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Where Does a Tip To an Amazon Driver Go? In Some Cases, Toward the Driver's Base Pay (latimes.com)
Amazon at times dips into the tips earned by contracted delivery drivers to cover their promised pay, a Los Angeles Times review of emails and receipts reveals. From the report: Amazon guarantees third-party drivers for its Flex program a minimum of $18 to $25 per hour, but the entirety of that payment doesn't always come from the company. If Amazon's contribution doesn't reach the guaranteed wage, the e-commerce giant makes up the difference with tips from customers, according to documentation shared by five drivers. In emails to drivers, Amazon acknowledges it can use "any supplemental earnings" to meet the promised minimum should the company's own contribution fall short. "We add any supplemental earnings required to meet our commitment that delivery partners earn $18-$25 per hour," the company wrote in multiple emails reviewed by The Times. Only drivers who deliver for Amazon's grocery service or its Prime Now offering -- which brings household goods to customers in two hours or less -- can receive tips through the company's app. Amazon insists that drivers receive the entirety of their tips but declined to answer questions from The Times about whether it uses those tips to help cover the drivers' base pay.
Like the old commercial "Stop 'Liking' _everything_!", it's time to stop attaching a tip to every single exchange of service in the U.S. It's a U.S. thing. It's confusing wages exactly like this article suggests. Let's just get away from tipping as a "norm" and if you feel someone did an exceptional service, then tip personally separately.
... Will Amazon supplement their income to reach the guaranteed minimum income or will they fire the underperformer?
Amazon appears to me to be a poorly-managed company. Every Amazon web page has the distractions of Amazon trying to sell something else besides the product that interests you.
... this is going to change the ownership in Amazon.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, seems to have a poorly-managed life. He was having sex with a woman besides his wife. Now his wife gets half of his money, more than $65 billion.
Knowing the sloppiness around Jeff Bezos, would you go into sub-orbital space with Blue Origins, risking your life to be a tourist?
How will Jeff Bezos losing half his money affect Amazon?
We're expected to tip the damn Amazon delivery drivers? The poorly-trained guys Amazon hires so they don't have to pay UPS and FedEx, who train their drivers and pay them a decent wage?
#DeleteChrome
When is the USA going to wake up and just pay your workers properly and get rid of mandatory tipping??? Your backwards arsed pay system and pricing schedule is fucked and deceptive!!! How about having some conviction in your pricing and advertising the real cost to the customer??
Pay your staff properly and if they give shit service, fire their arse!! That's how it works in the rest of the civilised world..
Yeah I'm an Aussie.. you know that place down under where you are told exactly what the price is and what we think... this bullshit mandatory tipping is just a hidden tax. And a way to confuse your customers into thinking they are getting a deal... down here we know when we are getting ripped off... and we know the waiters and bar wenches are payed properly... so when you do give a tip for good service it's fucking clear the staff did a great job....
It's not really fair on the back of house staff.. who goes back there and throw a couple of bills at the dish washers when you get clean plates?? It's just a way for the company to shift some of its tax burdens.... just tell us the fucking price if it goes up cuz you need and get good staff so be it!!!
There are a few things which I've noticed when travelling. Developing nations tend to over-use the horn when driving, and there is an expectation for some tax-free tipping after receiving a service.
If someone is on the clock for 40 hours in a work week and you only pay them for 30, this is a standard complaint handled by Department of Labor. This can quickly turn into a class-action lawsuit filed by all Amazon workers. They should probably quit this practice while they are ahead.
Why don't you Amazon drones just direct deposit your paychecks into Mama Amazon's bank account directly? It's more convenient than having to do all that swiping on your gadgets.
It's amazing to see how far the Slashdot community has come in the past 20 years or so. It used to be a group of nerds (of all kinds) who were mostly anti-mega-corporation and pro-privacy.And now, most Slashdotters just can't wait to give all of their money and all of their personal information to just a few giant mega companies in exchange for a little bit of (perceived) convenience.
I don't respond to AC's.
Yes... however in there's a difference. When you tip a waiter $10, you expect him to be $10 richer. You don't expect the restaurant owner to be $10 richer. Even if you think the minimum wage for waiters should be $15, it's not.
A tip is a contribution to the employee's standard of living, not the owner's. It's a fair bet that anyone who tips an Amazon driver thinks he's helping out a low wage employee, not Jeff Bezos.
Any business which steals employees tips, either directly or indirectly, deserves shaming.
