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To not tip a delivery person is odd. For goodness sakes, they are bringing the food TO YOUR HOUSE! If anything warrants an increased tip, this is it.
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Clearly different national cultures at play here, as it would never occur to me to tip a delivery person.
May I ask if the apparent American norm of tipping a delivery person applies just to food deliveries or would folk generally tip any delivery - the Amazon person, for example, or someone delivering a new fridge?
pretty much 100% accepted for food. For other types depends on what type I think. It has become more of an expected thing over the last oh 5-10 years. Prob powered by downturns in the economy.
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When you get Amazon, new fridge etc, you are already paying for the delivery somehow. For food thats how you pay. They mainly rely on tips.
How does it work in England. Not even a delivery charge?
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Thanks, Wallace.
And interesting about the downturn in the economy. Based on my BiL’s experiences taxi driving, the downturn in the economy has led to less tipping in the UK. I suspect a similar impact has resulted in many restaurants scrapping old fashioned cash tipping in favout of a service charge added to the bill. My guess is most people will generally pay the charge rather than ask for it to be deleted.
Depends. Most places, even if they are tied into an ordering website, like Deliveroo or Just Eat, will add a delivery charge. Others don’t - obviously building in delivery costs into their charges. Of the six places nearest to me, two do not charge separately for delivery, two charge £1.50 and two charge £0.99.
Delivery charge in my experience goes to the restaurant or the app, not the person.
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Yup. Most of the delivery charge goes to the delivery company – not the restaurant (in fact they pay to use the delivery service).
The driver gets a part of the delivery charge - GH, DD, UE all pay out between $5-7 at the most: for driving to the restaurant, waiting for the food, and delivering it to the customer… whom you often have to wait for as well if it’s a drunk student who already forgot they ordered food. I don’t know what kind of poor, desperate soul would deliver for that garbage pay. I’ve never once accepted an order w/out a tip. F that.
Tipping fatigue in action: We’re retired with no car. Have to rely on car service/taxi/pub trans to get around & home delivery for groceries some times & for some meals (pizza mostly). Our favored supermarket (Hannafords) has a $10 delivery fee + a “suggested” tip of $7. I don’t use them anymore. I use Walmart which has a $6 delivery fee. Walmart has an annoying tip process-- a range of suggested tips “$0, $4, $7, $15” & you specify amt. It defaults to the $7 & will automatically charge your card the next day if you do nothing. You can edit the amt (& I’m frequently lowering it to $4) when you check out but they don’t make it easy.
Me too. There is no question that the tipping practice causes confusion.
Correct. The idea that tipping encourages and promotes good behavior is unfounded. We tip wait staff, but not back kitchen. What? So we care about how fast our wait staff take our orders, but we don’t care how our foods being cooked? One also has to wonder if US restaurant service is that much better than other countries restaurant service. In Japan, if you give the wait staff a tip, they will likely take it as an insult. Is American restaurant service much better than Japanese restaurant service? Certainly, not my experience.
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I did a little math. I will use the %'s from the article.
Let’s say that pre-covid lockdown in early 2020, you went out and paid $100 for a meal and gave a 20% tip. So $20.
Post covid, prices have gone up and I will add from what I have experienced a conservative 15% increase in the cost of the meal. So the meal now costs $115. Applying the new 25% level, the tip is now $28.75. If I use a larger increase in costs then the scaler effect of increasing percentages will make the numbers even bigger.
So over the last 2-3 years the server’s income has increased 43.75%. A staggering increase. I know for sure my income hasn’t gone up that much. I doubt the writer of the article had a 40%+ increase in pay. As that person works for Vox, in all likelihood s/he is just thankful to be employed and not eating out a lot.
Obviously if I maintained the 20% tip level across a price increase of 15% the server’s income has also gone up 15%. Why should the server’s income go up in percentage terms nearly 3x? I know in the early stages of reopening restaurants were short staffed and they needed to increase wages. From what I know, that has happened and most places I go to now seem to operating at a scale similar to 2019.
I have no problem with servers being paid more as that will naturally happen with increases in prices but the scale is puzzling. Maybe that’s because journalists are just bad with math.
