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Comment by imzadi | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the US, if these apps are going to depend on customers tipping for their drivers to get a reasonable wage, then tipping/delivery fee should be required. If people aren't willing to pay the drivers for their labor, they shouldn't place the order.

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If tipping is required it is no longer tipping. It’s a tax/fee.

I don’t get why people are expecting to receive tips even if the service provided is fine at best.

It’s not about people being entitled it’s about employers recognizing an opportunity to subsidize their labor costs.

The employer is the one building in the expectation for tips.

Then let’s just ban tipping.

Lots of people get paid a normal wage to do subpar work. Why should delivery drivers be any different? If those jobs actually pay a decent wage, then better quality employees will be interested in doing them and the lower tier workers will get pushed out. It should naturally drive up the quality.

Won’t happen. It’s the perfect way to underpay people. You can overpromise and underdeliver without breaking the law. When your workers get upset about poor pay, they’ll mostly direct their ire at your customers rather than at you.

I would be happier to do it if there was transparency about how much of the delivery costs the restaurant is covering. Delivery services benefit both producers and consumers. I'm not willing to be on the hook for the whole thing.

Why should the restaurant cover any of the cost of delivery?

Because as a matter of fact, restuarants have been employing (paying wages) to emplyees who's role is to deliver food. They charge a delivery fee which they have rationalized will cover this "cost", and then have historically fell on the consumer to actually pay the driver.

if delivery where NOT offered by these traditional restaurants, they would have gone out of business. Typical market force at work here, nothing new; needing to modify service to increasee value proposition.

Now, Food delivery apps came in and promised restuaranteurs that they could remove the pesky delivery drivers, but still keep those sweet seeet delivery-meal profits. That is of course, until all these apps just sucked money from both the restaurants AND the drivers.

So, Why should the restautant cover the cost of delivery? Because, they provide a historical good and service, which they outsourced, and now everyone loses. They would make more money if they went back to handling employment of drivers. It's way easier for me to pay a 2 dollar deliveyr fee and 5 dollar tip when I know that there isn't another an arbitraty app in the middle collecting my money.

edit: to explain my ramble, I haven't had food delivered since like college because it's so confusing/a money grab. To order delivery from the pizza place I've gone to since I was a kid, I need to download an app and pay twice as much? And they make less? Why?

They generally do, in these apps: they also pay a fee to the delivery company for each order they get (~15% for Uber eats), and they pay it because they get more business if they're available for delivery, especially on the centralised apps, and it's cheaper than having their own delivery drivers.

(A lot of restaurants will offer a discount if you order from them directly instead, to try to incentivize repeat customers to avoid the middleman, or just straight-up have lower pricing on that menu)

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