What 15% Gets You
I have to say I absolutely love the new credit card functionality that’s hit all the NYC cabs in the past few months. This is tremendously convenient for a couple of reasons. One, it means not being dependent on the availability of your bank’s ATMs. And two, the taxi card-swiper calculates your tip for you! This is a godsend for people like me who struggle with the basics of math – including, but not limited to: adding, subtracting, and multiplying.
The swiper functionality is such that it gives you, I think, three tip options: 10%, 15%, and 20%. I usually choose 15% - sometimes 10% and never 20%. The other night I was leaving a party with my friend Joe and we walked together to Times Square to hail cabs. He said that he always gives cab drivers two or three dollars, no matter what the fare. Ludicrous on the face of it, this rule actually makes a smidgeon of sense to me once I do the math. In my case, most of my cab rides seem to hover between $15 and $20. Conveniently, a 15% tip for these fares would be around two or three bucks as well. Good rule!
It’s not that I take a lot of cabs, but I seem to have done in the past week. I don’t like doing it because I already pay $81 a month to ride the train. One cab ride on one night can easily set me back a week’s worth of subway rides. Think about that. All the same, there is little I hate more than waiting on a sweaty late-night subway platform for some miserable line like the D or the W or the fucking V.
Last week I went to see Evan at Parkside Lounge and afterwards we headed to the Delancey Street F, a miserable little trench in the best of times, made worse by the late hour. We actually stopped at an apocalyptically noxious McDonalds on Delancey and Essex so I could pee. We then headed down to the station and Evan went for the M train. Now, the M train is a pretty crappy line, and normally I would say that only losers take it. However, in this case, Evan only had to go as far as Fulton Street, which was just four stops away. I, on the other hand, faced a long trek all the way up to Columbus Circle and then a transfer to the 1 to 110th Street. I think I stood on the platform for about two minutes and then I was like “fuck it.” I came back up to street-level and hailed a cab on Delancey and listened to the news on my iPhone all the way up the West Side Highway.
The swiper functionality is such that it gives you, I think, three tip options: 10%, 15%, and 20%. I usually choose 15% - sometimes 10% and never 20%. The other night I was leaving a party with my friend Joe and we walked together to Times Square to hail cabs. He said that he always gives cab drivers two or three dollars, no matter what the fare. Ludicrous on the face of it, this rule actually makes a smidgeon of sense to me once I do the math. In my case, most of my cab rides seem to hover between $15 and $20. Conveniently, a 15% tip for these fares would be around two or three bucks as well. Good rule!
It’s not that I take a lot of cabs, but I seem to have done in the past week. I don’t like doing it because I already pay $81 a month to ride the train. One cab ride on one night can easily set me back a week’s worth of subway rides. Think about that. All the same, there is little I hate more than waiting on a sweaty late-night subway platform for some miserable line like the D or the W or the fucking V.
Last week I went to see Evan at Parkside Lounge and afterwards we headed to the Delancey Street F, a miserable little trench in the best of times, made worse by the late hour. We actually stopped at an apocalyptically noxious McDonalds on Delancey and Essex so I could pee. We then headed down to the station and Evan went for the M train. Now, the M train is a pretty crappy line, and normally I would say that only losers take it. However, in this case, Evan only had to go as far as Fulton Street, which was just four stops away. I, on the other hand, faced a long trek all the way up to Columbus Circle and then a transfer to the 1 to 110th Street. I think I stood on the platform for about two minutes and then I was like “fuck it.” I came back up to street-level and hailed a cab on Delancey and listened to the news on my iPhone all the way up the West Side Highway.
posted by Keith Lubeley at
12:42 PM
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