I mean this tipping automatically, it’s for the birds

It would appear that drivers are one of the many groups the government fucks in the ass on a regular basis.

Instacart confirmed that when its payment algorithm determines a driver should be paid below that guaranteed $10, the company uses the customer’s predelivery, “up front” tip to cover the difference. The “up front” tip is automatically set to 5% on the Instacart app; if the customer removes the tip, and the payout would be below $10, Instacart itself covers the cost.

Is that even legal? In some states, like OR, you can’t use tips to make up the minimum wage.

They aren’t employees, but independent contractors.

What the ever-loving @#$% …

You’re right. It’s the customers that are calling it a wage when it’s not really a wage at all.

Everything about the “gig economy” is wrong and should be burned to the ground.

Depends on the state. It’s illegal in CA, but legal in a lot of red states. “Right to work” (for peanuts!).

Yet another example of the red/blue divide. I do think we blue staters sometimes don’t get quite how screwed low wage workers are in a lot of red states. In many red states, if the tips in reality don’t make up the difference, workers can as a practical matter be working perfectly legally for less than minimum wage. In theory the tips are supposed to cover the difference but…

Knowing people who depend on it for their livelihood, it hurts me to agree but I do.

Me too. When I’m God-Emperor, it’s replaced with jobs and a social system that allow for both human dignity and basic needs to be met.

I’m a socialist monster.

The law here states minimum wage for tipped employees is the non-tipped min wage. You can get a base wage below min-wage, but the total wage has to be at least min-wage even if they get no tips.

The problem with that in reality is what happens when an employee reports to the employer that they didn’t get enough tips to hit minimum? Does the employer just pay up the differential with no repercussions or is there a perception that the employee was doing a bad job b/c they got low tips? In reality, is an employee going to report low tips every single time or is the employee likely to just suck it up and eat a low paying shift? That’s the kind of thing I was referring by talking about “in reality” etc.

Tips should be above and beyond wage, plain and simple. What Instacart and DoorDash are doing is total BS.

Another thing that stuck out for me from that article…the guy who uses Instacart 3 times a week, and you know he’s not alone. If you don’t possess the basic skill set necessary to plan out and execute a single trip to the grocery store per week to provide for your next several days of meals then I worry about your ability to effectively manage pretty much anything in your life. I mean, I get that emergency situations arise, or you get a sudden urge to make a specific meal you hadn’t planned for…but grocery delivery every 2-3 days just screams millennial stereotype.

This is true. When I am out and about with my east coast family, they have to remind me to tip more pretty much 100% of the time. At home, I tip based on service. If you give me crappy service, you don’t get a tip, but I also know they make minimum wage.

The whole gig economy thing seems like a real scam.

Yeah, Grubhub does the same. I’ve had their drivers tell me they prefer cash tips for this reason. UberEats does not.

Given that tips are shared usually between server and backroom staff, the backroom staff would also get cheated.

Instacart backs down, and will compensate any driver who didn’t get their full tip:

Meanwhile…

I’ve never really looked into it, so can someone tell me why tips are even a thing anymore? Why are some service jobs not obligated to pay minimum wage? Because of tips? So is this a chicken and egg scenario here then? If you were to abolish tipping so that restaurants, et al were to pay their employees more, would they not just raise the price of their goods and services to make up the difference?

I can’t be sure, but I have a hunch that the majority of people would rather pay more for their meal if it meant not having to fuck around with tips. Most people I know (especially as a group) just stumble around for a few awkward moments before plopping some arbitrary (and usually excessive) amount of money on the table. It’s an uncomfortable and pointless annoyance to the end of every meal. I just think it’s borderline anachronistic to still have this system in the year 2019.

It’s just ingrained in American culture at this point, and the few restaurants (even high profile ones) that have tried to institute no tipping + higher food costs didn’t end up so well and a lot of them are reverting back to tipping.

There’s a psychological between your burger being $10 on the menu and having $1.50 added on to the final bill by you and the menu showing the burger as being $11.50.

There’s also the horrible culture of withholding tips as a way to punish servers for any perceived slight or anything except absolute “perfect” service based on an expectation that no human being has ever met.

It’s really just a culture of being cheap and also enjoying demeaning others; the myriad complaints they inevitably draw from any dining experience are immaterial; they’d never tip a server well. Those people are just assholes.

And those cheap assholes, surprisingly, like eating cheap.