Tip Your Pizza Delivery Person!
I got called in to work last night, and had just a horrible night. Seriously, my worst since leaving Domino’s back in the fall. So:
**** RANT ALERT **** RANT ALERT ****** RANT ALERT *****
I couldn’t believe how many folks either tipped a pittance or didn’t tip at all last night. One of the reasons I switched stores and employers was because my current store, an independent, has a much better clientele. No more “ghetto runs” as we called them at Domino’s, where you had to wonder about your safety as your walked up to the customer’s house at night.
And there is also the tipping. Usually, I make mad money on tips at my current store. Not last night. I had two out of 11 runs not tip at all. On Monday night I had every run tip, but two of them only tipped less than a dollar.
Folks, gas is now officially over $3 per gallon in this town!! No, the store does NOT buy our gas. No, the store does NOT provide our vehicles, or any maintenance on them. I didn’t even make enough last night on ELEVEN freakin orders to fill up my gas tank, and remember the Pizza Taxi is a little Ford Escort that only takes about 11.5 gallons to fill from bone-dry to completely full. (Good thing it only uses a quarter of a tank on normal nights!)
Y’all probably do not want to know what we drivers say about non-tipping customers. We definitely have our opinions, and they are not nice. Read on at your own risk.
To me, if a person does not tip at all, that says two things about them: one, they are a cheap(*skate) and that is censored. Two, they just have no class. None. Think about it: They don’t want to expend their own gas and time and effort to go get their pizza, but they refuse to compensate me for doing it for them. And for some strange reason, the notorious non-tippers at our store ALL live five or more miles out from the store! No. Class. Cheap(*donkeys).
And every single one of us drivers KNOW those addresses that don’t tip at all. If we get multiple orders in a run … guess which one gets delivered last? And gets put on the bottom? Petty? Yeah, it’s probably petty. The boss man won’t cut them off on delivery (well, I take that back, he did cut one off, and I asked him to cut another off last night) so we still have to take them their $30-80 orders for absolutely no reward. Yes, the non-tippers usually order a lot of food. At Domino’s, even with many more notorious non-tippers, we still all knew the addresses.
“But don’t you get the delivery charge?” Um, nope. When I got my very first job in 1989 working inside a pizza place, we paid drivers $1.25 per run and had free delivery. Guess what I make today? $1.25 per run. At Domino’s they adjusted it to what gas prices did, so we could make as little as $1 per run last summer. So NINETEEN years later I am making the same money per run as a “gas offset” even though gas prices are almost three times higher.
And to top off my bad night last night, the last order wasn’t even home when I brought the pizza! This is the absolute pinnacle of rudeness. The lady was home, but she had no money, so she called up her man on the cell phone, and he asked me to sit in his driveway and wait for him to come home. Then he stopped by the store and paid for the pizzas, so the boss man called me to tell me to give the lady the food. Of course … you guessed it … no tip. So I asked the boss man to cut that address off for delivery. That guy can pick up his own pizza since he obviously doesn’t value the effort of this delivery driver. Our time is money when we’re working. Rude. No class. Cheap (*donkey).
Folks, when a pizza driver is sitting idle, that pizza driver is making only minimum wage (in Tennessee it is the FEDERAL minimum wage of $5.85 per hour). In my store, everyone except the owner is a student. A few are still high school students working their first job, but the rest of us are in college. Even us two “old gals” as the kids call us. When I worked at Domino’s the story was pretty much the same: mostly college students, trying to get money for books and tuition to avoid student loans.
If you’ve read this far down, you’ve either delivered pizzas yourself or have a strong heart. I found a website the other night run by pizza drivers called Tip The Pizza Guy (ok, they are gender-biased) that will give you even more insight into how we think and what we do.
It also quoted a rather disturbing statistic: pizza delivery drivers are the #3 workers who DIE on the job. About 6-8 weeks ago, a driver was shot and killed right here in town (but a totally different neighborhood from where I deliver!). Most of us drivers are college students, and those that aren’t have pizza delivery as a second job (especially those of us who listen to Dave Ramsey).
So seriously: TIP YOUR PIZZA DELIVERY PERSON!!!