Uber's reason to block tipping? Racism | Hacker News Reader

Uber's reason to block tipping? Racism

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38 pointssteven109 comments

I'd prefer to pay a higher price than tip.

When I book a service I want the transaction to be as straightforward as possible. I want to know the price at the time of booking, and I want that to be the price I pay.

The problem with tipping is that people take it extremely personally, they also try to encourage tipping through awkward conversation. I don't want to have to deal with that.

Plus these kinds of apps/services allow me to review the experience directly. I don't have to use money as a way to review the quality.

If they absolutely insist on tipping, it should all be in the app, with pre-set amounts that I can just mash without too much thought, and that I can calculate into the cost before the car even picks me up.

I really really hate American tipping culture. Even after living here a while it just seems so pointless, is completely arbitrary, and makes simple transactions more complicated.

Agree, as someone who grew up in a non-tipping country then became American later in life. I really like visiting countries where tipping is not only not done but actually "considered rude in their culture". Going to Japan in a few weeks...

Within the US I've made my peace with the tipping thing by simply always over-tipping (not excessively, but always 20%+ on meals and bar tab, for example). Although this costs me more money, I prefer to avoid the anxiety over whether the tip is sufficient, appropriate etc. I get to devote my brain-time to other things. I do follow the custom that business owners are not to be tipped.

fwiw when you say that tipping is pointless -- it is not because it serves the purpose of business owners to underpay their workers.

Spent a couple of days in Seattle since I wrote this and was surprised to find that several of the restaurants in which I dined have banned tipping, instead adding a 20% service charge (that they state goes to pay the service staff). Progress.

> I really really hate American tipping culture. Even after living here a while it just seems so pointless, is completely arbitrary, and makes simple transactions more complicated.

You aren't alone. I've grown up American and constantly wonder "do I have to tip for ___" and what is "normal" for the service in question.

In any situation where a business employee cannot significantly improve my experience by going beyond the minimum standard of service set by the employer, it is inappropriate to tip. It is also inappropriate to ask for tips, even passively, by way of a tip jar. Restaurant counter service, where you order and pay at the point of sale, and leave with your tray, is an example of this.

Never tip unless the employee is genuinely helpful to you, saving you time or labor beyond what you may ordinarily expect their employer to provide. Do not tip at all if there is a service charge included on your regular bill.

If the employee is providing you with a one-time personal service or a prolonged but nonpersonal service in conjunction with a regular purchase, you tip 10% the total regular value of the goods, before discounts and before sales tax. This applies to delivery drivers, taxicab or livery drivers, massagers, stylists, or tour guides. Most tip-worthy services that improve the value of your purchase will call for 10%.

If the employee provides you with prolonged personal service, you tip 15%. This is for something like restaurant table service, or golf caddies, or personal shopping assistants.

If you are requesting a service that is technically part of the employee's job, but only tangentially related to the main paid service, tip what you would regularly pay for one drink in a social context, rounded to the nearest dollar. If you drink coffees at IHOP, give $1. If you drink Miller or Bud at the dive bar, give $2. If you drink lattes at Starbucks, give $3. If you drink caramel appletinis at a bar lit by blue LEDs and with bowties on all the bartenders, give $20. This is what you give to porters per suitcase, hotel housekeeping per day, concierge per favor, valet per car retrieval, matre'd per non-snooty table-seating. This is also an appropriate amount to give for a street busker's performance that you enjoyed, or for a crowd-patronage subscription.

For a full standard deviation above and below the median quality of service, those are the only three numbers you need to know: 10%, 15%, and your personal fixed tip amount. For quality between one and two standard deviations below the median, you subtract 5% from a variable tip. For quality above one standard deviation above the median, you add 5% to a variable tip. For service more than two standard deviations below median, you complain to the manager and give a reason why you are not tipping.

If you intend to be a "regular" at any establishment, it is acceptable to tip more than the standard amount when the employees can greet you by name, or remember your "usual", but not until then.

Anyone advising you to tip 20% for median-level service, or 25% for anything, anywhere, does not have any idea what they are talking about--completely clueless. The standard is 10% for delivery or buffet, and 15% for table service. It already scales perfectly well with the menu prices.

Never tip with anything other than cash. Advice is not a tip. Religious tracts are not a tip.

I appreciate your detailed response, I liked your "tip based on what you drink socially" guide, never heard that one before in all of my googling.

However, I think that shows exactly why people hate tipping and would rather just pay a higher fixed cost. Not to mention the whole subjectivity of "quality" from the tippers POV. What you may call a crappy waiter another person may call average.

