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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.
This is pretty much the way things are done in Germany. You might leave a Euro or something for your server (trinkengled, literally drinking money) but that's it. I agree, this forced tipping is a joke. You should pay people what they're worth (higher wages and the associated higher product costs) and not force tipping. Nothing quite grates me like being expected to tip, at that point it may as well be part of the price of the product/service because it's no longer optional.
That is the idea. Someone bought up legislation to make Uber less competitive... It does take it to be very imaginative to understand what is going on.
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.
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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Has it occured to you that the american system of prostituting yourself for tips is wrong and that the companies should pay their employees fairly instead of relying on the state or the customers to allow them to survive?
I love you country, where civilisation means the law of the jungle: every man for himself, only the strong will survive. Not surprising for a country founded by christian nuts and where a sociopathic selfish bitch like Ayn Rand is revered as an intellectual role model.
Do your fucking job properly without needing me kissing you lazy ass with a tip to get what I pay for.
Let's not forget: driving for Uber is 100% volunteer.
While driving a cab is, as everyone knows, involuntary servitude.
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.
If tipping is done like in the Lyft app, then you're tipping after you've already left the car so there is actually less pressure to tip.
This is one of the things I tend to hate about cab tipping, as opposed to other services. (Tipping in general is of course annoying too; I wish people were actually just paid reasonably for their services.)
Anyhow, in most services, you tip as you are leaving the transaction (or the service person is leaving). In a cab, particularly if you are paying by card, you're often forced to tip before you even get out of the car -- frequently handing back the credit card thing to the driver, where he prints out your receipt with tip listed and hands it to you. If you have bags in the trunk or whatever, will the driver treat you the same if you don't tip well? And even if you wanted to tip in cash, it's awkward, because you generally do the transaction in the car for payment before those final parts of service are rendered (opening your door, taking out bags, etc.) -- and if you don't tip until after all of that is complete, the driver may be thinking you're a cheapskate because you haven't tipped already.
It's really awkward.
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...
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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.
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).
No, it's their employer that is robbing them.
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.)
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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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You might want to consult with all the waiters and bartenders before you do this.
Back in the day when I waited tables and slung drinks, I *really* liked the tipping system. I was able to shmooze a good living while in school.
I would dare say good servers would wish to keep the system currently in place as that if you are good, you can make WELL above min. wage on a regular basis.
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