Instacart paying 80 cents an hour because worker received a large tip | Hacker News Reader

Instacart paying 80 cents an hour because worker received a large tip

workingwa.org

1,320 pointstimebomb0675 comments

There's a related blog post up on Medium by this same group (Working Washington) where they placed the same order, once with tip and once without, so people could directly compare.

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...

> From my perspective Instacart is stealing from its customers and workers by doing this.

This is 100% wage theft.

Yep. They need to pay reimburse those workers with a penalty fee tacked on.

Same rules for should apply to wage theft as ordinary theft, more than $950 and it's a felony.

This isn't wage theft since they are independent contractors. It's more like a company stiffing a supplier. More of a civil than criminal matter. Of course, these folks wouldn't have the resources to sue anyway, even if they weren't bound by binding arbitration.

> More of a civil than criminal matter

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.

For one, we probably don't need the police to come and arrest Instacart's CEO in this case.

/shrug

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.

I bet the U.S. Chamber of Commerce can tell you the answer to this one.

Well, if you steal it, it's criminal, but that's simply because that's the definition of theft.

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.

They are also committing fraud by telling customers it is a "tip" rather than a "donation to Instacart".

> This isn't wage theft since they are independent contractors. It's more like a company stiffing a supplier.

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.

That's not necessarily true. Folks in the gig economy are often classed as "independent contractors" and thus are not subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act, including minimum wage laws. They also are not entitled to, nor almost ever receive, reimbursements for work expenses. When you are talking about using your own vehicle and paying for depreciation, mechanical work, and gas, this is considerable. It often winds up being an implicit loan against one's own vehicle.

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?

That's a shame. I wonder if customers have any recourse? I'd feel absolutely defrauded if I found out a tip I made through a service like this was (effectively) going to the operator rather than the person who the app represented it as going to.

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.

Class action lawsuit.

I wouldn't be so sure about their lawyers being "very aware" of the law. If they were, they wouldn't have called it a "tip" in the first place, as "tip" has a specific legal meaning in most states and in the US tax code.

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.

So we need to get rid of this "independent contractor" loophole.

Neither major party is at all interested in doing this, only some on the left wing of the Democrats. Labor reform is opposed in unison from the entire business community, so it is extraordinarily difficult in our political system.

> There is almost certainly a binding arbitration clause. This removes the possibility of individual or class-action lawsuits.

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.

>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.

Which they will. There's been a few recent cases that have made mandatory arbitration clauses more-or-less bulletproof.

This is absolutely illegal. They are defrauding customers. No one would voluntarily add money to an order if it was labeled as "donation to Instacart" instead of "tip". They are deceiving customers to get money from them.

This really probably doesn't add up to fraud. There's a difference between being scummy and crime. This should be illegal of course, but it really probably isn't. Restaurants illegally take tips from their employees all the time, which would be a fraud against customers in the same way as this case. However, they don't get into trouble for fraud against customers, but wage theft. That of course doesn't apply to Instacart.

Would customers give the money if it were not labeled a "tip"? No. Is it a tip? No. Does Instacart gain something of value from this deception? Yes.

That is textbook fraud.

No, that really doesn't follow.

They better hope there's no binding arbitration clause.

The chances of there not being is approximately zero.

The workers may be subject to arbitration, but state regulators (who enforce employment law) are not.

According to what ruling?

It depends on the agreement between Instacart and delivery staff.

The Fair Labor Standards Act disallows this type of agreement for ordinarily-tipped jobs.

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.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) covers only employees, not independent contractors.

Maybe so, but WA State Labor and Industries is not quite so "generous" to the gig economy, including their test for contractors, which is a bit more ... "rigorous" ... than some startups would like:

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...

All great questions but what has the state labor board not been enforcing it on Instacart up to now?

Because it wasn't obvious / evident / they haven't received a complaint from an affected individual in regards to this practice?

Regulations typically aren’t proactively enforced, but retroactively penalized.

Yet another reason this independent contractors thing is an exploitive scam.

The google term you want is "tip credit" -- it is common and legal federally and in most states to deduct tips from your hourly wage. Washington state is one of the few where tip credits are not 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.

How is this allowed by law? If you have to pay back your minimum wage before you get your commission then it’s not really a minimum wage.

There are lots of kinds of draw, but this kind is essentially a loan against your future commissions (or in our context, against your tips).

Here's some more information about how it works legally: https://corporate.findlaw.com/human-resources/legal-consider...

Logically, independent contractors should get paid more, not less, than full time employees, because they don't get the other benefits.

Not sure why this is being downvoted, as you absolutely are not wrong about this. They are independent contractors who entered into a contract just like a restaurant could contract with a food supplier. They aren't employees in the least as far as the law is concerned.

Because Washington state is a little more rigorous than "did you enter into a contract? nope, not an employee!" than you describe.

How and why are you so vehemently defending instacart when it comes to WA state law?

Is lenticular defending Instacart? It helps no one - much less the victims - to inaccurately portray their legal situation.

I'm not defending Instacart, I'm just pointing out legal realities. Many folks in this thread are severely mistaken about employment law. Just because something is morally wrong doesn't mean its illegal. I'm from Washington as well. I know a decent amount about employment law here.

I had a service industry job in texas that payed me around 2.50 an hour (iirc) and as long as I made enough in tips to cover minimum wage they didn't have to pay actual minimum wage.

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.

That might be legal in Texas, but in Washington it's explicitly illegal. In the state, tips are completely irrelevant to base pay, all employees must get paid at least minimum wage as base pay.

Instacart is going to get fucked very quickly by the Washington AG. This is as bad as Walmart not paying employees for overtime.

The WA AG is a bit on the antsy activist side too: this is like a great poster case for the anti-gig-worker advocates.

in any case, this is really awful for the poor drivers. I had no idea.

Especially because Washington's Attorney General is particularly fond of jumping on cases like this, particularly worker rights. But he is also fond of keeping startups in line. So this is a double-whammy case for him.

I'd love to see someone at Instacsrt jailed for wage theft.

They should have to pay back "the winnings" by 3x and fire the people involved.

This always seemed crazy to me. Basically the employer pays only a pittance and then stops paying until your tips exceed minimum wage. They're basically stealing the tips between $2.50 and whatever the minimum wage is in your area.

tipping encoded in to law in general seems crazy to me. many (most?) other countries don't have this ritual, and seem to do just fine. I've dined out in many other countries outside the US, and service is generally good regardless of whether tipping is involved/expected or not. And in the US, I don't feel my normal service is all that much better because someone is thinking I might tip an extra dollar or two on an $8 lunch.

I even feel it's the other way around, in other countries the tip is usually the change, like $8 meal, just leave a $10 bill and leave, staff is either happy or neutral, in the US if you don't leave enough you get nasty looks as you exit even if the service was unremarkable.

It will not matter. Washington state law does not apply. The sovereign state of Washington laws are superseded and invalidated by mandatory binding arbitration. The rights set out in the State of Washington's constitution do not apply, for they are superceded and ignored by mandatory binding arbitration.

Any dispute will go to a monkey court instead.

> The sovereign state of Washington laws are superseded and invalidated by mandatory binding arbitration.

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.

Washington state law certainly does apply. The state did not sign a mandatory binding arbitration agreement. The employee/contractor may not have the right to bring suit against Instacart, but the state maintains that right.

Thought experiment: could Instacart assault, kidnap, or murder a delivery driver and claim that arbitration is the only venue for redress?

And even then, the worker does have the right to petition the court to review the clause itself. So the worker can still sue with the knowledge that it will be thrown out if the judge decides to uphold the arbitration clause.

Washington state law is very clear that Labor laws cannot be superceded by arbitration clauses, and that employees, including contractors, cannot waive their labor rights.

This 'sovereign state' is the same state that uses a (regressive) sales tax to generate revenue, rather than an income tax. Maybe it'll grow up and be an adult state one day.

And while it is not as important an issue, I, as a tipper, feel that I have been defrauded when this happens (now that I am aware that this does happen, I assume that it has probably been done with some tips I have made.) To be clear: this is not an alternative way of looking at the issue, it is an additional indictment stemming from the practice.

Switch to cash tipping. Tipping through CC or some other mechanism means at least one other party is involved and takes a cut. Cash tipping ensures the money at least is seen by the service staff.

Statistically speaking, the main party missing out on its cut when you tip in cash is the IRS. Not really an ethical concern for most of us, but for those who do feel bad about this, you could just overpay your taxes every year by say 10% of what you estimate you tipped in cash.

It is the obligation of the tipped employee to report their tips as income and pay taxes on them. True, it's difficult to audit so sometimes they don't, but that's hardly my problem.

The notion that you should overpay your own taxes to solve this is just bewildering.

The worker is supposed to report all cash tips. Since most of these workers probably pay little to no taxes, it really doesn’t harm the treasury, even if they fail to report.

Recipients of cash tips must report the income to the IRS for taxation purposes. The fact that many people choose to refuse to disclose their cash tip earnings doesn't mean that I should bulk up my taxes to make up for their fraud.

Companies must now report credit card transactions to the IRS. It's possible for them to see % of cash vs credit and the amount topped in credit. It would not be hard for them to audit you, the worker, if you report lower cash tips than the average than your boss reports in his business.

I’m pretty comfortable tipping via credit card because I understand that the card company and a bank is taking a cut. I am _not_ comfortable with something like this, where it’s not immediately clear what’s happening.

Anecdotally, I've been told by a lot of former restaurant workers that management generally walks off with most or all of the credit card tips. I generally tip in cash everywhere as a result.

I worked for years as a server and this never happened to me. We just got taxed on them and everyone didn't report their cash tips.

> I, as a tipper, feel that I have been defrauded when this happens

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.

Tip pooling/sharing is different in a few significant ways, though.

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.

I agree that the first two points are significant, but I don't think they're particularly relevant to the viewpoint "as a tipper, I feel I'm being defrauded when this happens".

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.

I feel like you maybe need to write a book about why you think a server sharing their tips around is equivalent to a corporation reducing wages based on tips.

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!

> 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.

>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?

I'm just one data point, but I imagine I'm not alone:

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?

You are not alone, just in a minority of people who are not familiar with something that is almost integral to US culture: that most people in the hospitality/services/restaurant industry depend more on tips than wages, and that the bigger the business (chain restaurants vs small local places) the more likely that their system involves pooling the tip money.

The point being made that you're repeatedly ignoring is that that in this scenario the staff gets the tips. Only the staff. In no point in time, whether it's individual tips or tips sharing, does the restaurant receive any part of the tips pool.

From the tipper's perspective, what would the difference be between the restaurant garnishing the waiter's tips vs the restaurant garnishing the waiter's tips and then giving some to the cook?

> And their hourly compensation, as ridiculously low as it may be, is never adjusted to compensate for higher than normal tips.

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.

Yes, minimum wage for servers is lower than for people who don't get tips. But it's still illegal to lower a person's wage below what was advertised because the person got a tip.

I think you're confused.

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 don't see how my previous comment was confused. It was drawing a distinction between "server wage" and what Instacart is doing.

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.

It’s somewhat bullshit that the people who did all the work making the tasty meal get nothing, while the person handing it to you gets 20 percent. Especially when Seattle minimum wage is $15/hour and tips cannot count as part of that.

Tip sharing as a concept is well extended.

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.

