Comment by voidUpdate

We may just get this, along with a $7.25 per hour base wage!

Fun fact, we had this at an old job. It was a charge code field in Jira. It was required whenever you requested work from an external team. It operated like a credit card with a set budget. If you bothered other teams a lot, you ran out of money. Department heads set their price.

It sounds great in theory. But a black market quickly developed, and people figured out ways to circumvent it. People created tickets for their own teams and shared laptops.

If the apps were actually what they claim to be (a marketplace to connect hirers and workers) that's exactly what you'd have - the cost of the food + flat fee for the platform + your bid for the work. The platform could even suggest a bid, but you could choose to bid higher or lower depending on what you think would go through.

But that's not what they are; they're shady "avoid employment laws" companies.

i like the idea of bids, but only if its coupled with the ability of workers to just outright reject the offer.

the problem is that there's still a guarantee of service for the user regardless of what you bid. if i want my burritos delivered at 2AM and am only willing to bid $1 on delivery labor, i shouldn't expect that my burritos will be delivered.

for tips, the model is "the work will be done and i'll pay extra if it's good". but with bids its "how much do i need to pay to get this work started"

The gready sleazeballs who like the "tipping" system (mostly, restaurant owners) would prefer to pay all their employees $0 and have all diners/customers/etc pay 100% of the wages out of guilt.

While 10% was customary in the first half of the 20th century, the standard tip gradually increased to 15% by the 1980s.

In 2025 it's not uncommon to see little shortcut buttons for 20, 25, 30%. You can see where this is going. They want us to tip 50% and they pay $0, even though restaurant menu prices are one of the things that has experienced more inflation than other things.

There is a very clear different from the consumer's point of view between paying a 20% delivery fee with no tip (and realistically having most drivers still expect an in-person tip) and a 5% delivery fee with a tip amount of your choosing (and maybe only 1/1000 drivers expecting/requesting yet more).

I have always been a generous tipper and I try to always put myself in that person's shoes when deciding how much to tip but even I notice the psychological difference. If you don't ever think about it, have never had a job waiting tables or dealing with the public, it'd almost be a nonstarter to have a higher delivery fee regardless of tip expectation.

psychologically they are very different. Framing the wages as a "tip" moves the conversation to the drivers and users, where users think tips are an out of hand culture problem and drivers view the users as stingy. Then the company sits out of the spotlight collecting their absurd rents

It moves the real cost of the additional labor from the prices displayed for items (like you would see in a B&M grocery store) to some tertiary part of the purchase process that is displayed 1) after the used has gone through the effort of app navigation and selecting their purchases and 2) has been through the majority of the purchase funnel and self-selected as a high-prospect sale. This helps keep the listed prices for items in these apps relatively comparable to their in-store listed prices, acting to convince the user the sale is reasonable (similar to online sellers making up for low listed prices with high shipping prices). Moving this additional cost to some tertiary step lessens the impact of goods pricing seeming too high by adding a "small optional fee" at the end of the purchase process that the user is expected to subconciously understand is effectively a bid on labor. I'd imagine the psychology behind it is depressing.

Different because now list price of a sandwich is $8.99 instead of $14 that customer will actually pay. Hotels, resorts, restaurants, tours etc are master at this. Even after knowing these add-ons people fall for it often enough to keep this practice running.

Besides economists think positively of this so it has support not just from interested parties but officials, think tanks etc.

> I know the person there is being paid less than minimum wage (where I live)

The restaurants I worked at (a variety of family places and bars) everyone was paid $2.13/hr or something like that. And after taxes, you would get a paycheck for $0.00.

but

The same people who jumped to tell you that they got paid less than minimum wage (especially when customers inquired about it), were making $40-80K year in reality. The service industry is all about hours worked, and which hours you work. A lot of young workers refuse to work the busy shifts (weekends), and hate dinner shifts (could be out with friends) so they only work the slow shifts and make ~$20/hr * 18 hours or something like that.

But the people there to make money? They work all the busy shifts and slow shifts to fill the gap (they work a full 40 hours), and the money is insane for what the work is. Meanwhile they will happily tell you they get paychecks for $0.00 and only made $50 on Monday at lunch.

France here - no tip is the norm, tip is for service above & beyond... But, contrary to the USA, everyone gets a proper living wage !

> In the UK at least this is still very much the case.

Except for the very pervasive 12.5% "discretionary" service charge the you would have to request to be removed. Which is a genius piece of social engineering.

As someone who also lives in the UK this surprises me. Almost every restaurant I eat at now takes the liberty of adding a 10% service charge onto every bill. I assume the idea of which is to make it awkward/embarrassing for you to request to have it taken off.

You've never had excellent service for something?

In some scenarios, 1% tip can be informative to humans and data mining algorithms.

In the US, the tip is an expected part of the expense of eating out (and increasingly having any human in the loop). I hate it, and I really wish it wasn’t the case, but it pretty much is. If you say “I didn’t tip because the service was what I expected”, you’re pretty much considered an asshole.

(Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why the costs of eating out in the US and seem so much lower. Most people who come from non-tipping cultures don’t understand that Americans actually tend to pay significantly more than sticker price, especially after you include taxes, which are also often excluded).

If you’re asked for a 20/25/30% tip before they even start preparing your food, and you need to make extra clicks while the tip recipient is looking at you if you want to tip lower, theres a small fear that the food you ordered wont be prepared as well as someone who left the tip

On a gig delivery app, you give a tip so that someone will be happy to deliver it and not mess up your food, I think. a 0% tip is risking stuff. You can't really say it's a reward for the service though, more of a payment to secure better service?

Lots of places will now ask for tips before the food comes out even in person now - lunch sandwich shops, etc. I don't think they'd be unprofessional enough to mess up your order if you didn't tip, but maybe they'll be happier with you or be more generous if you tip now too.

At least where I am from tipping is more done to round out the bill to a nice number.

Well I am giving tip because of fucking nag screen on payment terminal.

Hehe, in here (US) tip for a bad hair cut in 15 dollars is 5 dollars. For better haircut maybe go for fancy salon if one is so particular about hairs.

Delivery drivers on some apps are told the expected pay for a trip. If you don't tip, they might decline the job because it costs them more to deliver then they make.

This makes your order sit longer until someone decides to do it, perhaps because there's a penalty from the company for declining jobs, and the driver is willing to lose money to remain in good standing

Ooh that’s actually a really interesting question. Because you’ve retroactively signaled that you will pay more for priority service? Or that you’re dumb. Needs to be iterated. Incentives depend strongly on population of both drivers and customers.

Why would you keep using an app that you suspect was cynically exploiting your generosity like that? I’d drive every time rather than encourage such behaviour.

About half the time I order UberEats I get a call from the driver that they're here and to come downstairs because they won't enter my apartment building. Could be laziness, it could also be because the street parking is always full and so the only place to park close by is a fire hydrant.

The app has different options for meeting in the lobby / come to my unit and I always select my unit, but whatever, I get why they might not do that.

Leaving it on the porch, on the street closest to their car, with the front lobby in an apartment building...

There's quite a lot of places people will think to leave food if they're rushing to pick up another job.

Some people live in multi-tenant buildings where "your door" is not the buildings entrance.

You can already filter out drivers that don't take tips (so, filter to zero) by just not placing the order.

You already are able to pay more for 5-20 minutes of "priority".

... Which they can still use against you