Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by distortionfield 1246 days ago
I've had delivery drivers give me my order only after explicitly telling me to tip more - which was frustrating because I actually increased my tip from $5 suggested by the app to $7 cause it was a snowy night. Some people won't be happy no matter what you do for them.
1 comments

$7 seems pretty good to me, though it's pretty mileage dependent (I assume the suggested tip is probably taking that into account), but I wonder, how much would I have to offer you to complete a Doordash order?
The tip isn’t the price of delivering the order though, you’re conflating the price and the tip into the same thing, which they’re not.

For the record, I’ve been a delivery driver before. Getting tipped at all was amazing, so I literally can not imagine pounding on the door, handing the person their pizza and telling them that they should tip more because I want more money.

For the modern food ordering app, the tip is the price of delivering. It's really a misnomer. More accurately, it should be called a bid, since you're placing a bid on your order and hoping a delivery driver will pick it up.
When you were a delivery driver, were you a W-2 employee? Doordash is not that - it's more like a live service market where you bid for delivery from a driver and Doordash attempts to match your order to a driver, all of whom are self employed (1099). They've got to pay all their vehicle expenses and in theory get something for their time, meanwhile Doordash is a middle-man and trying to squeeze both sides of the transaction. When it works, it is pretty impressive, but mostly it just seems like a Mug's game.