I've also wondered about it (though I know that bring a server is still by no means an easy task). I think Freakonomics had an episode on topping and reported (advertised?) some restaurants that split the tip between servers and cooks, or just don't let the customer tip but pay their employees more, upfront.

Yes, tips are bullshit

Tips are a holdover from the days of slavery. That's why it's so terrible.

https://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/post...

Farming is a holdover from the days of slavery too. Almost everything is.

If the restaurant pays you less due to the expectation of significant tipping, then I do have a bit hard time too see why the practice of Instacart and restaurants differ that much. I guess you need to be American to understand this tipping logic.

Instacart is dynamically adjusting down wages in response to tips; restaurants have a fixed wage, with a legislated minimum — even if it accounts for average tips.

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.

At my first waiting job, we didn't report our full tips because if our income including tips surpassed $8, our salary would be reduced. With the "benefit" that if we made less than minimum wage, we would be compensated. However base pay was $2.50/hour + tips, so do the math.

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.

  Somehow my responsibility

Right-to-work state or not, I know if no state in which that $20 clawback (as you describe it) was legal.

I have no doubt it was considerably illegal, however I would have been terminated immediately in a town where finding another job without a vehicle or parents would have been impossible, and since I was living on my own as a minor at this time it was pretty important that I maintained income.

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.

You all are being duped into contrived outrage. The example given in the OP link is very misleading and it is quite obviously cherry picking (to spark emotion) and is actually an outright lie. The truth is that Insticart actually pays a $10 minimum per delivery (this isn't even mentioned in the OP link) So how did this person make 80 cents an hour? The delivery was 0.7 miles and took 69 minutes. Ironically, under Insticart's previous policy, this delivery person would have made essentially the same amount. People making deliveries in dense urban areas (especially during traffic hours) can actually make far more than they used to.

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...

What the hell does that have to do with my comment and my own experiences?

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.

>"I worked these jobs while trying to support and educate myself so that I could get a better-paying job."

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/

This is really common in restaurants. Legal or not, it happens ALL the time. I've not only seen in in restaurants I've experienced it as a waiter as well.

>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.

In that case at least the staff get your tip. In this case Instacart is taking it for themselves.

There are issues with tip pooling, but there's one thing that I am absolutely sure of: my tip was not intended for the person's employer, and certainly not for anyone who claims to have arranged for the work to be done by a nominally self-employed contractor.

There's the crux. People may or may not think that their tip is going into a pool, but people definitely do not think that their tip is them saying to the establishment itself "I wish you'd charged me more!"

> 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.

Absolutely. Thought its definitely more pernicious to find out the restaurant owner was keeping the tips.

and it also reinforces the point that the whole tipping culture is ridiculous

Many many places do that. I worked in PizzaHut in NJ, and they pay you less than minimum wage initially. Then you report your earnings, and if your tips + salary / hoursworked < minimum wage, then they will pay you the difference to match minimum wage.

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.

> when asked why, he said they called customers to confirm we did receive tips

That would make some sense even. If a server doesn't get tips, that could be a sign that they are a bad server.

Also, that they were lying to him.

(Not agreeing with wage / tip theft, of course, but, as an employer, you need to be able to believe your employees.)

There is no moral obligation to say the truth when it is inappropriate to ask the question in the first place.

Many states have what’s known as a tipped minimum wage which is different from the minimum wage.

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.

WA doesn't have a separate tipped minimum wage, which makes the violation even more flagrant.

It may be, Federal Law is more specific on tipping, allocation, role definitions in the restaurant industry, but not well expanded to define other industries. State law can further regulate . In spirit, a tip is an independant transaction between 2 parties and should be accounted as one. You must pay min rate for position (2.xx+?) and employee must make above fed/state min wage with tips once accounted, you must increase your compensation to make up a defecit between wage + tips vs min wage. You cannot pay below a certain wage regardless of tip amount, or maybe that's only in specified roles. I'm not sure.

I love how even knowing the company is stealing from their employees isn't enough to get you to drop using their service. I'm going to send at most 3 angry tweets about this before I forget about it and move on to the next thing to be upset about today.

While I agree that the parent comment should probably drop them. This comment won't get them to stop. Maybe something like proposing alternatives, and empathy. We don't know them so let's not generalize them into the crowd of 3 tweeters.

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.

I'll drop them if it comes down to it, but if anyone actually read the link I shared it would show that what I'm doing is supporting the worker led action that is trying to make change. The workers themselves are asking people to keep using the service, but to only tip 22 cents in the app (paying the rest of the tip in cash) in protest.

I saw that and that's even better. Which is part of why I don't like people jumping on the shame bandwagon without knowing the full story.

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.

> how even knowing the company is stealing from their employees isn't enough to get you to drop using their service

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.

Can you give an example of more effective ways of bringing Instacart into compliance with your ideals? Do you mean, write them a sternly worded email?

I would make the hypothesis that mass sternly worded emails would have the same desired effect as mass service cancelling.

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

I downvoted this comment because it's got not one, but two complaints about being downvoted. Also, because it seems to be very low empathy ("Why shouldn't we reward thieves if they're effective thieves on your behalf?")

So ignoring 90% of the post and the entire point of it, got it

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

Tipping in cash seems like the best way to support the workers. Keep in mind the workers themselves are organizing this campaign- they want people to put a 22 cent tip (to show solidarity) and then tip in cash.

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.

GP is also tipping in cash, forcing instacart to pay the full boat and returning tip to its rightful place as additional (and untaxed!) income.

Seems like a not-bad approach.

Where did you get the notion that tips are supposed to be untaxed income?

Have you ever seen anyone accurately report tips earned in cash?

If they're under the IRS estimate? Absolutely.

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...

I've never heard wait staff making claims like that about the IRS, but what I can say is that if wait staff didn't want to get more money, they'd be quite unique in that respect...

I worked a tipped job where we signed an agreement with the IRS to automatically report a flat rate of tips, regardless of what we actually earned. So on a bad day it was certainly possible to earn less than minimum wage. That said, I don't know how common such agreements are.

Admittedly, that's a good point. I somewhat view that as electing to always take the standard deduction, regardless of whether you'd get more itemized.

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.

I've never worked at a job with tips, but that agreement sounds weird to me. Do you have any more information on that? What is it called?

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.

> 20% should be a baseline, for bad service, 25 for "decent" and 30% for good service...

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

Probably from real life.

It's not that they're "supposed to be." But they are.

Frankly tax fraud from people working for tips in the service sector should be among the very least of our worries as a society.

Still financially supporting literal thieves.

I'm not even going to send an angry tweet. I'm going to keep ordering. If a driver takes the job, at the price Instacart wants to pay, it's on the driver, of course. And this works until it doesn't! Once people quit driving for IC, THIS is the market price signal which will cause the system to reconfigure. If IC can't get drivers, they must pay more!

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.

Price signals are not the one, only, sole legitimate form of communication of preferences.

As a consumer, are you surprised that your tip is being used this way? I'd operate under the assumption that someone was being paid some sort of fair compensation, and my tip was an addition to whatever comp they earned.

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 person was actually paid $10.80 - $10 of which was tip, and $0.80 was from Instacart.

Yes? That doesn't meet my expectations. I'd expect them to paid whatever reasonable wage ($12/hr? $15/hr?) and then get the $10 on top of that.

It doesn't meet my expectations either, but your phrasing made me worry that you thought their total compensation was $0.80.

Instacart is defrauding their customers, who believe the tips are going to the driver, not straight into Instacart's pocket.

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.

> Maybe grade school should focus on reading comprehension.

You had a strong comment without the implied insult. Don't compromise your point to be mean to someone.

The proof of the sketchiness is that if you call the DoorDash support line, their phone reps are carefully trained with exact wording to be as misleading as possible about this. If you bring up the way payments depend on tips, they will carefully reiterate the talking points.

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.

I can't help but feel every time someone says "people don't understand the free market" its people who can't understand anything past the most simplistic explanation.

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.

There was a book [1] written about the myth that there are ethical consumers. Basically, no matter what people _say_ convenience, cost and other factors win out on the whole. I heard about the book in a recent Planet Money episode [2].

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/management/bu...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/01/18/686665609/epis...

The problem is the company, not the commenter you're responding to. Is it really necessary for you to shame them when they expressed concern about this, just because they won't take as extreme an action as you want them to? They're expressing some honesty and self-awareness, and you're directing your outrage at them instead of Instacart.

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.

Same here. I’ve been using instacart since 3 years almost everyday. But this is it. I am off it. I can’t believe the greed that some companies go to, to take advantage of people struggling to make ends meet. Shame on them

OP mentions the tip 22c and then the rest in cash to show instacart they shouldn't be doing this. I think it's a fair approach to see if they can be persuaded to make the right call.

That works, until it doesn't.

They are extremely likely to make another, more subtle bad call.

People who think this is OK can be very difficult to motivate.

Same. I just tried to cancel my membership but the link isn't working. I contacted customer service to get a working URL and I will report back here when I receive it.

yes, please always tip in cash for any service. there's no reason the business needs to be a middleman there.

It is important to be tipping in cash to begin with. Anyone doing unskilled labor and getting tips is not likely in a position to be able to afford the income tax on those tips. Always tip in cash.

Breezing past your suggestion that workers should do some tax fraud, not reporting your tips also lowers your social security earnings which is going to lower your payouts as well.

... it's been a while since I've been in the USA, but isn't the Earned Income Tax Credit still a thing? That might also show up if you're not earning that much...

Anyone who is doing an unskilled job that receives some component of their tips in cash is already “do[ing] some tax fraud”. Perhaps I am projecting my familiarity with the food service industry onto others; if you were not aware, this is the overwhelming norm with a rate of occurrence approaching 100%.

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.

Not everyone. I agree with you that it's very common, but an guarantee you from experience it's not 100%.

Keep in mind that if they're not earning much, they're probably not paying any income tax at all, and until they're earning at least $38,700, the most they'll be taxed on their taxable income is 12%.

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.

> Some of us have seen wages lowered by 30–40% overall.

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.

I've used it a half dozen times. The quality of has gone way down. The first time was amazing with the shopper suggesting a combo that was not only better but cheaper. And it was delivered an hour and a half later.

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.

> At a minimum I'm going to be tipping in cash.

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.

You didn't explain why that's "the right thing". Making sure the worker is paid well is the most important part.

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.

Respectfully, I think you're being a bit naive. At the moment, the evidence points to Instacart _not_ being the kind of company that will respond to "incentive to change policy", but that they _are_ a company that will commit wage theft. Pull the ripcord, delete accounts, tank all the metrics (MRR/DAU/WAU/MAU), and force the company to change or collapse. Subtle hints won't be effective here, as the response their community support indicates.

This is basically the argument for removing the minimum wage entirely. Some money is better than no money, right? I'd prefer not to live in that dystopia.

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 don't think you understand my argument at all. I'm suggesting that the tips be rearranged so that the working is making significantly more than minimum wage, and the company can't scam their way out of paying what they promised to lure in workers in the first place.

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.

exactly. Most people don't tip on Instacart so doing the right thing would be to make sure they pay their employees well.

Good for you, but arbitrary moral judgements against everyone else never goes well. Walking miles to gather food and water is the reality for billions of people.

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

> arbitrary moral judgements

This is redundant. You are making a general argument here against making decisions based on your own morality.

