Name:    13 June 2010
Date:    Jun 13, 2010 6:17 pm
Map:    Google Maps
Distance:    48.3 miles
Elapsed Time:    1:50:30
Avg Speed:    26.2 mph
Max Speed:    55.1 mph
Avg Pace:    02′ 17″ per mile
Min Altitude:    656 ft
Max Altitude:    819 ft
Start Time:    2010-06-13T22:17:01Z

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1. Just like a waiter, he doesn’t make minimum wage unless you tip.
2. Unlike a waiter, he has the substantial operating expenses of gas and wear and tear on a car (currently $0.585/mile).
3. If you don’t tip, he might spit in your food.

The minimum adequate tip would therefore be one that would enable the driver to make minimum wage during the round trip to and from your house after covering his expenses. Even for a 15 minute, 5 mile round-trip delivery, that’s about $3.50. Very few people actually tip enough.

That said, I’ve pretty much come to accept that a certain fraction of the public simply doesn’t tip. Where I work, it seems to be about 10%. That number increases dramatically, however, if you define a non-tip to include rounding up to the nearest dollar. With cash orders, this makes sense: I don’t carry change, so unless you have exact change ready for me (about 5% of deliveries) you have no choice but to “tip” me the remainder. Just to be clear, telling the driver “keep the change” is not a tip, it’s an insult.

Doing the same thing on a credit card receipt, though, is doubly insulting. It tells the driver in no uncertain terms that you want NOT to tip, but feel obligated, although your guilt can be assuaged by an amount that likely won’t pay for the gas required to bring you your food. The driver will therefore return from the delivery with LESS MONEY than he had before. Some people will try a variation on this theme by signing the credit card receipt without filling in the “Tip” and “Total” lines, hoping I won’t notice. I actually prefer customers who boldly write “0.00″, standing up for whatever warped philosophy they think they’re defending. If you’re going to cheat me out of my livelihood, the least you can do is be honest with yourself.

If you have the sagacity and strength of character not to listen to the radio anymore, you might not know that I’m talking about Kid Rock’s new single, which I’m assuming is titled “All Summer Long”, since calling it “Sweet Home Alabama” wouldn’t gain him any cachet in his target demographic (8-13 year old upper-middle-class white males), who have never heard of Lynyrd Skynyrd. I’d Google the title, but I don’t want to give Mr. Rock the benefit of another pity hit.

It isn’t even that the song, or Kid’s music in general, is bad per se. His particular brand of rap is certainly less aesthetically offensive than most, and I’ll be the first to admit that he got a chuckle out of me the first time I heard the line, “I’m not straight out of Compton, I’m straight out’ the trailer.” It’s just that by this point in his “career” I would hope he could afford to pay someone to compose background riffs for him when he runs out of ideas, rather than ruining Skynyrd for me.

I know that artists don’t create in a vacuum, and all art is derivative of other art, blah blah blah. I’m just not clear on how an argument about art pertains to Kid Rock. I’m assuming that there’s an album of some sort to back up this single, in much the same way that car companies will sell a single car so that they can race it in “production” divisions, which I will be boycotting, in addition to destroying any copies I happen upon in record stores. And so at this point I must reluctantly conclude that Kid Rock is a waste of oxygen. I don’t mean that in the metaphorical sense. I mean that there are literally trillions of chemical reactions in which an oxygen molecule could participate which are more worthwhile than the ones keeping Kid Rock alive.

Fuck you, Kid Rock.