Would you tip $10 on a $1,500 pizza delivery?

Customers of pizza joints and casual-dining establishments should probably keep in mind that not only do the underlings they shoo away between servings of low-cost food rely on tips to live and to balance out their tax burden, but they're not afraid to call you out for being stingy. Reddit has become a compendium of such service-industry horror stories, with the latest coming Tuesday from a user named jfastman who posted the receipt showing a $10 tip added to a $1,453.95 bill.

That's less than a 1% tip, big spender. Meanwhile, one person had to haul 85 pizzas from Point A to Point B. That 10 bucks is well below the $2-per-pizza that the Cornell Hotel School considers a baseline tip for a delivery, according to CNNMoney. That would come out $170 in this case, but if that seems a bit steep, a reasonable 10% tip would set a buyer back $145.

Seriously, 5% and an apology would have at least given the poor pizza schlepper $72.50 or so to play with. But $10 for a literal wall of pizza you had no problem dropping nearly $1,500 on? Mind you, those pizzas went for a not-so-cost-effectiv​e $17 a pop.

Maybe this delivery person should look at the forlorn face of Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill he got and consider himself or herself lucky. It could be a lot worse. He or she could be the server at Applebee's (DIN) who got stiffed by someone wondering why wait staff should get an 18% tip when "I only give God 10%."

Or he or she could work for Denny's (DENN) franchise owner John Metz, who owns 30 locations in Florida and put his servers in the crossfire of the Obamacare debate. He initially proposed tacking on a 5% Obamacare fee to pay for mandated employee health care and presented customers with two options: "They can either pay it and tip 15% or 20%, or if they really feel so inclined, they can reduce the amount of tip they give to the server."

Denny's CEO John Miller then promptly spat in Metz's cereal by scolding him into an apology, but the leaders of other chains have already discussed cutting worker hours to avoid giving them mandatory health care.

Metz isn't entirely wrong, though. With the restaurant business becoming increasingly focused on value and decreasingly interested in paying for various extras, there are two options: Tip-averse customers can keep stiffing servers and get publicly ridiculed, or we can do away with the gratuity system altogether and boost the average wage.

Since plenty of Americans grouse about that second option as well, get ready for the hour-and-a-half delivery time that comes with living in the low-priority cheapskate house.

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