If Instacart closes down because of this kind of shitty behavior, people may learn a thing or two, and the next company in this space might decide that wage theft is not going to be part of their competitive advantage.

Sure, and meanwhile these workers don't get paid anything. There are ways to fix things without shutting it all down.

There appear to be plenty of other unethical companies to work for so this is unlikely to be a problem.

>>There are ways to fix things without shutting it all down.

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.

My issue is claiming moral righteousness of the struggle of shopping for your own food after using a luxury shopping app. I pointed out that the article itself asked customers to use a workaround so both sides get what they want.

Frankly I don't care about this company but equating this to slavery just comes across as more of the same virtue signaling.

Yep, exactly. I started using Instacart when it first came out. It was very convenient. But then I started to see more stories about how the company was changing the compensation structure. It got so bad that the delivery people were leaving flyers in the bags, made by that person, explaining how Instacart was basically screwing them.

I haven't used Instacart since then.

maybe the right thing is just stopping tipping altogether? Then Instacart will be forced to pay a somewhat reasonable wage

Doordash too, apparently:

https://notipdoordash.com/

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.

Argh! I'll be closing my DoorDash account right now and also sending that website to anyone I know who uses DoorDash.

I used the support form to request a full refund of the component of all tips that I’ve made that were used to offset DoorDash’s expenses. I doubt they’ll do anything but close the case but it’s wirth the annoyance.

I tried to find a way to close the account but there does not seem to be one.

The reason it pisses me off so much is I have used them like, 3+ times a week for 2 years, and every time I felt good about tipping which of course now feels... well, not good.

I feel exactly the same about it, albeit weekly for 3ish years.

If you go to support and search for how to cancel your account, they tell you to file a support request asking for your account to be closed. So you did the right thing.

I wish I had thought to ask for a refund of tips too, but I already sent my support request.

If they refuse, you could probably take them to small claims court for fraud, depending on the total value and how much you care. Though you'll have to do your own research on how to prove fraud in court or hire a lawyer...

That's disappointing. Anyone heard anything about Grubhub?

hmm... what if tipping itself is a problem?

I think this is a good step towards de-incentivizing people to tip for everything.

100%. I expect a class action suit from consumers.

> That's right: the customer's tip doesn't get added to the worker's check — it just gets deducted from what Instacart pays. In other words, up-front tips go to Instacart, not to the worker.

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"

> My understanding is that the Fair Labor Standards Act does allow for employers to whithold tips

I think this sentence says the opposite of what you intended it to.

Correct. I fixed it.

Yup, and Washington state specifically does not allow tip credits. Tips in WA are always on-top or hourly wage. (Which is why even a terrible bartender in Seattle can do pretty well.)

But as soon as someone 1099's you, you're out of luck. Found this out the hard way when I got 1099'd by a startup I was working for in 2017. The IRS has a mechanism on the Federal level to fix things enough to avoid the higher tax burden, but WA state explicitly requires a W2 from an employer for even the most basic of unemployment benefits (the determination letter from the IRS apparently doesn't count).

So go the other way and report them for abusing 1099, for 1099 to be legal they can't even directly give you any hardware, you need to pay for it yourself, I think there are even laws about using their desks.

What I'm trying to say is that even if you report them for 1099 on the federal level, you do not necessarily convert to "employee" status in a state's eyes. This has an impact on your ability to file for unemployment, tax burdens, etc. You'd think that the federal opinion would influence the state's, but there's a breakage.

Also add on the fact that in Seattle the tipped minimum wage is 12/hr, where you only need to serve 20 dollars an hour worth of food in order to be making above minimum wage with tips should you also be busing your own tables.

Instacart delivery workers are classified as independent contractors, which allows the company to flout basic labor laws. This is commonplace in digital age 'gig economy' jobs, but dates back to the early days of food delivery - e.g., most pizza delivery drivers are classified as independent contractors.

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.

I would agree, if the app didn't say "tip for delivery person" instead of "tip for instacart" or something maybe more ambiguous like "tip." Take a look at the screenshots of their app being discussed here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2018/04/24/instacart-...

Are you sure those aren't the upcoming changes? There's another older screenshot further down that has more ambiguous wording.

Edit: welp, even that says it 100% goes to the person doing the shopping. Gross.

Insidious, right? 100% of the tip technically does go to your shopper.

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.

What’s more, this article is made by employees from Washington state, where they don’t even have a separate tipped minimum wage.

I think that may be the theory Instacart is using, but I suspect it hasn't been tested, and that they're doing this under the move fast, flout legal conventions until someone makes you stop startup strategy.

> Instacart delivery workers are classified as independent contractors

Only Instacart believes this.

They don’t believe it either, but it’s convenient lie, like corporations being people. It’s ridiculous, but as long as it’s the law and the people benefiting tip their politicians well, whomp whomp.

Dismissing corporate personhood as “a convenient lie” is pretty flip when the Supreme Court has ruled it is enshrined in the constitution.

But boy I’d love to dis-enshrine it.

Let’s not overstate the issue. The SCOTUS has a history of convenient lies, from the legal basis of segregation to fuckery around evolution.

> You can't just throw the word in your app and do what you want with the money it generates.

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'

I'm very curious to find out what may be in instacart's TOS here. Because at face value, and without hyperbole, this does look like it could be fraud. It seems unlikely that their legal team was not aware of potential issues here.

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 hope that one of the employers in the new “gig economy” gets taken to court over the contractor-versus-employee issue and that the case sets a sane precedent. An old joke (“western koan”?) comes to mind:

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.)

Isn't this exactly what restaurants all over the country do? Tips count as wages, and then the employer pays on top of that to make up the difference.

How many restaurants have $1.9B in funding and are valued at ~$8B? There's also an obfuscation on payment to workers that doesn't happen in a restaurant.

My understanding is that wages from the restaurant are fixed and tips do not count towards them unless the employee does not hit minimum wage- at which point the restaurant has to pay them more. I have never heard of a restaurant paying an employee less because they got more tips.

But I have never worked in a restaurant so I could be completely wrong.

So wait, isn't this a good thing? It discourages people to tip.

They don't actually withhold the tip. The sentence you quoted is being sloppy. If the tip was $50, the worker would get the full $50.

The problem is that they use the tip as an excuse to pay basically nothing. It's not acting like a real tip.

This is a distinction without a difference. There is no practical difference between paying less "because tip" and not paying the tip. 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.

> There is no practical difference between paying less "because tip" and not paying the tip.

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.

Also the increasingly common practice where a seller takes your money, wrongs you in the most blatant way, such as just not sending half of your order (Instacart), charges you for wasting your time and never providing any service (Uber) and when you complain, they keep your money and give you their Monopoly money instead.

I feel like for someone somewhere in the attorney general's office, prosecuting these should be someone's full time tax paid job.

More evidence as to why tipping culture needs to die. Tipping fundamentally takes away the responsibility of paying someone for their work from the employer to the customer. In what other business context do I pay an employee of a company I deal with directly outside of the service industry where tipping is common? Wages are a cost of doing business. Pay the worker enough. If you want to still provide them an incentive to work hard, offer them incentive plans! Bring up your prices to reflect the true cost of your product or service. It's time to abolish tips.

Tipping is the "trickle down"-myth's small scale cousin.

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.

I think many people just haven't traveled to for e.g. many European countries where tipping culture is mostly non-existent because over there people the service industry receive appropriate wages and the prices of things are adjusted accordingly. The quality of service is good, and the people working seem much happier. They have a guaranteed income for their time.

As a customer tipping culture is highly annyoing to me, I don't want to be upsold three times per dining at least. The attention given, coming form european non-tipping culture, just feels absurdly fake to me.

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.

>The attention given, coming form european non-tipping culture, just feels absurdly fake to me.

Agreed.

In Europe the cultural meaning of a tip is also different than the US -- you tip for superb service, and it's generally only in restaurants.

And also (in Europe) most of the time you just add enough tip to round off the number. E.g. if it's 390 you pay 400. Locals (mostly) never tip too much. Particularly in countries where people eat outside often, e.g. Italy. You add that little extra to round up the total, never mind how many people you are in the group. Tourists usually tip way too much.

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.

Why do they get offended?

It's better explained on this page than how I can explain it: https://www.tripsavvy.com/tipping-in-japan-1458316

> In countries such as Japan where gratuity isn't commonplace, leaving a tip inappropriately is almost like saying: "This business probably isn't doing well enough to pay you a proper salary, so here's a little something extra."

> 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

There must be some different kind of worldview here.. I guess it must have something to do with coming from a tipping culture vs a non-tipping culture. If I imagine myself, in my current job, dropping by a customer and deliver the updated product, and then the customer tries to hand over a fiver. I would go, in my mind, "What? What am I supposed to do with that? Do I look like a beggar that just happened to bring the product? I have a wage, I don't need to be "supported" with breadcrumbs by someone who think he's above me. I'm not a dog." And so on. It would definitely put a sour taste on everything. And actually my company's code of ethics (we're a worldwide company) do forbid receiving anything from customers, with the exception of the occasional shared lunch.

as a European I must disagree about the quality of service. I only was a few months in the US, but the quality of service was much better than here. I don't know if there's a correlation with tipping though.

As a European who regularly experiences atrocious QoS in restaurants, I'd be willing to bet it has something to do with the fact they get paid a decent wage whether or not they even notice the customer.

As a customer I prefer "fake" service over being ignored, but as an employee I would prefer the European system.

As an American I also agree, since restaurants in Europe have to pay a higher wage, they can only afford a couple wait staff, which definitely makes it harder to get service.

Waiters in Europe also seem to be less interested in coming to your table.

Not being flippant but as a genuine question, besides just bribery, remnants of colonialism or heavy tourism destinations for North Americans, is a tipping culture existent anywhere besides North America?

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).

Most people - traveled or not - would be okay with this if they knew the service person was making a fair wage. The problem is that service workers are not fairly compensated in the current system so our options are (a) hurt the service worker by not tipping to make a point, or (b) tip so the service worker is fairly compensated.

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.

I think it's easier to keep the tipping culture because everyone in the USA is already used to having extra random fees added to the sticker price of things.

In places where the tax and all other costs are already factored into the price, tipping is reserved for truly exceptional service.

Well it should start with you right? Are you willing to never tip again in your entire life? If so, let us know how it goes (or maybe is going?)

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.

I can't down vote your snarky comment, but yes I'd be absolutely happy to stop tipping, if the country I lived in paid fair wages to the people working in the service industry. The idea of rewarding high performers can be similarly achieved with incentive plans and at least guarantees people working in the service industry the minimum wage allowable by law. So for now, I'm going to continue tipping the culturally appropriate amount to ensure my server gets a fair wage and I will also support any activist initiative to abolish tipping.

And that's why tipping won't die because the few people who can make bank off of sob stories and bad logic.

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.

Some people like to be in control, that's ok. Tipping bundles a simple service task to the in most jobs needless component of giving the customer the illusion of attention. If you're a waitress by choice and tipping works for you, that's fine too, but it simply doesn't scale to a large scale gig based economy. Being able to extract that amount of tips is a skill, that not everybody has. If venues could, they probably would take money for customer facing service job opportunities to work there for tips to exploit that skill, which would be the more honest free market model in my opinion.

