I have no doubt it was considerably illegal, however I would have been terminated immediately in a town where finding another job without a vehicle or parents would have been impossible, and since I was living on my own as a minor at this time it was pretty important that I maintained income.
After several more undoubtedly illegal maneuvers by a new manager to fire me and other waitstaff so that he could replace them with random girls he wanted to work for him so he could hit on them, being taken off payroll without clearing it with the senior manager, and afterwards being reduced to a single day a week on the slowest days, I quit.
I then had to leave the place I was living at two months later to a brand new city, contracted mononucleosis, and, not having any saved up money after quitting this job and unable to work due to being bedridden for 4-5 months, basically starved myself into extreme malnutrition other than the food I could steal and scavenge, surfing from couch to couch. So, essentially my worst fears about quitting my job over illegal practices were realized.
I could also tell you stories from other jobs about bosses pulling firearms on me, commanding me to do straight up illegal things like lie to the police, illegally withholding paychecks for entire staff for months at a time, illegal unpaid overtime, slashing wages between paychecks, working me into extreme injury from RSI and then subverting my ability to collect comp, firing me over "clerical errors" for trying to cancel a shift I didn't even mean to sign up for on a stupid new workforce app after my boss explicitly lying about my employment not being in jeopardy, etc, and all of the hardships I had to endure for leaving each of these jobs at my breaking point.
You all are being duped into contrived outrage. The example given in the OP link is very misleading and it is quite obviously cherry picking (to spark emotion) and is actually an outright lie. The truth is that Insticart actually pays a $10 minimum per delivery (this isn't even mentioned in the OP link) So how did this person make 80 cents an hour? The delivery was 0.7 miles and took 69 minutes. Ironically, under Insticart's previous policy, this delivery person would have made essentially the same amount. People making deliveries in dense urban areas (especially during traffic hours) can actually make far more than they used to.
I am not sure why delivering 6 bags of groceries took over an hour in this case. It is entirely possible however that they made several other deliveries in between Wegmans and this location (making a $10 minimum for each). It is possible that this person actually made $50+ during this 69 minutes.
So is not a typical scenario. I could put together an article just as misleading showing that Insticart pays a mint...
I don't like when people try to mislead me. Perhaps the fact that the tip is not going directly to the delivery person is offending some of your sensibilities. This is quite legal. Many states have done this for the past 80 years. I don't know how residents of states that practice this are surprised. All restaurants and other service industry locations you frequent do the same.
Being a food delivery person, a restaurant server or for that matter a McDonald's employee is not a skilled labor position and has never been a job someone should aspire to feed a family off of. We have people busting their butts, putting themselves through college, working their way up the ladder. We have 50k skilled labor jobs vacant in this country that pay a good wage and even offer training. People used to move across the country for these jobs. They used to leave their grandma's basement and go make something of themselves. Now we just have them making a bunch of noise over McDonald's not paying a Living Wage. Grow up. This world should not reward the lazy, it results in ever increasing mediocrity.
What the hell does that have to do with my comment and my own experiences?
I worked these jobs while trying to support and educate myself so that I could get a better-paying job.
At the same time, if 6-8 hours a day of Instacart deliveries isn't enough to provide you with an apartment, tuition money and food & entertainment for a wife and two children, then it's a service that shouldn't exist and it is only propped up by investor cash.
Because that is what minimum wage was originally meant to provide for an individual in America, before nearly a century of propaganda and misdirection convinced people like you that someone on minimum wage is lazy and doesn't deserve enough money to eat healthily, rent a decent apartment and have enough cash for some entertainment, and generally live better than someone in a third-world country, much less afford something like an annual vacation or car payments.
>"I worked these jobs while trying to support and educate myself so that I could get a better-paying job."
So did many of us. People are not supposed to have to support a family as a primary earner on minimum wage and they never were. According to the 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics, full time minimum wage earners earn over the poverty line by more than $3,000 per year. Two minimum wage earners can support a family of four and live above the poverty line. Avoiding poverty is all about choices.
