But in this thread, we’re not talking about eating out; we’re talking about food delivery services.
When I go out to eat, I know what’s fair and expected and customary with respect to tipping. I’ve never used DoorDash or GrubHub or UberEats, and I am reluctant to partly because I don’t know the expectations and the economics involved. In a sit-down restaurant, I don’t have to worry whether I’m giving my server enough money to cover her expenses in bringing it to me. If the restaurant added a “service charge” and a “charge to bring the food to your table” on top of the cost of the food I order, I’d wonder whom that money was going to, and whether or how much I was obligated to tip my server on top of that.
The tax would be about $0.50 cheaper if I picked it up myself. Sales tax here is about 7%, so with $18 of food, the cost of a delivery after tip would have been $32.75 versus pickup $19.26, a difference of $13.49.
These guys also have discretion in which orders to fulfill, which is the key point. I had to be there delivering what I was assigned or I’d lose the job. If that wasn’t the case I wouldn’t have the credited tip wage for the entire shift, only the times I was actually out on deliveries - which would have been negated by the guaranteed $4 delivery fee.
The modern delivery service apps are more lenient, and the deliveryman/woman is shown a guaranteed rate before deciding whether to fulfill the order.
I don’t have much sympathy if they are taking an order that isn’t worth their time, like if they’re making a 10 mile delivery for $4. They are independent contractors, right? That’s on them for taking a bad contract.
It does mean it’s normal, based on my experience, not to tip for a small order over a short drive.
This is a sentiment that it’s hard to believe someone would express with a straight face. It seems wildly unlikely that anyone would need to explain to you the conditions that might lead someone to take your bad contract, because they need $4. If someone needs $4 that badly and you don’t feel obligated to give them $6, OK. You obviously have that legal right. But it isn’t clear to me what you expect other people to say about it.
You seem to understand the fundamental truth of the transaction, which is that you and tech companies are leveraging people’s poverty to save/make money and have a more convenient life. Is it a surprise that other people think you should not offer them such a shitty contract?
It was around $2 I think. I was driving an old Mercedes at the time (older than me) with maybe 18 miles to the gallon. So to break even I would need what, 12¢ per mile to cover gas, double that for the overhead of keeping a healthy car, and double that again for the return trip. So 48¢ per mile to break even. Round up to 50¢. Plus I’d want something reasonable to compensate me for my time.
Let’s say I got $4 and no tip a 3 mile delivery lasting ten minutes, in 2015. $1.50 would be for the car and gas. The other $2.50 would be my wage for those ten minutes, which equals 25¢ a minute or $15 an hour.
During the rush I would take multiple deliveries at a time and plan a route using Google Maps. All in all it evened out with downtime to make a reasonable part-time wage.
I do occasionally order food to be delivered, whether by the restaurant or some service. I do this infrequently, therefore the extra cost is affordable for me. And I figure if people are delivering food for a living, then they deserve to be paid adequately, which means a decent tip.
I’m hiring entry level positions at $14+/hr if the driver is that desperate. The sandwich shop they picked the food up from is hiring at $15/hr. I saw the sign when I picked my lunch up yesterday. Everybody is hiring.
For us, apply when you drop off the food. Desk job, regular hours, full time, sick and vacation benefits, health insurance option where we match 50% of the premium (but expensive). Can start today, we train.
(We had part time positions but they were recently filled.)
Part of the problem is that you’re not realizing it’s not just the drive from the restaurant to your house.
These sorts of delivery drivers aren’t sitting at that one restaurant waiting for an order to come up. They’re out in the neighborhood somewhere. They have to drive to the restaurant specifically to pick up your order, and then drive it to you. A lot of times, the pickup is longer than the drive to your house.
It’s fundamentally a different way of doing things. If you think it costs too much, don’t use the service, get up off your ass and do it yourself for cheaper.
I don’t think $4 for a 3 mile delivery is a shitty contract. It was a pretty good deal in 2015 and I’m thinking it’s still decent today (increase in mpg would counter increase in gas prices).
Why is this my concern as a consumer? This is all behind the scenes. If someone drives an extra 3 miles for my order, why is it my responsibility to pay them? Even employers don’t pay for their employee’s commute to work, much less a contractor’s commute to a job site. Why should the consumer? It seems to me this is between the company and the contractor to determine their rate of pay.
Again, if it was me, I would just not take the order if the guaranteed rate wasn’t worth it to me.