It does. Most people I know in SF, including me, don't tip. Waiters here are way more used to it and don't necessarily expect it.

You are simply wrong. It's trivially easy to disprove your several comments about SF tipping culture with a few google searches.

Don't confuse the fact that nobody has confronted you for the idea that waiters don't expect you to tip them.

I live in SF. I don't tip, most of my acquaintances don't tip either.

I for one wasn't aware of a no-tip culture in San Francisco. I would totally not do it provided I was absolutely sure that this culture was a thing.

You should start this in your city! We call "wasters" the waiters that expect a tip here.

Actually, I'm currently in San Francisco, and I haven't heard anything of the sort. I probably should ask around though.

If you're in places where non-tipping is expected and the staff are paid based on that, fine. If you're doing this in places where staff pay is determined based on expectation of tips, you may be an exemplar of what people hate about Silicon Valley dudebro culture.

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/

Restaurants in other part of the country will raise someone's paycheck if the tip didn't reach a minimum threshold. We call waiters who expect tips "wasters" here in the bay.

That's not a bro thing, just a shift in culture.

> Waiters and waitresses like to be tipped

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.

Following that last point, it sounds like customer preference is shaping the demographics. If people prefer to be served by women, and tip them more, the field will skew female.

The first one is to show that both customer preference and perceived customer action affect tipping. In many ways these have self enforcing realities.

I worked a tipped job for years and hated that aspect of it. It made my income more stressful and erratic than a normal wage. I can confirm what others have pointed out, that it also reinforces stereotypes.

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.

> Are you willing to never tip again in your entire life?

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.

Too bad every restaurant in the US that has tried to eliminate tipping has failed. Servers end up with less money, patrons end up paying more than with tips, and many patrons actually like tipping.

That's not true. Many restaurants in SF refuses tips. It works well.

There has been a no tipping movement in san francisco that has worked quite well. People don't tip anymore here and it is not socially accepted to do it.

As an SF resident I don't seem much evidence of this movement. I get prompted to tip very frequently for counter service, even at food trucks. People must be tipping if that's the case, although I don't watch other patrons.

generally people don't give tips for these things. It's just the default for a lot of these square point of sales. I don't know why square would do this honestly, this is just encouraging wrong behavior.

It’s configurable by the business, and you know exactly why they do it, to subtly push people to pay more money. There’s plenty of counter service fast food restaurants where I would never even think of giving a tip if paying in cash, but when the Square terminal prompts me whether I want to leave a 15% or 20% tip and then I have to go into “custom” and type in 0, I feel like a jerk. I know they’re just manipulating me and I hate it, but you’ve got of assume that they make significantly more money that way. Recently I’ve seen more and more restaurants adjust the default tip amounts higher, one of my favorite cafés in North Beach recently changed the settings on their Clover point-of-sale system so the tip options are “20% okay service”, “25% great service”, “30% amazing service”, and “(other)”. It’s infuriating.

I was in SF on a layover last October. Definitely tipped on our lunch and a beer downtown. But maybe that just outed us as foreigners. We didn’t get any odd treatment for it, either.

tipping culture has died in part of the country. As another comment pointed out, most people don't tip in San Francisco.

It's funny (to me, anyway) that this sort of things affects only America (and I guess Canada?) This odd culture you have there of tipping and how it's so tightly integrated into your society.

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 :)

Legally in America, employees who get tips instead of wages have the tips added onto a minimum of $2.13, which is three times more than these contractors were making. More than that, these contractors are from Washington state, which doesn't allow this exception - the minimum wage for everyone is $12/hour (except if you're an Instacart "employee," of course). Many other states also have higher minimum wages. Also, these Instacart workers were hired under a different pay system (wage + tips) and then this replaced it, while regular tipped employees at least knew it coming in.

Yes, and Canada.

Expected tip amounts have also been going up, I assume now because companies/restaurants want to hide a price rise behind it.

hide a price rise?

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%.

Hide as in not raise the menu prices as much, by letting expected tips go up, letting tips pay for more of the cost.

The end result is of course higher prices, but the sticker shock is lower on the menu.

Ah okay, that i agree with.

I have moved to the US not that recently.

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.

We have also obfuscated what you make. Combined its very strange.

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?

Isn’t this similar to what DoorDash (a YC company) is doing? https://notipdoordash.com

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".

Uber/UberEats drivers get 100% of every tip, that is completely outside the equation for their pay.

Sorry, that's what I meant: an independent contractor getting 100% of their tips doesn't mean Uber/UberEats hasn't adjusted the amount they pay the contractor.

I was a huge user of Instacart 2 years ago when my nearest grocery store turned into one of the busiest Whole Foods in my city that I didn't enjoy dealing with.

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.

100% of the tip goes to the driver yes. but, that statement is completely compatible with instacart changing how much they pay their driver for that delivery down to 80 cents. I hope this was a mistake on the part of instacart.

> I hope this was a mistake on the part of instacart.

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.

Come to think of it their aggressive upselling techniques always left a bad taste in my mouth. I do like the service but they really need to up their pay for their drivers.

Drivers also have wear, tear and usage of their car, which a shopper does not. Also, the shopper is much less likely to get in a deadly accident than a driver. Not saying shoppers don't deserve tips too. Just kinda laying out all the costs and risks of driving.

Wow. I'm cancelling my instacart account immediately. They've made so many mistakes in the past, but I liked their app. But this crosses the line by a mile. When I give someone a tip, it's not because I chose to pay more for an order just for fun, it's because I want the worker to get extra. They don't get to charge me a service fee, and ask me to tip, and then not give the worker my service fee. That's just crazy.

I'm also pretty sure that they say that 100% of the tip goes to the driver when you place an order.

They probably think the money is fungible.

“We gave the driver 100% of the $10 from your tip, and withheld our $10 from their wages.”

Instacart started out by secretly marking up groceries. Once that game was played out, it seems they started secretly marking down employee (oh sorry, contractor) wages

Frankly I can't fathom how this company is still in business. I live in the bay area and I don't know a single person who's ever used it or mentions it.

There's not as much competition outside of the bay area. This is in Washington State where they likely have a huge market share.

I've not really understood the point of grocery delivery other than in cities where car ownership is uncommon. And even there, you can rent a Zipcar once a quarter to stock up on bulky or heavy items (toiler paper, bags of rice or flour etc.) That's what I did when I was a car-less student. For other groceries, especially produce, I prefer to pick stuff out myself. And going to the store myself often exposes me to new products that I would not otherwise have learned about.

Well in Atlanta for example, it's either Instacart or Prime Now, and Prime Now from Whole Foods is about the worst grocery delivery service possible. Mostly because you maybe get half of what you ordered.

Hi. I'm a Fast Company reporter, and we've been investigating this and many other issues for about a week, including asking Instacart to explain them all. Stay tuned for a full report this week or early next. Thanks, Sean Captain @seancaptain

Would love to see the article expanded on with a legal analysis of the situation.

I used to work for a delivery company with this same pay structure. This is garbage and its taking advantage of young people who are looking for jobs.

Serious question: if somebody knows that a job like this is such a ripoff (even if the rates aren't advertised, you _will_ find out soon enough, if via stories like this), why would somebody take a job like this?

The reason people take jobs like this is that they don't have other options, often for a variety of reasons. I know that a lot of the people I talk to need the flexible hours due to family obligations. For some these types of jobs are supplemental- they aren't the primary source of income, but provide a bit extra when money is tight.

For some people though there just aren't a lot of jobs available that match their education and experience.

Because they need the money.

People that are desperate for money are frequently exploited. Whether it's through wage theft, or unsafe employment practices, or simply demeaning behavior.

Not everyone is a software developer with companies fighting over them. Some really don't have options, and the choice is either get no income and be unable to pay your bills, or get screwed over but get some money to pay the bills.

> Some really don't have options.

Unfortunately, in this economy, it's probably more accurate to say "most people really don't have options" rather than "some"

I thought the labor market was actually very strong right now?

The job market is as strong as it has been in the past ~30+ years?

It's important to keep in mind that a low unemployment rate does not say anything about the overall quality of jobs in the market.

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.

yes. "unemployment is low" is a measure of the job market. we can say it's "strong" by that measure. but, as you say, when we look at the actual jobs there's a helluva lot of retail and other low wage, limited benefit positions, positions whose salaries have lagged far behind the skyrocketing costs of health care and higher education.

Because they need to. We're talking about unskilled work. You take what you can get. Such companies know there are unskilled workers that will put up with it and take advantage of that.

All of the waiters/cooks/waitresses at a low-quality diner I frequent regularly have felonies for robbery or drugs. Ever since I've been going there I would say the vast majority of new hires have been people who couldn't get a job in other places because of their felony records and lack of education.

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.

Is this common? When I tip it's always with the intent of helping the individual, never the company. The much larger original bill is their share, in case they've forgotten.

Are cash tips an effective method of keeping grubby corporate hands out of it?

IHOP will adjust wages based on tips, they try to equal it out to minimum wage. My wife lasted about 3 weeks there. It was also by far the hardest I've ever seen her work, and for context we met in the Army.

I think I finally understand why my former very blue-collar coworkers would never leave a tip when we went out for lunch. I guess they had better information on the local businesses.

A lot of places' wait staff can make fairly decent money. They will usually make below minimum wage, but they often come out way ahead. So at some level, most businesses where you're expected to tip are using tips to subsidize wages. But there are some who take it to the next level, like IHOP or Instacart.

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.

No, that’s just rude (given that the tipping culture still exists). If they really wanted to show solidarity they’d leave cash tips, which their server could then forget to report.

I wonder how well using cash tips could solve the problem. I know there are restaurants where servers are required to turn in any cash tips. If a server "forgets to report" and always has far less tips than his/her co-workers, I imagine that he/she would simply be replaced for someone else that does earn tips to report. The employer could say the lack of tips is indicative of poor performance, too.

Most resturants ask you to claim your tips when cashing out, but most just fudge it. They arent going to go through the waiters pockets, as tips are their money and disclosed only to the government. It gets tricky because they try to be the middleman. Just tip cash.

It's an expected business structure in every state where the tipped minimum wage is below actual minimum wage.

Their help section specifically states :

"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

Goddamn liars.

What you quoted is not a lie. 100% of the tip is going to the shopper. The problem is they are not paying the shopper on top of the tip.

I am sure you are being humorous, but anyway, the FTC says:

"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.

Why doesn't the headline read "Instacart (YC S12)"?

I would like to see this corrected.

Maybe the (YC [SW]\d{2}) is good news only ?

lol we really needed a regex for this

It's only used for positive news

And the mods remove it if it's posted on negative news.

Wait, you thought HackerNews was impartial?

Brb getting banned and blacklisted.

This need to be higher

Unless the mods add the YC tag posthumously to posts that forget it, it is the mistake of the original poster

They don't add that to companies most people will already recognize:

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.

“Most people” surely doesn’t apply here. I’d never heard of them, much less knew they were YC.

It should be automatically added to the name of any YC company. A browser extension could do it.

I have never understood the tipping concept.

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.

Or increase the cost of your product or service and offer incentives to employees after you've already raised their wages.

DoorDash does the same thing of “stealing” tips. Either you should tip in cash or not at all.

Not only do they steal tips, they also jack up the prices of the food itself. I make six figures and honest to god I have no idea how anyone affords to use DoorDash.

