Maaan you almost got me. I allllmost got into a debate about tipping etiquette online.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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When I delivered pizza in 2012, if you gave a 5 I'd always be happy. The thing with delivery is that the service is the delivery, not making the food. So it doesn't really make sense to be percentage based. Whether you ordered 2 large pizzas and a coke or just some cheese bread, my labor was the same. Of course, if you order 30 pizzas then yeah, tip more. Or if you lived far from the store. If you were literally two blocks over, a dollar is fine.
Think about how much time you're taking up. If you're 15 minutes away, it's also 15 minutes back. Assuming it's not Friday night, you may be the only delivery on that route. Which means, I could only make 2 deliveries an hour. Papa John's only paid me 2.50/hr while driving and 7.25 while in the store. So with those assumptions, I'd only make 12.50 that hour. And that's not accounting for gas, which I paid for myself.
It really varies a lot. But if you tip 5 bucks, I'd be at least making more than minimum wage. Less than 5 and it's not even worth leaving the store and wasting my gas.
"The US" is a broad spectrum. I would tip a lot more in Los Angeles, California where a shit hole house costs $1.2 million and gas is $6/gallon than I would in Anderson Missouri where a really nice house is $95,000 and gas is $2/gallon.
Most delivery drivers pay for their own gas and make minimum "tip" wage, which is lower than the regular minimum wage. They also have to pay for maintenance and repairs for their vehicle, which is more than it would be if they were just driving to work and back. When I delivered, I averaged about 60,000 miles a year. That's a lot of gas and maintenance.
When you tip a server in restaurant, you're tipping them to walk the food out about 30 feet to your table. When you tip a delivery driver, you're tipping them to drive your food X number of miles to you in their own vehicle, at their own expense.
I think you should tip more for a delivery than for service at a restaurant, but the beautiful part of tipping is that it's up to you.
I usually tip $10 for a small delivery. If I'm ordering for multiple people, I try to get everyone to chip in $4-$5 each for the tip.
As someone whos has been a driver and manager at multiple places over multiple years, I have NEVER seen anyone make less than minimum wage BEFORE tips.
We had split pay too, if i worked a manager shift it was $8 an hour and delivery was $5.25 IIRC
I would never order from anywhere that does that
Store I delivered at, all the drivers made below minimum before tips. Minimum in store, 1/2 that on the road. Plus a pittance in mileage that never actually covered it
I've been managing pizza delivery for almost 35 years. It's common practice, at least in my area.
That is sad, and you guys should be ashamed of taking advantage of people.
Since you're parsing it out, keep in mind that a Pizza Hut delivery driver in Missouri makes $16.64/hr while one in Los Angeles makes $18.64/hr. But I live in West Los Angeles and tip about 18% because it's a bitch to get through traffic to my street, especially at dinnertime, and there's no parking. I tip the same percent for weekly groceries from Yummy.com even though the total is much higher so the tip is about $50 because they're picking out the items, bagging, driving several miles and lugging several bags to my door. If I had to do it all myself I'd damn well tip myself that much!
I find it hard to believe they make that much. We pay our driver's $6/hour. We wouldn't be able to get drivers if everyone else was paying almost 3X as much.
You guys are all just taking advantage of people then
Wtf are you talking about? We have a profit margin of about 2%. It's not like we have unlimited money to throw around. It's sad how little people actually know about running a business, but act like they have all the answers.
We paid our guys non tip wages and got along fine.
If you can't be in business without taking advantage of people then you don't deserve to be in business.
I just give everyone a flat 15 bucks. No percentages necessary.
Basically the same.
In general, I tip a flat $5 for food deliveries (pizza, Uber Eats, etc.) and $10 for grocery deliveries since they have to carry more stuff to my door. I may do more than that for special circumstances, but I find tipping the same amount every time makes it easier for me to ensure it's fair across the board and I haven't shorted anyone. That said, I'm only ever ordering for myself - I'd probably adjust amounts if the orders were for multiple people and routinely had a lot of items.
