'Why are my UberEats orders always late?' Your tips may hold the answers

In recent times, we are faced with the decision to tip more frequently and in more diverse contexts. Typically we feel the need to tip the server who waits on our table or the pizza delivery person who might be standing at the front door of our home. The advent and growth of the Gig economy has created more interactions like this. You could have a contactless delivery of your food via Doordash and never see the deliverer. Or you could have a convenient Uber ride where you are only prompted to tip the following day.

This increase in variety and volume of tipping decisions is partly responsible for unsatisfactory Gig worker compensation and benefits. Gig workers are independent contractors who take on ‘gigs’ to provide certain services, while not receiving benefits such as a fixed salary, paid leave, and sick pay. I write more about the despondent state of Gig Worker compensation and benefits here and you can read or watch more about it elsewhere. The number 1 complaint of these workers is poor tipping. I want to explore the underlying reason why we do in fact tip poorly, with the hope that it can guide us to better tipping habits.

One plausible explanation is that we simply are not willing to spend egregious amounts on tipping since we’re tipping more frequently these days. This is fair. If tipping became overbearing then we probably wouldn’t use these Gig services anymore. Alternatively, we can also ponder that reduced interaction with delivery people, or getting tipping prompts for a Lyft ride on the following day are to blame. I believed these challenges, along with plain low compensation from Gig employers, were the cause of the problem. But after more thought and research, I now believe there is a deeper, fundamental reason that affects all our tipping behavior: reality-expectation mismatch.

The mismatch here is between how much we think is a good amount to tip, and how much we should actually be tipping. The macro view of this effect is that we frequently underestimate how much we should expect to pay for an Uber ride, or have McDonald’s delivered to our doorstep. We then reduce tips to match reality to our expectations. The dollar difference here is equal to poorer compensation for Gig workers. We do this because we do not rethink our actions and habits. Let’s explore this rethinking.

In Think Again — a book by a renowned author and professor at Wharton, Adam Grant — the author invites us to let go of knowledge and mental models of the world that are flawed by remaining flexible to questioning and rethinking our beliefs. Let us extend this rethinking to tipping. I have no doubt we have our independent, conscious and unconscious rationales and beliefs about tipping. But have we updated these beliefs given the increased variety and volume of tipping that the Gig economy has introduced?

Grant presents the Dunning-Kruger effect as one major barrier to our rethinking. For the non-psychology majors, this effect is that “when we lack competence [is when] we’re most likely to be brimming with overconfidence”. In sports, this means that your confidence in making a better call than the Seahawks’ coach deserves some rethinking. In tipping, this means that your confidence in ‘the right amount to tip’ may deserve some rethinking as well. I tried to do some of this rethinking myself and here’s what I found:

• $4 is a good number to begin with:

In a study conducted by U.S. Foods, customers and food deliverers were surveyed on their use of food delivery apps. Both groups agreed that $4 is a good amount to tip on average. One helpful way of looking at this number is to factor it in as a part of your order cost before ordering/selecting items. Many times, we have a rough target amount we think is reasonable to pay for a certain meal but quickly exceed this number before we can even look at delivery fees, not to mention tips.

• Scale your tips for bad weather, long distances, and value added:

Low tips can be particularly horrible during poor weather conditions. The same goes for long distances that (not only increase gas costs, but) hinder workers from completing other orders simultaneously. Just as you would tip more for a waiter who provides great service and great menu recommendations, you should tip more for a deliverer who brings your food up stairs, has a longer drive, or brings your food in the rain.

• Tipping a couple of dollars more can cause better service (or at least prevent terrible ones)

Glamour interviewed a Grubhub deliverer in Denver, Curtis, who shares the following experience about reactions to low tip orders:

“there are drivers who will open that order, see it, and reject it. I’ve gotten orders that are already an hour late because they’ve gone through so many drivers who don’t want to pick it up because it wasn’t worth it.”

What is quite intriguing is that in the U.S. Foods study, the top two complaints among customers was the food not being warm/fresh and the food being late. If only we tipped a bit more to more reasonably sustain Gig workers, then we can have smoother, faster, food delivery experiences that also address the Gig Worker compensation challenge.

The changes in the Gig economy, which affects the larger economy, forces us to rethink our approach. Many times when we think it’s ridiculous to pay as much as $8 in taxes, service and tips, when we are only ordering food worth $15, maybe we should ask ourselves how much of a tip we would accept to complete the same request for a stranger. Perhaps even before that we should ask ourselves whether we need the combination of a deliverer’s time, energy, and gas spent, all to get our food in some 30 minutes. The mismatch: our expectation is often that ordering food may cost us a little bit more for the convenience, but the reality is that the convenience we want is expensive.

And in the cases where you believe that you would be paying too much, I encourage you to explore a group order instead, get off the couch and walk to the store, consider the public transportation options as opposed to an Uber ride, or maybe simply consider not using the service!