DoorDash Changes Tipping Model After Uproar
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If I sit down at a restaurant, and get served well, I'll leave a tip at the end when I pay. Hell, even if the service isn't great I'll still leave a bit of a tip.
But now there's this idea that you should tip for service... before you get served. The tip jars at Starbucks, apps that ask you to input your tip before you get your delivery, POS systems that ask for a tip, etc. There's no way I'll ever tip before service, and probably won't after either if the business is audacious enough to ask for a tip when they're using a pay-before business model.
I'm looking forward to seeing how long it takes for self-service gas pumps to start asking for tips. After all, there's an attendant inside keeping an eye on you, so that's a service right?
I'm sure these businesses have found that merely including the dialogue = free money, so why wouldn't they?
The correct evil strategy seems to be what Instacart is doing now which is to make a complicated algorithm so opaque that nobody understands it so it's difficult for it to generate outrage.
I've even seen "no tipping" restaurants do the same with a fine print saying that a 15-18% gratuity will be charged on top of my order, well.. why aren't all the dishes simply 15-18% more expensive then?
Until I read that, I honestly didn't know that people tip on top of the tax. I was firmly in the "tip 18 percent, before tax" camp and assumed I was leaving a good tip by doing so. I'll admit that I was a bit outraged after reading the article because it made me feel like a cheapskate over something that had never even occurred to me before.
What other tipping faux pas am I unknowingly making?
Tipping is ingrained in American culture because there's an insane disparity between rich and poor and it makes the rich feel better about themselves (and those who do it but wish they didn't then peer pressure their friends into doing it. See the current wave of articles about tipping hotel staff claiming that its the norm even though only a third of people do).
Its stupid and simply shouldn't be a thing. Especially since it means employees' salaries effectively end up at the mercy of customers, and customers are not regulated (eg: there is NOTHING stopping customers from being racist/sexist/bigoted/whatever like there is employers, so pay could theoretically vary drastically and there's fuck all they could do about it).
That's not anyone making anyone else feel guilty or good or bad about themselves, rather that's an entire industry that has been allowed through actual legislation to shift the burden of paying their employees from themselves to their own customers. That's the root of it. And those customers have no obligation to actually give anyone any money. It's a really screwed up system, and like you say it's completely unregulated and opens the door for all kinds of awful dynamics around racism/sexism/etc.
So, if someone stiffs their server in a restaurant in spite of their friends trying to guilt them into tipping, the person stiffing the server is truly the asshole in that situation. Yeah, the whole system's screwed up, it shouldn't be like that, it's all a big scam, but the service industry people shouldn't be the ones to get screwed over it. I'm not accusing anyone here of doing this, it's just something I've witnessed. I.e., someone who thinks they're really teaching someone (not sure who) a lesson about how much they detest expectations around tipping by stiffing their server or always leaving lousy tips. Whenever I've seen this happen, all I've seen was a rich person being shitty to a poor person to send a message to the poor person's employer that the employer never receives. I'm as annoyed by expectations around tipping as anyone, but hopefully everyone realizes that the restaurant server situation is very different from most other situations (valet, hotel employee, etc.).
As mentioned in a lot of industries outside of restaurants people behave the same way even though it's not true. A lot of restaurants pay at least minimum wage, and not all states allow lower minimum wage, yet the culture is EXACTLY the same. Plus, anecdotal, but I know plenty of folks who will fully admit to tipping because they feel it makes them better people (though not in those words). And try never tipping for a few weeks, you bet your ass some people will try to make you feel bad. I've seen people genuinely forget and the servers would run out of the restaurant to tell at them.
Yes, in some industries people are paid less than minimum wage but the culture would be the same either way. It's also a chicken and the egg situation.
IMO you can also encourage this practice by not tipping.
What weird, coded language. They're not "paying employees." They're "contributing" to "Dashers." At first, I figured this was just a way to avoid saying that they're independent contractors, but this seems even more vague than THAT.
Why, legally, would they say "contributions" rather than "pay?" It seems like there's a different distinction from the independent contractor one.
Instead, DoorDash would like you to think that you are paying the Dasher directly. DoorDash provided you a platform to find a Dasher and enter into a delivery agreement with them. And DoorDash is graciously "contributing" to the Dasher's income. This would make them no more an independent contractor than someone looking for work on Craigslist.
I don't think this holds up because DoorDash is custodial of the money before it reaches the Dasher's wallet, and because from the customer's perspective, they're ordering delivery from DoorDash, not a Dasher. But that's just my idle speculation.
I'm sure the service terms are different but in upwork's case, they're also acting as the escrow and taking a cut.
> Under the policy, which the company adopted in 2017, DoorDash would offer a Dasher a guaranteed minimum amount to do a delivery. If a customer tipped, in most cases a tip paid through the app would go to subsidizing DoorDash’s contribution toward the guarantee, rather than increasing the Dasher’s pay.
> For example, if DoorDash guaranteed a worker $7 for a delivery and a customer did not tip, DoorDash would directly pay the worker $7. If the customer tipped $3 via the app, DoorDash would directly pay the worker only $4, then add on the $3 tip so that the worker would still get only $7.
And this is one more reason why I have and will not ever leave a digital tip.
Yes I know how tipping aggregates for wait staff (and I think that’s stupid...) but this is different. These are independent contractors paid to do a job. If they agree to do it for $X then that should come out of the pocket of the company hiring them. Any tip is over the top.
