351–360 of 718 posts
One of the many things that I love about the Netherlands is the lack of tipping in the culture. People get paid a decent wage, and so tipping is only something done if the service is amazing.
Seriously, this is the responsibility consumers have in a free market. If there's behavior you don't like, move on. You don't get to complain about bad actors when you're literally keeping them in business.
No, this is why you have regulation, and need unions. 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.
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.
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Where did you get the notion that tips are supposed to be untaxed income?
Have you ever seen anyone accurately report tips earned in cash?
Above? Not so much.
A lot of wait staff seem content to push mis-information: "If you tip poorly, the IRS makes us pay tax on it anyway, i.e. we're having to pay to serve you!"
No, the IRS makes an estimate on how much tipped workers are paid. If you document and it's less, then you pay tax on that. But using the IRS as the big bad wolf to get more tips that you know damn sure you're not going to report, doesn't make me the most sympathetic.
I've seen wait staff say that they believe 20% should be a baseline, for bad service, 25 for "decent" and 30% for good service...
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No, that’s just rude (given that the tipping culture still exists). If they really wanted to show solidarity they’d leave cash tips, which their server could then forget to report.
I wonder how well using cash tips could solve the problem. I know there are restaurants where servers are required to turn in any cash tips. If a server "forgets to report" and always has far less tips than his/her co-workers, I imagine that he/she would simply be replaced for someone else that does earn tips to report. The employer could say the lack of tips is indicative of poor performance, too.
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> From my perspective Instacart is stealing from its customers and workers by doing this. This is 100% wage theft.
I had a service industry job in texas that payed me around 2.50 an hour (iirc) and as long as I made enough in tips to cover minimum wage they didn't have to pay actual minimum wage. 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.
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Why is 'service' seen as a separately billed item, paid for by the tip, in a restaurant in the US? Why isn't it included in the bill for the food, like everything else is?
Because standing in line for food is cheaper than having someone personaly serve it to you? You are not so much paying for a potato, as you are paying for it to be fried, packaged, and in your hand, quickly and reliably.
German reader here. Because of minimum wage you'd only tip if service was good (or always tip if you have enough money, my parents generation are more frugal than I am). Delivery services often get around minimum wage because they use the "Uber" trick and technically the drivers are "self-employed", always tipping those folks. Anyway: Are tips taxable in the US? Here in Germany tips are tax-free under certain conditi…
Instacart is AWFUL. 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 de…
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.
Always tip in cash. Tips should be a purely private thing, nobody but the tipper and the tipped should know about the tip.
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I love how even knowing the company is stealing from their employees isn't enough to get you to drop using their service. I'm going to send at most 3 angry tweets about this before I forget about it and move on to the next thing to be upset about today.
I'm not even going to send an angry tweet. I'm going to keep ordering. If a driver takes the job, at the price Instacart wants to pay, it's on the driver, of course. And this works until it doesn't! Once people quit driving for IC, THIS is the market price signal which will cause the system to reconfigure. If IC can't get drivers, they must pay more! I have zero illusions that enough people understand the free market…
Also, it's not clear to me, are the drivers told their comp for the job before accepting? Did this person know they would earn $0.80/hr?