Like, if I was good at math I could probably find a proof.
Restaurants;
2.5 + tip = x
If x is < 7.25 then x = 7.25
Door dash;
1 + tip = y
If 1+tip is > y then y = tip + 1
These are not the same thing?
If tip is 10 than the server made 12.5. if the tip is zero they made 7.25
If the tip is zero, the driver made y. If the tip is less than y, the driver made y. If the tip is greater than y the driver made tip+$1.
Not the same!
They are not the same because $1 and $2.13 are not equal.
They are *parallel* though, which is obvious if you stick to variables.
You get paid $X+$T, or $M, whichever is greater.
With DoorDash, X is 1, T is the tip, and M is a variable minimum guarantee for the delivery.
With a restaurant, $X is 2.13, T is tip, and M is 7.25 (the minimum guarantee for an hour of labor).
In both cases, if T<M-X, then it may as well be zero, because the customers tip makes no difference in the outcome.
In both cases, if T>M-X, the server comes out ahead.
Though DoorDash Drivers needs to make up that T>M for each delivery, where a server just needs it to average the hours worked per month. (i.e. 1 T>M per hour, averaged over the pay period)
If it's always T<M, i.e. everybody just decides to give $5 tip regardless, DoorDash Drivers will never make any tip money whereas the server can as long as they have enough tables per hour.
But DD Drivers still receive M in this scenario, it's just coming out of DD's pocket instead of the customer. They're M-(T+X) per order ahead of where they'd be if there were no guaranteed minimum.
But they'll never get over M since it's per transaction. Which means tipping offer no utility for either the employee or the customer.
So it's different than how restaurants work at least in the practical outcome.
In that sense, yeah, it's more like if servers were paid per table. But never earning more than M doesn't seem like a bad thing. Never earning more than M means M is set above what the driver could reasonably expect to earn as a tip.
Like, if I was good at math I could probably find a proof.
Restaurants;
2.5 + tip = x
If x is < 7.25 then x = 7.25
Door dash;
1 + tip = y
If 1+tip is > y then y = tip + 1
These are not the same thing?
If tip is 10 than the server made 12.5. if the tip is zero they made 7.25
If the tip is zero, the driver made y. If the tip is less than y, the driver made y. If the tip is greater than y the driver made tip+$1.
Not the same!
They are not the same because $1 and $2.13 are not equal.
They are *parallel* though, which is obvious if you stick to variables.
You get paid $X+$T, or $M, whichever is greater.
With DoorDash, X is 1, T is the tip, and M is a variable minimum guarantee for the delivery.
With a restaurant, $X is 2.13, T is tip, and M is 7.25 (the minimum guarantee for an hour of labor).
In both cases, if T<M-X, then it may as well be zero, because the customers tip makes no difference in the outcome.
In both cases, if T>M-X, the server comes out ahead.
Though DoorDash Drivers needs to make up that T>M for each delivery, where a server just needs it to average the hours worked per month. (i.e. 1 T>M per hour, averaged over the pay period)
If it's always T<M, i.e. everybody just decides to give $5 tip regardless, DoorDash Drivers will never make any tip money whereas the server can as long as they have enough tables per hour.
But DD Drivers still receive M in this scenario, it's just coming out of DD's pocket instead of the customer. They're M-(T+X) per order ahead of where they'd be if there were no guaranteed minimum.
But they'll never get over M since it's per transaction. Which means tipping offer no utility for either the employee or the customer.
So it's different than how restaurants work at least in the practical outcome.
Only because tipping at restaurants is a strong social convention and because restaurants make it easy to serve multiple simultaneous customers. So servers will almost always make enough to beat the equivalent minimum guarantee. Tipping for delivery drivers is somewhat less generous, and it’s a more serial versus parallel operation (if done well, which it must be if you want tips).
But if every restaurant patron just up and decided not to tip tomorrow, every server would still make that minimum, and being the one person who tipped would offer no utility for either customer or server. It would be no different.
As for the focus on the per-delivery aspect, honestly I expect this to favor the driver over the waiter. In a theoretical world where table tips don’t almost always easily exceed the minimum wage (they do) I would think that a per-table credit would work out much better than the current system (which I believe is per pay period). Because...looking at DoorDash as an example...a tip of little or zero is much more likely than a tip that greatly exceeds the guarantee. As such, if you *do* get a tip that exceeds the guarantee, it’s much better to have the guarantee reduced on that one delivery than have that large tip amortized across *all* your deliveries and *all* the shitty tippers.
Or, for an example, if one person tips me $100 and everybody else $0, I’m much much much better off on a per-delivery system. Because I get to keep $94 of that hundred and still get $6 for each of the rest.
Whereas with the table service example, that $100 tip will count against my tip credit for the entire...night? Pay period? I think it’s pay period. So if one table tips $100 and everybody else stiffs me, my employer effectively got the whole $100.
Shoutout from the south of the world.
We are also flooded with all of this new delivery systems and our labor laws are designed around protecting the employee, guaranteed minimum wage, insurance, payed medical/maternity/vacation leave, etc. the whole deal.
HOWEVER untill our laws catch up with current and future trends, all this app-workers are considered freelancers, or treated as freelancers, thus, they dont enjoy any of the protections granted by the state, and the companies enjoy all of the profit that comes from exploiting workers.
The good part is that they have created a union and are recieving the support of other strong unions (education workers and transport) to help them negotiate better conditions. My bet is, that if they have to treat the workes as employees (with a minimum of dignity), the companies will just vanish, since the whole business is built upon exploiting the worker.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
The thing about restaurants and the alternate minimum wage is a bit of a red herring. (granted it's its own form of bullshit and shouldn't be legal but...)
The main difference here is that for restaurants the amount the employer is siphoning by not needing to pay the full wage is fairly limited. You're looking at a single tip in an hour making up that difference, even if you average it all out the vast majority of tips received are going to the employee.
Whereas with doordash there's no limit in how much they can siphon. Every transaction is subject. If you do 100 deliveries doordash takes 100 times more.
This is kinda what raised my eyebrow. Because the doordash people are not hourly what the company is doing is taking a lot more bites at the tip apple than what any restaurant could. I am pretty sure if they could get this into court these gig delivery services probably would get slapped down badly but the law has not fully caught up to their shenanigans yet.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Right this is what was tickling my brain about this: this isn't a new or unique phenomenon. The "less then minimum wage" BS restaurants can do is exactly this.
No, it really isn't. It's close, but actually worse.
A restaurant pays you $2.5/hour regardless of your tip. If you tip brings you to less than $7.25/hour the restaurant must pay the remainder. If your tip + wage makes you more, you get to keep all of both!
Here, door dash tells you a minimum commission. Then they take away any tips that you earn that are less than their stated minimum commission. And they take away the minimum wage as long as you get at least that in tips.
Quite different, really!
No, you’re mixing up the numbers.
