Contrary to what some customers might think, those fees don’t necessarily go to the men and women delivering the pizzas. In addition to their small hourly wages, delivery drivers get reimbursed for the cost of wear and tear to their cars, but the reimbursement rate has nothing to do with the delivery fee. In fact, it usually adds up to about half the fee that customers are charged. Some customers, meanwhile, spot the delivery charge on the receipt and decide to skimp on the tip.
The way many drivers see it, the fees serve as a discrete price increase that ultimately eats into their pay.
“Unfortunately, driver reimbursements have not gone up in sync with those delivery charges,” said Greg Maschok, who’s been delivering pizza for nearly 11 years and runs a
lively online message board devoted to drivers’ issues. “A lot of people are under the assumption that the driver gets it. The delivery fees hurt our tips, and our tips are the main reason we do this job. I’d love to see them go away.”
The fees aren’t just the subject of online posts from drivers like Maschok — they’re now the subject of lawsuits. In
Minnesota and
Massachusetts, drivers have filed suits against Domino’s, claiming that by charging such fees and then keeping them, the company is violating state laws. This month, a Massachusetts judge sided with the drivers in
denying Domino’s request to have that lawsuit thrown out.
The legal question in that case is whether or not Domino’s does a sufficient job in letting customers know that the drivers don’t get to keep the fee — or, in other words, that customers need to be tipping on top of that charge,
since many drivers, like restaurant servers, are paid below the normal minimum wage and rely on gratuities to get by.
