This sounds like fine model to me, pay more, get faster service. The key should be transparency and a minimum service level, ie. they should lay enough by default that every order will get picked up.
I'm not a customer of either services since I'm not in the US but tipping upfront before you even receive the service seems a little odd. Doesn't one tip for getting an outstanding over-the-top customer service and in order to do that, one should undergo the entire workflow till receiving the goods?
In the US tipping is standard, not for over-the-top service.
In general, higher pay for better quality goods and services is part of a negotiated sticker price. Tipping is the anamoly here. In the DoorDash context, if the user were given the option to tip after delivery, they’d most likely just forget about the app once they got their food and never tip. So there’d be little incentive for the drivers to work hard for a good tip.
Unless service is so great that you have to leave a tip. I guess the culture in the US really puts tipping in a different light. When it becomes normal or close to mandatory I would say, to tip, so that workers get close to minimum wage, it really defeats the purpose. I guess I wanna tip when I feel that I'm getting more value than the amount I'm paying for and also when I'm not obliged to do so.
Anyways, aside from this point, whatever these startups are doing, are real shady. Them carefully choosing their words in the binding documents makes it even worse since they know the potential repercussions of these actions.
The server doesn’t know whether you will follow through with a tip when they decide how well to serve you. The information asymmetry goes one way or the other.
Whole Foods (Amazon) grocery delivery has you tip the delivery person up-front. They still seem to screw up my order all the time. I mean, seriously, I KNOW they have the stuff on the shelves, but the delivery people flake out all the time and don't deliver half my order. What a scam.
There's also the issue of tipping for service before it's been rendered. So you might pay a big tip and still receive shitty service, and now you have to deal with customer support hoping to get a refund.
The issue as described here is that the service captures most of the value of the tip, so the drivers are wasting their effort when they rush to complete tipped orders.