The $1 is the minimum commission for a delivery. You get that, plus your tips. All of it. That is analogous to the $2.13/hr plus tips.
Only if that combined amount doesn’t add up to the $6.83 (in the OP example) do they “top up” the difference to get you to the guarantee. That’s the $7.25/hr.
Its worth mentioning that the CEO of Doordash confirmed that the program does not work like this today. It works instead, as a better writer than me detailed, like this:
DoorDash offers its delivery drivers a guaranteed payout for each order, upfront—a flat $1 per order plus additional compensation calculated by some kind of malign algorithm. So if a driver is told they’ll make $8 upfront for an order, they’ll always receive at least $8. But if the customer receiving that order gave the driver a $4 tip, DoorDash would treat it as a credit towards the originally guaranteed $8, meaning the driver would still only get $8. The only circumstance in which a customer’s tip would actually go to the driver is if it was very generous.
The conversion happens AFTER the agreed upon transaction. The contractor is told they will get paid $8, and then any tip provided is taken from the driver unless it exceeds $5.25. There is no ambiguity here. This is how the company itself defined it in their quasi apology and walk-back of the program today.
Right this is what was tickling my brain about this: this isn't a new or unique phenomenon. The "less then minimum wage" BS restaurants can do is exactly this.
No, it really isn't. It's close, but actually worse.
A restaurant pays you $2.5/hour regardless of your tip. If you tip brings you to less than $7.25/hour the restaurant must pay the remainder. If your tip + wage makes you more, you get to keep all of both!
Here, door dash tells you a minimum commission. Then they take away any tips that you earn that are less than their stated minimum commission. And they take away the minimum wage as long as you get at least that in tips.
Quite different, really!
No, you’re mixing up the numbers.
The $1 is the minimum commission for a delivery. You get that, plus your tips. All of it. That is analogous to the $2.13/hr plus tips.
Only if that combined amount doesn’t add up to the $6.83 (in the OP example) do they “top up” the difference to get you to the guarantee. That’s the $7.25/hr.
Its worth mentioning that the CEO of Doordash confirmed that the program does not work like this today. It works instead, as a better writer than me detailed, like this:
DoorDash offers its delivery drivers a guaranteed payout for each order, upfront—a flat $1 per order plus additional compensation calculated by some kind of malign algorithm. So if a driver is told they’ll make $8 upfront for an order, they’ll always receive at least $8. But if the customer receiving that order gave the driver a $4 tip, DoorDash would treat it as a credit towards the originally guaranteed $8, meaning the driver would still only get $8. The only circumstance in which a customer’s tip would actually go to the driver is if it was very generous.
The conversion happens AFTER the agreed upon transaction. The contractor is told they will get paid $8, and then any tip provided is taken from the driver unless it exceeds $5.25. There is no ambiguity here. This is how the company itself defined it in their quasi apology and walk-back of the program today.
I’m very confused, because he quoted explanation you provide is exactly what I was describing.
A flat $1 per order. Plus your tips. Plus an additional compensation that will be reduced (via some “malign algorithm” aka subtraction) based on the amount of tip received, to provide a guaranteed minimum.
The communication in this thread is strange, because it seems to constantly be two people describing the exact same thing but insisting they are entirely different. What was described above in that quoted passage is almost perfectly analogous to the standard tip credit for tipped hourly employees. If differs only in that we’re dealing with per-job compensation rather than per hour.
Right this is what was tickling my brain about this: this isn't a new or unique phenomenon. The "less then minimum wage" BS restaurants can do is exactly this.
No, it really isn't. It's close, but actually worse.
A restaurant pays you $2.5/hour regardless of your tip. If you tip brings you to less than $7.25/hour the restaurant must pay the remainder. If your tip + wage makes you more, you get to keep all of both!
Here, door dash tells you a minimum commission. Then they take away any tips that you earn that are less than their stated minimum commission. And they take away the minimum wage as long as you get at least that in tips.
Quite different, really!
No, you’re mixing up the numbers.
The $1 is the minimum commission for a delivery. You get that, plus your tips. All of it. That is analogous to the $2.13/hr plus tips.
Only if that combined amount doesn’t add up to the $6.83 (in the OP example) do they “top up” the difference to get you to the guarantee. That’s the $7.25/hr.
Its worth mentioning that the CEO of Doordash confirmed that the program does not work like this today. It works instead, as a better writer than me detailed, like this:
DoorDash offers its delivery drivers a guaranteed payout for each order, upfront—a flat $1 per order plus additional compensation calculated by some kind of malign algorithm. So if a driver is told they’ll make $8 upfront for an order, they’ll always receive at least $8. But if the customer receiving that order gave the driver a $4 tip, DoorDash would treat it as a credit towards the originally guaranteed $8, meaning the driver would still only get $8. The only circumstance in which a customer’s tip would actually go to the driver is if it was very generous.
The conversion happens AFTER the agreed upon transaction. The contractor is told they will get paid $8, and then any tip provided is taken from the driver unless it exceeds $5.25. There is no ambiguity here. This is how the company itself defined it in their quasi apology and walk-back of the program today.
I’m very confused, because he quoted explanation you provide is exactly what I was describing.
A flat $1 per order. Plus your tips. Plus an additional compensation that will be reduced (via some “malign algorithm” aka subtraction) based on the amount of tip received, to provide a guaranteed minimum.
The communication in this thread is strange, because it seems to constantly be two people describing the exact same thing but insisting they are entirely different. What was described above in that quoted passage is almost perfectly analogous to the standard tip credit for tipped hourly employees. If differs only in that we’re dealing with per-job compensation rather than per hour.
I think the inference is that the minimum dash payout, $1 + x, is that x is not a clear number. It is the out put of some equation that factors in distance, number of dashers active, expected order volume, the phase of the moon, so on and such. The malign in that sentence is literary flair but is also viewed that way because it is opaque to the employees doing the deliveries.
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
edited July 2019
No, not based upon the tip received. You aren't reading.
Before the transaction begins. When a contractor takes the delivery, they get $1 plus incentives. For example, for a restaurant that has some form of agreement with DoorDash they might pay an extra dollar on the delivery to ensure it gets picked up by a driver faster. Or if the location is particularly over-saturated with deliveries and not enough people are in the area they may raise the rate paid to the contractor. So contractor is told: you get $8 dollars for delivering this. Good, I'll take that delivery.
I deliver it, the guy at the house says "hey, that was super fast. Not only will I pay for the delivery but I want to reward your hard work with $3 of tip." That $3 tip will always go to doordash. Unless they tip over the incentives paid by doordash (say $5.25 of that $7 over the $1 minimum), it will always go to door dash. The driver will never get the tip in this case. If the customer tipped $10, the driver might see $3 or $4, but only after Doordash recouped its costs for sending out the driver.
You can present it as throttled tips, but thats not actually what happens. The contract is agreed upon when the driver picks up, and nothing the customer can do will ensure that tip reaches the driver, and nothing is calculated after the tip is received.
