They're often exploitative of workers and this is just exactly the kind of thing that reinforces my decision to never stay at an AirBNB, never take Lyft, Uber etc.
I am not an instacart user myself but I use similar services and I expect that any tip will be delivered to the driver.
I'd be pissed off to find out otherwise.
Instacart won't see this transaction and therefore won't reduce their wages.
Less convenient. But this policy is unfair.
It's company responsibility to set the pricing policy so everyone one gets paid.
If they don't pay their workers, it's not my problem.
Others have said why. I will spend some time to make others aware.
I really hate this sort of thing. Viscerally.
My opinion is abolish tip culture.
Edit: I meant shouldn't.
The gig economy has so many problems like this it is silly.
Who should the tip go to?
- To the owner who spent/spends a fortune running it in LA?
- To the chef who catered to our needs without seeing us?
- To the person who immediately and happily tended to us everytime we raised our heads and looked around
- To the person who cleared the used plates and never let us wanting for crockery
- (we tipped the valet guy separately)
I wonder what as a customer should I do? How do I know the share goes to all? I cannot pay cash for that amount. I carry barely $5 with me in cash.
In any case, the owner's revenue is based on the menu pricing; if the owner wants more then the prices get raised. For anyone else, the expectation is likely to be that tips go through the server and are divided from there if they're divided at all. Don't stress too much about tipping the other staff unless someone's gone far above and beyond.
-- if TIP > minimum wage -- does Instacart record a negative -$ adjustment
such that a person's payment will only ever be the maximum payment, regardless of how much tip the customer gives?
That would really be egregious.
Disgusting, reprehensible, and frankly unbelievable. I've never used Instacart and now I never will.
> Tips have always been included in our calculation of earnings and it helps provide a reminder to customers that you are providing a valuable service.
Being fed garbage like that is pretty insulting, though it's interesting to see how far they're willing to stretch logic to try to put a positive spin on it. I mean, "we reduce your earnings so you can feel useful"? Man, logic broke right there.
In Russia, distinction is clear in law. Do you pay her regularly? I. e. at least one a month? Then she is employee, no matter who says what.
I understand less protection for workers, less vacation, less regulation overall, this is all understandable. I don't understand why facts are ignored in favor of words.
The Russian law may seem clear, but in reality it's just a stand-in for a more complex analysis.
Basically, all floor employees salary is commission based. If you don't get enough commission, they will pay you minimal wage but will get rid of you in several months, otherwise your sale commission kind of "fills" your salary until it gets to minimal wage, and only then starts to increase your wage.
Won't be surprised if most of retail works in similar way.
The whole gig thing is basically passing the risks associated with having employees (injuries and managing them) / sales variation risks (having to pay people when sales are up or down) onto folks who are no longer employees.
The idea that they'd take even more from their contractors based on other factors just seems natural.
Maybe a "franchise fee" type thing is next....
https://www.instacart.com/help/section/200761964#11500564332...
The whole point of the tip is that it is supposed to be a bonus on top of the worker's normal pay. Instead, here it is displacing the money that Instacart would have otherwise paid them.
If there was a popular 3rd party app for tipping directly to any individual, regardless of where they might be or whether they're working or not, that could actually prevent companies from snooping in on the tips. Even at restaurants.
I read through the blog post on Medium and the article, but couldn't find any case where the customer had tipped more.
Is $0.80 the minimum payment they will make, or will it decrease further – negative?
Integrate seamlessly into checkout experience (like Affirm does for micro lending).
This could prevent Instacart etc from reducing hourly rate based on tips (because they don't have access to that info).
Sure, you can try to use technology and innovation to reduce overhead. That's the pitch usually, I think. If you can provide a service with a lower headcount, you can be much more cost-efficient. But it seems a lot of the companies aiming for disruption aren't able to actually do that, so instead they reduce payroll costs by simply refusing to take on the responsibilities employers are traditionally expected to take.
It'll be interesting to see how long this model of "disruption" can be sustained.
As a YC alum, I'm disgusted to see a YC company behaving like this.
Instacart: It shouldn't have to be said, but you don't cheat your customers and workers. Whatever internal rationalization you've developed for this practice is just that — a rationalization.
Stop cheating people. If your unit economics are so broken that you can't survive without deceiving and cheating people, then shut down instead.
Tipping has ruined this whole new batch of convenience services for me.
People are harassed for not tipping. People look down on you for not tipping. Even, for bad service, we still have to tip.
Instacart has 1.9b in funding, if they are stealing from their workers, it only means that their business model is broken.. or we as consumers can fall into this dishonest game and normalize it.
Bu continuing to tip, you indirectly hurt workers.
Employers love it since they can underpay. Some employees love it since they can make a very good living but that's a fraction of the total. But overall it creates an economy subclass that's constantly struggling. They have trouble paying the bills. It's tough work plus they have to deal with upset customers even though they likely had no control of the situation.
I'm a fan of a permanent surcharge on the bill rather than having to deal with giving a tip. Pizza delivery places have a delivery charge now plus a fuel surcharge, as far as I am concerned they can add a service charge too.
Yes, services will become more expensive. But over time an economic equilibrium begins to appear at which time we can reevaluate and change. But the last thing we need to do is bring it into the future.
Instead of delivery people blindly accepting orders and hoping for the best, the people who are requesting the delivery should have to set a rate at order time and make the full order and destination visible so couriers can decide if it's worth it and make a counter-offer if it's too low to be worth it.
If you ever go read what the workers are saying in subreddits for these services, it's clear that the incentives for quick and accurate deliveries just don't line up with the current gig system.
That's an interesting idea --- reminds me of e-coins with variable transaction fees. You can offer more if you want people to work on your transaction faster.
Anyway: Are tips taxable in the US? Here in Germany tips are tax-free under certain conditions: If I give it directly to the barber, waiter, etc., it is a non-taxable event, while if the employer collects the tip and divides it up under all employees it is a taxable event.
There is some back-and-forth in that thread, but the gist of it seems to be the same as here, where Amazon takes tips into account when they calculate the base wage, which can result in getting a low base wage if there's a large tip.
https://help.goodeggs.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007378212-Do-...
I have no stake in them but it's interesting that they addressed this at all, and well before this instacart controversy.
https://www.wonolo.com/blog/best-gig-economy-apps/
I guess this Wonolo service is for choosing the right services to work for. Now I'm wondering how many Wonolo clones there are. :-)
He didn't actually get 80 cents an hour, but he also didn't get the wage+tip he expected. Instead, Instacart got tipped, and he effectively got the regular wage. I hope!
But here are the vile people responsible for this practice: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/instacart#section-cu...
I'm often thinking about Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4sbYy0WdGQ he makes the point I'm also trying to make. People should get paid for doing service and not need to rely on pittance of the customers because their bosses don't calculate the real cost of doing business. If it were up to me tips would be forbidden.
In Japan (as far as I understand) it's an insult to tip, it's almost like: "This business probably isn't doing well enough to pay you a proper salary, so here's a little something extra."
Is this not Instacart doing the same thing where your wage is .82 plus tips as long as that amount is above x wage. If it’s below x they will pay you x.
However in this instance it’s an issue because the tipped employees are not often making more than x even with tips therefore the consumer is misled about who their tip money is going to.
I can't see in either case how its sustainable business practice to offer gig work, but claim the tip is the pay.
I really wish there were penalties reserved for CEO and Board of these startups, which couldn't be passed on to shareholders or customers.
Flaying alive feels like it might be about all we've got left.
Happy to put on an old crone's clothes and sit below the scaffold knitting, while it happens. Maybe the sans-culottes had a point?
If someone is willing to be paid $10 to deliver groceries, does it matter who is paying them $10 for it?
I've never used instacart before. Is the verbiage around leaving a tip lead the end user to believe that they are giving it directly to the person making the delivery?
Service disrupted because bus driver/garbage collector / teacher/hotel employee strike? How dare those selfish underpaid and overworked peasants stand up for reasonable hours! They should consider themselves lucky they have a job at all! (It should be: how dare the corporations or federal agencies pay so little to their employees that their only recourse was to risk their livelihood by walking off the job)
How about that case where the teacher used her health insurance to pay for an impoverished student's pills? She committed insurance fraud, she's just raising rates for everyone else! (Never mind that rates will be as high as an insurance company can legally get away with in this insane profit driven healthcare industry)
Or the housing crisis. Stupid proletariat, taking loans they knew they couldn't afford! Why didn't they educate themselves? (Instead of 1. Why weren't banks doing due diligence 2. Why were banks allowed to not do due diligence 3. Why the fuck don't they teach us basic financial skills in elementary school?)
It doesn't work that way either, but that's the rationale.
Forcing people to tip to ensure people get paid enough money is a consequence of the system, not the reasoning why the system is implemented.
>It doesn't work that way either, but that's the rationale.
Indeed. The on the ground reality is that tipping does not serve this purpose. I don't know if it ever did, to be frank. Studies[0] generally show little to no correlation between performance and amount tipped.
And the reality is that tipping is the reason invoked in many state laws for paying restaurant workers less than minimum wage. Tipping is the reason they get paid poorly, and I always find it problematic that people invoke tipping as a way to help people, when it is the cause of their low wages. In those states, tipping is a big win for the restaurant owner. The customer pays more money out of his/her pocket, and the waiter often does not get much money.
Unlike others, though, I do not consider this wage theft (even at a moral level). We don't tip for many other services that we receive, and the problem of how those workers are compensated doesn't cross our mind. Why do we insist that tipping some category of workers has a moral component whereas others do not? Fixing those laws will be a challenge as long as tipping is commonplace.
[0] Example: https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
(Taking off my pink hat)
(Yes, I do contribute to their poor wages by tipping. Have to conform somewhat to society!)
So it sounds like it is absolutely used as a bad way to supplement wages.
Tipping really is a method for the employer to hold onto as much money as possible at the expense of staff.
In reality, the system in the US is what it is because of the mostly random process of cultural development.
