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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

You should only be able to reduce the tip through a dispute with Instacart justifying the compensation reduction (and banned for repeat abuse of the process), compensation that was offered as part of the job bid.

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Then it’s not a tip at all.

The solution is to not show hypothetical tips to workers before the tip is finalized.

Maybe I'm taking crazy pills, but what about getting rid of a tip altogether and have a reasonable wage?

All tips do is subsidizing the employer allowing them to pay less and makes customers feel guilty to provide tip, even when there was nothing special about the service or even when it was bad.

What about any number of other things that can go wrong? They say something rude to you or are in some other way unprofessional? You know, the kinds of customer service niceties that are the entire point of tipping.

I’d suggest then not basing your business model on dumping your costs on the worker and the customer, so these hacks and discussions are negated.

Dumping costs on the customer is fine if it’s transparent. Hiding behind tipping rather than wages based on the cost of providing a service is unsustainable.

I mean what do they expect? A shame based tipping economy for delivery?

Yes, a lot of companies rely on you feeling personally bad for the person you're dealing with when having an issue with the company as a whole. The company tries to "humanize" themselves in this way by tossing a peon/cog onto the front lines to bear the brunt of customer hostilities, with little resources to actually solve problems, then when the satisfaction survey comes down they'll hold the cog personally responsible for the dissatisfaction of the customer instead of actually reviewing and changing customer-hostile policies.

"Make a human connection and smile", doesn't solve dark pattern markup fees(Instacart), or terrible search interface that steers you towards the what the business wants you to buy at the price they want you to buy it at(Amazon), or that you got $200 in overdraft fees on $15 worth of purchases(any major bank).

these are the economies (efficiencies) many large corporations gain when they use (often low-wage, high-pressure) call centers to substitute for real customer service/sales.

they suck away power/information from both sides of the transaction (low-wage worker & customer) and use arms-length arguments to shield the managers & owners from the complexities and cost of genuine, trusting human interaction. it's dehumanizing all around.

How many customer service niceties are you exchanging with your instacart deliverer?

Before covid it was a short "thanks" or "nice day out". Now I don't even seen them because they usually just leave it outside the gate.

On my recent order, about half a dozen interactions while she picked the order, because many items were out of stock and she made substitutions.

> What about any number of other things that can go wrong? They say something rude to you or are in some other way unprofessional?

This should be fairly unusual.

If someone's dropping tips on every order, they should lose the ability to do so.

at that point it should probably no longer be called a tip... sounds like a different form of compensation

Right, like a guaranteed incentive bonus. With an indisputable deliverable, like GPS at the person's house. But, as with everything, it could probably end up being gamed.

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