From my perspective Instacart is stealing from its customers and workers by doing this. I'm a huge fan of instacart (my fiance and I use it regularly), but this is definitely going to push me away from the platform. At a minimum I'm going to be tipping in cash.
https://medium.com/@workingwa/instacart-heres-our-22-cents-n...
This is 100% wage theft.
It's immoral as fuck to steal tips. I don't care if it's legal. If I'm a customer tipping the person a certain amount I want to make sure it's actually helping that person and not just lining the pockets of their employer, that's absurd.
So you have incentive to report 0.0 tips. But then our manager at PizzaHut let go everyone who reported 0.0 tips (when asked why, he said they called customers to confirm we did receive tips).
And that's not only PizzaHut, that's everyone doing that, at least in NJ.
Any dispute will go to a monkey court instead.
It depends on the agreement between Instacart and delivery staff.
Do the right thing. Take a stand for human decency and make a compromise by closing your instacart account now. Absorb the inconvenience and do your own shopping. And make sure to tell instacart to (insert profanity of choice) if you can while closing your account. That behaviour is low down and dirty. Shady craigs list used car dealer level stuff.
I just walked three blocks in the rain to the local grocery store to pick up stuff to make dinner and food for tomorrow. Not like I was jumping for joy and made a dash for the door. I didn't want to, but I did. That's life.
I've tipped a lot on Doordash. I feel ripped off.
My company regularly used Doordash for years and made a point of tipping on orders. Crazy.
I think this a danger of contracting for VC-backed "gig economy" services like Instacart and Uber. They often subsidize the cost of the service using funding (billions, in the case of Instacart and Uber) in order to quickly attract customers and workers, then reduce the subsidies once they are established.
It's not right, but at this point gig economy workers should expect it and plan accordingly.
Now it seems they skip items, replace it without asking and the earliest delivery is tomorrow. And the produce has a lot to be desired. It'll last two days and already looks crappy on delivery. I think they are in such a rush they just grab whatever.
The best thing for any app service, keep 20 in singles and just tip cash. I honestly don't know how the app tipping works but I have a feeling the full amount isn't going to the person.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/management/bu...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/01/18/686665609/epis...
If that doesn't work then of course I'm going to drop their service. I just believe that supporting worker led actions is the best way to push change at this very moment.
I use Uber from time to time. Knowing full well that they have some practices I admonish. I use Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Safeway, etc. I try to be a better consumer with products but it doesn't always work.
I think we can approach this without the pitchforks and realize we all do this to some extent. The OP recognizes the problem and suggests they'll change their behavior. That's a win.
Parent - good luck moving off of the service. It's hard to swap something you've come to rely on out, and good on you for recognizing that as a consumer you need to make a change.
Seems like a not-bad approach.
Why don't you do something productive with your outrage, like changing your own lifestyle and keeping it to yourself? Or better yet, raise awareness without bullying someone else's attempt to process their frustration in an even-tempered way.
I have zero illusions that enough people understand the free market to be patient and allow for this to happen. We need to teach more economics in grade school.
why should it be?
ahh whaaat? mashes downvote button
since you are still reading, what is the exact thought process here, can you articulate this? So the service works and still provides a convenience for you, but is this action being masqueraded as the most effective way to get the company to change a policy amongst all other possible actions? Is it just to not "support" a company that does a single thing you disagree with? Is it something else?
I think there are more effective ways of bringing Instacart into compliance with your ideals. Isn't that a possibility?
edit: and no responses by time of writing while on the way to getting downvote censored. Be interesting to see if it flips when a different crowd gets off of work.
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"
That having been said, the concept of defining contractor wages in relation to customer tips is new to me. I could see a legal argument being made in the employer's favor if the worker gave due consent to the transaction.
The idea here would be: Instacart states somewhere on the order prior to pickup 'if you choose to accept this order, you will receive $10, of which $.80 will come from us.' Since the delivery worker isn't running a 'shift' as an 'employee,' but just coincidentally happens to be running Instacart orders for 10 hours straight, this counts as one of many transactions that they've accepted and hence waived the legal right to complain about.
If this legal fiction sounds absurd to you, you're not alone.
Only Instacart believes this.
That's simple fraud. It's like going door to door collecting money for a charity and then just pocketing the money. Potentially Instacart will need to refund those 'tips'
The strange thing about this is that it may actually be fraud against the people buying from instacart. The ones giving the tip. I'm curious then what kind of damages a customer could sue for beyond the amount of the tip. And I'm also curious if instacarts TOS for customers forces arbitration and prevents class action lawsuits.
This should be interesting to watch unfold.
I think this sentence says the opposite of what you intended it to.
The problem is that they use the tip as an excuse to pay basically nothing. It's not acting like a real tip.
I feel like for someone somewhere in the attorney general's office, prosecuting these should be someone's full time tax paid job.
Suppose that we decide to call dogs cats. In that case, what is a domesticated canine? Answer: it’s a dog, whatever you choose to call it.
(Pretty sure I butchered that, but hopefully the point still came through.)