Changing cultural norms is not easy in any society, even if you have good logical arguments against them.
This is absolutely fucking hilarious.
I swear someone who is not from the US is going to quote your throwaway account as being gospel about how things are changing in the US.
Thank your for making my day brighter with your humor.
Not how it works, unfortunately.
Honestly, in the general case, I don't understand how anyone can manage to live on minimum wage, unless they live in a barracks, their mother's basement, or under a bridge.
Thats a big assumption that is demonstrably untrue in many specific cases.
By in the short-term propping up those employees, we reduce the overall pressures to improve their conditions / negotiate better wages, and we've somehow managed to shift the blame from the employer to the employees and customers/students.
Right, because most service workers have a plethora of options, right? Tipping is a social construct that I'm fine with. I'm also open to the argument against it. I don't think it should give employers a pass on paying minimum wage.
The reality is that you are never going to convince enough people to stop tipping and, even if you did, you'd simply drive down the wages of people who already don't make much money.
If you remove some of the tips (not everyone will take part as you said), employers WILL have to adjust for it in order to reach a new equilibrium, or start losing workers.
You speak of helping the workers, but you know what; they love the tip system. They make far more on tips than they would others. If you think Chili's is going to pay waiters 35k and bartenders 45k you're crazy.
And/or a craven attempt by employers to further deflect any responsibility for responsibility for paying their employees. I noticed that the Curb app bumped the default tip rate to 25% at some point. I'm guessing that's somehow, directly or indirectly, leading to them or taxi companies getting to keep a larger cut of the fares.
A more interesting and useful comparison would be to poll individuals who have held similar service industry jobs in countries that do and do not have tipping cultures, and ask them which they preferred and why.
Why's Instacart getting the unique bad press?
- lack of empathy: Uber, Instacart, etc. etc. etc., exploiting the poor
- parasitic behavior: aggressive tax optimisation/tax evasion, Amazon employees relying on food stamps for subsistance
- superficial charm: get rich quick
- pathological lying: cf. Facebook denying they ever did anything wrong
- manipulativeness: "make the world more open and connected"
and my personal favorite,
- grandiosity: "change the world!", "solve physics for good!", "be immortal!"
But it's just a case of confirmation bias if you didn't look for counter-examples to try to disprove your theory.
Are the following companies ethically perfect? I doubt it. But I haven't heard much bad about them and they have changed my life for the better significantly: AirBnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Rappi, WhatsApp, Square, Netflix. I bet I could find others.
> Amazon > Facebook
I don’t think amazon and Facebook are startups
I'm tired of this implication that the poor can never be at fault for anything, because they are so poor. It is an overly simplified sympathy that doesn't always reflect reality.
Why start tipping for outstanding service, instead of setting the floor at $0 for 0 service?
Answer: because people like to pay less for stuff and let the company eat the blame.
Additionally, I refuse (on basic principle) to eat at any restaurant where I haven't mapped out their entire supply infrastructure. I made myself an app that keeps track of how much I spend at each of these restaurants in any given month and then I tip each entity a healthy percent (20% being the minimum because really if you can't afford 20% you can't afford to eat out). Currently, I'm tipping the truck drivers that deliver supplies, the factory workers who prepare the frozen food, the farmers, the accountants, the HR department, and the people who do road maintenance on the streets that all of the above use to get to work.
They're paying shit wages and thus offering shit quality, because they're offering a service that literally is unscalable. The logistics of laser-guided-bomb-type delivery of groceries from store to fridge is asinine.
Yo, grocery store shopping doesn't suck bad enough to pay someone else to do both the shopping and delivering! I'll pick up the pre-picked-up/bought groceries. I don't need you to delivery them directly to my fridge; I think I can handle that part. Just bring them out to my car when I pull up.
Problem solved, wages go up, quality goes up, I get my groceries. Everybody wins.
This is really much more a story of ethics in software development. Someone had to know they were doing the wrong thing when they wrote this.
edit: No, not going to talk about tipping. Like it or not, it is extremely common all over the world, and unrelated to this submission (which is about lowering "shopper's" compensation to almost negligible levels when tips are given).
I used to live in Japan where the service is quite better than in the US and tipping is frowned upon. You honestly don't know good service if you think tipping is necessary.
And to those saying to tip in cash, note that a lot of the times those that receive tips in cash typically don't report it as earnings on their income taxes. This is why I never tip cash.
Restaurants and such really just need to up their prices and do away with tipping. The practice itself is inherently discriminatory/racist in that better looking people typically receive higher tips, women typically receive higher tips than men, Whites receive higher tips than Blacks. It's really a disgusting practice.
There seems to be some logic to that to me. Whether that justifies a reduction in the minimum base wage for tipped roles, etc. I think of as a separate question, but I don't see tipping as a structurally problematic norm as long as the job interacts with many customers and a significant portion of the population actually tips.
If you want to blame someone, I suggest looking for the actual culprit and not a law-abiding company. This has little to do with Instacart and everything to do with state wage laws.
Edit: Oh, YC backed Instacart. Got it :)
Consumers have enough parameters to optimize for: price of groceries, cost of delivery, fair trade, availability of products, delivery speed, convenience, availability of delivery slots, the list is long.
Consumers are relatively good at optimizing for cost, not perfect -- but asking for more than that is unrealistic.
Personal responsibility is required in a good society, irrespective of the system of government or the level of regulation that currently exists. Even if it's consumers/voters pushing their legislators to build regulations, you need a mass of regular old people who care in order to change a society.
Then the onus is on you to prove that regulation of an issue--say, drinking and driving--didn't just happen to coincide with a national education campaign coming from a well-funded 501(3)(c). Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much.
In my opinion, the problem here isn't regulation vs. collective action people like grand-OP who are willing to continue using the service. Those same people will push back against legislation if they believe it will increase their prices, or eliminate the service altogether (Uber/Lyft in e.g. Austin?)
And in any case, consumer-driven action is MUCH faster than regulation. You can boycott them TODAY and cause an actual hit to their bottom line.
There is litterally no other way to have a democraty that to make your day to day actions matter. Each citizen has to have a life directed to create a society.
Now I understand how hard it is. And I don't blame people for failing at it, me included. But as long as we label it as unrealistic, it stops all hope of progress.
Learning to empower one's self is a skill we could benefit from teaching in society. Unfortunately, our primary education systems are not oriented toward teaching autonomy. They teach independence & compliance, which is false separation (since we're interdependent, not independent) and giving up power to others, respectively.
We hire people to grow our food because it is a better optimisation of labour, not because we can just forget about the process of growing food. We need to be aware of things like: is this food processing sanitary, is the farm run by ethics that we agree with, is the environmental impact acceptable, is this food then best thing to grow in this environment (eg: growing cotton and rice in the desert makes no sense at all).
We then exercise choice by hiring people who best match our criteria.
When the only criteria we filter by is cost, we throw everything else out the window: ethics, ecological sustainability, economic viability, morality, food safety: everything.
Regardless of whether it is a good or bad practice to rely upon, in any capacity, the moral action of consumers generally, the fact still remains for the individual that if they have learned a provider they are using is acting immorally, they have a choice to contribute to and reward that or not. Even if it is terrible to rely upon this on a social scale, it does not absolve you of moral culpability for your own actions. Everything else aside, if you know such a thing, you still made the choice to contribute to a thing you claim to not agree with. It creates a bit of dissonance, where your professed moral beliefs are not reflected in your actions. And that's something that plays a role in your own evaluation of self even if others don't learn of your actions and judge you for them.
People are entitled to their individual choices. If it's too much information to process, they can individually choose someone they delegate their decision making to. One way they do this is to trust a particular certification and only buy products with the certification seal. But each individual should get to choose which party plays the role of delegate for them.
Resorting to one-size-fits-all regulatory/union monopolies shows a lack of imagination that deprives individuals of their agency and breeds corruption/rent-seeking-behaviour.
As for this case, it's pretty clearly theft, and should be dealt with accordingly by the legal system. Customers/workers shouldn't have to band together to punish theft.
I disagree that collective action is impossible. Consumers become aware of problems, eg. high fructose corn syrup, and act accordingly, eg. buying less sugary junk. Cultural change is slow-moving but it starts with people giving a shit.
If that's not what you meant, can you please clarify?
Is this true?
It's not possible with an attitude like that. There is no government action that is forcing you to buy from Instacart.
>Boycotts essentially never work.
Tell that to Birmingham, Alabama.
>Not only that, but who are you going to use instead of instacart: Amazon Fresh? Uber? Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours?
Whataboutism and false dichotomy. There are many places that sell groceries that pay their workers more than minimum wage. Do a little research and give them your business. Or start your own grocery story if there's really a demand for something like this.
>Also, what do you think the working conditions were like for whoever picked that asparagus?
We can be concerned about more than one thing at a time.
Borderline living wage, but a lot better than being exploited by some BS company like InstaCart.
No, I will get on a bus operated by union-organized employees and travel to a grocery store where employees are also covered by a union and inside the city limits of a city with a reasonable minimum wage and scheduling rules inside a state with mandated paid sick leave. While there, I will likely pay a bit more than if outside those borders but the people involved in the process will be getting treated minimally well.
People crap on what cities like Seattle and states like Washington are trying to do as “socialist” or “a nanny state,” but workers are humans who deserve to be treated well and “the market” seems terrible at that if left to its own devices.
In addition, it's difficult to have empathy for a situation you've never experienced yourself. For every ethical consumer who knows how shitty these jobs are and makes decisions on that basis, there are many who either either unaware, don't think too much about it, or don't care because of the companion narrative of "they knew what they were signing up for".
In the final analysis, "vote with your dollars" often ends up being a defence of the status-quo against any labor regulation that might have real teeth and help people get paid a fair wage.
If you change what’s essentially the dictionary definition of the product being sold, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Except it’s really just a rock.
A cash tip fixes this problem. I can't do anything about the business itself.
