Request refused. I’m going off a discussion I personally had with one of the drivers. It is possible he was wrong, but he said they had ‘stolen tips’ before and are apparently doing it again.
You misread “base pay” to mean the amount the driver is shown when choosing which fares to take on.
From what I can tell the delivery driver is shown a guaranteed fare before accepting the contract. This guaranteed fare is totally disassociated with what I pay. I could add a tip of $1,000 and it would not affect the amount shown on the contract. The whole process really has nothing to do with me. If someone takes a bad contract that’s on them.
And as to the question of tipping I make it simple. Or difficult. I do my best to make sure my service provider is getting paid $30 an hour for their services, which comes to $60,000 a year, which is a good, living wage in San Antonio.
My barber gets a $24 tip. If I’m with a group of people at a restaurant, I make sure the tips add up to at least $30/hour, maybe ‘overtipping’ myself to get there. Of course I don’t go overboard - if your station is busy and customer flow is constant, then I may only do the usual 20% percent of the bill.
But otherwise, the issue of tipping demonstrates how much the issue of fairness and a living wage matters to each of us. Your chart is illuminating, and not in a way which does you credit, Max.
According to their website, he is wrong. The way they used to pay out was indeed often referred to as “stolen tips”, but they stopped doing that several years ago and I’ll believe them until someone provides better counter evidence.
I didn’t misread anything. You said:
While we all agree that that was true several years ago, it’s not the case now. My quote said:
If you want to claim that DoorDash will increase what a driver is paid if you don’t tip, you need to bring proof.
fwiw, I don’t feel comfortable paying more for the server “being friendly and enjoyable”. That seems pretty close to paying more for women to look pretty. I mostly just tip a flat 20%, unless we needed something extra. (So, when we used to eat out with little kids, who were a lot of work for the staff, but didn’t eat much, we’d pretend they ordered an adult meal and tipped on that basis. If a kid dropped a glass on the floor and made a mess, we’d tip more to make it up to the waitstaff who were stuck cleaning up after our kids.)
If I got objectively terrible service, I might tip a little less. But I don’t completely withhold the tip if I actually got my meal, because the government allows restaurants to pay assuming the staff get tipped. If they are terrible, they should be fired. But they shouldn’t be cheated of their wage in the meantime.
I don’t tip when I pick up or serve myself, either. Except I’ve been tipping pick-up during the pandemic in the thought that it must be damn hard for restaurants to stay in business. So tossing a little extra cash at the establishment seems like a good idea. I have no idea who gets that money, but don’t care much, if it’s helping the overall viability of restaurants that have pivoted to mostly takeout.
Yes, I hate, despise tipping. I would vastly prefer that servers were paid a decent wage and I was just charged what it cost, and the restaurant owner was responsible for for the quality of the service, just as the bank is responsible for the tellers offering decent service, or my my employer pays me for doing my job well or less well. But I live with the system we got.
I see what you mean but the tip is the only part of the consumer’s costs that is voluntary and flexible. Only with the tip can the consumer express her pleasure / displeasure with the overall service. The rest is non-negotiable fees and the price of the food.
It’s set up to penalize the low-status tip workers for any claims of bad service expressed by customers–whether the bad service was their fault or not.
If society is set up so that the lowest person on the totem pole is the one who receives crap when anything above them goes wrong, I do have the choice to not punish that person because of this.
And even if the problem is their fault, it’s not up to me to decide NOT to pay them a living wage merely because society put that burden on me, not the corporation earning from their services.
Taking your frustrations out on who you know is the lowest paid person in the business, knowing that the rest of the business will not suffer at all, is amazingly wrong… but common… thinking.
This isn’t true. One can use non-monetary means (social media, direct calls to management, withholding future business) without penalizing the person least likely to have any impact on the product and least able to withstand the loss of income. If the delivery driver is the actual cause of a problem (tossed your food in the ditch) then sure, you can use the tip to express your dissatisfaction.
But the OP is just saying that tipping makes the deal to expensive for him, so he’s going to short change the only person he can while the people responsible for the price are getting paid in full. It’s a morally dishonest approach to the problem.
So, if you don’t tip, there’s a good chance that the driver drove to the restaurant to get your food, waited for it to be ready, drove to your location, possibly navigating parking and office layout issues depending on where you ordered from and handed your food to you, all the while putting wear and tear on their car and using up gasoline. All for $2.
Anyone who is okay with this is hurting the driver. You might be fine with it, but that’s exactly what you are doing. DoorDash, the company, makes the exact same amount of money off of you whether you tip a million dollars or zero, so they could give a flying fuck other than from a retention standpoint.
How much of that is apparent to the customer? It’s a genuine question–I’ve never used these services. When I place an order, do I know exactly how much the driver is getting?
Max_S implied earlier that there’s a kind of bidding process involved. Is that true?