It doesn't only take away responsibility of paying, but adds emotional and mental load cost to the customer. It's hilarious that people accept that in exchange for an illusory level of control (you being the mini manager/boss of your service task) over quality of service.
In places where the tax and all other costs are already factored into the price, tipping is reserved for truly exceptional service.
Or, alternatively, maybe you don't live in a country with a tipping culture. And if so, then tipping doesn't really affect you.
People like to tip. I like to tip. Waiters and waitresses like to be tipped. My wife used to work as a waitress and would clear over $300 a night in tips alone. It's only a small minority of people who are against it.
As a non-American I had to read the article a few times to understand what the problem was - I thought this was just how tipping worked in the US.
I always read of service workers who only manage to "stay afloat" by the tips they earn, this seems to be almost the same thing, but reading it again I can see it isn't.
Here in NZ there is sometimes a "tip jar" at the counter of a cafe where you might throw in a coin or two (say $1 or $2) as a way of thanking the staff overall. High end restaurants will also offer a place for you to add a tip if you feel you got exceptional service, but there's also no hard feeling or death stares if you don't put anything there.
I hope tipping dies in the US and people get paid fairly regardless. But then you have bigger problems to solve first of all :)
The tipping system still baffles me (and I never know when I am supposed to tip or not .. )
From what I gathered, it comes from the prohibition as a way to supplement hotels and restaurants personnel wages (since they were making less in that context).
Why it persisted to nowadays and has been extended to many service works baffles me to no end.
Taxes are also added at checkout when you buy e.g. groceries, so it seems pretty cultural to have a very opaque 'what you pay' system.
Expected tip amounts have also been going up, I assume now because companies/restaurants want to hide a price rise behind it.
Food prices have gone up since increase in minimum wage last year, and default tip option is 18% at majority of the places. Oh and that 18% counts the 13% tax, so you are tipping more than 18%.
These sorts of stories confirm my feelings about tipping that I’ve had all along: tipping is just a way to subsidize employers by pitting employees against customers and guilt-tripping the latter.
Follow-up update: Aren't all the gig economy start-ups (Uber/Uber Eats, Lyft, Caviar, Eat24/Yelp, Fiverr etc.) potentially doing the same thing? They are probably exploiting the same loop-hole in whatever set of laws. It might be just a UI update, but I remember seeing a message of the form "our drivers get 100% of their tips" in Uber Eats just yesterday, which is sort of like saying "we are following the law about tips".
The way they keep working to create opaqueness around their tipping to the point that last year Drivers were handing out pamphlets explaining how to remove the "Service Fee" (which nobody but Instacart gets) to tip the drivers was a huge red flag. Removing the service fee was on a 2nd page you had to go to and by default I believe was 10% of your order. If you've never used Instacart the groceries in my experience have been quite a bit more expensive than they'd be in stores so they're making revenue on that end already.
I started using them a bit again this year and now there's only a "Driver Tip" section with I believe a hard locked in service fee. Does the shopper get the tip as well? Is the driver the shopper as well now? In my situation the shopper is doing FAR more work than the driver. I want to tip the people well because I know Instacart doesn't pay well, but I don't want to give a $26 tip for $130 in groceries (which is usually 3-4 bags) going to the person who only spent 10 minutes in a car to drop my groceries off at my front door (and Instacart drivers never read the Delivery notes, I've had to walk out and walk them over to me each time last year that I ordered).
Is the tip split between the shopper and the driver? It only says "Driver Tip".
Everything just seems to be disgustingly opaque with this company and I really do not feel right even using it anymore so I've used it incredibly sparingly (maybe 3 times last year) as of late.
edit: I just checked, there's an info icon and it says 100% of the tip goes to the driver. So should I not tip based on the entire process of shopping and delivery? I don't even want to use this app anymore because I shouldn't have to stop and waste time considering these things.
This company just screams deceptive to me. Guess I'll be done with it.
According to the screenshot of Instacart's email, they confirmed this is accurate and was most definitely not a mistake. And according to the article, Instacart has doubled-down instead of apologizing.
Are cash tips an effective method of keeping grubby corporate hands out of it?
When you have a felony a lot of higher-paying unskilled jobs will simply filter you out as being too high risk or likely to cause trouble. So the only places that will hire these kinds of people can get away with crazy tactics like the ones people are discussing in these threads. When your choice is exploitative tactics or literally no other option because the entire market has you blacklisted you are going to take the horrible option knowing full well it is a horrible option.
For some people though there just aren't a lot of jobs available that match their education and experience.
People that are desperate for money are frequently exploited. Whether it's through wage theft, or unsafe employment practices, or simply demeaning behavior.
"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
Airbnb: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ai...
Stripe: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+st...
Cruise: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+cr...
etc.
Wait, you thought HackerNews was impartial?
Brb getting banned and blacklisted.
Just pay your workers minimum wages at least and make tipping optional.
I shouldn't have to tip the "employees" just because a company can get away without paying even minimum wage to its "employees".
There is something seriously broken with the whole tipping thing.
