It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
a tip for an unusual order/circumstance would be fine. Say if you ordered a 50lb bag of cat food, and live on the Nth floor, and the elevators are not working.
I see no reason to think that was the case. They'll work for whatever rate companies pay them. There are many workers in minimum wage jobs who don't get tips at all. I agree that tipping is a bad practice and that it pushes labor costs onto customers. It will take regulation for companies to stop and tipping culture to change. I'm doing my part to try and keep the problem from getting worse by refusing to tip for almost anything except deliveries and being actually waited on. No matter how much companies beg for tips for basic retail purchases and counter service I don't feel at all bad about turning them down.
You not tipping doesn't improve anyone's material conditions. You choosing to give money to the exploitative companies does affect material conditions, negatively! To me it sounds like you're trying to doordash your cake, eat it, have it, not pay for it, and get paid for eating it, all at once!
I don't actually even have DoorDash available, but I can put my money where my mouth is when it comes to restaurants; PLEASE pay your workers a good wage, and then I won't eat there if I can't afford it. I don't know what your wages are, or your operating costs; don't make me guess how much I need to pay your employees for you!
Regarding the restaurant industry, I used to run a restaurant, and my conclusion is that the economy is fake.
There is no profitable way to run a restaurant legally. Somewhere in the supply chain, if not in the restaurant then in the delivery truck or farm, there are undocumented laborers being underpaid and working in unsafe conditions. If we actually applied the typical worker protections we've come to expect for other blue collar jobs, with the expected wages, the already razor thin margins of the restaurant industry would completely collapse. The only thing left would be vertically integrated oligopolies like McDonald's.
Every meal out, somebody, somewhere, is subsidizing your meal to make it affordable enough for you to buy it. Adding the 28-32% margin that Uber eats charges is just increasing that pressure to the breaking point. It all barely survives through psychological tricks that make it seem cheaper than it is like hiding the tip or tax until after you actually get the full bill.
I think the only way the restaurant industry could function fully legally is if the government was the only landlord. There's just not enough margin to include the margins a landlord expects, and landlords pathologically increase rent to be just below causing a restaurant to collapse, or simply cycle through restaurant after restaurant, not caring about months of lost rent revenue because the high rent cost increases the value of the property.
If I am tipping, it will be directly and usually in cash and there's only one person who gets that and it's the person who cuts my hair.
Get a different job if you don't like it. Minimum wage jobs are dime a dozen and have joke requirements to get onboarded. It's not like competing for faang or whatever.
There are an endless amount of jobs out there that don't have tips involved at all, require similar levels of experience/skill/craft/work-ethic, and pay similarly.
Why do you hold humans to a higher standard than corporations?
I don't do tips. If the company wants to not pay well, it's up to the person to choose to not take the job.
You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.
I feel like people posting on here have drastically lowered in quality. Am I speaking with bots?
It is trivially easy to determine I'm a real person by clicking my username and following through to my site. Within two clicks you can find a video of me talking. But since we're in the business of blame game here, why do you choose to interact with a website where you're not even sure it's humans you're talking to?
> You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.
Your interaction with society isn't just through paying for things. You seem to enjoy a situation where things are cheap because the labor cost is subsidized via financial tricks like tip culture, and you can swim through the culturally established cracks by not tipping, basically the definition of antisocial behavior.
If you wanted to protest tip culture and low wages, you could, for example, protest. Or stop giving money to companies that do this. For some reason you've decided to blame humans for trying to make a living in this broken system rather than blame companies, who have far more bargaining power, for engaging in exploitative behavior.
Your purchase of the cheaper, tip culture goods over the more expensive non tip culture goods is a price signal rewarding the less ethical company. That's the incentive I meant. It doesn't make any sense for blaming people trying to make ends meet. I don't quite understand why people think their Uber drivers and waiters and whatnot super duper love these tip based jobs, there's a million reasons they are essentially forced to take whatever work they can get. Do you really believe working class people have the bargaining power or job opportunities to walk away from the minimum wage tipped job? You are here which means you have access to the internet which means you must know that many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - that means they can't miss a single paycheck without catastrophic consequences. So no time to quit and find a new job.
YC may pay for the webservers but there's plenty of commies on here :) for some reason they haven't banned us yet.
People have the opportunity to walk away from minimum wage jobs all the time. It's unironically the easiest job to walk away from in this world because they are very common and easy to get hired on/off of. Low pay jobs are very common and easy to not take.
The jobs that are hard to walk away from are ones that pay enough for someone to live.
Man, you really sound privileged and like you've never worked a minimum wage job at all or know anyone in these positions. Stop talking!
So boy howdy, you must be a super smart guy! Smarter than all those dumbies. I bet you've leveraged your intelligence to accomplish incredible things.
