Story About Pizza Delivery Driver Receiving Bad Tip Sparks Debate On Tipping Culture

There’s an expectation to tip generously for food service and delivery people in the United States. Workers are often left with unfair tips and while they typically earn less than minimum wage, it makes it hard to justify even showing up to work.

One Redditor recently witnessed this firsthand and took it upon herself to help out a Pizza Hut delivery person who received A $20 tip on a nearly $1,000 order. They decided to share this story in Reddit’s popular Anti-Work subreddit. Here’s what happened:

“I (26 f) and my boyfriend Nick (27 m) have been dating for almost a year and something that has always bothered me is how Nick does not believe in maintaining or taking care of his vehicles.”

I work security at an office in Dallas. A Pizza Hut delivery person came to the building delivering a HUGE order for a group on the 3rd floor. While she is unloading all the bags of boxes of pizza, and the boxes of wings, and breadsticks, and plates and napkins and etc.

I took the liberty of calling the point of contact letting them know the pizza was here. While waiting for the contact person to come down, I had a little chat with the delivery driver. She was saying how she had a big order before this and another one as soon as she gets back. She was pretty excited because she said it was a blessing to be making these big deliveries. She didn’t flat out say it but was excited about the tip she should receive on such a large order.

An 18% tip would have been $168 dollars after all. She told me about her kids and how they play basketball in school and are going to state and another one of her sons won some UIL awards in science. You could tell how proud of her children she was. However, she revealed it’s been tough because it’s not cheap, in time or money. She had to give up her job as a teacher so she could work a schedule that allowed her to take care of her children. She said her husband works in security like I do and “it helps but it’s hard out there.”

Eventually the contact person comes down and has the delivery lady lug most of the stuff onto the elevator and up to the floor they were going to because the contact person didn’t bring a cart or anything to make it easier. I help carry a couple of boxes for her onto the elevator and they were off.

A few minutes later she comes back down and she sees me and says “I got it all up there and set it up real nice for them,” as she shows me a picture of the work she did. And then as her voice begins to break she says “they only tipped me $20. I just said thank you and left.”

I asked for he $cashapp and gave her $50 and told her she deserves more but it was all I could spare. She gave a me a huge hug and said that this was sign that her day was gonna get better.

And I didn’t post this to say “look at the good thing I did.” I posted this to say, if someone is going to whip out the company credit card, make a giant catering order and not even give the minimum 18% tip to the delivery driver who had to load it all into their vehicle, use their own gas to deliver it, unload it and then lug it up and set it up. You are a total piece of shit. It’s not your credit card! Why stiff the delivery driver like that?!

I was glad I could help her out but I fear she will just encounter it over and over because corporations suck, tip culture sucks, everything sucks.

They later shared some more information to clear up some questions in the comments and rant a bit more.

EDIT: Alright I can understand that 18% might be steep for a delivery driver but, even if she didn’t “deserve” an 18% tip, she definitely deserved more than $20 for loading up, driving, unloading, carrying and setting up $938 worth of pizza. This post is about is mainly about how shitty tip culture is and I can see how some of you are perpetuating the problem.

FINAL EDIT: Obligatory “wow this post blew up” comment. Thank you to everyone who sent awards and interacted with this post. I didn’t realize tipping was this much a hot-button topic on this sub. Tip culture sucks ass. Cheap tippers and non-tippers suck ass.

Obviously, we want to see the change where businesses pay their workers a livable wage but until that change is put into place, we need to play the fucked up game. And that means we need to tip the people in the service industry since they have to rely on tips to live. It’s shitty and exploitative but that’s late-stage capitalism for you.

Good night everyone.

The story sparked quite the response about “tipping culture” in the Anti Work community. Here’s what commenters are saying:

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