But does anyone else find it obnoxious that all these digital services exist, often starting out with no tip straight pricing, then tipping re-appears, and then you suddenly need physical cash to morally use the service at all?
Obviously workers should get fairly compensated. The problem is tipping culture itself, just set a price that customers are willing to pay and workers can enjoy a reasonable standard of living.
Plus the whole tipping thing is extremely inconsistent. Floral delivery? No tip. Pizza delivery? Tip. Some brands support credit card tipping, others don't, and even the ones that do you have to research how much using it hurts the employee...
The US needs law changes that outlaw tipping. It will be culturally painful while we adapt but once we do both workers and customers will be better for it.
No, it just needs to not treat workers that might receive tips differently: they should have he same minimum wages as other workers and tips should not count as compensation by the employer satisfying minimum wage mandates.
Private employers might then wish to prohibit employees accepting tips (since it no longer benefits the employer as it does now for the worker to be classes as “tipped”), for similar reasons to those for which public employers already do.
EDIT: And we need better enforcement (and possibly slight changes to the basic rules) against mischaracterization of employees as contractors, which is most of the problem in this case.
Let's face it. People tip the Dominoes guy so they don't get spit in their pizza the next time.
Tipping law for the most part isn't changing largely because tipped workers make more money under the status quo. For those familiar with the restaurant industry, tons of folks turn down management roles because they pay less than working the floor.
27.35 - actual face value of food (same as the in-store menu, at least for this restaurant) 2.32 - Tax 1.30 - "Healthy SF fee" 2.00 - Courier Bonus 4.92 - "Service Fee" (huh?) 1.99 - "Delivery Fee"
It's obviously a terrible system, but is this different from how most everywhere with tipping in the US works? I've never worked a tipped job in the US.
However, the absolute bare minimum the employer was allowed to pay was 50% of minimum wage. Not sure if this was just state-specific or if it changed.
Some engineer somewhere decided or was told: Hey if someone gets a big tip, lets consider that as part of their pay and not pay they what's due. And then they just blindly do it?!
I can understand that an engineer might just be following requirements, but _someone_ made that decision--probably a PM, or does this go higher than that?
It seems that companies (FB, Google, etc.) are almost going out of their way to be evil!
We need the equivalent of a "known to do evil" blacklist: companies and employees known to have been working on specific products/projects should be black-balled:
You wrote a VPN to collect information off people's phones? Good luck getting work with another tech company. You wrote/designed functionality to get kids to play games that require money and is hidden from their parents? Screw you. You wrote/designed a feature that said that people should be screwed out of their wage because they got a big tip? F you.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash/comments/963kyv/if_you_are...
I mean, it's hard to fathom how you could get worse than $0.80. But less than half that? That's worse for sure.
One super annoying thing about this system and people choosing not to tip is a situation like this, assume a waiter is serving two customers in an hour, the local minimum wage is $9/hr and the sub-minimum wage is $3/hr, the first customer tips $4 dollars, yielding a potential wage excess of $2 (assuming a reliable rate) when the second customer tips $0 then the waiter ends up making no money beyond minimum wage. So if you're a tipper another customer that doesn't tip can cancel out your tip.
I'm not certain how these are aggregated from an accounting perspective, but I wouldn't be surprised if the window was either a full day or a pay period (in the latter case, every two weeks someone totals $3 * hrs worked, adds on total tips and verifies if that number is above $9 * hrs worked (do nothing) or is below (make up the difference out of the employer's pocket.
Firing one guy because he won't steal from your customers won't fly if the union tells your entire development team to walk and they'll cover wages until they get a better job.
Sure, you can try to use technology and innovation to reduce overhead. That's the pitch usually, I think. If you can provide a service with a lower headcount, you can be much more cost-efficient. But it seems a lot of the companies aiming for disruption aren't able to actually do that, so instead they reduce payroll costs by simply refusing to take on the responsibilities employers are traditionally expected to take.
It'll be interesting to see how long this model of "disruption" can be sustained.
As a YC alum, I'm disgusted to see a YC company behaving like this.
Instacart: It shouldn't have to be said, but you don't cheat your customers and workers. Whatever internal rationalization you've developed for this practice is just that — a rationalization.
Stop cheating people. If your unit economics are so broken that you can't survive without deceiving and cheating people, then shut down instead.
Tipping has ruined this whole new batch of convenience services for me.
People are harassed for not tipping. People look down on you for not tipping. Even, for bad service, we still have to tip.
Instacart has 1.9b in funding, if they are stealing from their workers, it only means that their business model is broken.. or we as consumers can fall into this dishonest game and normalize it.
Bu continuing to tip, you indirectly hurt workers.
Employers love it since they can underpay. Some employees love it since they can make a very good living but that's a fraction of the total. But overall it creates an economy subclass that's constantly struggling. They have trouble paying the bills. It's tough work plus they have to deal with upset customers even though they likely had no control of the situation.
