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Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

washingtonpost.com

201–210 of 344 posts

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#201
post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

I appreciate your comment but it's tangential to the article - in this case it's not really about tips but stealing from people who depend on you, and basically getting away with it.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#202
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tips are fundamentally broken. If you didn't know about tips, and someone offered you a job and said, "I'll pay you crap wages, but you can ask the customers for more money. Don't worry, they'll pay or their friends won't like them," you'd think it was a scam because it's such an obviously terrible deal. Tips are an awful way to incentivize good service. I'm neither qualified to judge my server's performance, and I'v…

>I'm neither qualified to judge my server's performance, and I've got very limited and potentially misleading information about what a reasonable expectation is. I've got no idea what small crises my server had to deal with, or how other customers are treating him. That's ridiculous. If you're not qualified to judge the value of service to yourself then your probably not qualified for a lot of spending decisions in y…

>That's ridiculous. If you're not qualified to judge the value of service to yourself then your probably not qualified for a lot of spending decisions in your life.

I can trivially judge the necessity of service but unless I am an expert in the domain I cannot judge the quality of service and very often the entire point of the service is to outsource expertise.

I sent my car in for an oil change. They didn't replace the clogged oil filter and it started leaking a little. I had to sent it in again.

Clearly I know that I need an oil change but unless I do my own inspections (the very thing I am paying for) how am I supposed to know that something went wrong?

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#203
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys understand that the price of meals would go up to compensate for the lack of tipping right? You’re not simply removing the cash. That extra 20% or whatever is now baked into the price. And generous tippers can still leave their extra bit. The change is, that by default everyone earns a fair wage.

you know that the actual minimum wage of someone who makes $30 or more in tips a month is $2.13 right? By law, if they don't make enough tips in a week to earn an effective wage of $7.25 an hour, the employer has to pay them that much. this is all the employer actually has to pay. Everything else is the customer. Now imagine the employer has to pay $15 an hour. Thats 6+ times what they pay now if its a decently busy…

Wait, if the employee gets their min wage covered by tips the employer pays less? That's even shadier than I thought. Is this in law? Wasn't a delivery company booed for that kind of behavior a while ago?

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#204
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, in California the tipped minimum wage is at least $13/hr state wide (and $14/hr for businesses with 25 employees or more). I believe in San Francisco, it’s also just strictly the same as minimum wage of $16.07/hr (and again for larger businesses, Healthy SF medical coverage is also mandatory [Edit: actually, providing coverage is, not Healthy SF, that’s just the cheapest coverage and so very common], and…

And … California still has restaurants? I'm told that's impossible. Raising the minimum wage will cause all businesses to close.

I didn’t know about this anecdote before, but apparently Alan Krueger of minimum wage study fame had an interesting follow up: shouldn’t the federal minimum wage be too high somewhere? What about Puerto Rico?

Apparently, he didn’t find evidence to suggest a strong effect there. But it’s got me curious to follow up with other territory or county vs state differences in the data. My suspicion is that the current very low minimum wages are just too low to see effects anyway, but that a federal $15/hr would be enough of a jump to see many county-level area median wages suddenly tip over.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#205
post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

It's been tried in restaurants many times and usually with negative results. People balk at higher prices on the menu.

Another case of "it's impossible to do, says the only western country not doing it".

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#206
Reminds me of the time the team I worked with allegedly short-changed Discover, an advertiser with Amazon. The story went... people who reported it internally got fired: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600716

Usually, I have seen these things happen due to bugs (or worse, wanting to game metrics); and because Amazon can be ruthless with data determining a lot of decisions, very few (not all), especially at the top, are willing to admit incorrect metrics that might jeopardize their standing with the leadership.

You're what you measure.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#207
post #36

> (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post) Maybe it's only a veneer of independence, but I like that WashPo is reporting on this.

Jeff Bezos isn't reviewing or approving articles in the Washington Post. It's as independent from its ownership as any media organization.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#208
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, in California the tipped minimum wage is at least $13/hr state wide (and $14/hr for businesses with 25 employees or more). I believe in San Francisco, it’s also just strictly the same as minimum wage of $16.07/hr (and again for larger businesses, Healthy SF medical coverage is also mandatory [Edit: actually, providing coverage is, not Healthy SF, that’s just the cheapest coverage and so very common], and…

"Healthy SF medical coverage is also mandatory" I don't think Healthy SF coverage is mandatory. From what I've read, businesses have two other options: provide a regular healthcare plan, or set aside a fund to reimburse employee healthcare costs as they arise. Restaurants usually go for that last option. "usually passed onto patrons as a 4% fee on their bill, though this isn’t dictated by statute" I find the last par…

> Restaurants usually go for that last option.

So restaurants basically run their own health insurance company?

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#209
post #112
post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

Tips are fundamentally broken. If you didn't know about tips, and someone offered you a job and said, "I'll pay you crap wages, but you can ask the customers for more money. Don't worry, they'll pay or their friends won't like them," you'd think it was a scam because it's such an obviously terrible deal. Tips are an awful way to incentivize good service. I'm neither qualified to judge my server's performance, and I'v…

Can we talk about why service is astronomically better in the US than countries with very high worker protections and base wages like Denmark?

I'm genuinely curious what you think the factors are in their difference because when I live in Denmark (as I do now) it feels like the waiter could give less of a s** whether the service is good or not whereas when I live in LA or NYC I feel like I am the golden child of their day.

The mind first reaches to "it must be tips" but I am genuinely curious what you think the primary factor of this yawning gap in service is if not tips.

I mean I even worked for a Danish guy who was Noma's head chef's former sous chef (he had just opened a new restaurant in NYC at the time) and the American staff he employed there was just leagues beyond anything I had ever seen in DK.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#210
post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

I've said it before, the only way to get out of the tipping culture is to stop tipping, and to continue to fight for a raised minimum wage. There's just no way around it, that's how some other countries got out of the tipping culture too. Shaming others who don't tip, and tipping when you go out, just contributes to the problem. If people understand that tipping is actually less of a thing, then the pressure will be…

I've worked as a waiter during my university time and tips were the best thing in the world for someone that did not need any real qualifications. My wage alone would have barely covered my expenses but with tips I paid all of my living costs and could put aside a bit for my future. It was a system I liked as an employee since even when there were few customers I had not to worry too much about getting laid off immediately and the tips I received more than made up for my low wage. People who don't tip out of some principle with no viable alternative at hand other than saying make service employees miserable so that they will change a system that works for them are worse than those that simply are greedy in my opinion, such customers at least do not delude themselves that they are doing Good ™
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