You're upset that the thing that solves a nice pain point for you and is very useful is doing it in a way that you find disagreeable. You don't yet have an alternative or at least it will take some amount of time and effort to find one and make the switch. You are voicing your dissatisfaction and dissapointment in the hope that the situation will be rectified and you won't have to go through the process of switching because it might be expensive (in some sense) to do so or there may be no alternative that you find compelling.
It's a two way street. If the company refuses to change and it upsets you enough, you need to move on. If you voice loud enough complaints and there are enough of them then it may cause the company to change.
Complaining is part of the mechanism that makes the system work.
For most companies I deal with I have no idea if they are doing shady things or not and I generally don't bother checking.
No such market with perfect competition exists, which leads to market externalities and the need for outside forces to get involved to correct (such as regulation).
Remember United Airlines? Yeah, neither does anyone else. Exxon Mobile? You’d first have to find out their local brand name. Etc etc
Sure, INDIVIDUALS are at fault for a variety of options, but if you're looking to blame the poor as a group for something, you're using the wrong criteria, since it's a status that has no direct mapping to choice.
That seems like quite the atomised society.
There was the "everything the fault of the poor" bit in the first sentence, but that was obvious hyperbole.
What I want to know are examples of things that the poor are at fault for.
You haven't really said anything here, just vaguly created a strawman that people are arguing "the poor can never do wrong", which was never the claim.
If I must argue something, I'd say the housing crisis example wasn't so simple as it was presented. Some people knew exactly what they were doing, albeit it turned out badly for them, but they had so little to lose they took the risk anyway and just bankrupted out. But I'm not at all interested in talking about this, my original question still stands.
As someone who was once "just a poor boy, from a poor family" (to quote the bards) I've seen both sides of the coin.
My mother was a clever woman - as a child, too clever for the schools she went to, constantly picking fights with the teachers. As she tells it, she would usually win (at least on an intellectual level) but invariably - nobody likes a smart-arse - she would get expelled.
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for not keeping their heads down and working within the system. An instinct to rebel against the flow is bad.
In my early childhood, she was a factory worker, then she became a care assistant. Neither pays very well, but she worked nights (which pays marginally more for a significantly worse quality of life).
Of course, myself and my brother were a massive drain on her finances. She ended up as a single mother early on due to a manipulative relationship.
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for having children, trusting people, trusting the wrong people, or being human beings with human families. Being human is bad.
At one point, she tried door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales. She sucked (joke intended). She couldn't bring herself to lie to people about how a vacuum could change their lives, even if it was a pretty powerful vac.
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault refusing to become morally corrupt to earn a liveable paycheck.
When she became a care assistant - again, night shifts, and again, reasonably low-paid work. She tried to become a car mechanic - she had the physical strength to do the task, but her patchy education meant she couldn't handle the algebra. She could multiply any two numbers in the blink of an eye, but as soon as you replace one of the numbers with letters, her eyes would glaze over and she would yearn to discuss the weather.
But to her credit, throughout her life she never once took out a credit card (that I'm aware of). She treated credit as akin to the devil. Many many others did fall in the credit trap, because society tells you that's the way to cope, that it's better than failing to pay your bills on time, and the credit checks were nowhere near as stringent. (though, equally, there was no such thing as a pay-day loan).
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for working within the system. An instinct to rebel against the flow is good.
Now, she has MS. She can't see, walk, or even stand most days. The government gives her an ungenerous stipend which is enough for her, as she spent our whole childhood skipping meals to meet bills anyway, and she throws up if she has to move after eating. Of course, they still sometimes try to claim that she could work because she can move her index finger (because those jobs exist) or because on a really good day she can distinguish between two dissimilar faces.
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for being poor while other poor people are becoming morally corrupt to earn a liveable paycheck.
Now go through this and identify all the places that a non-poor person actively worked to keep the poor person down:
- The school teacher who would rather expel a kid than have a genuine conversation
- The factory bosses who pay their employees peanuts so they can charge their customers pennies less
- The care homes that charge each patient more than 3000/week, yet even with more than 4 patients per carer, budget for less than 1000/carer-week (that's idealized, 1 person for 24 hours, 7 days a week)
- The person who felt they "owned" her because they were the major breadwinner
- The salespeople who create ads for credit cards or pay-day loans that will never be repaid, and the salespeople who sign users up (or these days, the developers who build the systems to sign people up)
- The government-funded nurses who have a quota of "spongers" - a monthly number of people that they have to declare as fit for work, even if they're not, even if any appeal would reject the declaration without a second look, even if the disabled person has no money left, even if it will break the person's spirit, even if it might drive them deeper into credit, into depression, into suicide, into starvation.
I could go on. And, arguably, it's not the morally corrupt non-poor person who is at fault - if they don't do their morally-corrupt job, then they become poor. But there's never anyone up the chain of command who has any moral responsibility.
It's the poor person's fault. You know. For being poor.
Re: Pickup
Where I live (a huge city) this is easily an hour minimum affair. And I mean just going to, finding parking (the pick up spots are always full on weekends) and getting back home. And that's with the grocery store being a ~10-15 minute drive.
This isn't even considering the fact that I really don't enjoy grocery shopping. It's anxiety inducing for me. It was worth the $20-30 for me, personally.
I'd usually be at home doing chores I miss out on during the week while waiting for my order. Greet the delivery person, fridge the stuff and get back to chores/enjoying my infrequent time off.
It is a useful service to me however. I no longer need to own a car or pay for two lyfts back and forth from the grocery store, so thats several hundred to several thousands dollars I save every year now that I got rid of my last need for a car. If I lived outside of a city where a car was mandatory I could see it being relatively worthless but in the city, its a massive cost and time saver
I actually like going to the grocery store, but I still have been using instacart a few times a month (up to today) for various reasons:
- One of my kids is homesick or having a nap and I can't go to the store
- My day is packed with work and I can't go to the store
- I have guests over the holidays that I would rather spend time with than go to the store
- I'm doing something important with my kids on the weekend and I'd rather do that than go to the store
- My kid tells me that they need something for school tomorrow and there's no gap of time left in the day when I can go to the store
All of that said, I'm stopping today because of this article. Their ethics are reprehensible. They specifically say in the app that 100% of my tip goes to the driver. That's true only if you look at it with very shaky logic -- they fail to mention that they deduct an equal amount from their base pay.
Eh, most grocery stores have offered delivery service for decades, but this service typically isn't advertised to the 'young yuppie/hipser with disposable income' demographic because traditionally it's been assumed that the people who need/want grocery delivery are the elderly and infirm.
If you go looking for it or ask about it, you'll probably find it's available. It's much less formal and digital than instacart; it's typically not as trendy and sexy as a smartphone app. But that's likely a reflection of the target demographic they have in mind.
And fuck the whole substitution thing. Now I have to make all the goddamn decisions I would have had to in the store anyway. Plus, if they don't have X, I'd get Y, but you're offering Cherry-X instead. So after my shopping, I still have to go shopping.
Not everything needs to scale better than O(n).
(1) Tips are expected in the restaurant industry
(2) Waitstaff knows what they're signing up for
(3) The restaurant does not adjust wages after tips have been received
In many cases they do. If you receive zero tips for a shift, they are obligated to pay out minimum wage. If you receive $200 in tips for a shift, they pay out a lower figure, usually around $2.
https://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm
It is, of course, entirely possible that the worker in question is not on the west coast, but Instacart is still welcome to pay a fair wage even if not required to by law, and Instacart should certainly avoid lying about their business practices either way (from the article: "Even Instacart seems to know how messed up it is to pay workers less when they get tipped more — which is why they’ve denied the practice when speaking to reporters at Business Insider & the Miami Herald.")
The receipt was for a store named Wegmans. Those stores are located on the East coast (New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey).
It may be legal for instacart to take the tip money but it’s their decision to do so and they deserve the blame.
It’s wrong because the people paying the tip generally believe it goes to the person providing the service, not to the company. And it subverts the purpose, which is to incent and reward good personal service.
So the company ends up screwing their workers, deceiving their customers and disincentizing good service.
Legal, but wrong and stupid.
If the menu says friend potato, why am I paying separately for it to be fried?
It's trivial to verify that this is standard HN moderation:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Are we actually doing that? I've seen / heard little evidence that our trend on sugar is moving in a healthy direction, at least in the US.
I think, though, that, unless you're coming up with examples that specifically demonstrate that the things the parent poster listed weren't actually victim blaming, such an exercise would be tangential to the subject at hand.
However, laws and independent bodies specifically created for the purpose of regulating industry and researching consumer effects are much better than people at finding out the broad effects of company practices. They are specifically reviewing and analysing company practices and making targeted recommendations on effective regulation.
For me, relying on consumer driven action is ineffective, it certainly should be a part of any society, but with the pace of society today, you can't rely on people to be able to have the time, information and energy to vote with their wallets - especially when it often hurts their wallet to do so. Governments and independent bodies have to lead the way with the support of people. I'm painfully aware of being privileged with the time and wealth to be able to vote with my wallet, but I think the majority of people have neither for most of these boycotts.
I'm constantly reminded of a short blurb/study-abstract I read a little while back that found the chief determinant of whether people perceived the taxes they paid were 'fair' was perceived compliance of everyone else. That is, it was more important that everyone else was paying whatever their fair share was, than exactly what my own particular rate is.
Thus you can get people to vote for things that might hurt them a little, that they wouldn't do on their own, as long as they know that everybody else will fairly share in the burden.
But it's a great way to put the onus on the consumer and not blame the cause - the government or multinational.
EU or US regulation on the other hand could probably have Nestle ceasing that practice in days.
Even in tech you have paper CCNA who don't know anything, but have a piece of paper saying they're certified.
You're also saying in this case it is theft, and should be handled by the legal system, which in part is legislated by labor regulations.
1. https://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/History/ProductRegulation/ucm13...
There's nothing that makes giving an entity like a union or regulatory agency a monopoly that makes it more competent. There's no advantage in monopolizing a market under one quality assessor.
We essentially did that with credit ratings, by creating a special class of credit ratings agencies, that only three firms fall under, and making regulatory requirements requiring participants to receive a passing rating from one of them to be allowed to engage in various market activities.
The result in a non-competitive credit ratings industry with profit margins of approximately 40%, meaning they're extracting a massive amount of economic rent.
>>You're also saying in this case it is theft, and should be handled by the legal system, which in part is legislated by labor regulations.
I'm not endorsing those aspects of the legal system that prohibit contractually agreed terms. Only tort should be punished by the legal system.
The people delivering here are "contractors", not employees, so this doesn't actually apply to them; what Instacart is doing here is merely reprehensible, as opposed to illegal.
Expecting some sort of change to come from spontaneous, collective consumer action is ridiculous. This is especially true when most consumers in America are not on financially stable ground themselves, and can't afford to spend more money or time to assuage their guilt.
Does that mean you believe that collective consumer action had absolutely nothing to do with Travis no longer remaining as CEO of Uber?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-ceo-travi...
These things never start from the poorest doing these things though. They start with the middle and upper classes, because the do have the money, and companies chase that money.
Yes if everyone rolled over and did nothing, instcart would win.
What percentage of that richer demographic would have to switch to a competitor for it to start hurting? A demographic that includes journalists and 'influencers', that are willing and able to pay more, and are able to tell the world about it?
The distinction is that money provides opportunities, poverty is the lack of them.
You can hold the wealthy responsible for what they do with their wealth, or what they don't do with their wealth. Because wealth is something they HAVE. The poor, on the other hand, don't HAVE anything, so you can't say they are using their lack of wealth foolishly, nor can you say they are failing to use their lack of wealth wisely.
But even that is fraught, since, in the current economic culture, consumers are pretty much constantly being preyed on, and actively encouraged to make questionable decisions. Consider, for example, the predatory mortgage practices on the part of the banking industry during the 2000s. Or predatory lending practices on the part of the student loan and private college industries. Or payday loan companies.
(There's arguably a double standard there - if it's a person with relatively little money swindling people out of relatively small amounts of money, it's con artistry. If it's a company with lots of money swindling people out of lots of money, caveat emptor.)
At some point even if that is true, they have some responsibility. Unless they were born on a desert island.
Instead I've been assaulted and my eyes blackened all for what, because I asked a question that if answered may weaken the credibility of the op's original post?
Your question was not well asked. At all. It carried a ton of baggage with it, made several assumptions, and generalized a whole class of people in society and you seem to be extremely oblivious to it.
This isn't meant as an insult. I'm being harsh because this is a moment for you to learn. To get better. To take in the feedback instead of playing the victim card to protect your ego.
I hate extreme examples, but I'll use one here to make a simple point. How well do you think walking into a bar and asking the following would go over: "Hey fellas, how bad are Nazis really? And are Jewish people really that great anyway?"
And then when people give you their passionate thoughts, you just respond with "Woah woah woah, I'm just asking simple questions to expand my understanding".
That's similar to what's going on here.
I'm wondering what could be possible if a group of people (say, some in prison?) started saying "We peacefully revoke consent to be governed this way and request immediate transformative justice in the form of a justice system that allows us to craft our own path to recover from the wounds inflicted upon us by ourselves, our family, and our society free from imprisonment."
The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
I choose to collaboratively, peacefully, and fluidly coevolve with all life by mindfully embodying science and art, in love to identify ways to sustainably contribute to all life's needs.
Would you be willing to give me feedback on how I might evolve it further?
You do have to be careful with that sort of language, we have a bit of a history of nailing people to trees or shooting them for suggesting such things.
Edit: fixed a word.
Whats happening here is that companies have figured out they can just extract value out of a subset of their employees and pass the cost onto their customers by manipulating social norms.
If I'm paying the worker directly they should be treated like a contractor, but the companies want the control of hiring an employee and the responsibilities of hiring a contractor
Got those lovely nuggets? Buy there again, tell their manager how great the service was, and be a great customer. Also, treat better the next person you interact with, don't just offset your morale to paying some dollars and then be an asshe...
... You know now that I'm talking about it. I don't think I tip stockholders of C-Corps. I did consider S-Corp stockholders and decided that they probably shouldn't get a tip, but C-Corps stockholders are kind of part of a financial supply chain if you think about it.
Now that we're on the topic, can anything think of anyone else I'm leaving out? I wouldn't want to ignore the hard work of the people who make my daily life possible.
Imagine a widget where every link in the supply chain is paid proportionately, instead of each layer trying to skim what they can. If a salesperson sells the product for 10% more, they get 10% more commission - and the distributor gets 10%, and the manufacturer, and the producer of the raw materials, and the transportation provider, and...
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-boycotts-history-201802...
For the most part. It depends on your perception of a boycott. Very, very few boycotts are adopted by a significant fraction of the customer base. I've participated in plenty of boycotts. Only one of them resulted in a change in behavior. The rest were ignored by both the company and the majority of their customers.
For the most part, the value of a boycott is helping me sleep at night - not in actually solving the underlying problems.
> Pressure increased across the country. The related civil suit was heard in federal district court and, on June 4, 1956, the court ruled in Browder v. Gayle (1956) that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional. As the state appealed the decision, the boycott continued. The case moved on to the United States Supreme Court. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling, ruling that segregation on public buses and transportation was against the law.
Go ahead, try to organize a boycott. I'll support it. I guarantee you it won't go anywhere, though.
A comment like "What are the poor legitimately at fault for then? I'm tired of this implication that the poor can never be at fault for anything, because they are so poor." not only doesn't do that, it's hard to read it any other way than as a battle stroke. And when you write "I asked a question that if answered may weaken the credibility of the op's original post", you seem to confirm that. If you're focused on undermining others' credibility, they'll inevitably focus on defending themselves rather than exchanging information.
The site guidelines address this situation: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd appreciate it, and people would be more likely to respond to you with information rater than counterattack.
I don't know if it would actually be used, but if you wanted to do something like this, a blockchain would make a good deal of sense; especially if payment for the finished product was made through the same mechanism.
No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.
That's always the case. If you recycle, you are at a competitive disadvantaged compared to people who don't care. If you are veggie as well. Or if you help your kids to do their homework.
Do you think it's unreasonable to promote recycling ?
It's not a binary choice, it's a spectrum anyway.
> No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.
Regulations are very slow, subject to intense lobbying and conflicts of interest, and assume people in charge are benevolent and compentent.
Regulations are not the base of the society. They come, they go. They change according to the time, the context, the place... People are what's matter.
Again, I understand how hard this is. I also notice that a lot of people don't want to hear about it, because of the resonsibility it involves. But power to the people cannot comes without responsability to the people.
And responsability only truely work if it's chosen, not enforced.
Swedes don't just love recycling; the government makes it worthwhile by increasing the cost of not-recycling (fines, jail time).
Calling for personal responsibility is a good way to misdirect attention.
The instacart topic is just an example. An example saying, "if your economic system is currently capitalistic, and based on money, then voting with your wallet makes sense".
> I understand that it's hard, but try to imagine
That's so condescending.
> a world where workers can demand a living wage and not have to rely on the generosity of "good people" for the right to live.
Life is not binary, you can work on both. But your solution delegate the action to a small 3rd party, so it's still an oligarchy.
I was quoting you from the previous comment
It looks like you're drawing a conclusion based on an absence of evidence of what people aren't doing anymore.
But it probably goes both way, and I don't see a good reason to not do both: acting as micro and macro citizen.
From my perspective Instacart is stealing from its customers and workers by doing this. I'm a huge fan of instacart (my fiance and I use it regularly), but this is definitely going to push me away from the platform. At a minimum I'm going to be tipping in cash.
https://medium.com/@workingwa/instacart-heres-our-22-cents-n...
This is 100% wage theft.
It's immoral as fuck to steal tips. I don't care if it's legal. If I'm a customer tipping the person a certain amount I want to make sure it's actually helping that person and not just lining the pockets of their employer, that's absurd.
So you have incentive to report 0.0 tips. But then our manager at PizzaHut let go everyone who reported 0.0 tips (when asked why, he said they called customers to confirm we did receive tips).
And that's not only PizzaHut, that's everyone doing that, at least in NJ.
Any dispute will go to a monkey court instead.
It depends on the agreement between Instacart and delivery staff.
Do the right thing. Take a stand for human decency and make a compromise by closing your instacart account now. Absorb the inconvenience and do your own shopping. And make sure to tell instacart to (insert profanity of choice) if you can while closing your account. That behaviour is low down and dirty. Shady craigs list used car dealer level stuff.
I just walked three blocks in the rain to the local grocery store to pick up stuff to make dinner and food for tomorrow. Not like I was jumping for joy and made a dash for the door. I didn't want to, but I did. That's life.
I haven't used Instacart since then.
It's also possible that instacart will lose money on the sales where they can't scam tips; that means you can use the service and pay the worker well and punish instacart and increase the incentive for them to change their policy.
Using Instacart is a luxury in the first place, but having everyone close their account only hurts the very people you seem to be for. In case you missed it in the article, there is a workaround so that your tips are correctly considered, or you can always pay cash: http://www.workingwa.org/22cents
I've tipped a lot on Doordash. I feel ripped off.
My company regularly used Doordash for years and made a point of tipping on orders. Crazy.
I think this a danger of contracting for VC-backed "gig economy" services like Instacart and Uber. They often subsidize the cost of the service using funding (billions, in the case of Instacart and Uber) in order to quickly attract customers and workers, then reduce the subsidies once they are established.
It's not right, but at this point gig economy workers should expect it and plan accordingly.
Now it seems they skip items, replace it without asking and the earliest delivery is tomorrow. And the produce has a lot to be desired. It'll last two days and already looks crappy on delivery. I think they are in such a rush they just grab whatever.
The best thing for any app service, keep 20 in singles and just tip cash. I honestly don't know how the app tipping works but I have a feeling the full amount isn't going to the person.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/management/bu...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/01/18/686665609/epis...
