Thursday, February 26

2/25 Bad Tippers Beware?

I received the following comment on one of my earlier posts and decided to offer my thoughts today:

My name is Adam, I'm a driver from Florida. I got so fed up with people not tipping I made a website where drivers can post their tips and check their cities postings from their phone. My idea is that if drivers pool their knowledge of good and bad customers they can make better decisions on which order to take first. Anyway the site is goodtipbadtip.com, and I was wondering if you would link to it or maybe blog about it. I don't know how this works exactly. Let me know if you would like me to link to your blog too.

Thanks,
Adam

As a nerd I love the idea that there should be a predictor for tipping. I'm tracking my own tips and would love to work with other drivers in and outside my area to refine my methods, gather a larger and more significant data set, and put it into an easy-to-digest and useful format for other (less nerdy) drivers to use. Adam (if you're reading this), email me and if any of these ideas sound like something you'd like to flesh out more.

With all that said, my first thought when I visited the site is that I have a slight problem with posting customer's addresses. Even though they are bad tippers and it's extremely tempting to be vindictive (I've been tempted to kick my share of ceramic kitties/poodles/frogs) I'm concerned that, were the website to be a large success, the information could be used in ways not originally intended (a hit list for drunken former drivers to egg on Halloween, etc). I'm also concerned that if one of the chronic-bad-tippers were to discover this, the store and possibly the driver could be in trouble. I know it's a little far-fetched, but it is something to think about. People tend to frequent the same pizza places over and over again and if they felt that they weren't welcome as customers they might stop ordering from there altogether and, while I would rather not deliver to bad-tippers, business is business and without the store I don't have a job.

Honestly, I don't have a ton of control over which deliveries I take, so even if the pace in-store was such that I could whip out my cellphone and check the list, I probably wouldn't be able to do anything about it anyway; the dispatch system causes deliveries to be run on a first-come-first-served basis and my store pretty much sticks to that to prevent conflict (see previous entries about StinkyButtFace inventing his own dispatch system and how well that worked out).

Personally, I would be much more interested in it from a data standpoint. My current methodology is to try to figure out if certain neighborhoods tip more on average and deliver to higher tipping neighborhoods first (for example if I had a double to two close neighborhoods). It would be awesome (and much more statistically significant) if other drivers in my area were tracking this type of thing, but I'm not sure that any of the other drivers in my store would be interested; Most of them just don't take this job as seriously as some of us (including me) do.

****

Last night I took 8 deliveries and averaged $2.08 in tips per delivery. We had a freak rush after the Ash Wednesday church service got out. Came home with $25 in my pocket.

No comments: