Author Archives: PedroVerdon

Here’s How Much You Should Tip Your Delivery Guy During A Blizzard

by PedroVerdon Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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As you may have heard, a blizzard is about to destroy life as we know it on the Eastern seaboard. Your children, your children’s children, their children’s children will all learn of this snowfall in stories. If a normal snowstorm is, as the wise men used to say, “God shedding a bit of dandruff,” then what we are about to experience can only be described as, well, God shedding…a lot of dandruff? An avalanche of dandruff? One or two revelations of dandruff? We’re going to be knee-deep in God’s dandruff, is what I’m saying.

If, like mine, your fridge is bare of everything but the essentials (Tabasco, old Bloody Mary mix, a few jars of pickles) then you’re probably hoping to make it through this thing via one of two ancient ways: 1) master-cleanse or, 2) Seamless. Assuming you take the second door, the question becomes: What do you tip a delivery man during a blizzard? What is morally acceptable?

Let’s first dispense with the question of whether or not it is ever acceptable—regardless of gratuity—to order delivery during a blizzard. Leave that to the poets and the ethicists. It doesn’t matter in the real world. People order delivery more during bad weather. Them’s the facts. You are going to order delivery in bad weather.

During really bad weather like blizzards and apocalypses, a lot of restaurants nix their delivery offerings altogether—and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio has banned all non-emergency vehicles, including delivery bikes, after 11pm Monday night. But the ones that manage to stay open—and in this case are willing to deliver on foot well into the night—reap the benefits of constrained supply. If this were Uber, it would result in surge pricing to get more restaurants delivering. But since GrubHub and its parent company Seamless don’t do that—and they shouldn’t unless there is some way of ensuring that the increase goes to the delivery person and isn’t pocketed by the owner—we’re thrown into this sort of state of moral worry. You know in your bones that the guy who brings you pizza in sub-zero weather should get more than the guy who brings you pizza when it’s 68 degrees and sunny. But how much more?

GrubHub Seamless crunched the numbers on tips during last year’s polar vortex and found that residents in some zip codes increased their tips by as much as 24 percent, but on the whole, New Yorkers raised their normal tipping amount by a meager 5 percent. In the Midwest, however, where the temps dipped especially low, gratuities rose higher, to 14 percent in Chicago and 15 percent in Detroit and Minneapolis. Maybe the stereotypes are true and Midwesterners really are the nicest people in the country.

So, more. Tip more. How much should you tip a delivery man in a blizzard? More. More than you usually tip. Whatever you usually tip, tip better. Are you a good tipper normally? Become a great tipper. Are you an awful tipper? Become a just-bad tipper. (Also, you’re a very bad person, and no one likes you very much.)

Want a strict system? Don’t trust your heart to lead you to the right amount? New York magazine can help. Last year they spoke to Adam Eric Greenberg, a UC San Diego Ph.D. who co-authored an empirical analysis on the relationship between weather and tipping. Here’s what he told them:

When the weather is bad, be a bit more generous by tipping 20 to 22 percent. If it’s raining outside, tip 22 to 25 percent. If there’s any snow accumulation, add a dollar or two on top of what you’d tip if it were raining. Having to work as a delivery guy during a blizzard is similar to getting stuck with a party of 20 as a restaurant server, so if you hear weather forecasters promising a “polar vortex, ” a 30 percent tip is not outrageous.

So, there you have it: 30 percent. Anything under 25 percent and you go to Hell.

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Here’s How Much You Should Tip Your Delivery Guy During A Blizzard

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The Middle Class Needs More Income. Faith Will Follow.

by PedroVerdon Posted on December 29, 2014

Mother Jones

Atrios has decided to force me to read Robert Samuelson’s column this morning. Thanks, dude. Here’s the start:

What is curious about the present understandable preoccupation with the middle class is the assumption — both explicit and implicit — that the system is “rigged” (to use Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s favorite term) against this vast constituency of Americans. In reality, just the opposite is true. The system is rigged in favor of the middle class. That’s a natural result for a democracy in which politicians compete more for votes than for dollars.

If you look at how the federal government spends and raises its money, the bias for the middle class and poor becomes plain. In fiscal 2014, about two-thirds of the $3.5 trillion federal budget went for “payments to individuals.” This covers 59 million Social Security recipients, more than 54 million Medicare beneficiaries (overlapping with Social Security), 68 million Medicaid recipients, 46 million food-stamp recipients — and many more.

This really doesn’t make sense. When we speak of the “middle class,” we’re nearly always talking about the working-age middle class. Samuelson surely knows this. But the only programs he calls out by name are specifically directed at the elderly and the working poor. Barely a single dollar of those programs goes to middle-class workers.

What’s the point of this pretense? Beats me. I guess it allows Samuelson to ignore the stagnant middle-class wages and skyrocketing upper incomes of the past 15 years, which is what nearly everyone means when they say the system is rigged against the middle class. And it allows him to make the truly chin-scratching point that during the aughts, the result of this soaring inequality was basically a massive and fraudulent loan program from the rich to the middle class that eventually—and inevitably—broke down, producing a massive economic recession. This, in Samuelson’s view, was “an intellectual, political and social climate that legitimized lax lending policies in the name of promoting middle-class well-being.” If that’s the way we promote middle-class well-being, can I please be transferred to a different class?

I don’t agree with Samuelson much, but this column is a real head scratcher. It’s not as if any of this stuff is ancient history. For more than a decade, income gains have been going almost exclusively to the rich; the housing bust, by contrast, was a calamity mostly for the working and middle classes; and government aid programs have been aimed largely at rescuing the financial sector and (in a pinch) helping the poor. The middle-class folks thrown out of work have gotten a few grudging extensions of our meager unemployment insurance and a slight expansion of our meager disability system, but that’s about it. This is not a “crisis of faith,” as Samuelson puts it. It’s a crisis of not having very much money.

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The Middle Class Needs More Income. Faith Will Follow.

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