I have a simple answer: I will never use Instacart or Doordash again, ever. Even if they change their policy, they are dead to me as companies, and any company that acquires them is similarly dead to me.
If you're out there, upstart disruptors, know that pulling stuff like this will cost you at least one customer for life. I'm sure that there are more people like me.
Those Instacart workers can go drive for the other companies that will get my business. I'm not skipping out on grocery and food delivery. I'm voting for good behavior with my wallet.
Note: I recognize the same people driving for different services pretty regularly.
There's plenty of former employees who've left issues with low pay and these policies. I'd rather show solidarity with them by not supporting their exploitative former employer.
Can’t have your cake and eat it too. Either it’s not impacting workers as much as the article and our imaginations would lead us to believe, or it is. If it is, then yes voting with your wallet is 100% appropriate despite temporary disruption it might cause workers.
For these workers, it's really "neither have your cake nor eat it". They get screwed by Instacart and DoorDash stealing their tips, and then screwed further when they can't make as many deliveries because people boycott.
I'm not saying we should support shitty companies. But these boycotts ostensibly happen because we have empathy for workers. We shouldn't lose track of that empathy when workers talk about how the boycotts affect them.
This just goes to show that all industries need competition. If there's a third company that also provide this service, they could market themselves as more ethical, and if the people truly are as conscientious as it seems to be here, then it will gain market share.
Competition might be necessary to fix this, but it's certainly not sufficient. The restaurant industry is competitive, but according to the Department of Labor [1] "nearly 84 percent of full-service restaurants it investigated between 2010 and 2012 had violated labor standards, including but not limited to tip violations".
They're welcome to their opinion, and we're welcome to ours. If the point is to help every Instacart worker as much as possible, then the answer is complicated.
If the point is to not support businesses that lie to their customers, then not supporting them anymore is the right move.
This is exactly why I don't boycott WalMart. Because as abhorrent and their policies are, the last thing I want to do is put some poor person barely scraping by out of a job.
The solution here is not to boycott these places, it's to use your power to lobby for better laws to protect the workers, which will apply evenly to all companies, including future companies that might try to take advantage of people.
Or you could support a competitor that treats their employees well, giving them more business so they can expand their business and hire the people that eventually leave Walmart...
This is why I avoid Walmart and Amazon, even if it hurts my bottom line.
You can lobby for better laws and boycott businesses that treat their employees poorly at the same time.
Hopefully your business will stimulate growth in companies that treat their employees fairly, and they will hire those who are still stuck working for bad employers.
The few times I've used them [1] they were just choked with dark patterns. Stuff like [2] "Hooray, on your first order, we waive service fees!" -> "Delivery fee $4.99." Huh? What's the difference?
[1] I'm not a big food delivery user FWIW.
[2] just from memory -- I don't know the exact terminology
I wonder if those companies use the lack of tips as an indicator for not providing excellent service... and then use that as an argument to not use those drivers.
I’m a Dasher, and we can’t even see tips per order we complete, only how much we got in tips and how much we got from DoorDash during a session of deliveries.
Uber/UberEats pays their drivers a flat time/distance rate. If a customer gives a tip, this doesn't affect their pay for the drive (unlike DoorDash/Instacart), and the tip is 100% owned by the driver.
I would prefer this be phrased as "Uber does not take a cut of tips for drivers."
Drivers would definitely prefer, for a given dollar, that it be given in a way that does not create a taxable paper trail unless they elect to declare it.
I’m all for helping out the worker and always tip fairly even though I think we should abolish the custom, but I draw the line at changing my behavior in order to enable tax evasion.
Why take such drastic measures? Just use their system against them.
What I always, always do, is put $0 as a tip in the system and then tip the delivery person, in cash or using some app/paypal/etc., when they bring my order.
Same here. I used Instacart heavily for about a year until I started reading more about what a total scum bag company it is.
It’s very clear they only reversed this tipping policy because they are facing pressure. They would never do it otherwise. This is a consistent pattern with them — keep doing unethical behavior until the pressure requires you to change.
If you're out there, upstart disruptors, know that pulling stuff like this will cost you at least one customer for life. I'm sure that there are more people like me.