For delivery drivers, every shift is a game of gig economy roulette: Will customers tip? And if they do, how much? The answers determine their livelihoods.
“It’s like gambling,” Brantley Bush, an Uber Eats driver, told my colleague Kellen Browning, a technology reporter.
Kellen rode along with drivers in wealthy Los Angeles neighborhoods, pulling up to gated estates to deliver food to millionaires. Tips varied widely. Bush once received a $130 tip from Doc Rivers, the former Los Angeles Clippers coach. Some customers tipped nothing.
There is no collective understanding of what we owe delivery drivers in tips. While established etiquette governs tipping in restaurants, a clear protocol is lacking for apps. This confusion is one reason for the wide variation in the tips delivery drivers receive. Let me explain.
Tipping for food service used to be straightforward. We added around 20 percent to restaurant bills, dropped spare change in tip jars and had cash on hand for pizza deliveries and takeout.
Tipping has not only been entrenched in American life but also formalized as part of the economy. The U.S. is unusual among developed countries in allowing tipped workers to make below the minimum wage, sometimes as low as $2.13 an hour.
Delivery apps upended these norms in two ways.
First, apps have changed the timing of a tip. Delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash ask people to tip when they order, unraveling the logic that a tip is compensation for...
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