431–440 of 718 posts
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Switch to cash tipping. Tipping through CC or some other mechanism means at least one other party is involved and takes a cut. Cash tipping ensures the money at least is seen by the service staff.
I’m pretty comfortable tipping via credit card because I understand that the card company and a bank is taking a cut. I am _not_ comfortable with something like this, where it’s not immediately clear what’s happening.
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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.
There is no democraty if the people don't exercice their power. Voting once for a group of people make it one day democraty, the rest of the year oligarchy. 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 a…
Calling for personal responsibility is a good way to misdirect attention.
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> From my perspective Instacart is stealing from its customers and workers by doing this. This is 100% wage theft.
It will not matter. Washington state law does not apply. The sovereign state of Washington laws are superseded and invalidated by mandatory binding arbitration. The rights set out in the State of Washington's constitution do not apply, for they are superceded and ignored by mandatory binding arbitration. Any dispute will go to a monkey court instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no democraty if the people don't exercice their power. Voting once for a group of people make it one day democraty, the rest of the year oligarchy. 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 a…
Personal responsibility has a place, and it's important... But it doesn't scale to solve all problems. Calling for personal responsibility is a good way to misdirect attention.
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I mean, if that utility of every part of the supply chain was actually surfaced and you could make payments directly to parts of the supply chain, I could see trying that business model out as a consumer. Whats happening here is that companies have figured out they can just extract value out of a subset of their employees and pass the cost onto their customers by manipulating social norms. If I'm paying the worker di…
I mean, I see what you're saying. I really do. But it feels a bit cynical to me. Personally, I think everyone should try giving 20% (or more, haven't you ever received some freshly cooked chicken nuggets and just knew that they were delivered to the store with extra care) to every individual and/or corporate entity in the entire supply chain. It just increases the feeling of community in an ever growing global landsc…
Got those lovely nuggets? Buy there again, tell their manager how great the service was, and be a great customer. Also, treat better the next person you interact with, don't just offset your morale to paying some dollars and then be an asshe...
What are the poor legitimately at fault for then? 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> That's right: the customer's tip doesn't get added to the worker's check — it just gets deducted from what Instacart pays. In other words, up-front tips go to Instacart, not to the worker. 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 i…
> You can't just throw the word in your app and do what you want with the money it generates. 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.