The issue here comes down to lack of comprehension of what is actually happening, either by you not reading carefully or willfully ignoring people explaining the issue at hand.
Enc on
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
And, again, its worth noting that none of this is at all like actual tip law:
tip credit works by paying someone less than the minimum wage and allowing them to keep all their tips.
tip pooling works by taking everyone's tips and splitting them across all staff equally, sans management, and requires the employees make at least minimum wage.
Doordash isn't paying minimum wage, sharing the tips with the driver(s) in any capacity, and is keeping it as management/operational costs. All of which would be flagrantly against labor laws in any other business.
Right this is what was tickling my brain about this: this isn't a new or unique phenomenon. The "less then minimum wage" BS restaurants can do is exactly this.
No, it really isn't. It's close, but actually worse.
A restaurant pays you $2.5/hour regardless of your tip. If you tip brings you to less than $7.25/hour the restaurant must pay the remainder. If your tip + wage makes you more, you get to keep all of both!
Here, door dash tells you a minimum commission. Then they take away any tips that you earn that are less than their stated minimum commission. And they take away the minimum wage as long as you get at least that in tips.
Quite different, really!
No, you’re mixing up the numbers.
The $1 is the minimum commission for a delivery. You get that, plus your tips. All of it. That is analogous to the $2.13/hr plus tips.
Only if that combined amount doesn’t add up to the $6.83 (in the OP example) do they “top up” the difference to get you to the guarantee. That’s the $7.25/hr.
Its worth mentioning that the CEO of Doordash confirmed that the program does not work like this today. It works instead, as a better writer than me detailed, like this:
DoorDash offers its delivery drivers a guaranteed payout for each order, upfront—a flat $1 per order plus additional compensation calculated by some kind of malign algorithm. So if a driver is told they’ll make $8 upfront for an order, they’ll always receive at least $8. But if the customer receiving that order gave the driver a $4 tip, DoorDash would treat it as a credit towards the originally guaranteed $8, meaning the driver would still only get $8. The only circumstance in which a customer’s tip would actually go to the driver is if it was very generous.
The conversion happens AFTER the agreed upon transaction. The contractor is told they will get paid $8, and then any tip provided is taken from the driver unless it exceeds $5.25. There is no ambiguity here. This is how the company itself defined it in their quasi apology and walk-back of the program today.
I’m very confused, because he quoted explanation you provide is exactly what I was describing.
A flat $1 per order. Plus your tips. Plus an additional compensation that will be reduced (via some “malign algorithm” aka subtraction) based on the amount of tip received, to provide a guaranteed minimum.
The communication in this thread is strange, because it seems to constantly be two people describing the exact same thing but insisting they are entirely different. What was described above in that quoted passage is almost perfectly analogous to the standard tip credit for tipped hourly employees. If differs only in that we’re dealing with per-job compensation rather than per hour.
I think the inference is that the minimum dash payout, $1 + x, is that x is not a clear number. It is the out put of some equation that factors in distance, number of dashers active, expected order volume, the phase of the moon, so on and such. The malign in that sentence is literary flair but is also viewed that way because it is opaque to the employees doing the deliveries.
X seems to be clear at the time the job is accepted. Which is what matters. Any alleged fuckery with tips occurs after that point, in the context of the accepted job.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Right this is what was tickling my brain about this: this isn't a new or unique phenomenon. The "less then minimum wage" BS restaurants can do is exactly this.
No, it really isn't. It's close, but actually worse.
A restaurant pays you $2.5/hour regardless of your tip. If you tip brings you to less than $7.25/hour the restaurant must pay the remainder. If your tip + wage makes you more, you get to keep all of both!
Here, door dash tells you a minimum commission. Then they take away any tips that you earn that are less than their stated minimum commission. And they take away the minimum wage as long as you get at least that in tips.
Quite different, really!
No, you’re mixing up the numbers.
The $1 is the minimum commission for a delivery. You get that, plus your tips. All of it. That is analogous to the $2.13/hr plus tips.
Only if that combined amount doesn’t add up to the $6.83 (in the OP example) do they “top up” the difference to get you to the guarantee. That’s the $7.25/hr.
Its worth mentioning that the CEO of Doordash confirmed that the program does not work like this today. It works instead, as a better writer than me detailed, like this:
DoorDash offers its delivery drivers a guaranteed payout for each order, upfront—a flat $1 per order plus additional compensation calculated by some kind of malign algorithm. So if a driver is told they’ll make $8 upfront for an order, they’ll always receive at least $8. But if the customer receiving that order gave the driver a $4 tip, DoorDash would treat it as a credit towards the originally guaranteed $8, meaning the driver would still only get $8. The only circumstance in which a customer’s tip would actually go to the driver is if it was very generous.
The conversion happens AFTER the agreed upon transaction. The contractor is told they will get paid $8, and then any tip provided is taken from the driver unless it exceeds $5.25. There is no ambiguity here. This is how the company itself defined it in their quasi apology and walk-back of the program today.
I’m very confused, because he quoted explanation you provide is exactly what I was describing.
A flat $1 per order. Plus your tips. Plus an additional compensation that will be reduced (via some “malign algorithm” aka subtraction) based on the amount of tip received, to provide a guaranteed minimum.
The communication in this thread is strange, because it seems to constantly be two people describing the exact same thing but insisting they are entirely different. What was described above in that quoted passage is almost perfectly analogous to the standard tip credit for tipped hourly employees. If differs only in that we’re dealing with per-job compensation rather than per hour.
I think the inference is that the minimum dash payout, $1 + x, is that x is not a clear number. It is the out put of some equation that factors in distance, number of dashers active, expected order volume, the phase of the moon, so on and such. The malign in that sentence is literary flair but is also viewed that way because it is opaque to the employees doing the deliveries.
X seems to be clear at the time the job is accepted. Which is what matters. Any alleged fuckery with tips occurs after that point, in the context of the accepted job.
Right, which is why it's shady as fuck. Either the contractor is paid what they are agreed to be paid, which sure. In which case, no tip option should exist for the consumer, as tips (by law) are defined as owned by the received of the tip except in cases of tip pooling.
So either those tips are the drivers, or Doordash is committing fraud against their consumer. Those are the only options here.
I'm kinda split on this. Partly because tip culture is a trash fire and this is what it is gonna look like to get rid of tipping culture. The driver's are told of the entire situation. They only get the "or quit" choice but they know up front what they're making for doing a thing. That last bit is a positive to me. The part where it gets real fucking skeevy is how it is presented to the customers. "Tips" don't go to management/overhead, they go to the person. If they don't then it is duplicitous to call it a tip. Doordash (and others) are exploiting our social conditioning to tip. I don't know many folks who would think this big corporate entity deserves a couple more of my bucks because their "not" employee was fast/polite/whatever.