The restaurants, like the grocery stores in Instacart's case, determine the cost of food in their respective apps.

That's not true.

> 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...

That's a 3 yr old article

It's a better source than you provided.

this is not always true. my restaurant was listed on doordash without my permission or request, with a butchered menu and completely incorrect prices.

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...)

Did you contact a lawyer about this incident at all? It seems like a wilful misrepresentation (advertising that your establishment is available on this service when you've explicitly said no) that switches into a kind of extortion (the threat of de-listing).

I heard of this happening in Canada as well.

DoorDash seems to be the best value to me with their DoorPass option. I don't find the markup to be completely unreasonable, it makes sense to me and never felt shady, they have to make their money somehow.

It becomes a bit more reasonable with 2 or more people. But yeah, even then the pricing is insane on these services. From my recent Caviar order (USD):

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"

I want the worker to receive 100% of the tip as much as anyone.

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.

> The US needs law changes that outlaw tipping.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Now they're getting minimum wage and I still feel the need to tip.

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.

What sense of "obligation" are you referring to? If it is obligatory then it definitely should be outlawed, because it becomes false advertisement of prices.

> What sense of "obligation" are you referring to?

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.

Agree. Though the more I think about it, this is an opportunity for disruption. TaaS. An e-commerce platform, maybe even validated and protected on the blockchain, where users can exchange digital payments in an effort to circumvent these horrible practices.

+1 for outlawing tipping. Add it as a fixed cost of the service or don't. No in between.

It should also be noted that the need to tip for the perspective of workers having a decent standard of living varies a ton from place to place. In Seattle the tipped minimum wage is 12 dollars an hour at small employers and doesn't exist at large one's (where the minimum wage for large employers is 16/hr).

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.

> Plus the whole tipping thing is extremely inconsistent. Floral delivery? No tip. Pizza delivery? Tip.

Let's face it. People tip the Dominoes guy so they don't get spit in their pizza the next time.

An honest question: why can't you call up Dominoes and report it then?

Why the scare quotes? They’re not “stealing” tips. They’re stealing tips.

Quotes are because it's probably legal what they're doing.

I think this is great. It makes tipping useless.

How is this not wage theft? They're literally taking the tips from workers and using it to pay them. I'm tipping the worker, not Instacart.

I thought that was simply how tipping worked. Wage+tips have to average (at least) minimum wage.

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.

Many, many decades ago when I worked in a restaurant, the rule was tipped employees needed to be paid at least 50% of the standard minimum wage. At the end of the day, if the employee didn't clear the minimum wage rate with the total of their wage + tips, the employer was required to fork over the additional amount to equal the minimum wage.

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.

This is ridiculous! We need to start moving away from tipping. This reminds me of US restaurants. I'd much rather be charged mandatory service fees. It's a poor way to signal poor food/service by hurting those in front than the cooks behind.

WTF is going on?!

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.

DoorDash does the same thing, which is why I stopped using them as well.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash/comments/963kyv/if_you_are...

I read it as they paid him only $0.38 (not $0.80) for his time.

You are correct. You can't really count mileage reimbursement as "pay." It's a reimbursement for wear and tear, fuel, etc.

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.

I'm European, in my country if an employer only try to do something like that go strait to the jail. Now is in progress a process to guarantee to the guys employed in the delivery of food by bike a minimum wage because they was exploited by some companies, but that case isn't distantly comparable to this one. I can't believe this behavior it's tolerated in a civilized nation.

What absolute garbage, it defies the entire point of tipping. Is this even legal? If a restaurant got caught doing this, they would definitely lose many customers or even get run out of business.

It's the norm in many states, so I don't think so. I grew up in IL where waiters make something like $3 / hour. If that + tips is less than minimum wage then the company has to make up the difference. Not quite the same as they don't dock your pay if you make good tip money, but same principle.

It works out to the same end result (with the exception that waiters usually have some absolute minimum wage they can earn, so if a waiter makes 20$/hr in tips the restaurant still need to pay a bit on top of that.

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.

It’s 100% illegal in Washington state. Probably not other states though.

Why do they even have a “tip” field is beyond me, you already paid for delivery, what do you tip for??!!! And on top they ask you for a tip amount before the service is even performed. Tip is to reward for extra work that server did, what extra work is there in food delivery service? And how do you measure it before you even got the food??

The whole tipping system should be stopped. The businesses will be forced to start paying fair wages to their workers.

A restaurant in my neighborhood did not have tipping before New York raised its minimum wage to $15 because they paid their servers a "fair wage". It has since re-implemented tipping.

My wife looked into instacart and we canceled after learning they don't provide business car insurance for their drivers. What a scam.

This is terrible for the worker and highly deceptive to the client. Surely this is fraud? Collecting tips but not passing it on?

Of course it's illegal to steal tips, but actually enforcing that is another matter. Companies will blatantly build illegal business models. And of course some developer coded this automated tip stealing.

This is why I support unions... when you have strength in numbers, you can have an ethical code that can be followed.

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.

Can you cite any statute that says this is illegal?

Might fit under fraud. I hope it does. When I first learned of this tactic, I felt tricked. I assumed with a tip, that I was boosting someone’s salary for a job well done. I’m sure it’s debatable, and that my assumption was wrong? But I imagine most people feel this what a tip is.

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.

It's explicitly illegal under Washington State law:

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."

It's absolutely defrauding the customer, in addition to whatever laws there might be specifically about wages. They're asking you for money with a description of what the money is for that is between misleading and an outright lie. That's fraud.

Yes. Washington State law is explicit about this.

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

I guess this is how you actually disrupt a labour-intensive industry. You lower costs, or provide a much better service that somehow established companies haven't been able to provide profitably.

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.

(The following is completely predicated on the truth of the report that a customer tipping $x doesn't result in workers' total compensation being increased by $x)

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.

Uber was great until they introduced tipping, and somehow now we are supposed to tip employees for delivering stuff when the entire business model of the company we are also paying is delivery?! Why are we supposed to tip door dash drivers, but not Amazon delivery drivers or FedEx/UPS/USPS? I refuse to use Door Dash due to the expectation of tipping their employees on top of the super high up-charges and service fee I'm paying FOR DELIVERY.

Tipping has ruined this whole new batch of convenience services for me.

people should simply NOT tip. At restaurant maybe because it is socially mandatory, but anywhere else, a signal should be sent that it is stupid and doesn't make any economical sense to tip!

It is not "socially" mandatory as much as the workers suffer otherwise because they are paid less than minimum wage.

the market will necessarily sort itself out here. sad but true. if the workers are paid less, they will find employment elsewhere, the company will suffer (as they rightfully should).

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.

> if the workers are paid less, they will find employment elsewhere

Thats a big assumption that is demonstrably untrue in many specific cases.

Come on. It IS socially mandatory.

People are harassed for not tipping. People look down on you for not tipping. Even, for bad service, we still have to tip.

If an employee who earns tips does not make the equivalent of minimum wage pay his or her hours worked, then the employer is required to pay difference (i.e., employees will be paid at least minimum wage for their work)

Not tipping still makes the workers still suffer, though, because with tips, many of many of them make above minimum wage.

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.

In the case of on-demand companies, the workers are independent contractors so they're not even entitled to minimum wage.

They suffer because we made it socially mandatory to tip, allowing at the same time the businesses to pay under minimum wage for workers.

What about in states like California where that's illegal, even if their tips make up the difference between their actual wage and the minimum wage?

You're only hurting the workers; their employer's don't care.

That's exactly what they want you to think, and that's why this whole tipping nonsense continues. If you stop tipping, Workers will not accept to work for low wages anymore.

Bu continuing to tip, you indirectly hurt workers.

>Workers will not accept to work for low wages anymore.

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.

The reality is that workers are part of an offer and demand market which is already adjusted to be at equilibrium with the tips.

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.

Sure; they'll pay minimum wage or slightly above it. It's not a skilled position (I wanted tables for three years) and most places will take pretty much anyone who walks in. The vast majority of jobs are Chili's, not Morton's.

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.

I agree with this 100%. It's the same short-sighted approach that led to teachers getting paid pittances and forced to buy supplies out of pocket.

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.

The signal is not sent by not tipping. You can disagree with it all you want, but the people who decide to institute tipping will not hear you if you don't tip.

They will, by being force to pay a correct minimum wage (or lose the worker)

> (or lose the worker)

Not how it works, unfortunately.

The tip economy SUCKS. When will it stop! Now it's part of the future that is being sold to us as the new nirvana. Why can't things change?

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.

This is why I never tip on Prime Now, Instacart, Uber, Lyft, or Postmates: I don't trust them. Show me whatever the price is, and based on that I'll decide whether to use your service today. I'm not interested in voluntarily giving your business money.

I've always wondered why someone hasn't tried to reverse the model on these delivery service apps (postmates, doordash, instacart)

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.

> the people who are requesting the delivery should have to set a rate at order time

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.

I suspect DoorDash is doing something similar, that's why I always choose 0 tip on the app and tip them cash when they arrive.

German reader here. Because of minimum wage you'd only tip if service was good (or always tip if you have enough money, my parents generation are more frugal than I am). Delivery services often get around minimum wage because they use the "Uber" trick and technically the drivers are "self-employed", always tipping those folks.

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.

Officially yes, all tips are taxable. However people that get cash tips often don't report and pay taxes on them.

Tips are taxable income in the US, even to the point where the IRS will assume a minimum amount of tip income, even if you didn't receive that much.

Here is an article about the Supreme Court case that upheld it.

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jun/18/business/fi-tips18

Here is a difference between EU countries. In France, you cannot even tip by credit card or anything else that can be controlled by the employer or the state. It's only cash and at your discretion. Thus, it cannot even be a taxable event. However you need to have some cash if you want to tip.

I think you can, you have to ask "I want to tip x euros" before the waiter puts your cc in the machine. It feels really awkward and so most don't do it

Indeed you are right, you can do it! However they need to add a line to the invoice to sell you something more (e.g. a bottle of water). And when they will report what they have sell and what they have buy there will be a difference. So for few customers it may be OK, but they can't do it every time.

Instacart is not the only one of these apps doing this. Amazon Flex/Prime Now also does the same thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexDrivers/comments/66zkx7/w...

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.

Update: Instacart is introducing a $3 minimum on all jobs, in the wake of the 80-cent debacle. https://www.fastcompany.com/90300962/reeling-from-algorithm-...

FWIW Good Eggs directly states their pro living wage (and no tip necessary) policy on their website:

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.

This makes me wonder why people bother working for Instacart when there are so many alternatives. I googled for "service economy gig" and got this huge list:

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. :-)

What makes you think these other jobs haven't adopted, or won't adopt the same 'business model'?

Many people are willing to work for minimum wage, so I'm not sure I understand your question.

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!

Instacart doesn't list any company officers or important contacts on their website. I guess because they would end up dealing with irate customers too much.

But here are the vile people responsible for this practice: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/instacart#section-cu...

This really isn't that different than tipping at your favorite bar. Employers artificially pay service workers less than they should with the assumption that the customer will make up the rest. The real answer is to supporting the broken tipping model. Pay people an honest wage and expect them to do their job without expecting a consumer to pay a bribe to get good service.

Could someone explain to me what's up with those tips? If I'm doing a job I expect to be paid a specific amount. Tips to me seem like pittance which you would give to someone who at least can't work or something, for services you just pay a normal price which the owner of the place needs to calculate with.