If that doesn't work then of course I'm going to drop their service. I just believe that supporting worker led actions is the best way to push change at this very moment.
I use Uber from time to time. Knowing full well that they have some practices I admonish. I use Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Safeway, etc. I try to be a better consumer with products but it doesn't always work.
I think we can approach this without the pitchforks and realize we all do this to some extent. The OP recognizes the problem and suggests they'll change their behavior. That's a win.
Parent - good luck moving off of the service. It's hard to swap something you've come to rely on out, and good on you for recognizing that as a consumer you need to make a change.
Seems like a not-bad approach.
Why don't you do something productive with your outrage, like changing your own lifestyle and keeping it to yourself? Or better yet, raise awareness without bullying someone else's attempt to process their frustration in an even-tempered way.
I have zero illusions that enough people understand the free market to be patient and allow for this to happen. We need to teach more economics in grade school.
why should it be?
ahh whaaat? mashes downvote button
since you are still reading, what is the exact thought process here, can you articulate this? So the service works and still provides a convenience for you, but is this action being masqueraded as the most effective way to get the company to change a policy amongst all other possible actions? Is it just to not "support" a company that does a single thing you disagree with? Is it something else?
I think there are more effective ways of bringing Instacart into compliance with your ideals. Isn't that a possibility?
edit: and no responses by time of writing while on the way to getting downvote censored. Be interesting to see if it flips when a different crowd gets off of work.
I don't think that supporting tax evasion should be a primary reason for tipping in cash.
But there are other reasons why tipping in cash is a good idea, such as making sure that the money actually goes to the worker, and knowing that they'll have immediate access to it, rather than having to wait until their next paycheck.
My understanding is that the Fair Labor Standards Act does not allow for employers to whithold tips.[0]
Gratuity/tip is a legally recognized concept. You can't just throw the word in your app and do what you want with the money it generates. There are legal expectations around how the money goes from the customer to the worker.
[0] https://www.ramoslaw.com/is-your-employer-committing-wage-th...
[edit] Added "not"
As a non-American I had to read the article a few times to understand what the problem was - I thought this was just how tipping worked in the US.
I always read of service workers who only manage to "stay afloat" by the tips they earn, this seems to be almost the same thing, but reading it again I can see it isn't.
Here in NZ there is sometimes a "tip jar" at the counter of a cafe where you might throw in a coin or two (say $1 or $2) as a way of thanking the staff overall. High end restaurants will also offer a place for you to add a tip if you feel you got exceptional service, but there's also no hard feeling or death stares if you don't put anything there.
I hope tipping dies in the US and people get paid fairly regardless. But then you have bigger problems to solve first of all :)
The tipping system still baffles me (and I never know when I am supposed to tip or not .. )
From what I gathered, it comes from the prohibition as a way to supplement hotels and restaurants personnel wages (since they were making less in that context).
Why it persisted to nowadays and has been extended to many service works baffles me to no end.
Taxes are also added at checkout when you buy e.g. groceries, so it seems pretty cultural to have a very opaque 'what you pay' system.
These sorts of stories confirm my feelings about tipping that I’ve had all along: tipping is just a way to subsidize employers by pitting employees against customers and guilt-tripping the latter.
Follow-up update: Aren't all the gig economy start-ups (Uber/Uber Eats, Lyft, Caviar, Eat24/Yelp, Fiverr etc.) potentially doing the same thing? They are probably exploiting the same loop-hole in whatever set of laws. It might be just a UI update, but I remember seeing a message of the form "our drivers get 100% of their tips" in Uber Eats just yesterday, which is sort of like saying "we are following the law about tips".
The way they keep working to create opaqueness around their tipping to the point that last year Drivers were handing out pamphlets explaining how to remove the "Service Fee" (which nobody but Instacart gets) to tip the drivers was a huge red flag. Removing the service fee was on a 2nd page you had to go to and by default I believe was 10% of your order. If you've never used Instacart the groceries in my experience have been quite a bit more expensive than they'd be in stores so they're making revenue on that end already.
I started using them a bit again this year and now there's only a "Driver Tip" section with I believe a hard locked in service fee. Does the shopper get the tip as well? Is the driver the shopper as well now? In my situation the shopper is doing FAR more work than the driver. I want to tip the people well because I know Instacart doesn't pay well, but I don't want to give a $26 tip for $130 in groceries (which is usually 3-4 bags) going to the person who only spent 10 minutes in a car to drop my groceries off at my front door (and Instacart drivers never read the Delivery notes, I've had to walk out and walk them over to me each time last year that I ordered).
Is the tip split between the shopper and the driver? It only says "Driver Tip".
Everything just seems to be disgustingly opaque with this company and I really do not feel right even using it anymore so I've used it incredibly sparingly (maybe 3 times last year) as of late.
edit: I just checked, there's an info icon and it says 100% of the tip goes to the driver. So should I not tip based on the entire process of shopping and delivery? I don't even want to use this app anymore because I shouldn't have to stop and waste time considering these things.
This company just screams deceptive to me. Guess I'll be done with it.
According to the screenshot of Instacart's email, they confirmed this is accurate and was most definitely not a mistake. And according to the article, Instacart has doubled-down instead of apologizing.
“We gave the driver 100% of the $10 from your tip, and withheld our $10 from their wages.”
"Shoppers appreciate tips as a way of recognizing great service and 100% of your tip goes directly to the shopper delivering your order. For more information about tipping, follow this link."
Source: https://www.instacart.com/help/section/200761924#213895126 payment/service fee section
If confirmed this is straight out lying to your customers
"When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence. The Federal Trade Commission enforces these truth-in-advertising laws, and it applies the same standards no matter where an ad appears – in newspapers and magazines, online, in the mail, or on billboards or buses."
and:
"Statements that are literally true may be deceptive if they leave a misleading impression".
Unfortunately, the first step the FTC takes if they even get around to it is to direct the advertiser to remove such statements. No fines are levied if the advertiser complies with this request.
Airbnb: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ai...
Stripe: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+st...
Cruise: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+cr...
etc.
Wait, you thought HackerNews was impartial?
Brb getting banned and blacklisted.
Just pay your workers minimum wages at least and make tipping optional.
I shouldn't have to tip the "employees" just because a company can get away without paying even minimum wage to its "employees".
There is something seriously broken with the whole tipping thing.
It's obviously a terrible system, but is this different from how most everywhere with tipping in the US works? I've never worked a tipped job in the US.
However, the absolute bare minimum the employer was allowed to pay was 50% of minimum wage. Not sure if this was just state-specific or if it changed.
Some engineer somewhere decided or was told: Hey if someone gets a big tip, lets consider that as part of their pay and not pay they what's due. And then they just blindly do it?!
I can understand that an engineer might just be following requirements, but _someone_ made that decision--probably a PM, or does this go higher than that?
It seems that companies (FB, Google, etc.) are almost going out of their way to be evil!
We need the equivalent of a "known to do evil" blacklist: companies and employees known to have been working on specific products/projects should be black-balled:
You wrote a VPN to collect information off people's phones? Good luck getting work with another tech company. You wrote/designed functionality to get kids to play games that require money and is hidden from their parents? Screw you. You wrote/designed a feature that said that people should be screwed out of their wage because they got a big tip? F you.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash/comments/963kyv/if_you_are...
I mean, it's hard to fathom how you could get worse than $0.80. But less than half that? That's worse for sure.
One super annoying thing about this system and people choosing not to tip is a situation like this, assume a waiter is serving two customers in an hour, the local minimum wage is $9/hr and the sub-minimum wage is $3/hr, the first customer tips $4 dollars, yielding a potential wage excess of $2 (assuming a reliable rate) when the second customer tips $0 then the waiter ends up making no money beyond minimum wage. So if you're a tipper another customer that doesn't tip can cancel out your tip.
I'm not certain how these are aggregated from an accounting perspective, but I wouldn't be surprised if the window was either a full day or a pay period (in the latter case, every two weeks someone totals $3 * hrs worked, adds on total tips and verifies if that number is above $9 * hrs worked (do nothing) or is below (make up the difference out of the employer's pocket.
Firing one guy because he won't steal from your customers won't fly if the union tells your entire development team to walk and they'll cover wages until they get a better job.
That having been said, the concept of defining contractor wages in relation to customer tips is new to me. I could see a legal argument being made in the employer's favor if the worker gave due consent to the transaction.
The idea here would be: Instacart states somewhere on the order prior to pickup 'if you choose to accept this order, you will receive $10, of which $.80 will come from us.' Since the delivery worker isn't running a 'shift' as an 'employee,' but just coincidentally happens to be running Instacart orders for 10 hours straight, this counts as one of many transactions that they've accepted and hence waived the legal right to complain about.
If this legal fiction sounds absurd to you, you're not alone.
Only Instacart believes this.
That's simple fraud. It's like going door to door collecting money for a charity and then just pocketing the money. Potentially Instacart will need to refund those 'tips'
The strange thing about this is that it may actually be fraud against the people buying from instacart. The ones giving the tip. I'm curious then what kind of damages a customer could sue for beyond the amount of the tip. And I'm also curious if instacarts TOS for customers forces arbitration and prevents class action lawsuits.
This should be interesting to watch unfold.
I think this sentence says the opposite of what you intended it to.
But I have never worked in a restaurant so I could be completely wrong.
The problem is that they use the tip as an excuse to pay basically nothing. It's not acting like a real tip.
I feel like for someone somewhere in the attorney general's office, prosecuting these should be someone's full time tax paid job.
Suppose that we decide to call dogs cats. In that case, what is a domesticated canine? Answer: it’s a dog, whatever you choose to call it.
(Pretty sure I butchered that, but hopefully the point still came through.)
It doesn't only take away responsibility of paying, but adds emotional and mental load cost to the customer. It's hilarious that people accept that in exchange for an illusory level of control (you being the mini manager/boss of your service task) over quality of service.
In places where the tax and all other costs are already factored into the price, tipping is reserved for truly exceptional service.