And, again, its worth noting that none of this is at all like actual tip law:
tip credit works by paying someone less than the minimum wage and allowing them to keep all their tips.
tip pooling works by taking everyone's tips and splitting them across all staff equally, sans management, and requires the employees make at least minimum wage.
Doordash isn't paying minimum wage, sharing the tips with the driver(s) in any capacity, and is keeping it as management/operational costs. All of which would be flagrantly against labor laws in any other business.
Of course it is not exactly like tip credit, because there is no hourly position and instead a per-delivery contract.
But if you accept the DoorDash guaranteed minimum as analogous to the minimum hourly wage (established at DD’s discretion, since this is not an hourly position, but still), it operates almost entirely parallel to the tip credit system.
It is a per-delivery contract that implements the same mechanism as the tip credit system, in context.
And, again, its worth noting that none of this is at all like actual tip law:
tip credit works by paying someone less than the minimum wage and allowing them to keep all their tips.
tip pooling works by taking everyone's tips and splitting them across all staff equally, sans management, and requires the employees make at least minimum wage.
Doordash isn't paying minimum wage, sharing the tips with the driver(s) in any capacity, and is keeping it as management/operational costs. All of which would be flagrantly against labor laws in any other business.
Of course it is not exactly like tip credit, because there is no hourly position and instead a per-delivery contract.
But if you accept the DoorDash guaranteed minimum as analogous to the minimum hourly wage (established at DD’s discretion, since this is not an hourly position, but still), it operates almost entirely parallel to the tip credit system.
It is a per-delivery contract that implements the same mechanism as the tip credit system, in context.
Except with bonus fraud.
If people expected DoorDash pocketed the tip money because they already paid the driver this isn't a national news story. DoorDash is misleading people so they give them money. That is bad.
I'm kinda split on this. Partly because tip culture is a trash fire and this is what it is gonna look like to get rid of tipping culture. The driver's are told of the entire situation. They only get the "or quit" choice but they know up front what they're making for doing a thing. That last bit is a positive to me. The part where it gets real fucking skeevy is how it is presented to the customers. "Tips" don't go to management/overhead, they go to the person. If they don't then it is duplicitous to call it a tip. Doordash (and others) are exploiting our social conditioning to tip. I don't know many folks who would think this big corporate entity deserves a couple more of my bucks because their "not" employee was fast/polite/whatever.
I don’t know that this is better or not, but I’m reasonably confident that at some point DoorDash would definitely start terminating their relationship with drivers who don’t bring in sufficient tips, and instead ride the fill guarantee from DoorDash. Same way any server who isn’t clearing minimum from their tips alone and prevents the establishment from taking the full tip credit is going to see their hours disappear.
The customers may not be providing a carrot, but eventually they may protect the driver from the stick.
Also, on the topic of skeevy practices customers may not be aware of, you know those automatic 15% or 18% service charges added on to large parties at restaurants? Most people assume those go to the server, as a guaranteed tip for large parties. In many states, the restaurant is free to keep 100% of it. And the server is entitled to nothing at all, above minimum wage (because this is now considered non-tipped work). Pure profit to the owner, and the customer generally has no idea, thinking the $30 on that $300 bill went to the server.
Which, maybe it did. Or maybe it didn’t. Who knows!
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
edited July 2019
Yeah, service charges aren't tips, but tips added beyond service charges go to the waiter and/or pool. That's actually federal law.
"Automatic gratuity" is different from a service charge as well, and has to go to the waiter and/or pool. A service charge has to be a line item on a bill, not an implied tip.
You can actually tell where it goes by the nature of the receipt.
Yeah, service charges aren't tips, but tips added beyond service charges go to the waiter and/or pool. That's actually federal law.
"Automatic gratuity" is different from a service charge as well, and has to go to the waiter and/or pool. A service charge has to be a line item on a bill, not an implied tip.
You can actually tell where it goes by the nature of the receipt.
It’s my understanding, from a bit of cursory reading I’ll admit, that as of 2014 *all* automatic “gratuities” are service charges now. Not tips. The IRS redefined it, and for it to be a tip it must be entirely optional, the customer must determine the amount, the customer determines who gets it, and it can’t be determined by policy.
Geez, tipping is friggin complicated. I gotta cook more
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
To be fair, the customer has no relationship to the driver. You go into Doordash's website or app, and ask Doordash to deliver to you. They then put out a subcontract offer out to their drivers until one accepts it. The tip is set before you even know what driver is coming, and anything you put in the app is tipping Doordash, which passes it on according to their own rules. If you want to tip the driver beyond Doordash's rules, give the driver the cash.
To be fair, the customer has no relationship to the driver. You go into Doordash's website or app, and ask Doordash to deliver to you. They then put out a subcontract offer out to their drivers until one accepts it. The tip is set before you even know what driver is coming, and anything you put in the app is tipping Doordash, which passes it on according to their own rules. If you want to tip the driver beyond Doordash's rules, give the driver the cash.
The app doesn't say you are tipping Doordash, it says I'm tipping the driver. Which I'm not.
To be fair, the customer has no relationship to the driver. You go into Doordash's website or app, and ask Doordash to deliver to you. They then put out a subcontract offer out to their drivers until one accepts it. The tip is set before you even know what driver is coming, and anything you put in the app is tipping Doordash, which passes it on according to their own rules. If you want to tip the driver beyond Doordash's rules, give the driver the cash.
That whole system doesnt really treats the driver as a freelancer then, but as an employee of DD.
It would be good to know in general what are the obligations of drivers in this delivery apps, can they turn down jobs? Can they simultaneously work in multiple apps? Do they have any information on how are jobs distributed? etc.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
It's called skimming tips and if you did it at a restaurant where I've worked you'd have at best problems retaining staff. You'd probably end up with bricks through your windows and your car vandalized to some degree.
You don't fuck with staff tips unless you want a physical altercation at some point.
Doordash can justify it in whatever manner it wants. It's stealing and anyone who's ever worked for tips knows it.
Edit: You as a patron are putting a $10 on the table for the service and the owner is walking by and picking it up.
I feel like one thing that's being consistently missed in this discussion is the difference in style of work.
A server is in a building, on their feet. The wear is minimal and required maintenance low.
Delivery drivers are at risk being in traffic, consuming durability of a privately owned asset, and consuming costly resources (oil/gas). In my experience, even pizza delivery has a much higher guarantee to compensate for these resources, there's also a fall back should someone impact your ability to work by impacting the car (come work inside till the repairs are done).
There's a lot of comparison to restaurant servers, but that's a bit apples to oranges I think. Might be a better to compare other, long standing, food delivery services that exist.
I feel like one thing that's being consistently missed in this discussion is the difference in style of work.
A server is in a building, on their feet. The wear is minimal and required maintenance low.
Delivery drivers are at risk being in traffic, consuming durability of a privately owned asset, and consuming costly resources (oil/gas). In my experience, even pizza delivery has a much higher guarantee to compensate for these resources, there's also a fall back should someone impact your ability to work by impacting the car (come work inside till the repairs are done).
