Fact, but you should definitely tip!

Just because a tip isn’t required as part of your food delivery order, you should almost always still add on a tip for your food delivery courier! Food delivery couriers or drivers are gig economy workers. That means a lot of their take home pay comes in the form of tips from people like you who are ordering food. If you and everyone else doesn’t tip them, they will take home a significantly smaller portion of the total pay they expect to make.

The standard rate for tipping should apply to a food delivery tip. Somewhere in the range of 10-20% of your food order. Because there are sometimes additional fees attached to a food delivery order (service fee, small cart fee, etc.) that you wouldn’t incur if you ate the meal in a restaurant, you’re best off just tipping based on the cost of the food you ordered, not the total cost with fees included.

An easy rule of thumb is to consider the delivery person like your waiter at a restaurant. You would never not tip a waiter, so why not tip a driver? A lot of people don’t particularly like the manner in which tips are paid. It is true, you have to select the amount you want to tip the driver before they actually come and deliver your food. However, just because you don’t like the system a company has in place, doesn’t mean it’s ok to never tip a person that is more or less working to earn that money.

If for some reason you have a bad experience with a driver that you tipped and you want your money back, you can contact the food delivery support center and speak to them about it. Delivery drivers work hard to deliver food to consumers and tipping them is the responsible thing to do.

Especially now, in the face of Coronavirus, food delivery couriers are on the front lines delivering food to people in need of food options. These people are providing a great service during these difficult times so tipping them is even more important.

So there you have it. While tipping is not necessarily required, it is the right thing to do, and if you have the means to, you should always tip 10-20% to the person working hard to deliver your food!