They don't really make good tips. There was a user here a long time ago, his tag was like 'thepizzaman' or something and he was a delivery driver and broke down how awful the job is. The companies pocket the delivery fee which most people think is part of the tip. This means they often get no tip at all, and depending on how crooked your restaurant is, they will then skim even more off your tip. I personally worked for a pizza place that demanded a cut of every driver's tips on top of the delivery fee. This was the same place that regularly forced people to work overtime and then stiffed them on overtime pay by shifting hours into future weeks to get everything under the 40 hour straight-time limit. The entire industry is rife with petty wage theft, labor abuses and corruption, and it's the drivers that often get the worst end of it.
And as
@Birdjaguar said, me stiffing an individual driver won't make the companies behave any better. On 2, I agree, but with many apps you don't have a choice due to Covid.
And the thing is, even if the person does a bad job of delivering, that doesn't mean they should get less than minimum wage. Like, imagine if every job was such that you only got paid a decent wage if you really excelled on every single task, day in and day out. It'd be flipping mad, it's unworkable.
This whole system started as a way for white business owners to skip paying any wages for black servants; it makes no logical sense and it's deeply unfair. There's this veneer of plausible deniability, '
Well if they did a good job they'd get a good tip,' but in reality that's nonsense in my opinion. How many hard working people get stiffed for the most arbitrary of reasons, because the tipper was looking for an excuse to not pay up? How many are stiffed due to circumstances outside of their control, like
@Sommerswerd's driver that showed up only to be told the restaurant wouldn't fill the order?
And while the law has a clause that when a driver or server makes less than minimum through tips, the company must cough up the difference, there is 0 enforcement and basically every local restaurant willfully fails to comply with this and lies to their employees about what the law actually says. Some of the bigger national chains are better about this because they have to due to the level of scrutiny they get in financial audits, but they make up only a fraction of all the restaurants in the US - most are local mom and pop joints and are quite often crooked af.
If you can't tell, my first career was in the food industry and it was not a positive experience.
