Delivery Fee vs Driver Gratuity
If you are the kind of person that orders delivery, even rarely, it is likely that in the past five to ten years you have noticed the addition of a delivery fee to your order. Generally this fee ranges from three to five dollars. A lot of people assume that it is a tip for the driver and therefore do not give a tip of their own.
Sadly, this assumption is incorrect and regularly costs drivers (who generally make minimum wage) quite a bit of income that they could use.
The delivery fee is used to cover a lot of different things and only a small portion actually goes to the driver. At my work, the fee covers mileage reimbursement (which, depending on gas prices, vehicle fuel consumption, and detours, can often be less than you actually pay in gas), the cost of the warming bags that keep your food hot while on the road, the boxes that your pizza is delivered in, the cups, plates, napkins, forks, and bags to carry all of those, and also the flavoring packets that are provided with the pizza. At some places with higher fees, it also pays for gps systems and subscriptions for the drivers.
So how much of that delivery fee actually goes to the driver? Depending on location and corporate policy, it can be anywhere from fifteen to forty cents per mile. So if your driver works on the low end of that scale, and you live two miles away from the store, then only sixty cents of your $3 delivery fee is going into the driver pocket.
If you had an order that was for $20 worth of food, then $0.60 isn’t really anywhere close to what a tip should be.
For tips, a good rule of thumb is to look at the tax on your order, then double that. Based on tax rates for your area that will give the driver anywhere from a 10% tip to a 20% tip. If you know that you live in an area with a extremely high or low tax rate, you can instead look at your total and then divide it by ten to get an idea of what a minimum tip should be.
And yes, I did just say that 10% is the minimum that you should tip. As with eating out, if you cannot afford to tip, then you probably should not be ordering delivery. Don’t want to tip? Almost all food services are happy to prepare the food for you to come and pick up yourself.
As a final note, I am certain that most people are aware that stores have started taxing tips, both for servers in restaurants and for delivery drivers. This is especially true for tips written on a credit card receipt. Those tips automatically get reported to the store and therefore any taxes on those are taken from the worker’s paycheck. Tipping with cash makes it easier for a driver to report even a small amount less of the tips, which means that they don’t get as large a bite taken out of their paycheck.
Figure you’ll just save your driver/server the hassle of reporting tips by not tipping at all? Congratulations, you just screwed your driver/server doubly, as many businesses now audit any driver/server that reports under 10% of the money that their tables or deliveries earned for the store in tips. So any time you didn’t tip, you might just be making your server/driver report tips that they never actually got, which are taken out of their paycheck as taxes.