Going to Vegas for three days and will be visiting different casinos. What is a fair tip for a taxi ride of about a mile or two?

I don't know Jim. I live in Vegas. They say 20% is standard. But whenever I take a cab in which the fare is low I tip more....maybe for a 6 dollar trip I will give the driver a 10 and tell him to keep the change. They don't make a lot of money. But 20% is standard.

We did the same on our latest trip there--we made sure we tipped 15-20%, but ended up tipping more when the fare was low. In our case, we usually had 4 adults in the cab, so that felt right to us. Those short rides are hell for the drivers--they fight traffic and wait at lights for $10, then have to join the cab line and wait for the next low fare.

Yikes jim. Because $10 is cheap for 4 people to take a ride and the drivers need to make a living.

Not to mention they keep drunk drivers off the road. Yikes is right.

Jim> tip what is in your heart. jimjim> oh my goodness! if you tipped fifteen percent on a 3 dollar taxi cab fare your tip would come to forty-five cents! that would be forty-five cents less to put in the saddle bags you have sewed on your casket! LOL

If a quart of Coke were on sale for $1, would you insist on paying $5 because it serves four people? To give a driver $4.00 when there is $3.15 on the meter (25%) is reasonable, but to give $10.00 for a $6.00 trip (40%) makes sense only for those who want to be a big shot.

What do we have going here? A hack driver gets in line at the taxi stand. The driver waits in line for his turn to get passengers. It is a hellish ride in traffic to the casino and the fare comes to $3.00 dollars. The driver receives his 45 cent tip then fights his way back into the taxi stand line to wait for the next passenger. Perhaps the driver is worried the 45 cents will put him into a higher tax bracket. He thinks it over as he waits in line for his next passenger. Huh! Talk about cheapskates! By the way, what is wrong with the people from Topeka? I have known some fine people from there. And they were not CHEAPSKATES! And they did not go around bad mouthing people that live in other places. Maybe they have better manners than CHEAPSKATES.

I took a cab from one of the casinos to the airport and the meter read $12 and change. I handed the the driver a single bill. He said thanks, dropped it on the seat, and waited for me to leave. I had to tell him that I wanted change from the $20 bill that I gave him. He apologized, saying that he didn't notice that it was a 20. Right.

"If a quart of Coke were on sale for $1, would you insist on paying $5 because it serves four people? To give a driver $4.00 when there is $3.15 on the meter (25%) is reasonable, but to give $10.00 for a $6.00 trip (40%) makes sense only for those who want to be a big shot."

If someone served that quart of Coke to four people:

A) It would cost much more than $1 anyway and

B) I would tip according to the level of service that I received and that would put my bill well over $5.

We're talking about a *service" anyway. Not an item. Cab drivers are humans. Not quarts of sugar water.

A typical scenario for a cab driver is that s/he pays the cab company a gate fee in order to have the cab for a 10-hour shift. That gate can go as high as $125 in cities that have substantial demand for cabs. Any money the cabbie makes that day goes toward that gate and anything over the gate is their take-home. Mr. cher-cher was an SF cabbie for 7 years before he finally came to terms with the fact that it is a totally and completely thankless career path. No benefits, no healthcare, no retirement, no vacation, no sick leave, no love from the cab companies who act like *they're* the customer when, really, it's the other way around. He finally walked when the owner of his company told him to pay $700 to make up for lost gates while Mr. cher_cher was dealing with his grandfather's funeral. It didn't matter that he had cleared it in advance and that other drivers used the cab and paid the gates in his absence. Yet there was no recourse because the companies have so much power.

Cab drivers work their butts off to take home a pittance. They can't take breaks, rarely even stopping to go to the bathroom for fear of losing a good fare. In times of economic downturn, there are days when they pay the cab companies out of their own pockets because they can't even make the gate after a 10-hour shift of driving around in total futility.

I don't tip generously because I want to be the big shot. I tip well because I possess a characteristic known as empathy.

A .45 tip is an insult and people like jimjim are far too frequent. That's OK, though, because there is something out there called karma and I'm sure people like him are miserable enough on their own.

And if anybody has any more of an issue with that, don't blame the cabbies. Blame the companies for exploiting an underrepresented workforce and consider having the cities and counties take over the cab industry as part of their public transportation programs.

In my view $3 is $3. People who would drive a block to save $3 on a tank of gas won't drive a block to save $3 on a new TV set. But it's the same $3. Similarly, those who would give $3 to an underpaid taxi driver won't give $3 to an underpaid fast-food employee. What's with that?

cher cher> atta girl! you tell it like it is, thanks for that post.


jimjim> what was that last mumble about? do you stiff the waitresses too? is that what you are saying? are you saying you give the waitresses an even more crummy tip than the taxi? yeee gadds!!!!!!!!!

Author: mrwunrfl
Date: 10/17/2004, 11:21 am
Message:
I took a cab from one of the casinos to the airport and the meter read $12 and change. I handed the the driver a single bill. He said thanks, dropped it on the seat, and waited for me to leave. I had to tell him that I wanted change from the $20 bill that I gave him. He apologized, saying that he didn't notice that it was a 20. Right.


This is too funny. If it was a single bill and he didn't realize it was a twenty, yet DID realize it was enough to cover the $12 bill, what were the options? He thought it was a $15 bill? Or a $50?

You got it, Patrick. The really sad part of it was that only told him to give me $5 back. Because of my (partial) lapse, he got a $2.x0 tip after trying to rip me off.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for cabbies. I live about 13 miles from Dulles airport, at the end of the toll road. The taxis at IAD are a monopoly concession. The fare from the airport is around $26 and on more than one occaison, I had drivers grumble about the low fare. This was not grumbling about a bad tip, it was because they were expecting a $50 fare into the District.

A $4.00 tip on a $6.00 fare is not a 40% tip, but a whopping 66% tip! Are we supposed to feel sorry for the cab driver that we weren't riding from Mandalay Bay to downtown? They'll get some long rides and they'll get some short rides. Hey, that's the nature of the business - it all evens out.

If the ride is short, he can go pick up another fare right away. People say the taxi lines move quickly.

On my last trip to Vegas a couple of weeks ago, one of the cab drivers was trying to explain the 'system' drivers have. The guys who only work the strip, he said, are greedy and basically make a lot of money driving back and forth in short time periods. Their dispatchers will be desperately calling for cabs in other areas for people needing a ride, and they will ignore the calls because they're raking in the easy money. (Then he said I should marry him, but that's another Vegas story for another day.)

So I tip the standard 15-20% but if the cabbie is a jerk or tries to rip me off, I'll tip less.

I did give one extra generous tip, though. One night I happened to be a cabbie's first fare of the shift. He didn't know it, but I had just hit a jackpot.....anyway, he was really nice and was very enthusiastic about talking about his favorite foods and his favorite restaurants. I think I doubled whatever the tip was supposed to be and told him I wanted to start his shift out on a good note.

Wonder if it was a coincidence that the blackjack tables were so hot the rest of the trip? hmmmm.

This spirited debate has taken my mind off the race for President and has reminded me of some sayings my mother liked: A penny saved is a penny earned; A fool and his money are soon parted; Some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Thank you for the self-revelation.

It was karma, Melissa!
I do the same thing sometimes...

Melissa, the blackjack tables were good because you were having a lucky trip, nothing to do with how much you tipped the cab driver. You had already won a jackpot that day.