Finally.. one point my grandpa made to me that has stuck with me

> 15% for table service. It already scales perfectly well with the menu prices.

He would always take me out to breakfast. He told me he tips breakfast waiters what a typical dinner tip size would be. "Just because we are eating pancakes doesn't mean the waiter is working any less". I'm sure there is some whole "work your way up" in the restaurant biz but my anecdotal experience has been older women serving breakfast and young men & women at dinners. Guessing it has to do with being home for kids after school.

Everybody has their own rules for tipping. These are mine. It is because I have them that I do not feel tipping to be confusing or inconsistent or burdensome. I always know how much to tip, to whom, and when.

Just set your own rules and follow them.

As an American I agree completely. I know tipping fine for things like eating at restaurants, but there are tons of services I buy where I have literally no idea what constitutes a fair tip, and constantly wonder if I'm shortchanging people or overtipping. And of course you can't just ask the person because they feel weird about it, and you feel weird asking, and the whole thing is just annoying.

I get that it's a decent motivator to encourage good service, but I think in my entire 10 year consumer history I've left maybe 2 intentionally bad tips for poor service out of hundreds if not thousands of interactions. It can't be that big of a deal.

I agree with this assessment in terms of how I feel as a customer.

But I also think that tipping is used as a form of price discrimination. So what happens to an arbitrary price when tipping is removed might not be as simple and intuitive as we would want.

Either way, as a customer I prefer transactions without tipping because of the friction of trying to manage expectations without enough information.

The point of tipping is to empower the customer and measure their satisfaction. Because the customer has a considerable portion of the bill at his discretion, staff are going to be focused on making his experience as enjoyable as possible. This is what the restaurant owner wants but couldn't feasibly accomplish through direct management.

I used to be very uncomfortable with this power over people's pay; who was I to determine how much money someone was worthy of? But it's not about that. It's about rewarding good service and having a good incentive structure. It's about making sure that the customer comes first.

In this day and age I imagine tipping is also good documentation for performance, should someone need to be fired. Otherwise, the owner might find himself on the wrong end of a bogus discrimination law suit.

> It's about rewarding good service and having a good incentive structure.

I've thought this before, but my current view is that any theoretical benefits of tipping evaporate in the real world. Worse, tipping creates a huge vector for pay abuse, via all kinds of crazy schemes.

Tipping obfuscates actual pay for workers and actual cost for customers. It's delightful to travel in no-tipping countries, and I've uniformly had excellent service abroad. The lack of this "incentive" doesn't seem to have created any service apocalypse.

But the "base" tip is still kind of mandatory even if the waiter just does the very very bare minimum. Why should I have to give a tip at all just for someone bringing a dish to my table? That's what you are paid for, it's not like I can opt out of your service anyway so why not just include it in the price. And if your service is very good then I might give a tip.

It gives you room to go down, if the service is sufficiently sub par.

But is this an issue in areas where tipping is not common? This sounds like it's solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

> This sounds like it's solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

It may well be, but that's a question that would deserve addressing in the parent's rant.

Tipping is not a good tool for a customer to exercise influence over a transaction. If the exchange is anonymous, then tip cannot influence future interactions with the customer. If the exchange is not anonymous, then any attempt to punish with tip basically means you shouldn't go back to that restaurant again, because people are going to interpret it in a very hostile way.

This is exactly the problem that Uber's rating system solves, but without all the arbitrary factors that tipping incidentally includes.

That's a good point. I honestly haven't thought enough about the virtues of rating vs tipping. One potential issue that comes to mind is that people might be more frivolous with a rating than with real money.

I guess you could do an experiment at a restaurant. Give half the tables standard receipts with tip lines, and the other half a receipt that lets you choose a rating.

> One potential issue that comes to mind is that people might be more frivolous with a rating than with real money.

When you rate someone lower than 5 stars, Uber prompts for an explanation. And if you provide one, it often generates a direct followup from Uber support trying to address the problem; if there was anything seriously wrong, addressing the problem often includes either a full refund or some small credit for future rides, and some indication that there'd be an attempt to solve the problem. I think that's a pretty reasonable way to keep ratings meaningful, and actually address any problems that produced a low rating.

So, I actually feel like there's more connection between a rating and actual action, whereas choosing whether to submit a tip or not seems very likely to correlate with factors other than the quality of service.

I think you're talking about how you want tipping to be. In the real world, it is often more a measure of folks unconscious bias than the worker's performance. It's also a great way for management to shift risks onto workers. [this might be the one time Uber does something that isn't designed to shift risk onto their employees]

My experience in Japan, where tipping is frowned upon and service is usually quite excellent, disagrees with this.

