“For most markets where DoorDash operates, customers are prompted to tip on the checkout screen, with a middle option already selected by default. If they want to, they can adjust the tip later from the status screen while awaiting their food, or even after it’s delivered. That’s changing today; while blaming New York City’s minimum wage increase for delivery workers, DoorDash announced that for “select markets, including New York City,” tipping is now exclusively a post-checkout option”
It seems so ridiculous given tipping fatigue, that DoorDash is making what should be a given sound like a negative.
This is the way it should be everywhere. I’m sorry but tipping before the order is even delivered creates a fucked up incentive with the drivers and the people getting food. Especially when apps like DoorDash make it very apparent. Who tipped well before they even pick up food. The tip should always be rendered after service.
I’m fine with a tip for over and above service, but otherwise yes I agree.
Worth noting that this will absolutely destroy the gig economy (which I’m kinda also fine with, tbh) and things like food delivery we see today. There is a reason very few businesses delivered prior to the delivery apps.
close but not quite. Tips are given for excellent service. It’s an extra added bonus for going above and beyond. It should not (and as far as I’m concerned) is not used to pay a person’s base wage.
Minimum wage at restaurants in my state is $2.13 an hour. In such cases, it absolutely is used to pay someone’s wages, which is fucked up, IMO.
Your statement is accurate and reasonable for servers, who are employees of the restaurant, and are guaranteed to earn at least minimum wage.
But we are talking about delivery drivers. Drivers are generally contractors, not employees. There is no minimum wage for contractors. Further, contractors are responsible for their own expenses. The IRS says a mile of travel costs $0.655. DD typically pays a base rate of $2 per delivery, whether around the block, or 20 miles away. That $2 fee covers 3 miles of expenses, which is about a 2-mile delivery, plus travel to the store.
Typically, the driver ends up paying all of the base pay in travel expenses. The only part of his compensation he actually gets to keep is the tip.
This has always annoyed me about food delivery services. Tips are supposed to be reflective of the service delivered. How can I know if that service is going to be good before a driver is even assigned to my order? Prompt after the delivery to add a tip.
Secondary note, if a company cannot pay their employees a living wage without tips than said company shouldn’t exist. Nobody should have to rely on tips to…you know…exist.
So, I deliver for DoorDash from time to time, and it’s made me change how I view tipping in these apps.
I’m not tipping for quality of service (it’s hard to be ‘good’ vs ‘great’ on pick up, drive, drop off as a service, and if the driver manages to do that badly, DoorDash will make it right for you and ding the driver). Instead I’m tipping based on quantity of work, e.g., the distance I’m asking the driver to cover or the size/weight of the order if it’s something like groceries. While this is something that DoorDash should be doing, it’s not and is left to the customer to close the gap voluntarily.
DoorDash likes to act like they’re just connecting customers to people that want to make a delivery, but they’ve set up the system to feel like DoorDash is the service provider rather than the drivers. In reality, drivers should be setting their fees as independent contractors and DoorDash should only be providing the interface.
Tips are definitely not the answer, but…
if a company cannot pay their employees a living wage without tips
Actually, where I live, we don’t have a tip, but companies won’t even if they can. The sad truth is that businesses won’t without pressure. They just call it a social problem, weakness of their country, whatever.
It’s a false assumption.
Again, I believe tips are not the answer.
Wat. If an order isn’t getting delivered (your words):
if a driver sees no tip, your order is last in line if it gets delivered at all.
Than that’s an even BETTER reason that tipping should 100% be eliminated.
I agree. Pre tipping is not a good idea.
I also tip in cash whenever I can. Less chance of middlemen stealing it and “server” can decide to declare it as income or not.
Never offer cash tips on delivery platforms. People occasionally claim in their delivery instructions that they will pay an additional cash tip; nobody actually does. Talk to any driver and they will tell you the same: cash tippers are non-tippers.
Drivers can’t even see your offer of a cash tip until after they have accepted the offer. If you don’t offer a tip at checkout, your cash-tip offer is completely indistinguishable from a no-tip offer.
It should be: Let’s pay people proper wages instead of tipping.
yes but the way it stands right now, tips are still important right? until you get to a decent baseline minimum wage, workers will need tips to sustain themselves. is the new wage enough for sustenance in NY?
The way it stands right now, where base wages are not sufficient, is specifically because of tipping. Until people stop tipping, employers will continue to use it to subsidize wages that they should be paying. Whereas if people stopped tipping, the employers could not do that.
