Food Delivery Service Drivers are Skipping Orders Without Tips

As someone who has worked as a pizza delivery driver, I can’t stress how important it is to tip your drivers.

Food delivery services like Grubhub, Uber Eats and DoorDash are more popular than ever during the coronavirus pandemic. Not only are they convenient to customers who are unable to leave their homes, they’ve also saved a lot of small businesses that wouldn’t have survived otherwise.

But, according to a story by KHOU, some customers apparently don’t understand that sometimes it’s not even worth the driver’s time if the customer doesn’t tip. In some cases, the driver works for free if there’s no tip.

That’s why a lot of drivers have the “no tip, no trip” attitude. While drivers aren’t told in advance how much a customer is tipping, it’s a pretty safe bet that if the order is only going to pay $5 or less, there’s no tip included. In those cases, they’ll often decline and give the delivery to the next closest driver.

The result is that some customers are complaining of wait times of over two hours. It’s important to point out that some of the extended wait times can be attributed to driver shortages, but drivers like Kate, who works for an unnamed delivery service, refuse to deliver orders without tips:

If I see an order coming through that has no tip on it, I will decline that order. It will be offered to the next closest person, and then that person can choose to take it or decline it.

I’ll be the first to admit to being as frugal as the next person, but I always throw drivers a generous tip. Not only does it help the driver, you just might find that you get your food a tad bit faster.