I'm a fan of a permanent surcharge on the bill rather than having to deal with giving a tip. Pizza delivery places have a delivery charge now plus a fuel surcharge, as far as I am concerned they can add a service charge too.
Yes, services will become more expensive. But over time an economic equilibrium begins to appear at which time we can reevaluate and change. But the last thing we need to do is bring it into the future.
Instead of delivery people blindly accepting orders and hoping for the best, the people who are requesting the delivery should have to set a rate at order time and make the full order and destination visible so couriers can decide if it's worth it and make a counter-offer if it's too low to be worth it.
If you ever go read what the workers are saying in subreddits for these services, it's clear that the incentives for quick and accurate deliveries just don't line up with the current gig system.
That's an interesting idea --- reminds me of e-coins with variable transaction fees. You can offer more if you want people to work on your transaction faster.
Anyway: Are tips taxable in the US? Here in Germany tips are tax-free under certain conditions: If I give it directly to the barber, waiter, etc., it is a non-taxable event, while if the employer collects the tip and divides it up under all employees it is a taxable event.
There is some back-and-forth in that thread, but the gist of it seems to be the same as here, where Amazon takes tips into account when they calculate the base wage, which can result in getting a low base wage if there's a large tip.
https://help.goodeggs.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007378212-Do-...
I have no stake in them but it's interesting that they addressed this at all, and well before this instacart controversy.
https://www.wonolo.com/blog/best-gig-economy-apps/
I guess this Wonolo service is for choosing the right services to work for. Now I'm wondering how many Wonolo clones there are. :-)
He didn't actually get 80 cents an hour, but he also didn't get the wage+tip he expected. Instead, Instacart got tipped, and he effectively got the regular wage. I hope!
But here are the vile people responsible for this practice: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/instacart#section-cu...
I'm often thinking about Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4sbYy0WdGQ he makes the point I'm also trying to make. People should get paid for doing service and not need to rely on pittance of the customers because their bosses don't calculate the real cost of doing business. If it were up to me tips would be forbidden.
In Japan (as far as I understand) it's an insult to tip, it's almost like: "This business probably isn't doing well enough to pay you a proper salary, so here's a little something extra."
Service disrupted because bus driver/garbage collector / teacher/hotel employee strike? How dare those selfish underpaid and overworked peasants stand up for reasonable hours! They should consider themselves lucky they have a job at all! (It should be: how dare the corporations or federal agencies pay so little to their employees that their only recourse was to risk their livelihood by walking off the job)
How about that case where the teacher used her health insurance to pay for an impoverished student's pills? She committed insurance fraud, she's just raising rates for everyone else! (Never mind that rates will be as high as an insurance company can legally get away with in this insane profit driven healthcare industry)
Or the housing crisis. Stupid proletariat, taking loans they knew they couldn't afford! Why didn't they educate themselves? (Instead of 1. Why weren't banks doing due diligence 2. Why were banks allowed to not do due diligence 3. Why the fuck don't they teach us basic financial skills in elementary school?)
It doesn't work that way either, but that's the rationale.
Forcing people to tip to ensure people get paid enough money is a consequence of the system, not the reasoning why the system is implemented.
>It doesn't work that way either, but that's the rationale.
Indeed. The on the ground reality is that tipping does not serve this purpose. I don't know if it ever did, to be frank. Studies[0] generally show little to no correlation between performance and amount tipped.
And the reality is that tipping is the reason invoked in many state laws for paying restaurant workers less than minimum wage. Tipping is the reason they get paid poorly, and I always find it problematic that people invoke tipping as a way to help people, when it is the cause of their low wages. In those states, tipping is a big win for the restaurant owner. The customer pays more money out of his/her pocket, and the waiter often does not get much money.
Unlike others, though, I do not consider this wage theft (even at a moral level). We don't tip for many other services that we receive, and the problem of how those workers are compensated doesn't cross our mind. Why do we insist that tipping some category of workers has a moral component whereas others do not? Fixing those laws will be a challenge as long as tipping is commonplace.
[0] Example: https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
(Taking off my pink hat)
(Yes, I do contribute to their poor wages by tipping. Have to conform somewhat to society!)
So it sounds like it is absolutely used as a bad way to supplement wages.
Tipping really is a method for the employer to hold onto as much money as possible at the expense of staff.
In reality, the system in the US is what it is because of the mostly random process of cultural development.
Changing cultural norms is not easy in any society, even if you have good logical arguments against them.
Is this not Instacart doing the same thing where your wage is .82 plus tips as long as that amount is above x wage. If it’s below x they will pay you x.
However in this instance it’s an issue because the tipped employees are not often making more than x even with tips therefore the consumer is misled about who their tip money is going to.
I can't see in either case how its sustainable business practice to offer gig work, but claim the tip is the pay.
I really wish there were penalties reserved for CEO and Board of these startups, which couldn't be passed on to shareholders or customers.
Flaying alive feels like it might be about all we've got left.
Happy to put on an old crone's clothes and sit below the scaffold knitting, while it happens. Maybe the sans-culottes had a point?
If someone is willing to be paid $10 to deliver groceries, does it matter who is paying them $10 for it?
