We dug into how American tipping culture got so broken, and the fight to fix it.
It turns out that your tips are subsidizing the payrolls of multi-billion dollar chains, while they pay their workers under minimum wage.
It’s a system rooted in slavery, and pushed by a wealthy restaurant owners onto the rest of us.
But there’s a growing movement to change it.
again, what’s stopping the outsourced app business from calculating the gas and tacking that onto the customer’s bill?
Nothing. In fact, they do that where I live. The same companies even. Uber eats etc.
to your point, they actually do pay a base fee based on delivery distance, but it’s not really enough to make up for the fact that the further you drive from a restaurant the farther you have to drive back to your zone to get another order. making short orders far more desirable because they put less miles on your car as well.
Uber actually does list gas station prices in the area for its drivers, making it easy to see the cheapest places on a map. door dash implemented something similar to this also, although not nearly as good. but some people deliver in electric vehicles or even ebikes so they don’t need or use gas.
I fully agree with you on the they hide behind “you’ll get tips” to not pay a decent base fee though. and what’s more they take advantage of tipping customers by batching their orders with non tipping customers to make the offer more desirable, so their food gets there later.
what I’m trying to get at is we have the ability to build software to automate the calculation and payout on all of this. If the problem is realtime opting-in of drivers in the area, solutions could be created if the businesses were motivated to be more upfront to both their employees and the customers
like have the customer give a price range they’re willing to pay for the gas, and have the software advertise to all drivers that would fit into that price range from their current locations, and show them up on the map to the customer with some dollar sign amount for their gas prices above their icons. if there isn’t any, the software would be able to notify the customer before the order is finalized. if no one eligible opts to pick up that order after a certain time frame, then that’s also a customer notification.
A lot of the problems being brought up could be solved with effort put towards engineering the software to make everything more upfront to everyone, but those businesses aren’t motivated to be more consumer-oriented and employee-friendly; that’s my main point in all this
yes to all of this. you make a good point. but honestly since the gig apps don’t actually employ anyone and there are people who for some reason will end up taking the bad orders anyway, I don’t think this type of innovation is ever going to happen.