The Secret Lives of Restaurant Food Delivery Tippers

Tipping protocol is a constant subject of conversation, debate, and controversy in New York. Parking lot attendant extortion, unsolicited "help" hailing yellow taxis, doorman ties to the mob, the massage parlor "invisible hand," gypsy cab negotiations (and whether this term is offensive to the gypsy population), dedicated sommelier tip lines, Christmas gifts for the highrise building family you never knew you had, and the bartender binary bill conundrum are a few of the many gratuity topics on the mind of today's metropolitan citizen. Most of the notes I've read on the topic are generalized guides, outlining the appropriate instances when prescribed roundabout percentages are owed to certain recognized service providers. But with the recent rise of purveyor instituted tip jars -- accompanied by gratuity induced prices engineered to maximize coinage returned from paper bill purchases -- it's become increasingly important to develop a more granular and robust thought process for gauging these subjective matters of social protocol.

Friends commonly ask me for opinions on appropriate tipping procedure expecting a singular hard-and-fast rule in reply. Very few tipping situations are as uniform and static as the posers of this question would like to think. And many, like the one I’ve outlined below, involve multiple considerations in order to tabulate the proper outcome. To give you an idea I’ve outlined a cursory “thought process” examination of the high-frequency, multi-variable tipping scenario of restaurant food delivery.

>Long a Floor / Short a Cap
Importance: High

The blind application of a flat tipping percentage will at times result in a payment shortfall or overage. On the low side, remote patrons who are consistent placers of near minimum charge meal orders should be tipping more than 15-20%. On the high side, the toro sashimi takeout party you and your ten closest friends decide to have shouldn’t require the full 20% on top of an already pricey bill. A floor/cap of $2/$10 for a reasonable payload carryable by one delivery person should override an otherwise 15-20% of bill baseline rule-of-thumb.

>Distance
Importance: High

Requesting delivery to the outskirts of a maximum territory boundary prevents workers from churning out additional orders. Reward distance. Conversely, don't feel guilty offering up a low side tip on deliveries from restaurants located within shouting distance of your front stoop.

>The Multitask
Importance: High

Reward delivery journeys that appear dedicated to your order alone. If the person shows up with multiple bags it’s likely that the oven-to-door time has been extended against your interests (though this is not always the case).

>Weather
Importance: High

Though braving the elements is technically part of the job description, an additional tip is appropriate to compensate for safer/slower delivery speeds, especially if the payload arrives promptly. This booster is countered partly by the fact that during bad weather there is likely more orders to deliver, thus more tips.

Sidenote: The opposite theory applies in regards to bad weather when considering tips for taxis. Yellow cabs generally operate "in stride" during inclimate weather. And since there is usually no shortage of riders I feel less compelled to bump up gratuities.

>Tonnage
Importance: Moderate

Unwieldy pizza boxes and heavy orders of cheap brothy soba deserve more credit than a lightweight bento box or portable dish of Thai protein. Reward tonnage.

>Stair Stipend
Importance: Low

Climbing two flights of stairs is easier than four. Delivery to the door of my fifth floor walkup apartment deserves a small scaling consideration. Reward height.

The Pedometer Experiment

During the initial years of my adolescent running career I often wondered if I'd live to see an age of technology where pedometers didn't rely on internal clicky-thing mechanisms to measure your stride. Fifteen years later I'm still wondering...still hoping. I stuck a pedometer in my pocket for 30 days and here are the fascinating results:

Not Having the Time of Your Life. And You’ve Never Felt This Way Before. I Swear.

A periodic portion of my real life job (or my “adult job” as friends like to call it) involves traveling to Universities in the Northeast to give job interviews. These thirty minute trials of courage are a freeform mix of hard and soft, allowing sage questioners like me to say and ask practically anything. Don’t get the wrong idea; I take my white collar decider-of-fates role quite seriously. Not only because I want to admire the people I see at the water cooler but also since the ultimate successes and failures of my chosen hires are a direct reflection on my own tastes and values.

Given that one important prerequisite of my job is a penchant for all things analytical it’s common during the interview to pose a question whose answer requires some combination of math, spatial reasoning, and outright common sense. This is the part students fear most. Our hypercompetitive society buries kids $250k into debt to have a shot at this singular not-until-you-answer-this-riddle moment. Imagine The Showcase Showdown, Final Jeopardy, and Double Dare Obstacle Course all rolled into one. Except what’s on the line here isn’t a tricked-out RV, trip to Paris, or cash windfall; it’s what you believe to be your future. And it’s not that we don’t care about all the other things they’ve accomplished but if two other students who are also trilingual, kite surfing national champions, Fulbright scholars, and graduating three years early get this question right, who do you think we’ll be logically obliged to choose?

