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.
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