Postmates: company tells their drivers not to tip on food orders

I am a Postmate, and also work for other app-based courier companies.

The reason behind the no-tip for Postmates to-go orders is multifold, but simple.

1) MOST IMPORTANTLY: that's not our money we're using to pay for the food! Nor is it our company's money! Every penny that gets charged to the company cards we use to pay will be billed to the customer. It's not our place to spend more of the customer's money beyond what they've pre-authorized, and if we did it would almost certainly result in either complaints or silent walk-aways from our service more than half the time.

Postmates' customers are already billed for the nominal price of their order, tax, the delivery fee (driver's 80% commission of the Postmates fee), and the service fee (Postmates' 20% cut of the Postmates fee). So when they look at their invoice they're aready seeing 3 additional charges beyond the price of the food, and then we (the Postmates drivers who are independent contractors rather than employees FYI) are still hoping the customer tips us after seeing all of that, which they do not half the time. And tips make up about half our income on average desite that half of customers don't tip us at all. The result is that we depend on a few super-tippers to bring up our effective hourly averages; almost no one tips a reasonable, moderate amount. Just lots of no-tippers who wouldn't pay the commission either if they had the choice, a few reasonable tippers, and a few really generous folks who make up for the masses of cheapskates.

That said, I feel like fewer people would shortchange us if they knew we were independent contractors who work for a $0 hourly base rate, but Postmates makes no effort whatsover to make this known to its customers which is probably intentional.

2) That's not our food! We're not going to eat it, we're not the ones who decided to order it, and it's not even for our family, friends, or coworkers.

3) The higher the total bill, the smaller the % the customer tends to tip us when they do tip. For example, when demand is high (usually due to bad weather) Postmates charges customers higher delivery fees as incentive to get more of their drivers out on the road since the drivers will expect a higher than normal effective hourly average. However, this doesn't happen because as the customer's bill creeps up they start no-tipping more frequently to offset the higher cost. Similarly, if the driver were to force a higher cost on the customer by tipping the restaurant workers, this will increase the fequency with which we do not recieve a tip ourselves.

BOTTOM LINE: tipping you would fuck with our tips, and if we're not getting tipped we wouldn't be there at all because the work wouldn't be worth our time to begin with, and thus your restaurant simply wouldn't be making as much money in the first place.

/r/TalesFromYourServer Thread