Should I tip my food delivery person?

Is it wrong not to tip a food service provider?

A reader from California who we’re calling Martha emailed to express frustration over knowing when it is appropriate to tip food service workers.

“I have no trouble tipping a waiter or waitress for service in a restaurant, basing the tip amount on the quality of service,” she wrote. “Yesterday, in fact, we gave a 30 percent tip to a waitress who went above and beyond to make our meal satisfying.”

But Martha asks about tipping people “who are simply doing their job, before they have even done anything.” She focuses on the example of food delivery drivers and offering a tip when she pays when ordering her meal.

Martha’s friends tell her she “must” give big tips because food delivery drivers don’t get paid well.

“Isn’t that their issue with their employer?” Martha asked. “I don’t tip Fed Ex or postal employees for delivering packages. Why am I expected to tip drivers delivering groceries or hot food?

“How about when I pick up a meal to-go?” she continued. “I am not asked to tip at fast food restaurants but if I order ahead for food to go from the local burger shop, when I walk in to pick it up, I am asked to tip.”

While Martha is not obligated to tip her food deliverers, it is customary to do so for the service they provide. The deliverers are typically not highly paid and they do not receive any delivery surcharge tacked onto a bill.

Yes, they could take up their low pay with their employer, but any increases would likely be passed on to Martha and others in the form of higher food prices. It’s up to Martha, however, if and how much she wants to tip a delivery driver. Ostensibly she’s paying for the effort the driver made to do a good and timely job of getting Martha her food so she wouldn’t have to leave her house to go get it.

Picking up a burger or a muffin at a local establishment strikes me as a bit different. While there’s been more of a push to encourage tips on checkout screens, if the effort is a clerk essentially putting an item in a bag and handing it to a customer who walks in, it seems perfectly reasonable for Martha to balk at leaving a tip if she doesn’t want to.

The sometimes not-so-subtle pressure to leave a tip has seemed to pick up with the advent of paying online and screens asking for tips. If Martha doesn’t want to tip, she doesn’t have to, unless she is with a large party and automatic gratuity is added to the bill.

The reason for tipping, however, is to compensate servers or deliverers for work in an industry that still sees tipping as making up a sizable portion of their income. Unless, tipping becomes a thing of the past, Martha and the rest of us will be left to calculate how generous we want to be to someone who provides us a service.

The right thing is to calculate how good the service was or, in the case of food delivery people, how convenient and timely their delivery efforts were and base any tip on that.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Must you honor a deathbed request if it no longer feels appreciated?

 Are you obligated to fulfill a promise to someone even if doing so might feel unappreciated?

A reader we're calling Renza emailed recently to ask for advice. When Renza's aunt was dying she asked Renza to promise her that she would call her uncle, her aunt's husband, at least once a month. Renza promised that she would.

"I was never really close to my uncle," wrote Renza. "There were a few times when he was really inappropriate and I told him off while my aunt was still alive." Nevertheless, Renza called her uncle faithfully for the first two years after her aunt's death. For the first eight months or so, he would pick up the phone and they would talk for about an hour. For the past year, however, Renza reported that he never picks up the phone and that she has not spoken to him. 

"I promised my aunt I would call every month," wrote Renza, "but is it harassment on my part if I keep calling him if he doesn't pick up the phone or return calls?" Renza asked if she should keep calling him.

It was generous of Renza to agree to her aunt's request. Her attempt to honor her commitment to call her uncle monthly has been impressive, even if he has shown little outward appreciation for her calls. 

As long as Renza's uncle doesn't ask her to stop calling, I don't believe she is harassing him by trying to call him. She is simply honoring her aunt's request. 

Honoring a commitment made to someone who is dying can be challenging, particularly if you never fully felt comfortable with the request being made. About 15 years ago, I wrote about an incident where the children of a dying woman promised their mother they would not have a wake for her since she didn't want one. But after meeting with resistance from other family members who really wanted her to have a wake, they agreed to do so. In that column 15 years ago, I mentioned other instances where those who made promises found it challenging to honor those promises or simply didn't want to. 

I wrote at the time that "a promise is a promise. If you make one, the right thing is to make every effort to honor it, whether the person is on a deathbed or still living. There are, however, times when circumstances prevent you from honoring a deathbed promise as you wish you could or, obviously, discussing the issue with the deceased." 

In Renza's case, there's nothing really preventing her from making the monthly call to her uncle, even if those calls go unanswered. My suggestion would be that she continue to honor her aunt's request unless her uncle asks her to stop.

Renza has no idea if her uncle listens to any voicemails she might leave. She doesn't know if simply getting the call provides him some solace even if he doesn't talk to Renza. But her promise was to her aunt and as long as she can continue to fulfill that promise, doing so would be the right thing. Rather than worry about being a bother, perhaps Renza might try to feel good about herself for honoring her commitment to do something that gave her aunt some piece as she was dying. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

If a columnist tells you something, check it out

If you make an error when speaking to others, how far should you go to correct it?

Almost 15 years ago, I was interviewed by an anchor in the studio of a morning news program about the ethics of forgiveness. Without my knowing it, the person responsible for writing the identification that appeared under my name wrote “Ethicist and Clinical Psychologist.” I couldn’t see the identification as I was speaking to the anchor and only found out on my drive home when my wife, who is a licensed mental health therapist, called me to let me know she had watched the interview and told me of the mistake.

I believed the right thing to do was to let the program know and also to let my college public affairs office know of the mistake so it didn’t misidentify me if they shared a copy of the interview on social media. (The interviewer was an alumnus of the college where I taught at the time.)

In that case, the error wasn’t mine.

