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New York Plans To Force Uber To Add Tipping Option (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission announced a proposal today that could force Uber to finally allow riders to tip drivers within its app. The full proposal will be introduced in a few months and would require "car services that only accept credit cards" to let passengers tip with their cards in the app, according to The New York Times. "We have not seen the proposal and look forward to reviewing it," an Uber spokesperson told The Verge. "Uber is always striving to offer the best earning opportunity for drivers and we are constantly working to improve the driver experience." Cash tips have long been a part of a New York City cab ride, and Uber hasn't explicitly stopped riders from tipping its drivers in cash. But the touchscreen interfaces of New York City taxis allow riders to tip a driver even when paying with a credit card. Uber's app, meanwhile, has never had a similar option for including credit card-based tips.
I think not!
I don't tip because society says I have to. All right, if someone deserves a tip, if they really put forth an effort, I'll give them something a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, it's for the birds. As far as I'm concerned, they're just doing their job.
That will remove a greatly competitive feature of Uber. That's gonna jack up the prices by 15%.
Let's not forget: driving for Uber is 100% volunteer.
This sort of nanny-statist bullshit is exactly why Uber had to be started in the first place.
So, good job, bureaucrats. I look forward to seeing the next wave of unintended consequences.
I was buying something online and they started adding an automatic tip there, too. You know, just in case I wanted to blindly click 'next' and not think about tipping them. Also, if you get tips, they can legally pay you less than minimum wage, so long as tips make up the difference in pay. Not sure that applies here, but who knows.
They'll add a fee for a percentage of that tip. So while their prices still appear lowest on paper, society will say you have to pay more and Uber will get to dip itself into some of that. After all, the law is not going to say they're not allowed to do it, so that of course means they're required to do it.
Tipping is a cancer that feasts on social pressure, why make it mandatory? Even if someone did a shitty job I tip just to save myself from embarrassment, its terrible.
That's right, driver: I don't want to tip you extra, it's already expensive enough. There is only one situation I will tip and that is at a nice restaurant if the service was good.
I am actually offended when I'm paying for take-out and the receipt has a space to fill in a tip, or even worse those white cash registers that make you sign on the screen and ask you for a tip.
This is the main reason I don't use Lyft. When I saw that app ask me for a tip, that was an immediate deal-breaker. You are being hired for cheap transportation and tips are just not in the cards.
that's a tip
As someone visiting the US, the main appeal of Uber for me was not having to deal with tipping.
Tipping in restaurants was confusing enough, but trying to figure out what I was meant to tip a taxi driver, on top of whether the fair itself was legit, it was a nightmare.
I know culturally support for the tipping model of service industry over there is strong, but as someone who comes from a country where tipping is non-existent (base wages are just higher), not only did I feel tipping added no value to my experience (service was not better), I actually feel it made it worse.
I actually think it's reasonable to force Uber and similar services to follow the same rules as taxis in various areas.. (But really, the better solution is to REMOVE some of the rules from taxis, though I realize that screws over those who own the valuable medallions.. So maybe phase in the rule changes over time.)
This seems really stupid though. I would just purposely tip $0, just like I do now on the starbucks app!
From a non American, tipping seems weird. If worker's income is too low, why lawmaker prefer to enforce tipping rather than minimal wage increase?
it sends a chill down my spine. Not because I'm afraid of the government (the government paid for the cancer treatment & research that kept a close family member alive) but because everytime I've heard it it's been followed by tax cuts for the rich and screwing the poor. If you hear that phrase run, don't walk, to the voting booth and throw whichever bastard politician used it out of office. They just tipped you off on whose side they're really fighting for...
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how about cracking down on illegal miss-classification of hourly workers? Enforce your minimum wage laws while you're at it.
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Because F' the free market of ideas.
Also, isn't it illegal to encourage someone to break the law? No one pays income tax after tips.
Fer crying out loud, will people please stop getting in the middle of transactions between willing customers and willing sellers?
I know why the limo lobby wants to do this. They want to make tipping customary so Uber doesn't have a price advantage. But forcing Uber to include a tipping option in their app? No, that's not justified. Uber can put that in if they want, drivers can choose to drive for Uber or not. It's none of the city council's business how the deal goes down.
If I don't like a driver, and give them a poor tip (or no tip at all), could the driver turn around and rate me poorly on Uber's app?
Great, more tipping. New York can soon have:
- more sexual discrimination
- more beauty discrimination
- more racial discrimination
- more age-based discrimination
- more obsequious in-your-business workers
Tipping sucks. It isn't statistically tied to anything good, particularly better service. To read/listen to more about the negative effects (and correlations) of tipping, the Freakonomics podcast has got you covered: http://freakonomics.com/podcas...
