It is inevitable for DoorDash to make tipping an even more annoying and intrusive part of Deliveroo. I can't wait to see how europeen users react to that.
Back when I used Deliveroo, tipping always led to worse delivery success rates so I gave up.
They suddenly became really bad recently, which is unfortunate as they generally had the edge on Uber Eats (total charlatans!)
What does this mean? If you don't tip on doordash in the US, your order just arrives a few minutes later than usual since the auction starts at a lower price and drivers will reject the lowest prices
That’s an understatement. Your order sits on the shelf for while before someone picks up if you don’t tip, sometimes more than 30 mins, until DoorDash forces some poor underpaid driver to pick it up sometimes with incentives, but mostly threats on their livelihood. In some cases, drivers do pick it up, don’t deliver, eat your stuff, or drive in other directions to focus on other orders. Orders without tips do extremely poorly these days.
Customers will not correlate poor tipping with poor service, because tipping is considered so culturally different. If that behaviour starts to happen, customers will just use it once or twice, have a poor experience and decide "nope, that doesn't work for me, I'll not use that any more".
In the UK Deliveroo offers me a chance to tip when making an order but only really "pushes" it after delivery, conforming to the UK sense of a tip being in response to great service. I've only been minded to do it once when a driver genuinely did something exceptional when I messed up an order - so he got a £5 tip on a £2.50 delivery fee from a restaurant about a mile away from me.
DoorDash could actually try something innovative here - they could eradicate tips, and push service fees up a little, and make a big deal of it in their marketing that their gig economy riders are getting a great deal. If it catches on, you could find this ripple out into other services like Uber, and perhaps change the tone on tipping in general in other scenarios, too.
DoorDash (at least in some markets in the US) has a message indicating the correlation between no tip and slow delivery time.
In the US, many food-related jobs are paid rates predicated on the workers being tipped. Sure there are some laws requiring the business to make up the difference to minimum wage if not met (over an average), but that’s still only up to minimum wage which is criminally low in many states.
Some states have started requiring the companies running app-based gig jobs to also ensure a minimum wage is paid, but not many yet.
US tipping culture is crazy.
It's difficult to conflate the moral high ground with maximal participation in a weird auction format when people are just trying to buy a burrito.
In most other countries (like mine Australia) the price of the good is the advertised price. There is no extra weird moral based financial game played on top.
They're also treated badly because they don't know how much they'll get paid in practice, which makes financial planning even more difficult, including comparing job offers. Instead of just getting the higher-paid job, you get lured into accepting a low-paying one with promises of tips that may or may not materialize. My salary is basically the main thing that's legally enforceable when I sign an employment contract, but I wouldn't even get that if I relied on tips.
> Just pay what it really costs.
How much is that exactly? Is that +5/10/20% of the initial price?
Tipping when it becomes non-negligible completely breaks transparency (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(market)) which makes everything less efficient.
Then they should have whatever that is be the actual displayed cost.
As it stands now, there’s an often delivery fee which apparently does not guarantee and reasonable delivery time. How does that make any sense?
But it's a little odd to turn this into a moral issue when the app actually does give you the means to pay the driver what you believe is actually fair, above the base amount being charged.
So what this really tells me is that you just think the true cost is more than you want to pay. Which is totally fine.
However, you should still tip, because not tipping isn't a protest. You're not hurting doordash by not tipping, you're just hurting the driver and yourself. The driver who, as we've all rightfully pointed out, is already exploited.
It’s not a tip. A tip is an additional sign of appreciation for the quality of service. When this becomes a compulsory addition (as it seems to be in US culture) it’s simply a hidden tax, paying it in advance of receiving said service is even more ridiculous. In this case - as we seem to have established - it’s a model that hurts both worker and consumer, allowing exploitative employers to externalise costs by presenting a false moral dilemma.
> it’s a model that hurts both worker and consumer
Yes, it is. But by not tipping, you're objectively hurting the worker more. Notice my choice of words here - objectively. That means don't bother trying to argue against it.
Why?
You haven't even begun to further explain nor explore the wider economic and social implications of what you claim to be the one true way, nor potential alternatives (and why they are impossible or insufficient). You're making increasingly bold claims, therefore you should perhaps back them up. Simply declaring what you think to be true as objectively so, doesn't make it such.
> That means don't bother trying to argue against it.
Thanks, wasn't sure if this was meant to be humorous but it did give me a chuckle.
Maybe the hope is that if you kick people already down they’ll “learn a lesson” and then change their behavior? Which, I don’t know, maybe. But it seems to me it’s more likely they just continue doing what they’re doing but now worse.
And, by the way, I’m using objectively correctly.
If you don’t tip them, the worker makes less money on that order. Is less money for workers a better or worse outcome? It’s an incredibly simply line of logic. And, for the record, you haven’t even attempted to refute it. You haven’t said why not tipping is good. So… I’m inclined to believe I’m right and you know it. Maybe there’s some cognitive dissonance there where you want to simultaneously be pro-labor and pay labor less.
Tipping isn’t a culture. Well, it is, but because we allow it to be via legislation. Of course companies enforce and employ tipping - it’s a win for them. You can’t dismantle the culture without addressing the root cause. It’s like proclaiming you’re gonna solve a poverty culture by driving around in a Range Rover. Yeah… that doesn’t fix anything.
You want to believe you’re doing your part by doing nothing at all. It’s a nice thought and I’m sure comforting, but it’s not real. If you want tips to stop, then force employers to pay living wages and prevent them from gathering tips. There, problem solved.
No such wide spread culture or requirement in 50% of the counties considered to be in the Anglosphere.
Whilst it might exist in some capacity, a capacity that is far more limited, not applied in the same manner and easily avoided. It’s not even remotely the same as the situation in the US where it’s effectively mandatory across the board.
It’s a moral and social contract decision. In particular if you want to incentive the world to provide good service.
For the record, I never use food delivery services because the upcharge is absurd. If I want food delivery it'll be pizza and that's it. At least that's an honest transaction and I don't have to wonder when my food will arrive or how cold it might be.
Obviously nobody wants to order food on ebay, and if you're going to argue that an auction is the only possible outcome why wouldn't that apply to the restaurant itself too? The restaurant could aggressively underpay/understaff chefs, then you go to pick up the order and restaurant says "Oh someone else offered to buy food at a higher price, but feel free to order again and offer more, and sit here for 30m while we prepare it!"
Honestly only Americans could come up with this BS justification about "lowest bidder" for a service I'm fully paying for
So I really don’t see the point of tipping beforehand. You can tip the driver when he delivers the meal if that’s what you want.
Anything before the service have been delivered sounds like a fee and, if I understand other comments here, a mean to pay for your position in the queue which imho sounds pretty disgusting.
Then what's the delivery fee?
Note the implications: If every driver in your area accepts orders at the same price, doordash will absorb the entire tip from every order. I dunno why people make up FUD instead of just doing an image search for what the driver's UI looks like.
Edit: while it is true that base pay does go up if an order gets declined, it doesn’t ALWAYS go up and if it does, it takes a while to get it to a reasonable rate. That is when your order just sits there.
It’s my understanding that it may be different in some markets, but generally while drivers may not know exactly how much you tip above a certain amount venue accepting the order, they do seem to generally know if you haven’t tipped or have tipped a tiny amount.
https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash/comments/12d8p18/do_driver...
Low fee slower less likely to get a driver. High fee faster drivers will take your order over others.
That being said, it is cultural norm here to tip by rounding up the order(say total is 2.59/ you tip by asking to make it 3.00/) when you are ordering in person and the service is/was good and the food is/was also good quality. Alternatively, in some restaurant, it is not usual to tip as order is collected by someone near the cash register while served by someone else entirely and someone else is preparing it. Once you are done eating, you return the dishes and go home, so there is no option to tip as you simply don’t tip at the prepayment step because you don’t know the food and service yet, you don’t tip the server as they simply bring the food and walk away.
There is already a tipping UI in the app, but it is not intrusive, nothing as aggressive as what you'd experience in the US where you're inclined to pre-tip even before the delivery happens.
As for the capitals, yes it is becoming a thing but from my personal experience it is limited to touristy places
The Deliveroo app already asks if you want to tip.
On demand food delivery is a premium luxury service (though the platforms have done their best to market it as otherwise). Please tip accordingly. These people work their asses off and are generally from a very low income background. If you have problems with that, go to the grocery store.
I stopped automatically tipping in New York City and the Bay Area. They earn a minimum wage now [1]. If they go above and beyond, sure, I'll tip. But if they just do their job, there are now regulations that have them get paid.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/news/018-24/mayor-adams-first-a...
Different contexts. Even though restaurants are meant to make up the gap between the tipped and actual minimums, they often don't. And delivery drivers in New York and California are making well above the federal minimumw wage. Most importantly: a restaurant tip is split between skilled servers and kitchen staff. It's going to multiple people, each of whom have developed a specialised skill that adds value to my experience. None of that is true for someone carting my food to my home.
Absent regulation, I think tipping drivers and delivery staff is good. With regulation, the tradeoff has sort of been made for me.
This is the one thing that really irks me. This is a known thing. But everyone seems to think the solution to that is "well, the customer should fix that". Any attempt to try to fix that through Departments of Labor is met with reasons why not. Servers don't want to report their employer, etc.
And then that leads to tropes like "If you don't tip well, I am being taxed to serve you". No, you're not. The IRS taxes you on an estimate of your tipped income - if you can show that it was less than that, then that's what you get taxed on. The reality is that the IRS's estimate assumes that you get 8% tips (when was the last time you ever saw that?), so most servers are undertaxed on tipped income, and don't want to rock that boat.
Last time I mentioned this here, a few people piped up that this "didn't matter", because there is "no way to document cash tips for the IRS"...
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f4070--2005.pdf - fill this out, once a month. It takes a good three to four minutes.
It's more that they're regulated, the price of the delivered food is already high, and I'm not putting a premium on their labour above e.g. the folks who prepared the food.
I live in Oregon and employees here make a minimum of $14.70/hour and $15.95 in the Portland Metro area before tips. California and Washington have slightly higher minimums, seemingly state-wide. There are other states listed that are not as generous.
I tip but am sympathetic to my relatives who don't. Many places expect you to pay and tip, then take your drinks and food to the table, bus your tables, etc.
Absolutely with a roommate.
As HN frequently points out "your business model is not my problem".
Either don't tip, or don't use the service. If you do tip, you're contributing to workers being exploited.
It is problem with business taking advantage of low income groups and business should be guilt into doing the right thing. Not people for not tipping.
If a company can't exist/ will be bankrupt ( or whatever the greedy business owners complain) if they can't provide livable( not minimum wage that was set 10 years ago and never account for inflation) wage to workers they should not exist in first place.
Tipping just enables this exploitation and at the same time paying billion of dollars to shareholders . I have read news about companies, owners taking share of the tip.
delivery drivers should protest and make sure government to pass bills to stop this exploitation.
these business are taking advantage of situation of vulnerable people who either have to sleep hungry and not exploited or be exploited but have a meal. No idea how we can as a society make it better.