My biggest gripe with tipping culture right now is the number of services and establishments that think it's okay to tip ahead of time.<p>If I sit down at a restaurant, and get served well, I'll leave a tip at the end when I pay. Hell, even if the service isn't great I'll still leave a bit of a tip.<p>But now there's this idea that you should tip for service... before you get served. The tip jars at Starbucks, apps that ask you to input your tip before you get your delivery, POS systems that ask for a tip, etc. There's no way I'll ever tip before service, and probably won't after either if the business is audacious enough to ask for a tip when they're using a pay-before business model.<p>I'm looking forward to seeing how long it takes for self-service gas pumps to start asking for tips. After all, there's an attendant inside keeping an eye on you, so that's a service right?
I was amazed a few months ago when Instacart managed the uproar over this same practice and DoorDash apparently calculated that Instacart would take the brunt of the outrage and they would be able to keep their heads down and let it blow over without making any changes. That was stupid and it was only a matter of time before the next reporter noticed it and it would blow up again.<p>The correct evil strategy seems to be what Instacart is doing now which is to make a complicated algorithm so opaque that nobody understands it so it's difficult for it to generate outrage.
I think tipping is ingrained in American culture because of the lack of price transparency throughout this economy. This has been a recent topic of discussion in regards to healthcare but it also shows up in retail, where the shelf price is not reflective of sales taxes, and when booking services like flights and hotels where "resort fees" and "baggage fees" rear their ugly head last minute.<p>I've even seen "no tipping" restaurants do the same with a fine print saying that a 15-18% gratuity will be charged on top of my order, well.. why aren't all the dishes simply 15-18% more expensive then?
DoorDash CEO: "our average contribution to Dashers stayed the same"<p>What weird, coded language. They're not "paying employees." They're "contributing" to "Dashers." At first, I figured this was just a way to avoid saying that they're independent contractors, but this seems even more vague than THAT.<p>Why, legally, would they say "contributions" rather than "pay?" It seems like there's a different distinction from the independent contractor one.
> “Going forward,” DoorDash’s chief executive, Tony Xu, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night, “we’re changing our model — the new model will ensure that Dashers’ earnings will increase by the exact amount a customer tips on every order. We’ll have specific details in the coming days.”<p>> Under the policy, which the company adopted in 2017, DoorDash would offer a Dasher a guaranteed minimum amount to do a delivery. If a customer tipped, in most cases a tip paid through the app would go to subsidizing DoorDash’s contribution toward the guarantee, rather than increasing the Dasher’s pay.<p>> For example, if DoorDash guaranteed a worker $7 for a delivery and a customer did not tip, DoorDash would directly pay the worker $7. If the customer tipped $3 via the app, DoorDash would directly pay the worker only $4, then add on the $3 tip so that the worker would still get only $7.<p>And this is one more reason why I have and will not ever leave a digital tip.<p>Yes I know how tipping aggregates for wait staff (and I think that’s stupid...) but this is different. These are independent contractors paid to do a job. If they agree to do it for $X then that should come out of the pocket of the company hiring them. Any tip is over the top.<p>I hope they (DoorDash) get sued by their customers for deception, lose in court, and a precedent gets set to end this nonsense.
This doesn't change anything. DoorDash will lower the base pay of the orders, meaning the total compensation for Dashers will remain the same.<p>DoorDash has a model for what it considers "fair compensation" for an order. Since the company can see exactly what the customers tip in advance, they'll just subtract the tip amount from their previously calculated "fair compensation" and show that base pay / tip breakdown to the Dashers. DoorDash isn't going to suddenly increase its Dashers' pay by 50%.<p>If you want to actually compensate the Dashers, tip $0 in the app (raising base pay) and hand them cash at the door. That seems to be the only way to get around this policy.
It's interesting to see the new uproar about this change over on r/DoorDash. It's interesting to see a lot of the workers now worried this will actually end up being even less. It seems like they (workers/drivers) got what they wanted, but also didn't.
Wage theft is theft. DoorDash, and the VCs backing them, should be treated as thieves until such time as they unequivocally reject the practice of wage theft in all of their business dealings.
I can't believe that was legal. They basically tricked consumers into giving them millions of dollars.<p>If the app called it a "Tip" then that should be some kind of fraud because it wasn't a tip in the way that any reasonable person would assume, it was a donation to the company.
Tipping model is at its tipping point.<p>It is high time US citizens stop tipping and make businesses realize that the customers are not directly responsible for employee wages.
I thought management taking a cut of tips was known in the American restaurant/takeout industry to be illegal. And at least one other prominent dotcom has already been called on this.<p>Is this yet another instance of a dotcom knowingly and blatantly ignoring existing laws and regulations, and seeing how much they can get away with, while they use this advantage to steam full-ahead towards market dominance and IPO?<p>Is DoorDash yet influential enough that they can turn this into merely a regulatory handslap/caress?
There was a really easy fix for this. Remove the message that says "100% of your tip goes to your Dasher". Stop lying to the customer. It's that simple!<p>As usual, the reality of the <i>financial</i> situation is fairly complicated. Doordash guarantees minimums that other such services do not. In other words, in many ways, Doordash was more friendly to their 'contractors' than other services.<p>If they had simply chosen not to be unethical and lie to customers about where their tips go, they could have had it both ways.