>"At the same time, if 6-8 hours a day of Instacart deliveries isn't enough to provide you with an apartment, tuition money and food & entertainment for a wife and two children, then it's a service that shouldn't exist and it is only propped up by investor cash."
>"Because that is what minimum wage was originally meant to provide for an individual in America, before nearly a century of propaganda and misdirection convinced people like you that someone on minimum wage is lazy and doesn't deserve enough money to eat healthily, rent a decent apartment and have enough cash for some entertainment, and generally live better than someone in a third-world country, much less afford something like an annual vacation or car payments."
You have your facts quite wrong about the minimum wage and what it was originally meant to provide. The minimum wage was first enacted in 1938 by FDR. It paid a meager 25 cents per hour (this is $4 today when adjusted for inflation). So it has become substantially more generous as time has gone on. This is the opposite of your claim.
People in third-world countries earn less than a dollar a day. I'm sure they would love to earn even the 25 cents per hour that the original minimum wage paid.
Everyone I know that has been stuck in minimum wage jobs have definitely been lazy or made very poor choices (like stealing from their employer ETC.) in fact, only 3% of people above age 25 in the US make only the minimum wage.
Get the actual facts before making biased and factually incorrect claims (and cite sources when doing so). It really hurts your credibility to just make things up and try to sound like an expert so maybe no one will call you on it and you will appear to make a valid point.
If the facts that I stated are incorrect, cite your sources. If you wish to debate something I said... I welcome it.
You place yourself in a weak position philosophically and argumentatively simply going for the old dumb bully method of personal attacks, character assassination, shouting someone down, insults ETC.
Is that really the best you can do? I pointed out inaccurate information and information gaps in this story. This claim reeks heavily and obviously of major bias. I wouldn't be surprised in an Instacart competitor actually is behind this. It's sad that others in this thread didn't already do the same. The group think and blind social justice here is really sad. There are many people here far smarter than I, yet they cannot see when such a weak and slanderous smear attempt is made?
If you want to change the labor laws to make tips and wage separate then go ahead. But just know that every restaurant and service company in states that allow this do it. If a certain business doesn't, they will have a hard time competing against the company across the street who does.
This 80 cents an hour case is so factually incorrect and lacking specifics that you and others should frankly be embarrassed to be making judgments based on it.
I've never shared a story on the internet about a hardship I've endured, large or small, without an apologist coming somewhere out of the woodwork to make assumptions that the only way I could have such shitty luck with people is by making a whole lot of bad choices. Apologists who have never met me, know nothing of my personality or socioeconomic background, what my childhood was like, nothing. Just strict, close-minded judgement based on preconceived notions. Congratulations, you're a statistic.
> If you were a minor, you would have been a ward of the state. They would have paid to take care of you. You wouldn't even have to work.
My experience with the State is that foster care where I grew up is the last place you want to be if you at all want a decent shot at a good future. We could talk about criminal indoctrination, institutionalization, lack of resources, lack of boundaries, lack of personal space and belongings, I mean really there are so many reasons why being a ward of the state fucking sucks.
> You could live, go to school, and get all your needs met for free.
In highschool, my mother didn't have a job. We were homeless at times. My sister tried very hard to stay in school but dropped out. My brother had the luxury of living with some extremely abusive relatives who fucked him up in the head and he dropped out as well. I took matters into my own hand and first worked hard to get accepted in a boarding school, and later when that didn't work out found a place to live, found a way to get to a job, and finished out high school. Getting an education was really important to me, and I did it despite an abusive, impovershed and malnourished childhood, despite my parents not being in my life or keeping jobs to help support me, despite a lot of things. And somehow you're finding a way to condemn me for it? How incredibly close-minded and judgemental of you.
> The life of a guy I grew up friends with reminds me of you and what you went through. He never listened to good advice and always ended up in bad situations.