I hope they (DoorDash) get sued by their customers for deception, lose in court, and a precedent gets set to end this nonsense.
Unfortunately, this will never happen, because their terms of service includes a binding arbitration clause. (Some of us noticed in time to opt out, but surely not the critical mass needed for a class action.)
Californian drivers should file a claim with the Department of Industrial Relations: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/howtofilewageclaim.htm
At the same time I hypocritically am a power user of many "gig economy" apps like uber, ubereats, postmates, etc. so I am contributing to the problem more than most.
I have no idea what I'm paying for and who gets what. It's confusing. So i've been just tipping 3 bucks.
If I buy a couch online, how would it feel if the retail website has a optional 15% tip for the delivery guy opted in by default in the checkout flow. And, provide an option to modify the 15% in case your couch was delivered late or damaged. Somehow, this workflow is widely accepted when its food delivery :)
No idea, why is it expected to tip delivery persons for some commodities while its not expected for some other :) Same thing, its expected to tip a driver for a shared lyft/uber but not expected to tip a bus driver. It's just funny at this point :)
If they don't see the different payouts that come with different customer tips and they can't opt out, it's not very equivalent.
Quite a few states require wait staff/others to be paid the full minimum wage before tips: https://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm
(Technically, this question could apply to the tipping industry as a whole)
DoorDash has a model for what it considers "fair compensation" for an order. Since the company can see exactly what the customers tip in advance, they'll just subtract the tip amount from their previously calculated "fair compensation" and show that base pay / tip breakdown to the Dashers. DoorDash isn't going to suddenly increase its Dashers' pay by 50%.
If you want to actually compensate the Dashers, tip $0 in the app (raising base pay) and hand them cash at the door. That seems to be the only way to get around this policy.
> DoorDash offers a guaranteed minimum for each job. For my first order, the guarantee was $6.85 and the customer, a woman in Boerum Hill who answered the door in a colorful bathrobe, tipped $3 via the app. But I still received only $6.85.
> Here’s how it works: If the woman in the bathrobe had tipped zero, DoorDash would have paid me the whole $6.85. Because she tipped $3, DoorDash kicked in only $3.85. She was saving DoorDash $3, not tipping me.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/nyregion/doordash-ubereat...
Edit - I'd expect they'll show something like the below
Total pay: $6.85
Guaranteed base pay: $3.85
Tip: $3.00
In a restaurant
- The waiter is guaranteed normal minimum wage.
- The owner guarantees they will pay a minimum of <whatever waiter minimum wage is; less than normal minimum wage>
- The waiter gets tips from patrons, which generally brings them over normal minimum wage
- If the waiter's tips do not bring them above minimum wage, then the owner is required to pay them an amount that would bring them up to minimum wage.
With DD, it works more or less the same way, with the difference being that the minimums (upper and lower) are per delivery, not per hour.
If fact, odds are the DD deliverers are going to be worse off now, because DD isn't going to guarantee them a minimum amount; rather, they'll present "we pay you X + you get the tip which is likely around Y". And if the tip isn't enough, the deliverer winds up making less. Unlike before where they got the minimum.
My understanding is that DoorDash was doing the opposite: giving you a guaranteed wage and then subtracting the tips from that. It's as if a restaurant were paying you an hourly wage without tips, and then accepting tips on your behalf.
If a customer had tipped 100% of the guaranteed pay, do you think the deliverer would have seen any of that tip? Or would it all have counted against the guaranteed pay?
- DD provides a guaranteed wage of $1 per delivery, similar to a restaurtant's "under minimum wage" wage.
- DD provides a "you will make at least this much" rate. This is a parallel to normal minimum wage
- If the (<tip> + $1) is not at least <this much>, DD covers the difference
- If the (<tip> + $1) is more than <this much>, DD pays only (<tip> + $1)
The only real differences between that and a restaurant are - The numbers are all per delivery instead of per hour - The sub-minimum wage is $1 instead of whatever it is for wait staff ($2.50 or so?). How these numbers compare depends on how many jobs per hour there are. - The "you will make at least this much" amount varies by the delivery, vs waitstaff where it's a set number for all.
If you consider the "you will make at least this much" number to be "if you don't get tipped enough to make this much, we'll make sure to cover the difference for you", it's more clear how it's the same as for wait staff.
They offered $1 per delivery plus tips, and would increase the wage if the tips didn't meet the expectation.
If you tipped the driver $100, the driver would get $101.
If you tipped the driver $0, the driver would get $4 - $7 because DD would make up for that.
Waiters don't pay the restaurant back if they go over minimum wage. So, no, it's emphatically not the same way it works.
And even if it were, "it's legal to screw people!" is not a reasonable nor humane response to "people are getting screwed!".
But that is tipping.
A waiter makes $7.25 an hour. If they receive $2 in tips, the business only has to pay them $5.25 for that hour instead. There is a lower limit (around $2, I forget the exact amount), and tipping over that limit goes to the employee, but any tips under that limit effectively go to the company.
This is false. Only a subset of states allow this corrupt practice, here's a handy list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage#State_law
The federal minimum wage for tipped employees is $2-ish with the caveat that if an employee isn't making on average $7.25 for the pay period when factoring in tips, the employer is legally obligated to make up the difference.
So if an employee's tips average out to the difference between tipped minimum wage and regular minimum wage, then all you've done is save the restaurant money. The employee was going to get that amount regardless.
It's only when the tipped amount exceeds the difference on average does the employee come out ahead.