I absolutely agree with this. and I know that one of the ways to force employers to pay them fairly is to not tip. there’s still some problems with it, cause first of all minimum wage in the US is horrid, it’s not enough for living at all. but secondly, if everyone were to stop tipping immediately, workers might make lesser than they already are. a better way to go about it is to increase minimum wage to begin with. of course, not really possible IRL so I guess you’d see both happening simultaneously.
I’m 100% for not tipping in USA. But the bastards that own the restaurants and company’s won’t pay these people what they deserve. Time for nationwide strike in the restaurant/food delivery industry imo.
Well, and people are willing to roll the dice and accept work where tipping is an essential part of their income.
Time for nationwide strike in the restaurant/food delivery industry imo.
That will never happen, because the truth is that these folks do make more from tips than they would from any sort of overall wage increase. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, tip-receiving workers tend to favor the tipping system in my experience.
Then fuck tipping because it’s a non legal added tax on my food. How about that?
That will never happen, because the truth is that these folks do make more from tips than they would from any sort of overall wage increase. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, tip-receiving workers tend to favor the tipping system in my experience.
This is a major reason why I, personally, don’t tip. Those who like working for tips need to understand that they are not entitled to tips.
I never tip and hope that voting with my wallet will cause more people to realize that they should be fighting owners, not customers or employees.
Hey, good principled stance… I guarantee literally every server, and I mean absolutely every one, thinks you’re the asshole and they are 1000000% not thinking about the realities of the tipped industries when they see the bill with a zero percent tip.
Also, I kinda think you’re the asshole if you’re dumb enough to believe that you, the one you, is somehow going to change tipping culture in America by not tipping.
Have you ever applied to a job? It can be an exhausting experience especially when you always have to do it after getting out of work from you current shitty job that exhausts you to the point that you would rather do anything else than think about work.
I’ve been working since i turned 14. I’m in my early 30s now. I’ve been through many jobs and never really had an issue finding work. It has a lot to do with the area of work, region, luck, time and fuck tons of charisma to make yourself stand out. I moved countries and counties. I’ve been through the gauntlet of retail, healthcare and freelancing / contracting. My perspective is skewed because of it, my question wasn’t dismissive, I genuinely never had a downtime or could afford to be without a job for even a week. But I’m not from the States, I’ve got no idea what the market is like there, I can only speak for my experience on the other side.
Apologies if it looked disrespectful.
I’ve been to restaurants with mandatory 20% tip included in the bill and let me tell you, I don’t even know if I got service worthy of 10%. It seems to be more of a cultural problem though. Even when their salaries are covered, American restaurant service is pretty lackluster. Without the carrot on the stick, it doesn’t seem like they’re even willing to try.
Working in a restaurant is probably one of the most consistently hard jobs in the US. It takes like 3 times the amount of energy that the average office job does. I don’t think you are getting bad service because the people that are serving you are just lazy, they certainly wouldn’t be working in the food service industry if they were lazy.
I’ve worked in restaurants too, mate. I get that it may be a lot of work, but the experience also let me know that the service I’m getting is usually pretty subpar. I don’t mind tipping good waiters, but they are pretty rare outside of fine dining. Lazy waiters, like lazy employees in any other job, are always going to be a plague on their industry.
I find it interesting that there’s been this vocal movement to “100%” eliminate tipping across the board. It’s worked very well for us for generations until now. I don’t think tipping is the problem.
The problems include services that inflate prices and want fees on top of tipping (DoorDash), customer-facing point-of-sale systems making it easier to prompt for tips (Square. Toast), and the general drive towards and acceptance of consumerism allowing for all these things to take place (plastic and mobile over cash). Not to mention inflated costs of living and stagnant wages.
Tipping in and of itself is fine. It’s a win-win-win for the consumer, the worker, and the business. But it’s insulting and a hinderance on the consumer in the context of all that’s going on in the world today. In this regard, I share in the frustration.
If you were to make a stand and choose not to tip at a restaurant, your immediate impact is going to be on the worker who relies on that tip to support themselves and their family. Collectively, this movement is going to hurt the lives of individuals and potentially impact the local economies.
I share the belief that businesses should pay their workers a fair wage. However, in the restaurant industry, the businesses who’ve tried this have largely failed. Paying a fast-casual dinning or fine dinning worker the same as a McDonald’s worker isn’t going to bode well for customers expecting a higher level of customer service. Of course, this opens the conversation to the minimum wage laws and what’s proper in this regard.
I agree somewhat that we should “strike” on restaurants and food delivery. But I say so in favor of us being more self reliant on ourselves rather than constantly being consumers of other’s goods and services. Eating out / ordering in should not be something that we’re doing so often that it’s impacting our personal finances. It should be done in moderation (at most) and afford us the opportunity to pay those doing the work for us a fair compensation for their efforts. Our money should going towards people, not companies - certainly not DD.
