Personally, I think companies like DoorDash set a really dark precedent for the future of work in the US. Their primary value as a company is their ability to manipulate how thousands of people get paid, not to ensure top quality service.
- the opponent will flee or - the opponent will fight to the death
Don't you think that would affect the attacking party's plans?
By tipping you are directly subsidizing doordash
Not if they can't find other work (like now where un-employment is high).
Just because our regulatory frameworks allow DoorDash's workers to be taken advantage up does not mean that these apps have no value. DoorDash & others basically fed the whole young, well-off, urban dweller population that can't cook during lock down.
Our legal system supports companies making the most money the market will allow, if they paid more then the market for delivery drivers the executive that made that decision would be fired.
You aren't supporting exploitative practices by using DoorDash, you're giving somebody a job where they otherwise they wouldn't have any. You're funneling money from affluent city dwellers to the pockets of DoorDash's share holders yes, but also to their delivery drivers.
Attacking a company for creating jobs where there weren't any before is silly. Attack the issues with the legal framework, not the people that are using it as designed.
Laziness is an adaption, and we adapt to whatever level of effort is required. Money is just an intangible so it's easy to be wasteful with it when it pretty much doesn't exist and is just a number somewhere we can't see.
But if a particular luxury disappeared, you'd adapt just fine.
The fact that they don't make a profit even with shitty labor practices probably means it's not very sustainable, in the same way that WeWork filled a need but was ultimately not sustainable.
But the evidence suggests that given US labor costs and relative equality for much of the population, it's generally hard for middle-class or even upper-middle class to justify paying people to run errands for them generally. I'm not sure the economics of fast delivery are all that different from when kozmo.com was around.
For example, there's probably a pretty robust market for a personal chef to come by your house and cook you a gourmet meal for $5. And private jets for the same price as commercial? Sign me up.
WeWork showed that individuals want and are willing to pay for communal office space and that small companies want and are willing to pay for "slices" of that space.
DoorDash (and the like) shows that people want and are willing to pay for more than just pizza and American-Chinese takeout and restaurants were willing to take a large percent cut for delivery-as-a-service.
Regus existed long before WeWork--as did many local spaces. I guess WeWork demonstrated that there was a market for "cooler" co-working spaces at scale.
As for DoorDash? People clearly want all sorts of rapid delivery and especially younger people who hate calling up a place really want to order through a consolidated web site. I'm not sure that's a revelation. The question is whether the economics broadly work out which is really not proven yet.
The value proposition that has changed with the delivery apps is that lots of restaurants can share the cost of a large pool of drivers with an app that can sufficiently allocate routes. This isn't a proposition that has actually been profitable yet, though, and really the only thing that makes this situation unique is that we are now in an unprecedented situation where indoor dining is recommended against and in some cases heavily restricted or banned entirely. Presumably when restaurants are free to operate traditionally again they might not find having such a low-margin delivery arm so great, and they will leave. Anecdotally, some restaurants did this in my area when lockdowns were eased up.
EDIT: To those who ask why, you cannot trust the app to disburse the "tip" to the worker.
The societally disruptive idea of not paying your workers is the great "innovation" of the gig economy. The oldest grift there ever was.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/charlesradclyffe/2018/10/16/tip...
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/20/20825937/doordash-tippi...
It's just moaning about the bad UX deliveroo has and using made up figures.
All he says is that he's guessing 5-10% of people tip, and the default tip is only 10% therefore the gig workers are only getting 1% on AVERAGE.
It makes no claims of stealing, there are ZERO articles on the search backing up your claim, and only a few Reddit posts from riders who thought that maybe one-time, deliveroo didn't give them their tip in a complicated set of circumstances that was probably simple user-error.
I'm not a fan of the gig economy, I know the previously some other companies in America stole tips, but you've made a totally unsubstantiated, libellous claim about Deliveroo there.
This is part of the reason why there's this whole struggle to define what exactly the gig-economy worker contract is supposed to look like, because they're not paid hourly and it's often net negative for full-timers, who do exist.
Also to clarify a point made in the article; this is not the equivalent to a tipped wage. With a tip wage you already know what your base pay is up front, and tips are additive; what DoorDash was doing was deducting tip from some set base pay. Fortunately I live in a state that does not differentiate tipped and regular wage.
With all that said, tipping seems to be a weird cultural holdover where employers can keep labor rates down via a quasi-voluntary tax
The reality is that $1 + tips almost never makes it to $15, so they always pay them $15 an hour.
If you tip $5, they get $1 + $5 (from you) + $9 (from the company).
