The "right thing" he did:
1) Apologize, explaining that he made a mistake. Self-deprecation is good here.
2) Make it right, not just going forward - they are retroactively paying the delta to the impacted employees.
"Hey - we tried to cheat you blind. We thought we could cheat you without you noticing. Clearly that was a mistake - you noticed. I'm sorry that you noticed when we tried to cheat you."
2) Make it right, not just going forward - they are retroactively paying the delta to the impacted employees.
"The state attorney general's office phoned me and it was scary. I'm going to return the money that we cheated you out of because I don't want to go to jail."
"In the future, I promise to not cheat you in ways that you will notice."
if I were advising this CEO, I'd suggest sending every shopper who ever got a tip an additional 50% of their lifetime Instacart earnings, just to regain the community's confidence.
Who made this choice, and how has the company changed things to ensure that they won't make this choice again?
Instacart potentially thought that they are just guaranteeing a specific tip, regardless if there are tips or not, and not really thinking the model through. If a pizza delivery guy gets tipped nothing, or $1, I don't think the pizza company compensates? In some way you could see this an equalizing tips, everyone gets paid the same for each batch, as you would potentially do with normal wages.
Bigger issue for me coming from non-tip culture, that's ok not to pay any kind of employees enough and instead rely on customers to tip them.
Your proposed simplest solution isn't guaranteeing a minimum tip. It's saying that the first $x of a customer's tip will go to the company instead of the employee. This is theft. The company already charged the customer a fee for this service and should be using this to pay their expenses.