Because if enough people are assholes and stiff the drivers, we’ll end up with either no drivers, or only drivers who are so desperate for a job that this is the only job they can get. I’ll let you imagine what the quality of their service will be like.
You think it costs too much, vote with your wallet and don’t use the service. Don’t be an asshole and only punish the lowest paid person in the loop.
I’m not convinced that would happen if everybody tipped the way I do. To your earlier point about the driver not waiting around the restaurant, there’s a huge cluster of restaurants in my area, by a local mall and community college. That’s where all the deliveries are from. I would imagine drivers do hang out there during the lunch hour just like cab drivers in a city near a hotspot.
But the restaurant 5 miles away from the rest of civilization, yeah I could see them having a larger delivery fee just so the service can fulfill my orders. Which is fine by me.
Doesn’t apply because there is very high demand for labor in my area.
If the drivers are getting stiffed, is it by the customers, or by the companies who set up the system and establish the pricing/payment structure? (Serious, non-rhetorical question.)
I just want to remind everyone that if I put a tip in before the delivery, it reduces the amount the service pays the driver from the company coffers accordingly. This is from the lips of a deliveryman last week.
And that delivery drivers get discretion as to which orders to take, based on a guaranteed pay amount. Apparently the longer my order goes unfulfilled, the more the service raises the guaranteed pay amount.
It’s a collaboration. The companies set themselves up to skim off of the top from both ends, and they invite the customers to also save themselves some money by screwing over the laborers. It’s just decentralized Walmart. Both company and customer win, and the customer tells himself he had no choice in the matter.
This kind of feeds into something I often think about when I read the “What shortages are you seeing” thread over in the Quarantine Zone. A whole lot of those “shortages” aren’t so much people missing out on basic things, or even missing out on nice-to-have things, but are “I can’t get the exact thing I want in the exact size/package I want.”
That’s the kind of “shortage” that rich people complain about. A whole lot of Americans are so well off that they really think that this kind of “shortage” is a problem.
This seems similar. Americans are rich enough to support multiple delivery systems to bring them restaurant-cooked meals from virtually any restaurant in their city, and yet, they still want to be cheap enough to complain about the person doing the driving getting $6 for their effort.
If you’re rich enough to even think about using these services, you’re rich enough to pay the damn driver. Anyone actually poor enough to worry about $6 is eating a baloney sandwich they made themselves.
Then why is it set up so that paying the damn driver is voluntary?
Yeah, I know, we’ve had plenty of threads about tipping; and, like it or not, it’s just the way things work, at least in most of the U.S. But food delivery services are new enough that I don’t think there’s as much of a common understanding/consensus about the way things work.
The part I’m confused about is, if I am charged a service fee and/or a delivery fee, and I pay that, how much additional do I have to tip before I’m no longer failing to pay the driver?
The dude I talked to last week said the first $4 or so of your tip reduce the “base pay” that the company pays the driver. Apparently the way it works is like this:
You place an order with say $4 delivery fee, $3 service charge, and $6 tip.
The driver is sees the order on his/her phone with a guaranteed pay of like $2.50. They can’t see the tip amount or the cost of your order. Declines to take the job.
Some other driver sees the order with guaranteed pay rate of like $2.75. Declines.
etc until eventually it shows a driver something they think is worth taking, like $4 or $5. The driver accepts.
Driver picks up your order, delivers it.
After the delivery is completed the app unhides the details of their pay. The company always contributes at least the minimum of like $2.50 plus your tip. But if you don’t tip enough to match the “guaranteed pay” the driver was offered, the company will match the guaranteed pay.
So if the driver might have accepted a job with guaranteed $4.
You paid the $4 delivery fee, $3 service charge, and a $6 tip.
The driver’s final payment is $2.50 from the company and your $6 tip for a total of $8.50.
That is the structure you accept when you order out. You can claim that it’s not what you agreed to, and technically that’s true, you didn’t agree to tip. Do you say the same thing when you dine out? Do you feel obliged to tip your waitstaff? Because that’s the system. You may not like it, you may want to change it, but that’s what exists today.
If you object to tipping the delivery drivers the only ethical thing to do is not use the system. Anything else is exploiting the needs of the poorest worker.
It’s not how I see it. I’m using a service that promises to take my order and deliver it for a price. If someone is losing money on this deal, and if I’m paying a reasonable price for the service, it’s not my responsibility to make them whole with an extra gratuity.
Not always. If service is bad I won’t tip as much, or possibly at all.
The only reason I tip with normal service is based on the assumption that most restaurants flout the law and pay a tipped wage regardless of tips collected.