Last semester I was chatting with a merchants-on-points delivery guy who lamented to me that, apparently, Duke was taking 18 percent of all tips he got doing deliveries to Duke. At the time, I was writing the “Monday, Monday” column and didn’t want to accidentally blow my cover by emailing around for information on the matter so I opted to pass on the story until I was free from my anonymous binds. But now here I stand once more—named, visible and fully accountable for every poor joke and misreported fact I type.
Once I began looking into the facts, things became more concrete. Most of the food truck and delivery vendors I’ve spoken to this semester confirmed that Duke was taking about 17.2 percent of merchants-on-points earnings—both 17.2 percent of gross sales and 17.2 percent of tips provided through the “Add Tip” feature on those iPods you enter your Duke pin into. Of course, I didn’t speak to all vendors (there are rather a lot of them) and so some may lose different percentages of tips or even not lose any at all (which is the case at the Loop Bar, for example). But if so, those lucky vendors aren’t really my concern. My concern is that Duke is taking anyone’s tips at all.
Let’s be clear here, people; for those workers subjected to this tithe, Duke is basically taking away every fifth tip they earn. (And yes, fastidious defenders of mathematical accuracy in on-campus publications—I am aware that 17.2 percent is not actually equal to 1/5. But the phrase, “Duke takes 43/250 of workers’ tips,” just doesn’t pack the same rhetorical punch, you know?).
I did contact Duke Dining asking for clarification on this matter, by the way. They basically said that any money to do with food points is all based on commission, explaining that what Duke takes goes toward covering Duke Dining’s overhead. That’s particularly exciting because “It is against the law for the employer to require that any part of the tip received becomes the property of the employer,” even if that tip is allegedly going towards overhead.
Much as I’d love for this to be a career-making exposé in which I reveal that Duke has been illegally appropriating minimum wage workers’ tips, I doubt there’s any law breaking afoot. Duke is, after all, not the employer for any of the delivery people or food truck workers, and these vendors have all agreed in advance to pay a certain percentage of their sales for the privilege of selling on Duke’s campus. So I suppose I’ll have to settle for this being an exposé about Duke legally taking minimum wage workers’ tips.
And that money taken really can stack up. Look at it this way: to order merchants-on-points, the minimum fee is $10. Let’s imagine that you’re running short on food points so you’ve decided to just tip 10 percent on your somehow-exactly-ten-dollar order. Duke takes 17.2 percent of that tip. Now let’s conservatively imagine that this is the norm for a Duke order. Let’s also conservatively estimate that a delivery person for a popular near-campus pizza place might make thirty of these deliveries a night. Assume that this is a five days a week, fifty weeks a year job, and you have Duke nabbing $1,290 worth of a single MOP delivery person’s tips a year. To put that in more concrete terms, that means Duke is taking the equivalent of at least one month’s rent from these workers.
$1,290 dollars, conservatively. Do you know what you could get for that much money? For one thing, you could buy 25 fifty-dollar “Duke Dining gift cards,” which I have recently discovered are a real thing. Duke Dining gift cards: the gift of choice this Valentine’s Day for anyone looking to quietly encourage their partner to dump them.
Now, I don’t want to make out like anyone at Duke or Duke Dining is actively enforcing this policy. I find it somewhat unlikely that the ever-pleasant President Brodhead is sitting in his office maniacally twiddling his moustache while fanning himself with the ill-gotten gains of The Great Food Point Swindle. As some of the vendors I spoke to suggested, it may well be that the current payment verification system simply isn’t set up in such a way that it can differentiate money gained through tips from money gained through sales. But what I’m getting at is that that needs to be fixed.
For one thing, I think we as students really should have been told about this. We’re already required to give Duke a large amount of money for food points and for the university to then re-appropriate some of the product they give us in return through the shady mechanism of tip-tithing—and to do so without telling us, no less—is completely indefensible.
But more important is the fact that this tip money would be of value to the workers way more than it could be for Duke. For the university to so miserly insist on taking not only 17.2 percent of gross sales but 17.2 percent of tips given as a gift directly to delivery people and food truck workers is positively Scrooge-esque.
Duke: you are a university with a $2 billion yearly budget. If you’re really that interested in scrounging money back, I daresay you’d do better by restraining yourself from building $2 million dollar glass boxes every so often than by taking 20 cents from the guy who just delivered my Cinna-Zos.
Bron Maher is a Trinity senior. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.