Taking my e-bike as an undercover food delivery rider
electrek.co
electrek.co
The author is saying that the companies don’t pay him enough so I should tip to compensate.
This will actually make things worse, as I will then be artificially propping up a broken market.
A better solution would be for nobody to tip. At this point, all the drivers would quit because the pay is too low, so the companies would be forced to raise it to a level where they can attract drivers.
I'm in France and they're obviously trying to cirmcumvent labor law, they're not independent workers, they're often dependent on a single service that watches every single movement they do, punishes them for not following instructions, so they should have a salary, regular employment by the platform, not contracts.
I'll wait, in the meantime, I can go myself to fetch my food, or cook at home! Or purchase from takehome-first restaurants with employed drivers.
Would you rather not tip or not use the service?
Instead of begging for tips, drivers join a national union and regularly go on strike when a delivery company fails to meet payment expectations. New delivery services typical negotiate a deal with the union first to get drivers, and thus new companies have one less needless marketing expense.
Just don't tip.
It makes no sense for couriers to receive tips based on the price of the package. As far as they should be concerned, a 5$ burger and a 100$ steak are the same thing.
Now that some companies like DoorDash are also branching out and delivering medicines, and it would be preferable if they didn't even know what was inside any package and just charged appropriate by weight, distance, congestion fees for delivery.
It is a horribly broken way of doing things that feels terribly dirty to someone that wasn’t indoctrinated since birth.
Every time I see tipping and the behaviour, I can’t help thinking it’s a bunch of people with money who waive it at people who don’t while saying “be at my beck and call and I’ll give you some. Or not. But still dance for me”
Obviously the people with the money like it because they have an entire class of society dancing for them whenever they please
That might bring the shady numbers out into the open.
Better yet, tip partly/fully in cash so the app doesn’t know the true value of their earnings (especially with inevitable lawsuits and settlements that may deduct tips when doing minimum wage calculations).
Personally, I don’t like tipping in advance of receiving a service.
I’m in Canada, so it’s a good way to get rid of my $1 and $2 coins (and some minority of quarters).
My brother was a DoorDash driver and a lot of his friends were and they all said that they regularly skipped orders with $0 tips because it meant they made nothing on them. DoorDash, at one point, even tried to implement something to address this by changing the way the income for the order was displayed but it's still quite prevalent.
So, yeah, tipping cash is a great idea except these companies have built their whole model in a way that makes that look like you're going to tip $0. So unless someone doesn't care and picks it up, in my area at least, it sounds like you're just not going to get stuff delivered.
This sounds like the whole idea is just broken. No one is making any money, including DoorDash (I at least assume they're not profitable), and the only money to be made in any of this is the idea of a "tip" which effectively holds your order hostage unless you pay up some unspecified amount. All so you can have a lukewarm burger delivered to your door. Oh, and if you get ghosted, you could have already eaten your hot food by the time you get it sorted, had you just gone and picked it up yourself.
I dunno, does this sound like something a rational person would participate in? ("...he asked rhetorically.")
The Almighty Mar-ket, with all its acolytes, always form a rational economic system, by definition!
This is the root of the problems on both sides.
You've completely forgotten about the actual service you're paying for because it's so "cheap" and ubiquitous.
People use like infrastructure what used to be a treat. Like room service.
No. Jesus. Stop tipping everywhere, entirely. It’s a broken system that should have been abolished ages ago.
Pay employees a living wage or the business should go bust.
People will hand-wave this away as "this isn't meant to be a full time job, just beer money on the side" but for a lot of adults it is in fact their primary source of income.
So if they are willing, they can spend 30h waiting+delivering with a lower hourly rate, but higher total $ than just working 20h at min wage.
I assume he was using a new account for deliveries and this was day 1 for him. Wouldn't the app put a new user in a test phase for the firs number of days and give priority to other established accounts with good ratings
- 120% of minimum wage, plus
- 30 cents per mile
This doesn't cover the time between jobs, which makes some sense because a worker can be available for multiple services at once.
Importantly, tips don't count towards the minimum earnings guarantee.
However, food delivery gig workers in New York City and a few other places have recently successfully won the right to earn a fixed minimum wage: https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/09/28/minimum-hourly-pay-court-...
There was a big fight in washington/seattle https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-cit...
Lot's of misinfo/disinfo being disseminated from doordash/instacart etc about how unfair it is and how it will kill it's business. If your business can't survive your workers being paid minimum wage, maybe you shouldn't be in business.