[dangrossman]

Briefly, in 2019, until it made the news and the policy was changed so that drivers kept 100% of tips. There's more nuance than "DD was keeping tips", but plenty already written about that if you care to find the 2019 articles.

[ryaneager]

It’s not more nuanced they were skimming tips and got caught.

[mrguyorama]

Some programmer wrote that statement in the code, wrote the function that was given a tip amount and a driver profile and reduced the tip amount to give the driver under certain circumstances. Someone cut that ticket, brought it up in a grooming session, people asked and answered questions about exactly when a driver's pay should be docked. Other devs probably approved the PR. I bet it even has a clear and concise comment explaining the math and the business purpose. I bet there's a unit test about "do_not_overpay_driver_with_tip". Jesus

I bet they all came onto HN and bitched about taxes and Unions after.

[Sohcahtoa82]

This 100%.

They were stealing tips. Full stop.

If a driver would be paid $5 for a delivery, and the customer tipped $5, the driver should receive $10.

But what was effectively happening instead was that the pay would be reduced by the tip amount to as low as $2. So now that delivery would actually pay $2 plus the $5 for a total of $7.

On longer range deliveries that might pay $10, the customer could tip $8 and the driver would still only make $10.

Now, from what I understand, DD no longer does this practice and legitimately gives the entire tipped amount to the driver with no reduction in pay from DD, but DD lowered the base delivery pay to compensate.

At the time, IIRC, DD tried to wordsmith what they were doing to not make it sound like they were stealing tips, and instead was simply subsidizing poor tippers with a higher base pay and acting like the keeping of the tip was just the removal of the poor-tip subsidy. I say to-may-toe, you say to-mah-toe, it's bullshit. They were stealing tips.