It would be honest for them to simply remove tipping from their app. You don’t tip the UPS guy who delivers packages, why should the social consensus be to tip the DoorDash guy who also delivers packages. Pay them more to make up for it.
A DoorDash courier makes like $5/delivery. Most couriers work nights and get ~5 deliveries in a night. That’s $25/night or $750/month before gas, car maintenance, increased car insurance payments due to their courier job, etc.
For people who take this on as a second job, it’s barely worth it. For people who do this for a primary job, it’s a lot of work to barely keep your head above water.
As for the issue of tipping your food courier, I see it like this: you tip the pizza delivery guy, why not the DoorDash guy?
UPS does it in a 1 day timeframe and not with food which could get cold or something and they deliver to a lot more houses at once.
While DoorDash targets 1 customers house and lets 1 biker drive there. If you want to pay for him to have a fair wage then you probably wouldn't order from DoorDash anymore because it's too expensive
At the moment tips are a hidden cost that customers don't see or think about when they order.
It effectively allows Doordash (and others) to present their service as being cheaper than it really is.
If presenting the full cost upfront means people stop using the service then it simply means that there is actually no viable market.
There are plenty of food delivery companies (eg Deliveroo, Wolt, FoodPanda) in countries without a tipping culture. Go to any European capital and chances are you'll see loads of brightly-coloured cube-shaped backpacks cycling around — so the companies seem to be doing OK.
According to figures from end of last year Deliveroo lost £185m while making £277m in sale... Any 'normal' business would have collapsed even before getting there.
These companies are like Uber and Lyft: The business case is very shaky and they are facing employment law pressures at the same time. So we'll see...