Friday, June 27, 2014

Rich people don't get (or stay) rich by just giving their money away to little people -- like the menials who bring them food

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"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 teacher

by Ken

Hold 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.)
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3 Comments:

At 7:29 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

This idea the the rich are cheap fucks because if they weren't they wouldn't be rich -- well, that has to be debunked because it is pure bunkum.

If the rich tipped generously they would be oh so slightly less rich -- say, maybe 50-100 bucks or so a year.

I tip 20 percent to food delivery guys. Period. I could start shaving a dollar here or there on a $20-30 pizza or Chinese food delivery, but even though I'm not rich, what the hell is another buck gonna do for me? These people are performing a service for my lazy ass. They deserve more than a couple of bucks an hour (typically less than minimum wage if the owner can get away with it) for all the hustling and kowtowing they have to do.

If I delivered a $50 order to a Park Ave address and got a $1.50 tip, I'd be spitting on the pizza the next time I delivered there. And I'd be dreaming about pitchforks, tumbrels and guillotines.

 
At 5:58 PM, Blogger KenInNY said...

Nicely said!

Cheers,
K

 
At 2:51 PM, Anonymous Rick said...

No, no, no, the argument is not that they're rich because they're bad tippers. They're rich because they apply zero-sum, be-a-bastard-or-be-a-chump logic ubiquitously. They are grifting every single chance they get, cutting every corner, firing every worker, running every scam, that they can get away with. Crappy tips are characteristic, but insufficient. The investment-banker "short" who scams millions by conspiring to depress a good company's stock applies the same logic to a delivery person: "Here's another sucker I can stiff."

 

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