I love how DoorDash created an adversarial system where it’s figured out how to earn billions of dollars for itself while ripping off both the consumer and the worker, and when they find that they’re screwed they fight each other instead of DoorDash which is quite literally siphoning off billions from both of them.<p>This isn’t limited to DoorDash of course. This is the crux of the gig economy. The ability to steal money by making yourself a middleman.
I guess I just never "got" why ordinary people want to use meal delivery. Aside from things that have typically been delivered, like pizza and Chinese, it just seems odd.<p>Who wants to eat fast food that's been sitting for a half an hour? Even sit down food. Most of it doesn't travel well (soggy fries or bread), which is one area where pizza or Americanized Chinese takeout doesn't suffer.<p>And then the cost. A McDonalds meal is $10 as it is so you're going to add a couple more bucks for the convenience of not having to get it, plus a tip to the delivery person?<p>Sure, I can understand the spending $20 to not have to take a lunch or to stay later at work and eating dinner there. But for the most part it's ridiculous. I mean there's even a delivery order station at the 7-11. Who's getting a Slurpee delivered?<p>The local neighborhood Facebook group is full of drivers bitching about not enough jobs to go around, poor tipping, not making enough on their routes... and then you have the people ordering food and complaining about slow service, stolen, incorrect, or missing orders, and whatever else can go wrong.
To me tipping gives the vibes of that Ebay trick of selling something worth $100 by splitting it into a $20 price + $80 shipment to reduce fees or something. In this case they are offloading all the responsibility of a fair wage directly onto the customer and not indirectly through the food delivery company.
If you, as the driver, think a customer should tip 50% on a $20 pizza order, I’d recommend you not take up work in a role where pricing decisions are part of your responsibility.<p>People aren’t going to start tipping $10 for a $20 pizza, no matter how hard you wish for it.
In my experience, tipping culture first started to change with Starbucks, but it really seemed to accelerate with integrated tips in terminals like square and point of sale devices.<p>In short, when the checkout terminal asks you to round up your change for a donation to help kids, and the cashier is looking at you, nobody wants to feel like the jerk that says no.
Recently I ended up subscribing to Walmart+, because I was planning on taking advantage of having groceries shipped to my house.<p>When I went to actually order the groceries though, Walmart informed me that I should be tipping my driver who is actually delivering the groceries. I gave a 20% tip except they delivered it to the wrong address and I ended up on the phone with Walmart for about 40 minutes to get everything refunded anyway.
How much responsibility does Square/Toast/whatever POS with integrated client facing tipping have for the recent change in culture? How much did they drive it vs. respond to demand? Does it matter?<p>(Personally I don’t think they have any culpability per se, just interesting to think about the mechanisms at work).