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."

Absolutely terrible practice, and dishonest to both their workers and customers. Shame on Instacart -- never using them again.

Always tip in cash. Tips should be a purely private thing, nobody but the tipper and the tipped should know about the tip.

Technically the IRS gets a cut, but yes, no private entity needs to know.

Perhaps it does but my opinion is it should not.

Gigeconomy is just modern day slavery dressed as an informal employee contract with, "work your own hours".

This is why the tipping system in the US is absurd. The whole "you must tip because they get paid peanuts" argument is a circular logic. How about making sure that the worker gets paid fairly by their employer and customers can then optionally tip for outstanding service?

The idea that things are the way they are because people are convinced by an "argument" is a common misconception.

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.

Especially in the US. Just look at their ancient measuring system.

Hey, I really enjoy the imperial system (besides fahrenhiet). It gets more fun when you get beyond yards and pounds and into stones, hundredweight, and imperial tons and rods, chords, and furlongs.

Oddly, in Ireland, we often still use feet, inches, and stone, but mostly only for measuring _people_.

That's not the logic behind the tipping system. It's, "tipping incentives employees to perform well because they'll make more money for doing a better job".

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.

People do make the argument that you should tip generously because they're poorly paid.

The very people writing these workers’ paychecks are effectively making this argument.

The very people collected those checks are making those arguments, directly. Lets be honest, service staff prefer the way it is. They can prey on their customers, and they end up making more than they would if paid min wage.

Most service staff are probably thinking within a set framework, where getting a minimal base pay is a foregone conclusion.

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.

Anecdotally, Montreal certainly has a tipping culture _and_ pays service staff the same minimum that everyone else is subject to. The restaurant prices aren’t any different from metros in the US. Really, there is no advantage to taking a lower wage to anyone but the restaurant owners issuing that wage.

And it helps them dodge taxes.

Yeah, but, like the parent points out, that's not the rationale for having a tipping culture in the first place. It's just a well-intentioned attempt by people who live in a tipping culture to try and make it a bit less crappy for the people who have to suffer getting paid that way.

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.

I agree with you that tipping is a consequence of the system but I would argue the actual logic behind tippipng is that it allows employers to pay their employees less. Per federal law, tips can be used by an employer to satisfy the difference between the actual paid wage and the federal minimum. I would be very surprised if it was a waiters lobbying group pushing for this type of legislation. Several studies have also shown that there is very little relation between the quality of service provided and the amount of the tip.

Tipping really is a method for the employer to hold onto as much money as possible at the expense of staff.

As with many things in a America tipping started as a good idea, it was then taken too far and turned into a rather draconian setup where everybody is caught in a system you can't get out of.

From what I understand of US history, tipping was introduced when hotels and restaurants lost money because of the prohibition, as a way to supplement wages.

So it sounds like it is absolutely used as a bad way to supplement wages.

Plus all studies done on tipping have disputed this. Tips don't depend on the quality of service but rather on how attractive and flirty the waitress is.

That is a clear quality expressed in service. Why shouldnt you optimise for customer satisfaction?

Service is defined by how satisfied the customer is. Being attractive and flirty is a component (maybe not absolutely integral, but still a value-add, I think most would agree)

>That's not the logic behind the tipping system. It's, "tipping incentives employees to perform well because they'll make more money for doing a better job".

>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!)

Fuck it pisses me off how the conversation in America somehow shifted to make everything the fault of the poor.

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?)

capitalists!! leeching as usual!! blame the poor, is the mantra in the US. & the Illusion of convincing the poor that they can join the rich capitalist. r > g

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is why I refuse to tip in restaurants. Most people in san francisco that I know don't tip and as a consequence most waiters here don't expect a tip.

> This is why I refuse to tip in restaurants. Most people in san francisco that I know don't tip and as a consequence most waiters here don't expect a tip.

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 a joke.

I’m confused and hoping someone can clear it up. My understanding is you are allowed to pay well below minimum wage to employees that receive tips. If the sum of those tips plus what you pay them does not equal or exceed minimum wage the employer is required to pay them more money until they reach minimum wage. This isn’t often an issue because tipped employees will beat minimum wage significantly.

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.

In a context of pushback over casual hire/gig-economy workers and their actual employment status this feels like both egregiously stupid and possibly illegal behaviour, which the company does because its a scofflaw. If its legal its wrong. if its illegal then its wrong both equitably and legally.

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?

Should be shut down.

Isn't this what restaurant's do with wait staff in the US? I know in NJ wait staff are required to be paid minimum wage. Typically the restaurant pays them less (I think it was around $3) and then their tips get them to minimum wage. If they don't get enough tips the restaurant is required to pay them the difference(although in practice I'm not sure this ever happens)

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?

In the ancient history of gratuity, tips were originally given _before_ any service was received so that you can get priority service. It's absurd that tips now feel mandatory because of social pressures particularly in the US.

Our team of 5 went to a good restaurant/steak place in LA last week, ate and drank for $300, enjoyed the ambience and ate great food, enjoyed the warmth of the service, spent great time together and tipped $75

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.

It's been 30 years since I worked in a restaurant, but at that particular place the waitstaff received tips and split them according to some formula. I think busboys got 10%, not sure if or how much went to the bartender or anyone "back of house" in the kitchen.

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.

I guess the real test of how this system works is:

-- 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.

This is theft from the customer, who tips with the understanding that it will be extra money in the worker's pocket.

Disgusting, reprehensible, and frankly unbelievable. I've never used Instacart and now I never will.

> We include tips in the calculation so that you can get a more accurate picture of what your earnings will be after completing the batch.

> 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.

One of the many things that I love about the Netherlands is the lack of tipping in the culture. People get paid a decent wage, and so tipping is only something done if the service is amazing.

I'm almost with you there. Get rid of tipping completely. Employers should pay people a decent wage and reward excellent behavior. Don't put that on the customer at all.

When workers are thieving from their employer there is a very real prospect of jail. There seems to be no prospect of jail for managers thieving from workers. Why is that?

What I don't understand is why the law in USA allows someone be employed, and by signing some contract thing still count as if she is not employed.

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.

In the U.S., there is a multi-factor test if someone is an employee. Just paying someone regularly isn't enough. You might get a haircut once a month, but your barber clearly isn't an employee. It requires more, like control over their day-to-day actions, if you provide benefits, and several other factors.

The Russian law may seem clear, but in reality it's just a stand-in for a more complex analysis.

I've read that similar happens in Guitar Center.

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.

I always tip in cash, except in the rare cases where I happened to not have cash on me. I am always under the assumption that this kind of thing is the default not the exception; when you add tip to a credit card who knows what happens when the mothership sucks up that cash and filters it through various middlemen before finally (if ever) getting to the person who provided a service to you.

What would the worker have received if the customer had tipped $50 on a smaller order? Would Instacart have pocketed the additional $40?

This really isn't that different than tipping at your favorite bar. Employers artificially pay service workers less than they should with the assumption that the customer will make up the rest. The real answer is to supporting the broken tipping model. Pay people an honest wage and expect them to do their job without requiring a consumer to pay a bribe to get good service.

This is terrible, but unsurprising.

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....

I'm not an American so looking at this from afar - but according to this tips go straight to 'Shoppers'? Are they actually doing something completely different?

https://www.instacart.com/help/section/200761964#11500564332...

The tips go straight to the shoppers, yeah. And then their pay gets, you know, "adjusted" (in Instacart's favor) in the amount of the tip.

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.

Absolutely crazy. By comparison, Go-Jek in Indonesia ends up paying their scooter delivery workers about about $3-$4 on average per hour (in my experience) depending on traffic, for deliveries (food, shopping, etc). There is also no option to tip in the app, and tipping isn't expected but isn't alien either.

Really disgusting behavior, honestly I think the "gig economy" has the right idea of where we are headed, we are moving to a service / high skill (technology) economy. Gig economy tools combine the best of both worlds, but these exploitative labor practices and low hanging industry targets have got to end.

If Instacart can't afford to pay their employees, then they should not operate. They are stealing tips from their employees to make profit. It is unethical to use their service. Stop using it and write them an e-mail explaining why. Feel free to resume using it if they stop this practice and apologize.

Are instacart 'employees' private contractors/1099? Wouldn't that mean instacart is even LESS legally able to take their tip money? As in actual employees who are tipped will have a minimum wage that must be met, which is why in some places tipped positioned wages can be as low as $3.

Perhaps tipping should always bypass the company.

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 wonder what happens if a customer tips more than what Instacart would have paid?

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?

How is this any different from the what wait/serving staff experience. Most jobs are a flat wage (possibly minimum) and tips. It's always like that and still is. Maybe, the next time you leave a dollar tip for your server, you'll think again.

This is an outrage. I used instacart for awhile and eventually stopped - it just became too expensive. I would always waive the service fee when possible and tip the driver in cash. Glad I did - now knowing they use it to deny living wages.

Over the past two years, these kinds of complaints have piled up against Instacart:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instacart#Controversy

Instacart, a YCombinator funded company pays their workers $0.80 cents an hour.

Build app to receive tips anonymously.

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).

I will not use any of these gig economy BS companies.

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.

This is taking advantage of both the customer and the worker.

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.

I don't live in US, but for sure the only way to ensure your tip goes to the right person is to give it with cash.

We should tip shoppers with Venmo, Cash App, Paypal, etc, when the shopper delivers.

Instacart won't see this transaction and therefore won't reduce their wages.

Less convenient. But this policy is unfair.

Vote with your wallet - tweeting/posting/complaining is fine and should be done - but denying them revenue is a universally effective message to bad businesses.

Just don't tip. Tipping is bullshit.

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.

It's almost like working as a contractor for instacart is a crappy job that people should quit doing since it doesn't pencil out financially...

What happens if the tip exceeds the actual cost of the service? If the tip was $11 would they deduct $0.20 from the tip? This is completely absurd.

No Instacart for me. This is not OK at all.

Others have said why. I will spend some time to make others aware.

I really hate this sort of thing. Viscerally.

I would be interested in seeing a gig economy service being run and equally shared by the employees, or worker-owned.

This is legal though right? Isn't it the same way restaurants pay their servers so little wage?

My opinion is abolish tip culture.

It's about time tipping died, that's the bottom line. There never was a good outcome to opaque pricing.

So you are essentially thanking and tipping instacart, not the worker. Evil like a villain from a disney movie.

What if a tip amound exceeds a worker's payment amount? Will they demand from the worker to pay?

Haha what the fuck? And who was the brilliant mind behind this thinking it would be okay to do this?

Hm, 42 cents of that was his mileage pay for the trip. 38 cents was his actual salary.

Anyone know if Amazon Prime Now or other similar delivery services operate the same?

I use instacart weekly. Not going to leave them any tip via the platform anymore...

Why $.22? Is that the minimum before the tip has an impact on the nominal rate?

i heard this same thing from an instacart worker more than a year ago. at the time i was confused and kind of doubted her story, but now i see that Instacart employment really is just as shitty as she said. wow.

I don't get it. Should the minimum wage be excluding tips?

Edit: I meant shouldn't.

I mean obviously it should be. This is bananas.

Well typically people give tips under the understanding that they are supplementing the worker’s income, rather than the company’s bottom line

If I give you a tip surely it should benefit you. In this case the tip soley benefits instacart.