I agree entirely with saidajigumi. It's one of those "good ideas in theory, terrible in practice" things. There are more cons than pros and the pros expect an honest and fair system.

But then if the service is not as you wanted it to be, do you first tell them and then lower the tipp, or do you just lower the tipp? Even if something was bad, I'd just want to get out there, having to create another awkward situation is the last thing I would search for.

I hate tipping. It makes me uncomfortable, so I always tip really well, and I feel like I'm paying a niceness tax when I do it.

I will probably consider uber less of an option for short trips around town if tipping is baked in as an optional part of it. The negative feeling at the end of the ride will negate some of the uber convenience, and I'll walk or ride the bus.

That said, I already tipped uber drivers in cash if I was installing a car seat in their car and they were polite about it.

You can argue that Lyft, with it's tipping function, is the better option. I almost never leave a tip on Lyft, but my driver has no idea if I did or not so my rating isn't affected. When tipping happens well after the trip is over, both sides are sort of happy. The pressure to tip is lessened since you're not interacting with that driver after the tipping decision is made. Drivers are apparently happy with the arrangement as well.

I agree that it is a niceness tax, and would go further and say that tipping has come to mean more about the person tipping, and less about the service you receive.

When a waiter (or Lyft driver) gets a poor tip, or no tip do they think, "I really should have provided better service to that customer", or do they think, "that guy is cheap."

And, to be fair, most of the time it is "that guy is cheap". Anyone that's had a job dealing with the general public knows how fast you get jaded. Waiting is a tough job, and usually the waiters get the short end of the stick

Generally I think it's a bad idea to mix tipping and customer ratings.

If you buy a $4.50 coffee with a $5 bill and don't put the fifty cents in the tip jar, the worst that happens is that the barista looks at you uncomfortably for a second or two. Then you get on with your day. If they rate you along with other baristas (or coffee shops) you'll have a reputation before you set foot through the door.

Growing up in America, I didn't understand how absurd our tipping culture is until I visited Europe. There, wait staff don't bother you every five minutes to "ask how you're doing," you call them over when you need them, and if at the end of the meal you enjoyed your service, you can leave a few euros as an extra, not a semblance of a living wage because the employer refuses to pay it.

Still, if it's really that important to you to tip your Uber driver, use cash.

My experience in Europe (edit: Spain and France in particular, England to a lesser extent) was that customer service was not very good. There was a general bad attitude toward customers, treating them more like a nuisance than the lifeblood of the business. It really made me appreciate the way we do things on this side of the pond.

Just a heads up: you're trying to judge continental European cultural practices by Anglo-Saxon cultural norms, and that's pretty much always going to lead to nothing but misunderstandings. There are many things (like a waiter not coming to your table unless called) that are considered polite in e.g. Germany that would be considered rude in America, and vice-versa. (Source: I've lived in both of those countries.) It's part of the joy of travel to discover which parts of your culture aren't as universal as you assumed.

I think I generalized too much by saying "Europe". I really meant France and Spain. England was all over the place, good service in some spots, French service in others. I haven't had the pleasure of traveling to Germany yet.

This conversation makes it sound like I walked around being bitter about customer service or other things that I think are better here. That would be a terrible way to travel! Everywhere I went in Europe really was lovely and I intend to go back.

Could you extrapolate on your experiences? From what I saw (in Germany, Poland, and Italy), it is that people aren't paid to give a shit about the customer outside of the context of their service. No "how is everybody doing today?" No "have a nice day." You are there to be served and that's it.

Then again, these kinds of attitudes can change dramatically across national boundaries; the perspective I have often heard about France is that "the customer is always wrong."

Europe is very regional in many things, this is one of them. Southern Germany would be a very different (more friendly) experience than Northern Germany (in particular Berlin). [Waiting for fellow Germans to kick my butt for that ^^]

I've had similarly very nice experiences in France at the German border (south west that is).

When I visit Europe, my main complaint in restaurants is that I can never seem to get the wait staff's attention. I have been dining at a restaurant by myself, had all my food and drinks cleared and after waiting 5 minutes for someone to come by I had to get up and go ask for my check. It wasn't busy at the time. I guess the culture is different and I need to flag someone down? That always feels rude to me.

The idea is that you are there to be served, not babied. So yes, you are expected to flag them down. It is a signal that says you are willing to temporarily suspend your unassailable privacy. It is up to you to decide when to order and when you are done with your meal (if it's not too busy).

