Every college student knows the literal struggle bus of getting money.
Many of us get jobs working in food service as waitresses, waiters, cashiers or delivery drivers. For those who work as waiters, waitresses and delivery drivers it can be hard to make ends meet coming paycheck to paycheck. To make those ends meet on occasion we use our money from tips.
Tips are the literal LIFELINE to making ends meet, at the end of a busy night, coming away with that extra $30 can mean a full tank of gas or loads of laundry that otherwise would not be done. Personally working as a delivery driver for a pizza place in a college town, the reality of coming home with $30 just in tips a night is slim to none.
Many argue that we don't need tips because the delivery fee is the money that the drivers are getting in their pockets.
Which cannot be any further from the truth. The delivery fee actually goes down into the combination for all of the delivery drivers getting their mileage counted. Yes, we get "reimbursed" for our miles, I say that loosely because gas prices are always changing and it can depend on the week in which gas prices might be high or low, or they may just stay the same.
Most of the time, however, getting stiffed is the reality and it comes to be the norm. It sucks, flat out.
Driving to and from the college campus up to 100 times in a night, and knowing that less than 20 of those orders will actually give me a tip other than the rounding of the dollar, makes me kind of sad inside. For example. the normal tip when you go out to dinner at an actual restaurant can be between 15-25%. Which is usually between $4-$15 depending on how big your order was. For delivery drivers the normal tip amount per order, if paid online is between 1-4.5%, literally meaning if an order is $18.97, the tip will be $1.03 for an even $20.
Don't get me wrong I love what I do, and for those of us who are in food service, it makes us think twice about coming into work every day.
Sometime when the weather is bad, or those crazy Friday nights tips get even worse. Pizza, in particular, is the perfect pre-game party food and people like to save their cash for the cover charges at the bar which I totally understand. But since you paid with a credit card, it is completely okay to put a $5 on there, since I had to drive literally halfway up a mountain for the order.
Across the board I think that it is fair to say, people who work in food service will go above and beyond to work for those extra dollars.
It may not seem like that to some, but when the dinner rush hits and orders keep coming in faster than the people making food can go, or drivers can get back to take the next order out the door. It makes a difference to see that extra two or three dollars on that receipt, or that phrase that makes everyone smile: "Keep the change".
I wrap this up with this, If you order $69.75 worth of food from a pizza place, and ask for delivery and happen to be the last house in that restaurant's delivery area, and expect the driver to be there in 30-40 minutes on a Friday night rush, and WON'T tip because the order took an hour to get there and we told you that because the order was so large it was going to take a while.
Please, don't take your anger out on the poor person who is delivering your order, because they had nothing to do with how fast they can get out there or how fast your food gets made.