I've never used instacart before. Is the verbiage around leaving a tip lead the end user to believe that they are giving it directly to the person making the delivery?
Who should the tip go to?
- To the owner who spent/spends a fortune running it in LA?
- To the chef who catered to our needs without seeing us?
- To the person who immediately and happily tended to us everytime we raised our heads and looked around
- To the person who cleared the used plates and never let us wanting for crockery
- (we tipped the valet guy separately)
I wonder what as a customer should I do? How do I know the share goes to all? I cannot pay cash for that amount. I carry barely $5 with me in cash.
In any case, the owner's revenue is based on the menu pricing; if the owner wants more then the prices get raised. For anyone else, the expectation is likely to be that tips go through the server and are divided from there if they're divided at all. Don't stress too much about tipping the other staff unless someone's gone far above and beyond.
-- if TIP > minimum wage -- does Instacart record a negative -$ adjustment
such that a person's payment will only ever be the maximum payment, regardless of how much tip the customer gives?
That would really be egregious.
Disgusting, reprehensible, and frankly unbelievable. I've never used Instacart and now I never will.
> Tips have always been included in our calculation of earnings and it helps provide a reminder to customers that you are providing a valuable service.
Being fed garbage like that is pretty insulting, though it's interesting to see how far they're willing to stretch logic to try to put a positive spin on it. I mean, "we reduce your earnings so you can feel useful"? Man, logic broke right there.
In Russia, distinction is clear in law. Do you pay her regularly? I. e. at least one a month? Then she is employee, no matter who says what.
I understand less protection for workers, less vacation, less regulation overall, this is all understandable. I don't understand why facts are ignored in favor of words.
The Russian law may seem clear, but in reality it's just a stand-in for a more complex analysis.
Basically, all floor employees salary is commission based. If you don't get enough commission, they will pay you minimal wage but will get rid of you in several months, otherwise your sale commission kind of "fills" your salary until it gets to minimal wage, and only then starts to increase your wage.
Won't be surprised if most of retail works in similar way.
The whole gig thing is basically passing the risks associated with having employees (injuries and managing them) / sales variation risks (having to pay people when sales are up or down) onto folks who are no longer employees.
The idea that they'd take even more from their contractors based on other factors just seems natural.
Maybe a "franchise fee" type thing is next....
https://www.instacart.com/help/section/200761964#11500564332...
The whole point of the tip is that it is supposed to be a bonus on top of the worker's normal pay. Instead, here it is displacing the money that Instacart would have otherwise paid them.
If there was a popular 3rd party app for tipping directly to any individual, regardless of where they might be or whether they're working or not, that could actually prevent companies from snooping in on the tips. Even at restaurants.
I read through the blog post on Medium and the article, but couldn't find any case where the customer had tipped more.
Is $0.80 the minimum payment they will make, or will it decrease further – negative?
Integrate seamlessly into checkout experience (like Affirm does for micro lending).
This could prevent Instacart etc from reducing hourly rate based on tips (because they don't have access to that info).
They're often exploitative of workers and this is just exactly the kind of thing that reinforces my decision to never stay at an AirBNB, never take Lyft, Uber etc.
I am not an instacart user myself but I use similar services and I expect that any tip will be delivered to the driver.
I'd be pissed off to find out otherwise.
Instacart won't see this transaction and therefore won't reduce their wages.
Less convenient. But this policy is unfair.
It's company responsibility to set the pricing policy so everyone one gets paid.
If they don't pay their workers, it's not my problem.
Others have said why. I will spend some time to make others aware.
I really hate this sort of thing. Viscerally.
My opinion is abolish tip culture.
Edit: I meant shouldn't.
The gig economy has so many problems like this it is silly.
Why's Instacart getting the unique bad press?
- lack of empathy: Uber, Instacart, etc. etc. etc., exploiting the poor
- parasitic behavior: aggressive tax optimisation/tax evasion, Amazon employees relying on food stamps for subsistance
- superficial charm: get rich quick
- pathological lying: cf. Facebook denying they ever did anything wrong
- manipulativeness: "make the world more open and connected"
and my personal favorite,
- grandiosity: "change the world!", "solve physics for good!", "be immortal!"
But it's just a case of confirmation bias if you didn't look for counter-examples to try to disprove your theory.
Are the following companies ethically perfect? I doubt it. But I haven't heard much bad about them and they have changed my life for the better significantly: AirBnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Rappi, WhatsApp, Square, Netflix. I bet I could find others.
> Amazon > Facebook
I don’t think amazon and Facebook are startups
Consumers have enough parameters to optimize for: price of groceries, cost of delivery, fair trade, availability of products, delivery speed, convenience, availability of delivery slots, the list is long.
Consumers are relatively good at optimizing for cost, not perfect -- but asking for more than that is unrealistic.
Personal responsibility is required in a good society, irrespective of the system of government or the level of regulation that currently exists. Even if it's consumers/voters pushing their legislators to build regulations, you need a mass of regular old people who care in order to change a society.