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and enforce minimum wages. Make minimum wage $15/hr and adjust for real inflation (e.g. inflation on the stuff somebody making $15/hr is likely to buy, yes, yachts are cheaper than ever, 80/20 hamburger isn't) so you can be sure the person serving you can at least afford rent and food.
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How is this different from paying waiters less than minimum wage because they will get tips? The real problem is tipping. Get rid of it.
If people could be bothered to use actual money, this would never be an issue. Such is the nature of cash. Nobody needs to know about the transaction except for you and your counterparty.
Might makes right irrelevant.
Why do you allow crocodiles to roam free and eat people?
Amazon Prime Now (in very few markets, delivery in a few hours) and Amazon grocery delivery are the only 'tip-worthy' delivery options.
Ken
Found the libtard.
I, on the other hand, am still looking for a Republican who can argue like a grown up.
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The tip is paid with credit card, collected by amazon, reported to IRS, and taxes are withheld.
That's the law - not theft.
Ken
I think these are Gig/commission-based jobs, that's why the pay is fungible.
Ken
How else can the employer withhold required taxes from tips? Tips aren't tax-free.
Ken
You do know that this drives people who can't deliver enough value to deserve minimum wage out of the (legal) workforce, altogether?
Of course, the corporation (which might be a Mom and Pop shop) can always jack up the prices across the board on their lunch menu, but then who is going to steer Joe or Jane Schmoe with a cattle prod to pay two or three dollars extra for lunch every day on a daily basis?
What actually ends up happening is that marginal kiosks fold, and more people start to pack a bag lunch from home.
And now someone who doesn't have an employment track record to justify $15/hour can't get any kind of recognized entry-level position at all, and this helps to turn the bottom of the underclass into permanent denizens of the economic underworld, where they don't even have the power to enforce contracts (because those contracts don't officially exist), or labour rights (because those activities don't officially exist), etc.
* MW is a winning lottery ticket for the least employable person who manages to land such a job
* MW is a big fat indelible L on the forehead of the most employable person who does not manage to land such a job.
* the typical difference between epsilon+ and epsilon- is one wild throw of a 1d20
Maybe the net benefit exceeds the net cost in some civic contexts, but it's definitely no free lunch.
[*] Yes, it is possible to bridge minimum wage with internship programs, etc., but I sure didn't get the feeling that you're the type of person to sweat the details. You wave the magic wand, you collect the karmic glory, leaving people with an actual clue to roll up their sleeves and devise a sane implementation.
Things like internship programs aren't free either, the private sector isn't all that keen to invest in this kind of thing, nor even to collect the benefits if there are too many strings attached—somehow society needs to monitor for abuse, because these things do get abused—so it usually falls to local government, and the expense, naturally, gets rolled into the tax base.
Act III in the grand opera of free-lunch musical chairs: Joe and Jane Schmoe grudgingly pack a bag lunch to their next municipal council meeting to go red in the face over confiscatory tax policy.
And if they're too g.d. lazy to do even that much to involve themselves in civic affairs, they lean back in their plush chairs posting shallowly reasoned drivel on Slashdot.
The server is supposed to report his tip earnings.
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Cuz you can't trust employers and the IRS to keep their hands out of the tip jar. What tipp is a private gift from a person to a person in appreciation. Always pay tips in cash, so your appreciation is not garnished by unscrupulous third parties. Tipp workers use cash tips for day to day expenses, and use their paychecks for bills.
If that owner doesn't want to pay at least minimum wage to their workers, they can't do all the work themselves. The tip really should go to the server, which is the only reason the customer left it in the first place.
If the owner is pooling all the tips, then dishing out just enough to each worker to cover minimum wage and pocketing the rest, that's stealing a tip.
If the owner is pooling the tips and then dividing them out per each employees share, that's at least fair to the workers. The business owner should charge more for food and drink if they want to make more. Not take the tips.
>>Amazon insists that drivers [eventually] receive the entirety of their tips
This looks like a good place to cram a solution to a behavior lots of companies seem to be enjoying: They are receiving the tips. Followup transactions don't change who was recipient to a sum of money the consumer passed out.
Admittedly, the fine print may say that clicking OK on a lot of boxes does not designate the driver as recipient. By the letter of the law, anyway. At any rate, it seems like the chink in the sleazy armor, to "help along" companies that I'm sure are faithfully self-regulating and not squeezing every drop of blood that numeric optimization recommends.
If I agree to pay a certain about, for a certain service, and they provide that service as advertised, why exactly am I supposed to feel any obligation to tip the person doing their job in an adequate manner?
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