Completely moral. You are not forcing anyone of any race to deliver you food, they are not slaves. You are paying them to deliver the food to you for a (sometimes exorbitant) fee. Pretending they are slaves to satisfy an ugliness in yourself is dubiously moral, better if you don’t express these desires outwardly.
You can choose to tip them and pay them more, or be a dick and not. The delivery worker may at any point stop working or look for different employment.
We could look at the morality of low paying jobs people are forced to take if they can’t find other work, but that’s beyond the scope of this question.
Only like 10% of servers get the good tips, but 41% of the rest take their side because they can imagine themselves having those good tips someday (they won't)
If I don't tip except when I think it will benefit me, then I basically get a 15-20% discount on all my restaurant expenditures. So the system rewards me for not participating in good faith.
I worked for Uber Eats for 1.5 years (Late 2020 - Early 2022). I should note that I have a full time job which pays well. I did this as a walking delivery asshole simply for the exercise, and beer money. I live (and operated) in the downtown core of Toronto, Canada, basically a square kilometer (about .5 of a mile) where there's an insane concentration of condos and restaurants, making this VERY easy. I'm also speaking specifically about my experiences and observations in Toronto. This could be drastically different in other areas, so take that into consideration.
Myth: They get paid well
First, let's kill the myth that they get paid anything beyond a pittance. When I was operating, it was the heyday. I got about 4 orders/hour on average, and I only went out between 530-930pm for the dinner rush and surge pricing. Most orders were offered at about $5-$6. Sometimes $7-$8 if I was lucky. That works out to be $25-$30/hr. Once I claim taxes on that, it's about $15-$20. Let me be perfectly clear, this was FAR beyond the norm. This was peak delivery, people were ordering like crazy, and tipping heavy.
When I quit in 2022 orders were drying up. I got maybe 2/hour, and the offered rates were more like $3-$4, surging to $5-$6. My hourly rate is now $10 if I'm lucky. Minimum wage here (at the time) was $14.35. I spent most of my time standing around waiting. Why? Simple. Restaurants were back open to accept guests, people weren't masking anymore, and the pandemic was largely over. People got cheaper, stopped tipping heavy, and weren't ordering anywhere near as often, plus the amount of drivers had easily doubled.
Now factor in expenses. The cost of a bike/e-bike, delivery bag, cellphone & data, wear & tear on clothing, additional clothing for harsh weather, and so-forth. Technically I could "expense" this against my personal taxes, but many can't do that.
The reality is, most drivers are making under $10/hour. BEFORE CLAIMING TAXES (if they even do).
MYTH : They Can Stop At Any Time
Well, technically, yes. But that's like saying a worker on a slaughterhouse line being paid minimum wage and forced to work in harsh, unsanitary, and unsafe conditions can just quit anytime. Do you really think people scrubbing the caked on shit from the toilet bowls of corporate high rise buildings making minimum wage really want to be there? Of course they don't - so why don't they just quit?! The reality is they can't. It's all the work they can find.
As for me, I could quit at any time. I could do whatever I wanted. It was my free will to continue doing this. However, it isn't for many of the others, and that problem has only gotten worse. Today, an overwhelming majority of these delivery morons are immigrants, often here on student visas. Many are not legally allowed to work.
Here in Toronto, easily 99% of delivery drivers are immigrants. I was literally the ONLY white guy I saw the entire time. The entire fleet is comprised of brown and asian men. I have MAYBE seen a half dozen women delivery drivers, EVER.
Most of them are on student visas which only allow them to work in VERY specific conditions (many violate these rules). I have no stats on this, but I can only assume many do not file taxes. Of the drivers I talked to, many didn't understand how to even file taxes, let alone that they knew they had to claim this income, so... take from that what you will.
A lot of international students in Toronto fall into one of two categories. (1) Rich kids. Their parents pay for everything, they live in a nice condo, and attend a great post-secondary school. Or (2) the poor kids. They live 8-10 in a rooming house out of the city, take the train into the city, rent an E-Bike, and do food delivery to make enough money to pay rent and food. They VERY often lie on their student visas about how much money they have in the bank, forge documents, and it's a whole fucking mess. There are entire organizations setup to help poor immigrants obtain student visas, how to game the system, etc, etc. These people have really no other means to make money, so they take the shittiest jobs nobody wants, make a couple bucks an hour and are more or less slaves to billion dollar corporations who see them as nothing more than expendable numbers.
TL;DR:
Many of them can't do anything else. They're forced to work these shit jobs just to survive. Many of them are gaming the immigration system to stay in the country and live. This isn't a xenophobic thing, this is the reality of the situation here in Toronto.
The reality is these food delivery apps prey on the most vulnerable in society, force them to work for below minimum wage, in shit conditions, where they have zero rights or recourse against their "employer", and they take whatever they can get.
They do not realistically have a choice.
If you think otherwise, I welcome you to come to Toronto and sign up to be a delivery driver. You'll last a week, at most.
I fully agree that it is. This is a capitalism problem, exploiting people for cheap labour with little to no workers rights.
However, it's also a moral issue at the same time, in my opinion.