Some states have a minimum wage for tipped employees; where Washington only has a flat minimum wage for both tipped and untipped workers.

In many states you only have to pay the difference between the "tipped minimum wage" and the actual minimum wage if the employee didn't make enough tips to cover the difference.

oh really? employer paying way less than minimum wage because employee gets to keep some of the tips is shocking news now? ever heard of restaurants? they have been doing this for decades.

I swear to god I am never going to order from instacart ever again.

Shame on them.

The gig economy has so many problems like this it is silly.

Where's the outrage for the millions of service industry employees who also have to deal with this, and have been dealing with this for decades?

Why's Instacart getting the unique bad press?

In part because they’ve added a layer of deception to the practice. In part—and I’m speculating here—because this is a young company, founded and run by people in (or nearly in) our cohort, and were disappointed in them as peers (albeit peers who struck it rich).

Maybe, I'm leaning towards the, "people didn't realize what tip wages were" explanation though.

and to think I was just about to sign up and use it with www.bjs.com. Now that won't be happening

DoorDash does this too.

(just tip in cash)

Problem here: Isn't Instacart but the so called rich-hipster millenials that need / want / to use Instacart. Or lazy or just for the sake of convenience at the sake of a poor soul, don't wanna shop groceries for themselves. If your time is limited then you could easily use Amazon fresh/ Walmart / Boxed for your groceries. But nah, it's SV 2.0 Human exploitation at it's finest, Capitalism as usual. & to people building these services, put humans first. It's sad to see someone in HEB wearing a green tshirt shopping for someone - it's like society has rendered these people useless only fit to serve master. Basically slavery 2.0 with a little wage on top.

Startup culture is a study in psychopathy.

- 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!"

"solve physics for good!"... that was a quick meta.

Turns out machine learning has some limitations.

That's quite a broad generalization. For sure a lot of the biggest names have done ethically questionable things. It's no doubt that growing that fast and gaining that much power is going to hugely amplify whatever ethical flaws the founders have. And no one is ethically perfect. That's not to excuse Uber, Facebook, Google, Amazon or any of the more egregious companies.

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.

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook as of 2014, so unfortunately all the same issues with Facebook apply to them too.

I agree that folks have very good reason to keep a much closer eye on what WhatsApp actually does, and also what the user agreement says. However, you can't say that the WhatsApp team or product is necessarily and already violating people's privacy in the same ways as Facebook is. You can have all the healthy skepticism you want, but it doesn't mean that WhatsApp is doing those things.

This isn't just startup culture though, it's capitalism in general. Startup culture is really just the embodiment of everything wrong with capitalism.

Change "startup culture" to "corporate culture"

> startup culture...

> Amazon > Facebook

I don’t think amazon and Facebook are startups

Dick move, instant back lash

Seriously, this is the responsibility consumers have in a free market. If there's behavior you don't like, move on. You don't get to complain about bad actors when you're literally keeping them in business.

Collective action is essentially impossible among consumers though. Boycotts essentially never work. 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? Also, what do you think the working conditions were like for whoever picked that asparagus?

At least there are federal protections for employees. Companies that offset their operating costs onto an on-demand contract labor force are in a really exploitative gray area.

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.

The corn syrup example doesn't really work here. People make decisions with their money, and those decisions are primarily based on self interest. Not becoming diabetic is very much in folks' self-interest. That underlies people not wanting foods with corn syrup. It has nothing to do with concerns about wasteful corn subsidies or deceptive food practices.

> Consumers become aware of problems, eg. high fructose corn syrup, and act accordingly, eg. buying less sugary junk.

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.

>Boycotts essentially never work

Is this true?

Some are, but they have to be pretty overwhelmingly organized.

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-boycotts-history-201802...

No, this is not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott

"Essentially" is the operative word here. The Montgomery bus boycott was a small, geographically limited boycott at just the right time for an issue that was incredibly important personally to the boycotters. The boycotters were directly being very negatively affected by the bus segregation, thus they had much more of a personal stake than an upper-middle class individual who feels a pang of guilt after taking an Uber.

Go ahead, try to organize a boycott. I'll support it. I guarantee you it won't go anywhere, though.

The consumer collective-action economic effects of that boycott changed nothing. What did change things was the government action it triggered:

> 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.

also keep in mind that the segregation rules were unpopular with the bus companies themselves (think about the infra you need to enforce segregation), as soon as the court ruled against the local laws, the montgomery bus company was rushing to flip over to desegregated.

>Is this true?

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.

Check United Airlines stock price. Or Über. Or Exxon. Or Shell. Or Haliburton.

Those are companies that had enormous PR disasters and had short-term stock losses. It didn't even have anything to do with boycotts.

None of them had any significant loss. United stock was up, just two days after the incident. Many people claimed to never do business again with these companies, yet there is no indication that any significant number actually did.

Many people claimed to never do business again with these companies, yet there is no indication that any significant number actually did.

It looks like you're drawing a conclusion based on an absence of evidence of what people aren't doing anymore.

>Collective action is essentially impossible among consumers though.

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.

I'm grateful for your response. I especially appreciate the "We can be concerned about more than one thing at a time." That's useful language I can use in the future.

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."

Ok, I’ll be that guy... here we go:

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.

My mission statement:

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?

Bill Hicks on advertising is great too, especially when he equates it to pornography.

You’re being down voted for saying, especially, “we can choose to live differently, to be kind to each other”.

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.

I tried to change “especially” to “essential”, twice. And all I managed was a false sense of “fixed a word”.

Your comment suggests that it's ok to directly support bad businesses because you're probably also indirectly supporting bad businesses.

If that's not what you meant, can you please clarify?

Moreso that participating in modern society is impossible without doing business with companies who have unsavory labor and environmental practices. I'm not commenting on morality.

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.

> Expecting some sort of change to come from spontaneous, collective consumer action is ridiculous.

Does that mean you believe that collective consumer action had absolutely nothing to do with Travis no longer remaining as CEO of Uber?

That had more to do with fostering a workplace culture conducive to harassment and his opening of Uber to massive legal liability from Waymo. Uber's investors forced him out, not consumers. Investors have power because there are generally few of them and they have a great deal of skin in the game. Collective action is both easier and more incentivized in that case.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-ceo-travi...

"and can't afford to spend more money"

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?

What they meant, I believe, was that calling for boycotts which never work is just a talking point against meaningful regulation.

Most employees of large grocery stores are paid significantly more than minimum wage.

> Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours?

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.

Washington has no state income tax, which is why their attempts to fund basically any program always seem so out there. If they just taxed like normal states did, they wouldn't look either goofy or regressive every time they tried to raise money.

Here in Texas, grocery store workers often start around $10 / hr.

Borderline living wage, but a lot better than being exploited by some BS company like InstaCart.

Given the option between letting the trolley run over five people or taking action so the trolley only runs over three people, you chose letting the trolley kill five people.

No, this is why you have regulation, and need unions.

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.

To be pedantically clear about what needs are vs strategies for meeting needs, this is why we need autonomy; unions are a strategy for achieving that.

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.

There has to be some HN version of Godwin's law involving Unions.

There is no democraty if the people don't exercice their power. Voting once for a group of people make it one day democraty, the rest of the year oligarchy.

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.

This kind of assumption (that you must optimize your behavior for common good) is unrealistic. Only "good people" will do so, and that caring will put them at a competitive disadvantage compared to people who simply don't care.

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.

> Only "good people" will do so, and that caring will put them at a competitive disadvantage compared to people who simply don't care.

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.

It's unreasonable to expect that promoting recycling alone leads to systematic recycling of non-precious materials. Recycling is the law in places where it is considered commonplace.

Swedes don't just love recycling; the government makes it worthwhile by increasing the cost of not-recycling (fines, jail time).

This is taking the stance that the governement is the source of society, while I tend to think the governement is the consequence of society.

But it probably goes both way, and I don't see a good reason to not do both: acting as micro and macro citizen.

Nope, what you are describing is capitalism, not democracy. Unfortunately we are so deep into the game now that it's had to imagine a world without it. I understand that it's hard, but try to imagine 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.

I don't see any link between what I said and capitalism. Thinking of the policical and societal impact of your day to day actions does not only largely go beyong economy, but also doesn't assume the nature of the economic system you are in.

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.

> That's so condescending.

I was quoting you from the previous comment

Not the "hard" part. The "try to imagine".

Personal responsibility has a place, and it's important... But it doesn't scale to solve all problems.

Calling for personal responsibility is a good way to misdirect attention.

True. This thread convinced me both bottom to top and top to bottom is necessary. But I do think that ignoring bottom to top leads to temporary fixes, or illusions.

Not all customers/workers feel the same way about every business practice, so it's not fair to appropriate their decision-making power by monopolizing it through one regulatory agency or union that they may not support.

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.

Relying on certifications is laughable. Things like "Organic", "Fair Trade", and "Cage Free" do not always mean what you think they mean. Even what constitutes products like peanut butter is up for dispute by those trying to sell a cheapened product as the real thing[1].

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...

It's not at all laughable. It is as effective as the organizations people create and choose to follow.

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.

But asking consumers to vote for moral, intelligent legislative agents is somehow better? Optimizing for past opinions, moral fiber, understanding of the issues, etc. is easier?

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.

The problem is that corporations have people beat in terms of being able to obfuscate their business practices. While certainly true that people can often cause a business to change its actions when a big scandal come out, it's usually only the very obvious or very stupid, or relies on quality investigative journalism or things to quickly spread on social media to a large enough amount of people - and despite this seemingly happening regularly, it's still a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of companies doing morally grey stuff.

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 wonder if this is all a problem of scale. Maybe it is unreasonable for us to expect very large companies and governments to be anything but corrupt and minimally responsive, nothing like the smaller scales that humans are evolved to deal with. This is all very new, and loaded with bugs...

This is just my suspicion, but I figure many people don't boycott because they feel it doesn't make a difference, that they are giving up something useful to them and nothing at all will come of it. That feels unfair in addition to being unproductive.

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.

The boycott of South African goods during apartheid, and that against Nestle because of them promoting formula over breast milk in the developing world beg to differ. Very significant numbers participating, to no noticeable effect. Nestle undoubtedly considers it an acceptable cost of doing business, cheap at ten times the price. Those who participate are likewise aware it means never buying anything Nestle ever again.

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.

As participants in a democratic nation (whether that be the US republic, the UK parliamentary monarchy or whatever) it is our responsibility to be involved in all facets of the world we interact with.

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.

way too many libertarians on HN, what is it with programmers who think they've conquered the world and their way is the best? I swear they'd all run away and go live in on a space station like in Elysium if they could

Are you trying to say something, or did that word salad you vomited up only exist for the purpose of satisfying your need for attention?

There are two separate and very different issues at hand. On the one hand is the issue you are tackling, the economic and large scale one. But there is another - the personal and small scale one.

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.

Consumers pay a tip, expecting it to go to staff members directly. This steals the tip back from the staff members, directly contrary to the customer’s expectation.

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.

There's no alternative at least where I live. I either use their service or don't get the items (since the reason I'm using them is because getting them myself is a problem).

A cash tip fixes this problem. I can't do anything about the business itself.

So before Instacart, you starved?