Even if it was true in all 50 states, we could claim it is true in only a subset of those 50 states since a set containing all 50 states is a subset of itself. Had the claim been a proper subset instead, this wouldn't have been the case.
And even if it was true in all 50 states and all smaller governments therein, one could claim it as false because some businesses have to run under franchise rules that disallow the practice. I think such a sentence should be interpreted as talking about the general case of what is acceptable (acceptable in that people do not hold nearly an equivalent level of protest at the federal law on tipping and on organizations that follow it or state level varieties that allow a similar practice as they do for DoorDash's practice).
I worked at restaurants where I had to report my tips or share them. If I dipped below minimum wage for the month, the restaurant was supposed to add whatever difference was needed (never saw it happen, btw).
So if DoorDash lowers the base pay, I don't see why anyone should die on DoorDash's hill when the base pay of all restaurants around them is a hilarious $2.15/hour. DoorDash pays a minimum of $1 per delivery no matter the tip.
Before people get too angry at DoorDash, they should realize this is ubiquitous.
We're never going to evolve away from tipping culture if our only trick is to get outraged at one company at a time that makes the mistake of having the spotlight fall on them.
https://fortune.com/2014/03/20/starbucks-new-digital-tip-jar...
>Tip Pool: The requirement that an employee must retain all tips does not preclude a valid tip pooling or sharing arrangement among employees who customarily and regularly receive tips, such as waiters, waitresses, bellhops, counter personnel (who serve customers), bussers, and service bartenders. A valid tip pool may not include employees who do not customarily and regularly received tips, such as dishwashers, cooks, chefs, and janitors.
I haven’t yet seen a tip pooling scheme that didn’t also include back of house, i.e. chefs/cooks, and often supervisors or managers which cannot be included by federal law.
But your point stands, my statement was overly broad.
Also, in my experience, our prices are not higher than the $2.15/hr states.
Servers make a lot while bussers and janitors and cooks get screwed
Im a server in WA and im making 11.50 plus my tips. In the last state I was in I was making 2.50 plus tips.
Wrong, only a subset of states with corrupt labor practices allow this.
I know it's ubiquitous, I'm just enjoying seeing someone raked over the coals for it and I look forward to the angry mob moving on to everyone else who profits from this scummy practice.
If you think this is outrageous, you should consider that many people are like me and waiters get stiffed all the time by us. So every time you’re paying a tip you’re covering for me too. Isn’t this unfair?
The problem is that the old policy only works if the customers don't understand it, and maybe even seems generally unethical.
Even in the US where tips go against wages it's not so bad, generally the first tip or two will cover the difference and workers are probably doing way better than that. Doordash on the other hand applied the same thing to /every/ order.
DoorDash can claim they aren't paying for the time, but for the service. And how long that service takes is the responsibility of the contractor.
Is it dirty? Very. Does that make it untrue? No.
So the first step in any of these cases is to get these gig economy apps to admit that they're just trying to circumvent wage law by classifying employees as contracted services.
Eg, in Mass, it looks like tipped employee minimum wage is 4.35, and tipped wage plus tip must be $12/hour. If the employee doesn't get any tip, the employer has to foot the difference.
So for all practical purpose, all the tips you give up to $12/hour are simply saving the employer money but don't change anything for the employee unless they do dodgy shit like not declaring cash tips.
Yeah, the whole system is bullshit which is why we should abolish tips altogether in favor of proper minimum wages (or higher for professions that usually get a lot from tips like bartenders)
Every "outrage" in the US consists mostly of shit people don't understand. That doesn't mean they're wrong about the cause, but you can be "right" for the "wrong reason".
In this case, yes, DoorDash employees are getting screwed. At the -same time-, DoorDash is doing nothing weird or outside of the norm.
The solution is wrong. People are trying to get 1-2 companies to make tipping a little less bullshit, when its tipping itself, across the entire country, that is broken.
Whereas DoorDash's model was set such that you had to tip over $10 for the dasher to see a single cent of it. This meant that nearly all tips went to DoorDash instead of to the dasher, because I have to imagine most orders don't have a >$10 tip on them. And this was calculated per-order instead of per pay period, which mean that, as a customer, your individual tip was going to the company instead of to the dasher.
That is definitely not a useful place to use "which means".
Whether tips or regular wages are better or not is an endless argument, and it doesn't seem like dashers are particularly exploited relative to other gig economy jobs.
But still... that fake "tip" button was designed to exploit my emotional desire to fairly compensate low wage workers to goose DoorDash's revenue numbers, and that sucks.
edit: looks like it depends on which state you're in in USA on this. Mostly West Coast seems to have 'sane' ones: https://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm
Also there’s a decent amount of talk about how bad tipping is and talks about getting rid of it but it’s a culturally ingrained thing so it’s not going to go easily, especially as it benefits restaurant owners so they’re unlikely to change unless there’s a lot of social and business pressure to do so.
For example: In my state of NC for example minimum wage is $7.25/h and tipped minimum wage is $2.13/h so any money tipped after the first $5.12/h is all going to the employee. $5 worth of tips isn't that much to get per hour even averaging across a whole shift that includes both a mealtime rush and some off hours.
They could just like, pay them a monthly wage, like everyone else in the civilized world?
If they did that, it would inevitably be found out and lead to an even bigger scandal. That would be worse than doing nothing.
I am sorry but we have to let you go, because our customers do not seem to like you.
