We dug into how American tipping culture got so broken, and the fight to fix it.
It turns out that your tips are subsidizing the payrolls of multi-billion dollar chains, while they pay their workers under minimum wage.
It’s a system rooted in slavery, and pushed by a wealthy restaurant owners onto the rest of us.
But there’s a growing movement to change it.
not addressing you in particular, but this is different for getting delivery. tip based on restaurant distance and climate conditions. gas costs aren’t dependent on how much you ordered, unless the order is huge and takes multiple trips from car.
something that’s always bothered me when I see this brought up, but what’s stopping the businesses from managing all that for their employees themselves? it’s not like everyone doesn’t have the tech to find out gas prices around the area, and the estimated traffic distance and travel time on any map view. Hell, just tack that on as a service fee instead of the ¯\(ツ)/¯ they currently use it for.
this is all rhetorical, because of course it’s obvious why businesses don’t want to be more upfront about the final cost to the consumer, and keeping the employee blaming the customer for their bad take-home pay
because most delivery drivers these days don’t work for any restaurant. only chain pizza places like dominos/pizza hut usually have in house drivers anymore. far better to sign up for multiple platform apps and be available to take deliveries from any restaurant, anywhere, at any time. this means being able to turn down offers that don’t have a tip high enough to cover gas costs and make a profit. these orders often end up being canceled, or subsidized by the app company itself, possibly at a loss.
again, what’s stopping the outsourced app business from calculating the gas and tacking that onto the customer’s bill?
Nothing. In fact, they do that where I live. The same companies even. Uber eats etc.
to your point, they actually do pay a base fee based on delivery distance, but it’s not really enough to make up for the fact that the further you drive from a restaurant the farther you have to drive back to your zone to get another order. making short orders far more desirable because they put less miles on your car as well.
Uber actually does list gas station prices in the area for its drivers, making it easy to see the cheapest places on a map. door dash implemented something similar to this also, although not nearly as good. but some people deliver in electric vehicles or even ebikes so they don’t need or use gas.
I fully agree with you on the they hide behind “you’ll get tips” to not pay a decent base fee though. and what’s more they take advantage of tipping customers by batching their orders with non tipping customers to make the offer more desirable, so their food gets there later.
what I’m trying to get at is we have the ability to build software to automate the calculation and payout on all of this. If the problem is realtime opting-in of drivers in the area, solutions could be created if the businesses were motivated to be more upfront to both their employees and the customers
like have the customer give a price range they’re willing to pay for the gas, and have the software advertise to all drivers that would fit into that price range from their current locations, and show them up on the map to the customer with some dollar sign amount for their gas prices above their icons. if there isn’t any, the software would be able to notify the customer before the order is finalized. if no one eligible opts to pick up that order after a certain time frame, then that’s also a customer notification.
A lot of the problems being brought up could be solved with effort put towards engineering the software to make everything more upfront to everyone, but those businesses aren’t motivated to be more consumer-oriented and employee-friendly; that’s my main point in all this
yes to all of this. you make a good point. but honestly since the gig apps don’t actually employ anyone and there are people who for some reason will end up taking the bad orders anyway, I don’t think this type of innovation is ever going to happen.
Sure, that seems reasonable to me. I rarely do food delivery so I was not really trying to address it with my comment above.
Edit: 2 words
Sorry, delivery drivers should just be paid a living wage too.
well, generally delivery drivers aren’t employees and signed up to be an independent delivery contractor instead of a W2 job because this is side money and they have other ambitions and they don’t want to be employed by any particular gig app. part of the bright size of it is being able to choose when you drive, where, and being able to say no to any offer at any time, and cherry pick the best offers among all the apps that compete with each other for drivers. being an employee takes away all of that. most politicians get this very wrong. what is important among actual drivers is tip/pay transparancy. don’t hide tips or let drivers be tip baited by people.
This could be spun around to contract work where the company is offering each contractor a set amount of money to deliver each time. Again, there is no need for a customer to subsidize the companies pay
listen I fully agree, they should raise the base pay on delivery jobs to be profitable enough so that tips really are just frosting on the cake and not necessary to make it worth it. but as long as they can’t force anyone to take those orders, they will hopefully sort of have to do it regardless. I only feel bad for the sucker taking them thinking it’s super good money without realizing they still have to pay to upkeep their vehicle all the time they spent on the road.