If you tip $0, they get $1 + $14 (from the company).
This is a shitty system designed to get you to offset company expenses.
In a well-designed system they should not pay them $1 + 100% of the tips, they should pay them $15 + 100% of the tips and where tips are truly optional.
I think where we may disagree is that my main concern is that the employee makes that minimum threshold, whether paid directly by the customer via a weird quasi-voluntary tax or by the employer who would presumably pass that cost on to the customer. Again, assuming it all gets claimed in income I don't see any shortfalls; it's just a weird convention.
Where I may have a problem is that there seems to be some evidence there is bias in tipping. I've seen some that indicates some race groups/protected classes are tipped less, controlling for service quality, even by their own race/class. If true, it would mean tipping is a de-facto form of discrimination and obviously needs to go away.
I would consider unethical when the result of me tipping vs. me not tipping is the same outcome for the driver. If it is advertised as a "tip" box, it should result in exactly that amount of gain to the driver than if $0 were entered in that box. How much you, the corporation, pays, should never depend on what I fill in for the tips.
Also, if the company can pay $15, they should pay $15, and recruiting me to pay part of that $15 under the guise of "tips" is unethical IMO. Call it a delivery fee and charge a fixed amount.
If you are asking me how much extra I want to pay in tips to a driver (10%, 15%, or 20%), I would be sympathetic to gig workers, because you're an asshole for paying them a $1 base wage.
If you are asking me how much extra I want pay to your asshole corporation, the answer will always be 0%. I don't want to pay any extra to your corporation. Name your lowest price that would keep your company afloat and I'll decide if I want the service or not.
This doesn't hold unless you think profits should be driven to zero. Any profit would mean an additional wage being withheld. I may not understand the dynamic here, but my understanding is that tip laws ensure that if the employee comes in under $15, the company makes up the difference.
I've alluded to it a few times, but I think we disagree in that tipping is a quasi-voluntary tax. A tax is a fee paid to subsidize a service. That tax, in this case, subsidizes fare charges by reducing overhead labor costs. If you want to not tip, you should pay a higher fare because otherwise those who do tip are subsidizing your ride. I don't think it's unethical just because it's called a "tip" unless you assume people don't understand how the tipping system works. If your claim is it allows a corporation to make an unfair profit, I'm not sure I'm tracking the logic of that argument because the tax in this case is entirely voluntary. Where I have an ethical problem is when wages are suppressed so much that the public must subsidize employee wages in the form of government benefits. In that case, non-customers are subsidizing the company profits; since they are not consumers of that company, it makes it a compulsory tax to protect their profit. This is entirely different than a voluntary tax on those who use the service.
Personally, I would prefer tipping in general to be banned because it's a clunky, inefficient system. It's much more transparent and straightforward to just have a fair wage without all the game theory that comes along with a convoluted system of tipping.
100% agree with this.
Tip is not supposed to be deducted from a standard rate of pay.
The resulting backlash from consumers was severe enough that at least one company operating in this space changed the policy: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/22/20703434/delivery-app-tip...
It's worth noting that the law is still changing in the area; gig-economy workers in California were classified as employees by the courts, but then this got overturned by a voter initiative, so there are no solid answers as we continue political campaigns and litigation.
We Americans really need a way to tip via app. I wish cryptocurrency was viable, because the POS ecosystem (Toast, Square, Clover, etc) is fragmented and takes a cut, the gig-app ordering systems take an even bigger cut, and it's just awfully annoying to have paper cash on hand. Crypto has yet to make any firm inroads though.
It'll even be a great day for those who rely on gratituity when the US decides to mint $2 and/or $5 coins. $1 coins are so hard to come by and people think they're such a novelty yet they're immensely more useful, more durable, cleaner, and denser (10 $1 bills bursts my wallet and eventually turns into a chaotic mess in my pocket when I don't have time at the register to nicely stack and fold them back into my wallet; 10 $1 coins in my pocket is far more manageable.)
What we really need is to change culture so that it's considered totally unacceptable for a business to pay service workers far below minimum wage, and rely on customers to make up the difference individually. I'm not Mr. Pink--I tip, but with full knowledge that all it's doing is enriching the business owner, who, instead of paying their staff properly, pockets an extra few dollars an hour instead.
https://help.doordash.com/dashers/s/article/How-is-Dasher-pa....
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/20/20825937/doordash-tippi...
This is very, very bad advice.
DD drivers filter out customers based on the size of the tip. If drivers see only base pay in the app, they will pass over your delivery request for more lucrative ones, meaning your food will take longer to get picked up and delivered, and in some cases, may not get delivered at all.