I first checked it out in 2017, shortly after they implemented the current model. The entire subreddit was a massive open revolt of people complaining that they simply can't survive on what the new model pays them. For the record, I went there because I got curious after I had a string of several dashers who were just awful and couldn't follow basic directions. The impression I got is that everyone on the platform with any intelligence either had quit over the changes or was threatening to, leaving only the people who just don't have the skills to get work anywhere else.
I'd look at it every few months or so after that, and one thing pretty common was that people were suggesting that nobody should tip in the app and that everyone should leave a cash tip because DoorDash steals tips.
When the tipping scandal first hit the news (forcing Instacart to change their policies), I checked it out again, and everyone was talking about how finally the media is calling attention to how awful the tipping situation is and again suggesting that nobody ever tip in the app.
And now this. DoorDash is fixing this policy, and the people there are still upset. /r/DoorDash is simply the single unhappiest subreddit I've ever seen that isn't a politics sub or a straight-up hate sub.
My impression using DoorDash, by the way, is that the situation I mentioned above never resolved itself. I have a tendency to use DoorDash because DashPass actually saves me a lot of money (you pay $10/month and get most of your fees taken off on each order above $15... it usually saves me about $5/order, so it pays for itself after two orders a month), but dealing with the drivers is such a colossal headache that ordering something on DoorDash stresses me out each time. I have never had anywhere near the level of problems with drivers on Uber Eats or GrubHub (or Eat24 before them; I still miss that company) that I have with dashers. DoorDash treats its people so poorly that all the good dashers have long since quit, leaving only people who have a marked inability to follow basic directions or instructions. I've found myself ordering from Uber Eats more and more lately, even though I'm paying more, just because the quality of the drivers is so much higher.
Likely because they know the "fix" will likely just be a more subtle fucking.
If the app called it a "Tip" then that should be some kind of fraud because it wasn't a tip in the way that any reasonable person would assume, it was a donation to the company.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ (search for DoorDash)
It is high time US citizens stop tipping and make businesses realize that the customers are not directly responsible for employee wages.
If a bartender at a sluggish restaurant is scheduled monday-wednesday, instead of his usual fri-sunday, he's probably screwed and making a fraction of what he normally does.
The main problem with the DD model is that they're asking people to decide a tip before being provided a service. That's unfair to the customer and driver. As far as paying a decent wage before that, DD could provide a mile cost reimbursement as well as one for the time spent on the order. Paying the driver a blanket fee for every order they deliver rather than one based on time and millage is not sustainable. I understand that's much how the model used to work, but the whole thing about tip culture is rewarding people who do the little things to make the experience worth it for you having to pay extra. As a customer of DD you're only going to be aware of things after you've received your food.
Also, if a bartender is not getting the best shifts, that may be because the bar cycles their shifts or they aren't as good, or maybe Wednesday is a busier night and they only staff one bartender so that person may end up doing better than having to split a bar with several others. That said, if it's busier on a Saturday and the bartenders are getting hammered, why should they have to subsidize the bartender who isn't there?
That said, the biggest problem with most service type employees right now, and this sadly gets away from DD, but is the amount of hours they are being given to work. I know many people who only get 12-18 hours a week at their service job (and even worse, you can be sent home early or even called off if it's slow), and even in CA where minimum wage is $14.25, one cannot pay rent let alone earn a living or even hope to have or provide for a family.
You can still have tips but it shifts from basically every time to instances of truly exceptional performance.
Tipping has been shown over and over again to be horribly discriminatory against those who don't line up with the list presented above.
I worked in restaurants for a long time and think tipping to make up for paltry hourly pay is idiotic, but I can see why many people work late hours and weekends because they payoff is very high if you're in a good gig.
On the other hand, when the government asks to donate for a disaster, does everybody contribute even if they completely sympathize with the issue? You may do it sometimes, but will you do it every time there is a disaster? Will you do it even if you can afford it? What will be your opinion of the government if they tell you "We can't deal with these disasters unless we get donations. We know these same disasters happen every year and we should have budgeted properly but we didn't do it for political reasons. But now if you don't donate, people will be in trouble"
Tipping is a way of showing your appreciation for service. But if it has to be done every time, then you may as well call it a service charge.
Is this yet another instance of a dotcom knowingly and blatantly ignoring existing laws and regulations, and seeing how much they can get away with, while they use this advantage to steam full-ahead towards market dominance and IPO?
Is DoorDash yet influential enough that they can turn this into merely a regulatory handslap/caress?
As usual, the reality of the financial situation is fairly complicated. Doordash guarantees minimums that other such services do not. In other words, in many ways, Doordash was more friendly to their 'contractors' than other services.
If they had simply chosen not to be unethical and lie to customers about where their tips go, they could have had it both ways.
... it's just that they reduce _their_ fee paid to them by, coincidentally, the same amount.
And claim that this offers the Dasher "stability".
Add tip. Delivery driver fucks up the order/super late/spills your drink. Too late! already tipped.
Can someone explain to me WHY in 2019 we still tie the infrastructure to the power to make decisions?
Marketplaces are built not on open protocols (like email) but closed platforms.
They amass people from both sides and extract rents. But that’s a side effect of the closed nature of the software.
Why yell at doordash or uber or facebook to add a feature? Why does country X go after them for deleting posts while country Y yells that they didn’t delete similar posts? Closed software is the issue. “Zero to one. Competition is for losers” is who funded Facebook.
If people wanted to add tips in Wordpress or Email or whatever, they could just go ahead an add those. Or a million other features. Their clients would still interoperate.
