I don’t pay my own employees $30/hr, and 100% of our revenue is services. Also there are no tips or expectations of tips where I work. In my experience tips are not expected for all service jobs, only certain ones. Again I don’t know if this is a regional thing or if everything I’ve ever known is a lie, or what. I’ve never tipped a barber more than $5 but then again, pre-pandemic I was getting haircuts for $9.
~Max
I am operating off the assumption that the driver has the discretion to reject my order if the price shown does not make it worthwhile for them. As @JohnT wrote with regards to a different service,
If I were a driver, I wouldn’t accept the delivery if it wasn’t worth my time. If they really are being paid so poorly I would expect my food to be cold, at the very least. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The dasher I spoke with in January said he was paid $4 before the tip. I mean, you don’t have to believe me and I don’t have to believe him, but I don’t see why someone would lie about that.
~Max
So even in an ideal scenario where the driver can exceed 60 mph the whole way and runs into zero traffic and spends less than 4 minutes in the restaurant while you’re standing outside waiting to flag them down when they arrive thus creating no obstacles whatsoever, without a tip, they’d make at most $12 an hour at a job where none of their expenses, such as gasoline, insurance, and wear and tear or car payment are covered. Hell, the IRS puts the current standard rate at $.58 a mile, so these people would be better off working for a company that actually employs them at $0 an hour with no benefits (which is illegal), but let’s them use their own car, as that would work out to $20.88 an hour in your scenario.
Well jeez I guess I have to do math here 
It is possible I had the numbers all wrong but I thought for sure $4 was a reasonable rate for the trip…
ETA:
~Max
Continued.
55mph without speeding, 2.8 miles.
3 miles the other way at 50mph,
0.2 miles on our small side-roads connecting the two at each end, which has a speed limit of 45mph but you’d probably only travel 30mph on them.
Leaves just under 3 minutes at the counter, which I think is reasonable for this particular sandwich shop. They never have a line.
~Max
I’d rather over-tip than have to do all that math.
I mean, it’s my area. I know how long the drive is based on experience. Although there are stoplights, and if you are really unlucky and get a bunch of them it could be the full 10 minutes driving.
~Max
To ask again a question you previously ignored: why does the distance matter?
Excellent, when you show me that their minimum per order is $4, your math works fine. Their own website, where I’d assume they’d paint the rosiest possible picture says that it’s $2, but you are free to use any number you want in your hypothetical “what hypothetical can I use to juustify not tipping while attempting to appear like I care about the drivers” scenario. Just don’t expect the rest of us to give you affirmation on your decision not to tip the driver.
It depends on which thread of replies you’re looking at.
In one we’re talking about the value I put on the delivery service. The value of a delivery versus me picking it up is inherently based on the distance I don’t have to travel.
In another thread of replies we’re talking about whether $4 is a reasonable price to make, from the driver’s side. Distance determines time spent, gas used, etc.
~Max
I don’t particularly care about the drivers. I care about paying a reasonable price for my goods and services. If the entity I’m transacting with is screwing people over behind the scenes, but I’m paying a reasonable price, I’m not automatically obligated to pay more and make everybody whole.
Especially not when said drivers are literally shown the fare and have a choice in accepting or rejecting it. I have no sympathy for a driver who willingly chooses to deliver that steak dinner 25 miles for $2.75, (JohnT’s hyperbolic example); that order should go unfulfilled.
The guy I talked to said he was paid $4 on an order I didn’t tip until after delivery. If he’s in the minority, and most delivery people are only pocketing $2 for a 6 mile round trip, I just have no sympathy for that. They are either making it work by doing multiple deliveries, or they are… well, not business savvy.
~Max
Since you’ve acknowledged that you don’t particularly care about driver pay, I’ll stop responding to you on this topic.
For everyone else, someone did a bit more research on this than simply taking a single order and attempting to extrapolate someone’s hourly wage from it. In the end, they estimated that without tips, a DoorDash driver cleared $1.45 an hour. Luckily, there are people (like myself and most others in this thread) who understand the situation and actually do tip, often well. I guess @Max_S can consider our nice tips as a subsidy for his orders.
Drivers should have a database of customers like you so they all have the foresight to tell you “tough luck!” whenever you want something delivered.
I’m still trying to understand the whole system: why would drivers need such a database when they are told ahead of time what they would earn for making a particular delivery?
No driver is going to work for the guaranteed minimum. It’s only the prospect of adding tips to that amount that makes the job economically viable.
They’re not. Many customers tip in cash, so while the order they take may say “$2” or “$3”, they assume that the customer will tip, as most of us do. Unfortunately, they can’t actually rate customers, so my order and @Max_S’s orders look identical to them in many cases.
In case anybody has any thoughts about @Max_S they would like to express in a freer forum, Pitting Max_S
Thanks; that makes sense.
I’m genuinely confused. How are these two sentences compatible?
“Further, jobs with higher tips still tend to include lower pay: the set of jobs with tips of less than $1 pay 1.8 times as much as those jobs with tips of more than $8, on a gross hourly pay basis.”
“Workers’ only significant earnings comes not from pay by the company, but from customer tips.”
And this seems to match with my post #58, in contradiction to your post #94.
“If a job is rejected, it will be offered again to a different available worker, possibly at a higher rate; the company’s pay model is designed to slowly bid up the pay attached to a job until it is accepted.”
~Max
Or you could spend $9.99 per month on Uber One and get free delivery, but then you wouldn’t have an excuse for stiffing on the tip.