AfterEllen: Folks, can we talk about tipping?

from AfterEllen:

Folks, can we talk about tipping?

Hi everybody; just wanted to vent a little and possibly make some non-tippers aware of the importance of tipping. i work as a pizza delivery driver, and i had a delivery tonight that happened to be to a cute little soft-butch dyke (okay, i'm just giving you my impression, but i'm pretty sure i'm right - hopefully she's not reading this blog. ha ha); anyway i got the pizza there in 15-20 minutes, because she only lived a few blocks away, we gave her an X-large pizza for the price of a large, my service was polite and professional, and it seemed like we were actually kind of hitting it off. imagine my disappointment later when i looked at the credit card receipt and realized that she stiffed me.

sad to say, but lesbians in general do not have a good reputation for tipping, and it does not reflect well on us. and don't anybody waste my time telling me that "you can't strereotype." yes, you can stereotype, and i've been in the business long enough to have drawn some pretty valid conclusions about who tips and who doesn't. i'm sure that some of you who work for tips could say the same thing.

as far as pizza delivery goes, the delivery charge is NOT A TIP. that fee goes straight to the company and is nothing more than a way for them to increase their profits at the expense of the drivers. drivers do get some (small) compensation, based either on commission, mileage, per deilvery rate, etc., but they have been getting that compensation since long before companies started charging a delivery fee. when delivery charges were added, that money just went straight to the company.

drivers depend on tips to cover their gas and vehicle maintanence, but also to compensate them for the risks involved in the job - from accidents to robberies to getting stuck in the snow, etc. etc. if nobody tipped, no one would deliver pizzas, and those people who don't tip are basically free-loading off of the people who do tip. btw, the minimum half-way decent tip for pizza delivery is $2, but $3+ will definitely get you better service.

lastly, when someone doesn't tip it's like a personal insult to the driver/waitperson (assuming that the service was good). it's like saying "screw you." i once had a woman ask me for my phone number after she gave me a check for exact change for the pizza, and well, she would have had to have been way hotter than she was for me to give it to her after she stiffed me. i think it's time for lesbians to woman-up and start tipping better. and FWIW, gay men tip better than average, IMO.

Great comments, too.