“How many degrees separate the hour and minute hand on an analog clock reading 3:15?”
“If you painted the surface of a cube made up by 1000 smaller cubes, how many of the smaller cubes would have paint on them?”
“Which investment is most attractive: one that doubles in two years, triples in three years, or quadruples in four years?”
“If there’s an equal chance of rain or sunshine, what are the odds of three consecutive days of rain over the course of five days?”

Depending on how your mind works these questions might sound really difficult, really simple, or just really silly. Exercises like these are one of the prospecting tools used by financial companies, consulting firms, and political think tanks to sieve the not-so apparent analytical dynamos from the sea of “fools gold” straight-A bookworms.

The motivation for this note was to share a question of this sort that’s fascinated me since the day I heard it. “What are the odds of a once in a lifetime event happening once in your life?” First, I must express my condolences to the students who’ve been asked this in an interview. Questions that are infinitely more simplistic and discrete consistently confound the smartest of students. This one is tough. To technically answer this problem you’d have to read up on Simeon-Denis Poisson, the 18th century French mathematician whose work focused on the modeling of improbable events. I didn’t quite get that far in my studies (or was sick that day) and have chosen never to seek out how one would answer such an interesting theoretical query.

Romantic notions of fate and destiny are routinely suppressed by the clockwork nature of my analytical psyche. A psyche that rarely yields at the opportunity to expose unpopular truths or debase myth, superstition, and hindsight bias. This mental framework has blessed/cursed me to see the world as a cold, chaotic set of fluttering stereo equalizer-like probability distributions where strange coincidences are simply tail improbabilities bound to occur during the course of our lives. The “once in a lifetime” conundrum sheds a rare and strange light on the seesaw that balances my conception of hope vs. uncertainty. I’m thankful that my unrelenting analytical pitchfork is willing to leave this notion answer-less and wonder-full.

Blind Date Blindfold

My good pal MA posed this hypothetical question: “If you were to be set up on a blind date and could choose who you went out with based only on their occupation, what would be your top five occupations?”

Any assertion suggesting that one's job choice is self-defining is commonly met by blushes of timid unease; especially in a town where outsized costs of living require all sorts of aspirational compromises. Though many people relate to those blushy moments few could deny that the choice to spend a majority of one’s waking hours fulfilling a singular work function doesn’t say something, if not a lot, about who they are.

Quick draw answers I've heard to this "what if" dating psychology question fall into a few simple categories. (1) Occupations that describe a particular physical archetype: professional football player, yoga instructor, exotic dancer, or underwear model. (2) Jobs that typify a specific lifestyle or socioeconomic status: investment banker, travel journalist, art gallerist, or bass player for a well known rock band. (3) Careers that exemplify a certain brand of intellect or creativity: architect, philosophy professor, sculptor, or film director. There’s also the separate question of whether you generally seek a “partner in crime,” someone with similar creative/professional inclinations, or a person who you believe is your complimentary contrasting opposite.

My own answers combine ideas mentioned above with two addendums which I'll briefly describe. The first is what I call "Reincarnate Regret." It's the idea of being drawn towards people who chose a path you pursued in a former life, once considered, or still now consider. My other choosing variable is a hybrid of the response categories listed above. Based on silly generalizations (this is a somewhat silly exercise after all) I start with the world view, aesthetic sensibility, and physical appearance desired in a mate then interpolate to careers where one might find a high density of these idealized characters.

My top female blind dates knowing only their occupation:
1. Comic Book Illustrator
2. Hatter / Milliner
3. Contemporary Dancer
4. Furniture Maker
5. Field Anthropologist

{Extra credit list}

If I had lived during the 1920s:
1. Switchboard Operator
2. Hatter / Milliner
3. Confectioner
4. Costermonger
5. Bluestocking

If you'd care to indulge me with your own lists be aware that answers like French Maid, Slutty Nurse, or non-English speaking Pool Boy Hunk don’t apply. Sorry MA.