Main reason: the capitalistic system we have encourages getting very wealthy as a result of building a successful company. It encourages people to work extremely hard and take risks while competing and duplicating 90% of the work others are doing. But in the area of software and information, copying is so easy. Collaboration beats competition nearly every time, relegating the proprietary solutions of yesteryear to obsolescence. The private market is reduced to turning out brief “bleeding edge” innovations which are then subsumed into the open source snowball.
Wikipedia, the Web, Webkit, Wordpress, MySQL and NGinX has beat Britannica, AOL, Blogger.com, IE, Oracle and IIS. So why don’t we have more of it in other areas? Drugs? Marketplaces?
Albert Wenger from USV has a nice online book called “World after Capital” that speaks about this.
DoorDash has raised $2Bil from investors. They're using this money, presumably, to attract customers and suppliers through advertising and low pricing. DoorDash is one of many companies using VC money in this way. Now I'm supposed to subsidize the VC's subsidy of the product?
We should move to "fair pay", that includes slightly increased prices, and do away with tips for most services.
It's so common that tips don't mean what the consumer thinks it means. Restaurants and bars that pool tips and share them with all staff.[1] Restaurant owners that try to keep some tips and only pay out a percentage to the staff.[2] Casinos pool tips too so the dealer doesn't get to keep the money you gave him directly.[3]
I get asked for tips at Starbucks. I get asked for tips when I do takeout food from the local restaurant. I get asked for tips at the buffet restaurant. The pizza driver gets a delivery charge AND a tip!
Let's clean it up and make it fair for the servers and the consumers.
[1] https://www.restaurantscanada.org/industry-news/aware-ontari... [2] https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/advice-guy/can-rest... [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/wynn-tip-sharing-2011-6
If you knew everyone was getting paid the minimum wage, would you still tip on a regular basis?
I recently learned that in states like Washington, California, Oregon this is the case [1], and have been tipping less as a result, but still feel slightly bad about it (societal conditioning is strong!).
People get the cause and effect backwards on that. The minimum wage is lower because lawmakers knew they were already getting compensated by tips. It's a social custom, not charity.
Those reduced minimum wages are justified because the jobs include tipping.
The reason you tip your waiter is (ostensibly) because it creates a direct incentive for better service, by leaving some of the compensation up to the customer.
Let's not have a bunch of replies that ignore my caveat please.
Funny how service is as good if not better in the vast majority of the rest of the world, despite a lack of tipping culture.
I think its more of a cultural thing than an effect of tipping, but service in the US is usually pretty high quality.
"service with a FORCED smile" which I find far worse than service without a smile.
and
"PRETEND the customer is always right" which happens in non-tipping culture too (do whatever makes the least trouble for yourself at work).
Any Asian country I've been to had much better service than the US. France (Paris) had excellent service. Greece had extremely nice service. These are all low- or no- tipping places.
Very few restaurants would pay an hourly wage that is equivalent to what waiters are getting tipped now. So the waiter will just get less. Just look at what non-tipped restaurant workers get paid, not well.
One bartender I talked to made the (astute) observation that people feel more generosity toward individuals than to restaurants -- it de-personalized the transaction from the customer perspective, which turned the service charge into a food tax.
In other words, someone's being dishonest.
In most cases, still, the model I seem to see (and I live in the PNW) was a 15/18/20 tip model, and for personal services (nails, hair, etc.) 25.
Food servers would have us believe that poor tipping and other practices have them one shift away from being homeless, or "I have to pay the IRS to serve you, because they assume I'm getting tips I'm not"...
... and yet, when a 20% "tip"/surcharge (which would be on the high end, I feel, most of the time) is added on to every order...
"This sucks, we're making less money".
Restaurants in the US are run like a factory assembly line, with every person manning a portion of the line being incentivized to get the table out of the door as fast as possible in order to maximize the amount of scraps they get out of tips. In a fixed system, you might sometimes have to flag down a waiter rather than have your glass endlessly refilled even when you're done drinking, and folks might stop walking by asking (if you're lucky) to take your plates away before you're ready.
If you're a person who travels, count the amount of visible staff at an average German restaurant, and compare that to what you see in the US. It's drastic. Orders of magnitude drastic.
Tipping incentivizes servers to care about getting more tips. This is why there is a stereotype of American servers rushing you out of your table to seat the next party, upselling on more drinks/food, and constantly interrupting the setting by "checking on" the party.
A good waiter gets the main plates on the table after appetizers are finished and responds when I flag them. They are a queuing manager that synchronize orders to the kitchen to optimize delivery to the table. Tipping does not inherently incentivize this, and I'd say it actually incentivizes the worse service in the form of clearing the table as fast as possible in order to acquire the next table's round of tips, or as is often the case, crowding a table up with every appetizer, side dish, entree, and drink the table wanted throughout the dinner.
I find tipping makes many customers treat "servers" like faceless servants, making them feel like prostitutes forcing fake smiles and gritted teeth at bad behaviour.
In a non-tipping culture you learn to treat waiting staff as more human. Arseholes get kicked out, not "smiled" at.
The last German restaurant I went, I was in a party of five. Four of us got our orders somewhat promptly while the fifth waited nearly half an hour… for a frankfurter. Between that and the trains I got this sense that German efficiency was overrated.
I've seen lots of restaurants implement "no tipping" policies, only to revert back to tipping within a year or two. The reasons:
1. The higher base prices do have a negative impact on sales. 2. The best servers usually want tips, because they can make more at a tipping establishment.