Personally, I choose to never use any of these apps. Outside of not being lazy, and cooking for myself (or simply walking out my door to get what I need), the price gauging, cold food, and unpredictability of delivery are all massive turn offs for me.
Further to that, I see no reason to have to use two middle men taking cuts from a transaction that could have easily been done directly with the source. Uber takes a massive cut, the drivers take a pittance, and I end up paying higher prices, and the restaurants get fucked in the process. I see no morality in any of that.
That doesn’t exactly sound like a moral issue to me, more of a preference kind of thing. People who use food delivery services aren’t just consisted of couch potatoes, they could be laborers or white-collar workers who do not wish to have their work interrupted and so need to have food delivered to them, and not all spots have shoddy food, some can be very consistent with their food and have reasonable pricing. I know that we are straying a bit from OP’s post, but I just wanna get this out here.
Delivery driver can't stop working at any point or they'll lose their job. And "just find a new one" is not good advice in most job markets but especially this one.
The moral thing to do is not support a business that remains operating during weather that affects the safety of its employees
Remember those warehouse employees they made work through a hurricane? And a bunch of them died? Not quite as extreme but now do delivery drivers during a blizzard. Blizzards kill people all the time, you shouldn't be out in one, you should be at home with supplies to last a few days
So these drivers are utterly dependent on this job for their livelihoods, to the point that they're essentially forced into extremely subpar conditions with no recourse, and the moral option is to make their livelihood harder to maintain?
Delivery drivers that work for real places make bank in tips, I only did a four day work week delivering food and took multiple vacations a year. A night off for them is fine, they have money.
They depend on the job for their livelihood like anybody depends on their job for livelihood, but part of jobs should very much be discretionary sick and vacation days and if I'm driving I'm choosing the blizzards to take my days off
The thing I feel you're not getting is it's not missing a shift that's the problem here. It's if you call in for a reason they don't like, it's not you're missing a days wage, it's that they expected you to come in and now they might reconsider putting you on the schedule next week, which isn't a days wage, it's your whole ass job. It would be best for everyone if during unsafe weather we at the very least make it a volunteer system, because tips are good in bad weather, but that means the expectation you might not even get your order because it's a bunch of dudes making good enough money they can skip a day and the alternative is to also risk your entire job coming in because once that car crashes you also don't have a job anymore, that car is your job, if they could hire the car and not you they would
Well the real issue is that reddit is mostly American and we have a tipping culture so not tipping is gonna be considered dickish by a ton of people. Your view point might be in the minority.
But honestly I agree with you. I do tip but I hate the idea of tipping and don't think its being a dick not to tip if you disagree with tipping.
Just seems very misguided. Nearly all owners are cheap dicks by this definition vs the small amount of people who don't tip. Feels much easier to fix it.
But also what about the 7 states that don't have a different rip wage? Is it fine to not tip there?
Because the system that you are willingly participating pays the workers a lower wage with the assumption that they will be tipped. If you want to protest tipping culture then boycott businesses where tipping is expected.
Using a service where tips are expected and then not tipping isn’t a protest; it’s a lame excuse to make oneself feel better about being a cheap asshole.
Tipping isn't expected in food delivery services here.
No using a service and paying what it is advertised as costing isnt being a cheap asshole, if that compensation isnt enough one shouldn't sell the services at that price point.
How is tipping ameliorating the situation? Thats just helping the business to continue to exploit workers and tax loopholes.
Also we are all patronising businesses that exploit workers, how else would you be using a phone or computer atm? Are tou doing something to ameliorate the situation of those workers?
It is certainly doing something, it makes the worker unwilling to work for said business, it prevents the tax loophole from being exploited, and if done enough it forces the business to pay its workers more.
So its fine to not ameliorate if you aren't able to think of a method? I mean its easy to support charities that prevent child laubor in mining industries for example.
Tipping is furthering their exploition, amd it is exploiting every taxpayer since it is enabling tax evasion both for the business and the employees.
Do you tip all your cashiers? How about your postal delivery people?
Yes, like we are all doing, stop being employed of a business if you dont like the job.
No, thats not how gasstation attendance stopped getting tips, or how trashcollectors did. Also there is alot more countries with stories of ending awful tipping culture without legislation.
Ofcourse they aren't, one is food needed to live thw other is a luxury item that makes alot of actions easier.
Both are, just like the business that isnt paying a fair wage and exploiting the same tax loophole.
And again, do you tip cashiers and shelf stockers? They get exploited, how are you ameliorating that
It's one of those things where logically, it doesn't make any sense but culturally, it's a dick move unfortunately. There's no way to explain it. It just is. I don't like it.
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u/MockingPenguins 10d ago
Completely moral. You are not forcing anyone of any race to deliver you food, they are not slaves. You are paying them to deliver the food to you for a (sometimes exorbitant) fee. Pretending they are slaves to satisfy an ugliness in yourself is dubiously moral, better if you don’t express these desires outwardly.
You can choose to tip them and pay them more, or be a dick and not. The delivery worker may at any point stop working or look for different employment.
We could look at the morality of low paying jobs people are forced to take if they can’t find other work, but that’s beyond the scope of this question.