Huh, tipping...
It was a decade ago, but back when I was a pizza dude, I was generally happy with either $5 or a 15-20% tip, whichever was higher. It wasn't a hard rule, I'd be happy with lower tips in plenty of circumstances, but if I got that I definitely walked away feeling like I'd gotten a decent tip, and I generally try to keep to that today.
That was in the days before GrubHub and such with all of their delivery fees, the economy was somewhat less crazy, etc. I really have no idea what the economics of it looks like today.
But back then, at the place I worked, I made pretty much the same below-normal-minimum wage that waiters and such make with the expectation that the bulk of my income would be tips. The place I worked was a rarity that had their own delivery vehicle, they charged a $2 delivery fee, if I used my own car I got, IIRC 50¢/delivery and they paid for me to fill up my tank, if I used their car I got nothing extra. Normally I'd walk away with at least $20 in my pocket on a slow night, and could count on about $100-200ish on a Friday or Saturday night. Overall I probably averaged out to about $12/hour
In Korea the Delivery fee is on top of what you order and it is set by the company so you know how much you need to pay before you order. I think this way it's much better for everyone, there is no ambiguity.
The fee is around 2000 KRW ($ 1.52) and 4000 KRW ($3.03) and if you order a lot they offer no delivery fee. This is in the city where there a lot of restaurants offering it so it's not very far they need to drive and they use a Scooter most of the time.
Unfortunately delivery fees are still very much so a thing in the US, just doesn't go to the driver. Company pockets it.
Percentage of the bill is irrelevant. The key issues are mileage and time. 50% of your $10 McDonalds order delivered 5 miles away is garbage. 5% of your $100 pizza order a half-mile down the road is good.
More important than the tip is to turn on your damn lights, and make sure your address is 
Thanks everyone. I didn’t mean to start a debate, I just wanted to know the average tip. With the rising costs of food, delivery has gotten very expensive for the same amount of food and same delivery trip, yet the tips keep going up on my end. I want to be fair, but don’t want to go broke either.
I managed pizza places for way too long. Pre-pandemic my gold standard was:
$5 or 10%--whichever is more. Always cash.
But, I don't work in that industry anymore and I don't order delivery anymore.
Either way, it's not table service (where I tip 20%), so a straight percentage doesn't make sense, but also that percentage can be lower IMO. Also, the delivery aps and some chains really fuck with drivers tips, so I always tip cash.
Given that gasoline is high and many pizza places pay pathetic sums of money, I always give 30% unless the driver was just plain rude and then I reduce it to 20%.
Why do you tip at all when they're rude?
Well as they say, every dog has their day. It could be that the driver is just having a shitty day and we all have them. I try to be empathetic. As long as the guy isn't spouting out hatred and biogtry, they'll just get a reduced tip. I've been known to give even bigger tips to delivery drivers that are just plain awesome.
As someone who used to be a delivery driver in the uk the idea of getting a tip for doing a shitty job is bat shit insane, I almost never got tips beyond people telling me to keep the change and even when I did get a tip it was usually £2 for driving about 20 miles to do a delivery.
The absolute highest tip I ever got was £10 for delivering 2 full bags of food to a super rich neighbourhood in about 15 mins because it was the first house on my route. (And that £10 was still less than 10% of the cost of the order.)
As someone who grew up in the US, from my perspective it's less a question of "how good of a job did they do" and more a question of "did they do so poorly that I'm okay with them not making enough money to pay their bills or buy food this week." Not that my single tip is going to make that difference, of course, but at least in my circles the thought is that delivery drivers and waitstaff are paid poorly enough that tips are needed even for average service. It's not a great system and I'm all for changing it to making tipping truly optional, but in the meantime I'd rather tip even subpar service than contribute toward someone's financial worries.
This is exactly what I am getting at!
Because the penalty for being rude shouldn’t be starvation, probably.
I mean, doing your job poorly usually gets you fired, which kinda does lead to starvation if you don't find a different job. Why should delivery people be the exception?