Then the onus is on you to prove that regulation of an issue--say, drinking and driving--didn't just happen to coincide with a national education campaign coming from a well-funded 501(3)(c). Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much.
In my opinion, the problem here isn't regulation vs. collective action people like grand-OP who are willing to continue using the service. Those same people will push back against legislation if they believe it will increase their prices, or eliminate the service altogether (Uber/Lyft in e.g. Austin?)
And in any case, consumer-driven action is MUCH faster than regulation. You can boycott them TODAY and cause an actual hit to their bottom line.
There is litterally no other way to have a democraty that to make your day to day actions matter. Each citizen has to have a life directed to create a society.
Now I understand how hard it is. And I don't blame people for failing at it, me included. But as long as we label it as unrealistic, it stops all hope of progress.
Learning to empower one's self is a skill we could benefit from teaching in society. Unfortunately, our primary education systems are not oriented toward teaching autonomy. They teach independence & compliance, which is false separation (since we're interdependent, not independent) and giving up power to others, respectively.
We hire people to grow our food because it is a better optimisation of labour, not because we can just forget about the process of growing food. We need to be aware of things like: is this food processing sanitary, is the farm run by ethics that we agree with, is the environmental impact acceptable, is this food then best thing to grow in this environment (eg: growing cotton and rice in the desert makes no sense at all).
We then exercise choice by hiring people who best match our criteria.
When the only criteria we filter by is cost, we throw everything else out the window: ethics, ecological sustainability, economic viability, morality, food safety: everything.
Regardless of whether it is a good or bad practice to rely upon, in any capacity, the moral action of consumers generally, the fact still remains for the individual that if they have learned a provider they are using is acting immorally, they have a choice to contribute to and reward that or not. Even if it is terrible to rely upon this on a social scale, it does not absolve you of moral culpability for your own actions. Everything else aside, if you know such a thing, you still made the choice to contribute to a thing you claim to not agree with. It creates a bit of dissonance, where your professed moral beliefs are not reflected in your actions. And that's something that plays a role in your own evaluation of self even if others don't learn of your actions and judge you for them.
People are entitled to their individual choices. If it's too much information to process, they can individually choose someone they delegate their decision making to. One way they do this is to trust a particular certification and only buy products with the certification seal. But each individual should get to choose which party plays the role of delegate for them.
Resorting to one-size-fits-all regulatory/union monopolies shows a lack of imagination that deprives individuals of their agency and breeds corruption/rent-seeking-behaviour.
As for this case, it's pretty clearly theft, and should be dealt with accordingly by the legal system. Customers/workers shouldn't have to band together to punish theft.
I disagree that collective action is impossible. Consumers become aware of problems, eg. high fructose corn syrup, and act accordingly, eg. buying less sugary junk. Cultural change is slow-moving but it starts with people giving a shit.
If that's not what you meant, can you please clarify?
It's not possible with an attitude like that. There is no government action that is forcing you to buy from Instacart.
>Boycotts essentially never work.
Tell that to Birmingham, Alabama.
>Not only that, but who are you going to use instead of instacart: Amazon Fresh? Uber? Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours?
Whataboutism and false dichotomy. There are many places that sell groceries that pay their workers more than minimum wage. Do a little research and give them your business. Or start your own grocery story if there's really a demand for something like this.
>Also, what do you think the working conditions were like for whoever picked that asparagus?
We can be concerned about more than one thing at a time.
Borderline living wage, but a lot better than being exploited by some BS company like InstaCart.
No, I will get on a bus operated by union-organized employees and travel to a grocery store where employees are also covered by a union and inside the city limits of a city with a reasonable minimum wage and scheduling rules inside a state with mandated paid sick leave. While there, I will likely pay a bit more than if outside those borders but the people involved in the process will be getting treated minimally well.
People crap on what cities like Seattle and states like Washington are trying to do as “socialist” or “a nanny state,” but workers are humans who deserve to be treated well and “the market” seems terrible at that if left to its own devices.
In addition, it's difficult to have empathy for a situation you've never experienced yourself. For every ethical consumer who knows how shitty these jobs are and makes decisions on that basis, there are many who either either unaware, don't think too much about it, or don't care because of the companion narrative of "they knew what they were signing up for".
In the final analysis, "vote with your dollars" often ends up being a defence of the status-quo against any labor regulation that might have real teeth and help people get paid a fair wage.
If you change what’s essentially the dictionary definition of the product being sold, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Except it’s really just a rock.
A cash tip fixes this problem. I can't do anything about the business itself.
You're upset that the thing that solves a nice pain point for you and is very useful is doing it in a way that you find disagreeable. You don't yet have an alternative or at least it will take some amount of time and effort to find one and make the switch. You are voicing your dissatisfaction and dissapointment in the hope that the situation will be rectified and you won't have to go through the process of switching because it might be expensive (in some sense) to do so or there may be no alternative that you find compelling.
It's a two way street. If the company refuses to change and it upsets you enough, you need to move on. If you voice loud enough complaints and there are enough of them then it may cause the company to change.