Have you been careful about making sure that the prices you're charged when shopping online are the same as what's on the price tag on the shelves? Online shopping makes it extremely easy for companies to overcharge you based on what they think you're willing/able to pay and provides them with valuable data they can use to decide when/how much to raise their prices.
You can also run into problems where employees will select for lower quality produce, and about to expire foods that in-store shoppers will commonly pass over. It's nice that it means less food gets thrown away, but can also mean you can end up wasting your money buying food you can't or don't want to eat.
I haven't really had too many issues with ordering online. It works for me.
I haven't noticed a price difference shopping in store vs online. The local grocers massively overcharge in comparison to Amazon and Walmart.
Those local shops might not have much choice. Walmart has been caught forcing companies to charge every other store higher wholesale prices than what they charge Walmart for the same goods. It's actually illegal, but the FTC doesn't bother enforcing it. Amazon has also been accused of forcing companies to raise their prices elsewhere and if companies refuse amazon removes the “Add to cart” and “Buy Now” buttons from their products pages. Last I heard they were being sued for that, so maybe the situation with amazon will improve.
In theory, batching deliveries should delivery economies of scale on vehicle and labour costs.
I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.
Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.
Out of the group of people who have food delivered, that food mostly comes from restaurants or grocery stores. Instacart/DD will be a behemoth of food delivery.
Whenever I bring this up, someone always goes "so disabled people should starve"? What did they do before delivery apps? Many restaurants still offer delivery that they do themselves (seriously, look it up). But more importantly, meals on wheels and other services are still a very large, established network.
Anyways, I guess I could be convinced that this is bad for restaurants. But so many restaurants, especially in cities, are offering delivery services where 10 and 20 years ago there were none. And the infrastructure is not set up to handle that.
As a result, city streets are frequently blocked by delivery drivers. I genuinely would love if my city passed a resolution that prevented restaurants within the city center from offering DoorDash/Ubereats unless they had a dedicated parking lot.
- you have school kids and a full time
- a medical condition
- work 2 jobs because economy is fucked.
- can’t drive of old age.
And a million other reasons. In old times with a working community, delivery was a luxury, in “modern” days, it is often a necessity for lack of alternatives.
When was the last time you offered the old people down the road if they need help?
Meanwhile, people have been getting old, having kids, two jobs, medical conditions and so on for a little while now. A tremendous amount of America isn't even in a food delivery area unless you count McDonald's.
Eating out is a luxury. Getting that food delivered even more so. This isn't about basic needs.
>people have been getting old, having kids, two jobs, medical conditions and so on for a little while now.
well you explained the phenomenon pretty concisely.
Nonetheless, I don't see the productivity in arguing over generational lifestyle here. I just wanted to highlight that making people work more than ever means less people volunteer. Whether that is a good thing or not is up to the reader.
Less people aren't volunteering. Flat means stationary. On working hours, it's not significantly different either.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/reports/fil...
Doing it regularly is probably wasting money especially in this economy.
Kids + full time - pick up the food on your way home? Medical condition - arrange for a routine cost effective delivery (like those meal delivery services who tend to deliver on their routes for free even?) work 2 jobs - pick up along the way somewhere can't drive? - use that routine delivery or find a way to cook or use a weekly meal delivery service etc.
But buying one off every other day paying the premium seems definitely a luxury. YMMV.
At least with Uber, you could point to the regulated taxi system that was being displaced. That logic doesn't work at all for Instacart.
or the effective $13-$33 charge per order from the major delivery apps, after up charge to be using it plus delivery?
Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same stuff, here.
You will find that people have worked hard and/or had kids for a while now.
And of course, the pizza place down the street does cheaper delivery than uber/insta anyways, but you conveniently ignore that.
How is it different than customers driving to the restaurant? Are you suggesting that there should be less restaurants, or people should use public transport to pick up food?
I just had some American friends visit me in Taipei and now that they're back in the States they're telling me that if they want food they have to drive 20 minutes, so I understand the situation is different for most Americans, but the suggestion then seems to be the obvious ones: the USA should modernize its urban infrastructure.
When you go to sit down for a meal, do you double park your car, and put the hazard lights on?
They do serve the same market for gig workers that don’t want to be ride share drivers, though, right? I wonder what their market share is for that.
In my area Walmart is on Instacart and I've often wondered how that squares with their own delivery service.
They tried that with WalmartPay. After about a decade, they gave up[1].
Consumers have a lot of agency. A lot of people get paid access to one of the other platforms by virtue of tie-ins with their mobile carrier, or bank, or whatever. There's low incentive to pay again to use Walmart's delivery service, which will not also bring delicious Thai food for lunch.
1 - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/21/walmart-to-finally-start-a...