Can I ask - and this isn't just me being glib because I want to believe what you say is possible - but can I ask if you know of any consumer collective actions in the past decade that have succeeded?

Better yet - what percentage have succeeded?

Roku and Alex Jones just a week or two ago.

No, there need to be laws or regulations. even if some people watch these things and stop using the service most people don't know about the practices of a service.

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.

I think there is license to complain.

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.

It’s just that boycotts never work, could only ever work on consumer-facing companies, arbitrarily seek to punish the select few whose misdeeds become viral, etc.

Remember United Airlines? Yeah, neither does anyone else. Exxon Mobile? You’d first have to find out their local brand name. Etc etc

you do get to complain actually, complain to your elected representative and get them to legislate against this sort of behaviour. It is the responsibility of the businesses in a free market to act responsibly, if they dont then regulation is the result. Funnily enough most companies will continue to do things considered immoral or unfair until they are regulated, many will spend the money that they have generated 'immorally' to lobby against regulation.

You would correct if this truly was a free market, but the viability of a free market is dependent on perfect competition where there are identical competing sellers readily available for consumers to "move on" to.

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).

I know this sounds right to you and many people, but it's very flawed. The idea that everything will be fine if consumers in a free market use their purchasing power wisely and ethically is cant. A particularly ugly side of it is the tipping culture in the US, where Joe public gets to decide on how much waiting staff get paid according to their personal assessment of how good their waiting was. It's a fig-leaf over the society's love of controlling, criticizing and ordering others what to do.

I wonder if we can gamify this. Where your social media profile can display badges if you don't use various services. I imagine that's next to impossible.

Virtue Signal Badges!

This narrative is fundamentally anti-democratic. "Vote with your dollars" means that those with the most disposable income get the most "votes". Meanwhile, the people most affected by these kinds of policies probably can't afford instacart in the first place and thus get no vote at all.

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.

We detached this generic ideological subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19030072 and marked it off-topic.

This is much more substantive than a lot of other comments in that thread. How often does this "detaching" happen on HN?

Edit: Oh, YC backed Instacart. Got it :)

Actually, we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved, even though (or rather because) it's the cheapest trick in the book to accuse us of otherwise. However, that doesn't mean we don't moderate at all. A generic ideological "yay markets" vs. "yay unions" tangent discussion quickly becomes predictable, tedious, and off topic. Marking it such has nothing particular to do with YC or Instacart.

It's trivial to verify that this is standard HN moderation:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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. It is an overly simplified sympathy that doesn't always reflect reality.

What should they be at fault for?

The parent didn't say "the poor can never be at fault for anything", they listed a few legitimate examples of victim blaming.

There was the "everything the fault of the poor" bit in the first sentence, but that was obvious hyperbole.

And I never said the poor are at fault for everything, but I'm being treated as such it seems.

What I want to know are examples of things that the poor are at fault for.

Within the context of this conversation, the burden of figuring that out would fall more properly on you, since you're the one invoking the existence of things the poor are at fault for in order to challenge someone else.

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.

I mean, if you think that's the case, feel free to give examples. The posts here are talking about specific cases, if you disagree with them, say so.

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.

I asked a question, I don't think I need to provide some counter argument with it.

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.

Your question was clearly a rhetorical question that contained the statement "the poor are never faulted for anything", which is basically the same as the next paragraph in your original comment. That's how everyone read it and that's what people are responding to. Your "I asked a question" is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst, because it's basically saying "I was just asking questions! I didn't state anything and I hold no positions, which makes me invulnerable to criticism!".

It wasn't rhetorical and I really would have been interested in the OP's answer. Had they answered truthfully, it would have helped expanded my understanding of how some people think.

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?

I think you need to take a step back and truly reflect to take in some of the feedback people have given you here. Egos tend to expand to protect themselves, only to a person's detriment.

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.

If I could go back, knowing what I know now, I don't think I would have asked the question. I was a fool to think I could get any sort of simple response.

On an internet forum you have to do it differently than in person, where voice and facial expression can convey sincerity. When a topic is divisive, your question needs to come with enough information to make intent unambiguous. You need to make it impossible to interpret your question as a provocation, because otherwise people are going to take it that way.

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.

You're a fool for not thinking of the response yourself. Fault, as a concept, is a measure of means. The poor don't have the means, so they are not at fault. It's a damned tautology.

There is no excuse for exploiting people no matter if they are poor or something else. Ever.

Nothing.

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.

So the rich, powerful and elite are also not responsible for anything either? Just individually?

That seems like quite the atomised society.

> the rich, powerful and elite are also not responsible for anything either? Just individually?

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.

FWIW, you could argue that they are failing to handle their economic situation as well as they could.

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.)

No the rich and powerful have choices of how to act, while the poor have very little. Additionally, the rich and powerful are the ones who have structured the system in such a way that the proletariat have very little choice in the matter.

From that which is given much, much is expected.

Am I to believe that the poor all sowed the clothes on their backs from sheep that they raised themselves?

At some point even if that is true, they have some responsibility. Unless they were born on a desert island.

The poor do not, as a group, usually have much power in society, so it’s hard for them to be at fault for much.

I'm going to take your statements at face value as a genuine skeptics-driven desire for further exploration.

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.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19030031 and marked it off-topic.

How about paying people who serve you instead of passing the "buck" to the someone else?

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.

Yep, personally, when I go to mcdonalds, I like to pay the guy at the register, the people cooking, the manager, and the unfortunate individual on trash duty all separately.

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.

“the customer can decide how much he wants to pay everybody in the supply chain” sounds a bit to too much like a possible pitch for a startup.

True. But lets be clear. I'm tipping everyone in the supply chain. They also get paid by their employer.

... 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.

I mean, if that utility of every part of the supply chain was actually surfaced and you could make payments directly to parts of the supply chain, I could see trying that business model out as a consumer.

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

I mean, I see what you're saying. I really do. But it feels a bit cynical to me. Personally, I think everyone should try giving 20% (or more, haven't you ever received some freshly cooked chicken nuggets and just knew that they were delivered to the store with extra care) to every individual and/or corporate entity in the entire supply chain. It just increases the feeling of community in an ever growing global landscape.

I don't agree, I think money is a fairly poor incentice for increasing the level of community and might even do the opposite and make it too profit-based. I think everyone should be putting the extra effort on treating others with care instead! That increases the feeling of community.

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...

(psst, this series of responses are kind of a joke)

What do you mean series? And I'm not joking, it's how it works in Japan and it seems to be working great here

maybe we should tokenize it and put it on the block-chain :)

You say that in jest, but this sort of thing really is a potential use for the tech.

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...

Their jobs might have different value for this to happen at all. Usually that’s exactly what the market does, assign value. The 10% margin sounds in general fair but depends on so many factors, margin on what? Production, Research, Investment ?

I don't disagree, but I see nothing wrong with using a tool like that if everyone agrees it's a good idea. It needn't be the entire supply chain, either - individual portions could set up profit-sharing arrangements using contracts.

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.

Tipping is frowned upon and considered bad manners in the parts of Asia that I frequent.

Why is 'service' seen as a separately billed item, paid for by the tip, in a restaurant in the US? Why isn't it included in the bill for the food, like everything else is?

Because standing in line for food is cheaper than having someone personaly serve it to you? You are not so much paying for a potato, as you are paying for it to be fried, packaged, and in your hand, quickly and reliably.

> You are not so much paying for a potato, as you are paying for it to be fried, packaged, and in your hand, quickly and reliably.

If the menu says friend potato, why am I paying separately for it to be fried?

Ouch. But unions are not the answer.

Instacart is AWFUL.

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.

Instacart is great for people who live in urban areas and don't have a vehicle. If you live in a rural area or have a car then it's definitely not as useful. Because of things like instacart I can rely completely on public transit and am able to get rid of my car (saving hundreds a month).

I mean, Instacart is awful and I stopped using them the last time they fucked with their employees pay based on both moral grounds and the fact that it incentivized their employees to cut a million corners.

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 saw the ceo speak at a YC event in NYC a few years ago, and I looked around the room and thought "what the fuck is this shit". I guess Instacart ticked the checkbox of tackling a problem that doesn't scale, something YC looks for. To me it symbolizes everything I hate about startup culture- the CEO trying to change the world by doing something mundane, the circle jerk celebrating a stupid idea and dubious ethical practices...etc.

> grocery store shopping doesn't suck bad enough to pay someone else to do both the shopping and delivering

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.

> 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.

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.

> "The logistics of laser-guided-bomb-type delivery of groceries from store to fridge is asinine."

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.

I haven't had a good experience with those pick-up services either. For the amount of time I've waited in my car for the "ready" groceries, I could have just done my shopping.

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.

> literally is unscalable

Not everything needs to scale better than O(n).

I am 100% in favor of tipping, and all of you people calling to ban it don't understand service jobs. Those doing so should be ashamed, as they are effectively victim-blaming in this context (in what really seems close to wage theft, at least in spirit, by Instacart) to push this cause.

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).

Why are you in favor of tipping? Can you justify your reasoning?

Not parent commenter, but the common argument is that for the class of service jobs where the employee's role is to interface with the customer and provide them a service, customers are in a better position to assess the employee's job performance than a manager. For that class of jobs, giving customers influence over the employee's "merit bonuses" is a more accurate system of rewarding performance and requires less managerial oversight to ensure good service.

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.

>I am 100% in favor of tipping, and all of you people calling to ban it don't understand service jobs.

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.

You realize that you can still tip, without all of us living under this broken system, right?

This isn't uncommon or new. Many states allow for tips to offset wages, even if wages fall below the minimum wage. Some states even have a separate minimum wage for tipper workers that is below the standard minimum wage.

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.

I'm definitely in favor of improving the laws, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't criticize a company's policy, too, even if it's legal.

There is a larger problem, but that doesn't absolve Instacart (or any other company) in this matter.

Washington state appears to not be such a state: https://www.minimum-wage.org/washington/tipped-employee-mini...

Yes, this is common in the restaurant industry. But a few differences:

(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

For many years, we've been in the habit of leaving restaurant tips in cash, because of various reports that restaurant managers would basically take card fees out of the tip. I recall hearing more recently that there has been some effort to crack down on that practice, but still, old habits.

> (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.

This must be a new thing or only apply to certain states/cities. I've never saw this happen back when I was doing low wage work.

This has been United States federal law since 1938.

A tipped employee must receive at least the tipped minimum wage before considering tips, and the normal minimum wage after considering tips. The only adjustment an employer is allowed to make is to increase an employee's base wage if the base wage + tips is less than the normal minimum wage. In no case can the base wage be less than the tipped minimum wage.

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.

Or you could blame them for not doing the right thing, regardless of the law.

This was posted by "Working Washington", so it seems reasonable to look at Washington state law: It requires tipped employees to be paid minimum wage. So does the rest of the west coast, including California (where Instacart has it's HQ).

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.")

Washington state law does not apply. All of the State of Washington laws and constitution are fully invalidated and superseded by the American Arbitration Act.

Let’s hope that’s tested in court.

> It is, of course, entirely possible that the worker in question is not on the west coast

The receipt was for a store named Wegmans. Those stores are located on the East coast (New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey).

Are "contractors" covered by employee wage law?

Just because the law allows it doesn’t mean a company must do it.

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.

"Once something has been approved by the government, it's no longer immoral." -Reverend Lovejoy

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