Or, alternatively, maybe you don't live in a country with a tipping culture. And if so, then tipping doesn't really affect you.
People like to tip. I like to tip. Waiters and waitresses like to be tipped. My wife used to work as a waitress and would clear over $300 a night in tips alone. It's only a small minority of people who are against it.
Sorry, waiting tables is not a really complicated skill. Tipping is not related to quality of service.
Most people don't think about tipping. They do it because it's expected and maybe the waitress is hot. If pressed, they would likely prefer not to do it.
Servers are also some of the most disingenuous people I've seen when arguing about tipping. Because that top tier knows they can make a lot of money in a low-skill job. They like to complain about how much money they make and how screwed over they are by tips, but when restaurants pay a fair wage and eliminate tips, the staff abandons them for places that do tip. Why? Money.
Waiters and waitresses HATE to NOT be tipped in a world where it's their livelihood. And studies have shown that this leads to racist, classist, and sexism within the service industry.
- Studies show that non-caucasians receive worse service because they are perceived as likely to tip less.
- Studies show that a high class restaurant server gets more in tips than a medium class restaurant, even when the food and service is of lower quality.
- Studies show that men often get tipped less than women for similar service.
Like any erratic and arbitrary system there will be some winners who make out well, but it's not a great way of compensating people for work.
I would happily do that if I knew the server would earn a living wage even without my tip.
No one is talking about making tipping illegal. Killing tipping culture means not making food workers dependent on customers' largess and generosity to make a living wage.
Even in most countries without a tipping culture, you're free to hand over additional money to your server or cook if you feel like it. No one is stopping you.
You could tell someone they get a new job paying $30/hour and you are selling them this house for $10/hour. After everything is said and done, those numbers could be the same... what?
Expected tip amounts have also been going up, I assume now because companies/restaurants want to hide a price rise behind it.
Food prices have gone up since increase in minimum wage last year, and default tip option is 18% at majority of the places. Oh and that 18% counts the 13% tax, so you are tipping more than 18%.
Are cash tips an effective method of keeping grubby corporate hands out of it?
When you have a felony a lot of higher-paying unskilled jobs will simply filter you out as being too high risk or likely to cause trouble. So the only places that will hire these kinds of people can get away with crazy tactics like the ones people are discussing in these threads. When your choice is exploitative tactics or literally no other option because the entire market has you blacklisted you are going to take the horrible option knowing full well it is a horrible option.
For some people though there just aren't a lot of jobs available that match their education and experience.
People that are desperate for money are frequently exploited. Whether it's through wage theft, or unsafe employment practices, or simply demeaning behavior.
But does anyone else find it obnoxious that all these digital services exist, often starting out with no tip straight pricing, then tipping re-appears, and then you suddenly need physical cash to morally use the service at all?
Obviously workers should get fairly compensated. The problem is tipping culture itself, just set a price that customers are willing to pay and workers can enjoy a reasonable standard of living.
Plus the whole tipping thing is extremely inconsistent. Floral delivery? No tip. Pizza delivery? Tip. Some brands support credit card tipping, others don't, and even the ones that do you have to research how much using it hurts the employee...
The US needs law changes that outlaw tipping. It will be culturally painful while we adapt but once we do both workers and customers will be better for it.
No, it just needs to not treat workers that might receive tips differently: they should have he same minimum wages as other workers and tips should not count as compensation by the employer satisfying minimum wage mandates.
Private employers might then wish to prohibit employees accepting tips (since it no longer benefits the employer as it does now for the worker to be classes as “tipped”), for similar reasons to those for which public employers already do.
EDIT: And we need better enforcement (and possibly slight changes to the basic rules) against mischaracterization of employees as contractors, which is most of the problem in this case.
Let's face it. People tip the Dominoes guy so they don't get spit in their pizza the next time.
Tipping law for the most part isn't changing largely because tipped workers make more money under the status quo. For those familiar with the restaurant industry, tons of folks turn down management roles because they pay less than working the floor.
27.35 - actual face value of food (same as the in-store menu, at least for this restaurant) 2.32 - Tax 1.30 - "Healthy SF fee" 2.00 - Courier Bonus 4.92 - "Service Fee" (huh?) 1.99 - "Delivery Fee"
They are extremely likely to make another, more subtle bad call.
People who think this is OK can be very difficult to motivate.
There is, because the pay can't go negative.
> The legal system is not staffed by robots, either. I don't see how they can defend a class action regardless of what words they've written on a TOS.
It depends on what the lawsuit is for. Normally we have things like "minimum wage" but those don't apply if you manage to convince everyone it's a contractor situation. If they can be classified as employees then there's all sorts of lovely anti-tip-taking law. But that's a big if. And I don't think contractors have tip laws? It's not generally illegal to say one thing about how your company allocates money coming in and then do another.
No, they aren't; binding arbitration is a venue for resolving disputes about the application of laws, it doesn't supersede the laws, and manifest disregard for the law is one of the few reasons for courts setting aside a binding arbitration decision.
Thought experiment: could Instacart assault, kidnap, or murder a delivery driver and claim that arbitration is the only venue for redress?
Or we can just make it very clear that companies that engage in outright wage theft should be put out of business, so no other business ever tries it in the future.
I'm all for bringing a legal hammer down on them! I'm just saying that as far as personal action goes, getting them to lose money while their worker gets a healthy wage is better than a boycott.
Thanks for clarifying. Good on you for taking an active approach to this and being thoughtful.
Also - I think this is where the power of the unionization comes into effect. While Unions can be a tremendous blocker of progress I feel that the pendulum has swung too far the against them.
If you are working a laborious job and you get cash tips, they go into your pocket. Full stop. To assert otherwise is to be simply unaware of the realities. No one scraping by with cash tips is summing them for their 1040. No one.
Fraud n. the intentional use of deceit, a trick or some dishonest means to deprive another of his/her/its money, property or a legal right.
RCW 49.46.020 section 3:
"Tips and service charges paid to an employee are in addition to, and may not count towards, the employee's hourly minimum wage."
RCW 49.46.020 section 3:
"Tips and service charges paid to an employee are in addition to, and may not count towards, the employee's hourly minimum wage."
Source: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.46.020
The end result is of course higher prices, but the sticker shock is lower on the menu.
I tried to find a way to close the account but there does not seem to be one.
I wish I had thought to ask for a refund of tips too, but I already sent my support request.
The perspective of “rewarding thieves” is a perspective I asked for
Yet you wouldnt have even commented except for the meta downvoting mention. I dont even think you realize that the “first” downvoting complaint was part of the original post and wasnt a complaint, it was because people are predictable and maybe they would continue reading and contribute to the thread
or to put it another way, I would say that an individual cancelling to telepathically convey their disagreement with a company is just as effective as an individual writing a sternly worded email
or even protesting on the street
Edit: welp, even that says it 100% goes to the person doing the shopping. Gross.
Welcome to the world of 'tipped wages'. In my state, every paycheck, the first $520 worth of tips effectively goes straight to your employer for the purposes of paying your minimum wage and then you can have whatever is left over.
Frankly tax fraud from people working for tips in the service sector should be among the very least of our worries as a society.
Above? Not so much.
A lot of wait staff seem content to push mis-information: "If you tip poorly, the IRS makes us pay tax on it anyway, i.e. we're having to pay to serve you!"
No, the IRS makes an estimate on how much tipped workers are paid. If you document and it's less, then you pay tax on that. But using the IRS as the big bad wolf to get more tips that you know damn sure you're not going to report, doesn't make me the most sympathetic.
I've seen wait staff say that they believe 20% should be a baseline, for bad service, 25 for "decent" and 30% for good service...
Same arguments were used to suppose slavery. If we make slavery illegal, where will slaves work apart from cotton farms?
There are other jobs to do, it doesn't mean we have to allow blatant injustice to go on, in exchange for profits. All the while using a moral arguments to justify it.
This is redundant. You are making a general argument here against making decisions based on your own morality.
But boy I’d love to dis-enshrine it.
My mom was a waitress most of my life and made decent money, so I always tip 20-25% and a minimum of $5 unless I get extra shitty service. Depending on where you and your coworkers ate at, I would say they were just cheap asses.
The tipped minimum is usually something like $2 vs the $7 minimum wage (these numbers are probably off now that so many places have raised the minimum wage to $10 or $12).
Since in this instacart case they ended up paying out $.80 an hour it’s below even tipped minimum wage standards, although I assume there’s some dodge about claiming the employees are contractors to get around paying wages.
That would make some sense even. If a server doesn't get tips, that could be a sign that they are a bad server.
(Not agreeing with wage / tip theft, of course, but, as an employer, you need to be able to believe your employees.)
Unfortunately, in this economy, it's probably more accurate to say "most people really don't have options" rather than "some"
So while it's a 'strong market' in the sense that 'unemployment is low', it could also be examined from another angle. Which is the rise of the gig economy giving people a lot of opportunities for work, but work that comes at a cost of being heavily exploited like with Instacart. Nor does it say anything about whether or not people are holding full time vs part time jobs or the stagnant wage issues.
Now they're getting minimum wage and I still feel the need to tip. That doesn't fix the problem unless we also make major changes to the minimum wage.
> Private employers might then wish to prohibit employees accepting tips (since it no longer benefits the employer as it does now for the worker to be classes as “tipped”), for similar reasons to those for which public employers already do.
They wouldn't do that at minimum wage, and they get negative value out of a combined pay-more/anti-tip policy.
I don't think it's enough to fix the problems with tipping culture.
I'm not sure that your dislike of your own sense of obligation is sufficient cause for a legal prohibition on tipping. I think you should be free to tip (though employers should likewise be free to prohibit employees from accepting tips, and should have fewer reasons not to do so than they currently do.)
OTOH, I would get behind (and meant to include this before) prohibiting employers from taking, offsetting, or redirecting tips, including directing employees in a sharing regime; requiring tips, if given and accepted (employers would be permitted to prohibir the latter as a condition of employment, so long as the policy was uniform) to be property of the recieving employee independent of the employer. Basically, they are now a dodge around sales taxes for many employers, but effectively still revenue that the employer controls, within some limits, which gives employers a big reason to protect tipping culture.