Doordash is so stupid. I should be able to tip after I get my order, not before. Until they fix that, the model is backwards and broken for the consumer
Hey all.<p>Can someone explain to me WHY in 2019 we still tie the infrastructure to the power to make decisions?<p>Marketplaces are built not on open protocols (like email) but closed platforms.<p>They amass people from both sides and extract rents. But that’s a side effect of the closed nature of the software.<p>Why yell at doordash or uber or facebook to add a feature? Why does country X go after them for deleting posts while country Y yells that they didn’t delete similar posts? Closed software is the issue. “Zero to one. Competition is for losers” is who funded Facebook.<p>If people wanted to add tips in Wordpress or Email or whatever, they could just go ahead an add those. Or a million other features. Their clients would still interoperate.<p>Main reason: the capitalistic system we have encourages getting very wealthy as a result of building a successful company. It encourages people to work extremely hard and take risks while competing and duplicating 90% of the work others are doing. But in the area of software and information, copying is so easy. Collaboration beats competition nearly every time, relegating the proprietary solutions of yesteryear to obsolescence. The private market is reduced to turning out brief “bleeding edge” innovations which are then subsumed into the open source snowball.<p>Wikipedia, the Web, Webkit, Wordpress, MySQL and NGinX has beat Britannica, AOL, Blogger.com, IE, Oracle and IIS. So why don’t we have more of it in other areas? Drugs? Marketplaces?<p>Albert Wenger from USV has a nice online book called “World after Capital” that speaks about this.
I'm regularly confused by tipping. I was never confused by tipping until the gig economy. There's a tip on almost all of the gig services I use now, with zero explanation of how the tip affects the gig worker. The tip should be a reflection of the workers contribution to the service. I probably won't ever tip a company.<p>DoorDash has raised $2Bil from investors. They're using this money, presumably, to attract customers and suppliers through advertising and low pricing. DoorDash is one of many companies using VC money in this way. Now I'm supposed to subsidize the VC's subsidy of the product?
I feel sick to my stomach. I give tips specifically to the drivers, yet those companies took a cut without even telling the drivers. A so-called high-tech company behaves like a rogue restaurant owner. How low can we go?
I think North America really needs to re-evaluate this concept of tips. The rules of what to tip and when are intentionally vague because it's a sensitive subject.<p>We should move to "fair pay", that includes slightly increased prices, and do away with tips for most services.<p>It's so common that tips don't mean what the consumer thinks it means. Restaurants and bars that pool tips and share them with all staff.[1] Restaurant owners that try to keep some tips and only pay out a percentage to the staff.[2] Casinos pool tips too so the dealer doesn't get to keep the money you gave him directly.[3]<p>I get asked for tips at Starbucks. I get asked for tips when I do takeout food from the local restaurant. I get asked for tips at the buffet restaurant. The pizza driver gets a delivery charge AND a tip!<p>Let's clean it up and make it fair for the servers and the consumers.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.restaurantscanada.org/industry-news/aware-ontarios-tip-pooling-rules-regulations/" rel="nofollow">https://www.restaurantscanada.org/industry-news/aware-ontari...</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/advice-guy/can-restaurant-owners-share-tip-pool" rel="nofollow">https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/advice-guy/can-rest...</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/wynn-tip-sharing-2011-6" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/wynn-tip-sharing-2011-6</a>
Tipping just needs to die. If your business model demands that customers pay your price + 20% to pay your employees a wage they'll accept, then just increase your price by 20% and pay your employees that wage to begin with. Don't lie to customers and tell them the price is 20% lower than it really is when they're expected to add on more.
The "gig economy" is designed for the idiots on both sides.<p>The idiots that use these services.<p>The idiots that "work" for these services.<p>Can't wait until it all goes away.
Many people want to keep the very concept and system of tips in place because it affords them power over someone:<p><a href="https://theoutline.com/post/4602/the-restaurant-industry-is-fighting-like-hell-against-raising-the-tipped-minimum-wage" rel="nofollow">https://theoutline.com/post/4602/the-restaurant-industry-is-...</a><p>>“Money is power,” said Brooklyn-based waitress Marisa Licandro. “If the customer is paying my wage, they have power over me. And customers having power over you means that you can’t speak against them when they try to grab you.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/11/business/tipping-sexual-harassment.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/11/business/tipp...</a><p>>There was the waitress in Portland, Ore., Whitney Edmunds, who swallowed her anger when a man patted his lap and beckoned her to sit, saying, “I’m a great tipper.”<p><a href="https://jezebel.com/what-does-tipping-have-to-do-with-sex-and-power-1156118970" rel="nofollow">https://jezebel.com/what-does-tipping-have-to-do-with-sex-an...</a><p>>And his go-to line was so predictable, we would wait for it, anticipate it. “I always tip way more than twenty percent!”<p>>If that was the case, why were these guys so mad about paying only 18%, far less than they otherwise would? What was it about not choosing the amount they tipped, that infuriated them, even when they were getting a discount?<p>>It had to be at least partially about lack of control. Or, more accurately, lack of imagined control. This guy thought that, in a tipped environment, his server would perform better in order to get more of his money. That idea is false, as shown both by repeated studies and common sense, but that was irrelevant. His anger could not be redeemed by mere facts.
Wage theft is distressingly common. The biggest thieves are businesses (stealing from workers) and not some cat-burglar in a striped shirt:<p><a href="https://preview.redd.it/grnr8kxbl6zz.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=58e55a49de73f58ebd92aed4472b10d525627262" rel="nofollow">https://preview.redd.it/grnr8kxbl6zz.jpg?width=960&crop=smar...</a><p><a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year-survey-data-show-millions-of-workers-are-paid-less-than-the-minimum-wage-at-significant-cost-to-taxpayers-and-state-economies/" rel="nofollow">https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...</a><p><a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/abuse-by-bosses-comes-in-many-forms" rel="nofollow">https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/abuse-by-bosses-comes...</a><p>This is why unions and collective bargaining are so important. The power of an individual is almost meaningless versus a business of any size.