One Siren's Song

Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, oh how many times you’ve tricked me! You sit in the back of my cupboard unbound by expiration dates, whispering to me, wanting me to want you. Something you said to me as a child keeps me coming back, keeps me wondering why I haven’t heard the maraca shake of your slim corrugated blue box for so long. I’m willing to put aside the bad times we’ve had together and give it another chance. Did I add too much milk last time? Should I have boiled your elbows in salted water or used margarine instead of butter? Is one packet of bright and dusty cheese powder really enough? Was I using the high altitude directions by mistake? You’re right, there isn’t enough pasta in this box for a growing young man like myself; I’ll just make two batches for good measure. Wait a second … No … I won’t do it! Your wily charms have fooled me for the last time! I know you’re the cheesiest but I don’t care. Your conniving nature and stomachache-inducing artificial flavors are the reason I don’t like girls who eat American cheese. I'll get my calcium elsewhere, thank you very much. And don’t think that I’ll aid in propagating this vicious cycle by donating your non-perishable wares to the local food drive. You’ve ruined enough lives already.

Q Square, 5 Circle, or 7 Diamond?

Thousands of New Yorkers make this decision every day. Is it faster to take the sure thing incoming local train or wait for the no-where-in-sight but most times expedient express line? Given a few set variables most grizzled locals can quickly spit out an answer calculated by the subconscious algorithm they've built on years of commuting experience. I've always wondered what one can infer about another's personality based purely on their subway platform decisions.

Riders are continually optimizing multiple considerations each time they swipe their Metrocard: travel time, comfort, safety, surety of destination, crowd, view, etc. Not knowing how each person prioritizes this list makes predicting their behavior and thus inferring anything about their personality quite difficult. Many make choices considering only travel time. Others don’t mind taking the scenic local track in exchange for a luxurious lumbar supported seat. One might ignore their normal intuition to politely stalk an attractive fellow traveler (where do you think all those “missed connections” come from?). Misgivings on whether express trains are operating normally through unfamiliar terrain force even experienced New Yorkers into suboptimal decisions.

There are certain moments during the week where the variable of travel time is undoubtedly paramount to train riders. 5:30pm on a Friday in Grand Central Station is one of those moments, and I occasionally have a front row seat. Observing waffling straphangers as local and express trains simultaneously approach seems akin to the curious wonder of watching a lab rat in a maze. Why do people so commonly duck into the local train, wait a few nervous moments, then dart out the door across the platform onto the express track? Should I feel guilty for smirking when a merciless conductor punishes their indecision by leaving them stuck trainless on the platform? But what happens when a local train approaches during rush hour and you have a multiple express stop distance to travel. Are you the type of person who will just take the sure thing or will you bank on the experience that waiting will get you there faster? I'll spare you the details of my decision making neurosis and just admit to being a local kinda guy. I'm rarely in a rush, choose people watching scenery over speed, and just earnestly enjoy taking a long subway ride.

So which are you? Express or local?

Koppenhaver's Precept of (Un)Attractiveness

- Circa 1999 -

The setting was pretty common for a Sunday afternoon in Ithaca. A group of guys lounging on the porch of a soon-to-be condemned house slouched over tattered 1940s era furniture in their underwear. It's a photograph that rarely makes it to the final press of college brochures but one of the few images I can vividly remember from those four years on the hill. We partook in the age old tradition of attaching meaning to our lives by ways of inane and pointless conversation. The gawking of passersby brought up the regionally important "Why are there so few attractive women in Ithaca?" conundrum, a subject of conversation that came up at least once a day. Normally the issue was put forth, met by a few nods of agreement, and then left quietly undisputed. But that day Ithaca's most disappointing truth turned into something different. Something important.

WK was a freckly fine arts major armed with a fiery, outspoken demeanor. His artistic tendencies provided well-needed contrast to the pragmatic white collar aspirations of his housemates. But on that afternoon he set down his paintbrush and unbeknownst to him, began speaking like a doctorate in sociology. He started outlining qualitative evidence for his theory that the people of the world, not just Ithacan women, were generally unattractive. His accompanying numerical rating system, which I've dubbed Koppenhaver's Precept of (Un)Attractiveness, accurately fit this dim outlook for aesthetic beauty.

Scienticians are always building models for the purpose of fitting and predicting observed data. A normally distributed set of data, also known as The Bell Curve, is one of statistics' most recognizable assertions. In a normal distribution a majority of observed data is grouped around the mean (or average) with fewer and fewer data points symmetrically trailing off in either direction. For example, if you asked a group of American Caucasian males their height you'd likely find the results to be normally distributed, with most respondents grouped around the average answer of 5'9" and very few people registering below 5'0" or above 6'6". If you charted the results of this survey you'd see a bell shape resembling this chart's blue line (vertical Y axis = % of people who responded within the corresponding height range, horizontal X axis = height). But not everything fits neatly inside a bell shaped normal distribution. The also popular lognormal distribution is defined by more parameters, making its asymmetric shape capable of fitting other complex natural and sociological phenomena. A good example of this distribution is American annual incomes. From a range of $0 to $1,000,000,000 it's not hard to imagine many data points gathered around $40-50k with fewer and fewer points trailing off towards higher sums. The red line on the chart shows a generic lognormal distribution that would resemble the graphed results of this data set (vertical Y axis = % of people who responded within the corresponding annual income range, horizontal X axis = annual incomes).