Frankly I don't care about this company but equating this to slavery just comes across as more of the same virtue signaling.
Instacart is going to get fucked very quickly by the Washington AG. This is as bad as Walmart not paying employees for overtime.
They should have to pay back "the winnings" by 3x and fire the people involved.
in any case, this is really awful for the poor drivers. I had no idea.
Customer awareness is the free market solution to this, if that's the hammer you want to use to fix everything.
Maybe grade school should focus on reading comprehension.
You can learn a lot from how companies feel about their practices by looking at how they train the customer support personnel with talking points to avoid admitting certain of them.
You had a strong comment without the implied insult. Don't compromise your point to be mean to someone.
I'm going to leave you with a quote from Adam Smith who most would say founded the field of Economics.
> The interest of the dealers ... in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public... [They] have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public ... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate ... It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.
Also, it's not clear to me, are the drivers told their comp for the job before accepting? Did this person know they would earn $0.80/hr?
The sense of “sense of obligation” in play when one says “I feel the need to tip”, as I would have thought was obvious by the quoted bit I responded to.
> If it is obligatory then it definitely should be outlawed
It is not actually obligatory (except where it is advertised as required, in which case there is no false advertising), even if some people have a sense of obligation which demands tipping.
> DoorDash, which launched in 2014, services 15 metro areas in the U.S.; like many other delivery apps, it employs couriers to pick up food from restaurants and deliver it to customers. But beyond the usual delivery fees, taxes, and tips customers will shell out for, DoorDash also inflates the cost of each menu item — often unbeknownst to customers. For example, a sandwich that costs $10.99 directly from a restaurant might be listed as $14.95 on DoorDash, and the app gives customers no indication they're being upcharged. As Bloomberg notes, "Other delivery apps, such as Postmates and Square Inc.'s Caviar, typically list the same prices as those on the restaurants' menus."
https://www.eater.com/2016/3/18/11261548/doordash-delivery-s...
multiple requests asking them to at least fix this info or take me off the platform altogether (because customers were starting to wonder why my prices were so low on doordash - they're not, the couriers paid the current amount in-store...) and they ignored me. it wasn't until i signed up to be contacted about being a restaurant partner that they finally paid attention.
of course, once i registered interest in partnering with doordash, they spammed me with requests to sign the terribly lopsided agreement, and then took my restaurant off as a "bargaining" chip. yeah, okay. works for me.
so, tl;dr, if a restaurant isn't directly partnered with doordash, they can do whatever the heck they want with the prices.
(which, speaking of restaurants setting prices, they all definitely have clauses in there about not charging more than you would on other services. they definitely let you upcharge... i was half tempted to put up burgers for $20 each, for real...)
Don't confuse the fact that nobody has confronted you for the idea that waiters don't expect you to tip them.
It's entirely possible that restaurants in SF have shifted to non-tipping and jacked their prices up to pay higher base wages just because it's so expensive to live anywhere in that area, but in most of the country people in traditionally-tipped positions are often paid significantly below minimum wage (as low as $2.13/hour as the federal minimum, many states are higher). In California the tipped minimum wage at $11/hour is only $1/hour lower than the regular minimum wage, so not tipping may have less impact.
Numbers taken from https://www.minimum-wage.org/
That's not a bro thing, just a shift in culture.
Not quite the same, but perhaps it's a quid pro quo, of sorts. "Ups and downs in the economy, we won't come after you for earnings above the flat rate, but you will pay when lower". Which does negate my point, but such an agreement is consensual.
It doesn't seem to me that the IRS could just make "deals" with individual restaurants since congress has to actually legislate the internal revenue code. But I don't see anything when I search for what you describe.
where does this insanity stop? 50%? 100%? No matter how much you tip, people will grow to expect it as baseline, and then some more
I feel sorry about this, but from my experience, the only other business that comes to mind, that is so build on 1-on-1 flattering "good choice sir" and selling attention to me is prostitution. I mostly don't need that much attention, when I just wand to have a beer or lunch.
Agreed.
There's no tipping in Japan, and people get offended if you try to tip. If the taxi is 1963 yen, you pay 1963 yen (or get back the change to make it so). It's lovely. And the service is great.
The only real way this changes is if we first make sure service workers are fairly compensated, but for most people this isn't a big enough issue to prioritize it - we only discuss it in forums like this when an article this appalling gets posted - but it is a big issue for the millions of restaurants in the US who would have to increase wages so they will all lobby against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity#By_region
We love traveling and I have yet to see local tipping culture anywhere besides North America (besides cheeky let's-get-more-money-from-the-foreign-tourist type).
As a customer I prefer "fake" service over being ignored, but as an employee I would prefer the European system.
Waiters in Europe also seem to be less interested in coming to your table.
I don't know how the contractor status of Instacart drivers affects this. They're not technically employees. But the verbiage of "Tip" in the UI is a strong signal to the customer that the money is directly credited to the driver. It should bear no relation to their fee from Instacart.
This is wage theft. A horrible agreement doesn't make it right, even if it is legal.
This is a very common setup in other pay structures as well, such as commissioned sales where you are paid a "draw" (such as minimum wage) and you don't paid get any commission until your commissions exceed minimum wage.
What's more, the tip money did go directly to the driver; Instacart just decided to pay less.
It's a pretty inhumane thing to do but on the face of it I don't see how it's wage theft. Welcome to the gig economy.
Does the independent contractor bring more than their personal labor?
Do they hire crew of their own or are they bringing other employees?
Or, are they bringing heavy or costly specialized equipment?
Are they an established business, working without your direction or control?
Are they free from your supervision, direction or control?
Is the individual’s business different and separate from your own?
Is the individual’s service “outside the usual course of business,” or in other words, does the contractor do something different from what you do?
Is the individual’s service being performed “outside of all of the places of business,” or in other words, does the contractor perform the service away from where you perform your services?
Is the individual contractually obligated to pay costs affiliated with the location from where the work is controlled (usually its headquarters)?
Does the individual have an established independent business that existed before you brought them on – OR – does the individual have a principal place of business that qualifies for an IRS business deduction?
Do you have evidence to demonstrate that the individual has an established business?
Does the individual have a principal place of business that qualifies for an IRS business deduction? Do you have evidence to demonstrate it?
Is the individual responsible for filing a schedule of expenses with the IRS, such as would be part of a business tax return?
Does the individual have all required registrations and licenses for their business?
Does the individual maintain his/her own set of books and records that reflect all income and expenses of the business?
This question is for construction contractors only: Is the individual a properly registered contractor?
Note that this is not an "Answer 'yes' to any question to be considered a Contractor", it's a "totality" thing. (https://www.lni.wa.gov/IPUB/101-063-000.pdf)
"I subcontracted some work to a guy who has a contractor’s registration with L&I. Doesn’t that mean he’s not my employee?"
Not necessarily. L&I auditors look at “direction or control” and other factors described on the previous pages. Because he is a construction contractor, all seven parts of RCW 51.08.181 must be met.
And so on...
It is standard (though not universal) practice for restaurant staff to pool and divide tips, which would appear to be the same thing from a defrauding-the-tipper perspective.
I'm more upset about this line from Instacart:
> We include tips in the calculation [of pay for deliveries] so that you can get a more accurate picture of what your earnings will be after completing a batch.
This is incredibly dishonest. They're arguing with a straight face that they're doing you a favor by smoothing your earnings from an unpredictable (for example) $8-$50 per hour down to a more reliable $8-$9 per hour.
This is actually the same argument the US government advances in favor of its sugar tariff. Sure, it raises the price of sugar by 200% on average, but it protects us from the awful unpredictability of the world sugar price.
First, restaurant staff always know ahead of time if they have to share tips.
And their hourly compensation, as ridiculously low as it may be, is never adjusted to compensate for higher than normal tips.
And, finally, in most restaurants the tip pool is also split up with bussers, bartenders, and hosts who don't always make tips of their own, but still contribute to the overall experience.
Yet somehow the system only ever seems to work in one direction. I once had to pay $20 after working an 8-hour shift before leaving home under threat of termination (right-to-work state) because of the two tables I had that night, one was a giant party that didn't tip me at all and the other ran out on his $20 meal while I was taking care of other duties in the back. Somehow my responsibility, of course.
This varies by state. Google "server wage" and your blood will boil. It's illegal in WA, though — servers make standard minimum wage and employers can't take servers' tips.
The third point is also correct, but in that case I think it supports the idea that the tipper is being defrauded when it happens.
In that case at least the staff get your tip. In this case Instacart is taking it for themselves.
Absolutely. Thought its definitely more pernicious to find out the restaurant owner was keeping the tips.
The notion that you should overpay your own taxes to solve this is just bewildering.
Here's some more information about how it works legally: https://corporate.findlaw.com/human-resources/legal-consider...
I'd be surprised if calling something a "tip" makes it legally obligated to go to a contractor. I'm sure their lawyers are very aware of the law on this. As someone else said, there is almost certainly a binding arbitration clause. This removes the possibility of individual or class-action lawsuits.
edit: The abuse of the term "independent contractor" is just one of many examples of how labor law enforcement has become lax in the last several decades. How many people on this site aren't in management and work unpaid overtime?
But it does not remove the ability of the court to overrule the clause itself. So someone could still sue Instacart knowing that it will be thrown out if the court decides to enforce the clause.
In my life experience, these things are almost always up in the air until a judge says otherwise.
Getting to the contractor thing, the most workers can really do is file IRS Form SS-8 and see if the IRS will release them of some of their tax obligations. Other than that, there's really not that much enforcement.
Source: I was a misclassified contractor in 2017 while working in WA state. IRS forgave some of my tax burden, but Labor/Industries and Employment Security are absolutely useless if you don't have a literal Form W2 to use.
Which they will. There's been a few recent cases that have made mandatory arbitration clauses more-or-less bulletproof.
In fact, I would hesitate to say that the lawyers for most startups have any clue what they're doing, as most seem to be in it to play startup lawyer rather than provide necessary legal advice to their client/employer.
I don't think "oh the tip went to the contractor we just lowered their wages by the same amount" sounds convincing in a court room.
I think the question though is _why_ is that? If I steal $950 from someone then it's criminal, but if I refuse to pay them what I agreed then it's civil. It's an odd discrepancy IMO.
Why do you keep saying things to this affect?
A company stiffing a supplier is going to rapidly find themselves without suppliers, or the supplier can afford to / accounts for being stiffed on some orders.
An independent contractor who works for one, or maybe two very similar types of, company is very much like an employee in every way that matters to that individual “independent” contractor, and literally nothing like a B2B supplier.
Additionally, you seem preoccupied with existing legislation as though it has some higher virtue, whereas in reality the law can be, and frequently is, unjust and absurd.
The difference is that one allows the customer to dynamically adjust the wages in response to service; while in the other the company is pocketing that variance themselves, rather than passing it on to workers.
It’s simply fraud to pretend one situation is the other — there’s a distinct and meaningful difference in who pockets tip variance.
> On the rare occasion that you actually need to give a tip in Japan, do so by putting the money inside of a tasteful, decorative envelope and seal it. The tip should be presented as more of a gift than simply additional cash or payment for services. Hand it to the recipient using both hands and with a slight bow.
> Don't insist that someone accept your tip; it may be forbidden and a condition of employment.
This raises more questions than it answers
Taking stuff away from people, though, is not necessarily theft, and also not necessarily criminal. If you accidentally take someone else's property because you confused it with your own, for example, that's not criminal, but the other party still has a civil claim against you (namely, to be given back their property).
On the other hand, if you intentionally mislead someone into providing you with some service or product, promising to pay them for it, even though you never intended to pay, that constitutes fraud and is very much criminal.
Generally, it's criminal if it's in the interest of the public and civil if it is primarily in the interest of some party. Not paying some debt because you actually have doubts that you have to pay, or due to an honest mistake is not really something that affects anyone else. Someone intentionally causing situatons where others can't rely on them fulfilling their legal oblications can erode trust in a society, therefore it is in the public interest to prevent that. The boundaries can be fuzzy, but wage theft can very much be criminal.
In this case they're doing something (questionably) legal but terrible.
There are plenty of cases out there of outright wage theft. I wouldn't have a problem with the people in charge of those decisions getting arrested.
That is textbook fraud.
Somehow my responsibility
After several more undoubtedly illegal maneuvers by a new manager to fire me and other waitstaff so that he could replace them with random girls he wanted to work for him so he could hit on them, being taken off payroll without clearing it with the senior manager, and afterwards being reduced to a single day a week on the slowest days, I quit.
I then had to leave the place I was living at two months later to a brand new city, contracted mononucleosis, and, not having any saved up money after quitting this job and unable to work due to being bedridden for 4-5 months, basically starved myself into extreme malnutrition other than the food I could steal and scavenge, surfing from couch to couch. So, essentially my worst fears about quitting my job over illegal practices were realized.
I could also tell you stories from other jobs about bosses pulling firearms on me, commanding me to do straight up illegal things like lie to the police, illegally withholding paychecks for entire staff for months at a time, illegal unpaid overtime, slashing wages between paychecks, working me into extreme injury from RSI and then subverting my ability to collect comp, firing me over "clerical errors" for trying to cancel a shift I didn't even mean to sign up for on a stupid new workforce app after my boss explicitly lying about my employment not being in jeopardy, etc, and all of the hardships I had to endure for leaving each of these jobs at my breaking point.
I am not sure why delivering 6 bags of groceries took over an hour in this case. It is entirely possible however that they made several other deliveries in between Wegmans and this location (making a $10 minimum for each). It is possible that this person actually made $50+ during this 69 minutes.
Source for more details of new policy: https://www.miamiherald.com/site-services/new-newsletters/bu...
So is not a typical scenario. I could put together an article just as misleading showing that Insticart pays a mint...
I don't like when people try to mislead me. Perhaps the fact that the tip is not going directly to the delivery person is offending some of your sensibilities. This is quite legal. Many states have done this for the past 80 years. I don't know how residents of states that practice this are surprised. All restaurants and other service industry locations you frequent do the same.
Being a food delivery person, a restaurant server or for that matter a McDonald's employee is not a skilled labor position and has never been a job someone should aspire to feed a family off of. We have people busting their butts, putting themselves through college, working their way up the ladder. We have 50k skilled labor jobs vacant in this country that pay a good wage and even offer training. People used to move across the country for these jobs. They used to leave their grandma's basement and go make something of themselves. Now we just have them making a bunch of noise over McDonald's not paying a Living Wage. Grow up. This world should not reward the lazy, it results in ever increasing mediocrity.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/04/25/605092520/high-pa...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2018/08/30/dirties...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/05/the-us-labor-shortage-is-rea...
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+us+has+vacant+skilled+la...
I don't see how any shorter treatment would be a sufficient explanation.
I mean, imagine the scenario where the server just buys a line cook a drink to say thank you. Fraud!
That would be a case of the server getting the money and deciding to buy something for the cook.
Whereas in an actual tip-sharing restaurant, the server gets his share of the tip pool after the cook's share has already been taken out. He doesn't get a choice in the matter.
This is generally not what the people giving the tips have in mind.
Can you substantiate that in any way with any kind of evidence or is it a baseless claim?
If I tip someone well, it's because they've been incredibly attentive, kind, accommodating, etc. As much as possible, I want the tip to brighten their day. The effect is greatly diminished if that money is immediately divvied up amongst the other servers, making the difference to what they bring home negligible.
I've never worked as a server (though I did work at Chik-fil-A in highschool; employees are not allowed to accept tips there), and I did not realize that many restaurants are involved in the handling of tip money, rather than the tips going directly to the respective server.
So, no, that's not what I had in mind.
Why should anyone expect that sort of handling of tips? Not everyone has worked a job involving tips. I didn't. Should I have spontaneously asked one of my server friends "hey, btw, how are tips handled at your job? Like, I suspect that when I tip someone, you know, that money goes to them, because after all, I gave it to that person and not the restaurant and not anyone else, but just in case I'm mistaken, could you tell me what happens with the tip money after I leave it on the table? It's a question that's been gnawing at the back of my mind, and I just had to ask!"
My point being: unless you're a server at one of those restaurants, how would you know that your server doesn't get the tip you left for them? Could you substantiate such a claim?
I worked these jobs while trying to support and educate myself so that I could get a better-paying job.
At the same time, if 6-8 hours a day of Instacart deliveries isn't enough to provide you with an apartment, tuition money and food & entertainment for a wife and two children, then it's a service that shouldn't exist and it is only propped up by investor cash.
Because that is what minimum wage was originally meant to provide for an individual in America, before nearly a century of propaganda and misdirection convinced people like you that someone on minimum wage is lazy and doesn't deserve enough money to eat healthily, rent a decent apartment and have enough cash for some entertainment, and generally live better than someone in a third-world country, much less afford something like an annual vacation or car payments.
So did many of us. People are not supposed to have to support a family as a primary earner on minimum wage and they never were. According to the 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics, full time minimum wage earners earn over the poverty line by more than $3,000 per year. Two minimum wage earners can support a family of four and live above the poverty line. Avoiding poverty is all about choices.
>"At the same time, if 6-8 hours a day of Instacart deliveries isn't enough to provide you with an apartment, tuition money and food & entertainment for a wife and two children, then it's a service that shouldn't exist and it is only propped up by investor cash."
>"Because that is what minimum wage was originally meant to provide for an individual in America, before nearly a century of propaganda and misdirection convinced people like you that someone on minimum wage is lazy and doesn't deserve enough money to eat healthily, rent a decent apartment and have enough cash for some entertainment, and generally live better than someone in a third-world country, much less afford something like an annual vacation or car payments."
You have your facts quite wrong about the minimum wage and what it was originally meant to provide. The minimum wage was first enacted in 1938 by FDR. It paid a meager 25 cents per hour (this is $4 today when adjusted for inflation). So it has become substantially more generous as time has gone on. This is the opposite of your claim.
People in third-world countries earn less than a dollar a day. I'm sure they would love to earn even the 25 cents per hour that the original minimum wage paid.
Everyone I know that has been stuck in minimum wage jobs have definitely been lazy or made very poor choices (like stealing from their employer ETC.) in fact, only 3% of people above age 25 in the US make only the minimum wage.
Get the actual facts before making biased and factually incorrect claims (and cite sources when doing so). It really hurts your credibility to just make things up and try to sound like an expert so maybe no one will call you on it and you will appear to make a valid point.
Source: https://bebusinessed.com/history/history-of-minimum-wage/
Having seen the wrong people get rewarded bonuses, RSUs and raises all the time. You are just better off with a salary band/pay grade and give money uniformly across the band.
Ideally 'top performers' are supposed to be rewarded for 'top performance'. But in any subjective evaluation you are just dealing with cooked up documentation to prove a person did something, therefore deserves extra. Pretty much any and anyone's story can be twisted and narrated in a way that could sound positive or negative, to reward or punish respectively.
You are better off with a tip pool and paying it across the band.
https://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/post...
You're describing "server wage" laws, in which employers are free to steal tips up to the difference between real minimum wage and server wage per hour. In effect, servers in these states make above minimum wage during peak times and at most minimum wage off-peak. But they have to work off-peak or they don't get scheduled for peak hours.
In WA, this form of wage theft is illegal. Your statement, "minimum wage for servers is lower than for untipped workers" is false in Washington state, which is where the wage theft in TFA took place.
I never claimed "server wage" laws apply to this situation.
Also, the term "wage theft" seems like it doesn't apply to "server wage", because "server wage" is a construct specifically created by the law, whereas wage theft is something that's illegal.