If you want to read a book quietly at your table, nobody will make you leave. If you want to chat with your friends after the meal because you like sitting down where you are, nobody will bug you to buy a dessert (and conveniently up the gratuity).

I can see how Americans may perceive it as rude, but to me it's an affirmation of personal space, both to the waiter that does not feel compelled to ask how things are going (always when I have a mouth full of food), and to the customer that can enjoy dining in peace.

Yeah, i recall that when i was in Amsterdam visiting some coffee shops most of the employees were pretty dismissive, I can see why though because of the crowd of people that it brings in... But when I found one that I liked, I started chopping it up with the worker there found out that he was from Santa Cruz, CA was a stellar experience. EVERYTHING else about that trip was meh.

Tipping is a crummy form of compensation at the root, in my belief. I don't mind playing guitar on a corner for tips, sure. But it's a hard way to make money sometimes, as I learned first-hand.

After reading the article, I was wondering which direction the "racism" label might be pointed. Apparently it's being directed toward the drivers, and using waiters and waitresses as an example. I've worked as a waiter on several occasions, and the article mentioning that women fare worse than men (according to a study) does not ring true in my experience. Men make more in tips than women? Really? Uhhhh...

I'm going to be careful in how I phrase it, because it might not be universal: In my experience, most of the racial overtones in regards to tipping were mostly directed at the customers, not at the waitstaff themselves. As in, the race or gender of the waiter/waitress was less thought of as the race or gender of the customer, or their nationality, considering some Europeans may be familiar with the custom of tipping but decide not to do it anyway as they drown their fries in Mayo.

The lack of tips is definitely one of the better aspects of the Uber experience. Tips are awkward and complicate things.

I'd much prefer for the base rates to just go up. I don't want to have to think about tipping.

If Uber is not going to allow tips, but drivers are going to pressure for cash tips, I might as well take a regular cab.

At least in a regular cab, tipping is expected AND I can add the tip in on my credit card. So with Uber, now my choices are either to tip make sure that I am carrying small bills so that I can do so, or not tip and risk getting a "low rating" (whether I should care about that is another question.)

No thanks. Uber should either crack down on tips, or just put them in the app. Of course, cracking down on tips would probably require that Uber actually allow drivers to make decent money, which they are not interested in.

No tipping is one of my favorite features of Uber.

Agreed, and at least with the black car service it makes the experience feel much more professional.

I will never, ever tip my Uber driver. It's one of the banes of Western living and I'm so happy that Uber doesn't include tipping in the app, if they did it would make it far less valuable to me. Feel free to not drop prices so aggressively, but please do not add tipping.

I'm for eliminating tipping in favor of just paying the people as part of the service. That said, there's one angle these kind of articles never mention: the oft-repeated claim that black people don't tip as often, which would hurt drivers too. Almost every waiter or waitress I know down here says this. A good chunk are black men or women. Rather than never tip, they say they're less likely to tip and often for less money. The exceptions (and job security) keep them delivering good service where they can. They just don't expect anything to come out of it. Strange that I never see that angle on public sites covering discrimination but hear it from black waiters all the time.

I'd like to see a survey of various areas with careful questions on the subject to see how true it is, in what areas, and what combinations of race/gender for both waiter and table. Also, if it's more or less likely with groups vs single seats. Anyone know a study or hear similar things from your waiters locally? Or is it better in your area?

Tipping is some of the worst form of payment in existence. It's completely unregulated from a consumer standpoint, and is therefore subject to every single bias one can think of - sexism, racism, "attractivism"? Literally every single little thing that people use to incorrectly assess another person's performance or behavior will be calculated into a tip. Don't like a person's nose ring? Lower tip. Don't like a person's haircut? Lower tip.

If a company were found out to be basing salaries on these things, they'd be sued so hard and so fast, their HR department would catch fire from the friction.

We laud restaurants when they do away with tipping [0], what's up with the two-faced response to Uber and their tipping stance?

Tipping sucks. Tipping absolutely sucks. I'm begging you nice people to not push Uber into a tipping model just because you hate Uber. Tipping is the much worse evil here.

    [0] - https://goo.gl/0oFRei

Is there a two-faced stance? I haven't seen it. Everyone in this thread, as well as everyone I've talked to personally, loves Uber because you can't tip. It's literally the only reason why I personally never take Lyft, despite it being cheaper.

This article seems to give way more credence to the option of being able to tip Uber drivers than I think is warranted.

Just to add on for folks in other parts of the world, in the US, if you work a job that gets tipped, you usually can legally be paid way less as a base wage.

