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Corporate America Thinks We Can’t Do Math
How tipping has become a scam
“Hey, hon, come check this out.”
I put down my book and walked down the hall to my wife’s office. It was a quarter to six on a Saturday night. In fifteen minutes the babysitter would arrive, and my wife was ordering a pizza for our three sons. When I stepped into her office she pointed at her monitor, open to the pizza place’s checkout page. It invited her to tip the delivery driver and gave her three options: fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five percent.
“Just confirm for me that I’m not crazy,” she said, and that’s when I saw it.
“What the hell?”
The price of the pizza was a little under $18, with a $4.99 delivery fee. Add in the sales tax, and the total came to just over $23. Now, fifteen percent of eighteen is $2.70, twenty percent is $3.60, and twenty-five percent is $4.50. If you calculate the tip off the total including taxes and fees, fifteen percent of twenty-three is $3.45, twenty percent is $4.60, and twenty-five percent is $5.75.
I could figure that in my head in a matter of seconds, thanks to the nuns who drilled me on multiplication tables in my youth. But that’s not what the “tip calculator” was proposing. No, according to this particular national pizza chain, employing an esoteric form of arithmetic that clearly lay beyond my meager faculties, fifteen percent of twenty-three was just shy of $9, and twenty-five percent was more than $11.
I asked my wife to restart the order, in case it was a glitch. She did, but now the suggested tip actually increased! And on the third go-round, it increased yet again. Now, according to the website, twenty-five percent of our total was $17, or nearly one hundred percent of the cost of the pizza before taxes and fees.
I was baffled, but my wife, noticing the clock on her computer as it inched towards 6pm, drew in her breath.
“It’s surge pricing,” she said.
Obviously the factoring of percentages is a purely abstract exercise, having no truck with real-world minutiae like the vicissitudes of supply and demand. In the straight-edged space of Euclidean perfection, ten percent of a hundred is always ten, regardless of things like rush hour…
