A pizza driver’s meager tip has snowballed into something much bigger.
On Jan. 11, Lieutenant Richard Craig posted a video to TikTok, where he is known as “Officer Craig,” showing his interaction with Connor Stephanoff, a 20-year-old delivery driver for Rockstar Pizza in Brownsburg, Indiana.
The video, which starts by showing blizzardy conditions on a snow-covered street, highlighted the employee’s work ethic in the inclement weather.
“You delivering a pizza, bro?” Craig asks Stephanoff, who replies in the affirmative.
The delivery man trudges through the snow in sneakers and sweats. Stephanoff points to the distance, down a snowy hill, to indicate where he had to park and walk from.
“Did you get a good tip?” Craig asked Stephanoff.
“Two dollars,” Stephanoff replied.
“Are you kidding me?” Craig said. “Man, cold-blooded! Two dollars! Look at this man! This man walked through hell and high water to deliver a pizza.”
Stephanoff tells Craig that the full tip for the $40 pizza order was $2.15, then continues on his way up the hill to serve his customer.
In a follow-up video, Craig says he couldn’t let Stephanoff go without contributing to his tip with the money he had on him — $15.
“Because that’s the right thing to do,” Craig says before showing viewers the large houses in the neighborhood. “It’s not like these people didn’t have the money to tip that young man. Absolutely insane. Do better, folks!”
The comments section was incensed at the tiny tip that Stephanoff got in return for his efforts.
“A neighborhood like that and tipping $2 🤦🏼♀️,” wrote one user on TikTok. “If you’re coming out in the snow for me. I’m giving you at least a $20 tip for one pizza.”
“Seriously unacceptable to tip $2 for delivery even if it’s sunny & 80 degrees,” commented another.
“It was terrible,” Stephanoff, who lives with his grandmother and brorows her car to deliver pizza, tells TODAY.com. “There was no grip on the roads at all, and it was cold and snowing, nonstop.”
But, he says, not delivering that pizza didn’t even occur to him that day — regardless of tip.
Craig didn’t want his support for Stephanoff to be limited to the contents of his own wallet, so he started a GoFundMe on Jan. 12 — “Support Rockstar Pizza Driver’s Dedication” — hoping to raise a few hundred dollars for the pizza driver.
Rockstar Pizza also commended Stephanoff in a Facebook post and shared the fundraising link. Its owner also wrote a clarifying note: “At no point did we force anyone to come to work or deliver. There is no pressure or implication that there will be repercussions for not coming to work due to weather.”
“If I could raise $500 for this kid, that’s enough to make me forget some of the bad things that people had done, you know?” Craig tells TODAY.com. “The next day, I checked it at like, two o’clock, and it was at about $1,500. I’m like, holy s—, I was just blown away.”
In the three weeks since Craig started the GoFundMe, it has raised over $41,000 from nearly 2,000 donations.
“I found out around Sunday morning,” Stephanoff says, adding that when his grandmother told him about the fundraiser, he didn’t think much of it — until he saw the donations racking up. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is real!’”
Stephanoff says he plans on buying a car with the money so he doesn’t have to use his grandmother’s, and he hopes to help her with bills, too.
“If I still got some leftover, hopefully college,” Stephanoff says, adding that he wants to major in either history or business.