> The American federal government requires a wage of at least $2.13 per hour be paid to employees that receive at least $30 per month in tips. If wages and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any pay period, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate. [0]

Uber will take advantage of this, if they can. Tipping is a trap!

    [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_States

Uber drivers aren't employees so don't get paid minimum wage (or anything, really) by Uber in the first place. They get paid their fares minus Uber's vig.

Fully agree, been to Japan couple of weeks ago and they literally don't tip at all. Everybody gives you the change to the last penny, which is awesome. There's no need for you to evaluate the service and tip accordingly, not to mention some awkward situations when one of the parties is not happy with it.

Why do you need tipping in an app, going through the official channels? The driver is paid to bring the customer from point A to B, the customer pays. Why is there a need to pay again/more?

Isn't one of the reasons for the crazy tipping culture to avoid tax since it's in cash and not declared as income? How would that work if it's done through a controlled system like uber.

Uber's stated reason to block tipping. But really, it means passengers don't need to care about working out the tip, feeling bad if they don't leave one or don't leave enough, don't need to carry cash, etc etc. It lowers the friction of taking an uber and means more business.

I live in a country where tipping basically doesn't exist. It's such a foreign concept to me that I'm afraid of going to the states. It's almost like removing all price tags and having to guess what things cost, with repercussion if you pay too little.

Well, here's my proposal then. Give uber users a 'living wage' option. Where when you use the app you pay at least 1.5x pricing as a floor. The prices for uber around here can't be livable, and no one pays cash.

I don't know where you live, but almost every single Uber driver I've talked to say they make more money than the job they had previously with far more flexibility, so they're pretty happy. One Uber driver said he made over $80k last year and he loved it.

Why not just always pick UberSelect or UberBlack instead of UberX?

You seem to be missing the point. Also they seem to be paid reasonably. It sounds like you just want more regulation.

This title seems editorialized: the title here on HN is ambiguous about whether the "reason" is "because of" or "to prevent", while the title of the actual article makes that clearer.

If drivers aren't getting paid enough to want to drive for a particular company, they should build the "tip" into the price, to make sure everyone gets paid enough. But the right response to good/bad service is a rating, not a tip. A field for a tip implies that the "real" price is higher than advertised, because only a monster wouldn't tip, and that bad service just means a lower tip. A rating system makes sure that all drivers must provide good service, and the company should be making sure they get paid accordingly.

Transportation isn't a service where it's acceptable to have good drivers who get paid more and bad drivers who get paid less, no matter what mechanism implements that pay differential. There should only be "good" drivers.

>Transportation isn't a service where it's acceptable to have good drivers who get paid more and bad drivers who get paid less, no matter what mechanism implements that pay differential. There should only be "good" drivers.

Of course, there's no universal authority on what "tipping" actually means but I think many people (both the riders & drivers) understand that tipping is for the "service" portion that's not related to the driving. E.g. carrying the suitcases, pointing out the landmarks like a tourist guide, etc.

The "driving" component of getting from point A to point B in a safe manner, without making incompetent U-turns, etc is the baseline. The tipping isn't for that.

E.g. I usually don't tip the Hertz/Avis car rental bus driver but if I'm trying to carry 3 bags and he helps me with them, I will tip him.

All that said, it's possible that some Uber drivers want extra tip money just for the sake of extra money.

Like others, I also prefer transactions where there is no tipping expected. It would be annoying to scramble for some loose dollar bills to tip the flight attendants as I try to rush off the airplane to make a connection.

> The "driving" component of getting from point A to point B in a safe manner, without making incompetent U-turns, etc is the baseline. The tipping isn't for that.

That's how it should work, yes, but once tips become an option, tipping culture takes over in awful ways. Consider that the expectation in US restaurants is a 10-15% tip at minimum, for baseline competent service, and anything less suggests that your food came with extra saliva. That's not a healthy process.

There are good reasons to tip a good driver beyond the stated cost of the service. Maybe they know the area well enough to get you through during rush hour. If you have a car seat you need to install and they can help quickly (as well as drive smoothly to keep the child from acting up) that is also a boon.

If any service is exceptional, I am always happy to tip, even if I am already paying the full price (and living wage).

Should. Should. But that's not the way reality is right now.

The article admits that information from eight drives is "a hopelessly anecdotal number"... then goes on for several paragraphs to imply that these eight drivers are evidence to systematically disprove Uber's claims about racism and sexism.

Completely bogus.

I liked seeing that the author clearly pointed out that the data they collected was not anywhere near statistically significant...

> Eight drivers sent me a report covering all their rides during a week in April, a hopelessly anecdotal number, but enough to learn more than [Lyft] will release.

