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.
A tip is essentially an extra 15-20% pseudo-tax on food delivery (at least in the US-where some people feel entitled to be tipped just for doing their job).
>at least in the US-where some people feel entitled to be tipped just for doing their job
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.
Extra profit for the app, on top of the 30% they charge the restaurant. They do technically pull from the delivery fee for the base offering to drivers, but they certainly don't start the offering there.
No, a tip is a variable component of the price of having your burrito delivered to you in a private taxi cab, and if you don't want to pay it, go pick up your own burrito.
No, I'm already paying for a delivery service fee. A tip is an extra thank you. If restaurants charge me a mandatory fee ("tip") on top of my food price, there's no extra tip on top of that.
I mean, you can choose to pay or not pay for the service. I'm not saying you should go out of your way to patronize businesses that charge you more for your burrito taxi than you think it's worth. But if your burritos arrive cold because you are the lowest bidder for the service, I think you've lost some of the moral high ground to complain.
I have a high moral high ground because I don't use these services at all due to poor treatment of employees.
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.
I mean, OK, but they're treated badly because they're not paid enough, which makes tipping a strange complaint! You could use the service, if you wanted. Just pay what it really costs.
> they're treated badly because they're not paid enough
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?
Oh certainly, it doesn't make sense at all. We should be presented the cost of the service, including a reasonable wage for the driver.
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.
It doesn't make any sense and it's purely exploitative.
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.
Yes so your solution is to buy into that exploitative model?
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.
That's not a solution, but it's what you should be doing. A solution is legislation, any other "solution" is a lie and we should actively disregard anyone who claims otherwise.
> 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.
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.
Because as I’ve stated, it only hurts the worker. You’re not materially improving their lives, you’re literally doing the opposite.
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.
It's not purely US. In the UK, an "optional" (though not really) ~10% service fee is often added for sit-down service though not if you just pay at the bar. So more like Anglosphere than just US--though US is both higher and more pervasive. I forget what it was the other day but I was asked about a tip for some totally routine retail transaction.
Ask for it to be removed, it's absolutely optional. In many cases, though not all - because I ask discreetly every time - it doesn't even translate to any benefit for the staff, they get paid the same and it just goes in as general takings which makes it even more of a flagrant piss-take. If I do want to tip as a sign of genuine appreciation I give them cash separately and ask they share it with the kitchen team.
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.
There is no reason for a tip to be given before the actual service is provided. A tip is meant to show appreciation for the quality of service, not to be an insurance to get a barely decent one.
If food delivery services were presented to end users as some sort of bidding model, sure, but it's not. It's presented as simply as "you order food, food gets delivered to you". There's no ability to see how my order might be affected by how much I pay.
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.
I don't think GGGP was complaining about the price. I think they were complaining about it being a non-disclosed fee (like tax) while also not being a clearly defined amount (pseudo-tax) and with aggressively bad consequences if someone doesn't go along with the mind game (deliverer eats the food, wastes an hour of your time while you're hungry, need to follow up with support, etc) rather than just an up-front rejection.
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!"
I’m not from the US so I’m barely concerned with tipping but it seems to me that even in the US, the amount you tip is dependent of the QoS you got.
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.
To be honest, this is all nonsense. When I Doordash I don't really tip and things are fine. My wife tips 10% and she's fine. But I think it's pretty funny that you're going around defending pricing dark patterns with the latest Twitter-trend-du-jour. It's a pity you couldn't refer to the burrito as "slop" eaten only by the "deeply unserious" who need to "go to therapy" because you're "begging them, please read a book". Maybe a little description of how the "enshittification" of the delivery process leads to "ghoulish" requests that demonstrate "late-stage capitalism" in a "mask-off moment".
In the bay area we're talking 25min vs 30min. It's a pretty simple auction: The price increases until someone accepts. The driver has no idea how much you tipped.
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.
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.