Complaining is part of the mechanism that makes the system work.
For most companies I deal with I have no idea if they are doing shady things or not and I generally don't bother checking.
No such market with perfect competition exists, which leads to market externalities and the need for outside forces to get involved to correct (such as regulation).
Remember United Airlines? Yeah, neither does anyone else. Exxon Mobile? You’d first have to find out their local brand name. Etc etc
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.
Sure, INDIVIDUALS are at fault for a variety of options, but if you're looking to blame the poor as a group for something, you're using the wrong criteria, since it's a status that has no direct mapping to choice.
That seems like quite the atomised society.
There was the "everything the fault of the poor" bit in the first sentence, but that was obvious hyperbole.
What I want to know are examples of things that the poor are at fault for.
You haven't really said anything here, just vaguly created a strawman that people are arguing "the poor can never do wrong", which was never the claim.
If I must argue something, I'd say the housing crisis example wasn't so simple as it was presented. Some people knew exactly what they were doing, albeit it turned out badly for them, but they had so little to lose they took the risk anyway and just bankrupted out. But I'm not at all interested in talking about this, my original question still stands.
As someone who was once "just a poor boy, from a poor family" (to quote the bards) I've seen both sides of the coin.
My mother was a clever woman - as a child, too clever for the schools she went to, constantly picking fights with the teachers. As she tells it, she would usually win (at least on an intellectual level) but invariably - nobody likes a smart-arse - she would get expelled.
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for not keeping their heads down and working within the system. An instinct to rebel against the flow is bad.
In my early childhood, she was a factory worker, then she became a care assistant. Neither pays very well, but she worked nights (which pays marginally more for a significantly worse quality of life).
Of course, myself and my brother were a massive drain on her finances. She ended up as a single mother early on due to a manipulative relationship.
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for having children, trusting people, trusting the wrong people, or being human beings with human families. Being human is bad.
At one point, she tried door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales. She sucked (joke intended). She couldn't bring herself to lie to people about how a vacuum could change their lives, even if it was a pretty powerful vac.
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault refusing to become morally corrupt to earn a liveable paycheck.
When she became a care assistant - again, night shifts, and again, reasonably low-paid work. She tried to become a car mechanic - she had the physical strength to do the task, but her patchy education meant she couldn't handle the algebra. She could multiply any two numbers in the blink of an eye, but as soon as you replace one of the numbers with letters, her eyes would glaze over and she would yearn to discuss the weather.
But to her credit, throughout her life she never once took out a credit card (that I'm aware of). She treated credit as akin to the devil. Many many others did fall in the credit trap, because society tells you that's the way to cope, that it's better than failing to pay your bills on time, and the credit checks were nowhere near as stringent. (though, equally, there was no such thing as a pay-day loan).
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for working within the system. An instinct to rebel against the flow is good.
Now, she has MS. She can't see, walk, or even stand most days. The government gives her an ungenerous stipend which is enough for her, as she spent our whole childhood skipping meals to meet bills anyway, and she throws up if she has to move after eating. Of course, they still sometimes try to claim that she could work because she can move her index finger (because those jobs exist) or because on a really good day she can distinguish between two dissimilar faces.
So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for being poor while other poor people are becoming morally corrupt to earn a liveable paycheck.
Now go through this and identify all the places that a non-poor person actively worked to keep the poor person down:
- The school teacher who would rather expel a kid than have a genuine conversation
- The factory bosses who pay their employees peanuts so they can charge their customers pennies less
- The care homes that charge each patient more than 3000/week, yet even with more than 4 patients per carer, budget for less than 1000/carer-week (that's idealized, 1 person for 24 hours, 7 days a week)
- The person who felt they "owned" her because they were the major breadwinner
- The salespeople who create ads for credit cards or pay-day loans that will never be repaid, and the salespeople who sign users up (or these days, the developers who build the systems to sign people up)
- The government-funded nurses who have a quota of "spongers" - a monthly number of people that they have to declare as fit for work, even if they're not, even if any appeal would reject the declaration without a second look, even if the disabled person has no money left, even if it will break the person's spirit, even if it might drive them deeper into credit, into depression, into suicide, into starvation.
I could go on. And, arguably, it's not the morally corrupt non-poor person who is at fault - if they don't do their morally-corrupt job, then they become poor. But there's never anyone up the chain of command who has any moral responsibility.
It's the poor person's fault. You know. For being poor.
Why start tipping for outstanding service, instead of setting the floor at $0 for 0 service?
Answer: because people like to pay less for stuff and let the company eat the blame.
Additionally, I refuse (on basic principle) to eat at any restaurant where I haven't mapped out their entire supply infrastructure. I made myself an app that keeps track of how much I spend at each of these restaurants in any given month and then I tip each entity a healthy percent (20% being the minimum because really if you can't afford 20% you can't afford to eat out). Currently, I'm tipping the truck drivers that deliver supplies, the factory workers who prepare the frozen food, the farmers, the accountants, the HR department, and the people who do road maintenance on the streets that all of the above use to get to work.