Most of them are now pretty transparent directly in the app about the tips themselves (as in 100% goes to the driver), but you usually have to look up how the rest of their pay is calculated, if it’s even possible.
What people are referring to with the “stolen tips”, is that DoorDash (and some others) used to have a guaranteed minimum that a driver would make that was above the “Base Pay” that I mention above. It was initially meant to offset the fact that some people just won’t tip, no matter what. The problem came in when, for example, Base Pay is $2, but they Guaranteed $5. If a customer tipped $10, the driver would pocket a total of $12, not $15, as the first $3 just got them to the guaranteed amount. Some people saw it as stealing from the customer’s tip, but I see it as no different than a “draw” in sale commission parlance.
I wasn’t talking about sex appeal, but attitude. Sometimes they’ll smile, they’ll check up on the table, look at you when talking to you, or generally give you the impression that they care about your party without being intruding or wasting anyone’s time. I tip extra for that good attitude because I like it and want to encourage more of it, with $$$.
Then sometimes the server is… I’m sure you know the stereotype, never smiling, monotone voice, very terse, never looking right at you, kind of just drops your food on the table. It’s not necessarily bad service - many times this leads to very efficient service: no coming back to clarify the order, no mistakes when the food comes out quickly and tasting great. I wouldn’t tip poorly because of this kind of attitude, I just won’t add that extra that I might add if the staff had the other kind of attitude.
I would only tip poorly for bad service, and only withhold the tip in very rare cases. An example, one time we went to a restaurant around 8:30pm, had our order taken very quickly, but come 9:15 and no food. The waiter is shooting the breeze with the bartender the whole time. The kitchen is a little slow today, they said. Ok, but then come 9:30 and he has to apologize because the kitchen is closed and he forgot to put up our order. So we just had our drinks and appetizers - no tip in that case.
Ok, thanks. Still, the tip thing isn’t 100% convincing if the rest of the pay structure is variable. If drivers underbid jobs because they expect a tip, that’s effectively still a stolen tip.
I’m not aware of drivers bidding on jobs. They can choose to not take a job, but I’m pretty sure they are assigned automatically based on the driver’s location and rating.
I did include wear and tear, but I didn’t account for insurance.
Well, that’s what DMC is saying too. I’m not privy to insider knowledge beyond the discussion I had with a driver at the end of January, which informed post #58. I don’t really see how what I was told differs from what they were complaining about in 2019. In both cases it would be technically true that “100% of the tip goes to the driver”.
Okay, granted.
I usually tip cash on deliveries, so not a problem for me. It wouldn’t make sense to tip with a card for a small amount since there are transaction fees. Back in 2015 I didn’t carry a card reader with me, that is, all of the tips I took in were cash.
I’m not that “righteously indignant” about corporate policies. I’m not a party in their internal dealings with drivers.
Not that I’m aware of, but it could be built into their model. Again, the “Base Pay” calculation is a black box. With that said, if betting were allowed here and you said we’re betting what percentage of deliveries have a base pay of $3 or less, I’d take the over even if you started at 60%. For $10+ dollars, I’d take the under even at 10%.
Uber Eats delivery fees are like $12-16 without tip in my area (only $5 for a restaurant two towns and 15 miles over though???), which is why nobody uses it for lunch deliveries here. If you’re saying you only see $2 before tip that’s pretty much just as bad, but I wonder if it’s a regional thing since I believe you live in a metropolitan area, and I do not.
Like, I’m sure you could check Cracker Barrel in your area. I have one about 2 miles out, a very smooth ride over a single highway with two turns each way. Here the Uber Eats delivery fee is $11.59, and that is before the 15% service fee, let alone tip. I’d say the service is worth $5 to $7 to me, so no matter how I look at it, it’s just not worth the price for the service.
The lack of transparency is pretty infuriating, and IMO means it’s impossible to ethically be a customer at all.
This article implies that at least for DoorDash, declining offers does increase the base rate:
Another question. I assumed that drivers typically handled multiple orders at once. Doing a bit of searching, it looks like Uber supports this, and DoorDash supports it but only for one order coming from two different places. In any case, it seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Which is crazy, IMO; at least in a busy area, I’d think they could easily combine orders without adding to the delivery time too much. Uber did this for their taxi service with Uberpool and I found that even with 3 people in the car it took <50% extra time vs. simple point-to-point.
You’ve got to be fair with me, my examples are lunch orders with $18 of food from a restaurant within 3 miles. And just a couple right turns both ways (we’ve got a county road going most of one way and a highway going the whole way back). It’s under 10 minutes for a round trip and that includes me waiting at the counter for the food. I’d be a jackass not to tip for a steak dinner from a restaurant with a 25 minute drive, but I don’t think that carries over to the lunch being delivered in under 10 minutes.
