The author is saying that the companies don’t pay him enough so I should tip to compensate.
This will actually make things worse, as I will then be artificially propping up a broken market.
A better solution would be for nobody to tip. At this point, all the drivers would quit because the pay is too low, so the companies would be forced to raise it to a level where they can attract drivers.
Yeah - I don’t use food delivery apps because of the wage/tipping issue. My wife HATES that I go and collect food myself but I just feel too anxious navigating the exploitation in the sector.
Same, never used a food delivery service, nor an Uber.
I'm in France and they're obviously trying to cirmcumvent labor law, they're not independent workers, they're often dependent on a single service that watches every single movement they do, punishes them for not following instructions, so they should have a salary, regular employment by the platform, not contracts.
I'll wait, in the meantime, I can go myself to fetch my food, or cook at home! Or purchase from takehome-first restaurants with employed drivers.
Why on earth would this bother her??? It also saves tons of money. I downloaded a delivery app, saw how much more it would cost, and have never used one again.
It is a horribly broken way of doing things that feels terribly dirty to someone that wasn’t indoctrinated since birth.
Every time I see tipping and the behaviour, I can’t help thinking it’s a bunch of people with money who waive it at people who don’t while saying “be at my beck and call and I’ll give you some. Or not. But still dance for me”
Obviously the people with the money like it because they have an entire class of society dancing for them whenever they please
In my country, no one tips, yet rideshare and food delivery services still exist.
Instead of begging for tips, drivers join a national union and regularly go on strike when a delivery company fails to meet payment expectations. New delivery services typical negotiate a deal with the union first to get drivers, and thus new companies have one less needless marketing expense.
Just don't tip.
It makes no sense for couriers to receive tips based on the price of the package. As far as they should be concerned, a 5$ burger and a 100$ steak are the same thing.
Now that some companies like DoorDash are also branching out and delivering medicines, and it would be preferable if they didn't even know what was inside any package and just charged appropriate by weight, distance, congestion fees for delivery.
> So please tip your delivery rider. I always did before, but now I tip even better.
Better yet, tip partly/fully in cash so the app doesn’t know the true value of their earnings (especially with inevitable lawsuits and settlements that may deduct tips when doing minimum wage calculations).
Personally, I don’t like tipping in advance of receiving a service.
I’m in Canada, so it’s a good way to get rid of my $1 and $2 coins (and some minority of quarters).
Your experience may vary but for me this sounds like a great way to never have anything actually get delivered. I have to tip $10+ for every order just to get my order picked up and brought to my house. If I don't declare that's the tip amount in the doordaash app, no driver picks it up. Once I had a $5 smoothie order and tried to only tip $5 so I wasn't paying $15 for a smoothie and the order ended up sitting at the restaurant and got cancelled.
My brother was a DoorDash driver and a lot of his friends were and they all said that they regularly skipped orders with $0 tips because it meant they made nothing on them. DoorDash, at one point, even tried to implement something to address this by changing the way the income for the order was displayed but it's still quite prevalent.
So, yeah, tipping cash is a great idea except these companies have built their whole model in a way that makes that look like you're going to tip $0. So unless someone doesn't care and picks it up, in my area at least, it sounds like you're just not going to get stuff delivered.
My brother was a DoorDash driver and a lot of his friends were and they all said that they regularly skipped orders with $0 tips because it meant they made nothing on them.
This sounds like the whole idea is just broken. No one is making any money, including DoorDash (I at least assume they're not profitable), and the only money to be made in any of this is the idea of a "tip" which effectively holds your order hostage unless you pay up some unspecified amount. All so you can have a lukewarm burger delivered to your door. Oh, and if you get ghosted, you could have already eaten your hot food by the time you get it sorted, had you just gone and picked it up yourself.
I dunno, does this sound like something a rational person would participate in? ("...he asked rhetorically.")
You can usually edit the tip amount after delivery though. If I have a terrible delivery (driver picks up wrong order, etc), I no longer hesitate to edit the tip down after the fact on Doordash.
Interesting video, but the amount of money he made from food delivery is horrifyingly low. Maybe under minimum age. Least of all if you stay until near the end when he says that almost all of that was from tips.
People will hand-wave this away as "this isn't meant to be a full time job, just beer money on the side" but for a lot of adults it is in fact their primary source of income.
a lot of people with student visas in Canada choose to do it since they're limited to 20hr/week of work. You make a bit more money doing ~30 hours of Uber eats with 20 hours spent actually delivering food than working 20 hours at minimum wage.
I think their point was that they have an artificial limit for the actual hours booked (20h), but a lot of delivery time is not-working (e.g. waiting on an order) but that doesn't count against the 20h.
So if they are willing, they can spend 30h waiting+delivering with a lower hourly rate, but higher total $ than just working 20h at min wage.
Not quite: while the 10 hours spent waiting in between orders is not as good as free time, it is not as bad as working (in this case driving) time either. You can read a book, watch videos, browse the Internet, etc.
> limiting my income was that the app just didn’t seem to give me many offers to deliver food.
I assume he was using a new account for deliveries and this was day 1 for him. Wouldn't the app put a new user in a test phase for the firs number of days and give priority to other established accounts with good ratings
Proposition 22 in California means that app-based limo drivers and delivery workers receive guaranteed minimum earnings for the time and distance they're on a job:
- 120% of minimum wage, plus
- 30 cents per mile
This doesn't cover the time between jobs, which makes some sense because a worker can be available for multiple services at once.
Importantly, tips don't count towards the minimum earnings guarantee.
If you like this, Jeroen van Bergeijk has been writing about his doing such jobs undercover for a decade. I don't know that he was translated, but a documentary I think was.
If tips don't put you above minimum wage, does Doordash need to top you up? Or is that part of the appeal of being a contractor - that you can get paid below minimum wage legally?
Paying a fee per job done, rather than a wage per hour of labor, is literally the entire point of the gig economy. Uber/DoorDash/etc. claim this is a perk, since you can set your own hours.
Lot's of misinfo/disinfo being disseminated from doordash/instacart etc about how unfair it is and how it will kill it's business. If your business can't survive your workers being paid minimum wage, maybe you shouldn't be in business.
every time my food delivery driver is on a moped, I get my food 3x faster than by car, and often half of the estimated delivery time. haven't seen an e-bike driver yet.
The author is saying that the companies don’t pay him enough so I should tip to compensate.
This will actually make things worse, as I will then be artificially propping up a broken market.
A better solution would be for nobody to tip. At this point, all the drivers would quit because the pay is too low, so the companies would be forced to raise it to a level where they can attract drivers.