If the food arrived or I got to my destination I give the same, good, tip. I think it's gross to make workers dance for their supper. It's not "a little extra you're paying to a kid in highshcool" anymore, it's almost their entire income.
But! BUT! This is a top-down change that has to has to come from leadership. Trying to do this by just not tipping or being a bad tipper does nothing except punish the poorest people.
It's a great question, and there's no simple answer that will satisfy anyone. Suffice it to say that I have my own interpretation. Take it for what you will:
1. DD (and other gig economy) apps, have redefined the concept of a tip to subsidize the low wages paid to gig workers.
2. When gig economy workers see the tip in advance of their gig, it acts as an incentive to complete the task. For example, the higher the tip, the farther a DD driver will go, the more items they will deliver, and the better service they (should) provide.
3. In this particular case, the DD customer can still rate the driver after the delivery is complete. If their rating drops below a certain level, or if they receive a contract violation three times in 100 orders, they will face deactivation from the platform.
4. Currently, Lyft and Uber both delay tips to drivers depending on different circumstances. Tips could be delayed anywhere from minutes to hours to days, and this tends to de-incentivize drivers and could lead to diminished quality of service. DD, on the other hand, has found a strategy that both incentivizes drivers and promotes increased customer and driver satisfaction.
The odds of DoorDash lying about tip distribution are basically 0.
"That’s right — the more you tip in-app on DoorDash, the less DoorDash pays the worker."
You don't get to act as though your behavior is a categorical imperative if you don't participate in writing laws that make such imperatives a reality. You do not live as Robinson Crusoe, Chuck Noland, or even Richard Hatch did.
"Categorical imperative" is just a bad translation of "Law" which is a perfectly cromulent word.
Price(A) > Price(B)
=>
B > A
--------------------
Simplification aside, tipping is a service as well. The tipper "feels" good about tipping, the same way people donate or buy because of donations when there are such campaigns. For a lot of people the utility of that is close to 0, so they don't tip. For some its very high.
So it makes sense to have tipping as a way to implement price differentiation.
This would be true if tipping was optional, rather than expected. But this isn't even close to how things work in the US. In the US, you tip so that the restaurant can advertise lower prices on their menu. That's it. They tell you a burger costs $12, when in reality it costs $15. And if you decide to only pay $12 instead of $15 the restaurant just makes the waiter eat the cost.
Price discrimination means you can sell at a lower price to customers who might will not buy otherwise.
There is no price obfuscation.
I think in a world where people made enough money to eat and we didn't outlaw the stupid penny, we could keep all the pennies and offer them to people as tokens of our appreciation, then it's operating as a symbol and the emotional purpose is served without people who don't want to tip feeling expected to support people's lives all of the sudden at the end of the meal.
Our current system makes thoughtful, considerate people feel guilty if they don't want to tip deep down but feel they ought to.
Steve Martin's My Blue Heaven deals with the problem of wanting to express gratitude and joy to people in a world where everything is officious and transactional
I tip quite a bit now that I'm back in the US, but I prefer restaurants where servers were paid a better wage and their service was baked in to the cost of the meal.
The correct place for this implementation is in legislation or in free markets.
If we as society deem it necessary, legislation.
If we as society stopped being tricked into tipping as you are suggesting, and the effective wage was low to the point of triggering necessary business changes, the free markets will do their work.
Tipping is an entirely broken concept for the deliver model and arguing for customers to tip more or via cash is further incentivizing the model.
In merit and morality I agree, these are nice, hard working people that choose a profession that cannot meet their financial needs. I don't have an perfect answer for it either, I just see the glaring elephant in the room.
But then again, maybe this would create an incentive for delivery services to raise costs for restaurants?
Separately, I really don't understand this tipping economy at all. Aren't tips supposed to be based on quality of service? Why do they ask you for the tip amount before you have received service? They should just charge a fair amount and pay drivers a fair amount and not over-complicate the checkout process.
In general I absolutely hate "how much do you want to pay" type interfaces. I really hate thinking about that stuff. Just give me a number and I'll decide if I want the product or not -- that's how the rest of the world works.
One supposed origin of the word TIP is "To Ensure Proper Service. Ask people who are old enough and they'll tell you about how a tip was put on a table at the beginning of a meal. Today that's extremely rude, but it was common in certain areas.
Clearly it would be better if they were compensated fairly and I didn’t have to try to even it out with tips
tipping in general stinks and you should really set tip to $0. the driver sees the tip in advance and can take or not take the delivery. but then tip in cash if you want.