"DNAinfo put together a map of GrubHub's data, showing how each neighborhood tipped from March 2013 to March 2014. (Note that the map does not include parts of the Rockaways, where GrubHub said they had insufficient data.)""If you don't tip [food delivery people], I don't know how people think they're going to live."-- Upper West Sider Nancy Burden, an elementary-school teacherby KenHold onto that thought, Nancy. We're going to come back to it.I think we have our Least Surprising Exposé of the Week here, as reported the other day by Rosa Goldensohn for DNAinfo New York: "Richest Neighborhoods Aren't Best Delivery Tippers, GrubHub Data Show."Which better describes your reaction to this startling revelation?(a) OMG, can it be? Say it isn't so!(b) Yawn.A piece of anecdotal testimony:
In the Upper East Side's 10075, the third-richest zip code in the city, Faustino Hernandez, 48, who delivers for an artisanal pizza place, said tips are worse than they are farther uptown, where he used to deliver.“In the elevator here, the delivery boys, we see each other and compare,” Hernandez said. “Two dollars, $1.50, $3 on a $50 order."
Ladies and germs, I give you "$1.50, $3 on a $50 order." Take a bow, rich folks!In fairness, the picture isn't generally quite that grim.
Customers in the 10075 zip code — which runs from Fifth Avenue to the East River in the 70s and is one of the 10 richest zip codes in the country, according to Forbes — give food delivery workers just a 14.4 percent tip on average, lower than the tips in dozens of poorer zip codes across the five boroughs, according to data from GrubHub , the online food ordering site.
Okay, 14.4 percent isn't horrible. It's hardly generous, but it's not horrible -- not horrible in the mode of "$1.50, $3 on a $50 order," which is disgraceful. Those people shouldn't be allowed to have food delivered. They can either get off their lazy fat asses and get their own damned food or, better still, starve to death.Umut Maya, 32, the owner of A La Turka , a Mediterranean restaurant at Second Avenue and East 74th Street, has a theory:
They are the ones who are the richest, in the penthouses. They order [but] they don't tip well. "That's why they're rich."
Maybe so, Umut, but I think Nancy, our schoolteacher from the Upper East Side, has put her finger on it. How, she asks, do those richie-rich-cheapskate tippers think their food deliverers are going to live?I doubt that they give it as a much as a first, let alone a second, thought. So busy and important are they -- with all they do, for fun and profit, to turn the planet into a shithole -- that they can't be bothered to procure their own food. I doubt that it even occurs to them that the menials who deliver the grub with which they stuff their faces are people. Why, they're just more of those endless takers-not-quakers who are ruining America, except when the Quality Folk get hungry. Maybe if the QF tried doing their job for a few days, they might discover that the job isn't quite as easy, entertaining, or fulfilling as they imagine.On the DNAinfo website you'll find a ranking of NYC's 20 top-tipping zip codes, from No. 1, 10069 (Upper West Side, 60s), through No. 20, 10020 (Seventh Avenue in the 50s). Those are two only four Manhattan zip codes represented in the top 20; 10014, West Village, comes in at No. 10; 10065, Upper East Side, at No. 13.The average-tip borough ranking is: (1) Brooklyn, 15 percent; (2) Queens, 14. 9 percent; (3) Staten Island, 14.7 percent; (4) Manhattan, 14.5 percent; (5) Bronx, 13.9 percent. And in case you were wondering:
New York City as a whole is the 13th-best tipping city nationally, GrubHub found, behind St. Louis, Missouri; Kalamazoo, Michigan and the country's top-tipping Boulder, Colorado, which averaged 16.2 percent.
A Park Avenue delivery? This suggests that: (a) the food must be going to really important people, and (b) this poor fellow better not be hoping for a really big tip. But what the heck, he's got his health and he's working in the great outdoors! He'd probably do this job for nothing. Or anyways pretty close to nothing -- "minimum wage for delivery workers is $5.65 per hour." (Photo by DNAinfo's Rosa Goldensohn.)#