WK's simple yet poignant assertion is that human attractiveness, much like American annual incomes, is described by a lognormal distribution, not normally as is commonly believed. The classic method of rating one's attractiveness is by use of the simple zero to ten scale with ten being the most attractive. Without giving it much thought people typically gravitate towards a normally distributed scale, assigning ratings that have a central tendency around the middle grade of five. In WK's distribution a five should consider a career in modeling. According to Koppenhaver's Precept of (Un)Attractiveness most people register in the two to three range, with exponentially fewer people occupying slots approaching ten. "I've never actually seen a seven in person, and a perfect ten probably doesn't exist," he asserted that afternoon.

From that point on I decided to adopt this rating methodology. Fortunately, the superficial exercise of attractiveness rating comes up less and less often as you get older. Imagine having to explain to your girlfriend why a rating of four out of ten is actually quite flattering! After logging almost eight years in New York City I now wonder if I've ever seen an eight or a nine in the flesh. Whenever I overhear someone make a comment like “She’s a perfect ten,” or “He’s just a six, nothing special,” I think back to that sunny Sunday and laugh.

Velvet Rope Scars

The below note was written by a friend (who will remain anonymous) in response to a query for "upper crust" nightlife recommendations. A sad, hilarious, and telling commentary on a slice of New York nightlife written by one who isn't famous, connected, attractive, or female enough to wander carelessly through bouncer protected gates.

>>>>>>

K:

You may want to also forward this commentary to your friend.

These pearls of wisdom do not come from any innate hipness I possess, but from brute-force trial and error over the years in the NYC bar/lounge/club scene.

1) Unless you are going to a private party, very little is happening in NYC until **after** 11pm. Some of the hottest places don't even open up their doors until 11pm. Most places peak around 2:30am and tend to peter out by 3:30am. That being said, if you can get into a good place before 11pm it may make sense to just grab a few drinks in a relaxed setting (albeit devoid of girls) until it becomes more populated. This strategy will work at almost all places with the exception of the Rose Bar @ The Gramercy Park Hotel and other X-Level establishments where they will sweep out the Riff-Raff at 11pm.

2) Bottle Service: If it is within your budget this will work wonders in two dimensions: it will maker it infinitely easier to get into any of the hot places (especially as we may be on the precipice of a economic recession) AND more importantly it gives you a Home Base of Operations. This Home Base is very important for several reasons in that it enables you to have a secure seating area in the VIP area and serves as an attractive lure for a particular type of woman. The VIP is not Nirvana, it does not make you smarter, better looking or more witty. But it is less crowded place and extremely easy to invite people back there.

The bottle is approx $400 all-in per bottle of liquor (with tip and tax). That price will not change much from bar-to-bar. Having the table and bottle is the surest path to a fun-night (I know its unimaginative, but it works) and you can be creative with forming your own little party within a party. (ie you, your friends and 6 Norweigian Airline Stewardess, etc).

Most clubs have a minimum botle requirement for a group of people depnding on the guy/girl ratio.
Here are a few permutations of the bottle requirements for both an "A" level bar and a "B" level bar (with A being more popular). "X" level bars have been omitted.

Two guys
A-Level: 2 bottles
B-Level: 1 bottle

Two guys one girl
A-Level: 2 bottles
B-Level: 1 bottle

Three guys
A-Level: 2-3 bottles
B-Level: 1-2 bottles

Two guys Two girls
A-Level: 2 bottles
B-Level: 2 bottles

Two guys Three girls
A-Level: 2 bottles
B-Level: 2 bottles

Remember if you are buying bottles and inviting guests to your table, be sure to budget approx one extra bottle per every 3 people getting the table as the guests will certainly want a drink and it may take a few iterations to find the correct group of guests to stay for the duration.

Examples of A level clubs: Bungaloo 8, Marquee , Cain, Tenjune, Socialista
Examples of B level Clubs: Home, Guest House, PM

Gentrify Gripe

Houston between 2nd Avenue and Bowery.

David vs. Goliath.