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Comment by jamilton | Hacker News Reader

Most states allow tips to be deducted from wages down to sub-minimum wages for for most tipped workers. Which sucks to be clear, just saying it's not unique to ride-share drivers.

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That’s bad and should be considered theft. But what DD did is even worse. They didn’t just reduce pay, they hid what they were doing and didn’t even show a tip to the driver unless the tip was more than the guaranteed pay. And they did this to the tune of over sixteen million dollars.

> And they did this to the tune of over sixteen million dollars

So like $1 per driver?

Also it's not like the tips they earn correlate with service drivers can provide. At most you can be a bit faster, but generally bound to traffic? (I haven't used them tbh).

You are excusing literal theft to the tune of $16mm. And the excuse is that the company is so large and vast and dominant that the scale to the company is a drop in the bucket.

Does the theft of $16mm become worse if DoorDash was half the size?

If I steal $16mm I’d go to jail but it’s no big deal because a corporation did it? The apologia for this is baffling to me.

Relax it's basically an accounting error.

Not to the drivers, it isn't.

Not sure why you seem to think that the company only matters here, and the workers are irrelevant.

(And no, it's not $1 per driver, way to argue in bad faith.)

How much is it then? Their revenue is 16B per year. Do you really think its worth "stealing" 0.1% to pad your numbers? Are you that naive that publicly traded company can pull this off?

There’s no dispute that they did what they did. What are you even arguing?

Funny how those never seem to favor labor. I wish I could have an accounting error like that don’t you?

I genuinely don't understand how corporate propaganda in the US got people to get to the point where defending corporations is like a Pavlovian reflex for some people.

We’re on a forum run by the VCs who funded DoorDash. A lot of people here dream that they too can one day get funded and go on to steal millions with no consequences.

Nah we just don't let emotions get over the mathematics. DD does 15B in revenue. 16M is ~0.1% of that.

So theft is ok if you’re already rich?

Stealing sixteen million dollars spread out over a large number of people is still theft and should still result in serious prison time.

Have you not watched Superman 3 (or Office Space)?

I think this is different, though. The phenomenon you are talking about is customarily applied to hourly workers, where they are paid a set hourly wage for the time they're on the job, and then tips can deduct from that hourly wage. Hourly workers see both sides of this and can do the math, and know what their take-home will be based on their hourly wage and the tips they accept.

For a DoorDash delivery driver, the problem is transparency. Consider a $7 delivery with a customer tip of $5, and the difference between being told:

"This delivery offers you $7", or

"This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $5 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $2, so the total you receive is still $7."

In both cases the customer behavior and end result for the driver is the same, but in the first case DoorDash doesn't even mention the tip, and quietly pockets it. Another example, with a driver tip of $10 instead:

"This delivery offers you $7, and the customer added a tip of $3", or

"This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $10 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $0, so the total you receive is $10."

The 2nd statement in both cases is the honest one, but of course that would make drivers feel cheated, so DD says the 1st thing, and completely hides that they offset "wages" with tips.

Regardless, I personally think this practice (for regular hourly employees or delivery drivers) is garbage; in my state, the tipped minimum wage is set to the same value as the non-tipped minimum wage, so employers don't get to pull that crap.

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