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
I love to tip good service. I don't carry cash typically.One reason I've tended to favor Lyft of late. If Uber adds this it would certainly make me happy.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
because they built the roads, schools and infrastructure that made it possible. They built the civilization we all enjoy. Private companies didn't build the Internet. They didn't even build the motherfucking rail roads. And they sure as hell didn't build the satellites & ocean wires that make a global telecom network possible.
For anything more important than a Twinkie if you look closely (hell, not even _that_ closely) you'll find it required an intelligent, organized response and you'll find that response came from a government. Leave people to their own devices and you get a thousand years dark ages. That's not supposition. That's historic fact. Now that said: That cold, hard fact makes people damned, damned uncomfortable. Not sure why. This country was on this.. But I guess nobody likes admitting they're not John Galt.
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When I signed up for Uber, there was a section where you could adjust the gratuity automatically added to your bill. The default was 20% which seems a bit steep, so I turned it down (locally it's 10% in latin america). Why should I have to tip on top of the tip? Or does the American version simply not have this built in feature?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't know what it's like in NYC, but I know that in Boston one of the big advantages of Uber/Lyft is the ability to pay by credit card AT ALL. Whenever one attemps to pay by credit card in Boston the driver will claim this his machine is "broken", and only if you don't have any cash and there's no other option will it magically "repair" itself.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When did you last tip the cashier in Walmart? Why is her service worth less than the guy who brought you a sandwich? (She probably did more work ringing up and bagging your purchases than the guy did carrying a sandwich from the kitchen to your table.)
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
"Cash tips have long been a part of a New York City cab ride"
I have never, not once, given a cash tip to an NYC cab.
What happens is you have your ride, then you come to pay. There is a screen and card reader in the back. You go through one or two screens to pay, one of which is the tip screen.
The tip screen has three options;
1. 20%
2. 25%
3. 30%
There is no option not to tip. Unless people are giving 20% tips and then the rest in cash to keep it private, why bother? so the article seems to me to be flatly wrong.
I have mixed feelings about tips.
On one hand it is I think very good that the pay someone receives related to their performance.
On the other hand, when you just want to get from A to B, you don't want the emotional engagement hassle of judging someone.
Either way, whether or not tips are offered has *NOTHING* to do with the State.
The US tipping model is quite possibly the most asinine example of groupthink in human history. Nobody can actually explain WHY the tipping model should be preferred, let alone frame it into a logical and coherent argument, yet EVERYBODY somehow knows that it's the "right thing to do" and will defend it like their first-born child.
True story: I once had a houseguest over who used the bathroom, and when finished, actually offered me a quarter for my hospitality (or perhaps the gallon flush). Even as a person who grew up with the asinine tipping culture, this was just a wee bit creepy. Just as the expected tip somehow only goes up over time, they keep pushing and pushing the culture until it's genuinely extreme.
It's completely arbitrary, and therefore we know it wasn't implemented for our benefit. Note that the average value of an expected tip has only gone up over time, and yet what we're supposedly tipping for (service) is the same or worse (not better). Note that the scope of what we're expected to tip for has increased as well. Clearly the tipping culture is being pushed by some force, and if I was a betting man, I'd bet on it being the force of profit.
Do not be fooled. This is all about money and control.
Bottom line: This gives the NY state government more power since:
Sure, people who make software have put together some impressive solutions, but think how much better software would be if politicians were designing it?
Think of how many killer apps there would be if the app store was more like filing a W2?
Those government workers are always finding new ways of helping!
I can afford it without problems, it's more the annoyance. I suppose you would say the same about taxes and fees the airlines tack on to their cheap advertised prices? If you have to know about the final price, you can't afford it?
Besides, from a report: "For instance, most states exempt groceries from the sales tax, others tax groceries at a limited rate, and still others tax groceries at the same rate as all other products. Some states exempt clothing or tax it at a reduced rate."
So yeah, having the price you have to pay in advertising and on the sticker would be great. Hell if I know what the local food or clothing tax is.
Harald
Try this....scroll down until the article summary is somewhat centered on the page.
...and disabling slashboxes like suggested below doesn't do anything for me either
Hit Refresh
IMPORTANT: wait for the full page to load, when the tab's indicator stops spinning or whatever
Now scroll down and the top ad should not scroll with you.
The side ad bullshit may take another refresh
I generally browse the main page and open all the stories I want into separate Chrome tabs in the morning and I get this issue all the time now.