not go to the driver. And it’s really criminal that you should pay a delivery fee if it doesn’t benefit the person doing your delivery for you.[/spoiler]

44

The driver can deduct his business expenses provided he files a Schedule A. Most drivers wouldn’t file a Schedule A since young adults usually don’t own a home or have huge medical bills.

45

Look! Up in the sky! Oh, it passed. Sure was fast! :wink:

46

That’s what I was thinking. How much is it worth NOT to have to get out of your nice warm house to run to the pizza joint? Definitely more than two bucks!

47

Thats how I do it as well - never less then 5 - sometimes double that - even more around the holidays where I know the delivery driver is not really where they want to be (and I am).

48

When driving conditions are bad, I always tip more, otherwise, I tip about $2 or $3 for a “standard order,” and more for a "party sized’ and so forth.

49

$5 or 20% rounded up, whichever is higher. We order from the same place relatively frequently and have for the last six years; tipping well is absolutely worth it in terms of the increased quality and speed of the service and food we’ve seen over the years.

50

Back when I worked for Domino’s, I learned that the delivery charge did NOT go to the driver. They got paid a few pennies for their gas and sometimes that was adjusted up or down when the gas prices changed. Most customers thought that was a guaranteed tip for the driver and gave nothing to the person they saw at the door.

Me, if I’m too lazy or busy to go to the pizza place and pick my order up, I tip the driver like I would in a restaurant.

51

Yeeeep, all this is doing is convincing me I am going to need to relocate to a better spot.

I already know it’s a bad spot, I worked at 2 others, both were better, so I’m already on the low end of just my small sample size.

What you guys are talking about seemed unfathomable to me, though. I am trapped in my local bubble, I’m unaware of pizza guys actually earning regular tips of those kinds of amounts, and that’s including the other two spots I worked at.

Time to start shopping around. Trouble is, moving isn’t cheap or quick, and I can’t just hop and hop and hop from one shop to another. It’s not feasible and my employer will wonder why I’m employed there if I won’t stay in one spot very long, probably won’t keep approving transfers.

If it were as simple as “go where the tips are” I’d have done it before text-n-drive totaled my last car at the stop light. The car I drive now won’t last long doing runs, thanks insurance companies.

52

I’m willing to bet that the places where the tipping is better are also the places where the cost of living is much higher, making a move a net loss.

53

Thankfully, I haven’t delivered pizza in more than a few years. I did the job for a little over two years, and I wasn’t even close to a teenager at the time. I worked for an independent shop for 3 an hour and did get to keep most of the delivery fee. The house would keep .50 on a $2 delivery fee, for example.

I was pretty well respected for my skills. Anybody can drive a goddamned pizza to a house, but taking 3-6 orders to 3-6 addresses spread about a city in an efficient manner is a skill. I worked evenings to late-late night (3-5AM) five days a week on 10-12 hour shifts. I used to clear $10-15 an hour, but I killed a pretty decent vehicle in the process.

It’s not a bad job in a lot of ways. The absolute worst thing about being a delivery driver is risk of being assaulted and robbed. You are 100% of the time carrying cash, sometimes up to a few hundred bucks. Smart drivers leave the bulk of their cash hidden in their car, but sometimes you get busy and are more concerned about staying on the move than safety.

I was personally robbed at gunpoint once and came within inches of an assault/robbery on another occasion. I know plenty of guys who have been assaulted and robbed of their cash. I know one guy who was robbed of his car and just before I stopped doing the job, there was a guy I didn’t know who worked for a pizzeria across the street who was hospitalized and almost died after an assault.

Food delivery guys in urban environments are always subject to being Dial-A-Victim. It even happens in “safe” neighborhoods because it’s so easy to set up by the perpetrator.

I used to be a $2-3 tipper, now I’m in the $5+ range. It’s a dangerous fucking job and one I hope I never have to do again.

54

I’m probably answering too late but, If they collect mileage per trip, they can’t write that off, the owner can. They only get minimum wage if they collect enough tips “overall” to raise them to minimum wage. Different states vary on what you can pay for split wages.

After all that my drivers earn between 12-16 per hour overall. It depends on what shift they are on and how many deliveries per hour they can manage.

I have 37 “pizza guys” working for me.

55

I always do 20% and more if the weather is bad and the service is decent

56

But if they are not paid for their mileage they can write it off as work expenses. If they itemize. Which they probably don’t because they are paid too little to end up paying income tax, anyway.

57

I saved all my gas receipts for a year, it’s pointless, you never make enough money for those receipts to matter. It might matter if I earned a lot more money and paid some substantial amount of income taxes.

58

I rarely ever order pizza to be delivered.

From now on, when I do, I will ask if there is a delivery fee, and if the driver gets to keep any of that fee. If not, I will shop around to another place. Since askthepizzaguy told me that it’s evil to pay a delivery fee that doesn’t go to a driver, I don’t want to be evil.

59

Well, I wouldn’t say that.

But, if it is something you’d consider, supporting shops that don’t rip you off, or the driver, would make for a fairer marketplace. But to be realistic, there’s little that consumers can do to address the problem unless their dollars went dramatically in a different direction. There’s no such will from consumers, because it’s such a minor issue in the scheme of things.

The only thing that would affect change is either collective bargaining or legislation, and neither of those are realistic either.

60

I like how most chinese restaurants don’t charge a delivery fee if the order is over a certain amount. I might support a pizza place that did that too.