But then a few paragraphs later...

> These results don’t look great for Uber’s hypothetical claims: the one female in the lineup made the best tips. And the black driver, so disfavored in all the academic studies, emerged a bit below average.

No, no, no!

A "lineup" of 8 people carries no weight at all against Uber's claims. It's frustrating to see articles being shared that have blatantly wrong conclusion-drawing practices like this.

> passengers will now feel a “Tony Soprano-like veiled threat” from drivers: “Pay up or I’ll give you a poor rating.”

Is that really a problem? I honestly didn't even know Uber drivers rated the passengers! I would imagine a driver getting a bad rating for being forceful about a tip would be much worse for them than a passenger bad rating would be for me. I can take a Lyft, bus, tube, etc if I can't get served with Uber. Heck, in a lot of cases I can just walk. A driver can only drive for so many companies before they're churned out of the business

I really doubt that is, or would become, a thing.

The last Uber ride I had, when traveling, I got a ten-minute diatribe on how terrible Uber was, how much better Lyft was, and how passengers could tip in cash, hint hint. Not enjoyable at all.

Wow. Every time I've used Uber the driver has been quiet outside of friendliness and greetings until I engaged them in conversation (London, so maybe not as fussed about tips/pay?)

I think I'd have to tweak my 5-star-unless-we-crash rating system if I had someone ranting against the company they're driving for

Tipping is a barbaric practice. If drivers aren't making enough they should be advocating for higher wages instead of complaining that Uber doesn't make it easy enough for them to take bribes.

I'm not much of an Uber customer. Maybe five trips a year when I am in the city where Uber is big. So maybe people like me don't matter. But:

Tipping would make the whole thing much worse. I would be much happier if they would raise their rates systemwide by whatever percentage is warranted, and pay appropriately. If I wanted a bad experience, I would take a taxi.

If they go this route, among other things they are opening the door to be Ubered by the next Uber.

They're not going to raise rates, and they're not going to raise what they pay drivers.

While yes, the issue with disparate tipping dependent on race is probably an issue, I'm pretty sure Uber is just using it as a cop out here.

I don't think so. If Uber allows tips through the app they collect data on their drivers suffering pay discrimination.

Eventually it will wind up in court and jury will side with the drivers forcing Uber to pay the difference.

Lyft allows for tipping via the App. I do it often, when a driver goes above the bare minimum of Point A -> Point B.

Having water bottles available in the car, good music or ability to put something of my choosing on, a good conversation, friendly driver, driver who looks for short cuts to cut down on the fare, etc.

Some drivers act like you're not even there, or don't have good "people skills", and it can sometimes make for an uncomfortable experience. Supporting those drivers that go above and beyond the minimum is something that encourages a better experience for me.

Lyft will eventually have to speak to the reality that how much money you make per ride as a Lyft driver can be predicted by skin tone and sex.

> Lyft will eventually have to speak to the reality that how much money you make per ride as a Lyft driver can be predicted by skin tone and sex.

Do we actually have data on this, or is this some sort of assumption?

Uber is using this as an excuse to not even try a tipping system, but without data, it's just a hollow excuse.

I tip based on experience. I'm sure most of us do... not based on what color your skin is or your sex.

>I tip based on experience. I'm sure most of us do... not based on what color your skin is or your sex.

I'm not sure how you tip based on experience, do you interview them on their job history?

Most people are tipping based on pretty fuzzy criteria, and they wind up tipping people that are familiar to them more.

> I'm not sure how you tip based on experience, do you interview them on their job history?

Oh no, I didn't word that the best way. I didn't mean "experience with that person"... I mean I tip based on the experience I had while dining for that particular meal. Was it good or bad? Was my drink refilled without me having to ask? Was the server attentive and friendly, etc.

Something related, tho not something I've previously heard or read about, is whether Uber is rationally deciding that its current 'low' prices/fares are optimal, from the perspective of maximizing profits.

In a lot of comments on this thread people claim to prefer to pay a higher price than tip. If driver's are upset at poor pay, I'd expect Uber to care – all else being equal.

And if Uber could increase its profits by raising prices, I'd expect it do so. I wouldn't expect all price increases to fully benefit drivers alone. So, given that Uber seems to be applying significant pressure to keep prices and fares low, why are they doing so if not to maximize their long-term profits?

As a customer accustomed to being catered to by Uber, you might indeed expect Uber to care.

In actuality both Uber and Lyft have been _relentlessly_ driving employee wages ("contractor rates") down to the lowest possible sustainable level. That's their business model of course: colonize a regulated industry and make hay as long as possible using technology to dodge established regulation while externalizing as many costs as possible.