In the past 10/15 years I've changed my attitude around tipping now that pretty much every place I go to "flips around the iPad", asking for a tip. I no longer really think of it as a reward for good service. At the end of the day, I can't imagine trying to survive in a major city on barista wages, and I can afford it, so I tip.
You think this is based on logic and sensibility? That's not how government works in the USA. The null hypothesis is that capitalism rules; all else, democracy and logic and truth, come a distant second.
Choosing where you will buy based on those fictional "base" prices and then tipping just supports that world which is detached from reality.
If people stopped tipping, eventually things would right themselves: workers would stop working for establishments that do not pay enough, businesses would need to raise prices, people would need to start accepting the realistic pricing.
Restaurants are in one physical place, taxes aren't a mystery, there's no real excuse for the price printed on the menu not to be the actual price. Encouraging your employees to make side-deals with customers for cash... maybe we should start treating that as tax-evasion on the part of the restaurant. Putting a guess down in the books isn't OK for any other transaction.
Don't even get me started on the idea that FOH employees are often making 2 or 3X what the kitchen staff is bringing home. Sure the servers want the tips, but why wouldn't cooks want that money to be in the pool of money that can be allocated to them as well (since most servers aren't required to tip the back of house, and any money that isn't guaranteed can't be counted as part of your pay rate).
Eliminate the tipped employee rate entirely. Give the culture 10 years, and everything will be fine. It will be a long painful 10 years, but fixing omelettes and breaking eggs.
It starts with minimum wage laws changing so that waiters and bartenders are not exempt from normal minimum wages. Start there.
[1] https://www.ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standa...
There was some talk about if people would stop tipping. Nope, people still tip!
Most places in the US require businesses to "make up" the delta between minimum wage and what the employee receives through wage+tips. Seattle just codified this more clearly by having a "minimum wage" and a separate (higher) "minimum compensation". So while wait staff have a minimum compensation of $15/hr, that number is inclusive of tips they receive. Their minimum wage (what the business has to pay regardless of tip) is lower at $12/hr.
People may have considered no longer tipping because of the publicity behind the new-to-them-but-not-actually-new concept of minimum compensation but it's effectively the same system at a higher number.
It’s not the “best” servers according to studies, it’s often the most attractive and non minority servers.
I don’t have any opinion either way about his conclusion/opinion but this is the first article I could find. I first heard about this on Freakonomics
http://www.opportunityinstitute.org/blog/post/im-going-to-ti...
I find it frustrating to read time and time again "but it will never work". Having lived the reality, where employees are paid a decent living wage with no tipping, I say to you that such a response is simply untrue.
If anything, the US has moved 180 degrees in the opposite direction in the past 15 years. This is largely a result of the growing inequality and huge increase in expense in major US cities. Up until about 20-25 years ago, 15% was the "standard" tip amount at restaurants, now it's more like 20%. Virtually every place I go asks for a tip now (even places like a bodega where the person behind the counter does practically nothing - I pick out my food myself, I don't need a bag, and I pay with my phone) as a result of the Square/iPad tip phenomenon, and tipping in many of these places was unheard of just 10 years ago.
Flipping to fair wages will only happen after a massive publicity campaign and coordinated change.
those parts that I've been to or lived in.
- the establishment that I frequent (they remember)
- uber (they affect your rating)
- I knew for sure that it will give me extra service.
In most situation I didn't experience negative affect.
I suspect it is true since I never tip on Uber and I have a 4.96 out of 5 star rating.
They initially billed themselves as no tipping necessary. I refuse to subsidize driver wages on behalf of Uber. There is no way Uber is not benefitting from tipping by being able to keep wages lower as a result.
You tip in the US because the employees are paid a sum that assumes tips are coming. You can pay less than minimum wage because the actual compensation comes from tips.
Of course, this is different in other countries...
And yes, 15% is standard for "acceptable" service and food. You can tip less if you really have a complaint, but with the proliferation of Yelp and Google Reviews, it's easy enough to avoid bad places.
On a road trip, that can be a little different, but...
This type of justification has always seemed very Stockholm Syndrome-y to me. This is not a valid or acceptable reason.
You tip in the US because everyone is complicit in the horrendous industrial relation laws.
Part of their vulnerability does come from near worthless job-injury/termination/severance pay because, on paper, take-home pay is far less than actual.
However, even in the jurisdictions that don't have a minimum wage exemption for tipped positions (such as Oregon), you're still socially expected to tip.
At this point, the only thing tips are good for is letting business owners pay staff less than what they would normally have to, which the staff doesn't mind because they get to evade taxes on cash tips, and they sometimes make more money than if they were to be paid a wage and didn't get tipped. The customer gets the raw end of the deal as they frequently overpay.
In food service, never say “cannot”!
It's not my role as a customer to support workers at a paper mill with lax safety standards because the workers won't go to OSHA, why should it be my role to ensure you have a livable wage because you won't go to to L&I to report wage theft/other practices?
And if they do award you back-pay, it may still be on you to follow through on collecting.
There is big structural barriers for the system to work in favour of employees that aren’t being paid properly.
[1] specifically, that means tipping under the average and/or in accordance with a lower scale or tougher standards than is generally expected.
Hey, the pricetag on the shirt at Walmart says $10, but you should really pay $13 because otherwise they'll just not pay their staff. But hey, your choice, you can (if you choose) cause their staff to have no money for food for their families.