There's a lot of comparison to restaurant servers, but that's a bit apples to oranges I think. Might be a better to compare other, long standing, food delivery services that exist.
I think there's also strong distinction between a "staff" delivery driver who has to hang around all day and can't decline deliveries, and someone who can just fire up the app and choose to take an order or not; but I'm unclear on which side of the line a DD driver lands on. Are DD Drivers ever required to be available for set intervals, or is it entirely up to them?
Side note: I heard on NPR that DD capitulated Tuesday night, so that's good for all involved (Since I assume that DD would not have set M above what their models suggested they could recover in tips).
To be fair, the customer has no relationship to the driver. You go into Doordash's website or app, and ask Doordash to deliver to you. They then put out a subcontract offer out to their drivers until one accepts it. The tip is set before you even know what driver is coming, and anything you put in the app is tipping Doordash, which passes it on according to their own rules. If you want to tip the driver beyond Doordash's rules, give the driver the cash.
That whole system doesnt really treats the driver as a freelancer then, but as an employee of DD.
It would be good to know in general what are the obligations of drivers in this delivery apps, can they turn down jobs? Can they simultaneously work in multiple apps? Do they have any information on how are jobs distributed? etc.
You can turn down any order. When the order pops up on your app, you're given the restaurant name and address, customer first name and address, the time you're expected to deliver by, the distance, and the guaranteed rate for completing the drive. Your acceptance rate is displayed in the app and they occassionally run incentives to encourage you to raise it, but it otherwise affects nothing.
You can work in multiple apps, if you want. You pick which hours (first come, first served) you want to work 5 days ahead (or just log in when it's busy), but you can cancel or leave your drive at anytime with no penalty. You can also pause your drive for up to 30 minutes.
Jobs are distributed first to the closest driver to the restaurant and then out from there if it's declined. You can get multiples from nearby restaurants (batch orders), if there's no one else close by.
Right this is what was tickling my brain about this: this isn't a new or unique phenomenon. The "less then minimum wage" BS restaurants can do is exactly this.
No, it really isn't. It's close, but actually worse.
A restaurant pays you $2.5/hour regardless of your tip. If you tip brings you to less than $7.25/hour the restaurant must pay the remainder. If your tip + wage makes you more, you get to keep all of both!
Here, door dash tells you a minimum commission. Then they take away any tips that you earn that are less than their stated minimum commission. And they take away the minimum wage as long as you get at least that in tips.
Quite different, really!
No, you’re mixing up the numbers.
The $1 is the minimum commission for a delivery. You get that, plus your tips. All of it. That is analogous to the $2.13/hr plus tips.
Only if that combined amount doesn’t add up to the $6.83 (in the OP example) do they “top up” the difference to get you to the guarantee. That’s the $7.25/hr.
Its worth mentioning that the CEO of Doordash confirmed that the program does not work like this today. It works instead, as a better writer than me detailed, like this:
DoorDash offers its delivery drivers a guaranteed payout for each order, upfront—a flat $1 per order plus additional compensation calculated by some kind of malign algorithm. So if a driver is told they’ll make $8 upfront for an order, they’ll always receive at least $8. But if the customer receiving that order gave the driver a $4 tip, DoorDash would treat it as a credit towards the originally guaranteed $8, meaning the driver would still only get $8. The only circumstance in which a customer’s tip would actually go to the driver is if it was very generous.
The conversion happens AFTER the agreed upon transaction. The contractor is told they will get paid $8, and then any tip provided is taken from the driver unless it exceeds $5.25. There is no ambiguity here. This is how the company itself defined it in their quasi apology and walk-back of the program today.
Even if the driver agreed to it how the hell is this still not fraud to the customer. You list a tip the customer assumes the driver is getting the money. In this case there is almost no chance that money is ever going to the driver.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Right this is what was tickling my brain about this: this isn't a new or unique phenomenon. The "less then minimum wage" BS restaurants can do is exactly this.
No, it really isn't. It's close, but actually worse.
A restaurant pays you $2.5/hour regardless of your tip. If you tip brings you to less than $7.25/hour the restaurant must pay the remainder. If your tip + wage makes you more, you get to keep all of both!
Here, door dash tells you a minimum commission. Then they take away any tips that you earn that are less than their stated minimum commission. And they take away the minimum wage as long as you get at least that in tips.
Quite different, really!
No, you’re mixing up the numbers.
The $1 is the minimum commission for a delivery. You get that, plus your tips. All of it. That is analogous to the $2.13/hr plus tips.
Only if that combined amount doesn’t add up to the $6.83 (in the OP example) do they “top up” the difference to get you to the guarantee. That’s the $7.25/hr.
Its worth mentioning that the CEO of Doordash confirmed that the program does not work like this today. It works instead, as a better writer than me detailed, like this:
DoorDash offers its delivery drivers a guaranteed payout for each order, upfront—a flat $1 per order plus additional compensation calculated by some kind of malign algorithm. So if a driver is told they’ll make $8 upfront for an order, they’ll always receive at least $8. But if the customer receiving that order gave the driver a $4 tip, DoorDash would treat it as a credit towards the originally guaranteed $8, meaning the driver would still only get $8. The only circumstance in which a customer’s tip would actually go to the driver is if it was very generous.
The conversion happens AFTER the agreed upon transaction. The contractor is told they will get paid $8, and then any tip provided is taken from the driver unless it exceeds $5.25. There is no ambiguity here. This is how the company itself defined it in their quasi apology and walk-back of the program today.
Even if the driver agreed to it how the hell is this still not fraud to the customer. You list a tip the customer assumes the driver is getting the money. In this case there is almost no chance that money is ever going to the driver.
I agree, it is fraud. That's my entire point repeatedly in this thread?
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KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
There's one area I'm still murky on because I've seen conflicting answers posted in various places: what happens when the customer tips more than the amount that DoorDash guarantees to the driver? For example, the order pops up in the driver's app with a guaranteed rate of $7, but I tip $11. Does the driver get the whole $11 in that case, or just the $7?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
There's one area I'm still murky on because I've seen conflicting answers posted in various places: what happens when the customer tips more than the amount that DoorDash guarantees to the driver? For example, the order pops up in the driver's app with a guaranteed rate of $7, but I tip $11. Does the driver get the whole $11 in that case, or just the $7?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
It's still fraud.
You're paying extra money to door dash for nothing.
I might voluntarily pay an extra $5 to the driver, an actual human who I respect.
Why would I pay an extra $5 to the faceless corporation? They should be getting their cut already though fees and price inflation.
Like, if it was labeled "service fee" but you got to fill in the number it'd be zero every time.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
There's one area I'm still murky on because I've seen conflicting answers posted in various places: what happens when the customer tips more than the amount that DoorDash guarantees to the driver? For example, the order pops up in the driver's app with a guaranteed rate of $7, but I tip $11. Does the driver get the whole $11 in that case, or just the $7?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
It's still fraud.
