Pizza Girl, a pizza delivery girl who is a regular contributor on Slice, tallied up and analyzed the time she spends on various duties in her pizzeria.  This is just the first part in a series, but so far she determined that she spends 67% of her shift driving.

According to her pay schedule, she makes less money while driving ($4.95/hr) than she does while in the pizzeria ($7.50).

For starters, I think we should looked at the expected value of her shift:  E[x] = .67*4.95 + .33*7.50 + E[tip] = 5.79 + E[tip].

So we can see–assuming driving consistently makes up 67% of her time and the other 33% is in the pizzeria–that she has to earn $6.71 in tips, on average, to hit the $12.50/hr mark, which is what she considers a successful shift.

I’m looking forward to the rest of her analysis, so stay tuned.

Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science and AI firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Government Data Science and AI Conferences and author of R for Everyone.