Works out great! Except for the employees. My mother drove until last week for both Uber and Lyft in the Bay Area.

Over the last 18-20 months her take home earnings were reduced to about _one third_ what they were when she began.

So she gave it up.

Personally I cannot _wait_ for regulation to catch up with these companies. Of course, they might completely eliminate their driver base via self-driving fleet vehicles before it does...

...though I suspect their business model if they're still around at that point (or that of whoever 'disrupts' them) will be leasing self-driving cars from private individuals. Why maintain a fleet when it's clear asking subcontractors to do so for you is so profitable?

When I use Uber, I frequently ask the drivers how often they get tips. They tell me that about one third of the time, the rider gives them some cash. (This is anecdotal of course, but I've asked roughly 30 drivers. Some drivers say they never get tips).

FWIW, I have found that Uber drivers are frequently eager to talk about their experience with Uber and their opinions. I've heard a wide range of feedback from "Uber is evil but I need this job" to "Uber changed my life".

But all drivers seem to agree tipping should be built in.

I admitted that tipping gives a good incentive to the person providing the service as I myself felt before. But I dislike tipping as I see people react differently whether you tip or not and the amount you tip. It was quite hard for me to really know what percentage to tip the person happy and to continue a good service. How do you gauge the quality of the service to tip 15-25% or even higher? That's just playing with our emotion.

I remember when i was working at a fruit stand company, they said we could not be tipped... However that did not stop this guy from New York from tipping me, i recall he said, "For the service you provided i could not asked for anything else, where I'm from if you get good service you tip" I find it funny because it's directly against that whole "racism bit"

I don't like the practice of tipping. I want the total price baked in.

So, I agree on the no tipping policy but painting tipping as racist because people may tip along racial and gender lines is ridiculous. That's the same as saying when people date and marry they are expressions of racism because people typically intermarry.

So it dilutes the whole meaning of racism and reduces it to a politically weak tool.

Interesting look at lots of research on tipping: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/should-tipping-be-banned-a-n...

(You will agree that tipping is racist by the time you finish listening.)

Tipping is too personal and needs to go in general. I think tipping does lead to classism, racism, and an overall awkward experience. Going to other countries where tipping is not expected is really refreshing. I vote to pay more than to be put into a tipping situation.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows-wo...

"...Yet the fact that she had just sued her former venture capital firm for discrimination tends to prove Pao is all-in on this egalitarian thing."

Is that sarcasm?

Tipping would mess Uber's reviews. The drivers would give a good review just for who gave a big tip.

I have often just tipped my drivers cash.

Why? Do you often tip other random working-class people when it's not expected, like cashiers in grocery stores?

> Why? Do you often tip other random working-class people when it's not expected, like cashiers in grocery stores?

Generally you tip when someone provides you with a service, and especially when they've gone above and beyond the base "experience".

A cashier isn't really providing a service... they're collecting money for the store.

Baggers, however, provide a service, especially if they walk the bags to your car. Servers in restaurants provide a service, as they are in charge of your dining experience. Handymen that fix things in your house provide a service, etc.

In theory, you tip because you got an excellent experience. The chance of a good tip is, in theory, what motivates service providers to go above and beyond the bare minimum. If it's a repeated service (like you dine at your favorite restaurant often), and the service provider knows you tip well for good experiences, it provides a good incentive to keep providing excellent experiences.

What about the novel idea of incentivizing the restaurant to provide excellent experiences through charging a fair market rate for a reliably excellent experience? You can show your support for this restaurant by being a repeat customer because you think the value proposition that they provide is one that meets your standards.

This idea has some merit. However, it's not the restaurant that's providing the experience, it's whoever your particular server happens to be.

By paying a "fair" wage to the server, you do remove some problems, but you may introduce others.

When I was younger and worked as a server, it was commonplace for fellow servers to end the night with $150-$200 in tips (in addition to minimum wage, as this was California), which is decidedly above a "fair" wage for maybe 4-5 hours of work. It was a bad night if you didn't break $100 in tips. Changing to a salary system, for some, would mean a net pay decrease (or far more expensive food, which may decrease patronage).

In addition, many feel a salary system would remove any incentive to deliver excellent experiences above the bare minimum. If you're a server, and you know no matter what happens on the floor tonight, you get paid exactly the same... perhaps you don't refill drinks quite as often... or you don't put on your best friendly face when taking orders... because it doesn't matter (think of your Fast Food experiences, where employees don't really care about quality in any regard, food, service, cleanliness, etc). We worked hard for those tips, because it produced immediate, tangible results.