As to comments, I loved the one from the person who was so indignant s/he was going to cancel a subscription to the New Yorker magazine. Hello! New York is not the New Yorker. If you don’t know the difference you really shouldn’t be subscribing to either.
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Entirely subjective matter, Chem. It’s about customer expectations and how well they are met. I suspect most of us will claim that our own national style of service, whatever that may be, works best for us.
Let me make a comparision. My experience in many mid range American restaurants is that the server will do a check-back on every course and will constantly be topping up the water. In a similar quality British place, the jug of water will be left on your table and there will be no check-back at all. Without doubt, I prefer the British way - the water is ready to hand whenever I want it and I have no need of someone coming to ask if everything is OK - I have a tongue on my head and they’d be hearing soon enough if it wasnt. But an American visitor to my small, damp island may look at the same experience and conclude they’d had poor service.
Of course the key to good service has nothing to do with tipping cultures, IMO. It’s all to do with recruiting the right people, training them properly for the business and treating them right as people. In those respects, restaurant employees and employers are no different from other employments.
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Well, hopefully, not many Americans really feel that way. I agree with you. We don’t tip most professions, and yet we still have faith and expectation of their ability to do their jobs. I don’t tip the chefs cooking my food to make sure my sunny side up is perfect.
Question. A reverse question, in England, what do you tip? Or there is no everyday job and service, you need to tip?
It depends on the way it is set up.
Sometimes there is a delivery charge that goes to the restaurant – presumably they are using it to offset what they are paying the company, so in effect the consumer is paying the cost to the restaurant for being on the app.
In other cases it goes to the delivery company.
They vary the words, presumably to confuse the consumer.
I remember trying to order from a casual place a few years ago, and just happened to check the itemized bill before hitting “purchase” – the food was maybe $12, then there were another $10 of assorted “charges” – before the tip. And of course tip was calculated after all those charges. Last time I opened Postmates.
Aah, math and logic, the enemy of many a rant.
Of course when faced with an electronic device where the lowest tip button is 20% (then 25 and 30%), I doubt even the math-savvy are hitting “custom amount”.
You simplified taxes into your $100 tab for obvious reasons, but that exacerbates the “effective” tip % issue.
In NYC, tax is almost 10%. So a 20% tip on a $100 bill after tax works out to 22% on the before-tax amount. On the 15% inflated cost, 25% is actually 27.5% tip.
Now add the alcohol, which is already much more inflated than the food. Used to be that places would break out the bar tab at the bottom, to aid tip math. No more. So if you had 1-2 drinks per head @$15-20 each, suddenly everything is in a very different place.
But math is the enemy of sentiment, so when one is eating out, especially with a group, these things don’t / can’t / won’t be discussed.
There’s nothing where there’s a cultural obligation to tip.
It used to be more common - restaurant service, hairdressers, taxi drivers, etc. Some things linger on - my wife always tips her hairdresser whilst I have never tipped my barber. Restaurant tipping has become more nuanced with the service charge effectively replacing cash tipping in many places. It’s use has been extended as diners gradually stopping wanting to tip. Now means they have to be proactive and engage with staff if they don’t want to tip, whereas not leaving a cash tip is easy. Restaurants with service charges will always note on the menu that payment is entirely discretionary but you rarely see anyone asking for it to be taking off the bill.
I don’t like tipping both on the practical and ethical level. It just feels such an antiquated practice, very much a master/servant sort of thing which just doesnt represent modern British society. I believe it disrespects the server, both by the diner and the employer - effectively saying “I know your employer doesnt treat you well and pay you properly, so here’s some more money to make up your wages”. I have less of a problem with the service charge but am much happier with the situation in, say, France or Spain, where service is included in the menu price and nothin else is required or expected (apart from maybe a bit of rounding upg or leaving a few coins).
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I see. So that the service fee has formally replaced the “tip”. I think I like it better than what I see here in US. At least it is standardized, so you and I are expected to give the same service fee, and an attractive young waitressis not getting a higher tip than an old grandmom simply because of their look difference (Let’s be honest. Studies have shown that physical appearance has more to do with tip amount than the actual service)
My Deliveroo app offers the opportunity to tip both the restaurant (rounding up) and the driver. This is separate to the charge. However, Just Eat is just the charge.
