DoorDash’s about-face on tipping shows customers have more clout than workers

Not when regulation steps in. That is what labor law and regulation is for.

The "gig economy" was a tech industry attempt to sidestep labor law, and the law is finally catching up. And mind you, you don't have to outlaw how gig workers are currently treated as contractors everywhere to break these platforms; just in places large enough that without those markets, the platform is no longer barely sustainable (for example, 25% of Uber's bookings occur in just five cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and São Paulo). It doesn't matter much for platforms if gig workers are still legal in say, Wyoming.

https://www.wired.com/story/california-lawmakers-move-protec... (Wired: California Lawmakers Move to Protect Gig-Economy Workers)

It helps when government regulations exist to reduce employers' ability to find replacements. That's the fundamental conflict that employers can exploit: when they can appeal to each individual to work at cost to the advancement of the entire set of workers, the organization fails. Employers can then reduce pay and worsen working conditions to the poverty level.

A variety of things have reduced the effectiveness of labor organizers over the past few decades, but they were responsible for things like the 5-day, 40-hour workweek and safety regulations. The ability of the Internet to reach out to an even wider set of unskilled workers makes the job nearly impossible.

DoorDash being scammy doesn't give the customer permission to ignore a social norm. The customer should still tip, just do it in cash outside of the app. It is a little less convenient, but it is better to be inconvenienced than to be an asshole.

Every month, the app collects the data from its users and produces a report: "Dear Nestle, this month you lost $X of revenue on account of people boycotting you because of this or that."

I think it's important to send some kind of negative feedback to companies.

If there are no customers there is no business. It doesn't matter how many 'angel investors' you have in a business or other nonsense like that. If producers try to jack up prices and nobody feels like paying them then it's the producers that go bankrupt, not the customers. Similarly if producers piss of their customers so they leave then it's the producers that lose jobs, not the customers.

This is the democratizing effect of capitalism. Everybody works for a living and everybody is somebody's customer. In a total capitalist society you must serve to be able to eat and when you eat must be served.

Of course the world is not a perfect place and there are a multitude of ways that this power dynamic gets turned on it's head.

One of the ways is people being convinced that they are passive "consumers" who believe they are helpless to 'capitalists' and apathetically volunteer themselves to be victims... Like people who go out and put 600 dollars on their credit cards on a new smart phone only to complain and moan on that smart phone on how they are being spied on and so on and so forth... while all the while paying interest to the bank for joy of financing their own privacy violation.

IIRC, it's true that when restaurants shift to a tipless system that (a) charges the true price up front and (b) distributes the revenue more evenly to both front of house and back of house, servers end up making less.

It seemed to be the most straightforward thing to do is to charge the customer the "guaranteed minimum" that they're promising to pay the delivery person, then add tip on top. The higher sticker price would probably drop demand, but the people who do deliver would earn more on average. It's also possible, though, that people will simply stop tipping, leading to a small drop in average revenue per delivery.

I wish we got rid of tipping for these situations altogether, but I realize it's useful as a price discrimination mechanism.

Unfortunately stuff like this happens at many local restaurants. The jobs are allowed to pay below minimum wage and let the tips pay the employee. Some places abuse that even further.

Meanwhile a guy who stole 23 cellphones in an armed robbery was sentenced to 17 years is prison the other day: https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2019/7/23/20707907/aries-...

Now armed robbery is bad, no doubt. If I had heard of this fellow getting 17 months in prison for it I probably wouldn't have thought twice. But 17 years is ridiculous, even if he will be out in 8 with good behavior. Meanwhile examples like Doordash show it's basically legal to steal from poor people, and Bernie Madoff, who stole $20 billion dollars is petitioning for clemency because he's old and what the hell, it was just money.

They say politics is like a pendulum and it seems like we are all the way on the right and it should start going back to the left any day now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Both consumers and Dashers assumed that the equation was instead X promised dollars PLUS Y tip dollars.

(e.g. A dasher is promised 5 dollars for a delivery. DD assumes that the customer will pay 4 dollars in tip, meaning the cost for DD should be 1 dollar. If the customer tips 2 dollars, they will "make whole" the Dasher by paying them 3 dollars in addition to the tip. This is all horse shit and people were pissed by this deception.)

Also, obligatory Reservoir Dogs tipping scene (warning, NSFW language): https://youtu.be/V4sbYy0WdGQ