The problem here isn't the person not tipping, it's the broken culture where ensuring a livable wage for the poorest in society is a choice the wealthy get to make based on how they feel today.
The whole tipping system is insane: I'll allow you to provide services in my restaurant and if the customers like you, perhaps you'll earn some money.
I'm still waiting for the restaurant holders to come up with the idea of charging for this unique opportunity. "Don't think of it as paying to be allowed to work, think of it as investing in your revenue-generating activities! !"
Actually, it wouldn't matter if lowest price was the sole factor for picking a particular restaurant. Because all restaurants would be lowering their prices by the same general percentage.
However, it does impact the choice of whether or not to go out to eat.
Unless you're talking about the case where some restaurants discourage tipping (and charge more) but others don't. In which case, there's many cases of that happening and the restaurants closing or switching back. Because price, which not the sole factor, can be a very important one. It certainly impacts my choice when I go out to eat.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjA...
Anecdotally, it remains true.
Tips don’t go on the official pay reports that go to the Canadian government since it isn’t actually employment income paid by the employer.
Why would sales taxes be inconsequential?
Overall, businesses will charge what they can. And if they don’t have to pay taxes, they can keep that $ for themselves.
Right, and it's undermarked because you are expected to tip.
The only differences are - You can choose to pay less if things aren't good, or pay more if things are great. - If you're someone that is heavily impacted by other people's opinions, then you may feel bad tipping less. But all that means is that you don't get one of the benefits.
You get the "benefit" of lower prices... and you're expected to tip to balance the scales.
Once with my hosts, I took care of the dining bill myself. Just when I thought I figured it all out, they’re like “oh, that was the owner of the restaurant with the cheque at the end, you really don’t have to give him a tip”.
D’oh.
But pizza is a delivery food. Dominos doesn't even have seats. 90% of what it does is delivery. So the "overhead of running a delivery program" is just a business expense that should come out of their revenues.
Not sure if that happens in all cases, but I can see the case for charging a delivery fee. Baking it in to the cost of a pizza in general would unfairly charge people eating in or picking up. With delivery, you are paying for the pizza, and then an additional service.
I still think tips should be eliminated from the equation, though.
I've seen people make moral arguments about it, but I will not pay twice.
I think some places don't give the delivery charge to the driver (I hear Papa John's pockets it, but maybe I heard incorrectly).
I agree in that I think tipping in general needs to change. But I was reading the other day where a bar owner was saying he could pay $X. But with tips, his employees were bringing home more than he was. It's hard for me to say this is wrong. What I find wrong, as you point out, is that everyone is asking for tips now. What I don't know is where to draw the line on who can ask for a tip and who can't.
... and gives you a dirty look when you don't tip for "service".
If the server is unhappy with the lack of a tip, and accosts me verbally (which has happened), I will explain my reasoning.
Vote with your wallet, and all that jazz.
If enough people stop tipping for crappy or non-existence services... perhaps eventually it will become more and more difficult for businesses to hire people to work for less than minimum wage... and the world will change.
One short tip at a time.
I am fine with other people thinking I am an asshole, they're free to do so. Most do not.
I have worked in restaurants for years, and I worked my ass off for every tip I received.
If you're serving me a microwaved burger, I don't care if that's the way they do it at this restaurant, I'm not tipping.
To the downvoters... what solution do you propose?
Legislation to be enacted to force restaurant employers the continent-over to start paying their employees more than twice what they're currently getting paid by the company, and increase food prices?
That's never going to happen imho, we tip in North America, and the restaurants pay their employees less than minimum wage, that's just the way it is now.
Here's how that results in a lose-lose for both you and the server.
Normally, if your food does not meet expectations, the best recourse is to let the server know what the problem is. The server can then either have the kitchen resolve the problem or talk to a manager, who can intervene to make things right. The end result is that you end up with food that meets expectations, or perhaps get a portion of the meal comped, and you walk out satisfied.
By being passive aggressive and expressing your displeasure with a zero tip, you don't give the restaurant an opportunity to make things right, so you walk out unsatisfied.
You also punish the wrong person, because it's not the server who is preparing the food. And keep in mind that the server is working a low-paying, often high-stress job, and your withholding of a tip might hit hard.
And perhaps the reason why you've been accosted by servers is that nobody knows the reason why you're refusing to tip unless you tell them. If someone works hard but you stiff them because you didn't like the texture of your burger and didn't bother to raise the issue during your meal, it's not unreasonable for them to assume you thought there was something wrong with their service.
Have you eaten in many low-quality restaurants lately? And complained about the food to the server?
The last time I had a problem with my food (the vegetarian pasta that my partner ordered... who has been vegetarian for decades because of strong personal beliefs against harming animals... had chicken in it which she ended up eating and feeling terrible about)...
I brought that to the attention of our server, who just said "oh sorry, I'll bring out another one".
There's one example of a server who didn't get a tip.
Another time we were eating pizza with olives on it and the olive had a pit in it that almost broke my tooth... am I supposed to ask that the server please inspect every olive on my pizza and make me a new one?
Or ask the server to take back my stir fry that has almost as many ants in it as there is rice, and ask them for another one?
No, I wouldn't think so...
A restaurant is a team (who typically share tips amongst everybody in the restaurant in my experience), and if the team screws up, the team doesn't get tipped.
When I worked at a restaurant and served food, it was on me to make sure that everything that was served to the customers was perfect. If it wasn't, I would send it back to the kitchen.
I don't care what people think of me and my levels of compassion for restaurant staff.