You're paying extra money to door dash for nothing.
I might voluntarily pay an extra $5 to the driver, an actual human who I respect.
Why would I pay an extra $5 to the faceless corporation? They should be getting their cut already though fees and price inflation.
Like, if it was labeled "service fee" but you got to fill in the number it'd be zero every time.
But again, every time you tip an employee in the 43 states that allow employers to take the tip credit, you are doing the same thing.
You are leaving money on the table. And the employer is taking $5.12 per hour out of that money, every hour, every shift, for as long as the server works there. On a slow night when you tip your server are you actually sure that they got to keep any of that money? Or did the perfectly legal, normal, and common tip credit grind most of it away? You have no idea.
There's one area I'm still murky on because I've seen conflicting answers posted in various places: what happens when the customer tips more than the amount that DoorDash guarantees to the driver? For example, the order pops up in the driver's app with a guaranteed rate of $7, but I tip $11. Does the driver get the whole $11 in that case, or just the $7?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
It's still fraud.
You're paying extra money to door dash for nothing.
I might voluntarily pay an extra $5 to the driver, an actual human who I respect.
Why would I pay an extra $5 to the faceless corporation? They should be getting their cut already though fees and price inflation.
Like, if it was labeled "service fee" but you got to fill in the number it'd be zero every time.
But again, every time you tip an employee in the 43 states that allow employers to take the tip credit, you are doing the same thing.
You are leaving money on the table. And the employer is taking $5.12 per hour out of that money, every hour, every shift, for as long as the server works there. On a slow night when you tip your server are you actually sure that they got to keep any of that money? Or did the perfectly legal, normal, and common tip credit grind most of it away? You have no idea.
You seem to be willfully ignoring that any server who claims not to have made enough tips outside of a major disaster will be quickly fired. Most servers NEVER claim that fall back wage. That's a different shitty situation that DoorDash is exploiting.
There's one area I'm still murky on because I've seen conflicting answers posted in various places: what happens when the customer tips more than the amount that DoorDash guarantees to the driver? For example, the order pops up in the driver's app with a guaranteed rate of $7, but I tip $11. Does the driver get the whole $11 in that case, or just the $7?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
It's still fraud.
You're paying extra money to door dash for nothing.
I might voluntarily pay an extra $5 to the driver, an actual human who I respect.
Why would I pay an extra $5 to the faceless corporation? They should be getting their cut already though fees and price inflation.
Like, if it was labeled "service fee" but you got to fill in the number it'd be zero every time.
But again, every time you tip an employee in the 43 states that allow employers to take the tip credit, you are doing the same thing.
You are leaving money on the table. And the employer is taking $5.12 per hour out of that money, every hour, every shift, for as long as the server works there. On a slow night when you tip your server are you actually sure that they got to keep any of that money? Or did the perfectly legal, normal, and common tip credit grind most of it away? You have no idea.
The tip credit being based off of pay period, and door dash being per delivery, makes the two systems pretty different, for the benefit of doordash.
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KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
There's one area I'm still murky on because I've seen conflicting answers posted in various places: what happens when the customer tips more than the amount that DoorDash guarantees to the driver? For example, the order pops up in the driver's app with a guaranteed rate of $7, but I tip $11. Does the driver get the whole $11 in that case, or just the $7?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
It's still fraud.
You're paying extra money to door dash for nothing.
I might voluntarily pay an extra $5 to the driver, an actual human who I respect.
Why would I pay an extra $5 to the faceless corporation? They should be getting their cut already though fees and price inflation.
Like, if it was labeled "service fee" but you got to fill in the number it'd be zero every time.
No. If everybody just stopped tipping Doordash drivers so they would just get the guaranteed minimum from DD instead, DD would either go out of business or make up the amount with fees to the restaurants being ordered from. Or third possibility would be to just add an exorbitant service/delivery fee to every order - when we lived in Hawaii the only delivery service available was a place called Aloha2Go that charged like $10 per order.
The money you pay is a tip, DD is just guaranteeing that their drivers will hit a minimum tip on every order, with or without you.
There's one area I'm still murky on because I've seen conflicting answers posted in various places: what happens when the customer tips more than the amount that DoorDash guarantees to the driver? For example, the order pops up in the driver's app with a guaranteed rate of $7, but I tip $11. Does the driver get the whole $11 in that case, or just the $7?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
It's still fraud.
You're paying extra money to door dash for nothing.
I might voluntarily pay an extra $5 to the driver, an actual human who I respect.
Why would I pay an extra $5 to the faceless corporation? They should be getting their cut already though fees and price inflation.
Like, if it was labeled "service fee" but you got to fill in the number it'd be zero every time.
But again, every time you tip an employee in the 43 states that allow employers to take the tip credit, you are doing the same thing.
You are leaving money on the table. And the employer is taking $5.12 per hour out of that money, every hour, every shift, for as long as the server works there. On a slow night when you tip your server are you actually sure that they got to keep any of that money? Or did the perfectly legal, normal, and common tip credit grind most of it away? You have no idea.
You seem to be willfully ignoring that any server who claims not to have made enough tips outside of a major disaster will be quickly fired. Most servers NEVER claim that fall back wage. That's a different shitty situation that DoorDash is exploiting.
I’m not ignoring it, I’m trying to be as reasonable as possible by assuming restaurants follow the law. Because if anything, that’s worse, and makes DoorDash *better* than the average diner. Because they happily pay the guarantee without firing anybody.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
There's one area I'm still murky on because I've seen conflicting answers posted in various places: what happens when the customer tips more than the amount that DoorDash guarantees to the driver? For example, the order pops up in the driver's app with a guaranteed rate of $7, but I tip $11. Does the driver get the whole $11 in that case, or just the $7?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
If they have the guaranteed rate of $7, and you tip $4, they do not get that $4. The first $X (up to $6 in this case) of the tip go to DoorDash, and then they release the rest to the driver, so if you paid $14 in total, $1 of that $7 of tip you paid would be the drivers.
If any amount of the tip is taken by DoorDash and not the driver, that is fraud to the consumer. Tips have legal definitions in the US, and may only be gotten around with specific mechanisms I've already defined like four times now on other pages.
There's one area I'm still murky on because I've seen conflicting answers posted in various places: what happens when the customer tips more than the amount that DoorDash guarantees to the driver? For example, the order pops up in the driver's app with a guaranteed rate of $7, but I tip $11. Does the driver get the whole $11 in that case, or just the $7?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
It's still fraud.
You're paying extra money to door dash for nothing.
I might voluntarily pay an extra $5 to the driver, an actual human who I respect.
Why would I pay an extra $5 to the faceless corporation? They should be getting their cut already though fees and price inflation.
Like, if it was labeled "service fee" but you got to fill in the number it'd be zero every time.
