If you use DoorDash, InstaCart, GrubHub, postmates, or any other service like that for delivery -
Tip. In. Cash. Not via the app. I did these three deliveries today. One guy wanted me to get six dollars in tip. I got no tip, because these services use tips to pay their drivers’ wages.
Tip in cash, or not at all.
i work for DoorDash and they claim to “give us 100% of tips”, but they just take that out from what they’d pay us. in my area its even worse, base pay is $5
(Image description: three receipts from DoorDash payments to the OP. All three start with $1 as “door dash base pay,” then add in the customer tip, then add “doordash additional pay” to make all three magically come out to exactly $7.)
“DoorDash offers a guaranteed minimum for each job. For my first order, the guarantee was $6.85 and the customer, a woman in Boerum Hill who answered the door in a colorful bathrobe, tipped $3 via the app. But I still received only $6.85.
"Here’s how it works: If the woman in the bathrobe had tipped zero, DoorDash would have paid me the whole $6.85. Because she tipped $3, DoorDash kicked in only $3.85. She was saving DoorDash $3, not tipping me.”
Instacart does it too. From the same June 2019 article:
“In February, the grocery delivery app Instacart was the subject of outrage for the same practice; afterward, it publicly apologized and announced that it would begin paying its workers with a new structure that increased baseline pay from $3 to between $7 and $10.
"Vox’s Chavie Lieber spoke to one Instacart employee in May, however, who said that these “fixes” have left her with even less pay than before. “Instacart says our payments are based on some sort of algorithm, but they aren’t transparent with us and none of us know how the payments work,” she said, adding that her income has dropped by 30 percent.
"Instacart at the time told Vox its payment system was redesigned “to improve, enhance and create clarity around shopper compensation.”
"Like many apps, Instacart offers ways for workers to earn bonus pay, by, for instance, receiving a five-star rating from a customer. But the Instacart employee said that the company had made it far more difficult for customers to find the review tool.
"She also said that the default tip had been dropped to just 5 percent.”
The article says that DoorDash claimed it was going to change their policy… but that Instacart had also claimed to change it, and that their drivers were still seeing tips made right in front of them that never got paid out.
This is infuriating.
The entire reason I use apps like these is when I am too exhausted and spoonless to go out. I am the only driver in my family. I used Instacart a lot when I was in chemo last year.
If I am too tired to go out, I am too tired to go out to an ATM to get cash. Cash does not magically appear in my pocket; I have to get it.
My intent in tipping an employee through the service is to give them extra money to thank them for their service, while also not having to go out, which defeats the entire purpose of using the app. The idea that the company can subvert my intentions by stealing the tip for themselves is outraging.
So now I can’t use these services unless I happen to have cash? Because if I need the services, I’m too tired to go get cash? Thanks, soulless corporate motherfuckers. Pay your employees an actual wage. I’m so tired of this shit.