If I am not enjoying my time in your restaurant, I am not going to submit to the gauntlet and tip on the way out the door.
If the waiter isn't checking that they got your order correct, then who is?
Should I be double checking with the manager that everything I ordered is exactly as it should be before I put it into my mouth?
Yes, I did.
>If a customer stiffed you on a tip would that encourage YOU to give them better service next time they come in?
You shouldn't need any encouragement to do your job properly and professionally the first time imho.
And I wouldn't consider it being stiffed.
The couple who I poured an entire pitcher of water onto just as they sat down to dinner one night didn't tip me, and I am not confused or upset as to why.
Likewise, the sever chose to work at that restaurant, so they knew what they were getting into as well.
I've been told by several waiters and bartenders that worked in these restaurants that there was an employee revolt. People earned noticeably less money under the mandatory 20% service charge than with tipping. Consequently, no one wanted to work for restaurants that didn't have tipping. It was seen as a socially conscious move but it backfired for the people it was supposed to help.
The behavioral and economic dynamics with tipping in the US seem to be more complex than people account for.
The only reason I tip at all is because some restaraunts will remember me and you tip or get to wonder if they spit in your food. What a wonderful system.
I tip nowhere else and, since I'm not remembered, I face no negative consequences of this.
I'm fine with that system, as long as it's setup that way. Give me a way to refill my drink etc. But sometimes it's setup where they have to do it, and you're either waiting an hour for a drink or a check.
The tipping culture is directly reflective of the type of service American's like to receive.
I was just using Japan as an example of a different service culture since the GP brought up the comparison.
Usually the process goes like this:
0: sit, bring water, give order, wait for food
1: eat
2: wait for the waiter to notice we are done. This can take a long time.
3: they want to pre clean the table, at which we say we are done, bring the check please
4: they drop off the check, if you are lucky, you can hand the card to them then,
5: If not, wait for them to come back to pick up your credit card
6: wait some unknown amount of time for them to bring your card back so you can sign and leave a tip
It's so much easier to pay up front and leave the second you are ready. Sometimes that ritual at the end takes longer than it takes me to eat my food.
but i'm not trying to tell anyone what to do. :)
When I finished eating twenty minutes ago, and you haven't topped up my (now empty) glass, while I wait for you to drop off the check, I'm going to argue that "seem quicker" is pretty synonymous with "_is_ quicker", whether appreciated or not. And I'm sure the people waiting for a table in the lobby would agree too.
Someone explained to me that the 1 penny/cent tip was the "I appreciated things, but I don't have anything at all to spare" (and I have certainly heard the subjective philosophy of "if you can't afford to tip you can't afford to eat out")... and that two pennies was the "I'm doing this out of obligation; that sucked".
I've been to plenty of places where you pay up front, and they still ask for tips. I wouldn't expect tipping to factor into this nearly as much as encouraging you to get another drink or dessert without having to get a separate check for it.
A tip should never go to the business, and if the business is collecting it, it should only go to the tip pool to pay the supporting staff as well.
The employer/employee wage negotiation should be completely independent of any tips and the employee should be receiving a wage they would be happy with even if they got 0 tips. Any tips should be in addition to that.
The idiots that use these services.
The idiots that "work" for these services.
Can't wait until it all goes away.
https://theoutline.com/post/4602/the-restaurant-industry-is-...
>“Money is power,” said Brooklyn-based waitress Marisa Licandro. “If the customer is paying my wage, they have power over me. And customers having power over you means that you can’t speak against them when they try to grab you.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/11/business/tipp...
>There was the waitress in Portland, Ore., Whitney Edmunds, who swallowed her anger when a man patted his lap and beckoned her to sit, saying, “I’m a great tipper.”
https://jezebel.com/what-does-tipping-have-to-do-with-sex-an...
>And his go-to line was so predictable, we would wait for it, anticipate it. “I always tip way more than twenty percent!”
>If that was the case, why were these guys so mad about paying only 18%, far less than they otherwise would? What was it about not choosing the amount they tipped, that infuriated them, even when they were getting a discount?
>It had to be at least partially about lack of control. Or, more accurately, lack of imagined control. This guy thought that, in a tipped environment, his server would perform better in order to get more of his money. That idea is false, as shown both by repeated studies and common sense, but that was irrelevant. His anger could not be redeemed by mere facts.
https://preview.redd.it/grnr8kxbl6zz.jpg?width=960&crop=smar...
https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/abuse-by-bosses-comes...
This is why unions and collective bargaining are so important. The power of an individual is almost meaningless versus a business of any size.
They charge the employees a fee every paycheck, but when you need them, they'll do what's in their best interest not yours.
As a teen, I was forced to quit a job (with my union rep beside me) for a made up reason. "Better to quit than to be fired" was his advice. Obviously my "quitting" was part of some bigger plan to save a job of his friend or some other concession the boss made to him.
Unions protect the employees as a whole but not the individuals. They have their own interests that are not always aligned with the employees either.
That would frame it in a way that doesn't somehow legitimize it, and would make employers seem, and be, far more criminal after they decide to reach into someone's pocket and steal cash.
Does this qualify as wage theft? Per US tipping laws, this is how tipping normally works.
That is worse.
EDIT: Because some people seem to be unaware: there is no actual crime in US law called "wage theft". It's a term that describes specific behavior and some of that behavior violates certain employment laws and regulations. See the Wikipedia article for the specifics, although it specifies that "tip theft" is actually its own legal complex within "wage theft": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft