The Secrets of Your Delivery Guy's Hustle

When Alex Thompson, then a grad student in sociology, started a part-time delivery job in his northeastern college town, he found himself overwhelmed by the intricacies of the tipping process. “Anytime that I would bring it up—god, I was so embarrassed,” he says.

But embarrassment doesn’t bring home the bacon. So in the year that Thompson worked for Jake’s—not the restaurant’s real name, but the moniker the sociologist gave the calzone spot in a paper he published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography last year—he found ways to bring in money without sacrificing his dignity. There was one semi-official rule, passed down from Jake’s laid-back manager: You can’t outright ask for tips. Everything else was left up to Thompson and his band of fellow delivery guys.