But again, every time you tip an employee in the 43 states that allow employers to take the tip credit, you are doing the same thing.
You are leaving money on the table. And the employer is taking $5.12 per hour out of that money, every hour, every shift, for as long as the server works there. On a slow night when you tip your server are you actually sure that they got to keep any of that money? Or did the perfectly legal, normal, and common tip credit grind most of it away? You have no idea.
No, this is nothing at all like tip credit. Tip credit, the consumer gives a tip to their service person and every dollar of that goes to them, 100% of the time. If I tip the guy $5, they get that $5. Then at the end of the month, the company fills in the gaps. That's a problematic system as well, at times, but is very different from what is happening here. Doordash has an agreed upon rate for the driver, but takes the tip 100% of the time. The customer is led to believe they are doing the same thing, but they are not.
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In that sense, yeah, it's more like if servers were paid per table. But never earning more than M doesn't seem like a bad thing. Never earning more than M means M is set above what the driver could reasonably expect to earn as a tip.
Only because tipping at restaurants is a strong social convention and because restaurants make it easy to serve multiple simultaneous customers. So servers will almost always make enough to beat the equivalent minimum guarantee. Tipping for delivery drivers is somewhat less generous, and it’s a more serial versus parallel operation (if done well, which it must be if you want tips).
But if every restaurant patron just up and decided not to tip tomorrow, every server would still make that minimum, and being the one person who tipped would offer no utility for either customer or server. It would be no different.
As for the focus on the per-delivery aspect, honestly I expect this to favor the driver over the waiter. In a theoretical world where table tips don’t almost always easily exceed the minimum wage (they do) I would think that a per-table credit would work out much better than the current system (which I believe is per pay period). Because...looking at DoorDash as an example...a tip of little or zero is much more likely than a tip that greatly exceeds the guarantee. As such, if you *do* get a tip that exceeds the guarantee, it’s much better to have the guarantee reduced on that one delivery than have that large tip amortized across *all* your deliveries and *all* the shitty tippers.
Or, for an example, if one person tips me $100 and everybody else $0, I’m much much much better off on a per-delivery system. Because I get to keep $94 of that hundred and still get $6 for each of the rest.
Whereas with the table service example, that $100 tip will count against my tip credit for the entire...night? Pay period? I think it’s pay period. So if one table tips $100 and everybody else stiffs me, my employer effectively got the whole $100.
And Amazon is also doing it, but I doubt they care about a public backlash, if any existed against them.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/08/amazon-flex-tips-base-pay/
We are also flooded with all of this new delivery systems and our labor laws are designed around protecting the employee, guaranteed minimum wage, insurance, payed medical/maternity/vacation leave, etc. the whole deal.
HOWEVER untill our laws catch up with current and future trends, all this app-workers are considered freelancers, or treated as freelancers, thus, they dont enjoy any of the protections granted by the state, and the companies enjoy all of the profit that comes from exploiting workers.
The good part is that they have created a union and are recieving the support of other strong unions (education workers and transport) to help them negotiate better conditions. My bet is, that if they have to treat the workes as employees (with a minimum of dignity), the companies will just vanish, since the whole business is built upon exploiting the worker.
This is kinda what raised my eyebrow. Because the doordash people are not hourly what the company is doing is taking a lot more bites at the tip apple than what any restaurant could. I am pretty sure if they could get this into court these gig delivery services probably would get slapped down badly but the law has not fully caught up to their shenanigans yet.
Its worth mentioning that the CEO of Doordash confirmed that the program does not work like this today. It works instead, as a better writer than me detailed, like this:
The conversion happens AFTER the agreed upon transaction. The contractor is told they will get paid $8, and then any tip provided is taken from the driver unless it exceeds $5.25. There is no ambiguity here. This is how the company itself defined it in their quasi apology and walk-back of the program today.
I’m very confused, because he quoted explanation you provide is exactly what I was describing.
A flat $1 per order. Plus your tips. Plus an additional compensation that will be reduced (via some “malign algorithm” aka subtraction) based on the amount of tip received, to provide a guaranteed minimum.
The communication in this thread is strange, because it seems to constantly be two people describing the exact same thing but insisting they are entirely different. What was described above in that quoted passage is almost perfectly analogous to the standard tip credit for tipped hourly employees. If differs only in that we’re dealing with per-job compensation rather than per hour.
I think the inference is that the minimum dash payout, $1 + x, is that x is not a clear number. It is the out put of some equation that factors in distance, number of dashers active, expected order volume, the phase of the moon, so on and such. The malign in that sentence is literary flair but is also viewed that way because it is opaque to the employees doing the deliveries.
Before the transaction begins. When a contractor takes the delivery, they get $1 plus incentives. For example, for a restaurant that has some form of agreement with DoorDash they might pay an extra dollar on the delivery to ensure it gets picked up by a driver faster. Or if the location is particularly over-saturated with deliveries and not enough people are in the area they may raise the rate paid to the contractor. So contractor is told: you get $8 dollars for delivering this. Good, I'll take that delivery.
I deliver it, the guy at the house says "hey, that was super fast. Not only will I pay for the delivery but I want to reward your hard work with $3 of tip." That $3 tip will always go to doordash. Unless they tip over the incentives paid by doordash (say $5.25 of that $7 over the $1 minimum), it will always go to door dash. The driver will never get the tip in this case. If the customer tipped $10, the driver might see $3 or $4, but only after Doordash recouped its costs for sending out the driver.
You can present it as throttled tips, but thats not actually what happens. The contract is agreed upon when the driver picks up, and nothing the customer can do will ensure that tip reaches the driver, and nothing is calculated after the tip is received.
The issue here comes down to lack of comprehension of what is actually happening, either by you not reading carefully or willfully ignoring people explaining the issue at hand.
X seems to be clear at the time the job is accepted. Which is what matters. Any alleged fuckery with tips occurs after that point, in the context of the accepted job.
Right, which is why it's shady as fuck. Either the contractor is paid what they are agreed to be paid, which sure. In which case, no tip option should exist for the consumer, as tips (by law) are defined as owned by the received of the tip except in cases of tip pooling.
So either those tips are the drivers, or Doordash is committing fraud against their consumer. Those are the only options here.
Of course it is not exactly like tip credit, because there is no hourly position and instead a per-delivery contract.
But if you accept the DoorDash guaranteed minimum as analogous to the minimum hourly wage (established at DD’s discretion, since this is not an hourly position, but still), it operates almost entirely parallel to the tip credit system.
It is a per-delivery contract that implements the same mechanism as the tip credit system, in context.
Except with bonus fraud.
If people expected DoorDash pocketed the tip money because they already paid the driver this isn't a national news story. DoorDash is misleading people so they give them money. That is bad.
Else, they are committing fraud against the consumer.
There isn't a third argument here, aside from "well they got away with it for a while" to which, sure. They did.
I don’t know that this is better or not, but I’m reasonably confident that at some point DoorDash would definitely start terminating their relationship with drivers who don’t bring in sufficient tips, and instead ride the fill guarantee from DoorDash. Same way any server who isn’t clearing minimum from their tips alone and prevents the establishment from taking the full tip credit is going to see their hours disappear.
The customers may not be providing a carrot, but eventually they may protect the driver from the stick.
Also, on the topic of skeevy practices customers may not be aware of, you know those automatic 15% or 18% service charges added on to large parties at restaurants? Most people assume those go to the server, as a guaranteed tip for large parties. In many states, the restaurant is free to keep 100% of it. And the server is entitled to nothing at all, above minimum wage (because this is now considered non-tipped work). Pure profit to the owner, and the customer generally has no idea, thinking the $30 on that $300 bill went to the server.
Which, maybe it did. Or maybe it didn’t. Who knows!
"Automatic gratuity" is different from a service charge as well, and has to go to the waiter and/or pool. A service charge has to be a line item on a bill, not an implied tip.
You can actually tell where it goes by the nature of the receipt.
It’s my understanding, from a bit of cursory reading I’ll admit, that as of 2014 *all* automatic “gratuities” are service charges now. Not tips. The IRS redefined it, and for it to be a tip it must be entirely optional, the customer must determine the amount, the customer determines who gets it, and it can’t be determined by policy.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The app doesn't say you are tipping Doordash, it says I'm tipping the driver. Which I'm not.
That whole system doesnt really treats the driver as a freelancer then, but as an employee of DD.
It would be good to know in general what are the obligations of drivers in this delivery apps, can they turn down jobs? Can they simultaneously work in multiple apps? Do they have any information on how are jobs distributed? etc.
You don't fuck with staff tips unless you want a physical altercation at some point.
Doordash can justify it in whatever manner it wants. It's stealing and anyone who's ever worked for tips knows it.
Edit: You as a patron are putting a $10 on the table for the service and the owner is walking by and picking it up.
A server is in a building, on their feet. The wear is minimal and required maintenance low.
Delivery drivers are at risk being in traffic, consuming durability of a privately owned asset, and consuming costly resources (oil/gas). In my experience, even pizza delivery has a much higher guarantee to compensate for these resources, there's also a fall back should someone impact your ability to work by impacting the car (come work inside till the repairs are done).
There's a lot of comparison to restaurant servers, but that's a bit apples to oranges I think. Might be a better to compare other, long standing, food delivery services that exist.
I think there's also strong distinction between a "staff" delivery driver who has to hang around all day and can't decline deliveries, and someone who can just fire up the app and choose to take an order or not; but I'm unclear on which side of the line a DD driver lands on. Are DD Drivers ever required to be available for set intervals, or is it entirely up to them?
Side note: I heard on NPR that DD capitulated Tuesday night, so that's good for all involved (Since I assume that DD would not have set M above what their models suggested they could recover in tips).
I mean, that wasn't my point, and that's pretty obvious in my post I feel like, but... Uh.... Yup. Don't think any one ever would disagree with that.
You can turn down any order. When the order pops up on your app, you're given the restaurant name and address, customer first name and address, the time you're expected to deliver by, the distance, and the guaranteed rate for completing the drive. Your acceptance rate is displayed in the app and they occassionally run incentives to encourage you to raise it, but it otherwise affects nothing.
You can work in multiple apps, if you want. You pick which hours (first come, first served) you want to work 5 days ahead (or just log in when it's busy), but you can cancel or leave your drive at anytime with no penalty. You can also pause your drive for up to 30 minutes.
Jobs are distributed first to the closest driver to the restaurant and then out from there if it's declined. You can get multiples from nearby restaurants (batch orders), if there's no one else close by.
Even if the driver agreed to it how the hell is this still not fraud to the customer. You list a tip the customer assumes the driver is getting the money. In this case there is almost no chance that money is ever going to the driver.
I agree, it is fraud. That's my entire point repeatedly in this thread?
If they're getting the entire amount, I'm not seeing this as fraud at all. What it looks like to me is that DoorDash is effectively guaranteeing a certain tip level to take an order to ensure that drivers aren't getting stiffed by deadbeats. They're telling their drivers that no matter what, they will get at least $7 for this order. If the customer doesn't tip at all, we pay $7 and it all comes from us. If they tip $3, we pay $7 and $4 comes from us. If they tip $7 all is good. If that's the case, this is a way better system than was in place when I delivered pizzas - $2 per delivery, plus tips. Get stiffed by a deabeat? Too bad, you get your $2 and that's it. Get undertipped all night? Well, good luck making rent this week.
The question to me really is whether the driver gets the extra when a customer tips more than the guaranteed amount. If it does go to the driver, I have no problem with this system. If it's being pocketed by DoorDash then, yes, there's some fraud going on here.
But you don't understand Enc, it's fraud!
It's still fraud.
You're paying extra money to door dash for nothing.
I might voluntarily pay an extra $5 to the driver, an actual human who I respect.
Why would I pay an extra $5 to the faceless corporation? They should be getting their cut already though fees and price inflation.
Like, if it was labeled "service fee" but you got to fill in the number it'd be zero every time.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
But again, every time you tip an employee in the 43 states that allow employers to take the tip credit, you are doing the same thing.
You are leaving money on the table. And the employer is taking $5.12 per hour out of that money, every hour, every shift, for as long as the server works there. On a slow night when you tip your server are you actually sure that they got to keep any of that money? Or did the perfectly legal, normal, and common tip credit grind most of it away? You have no idea.
You seem to be willfully ignoring that any server who claims not to have made enough tips outside of a major disaster will be quickly fired. Most servers NEVER claim that fall back wage. That's a different shitty situation that DoorDash is exploiting.
The tip credit being based off of pay period, and door dash being per delivery, makes the two systems pretty different, for the benefit of doordash.
No. If everybody just stopped tipping Doordash drivers so they would just get the guaranteed minimum from DD instead, DD would either go out of business or make up the amount with fees to the restaurants being ordered from. Or third possibility would be to just add an exorbitant service/delivery fee to every order - when we lived in Hawaii the only delivery service available was a place called Aloha2Go that charged like $10 per order.
The money you pay is a tip, DD is just guaranteeing that their drivers will hit a minimum tip on every order, with or without you.
I’m not ignoring it, I’m trying to be as reasonable as possible by assuming restaurants follow the law. Because if anything, that’s worse, and makes DoorDash *better* than the average diner. Because they happily pay the guarantee without firing anybody.
No, this is nothing at all like tip credit. Tip credit, the consumer gives a tip to their service person and every dollar of that goes to them, 100% of the time. If I tip the guy $5, they get that $5. Then at the end of the month, the company fills in the gaps. That's a problematic system as well, at times, but is very different from what is happening here. Doordash has an agreed upon rate for the driver, but takes the tip 100% of the time. The customer is led to believe they are doing the same thing, but they are not.