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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.
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.
If anything, the law should not encourage tipping at all, rather than effectively making it obligatory. I.e. put servers, drivers, bartenders, etc under the same wages as everybody else (be that minimum wage or otherwise,) and make tipping a thing of the past. Also make it illegal for any business to automatically add a gratuity to your bill, i.e. the total price is baked into the menu/advertised price rather than effectively adding a 15% below the line fee.
Oh and while I'm here, slashdot's web designers are somewhat retarded as of the last few months. Seriously, and ad that takes up 1/3rd of the page? Who thinks of this shit? And now to make things worse, the user pane scrolls with the page when reading the comments, so you have to scroll heavily just to read the comments. The first dumbfuck idea can be fixed with adblock, but the second dumbfuck idea requires outright disabling javascript just to make the page readable.
the government paid for the cancer treatment & research that kept a close family member alive
No, other people did. They government just took that money from them and took 78% off the top in administrative overhead before your family member got some. In comparison with a charity with a 90% efficiency ratio, two other people didn't get treatment who otherwise could have.
Actually, no. They don't. Minimum wage for "tipped employees" in California is $2.71 per hour, so if you're not tipping then you are quite literally robbing your server (and kitchen staff).
And that's why it needs to be included in the price, the way it is in most of Europe and Japan. Idiots like you believe that tips aren't necessary to earn a living wage, but when minimum wage is halved simply because someone *might* give you more income, that's BS. Tips are essential. Moreover, other customers are subsidizing your tip-free existence, and on top of it, there's a good chance the employees aren't including all of their tips in their taxable income, which means we're all subsidizing them even more. Honestly, that shouldn't be your responsibility anyway, or mine -- it should be the employer's. So yeah, fuck tipping, once it's not necessary. Until then, fuck you.
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