What I’d like to see a measure on is consumerism and compensation in the US compared to countries that don’t have tipping. I wonder if non-tipping countries eat out / order in less and if they have different regulations about fees. I’d also like to see a measure on the average wage and income compared to living costs. So, is someone working at Applebees (for example) in the US making relatively the same in the UK when accounting for their cost of living? How much do Americans spend on leisure, what do we define as leisure, compared to other countries? How do government support systems compare? What does the tax structure look like? I’m just not so sure it’s a fair 1:1 comparison if you want to do what other countries are doing (not to say I oppose those systems).
I like tipping. I refuse to be nickel and dimed. I have a bigger problem with streaming services constantly raising their prices and inflated DD and Ticketmaster fees than I do tipping. Canceling all my streaming services, my Prime account, my DD account (and eating out less) affords me a bit more money to be a good tipper. Paying in cash sometimes gets me a discount and allows me to have a more positive impact on wait staff.
I see the non-tangible appification of payment as a bigger problem - and I see rampant consumerism as the primary issue. And I believe the government knows this. They’re pushing towards a cashless society because they know how easy it is to thoughtlessly click a button to transfer money from one entity to another.
the businesses who’ve tried this have largely failed.
See most nations outside the US
Paying a fast-casual dinning or fine dinning worker the same as a McDonald’s worker isn’t going to bode well for customers expecting a higher level of customer service
Then wages can be set to match the establishment and expected level of customer service.
I’ve eaten at restaurants outside the US and prices are not ridiculous. However, US businesses assert they’d need to be. If it’s truly going to set prices outside the affordable range for US customers I’d like to compare restaurant balance sheets inside vs. outside the US. What is costing US restaurants so much money that they have to pay their employees so poorly?
I think you are giving business owners too much credit with your questions. Businesses and the rich like to spread FUD that anything taking any money from their pockets will destroy the economy.
Much like Covid showed us that working from home was totally doable for many office jobs, I’m sure some some forced elimination of tipping would show that it’s completely possible to adjust to that change.
I’d be more satisfied if they just stopped calling them tips. They aren’t a tip. Door Dash gives drivers about a $2.50 incentive to even bother looking at the orders that pop up, but it’s up to them to decide whether to take the orders. So you’re quietly negotiating with a complete stranger to go pick up some taco bell and bring it to your house at 3 a.m. it’s a bid. Not a tip.
Calling it a tip is disingenuous and why a hell of a lot of people never “tip” at all.
Edit to add: The real abuse of their workers is that they talk out both sides of their mouth about how independent drivers are, but then they weight the system to punish drivers who don’t take bad jobs. If that mess ended the service would improve for everyone on both sides of the order.
They’ve recently lowered the base pay to $2. I’ve had ‘offers’ pop up for $2 on a 10 mile delivery. If I were to accept that I’d be losing money on the delivery.
You say “losing money”, but I want to quantify that for those reading along:
IRS allows us to claim $0.655 per mile in expenses. DoorDash’s $2 base fee covers only the expenses on a 3 mile trip.
A 10 mile trip costs $6.55. DD pays $2.
But that’s not the end of it. That 10-mile trip took me at least 4 miles outside of my zone. I need to get back to it before I can reasonably expect to receive offers again. I need about $9.17 before I earn one red cent. All that driving and waiting for your food took me about an hour. Just to make minimum wage, I need to gross $16.42. DD pays $2. I need about a $15 tip from you to make minimum wage.
That doesn’t make sense.
Doordash doesn’t pay you based on the order? Customers are charged more based on how much they order (everything has an upcharge), so I assumed some of that extra money went to the drivers. There’s also I think 2 mandatory fees: a delivery fee and a maintenance fee or some shit. I don’t know if these scale based on how much you order or how far the delivery is etc, but it’s a lot of money. Way more than $2.
I just find it hard to believe the app could exist at all with drivers having the experience you described. Or maybe I misunderstand you. Are you saying that delivery would make you $8.55? (not counting your expenses, obviously.)
-sigh- speaking from experience, it doesn’t cost you $0.65 a mile to drive. Perhaps you could make that argument if you bought and insured a new gas guzzler specifically for delivery driving, only took it to the dealership for maintenance/repairs, and only filled up with premium. If you’re doing that, then… you should probably work for someone who makes decisions for you.
I would actually be interested in using an app like this where it’s truly a bid… Sounds interesting.
Tips are an excuse for employers not to pay their employees a livable wage. If you rely on tips to get by, your employer doesn’t deserve to be in business.
