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.