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Comment by sanj | Hacker News Reader

Tip pooling makes sense because a restaurant experience is composed of the work of multiple players in the front/back of the house.

DoorDash drivers don’t rely on other drivers. So why should a good driver compensate for the poor tips of a bad one?

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Why do you expect bad delivery drivers to have poorer tips? I've never adjusted a tip based on the quality of the driver, because I can't measure that. Anyone can hand over a bag of food, so the only thing I see is how long they took. But whether they arrive quickly or slowly is probably the kitchen's fault, or luck of overlapping orders. Realistically, I have nothing to rate them on.

Maybe because the tip has at least as much to do with the customer as it does the driver.

There's not a lot of evidence that tips actually reliably vary in response to quality (easy to Google, but stuff like https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe... ).

Tipping frequently matters more about the tippers mood, the tip-receiver's race and gender, and (of course) order size.

This isn't like restaurant tipping where bad service gets 10% and good service gets 25%+ It's mostly bi-modal, drivers frequently don't get tipped at all. In this scenario reducing variance makes sense because (as many other commenters here note) unless the experience is overwhelmingly bad the tip generally has more to do with the receiver of the order rather than the driver.

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