A few weeks ago, I was a guest on a podcast to talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence. The interviewer asked terrific questions and we talked some of the propensity of AI chatbots to make mistakes. Turns out that and other observations in the podcast were true, but it was I who made an unforced error during our discussion. In referring to an article I had written years ago for a magazine that the podcast interviewer and I worked for, I made a passing reference to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) when I meant to refer to the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration).

It's likely that few people listening to the podcast will notice the error. I only caught it when the interviewer sent me a link to the podcast after it had been edited and went live. The error also doesn’t change the intent of what I was saying in the sentence where I used the wrong acronym. Nevertheless, it was a mistake.

My options are to say nothing to anyone since, again, few if any are likely to notice. But that doesn’t seem the right thing to do. Instead, I let the podcast interviewer know and I am using this column to come clean and admit the error. It was my mistake, not his or anyone else’s.

In the podcast, I talk about the importance of checking the facts of anything an AI chatbot might create for you. A few weeks ago in The Right Thing column, I wrote about how various AI chatbots had gotten information about me wrong when I asked them to write an obituary for me. The chatbots created a wife who doesn’t exist along with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who had beautiful names but who also don’t exist. (My wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchild are all beautiful in real life.) I was also given credit for books I didn’t write and fellowships I never received.

There’s an old journalism saw that goes something like: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” The same thing goes for when you hear a white-haired and bearded ethics columnist tell you stuff on a podcast. Before you spread what he has to say, check it out.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Giving credit to the right person

Should you correct someone when they give the wrong person credit for something?

My mother died in August 1991, a few days after she turned 61. She was living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, at the time where she had moved a couple of years earlier with my father so they could be in the same town as my sister, her husband and their three young children. The woman I’d eat bees for and I had traveled to Grand Forks from Boston for the funeral. We stayed on for a bit to try to help my father sort things out.

Nancy and I noticed there was a large turkey in my father’s freezer and we decided to prepare it along with other dishes that are more traditional to Thanksgiving than to a 99-degree day in Grand Forks. Nevertheless, we persisted and the eight of us ate dinner around my father’s dining room table. Among the items we prepared was the stuffing I had made each Thanksgiving for our family and friends back in Boston.

As my sister was eating a fork full of stuffing, she commented how much she always liked this stuffing from my mother’s recipe. As playfully as I could, I told her it was my recipe and she had never eaten it before. She laughed and ate on.

Did I need to correct her? No. I gained little by having it known the recipe was mine. It didn’t strike me, however, that offering the correction would diminish my mother’s memory since it was after all my mother’s frozen turkey that had inspired the dinner.

Often, when someone is being given credit for something they didn’t do, it might feel awkward to set the record straight. If, for example, in a work setting a manager is heralding the efforts of a worker on a particular project when it was actually the work of someone else, it might feel petty for the person actually responsible for the work to speak up.

In such cases, the right thing for anyone receiving credit for something they didn’t do is to be the one to set the record straight. When a group of employees contribute equally to an accomplishment and only one gets singled out, that one person should name the other members of the team. Getting recognition feels great. But accepting it for something you didn’t do is dishonest.

Before my sister died in October 2020, it became something of a tradition for her to call me around Thanksgiving and ask for our mother’s stuffing recipe. I’d moan, remind her that it wasn’t mom’s recipe, and then send it on to her.

On that note, I should point out that my stuffing recipe borrows liberally from both the Joy of Cooking and from the recipe on the plastic packaging of unsliced white bread sold in grocery stores around Thanksgiving time. When the recipe appeared in a holiday cookbook compiled by my employer, I gave credit to each because that’s the right thing to do. If you’d like a copy of the recipe, email me and I’d be glad to send it to you.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Think twice before sending that group text

Are you obligated to let others know when you decide to leave a chain of group text messages?

I haven’t counted them personally, but various sources estimate that as many as 23 billion text messages are sent every day throughout the world. While many of these texts might be useful to managing our daily lives, some are simply dross.

In the mix of text messages are group texts. Sometimes the recipients are aware they are part of a group text chain, but often these group texts come in unexpectedly from someone who decides to include us. These texts might be from a work colleague about an ongoing project. Or they might be from a family member keeping us and others abreast of some milestone or other. On other occasions someone who has our number decides to include us on some joke or story or meme they found amusing. Depending on the size of the routing list, responses to the original post may multiply quickly, resulting in even more distractions from more useful incoming texts.

If a group text is part of a conversation that we need to be part of – an ongoing work project, for example – it’s unlikely we should leave the chain no matter how tempted we might be. But if the chain is some random bit of information we didn’t ask for and don’t particularly need and is copied to a bevy of recipients whose numbers we don’t recognize, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with removing yourself from the chain. If doing so helps unclutter your inbox and manage unwanted distractions, it’s a simple enough process to remove yourself from the conversation. No harm. No foul.

If you do so, however, do you owe it to the original sender to let them know you’re opting out? If it’s a work text focusing on something with which you’re only tangentially involved, you might want to let the colleagues you see regularly know that you are opting out as a courtesy. If it’s a group text you asked to be part of, even if in the distant past, it also would be gracious to let the sender know you are leaving the discussion.

But if it’s an unsolicited group text concerning something you don’t have a desire or a need to know about, there’s nothing wrong with just leaving. Doing otherwise and sending a text to the group to let them know you’re leaving risks triggering a slew of new unwanted texts in response. Who needs that? Surely not you nor the others on the text chain.

If a friend or acquaintance includes you when sending something you find off-color, factually wrong or otherwise offensive, it could be worth it to send them a direct text to let them know why you find the text offensive and to please not include you on other such messages in the future.

The right thing when receiving unsolicited group texts is to decide which you really want to be part of and to leave the rest. If you’re thinking about sending a group text, the right thing is to be thoughtful and consider whether what you’re about to send is really worth adding to the billions of texts sent every day, many of which none of us need to receive.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.