Yes, GreenToad5, because we go way back as you know, and you know all about me. You know people that remind you of me, and you know that I never listen to good advice and always end up in bad situations. Just like your other friend, whom I'm not entirely inclined to believe you have made an accurate assessment of. Please, tell me all about my life and the mistakes you've seen me make. Pigeon-hole me some more with the handful of lazy shits you know.
> It is clear just by your demeanor and manipulation of facts that you have some challenges brought on by yourself.
This is literally delusional thinking. Nothing is clear based on what I wrote. I wrote two very vague and summarized posts about large portions of my life. You don't a single thing about any of the events I described except that they happened. It's insane to think you could derive anything else from that, even if you had a PhD in Psychology, which you obviously don't.
> If you are a minor, the state will take care of you. If you are broke and not a minor, pass a GED, then get financial aid for a Junior College or Trade School.
Again, I decided to get a job and work through highschool while homeless and parentless. And I passed high school with nearly a 4.0GPA and got a scholarship to every college I bothered applying to, with several full rides and paid-for state tuition. On track to actually do what I want to do, not settle for some stupid bargain job through a trade school, spending the rest of my working life doing something I don't like. As life would have it, a vindictive teacher illegally modified my final grade and refused to apply mandatory points that would still have passed me despite her modifications, and I failed a core class and had to forfeit all of my scholarships. Believe me, I was at the schoolboard, I was in the principal and guidance counselor's offices, I did not let it go--- and I was promised it would be fixed. And it never was.
Somehow you'll tell yourself that I must be lying, the system is perfect, it could never fail someone so badly and that teacher would surely have lost her job. Well, that's what I thought too when I put so much time into doing well in school.
So I didn't get to go to college unless I got massively in debt with the State. Instead of taking out loans like my peers, I continued to educate and support myself until present day where I am now happily employed as a software engineer with an actual sane boss. While my peers are still wrestling with student debt and working low-salary jobs despite parental financial aid. I bet somehow that's the wrong decision, too.
I have done so well for myself in spite of adversity, and honestly I'm very proud of myself for even being alive today, much less happily employed in the field I wanted. But the worst part about all I've gone through is that I feel afraid to share my experiences with others because I know that even without the loudmouth jerks such as yourself, many people will simply silently disbelieve me. It really sucks having to defend the same stories over and over and over again until finally you give up ever offering any explanation for the way things are.
> Making laws based on emotions and feelings have got us nowhere in the last 80 years
Emotions have nothing to do with this. I was sharing some of my experiences with the hope that they would add value to the conversation.
> Look at all the government programs and affirmative action that have been made for African Americans over the last 80 years... Yet their poverty levels remain exactly the same. Why?
Oh. Wow. Ok, I get it now. You're one of those. One of those people who can't understand socioeconomic oppression when it's staring you right at the face. One person sees that the black community is still impoverished 60 years after the Civil Rights movement and places blame on the government for not doing enough to reverse hundreds of years of institutional racial oppression. You see the same thing and decide to blame the poor person for still being poor.
> We have created a culture of public assistance dependence and generations of "victims" with all the welfare.
Classic diversion argument. We spend over 50% of the federal budget on our war machine each year, more than the next 13 countries combined, we lose billions to tax havens and loopholes and lobbyist tactics, and you want to talk about the underfunded garbage that is our excuse for State welfare.
It's so incredible that on one hand you chastise me for working my way through school, telling me I should have freeloaded off the state and not worked at all, and then on the other hand you piss all over state welfare and its recipients. The level of mental gymnastics required for such cognitive dissonance is just incredible. You're a serious intellectual titan.
I don't want to change your mind. I'm not going to be able to. I know that. I'm not interested in speaking with extremely close-minded people, especially when they're just plain frustrating to talk to. Go ahead and make your long-winded judgemental reply, but don't expect one in return.
This is really common in restaurants. Legal or not, it happens ALL the time. I've not only seen in in restaurants I've experienced it as a waiter as well.
