We dug into how American tipping culture got so broken, and the fight to fix it. It turns out that your tips are subsidizing the payrolls of multi-billion dollar chains, while they pay their workers under minimum wage. It's a system rooted in slavery, and pushed by a wealthy restaurant owners onto the rest of us. But there's a growing movement to change it. ----- More Perfect Union is a new nonprofit media org with a mission to empower working people. Learn more here: http://perfectunion.us/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/perfectunion/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MorePerfUnion

We dug into how American tipping culture got so broken, and the fight to fix it.

It turns out that your tips are subsidizing the payrolls of multi-billion dollar chains, while they pay their workers under minimum wage.

It’s a system rooted in slavery, and pushed by a wealthy restaurant owners onto the rest of us.

But there’s a growing movement to change it.

  • DigitalPaperTrail
    9•1 year ago

    something that’s always bothered me when I see this brought up, but what’s stopping the businesses from managing all that for their employees themselves? it’s not like everyone doesn’t have the tech to find out gas prices around the area, and the estimated traffic distance and travel time on any map view. Hell, just tack that on as a service fee instead of the ¯\(ツ)/¯ they currently use it for.

    this is all rhetorical, because of course it’s obvious why businesses don’t want to be more upfront about the final cost to the consumer, and keeping the employee blaming the customer for their bad take-home pay

      • DigitalPaperTrail
        5•1 year ago

        again, what’s stopping the outsourced app business from calculating the gas and tacking that onto the customer’s bill?

          • DigitalPaperTrail
            3•1 year ago

            what I’m trying to get at is we have the ability to build software to automate the calculation and payout on all of this. If the problem is realtime opting-in of drivers in the area, solutions could be created if the businesses were motivated to be more upfront to both their employees and the customers

            like have the customer give a price range they’re willing to pay for the gas, and have the software advertise to all drivers that would fit into that price range from their current locations, and show them up on the map to the customer with some dollar sign amount for their gas prices above their icons. if there isn’t any, the software would be able to notify the customer before the order is finalized. if no one eligible opts to pick up that order after a certain time frame, then that’s also a customer notification.

            A lot of the problems being brought up could be solved with effort put towards engineering the software to make everything more upfront to everyone, but those businesses aren’t motivated to be more consumer-oriented and employee-friendly; that’s my main point in all this