I know this is partly anecdotal, but for me back then as a server, I prefer tips over salary.

If you increased the price of the food to include the average tip and distributed that increased price among your workers you've just provided that same incentive (a wage decidedly above "fair") to your servers and the experience remains constant for your customers. Now if the servers decide that means they can slack because the "tips" are guaranteed, they can find another place to work for those kinds of wages. Especially with feedback systems being easier to implement through recent mobile technology, the problems are not intractable.

I kind of agree, but high wages does not imply good service.

Also, in California, servers must be paid the state's minimum wage - this is not the case everywhere in the country.

Many states have an alternate minimum wage for the service industry. If food prices were increased to compensate every wait staff say, $30k a year, food prices in these areas wouldn't be going up only $5-$10... in those cases, food prices may double or triple in order to support this significant wage increase. This will undoubtedly cause a reduction in patronage, which ultimately means fewer staffers on payroll.

This brings up an interesting thought experiment, and is very relevant to the minimum wage issue in general:

Is it better to have fewer people employed at a higher wage, or more people employed at a lesser wage?

On one hand, a percentage of the workforce will enjoy a more comfortable living - on the other hand more people will be left with no living at all.

I don't get why raising the wages implies that food will go up more than the average amount of tipping (~10-20%). Currently, if it's legal for their wages to be lower granted that they are supplemented by tips, if we raised the price of food at establishments with waitstaff by the average tip amount, the amount of money that the customer pays for food would be exactly the same (on average) as it currently is. Now if that money was diverted directly the the waitstaff (as it currently is) then we would have higher wages being paid to the waitstaff.

I recognize that some restaurants might raise prices by more than the average tip amount in order to increase profits, but that seems to be a separate concept from the one that I proposed. My proposition in no way requires that any restaurant raise the current cost that the customer pays (net money outflow from an average customer).

As for high wages not implying good service, I agree, and it's also a core axiom of why I believe tipping is inefficient, outdated, and cumbersome. But if we operate on the assumption that a good server gives good service in order to earn higher wages through tipping, I think we can also assume that a good server will give good service in order to continue to make his wage and not be fired as a result of treating customers poorly out of laziness.

Exactly! Also, tipping (actually the lack of tipping) allows the customer to provide monetary feedback on the quality of the service.

I can choose to tip nothing as a "fuck you" for bad service.

In fact, I actually once deducted 18% from a bill I got at a restaurant where the service was so poor, we had to carry our own drinks and food from the kitchen to where we were sitting.

I left a note and explained that I was tipping myself for that experience and left 18% less than the bill was.

That actually worked and the service we have had from them since has been stellar!

Tipping a driver is not expected, now?

Not tipping an uber driver. Nobody I know tips uber drivers.

When Uber first started, in your account settings you could set a tip amount. They took that away at some point.

Sometimes I change my mind about where I'm going and take a totally different trip than planned - and when I like the driver or make them go out of their way, like say "I'm going to make several stops" and they aren't expecting that, then I sometimes tip them.

However, when they fuck up my route, like for example me telling a driver I was going to alameda and he gets off the freeway in San Francisco instead of going across the bridge as to be expected and wastes my time, I complain to support@uber and request a refund.

Uber support has actually been quite good for me. I recently was mistakenly charged three times for one ride, and they fixed it very quickly.

AirBNB on the other hand has horrid support from my experience.

You can't be positive. Uber has literally never supported tipping. You might be thinking of Lyft or Sidecar or some other competitor.

Are you sure? I've been using Uber since April 2011, and they launched in July 2010, and I remember when I signed up having heard about how you don't have to tip. There certainly wasn't that option when I joined.

I'm positive, though it seems this setting may have been removed far longer ago than I thought

stop doing that, one of the main draws of Uber is not having to deal with the ridiculous tipping system with cabs, once you introduce tipping there are incentives for the drivers to get paid less and a whole host of negatives are added and we're just back to a less regulated taxi company.

I don't agree. As I said above, if I am happy with a service I get I will tip. If I am unhappy I contact support and demand a refund - it has worked well for me and I have been using uber since pretty much day one.

I can't remember the last time I carried cash. If it can't be paid for by credit card, I'm not buying it.

Last winter I even paid the neighbor kid to shovel my sidewalk with a card. I have no idea how a 13 year got a square account, but.... it's a thing.

In theory, drivers should refuse.

Why?

The hoi polloi has voted: Sam in fact has never carried cash or tipped any drivers!

The king of algorithms?

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