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Amazon Flex does this as well. I signed up to do deliveries last year to see how it worked, and on a couple occasions gamed it such that I was able to deliver an order I placed to myself (which is really just ordering from a nearby restaurant and hoping you get the offer). The advertised pay I would get for the delivery before accepting it was $7-12 (the range is supposed to account for tips, and across all deliveries, when everything settled it was almost always the low end of that range). With Amazon Restaurants, you had to tip when you ordered, and couldn't change afterwards, and my tip was $3. When everything cleared, I got $7, and I knew $3 of that was my own tip to myself. Had I tipped $0, I would still have gotten $7. I always felt it was a crummy thing to do to people -- your tip was just making Amazon give the driver less money. Not being able to change the tip also sucked, as I don't like tipping when I haven't received anything yet. That's more of a "name your price" service fee.

Amazon has dropped out of the restaurant game, but they still probably do this for Prime Now and Whole Foods (package deliveries aren't eligible for tips). The funny thing with restaurants was during peak times, when they didn't have enough drivers, they'd send out guaranteed $22 offers to delivery maybe $20 worth of food, which I always pounced on as it was incredibly easy money. It's no wonder they couldn't keep that business going.

Tips sometimes worked out well, though -- on some Prime Now routes where it was maybe $20-30 guaranteed, I'd get over $60 after tips. So they weren't always keeping everything to themselves. I could never figure out the rhyme or reason behind any of it.




Do you know if the tip was for delivery or for the restaurant?


It's for delivery.


What comes next? Tipping the garbage collector or the postman for doing their basic work, so the company can save a few bucks on his wage?


In some places, with nicer people, people probably without MBAs, yes, garbage people and their mail person will get a tip at the holidays.


> Amazon Flex does this well.

I feel like you intended this to be "Amazon Flex does this AS well"

... which is the difference between saying "they ALSO do this" and "they do a good job at this".


typo, fixed


Odd that someone downvoted me AFTER the OP stated it was a typo and fixed it.


Also odd that someone has already downvoted this comment.

Attention downvoter: You should probably downvote my other comment here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20502359


Would you please follow the site guidelines? They ask you not to go on about downvotes. Yes, they're annoying, but everyone gets them, and it's not a good reason to add noise to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html




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