They're paying shit wages and thus offering shit quality, because they're offering a service that literally is unscalable. The logistics of laser-guided-bomb-type delivery of groceries from store to fridge is asinine.
Yo, grocery store shopping doesn't suck bad enough to pay someone else to do both the shopping and delivering! I'll pick up the pre-picked-up/bought groceries. I don't need you to delivery them directly to my fridge; I think I can handle that part. Just bring them out to my car when I pull up.
Problem solved, wages go up, quality goes up, I get my groceries. Everybody wins.
Re: Pickup
Where I live (a huge city) this is easily an hour minimum affair. And I mean just going to, finding parking (the pick up spots are always full on weekends) and getting back home. And that's with the grocery store being a ~10-15 minute drive.
This isn't even considering the fact that I really don't enjoy grocery shopping. It's anxiety inducing for me. It was worth the $20-30 for me, personally.
I'd usually be at home doing chores I miss out on during the week while waiting for my order. Greet the delivery person, fridge the stuff and get back to chores/enjoying my infrequent time off.
It is a useful service to me however. I no longer need to own a car or pay for two lyfts back and forth from the grocery store, so thats several hundred to several thousands dollars I save every year now that I got rid of my last need for a car. If I lived outside of a city where a car was mandatory I could see it being relatively worthless but in the city, its a massive cost and time saver
I actually like going to the grocery store, but I still have been using instacart a few times a month (up to today) for various reasons:
- One of my kids is homesick or having a nap and I can't go to the store
- My day is packed with work and I can't go to the store
- I have guests over the holidays that I would rather spend time with than go to the store
- I'm doing something important with my kids on the weekend and I'd rather do that than go to the store
- My kid tells me that they need something for school tomorrow and there's no gap of time left in the day when I can go to the store
All of that said, I'm stopping today because of this article. Their ethics are reprehensible. They specifically say in the app that 100% of my tip goes to the driver. That's true only if you look at it with very shaky logic -- they fail to mention that they deduct an equal amount from their base pay.
Eh, most grocery stores have offered delivery service for decades, but this service typically isn't advertised to the 'young yuppie/hipser with disposable income' demographic because traditionally it's been assumed that the people who need/want grocery delivery are the elderly and infirm.
If you go looking for it or ask about it, you'll probably find it's available. It's much less formal and digital than instacart; it's typically not as trendy and sexy as a smartphone app. But that's likely a reflection of the target demographic they have in mind.
And fuck the whole substitution thing. Now I have to make all the goddamn decisions I would have had to in the store anyway. Plus, if they don't have X, I'd get Y, but you're offering Cherry-X instead. So after my shopping, I still have to go shopping.
Not everything needs to scale better than O(n).
This is really much more a story of ethics in software development. Someone had to know they were doing the wrong thing when they wrote this.
edit: No, not going to talk about tipping. Like it or not, it is extremely common all over the world, and unrelated to this submission (which is about lowering "shopper's" compensation to almost negligible levels when tips are given).
I used to live in Japan where the service is quite better than in the US and tipping is frowned upon. You honestly don't know good service if you think tipping is necessary.
And to those saying to tip in cash, note that a lot of the times those that receive tips in cash typically don't report it as earnings on their income taxes. This is why I never tip cash.
Restaurants and such really just need to up their prices and do away with tipping. The practice itself is inherently discriminatory/racist in that better looking people typically receive higher tips, women typically receive higher tips than men, Whites receive higher tips than Blacks. It's really a disgusting practice.
There seems to be some logic to that to me. Whether that justifies a reduction in the minimum base wage for tipped roles, etc. I think of as a separate question, but I don't see tipping as a structurally problematic norm as long as the job interacts with many customers and a significant portion of the population actually tips.
If you want to blame someone, I suggest looking for the actual culprit and not a law-abiding company. This has little to do with Instacart and everything to do with state wage laws.
(1) Tips are expected in the restaurant industry
(2) Waitstaff knows what they're signing up for
(3) The restaurant does not adjust wages after tips have been received
In many cases they do. If you receive zero tips for a shift, they are obligated to pay out minimum wage. If you receive $200 in tips for a shift, they pay out a lower figure, usually around $2.
https://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm
It is, of course, entirely possible that the worker in question is not on the west coast, but Instacart is still welcome to pay a fair wage even if not required to by law, and Instacart should certainly avoid lying about their business practices either way (from the article: "Even Instacart seems to know how messed up it is to pay workers less when they get tipped more — which is why they’ve denied the practice when speaking to reporters at Business Insider & the Miami Herald.")
The receipt was for a store named Wegmans. Those stores are located on the East coast (New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey).
It may be legal for instacart to take the tip money but it’s their decision to do so and they deserve the blame.
It’s wrong because the people paying the tip generally believe it goes to the person providing the service, not to the company. And it subverts the purpose, which is to incent and reward good personal service.
So the company ends up screwing their workers, deceiving their customers and disincentizing good service.
Legal, but wrong and stupid.
