Saturday night was an unusally expensive cab night for me. I took a cab to the West Village for a birthday party. Then went to Bartini in Hells Kitchen with two friends. From there, we went to the eagle in Chelsea-ish. Then to Eastern Bloc in the East Village. And then, finally home in Gramercy. Add in drinks to the equation and you can only imagine the amount of cash I disepensed with on that night alone. New York, rightfully, has a very well-deserved reputation for being an exorbitantly expensive place to live...to a degree most people who have never lived here will never understand.
That said, I see many people try to cut corners in the worst imaginable ways, and one that gets me is the crappy tips given to cab drivers. Cab drivers work absurdly long shifts. They get taxed like crazy. Gas prices are an all-time high. If they want to invest in the medallion, even more money is taken away from them than the standard fees they have to pay to the cab company. And then they have to live on whatever is left over...often trying to support a family on what must be a very meager income they have to work many hours to achieve. Is giving them 2-3 bucks instead of 1 gonna change your night? No. But it will change their income in the aggregate.
Just a thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment