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Food

How Much Do New Yorkers Tip On Food Delivery?

By

Jen Carlson

Published Mar 4, 2015

Modified Mar 5, 2015

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By

Jen Carlson

Published Mar 4, 2015

Modified Mar 5, 2015

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(Photo via alexiustan's flickr)

The national average tipping percentage (year round) on food delivery is 13.9%, and New Yorkers come in just below average, at 13.1%. These numbers come from the GrubHub and Seamless teams, who've shared data on how residents in the five boroughs perform at the tipping game. Their data only includes tips given on credit cards, not cash.

One main talking point has been how to adjust your tip during bad weather. Seamless did a day-by-day tipping breakdown over the last year (since January 2014) to identify correlations between tipping percentage and weather patterns—"In doing so, we were able to find NYC's highest tipping-tipping day." That was January 21st, 2014—which saw temperatures hovering around 12 degrees, as well as snowfall—when the average tipping percentage was about 16%.

On January 26th of this year, when we were due to be hit with another big storm, tips spiked 9% higher than the city's year-round average. Here are the stats for that day broken down by borough:

They noted that "tips saw the biggest jump after 6 p.m., when they were up to 16% higher than normal."

Where do the best tippers live? Not in any of the five boroughs—GrubHub says that "Denver has consistently been our highest-tipping city." They added, "NYC doesn't crack the top 25 cities."

UPDATE: We asked Seamless/GrubHub if they take a percentage of the tips, and they told us, "The whole tip is distributed to drivers, in accordance with law and contract (which we enforce). If a diner gives a $3 tip on their credit card, then $3 goes to the delivery driver (regardless of the individual restaurant fee). If we find out that a restaurateur passes our fee on to tips in any way, we remind them of the law and remove them from our platform."

Tagged

delivery

grubhub

seamless

tipping

weather

original

Jen Carlson

Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.

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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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