robin1234

Interesting contrast to the British situation, where all the major grocery chains deliver. Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrison’s, ASDA and Waitrose. Tesco have a fee based on your booked delivery time - I always pay £1. In fact, they’re all competing for the business, so have offers like “£80 off your first four grocery deliveries!” I’ve been so happy with Tesco’s service, I haven’t been tempted by the offers. I appreciate the fact that everyone involved is a Tesco employee, and it’s delivered to my door in a Tesco van.

Best part is - everyone knows no tip is required or expected!

In the situation you describe, I’d be incredibly pissed at Kroger that they purport to offer a service, but actually farm it out to a gig company.

In America, we now do our grocery shopping at Aldi, and they’ve been advertising a home delivery service - again, I believe it’s with a third party company.

scrubbedexpat091

Yes, I could see the confusion that would be involved there. Probably why the chain here chose to keep it all in house, they can control the process start to finish, because they are employees and union, they are not allowed to accept tips though. The drivers make an okay wage at $17.50 but its not consistent hours, anywhere from 0 to 40 a week, but the shoppers are just min wage and 10-20 hours a week, my wife brings home around $240 a week after deductions.

I am not sure what their fee is, it varies by time slot, the more high demand delivery time periods cost more, lower demand cost less, and if you redeem 2,500 points from their rewards program it's free.

caretaker

I can't afford to have my food delivered, and I have a job. If I order take-out I'll go pick it up myself, save money, and get it fresh and hot and home soonest.

kodokan

It is - it’s the one I work for 🙂

ddsrph

Kodokan
Are you still in Ohio? Did your son decide to go to Ohio State?

kodokan

Yes, I’m in Columbus, and my son is in his second year at OSU now. He loves it there, and has settled in really well - made good friends, enjoys his studies, and has a great on-campus part-time job manning a dorm hall reception area (mostly he does night shifts when no one comes, so he can get paid for doing his homework and watching Netflix).

And, like all American students, he’s already switched his major once so far 😄 Started in Engineering but is now pursuing a Psychology major with minors in some sort of neuro-biology thingie, and French (an effortless shoe-in for him from our years in Switzerland).

Steerpike

Wow - that's allowed?! And legal? Yikes! That really sucks! What a f**cked up system this is! I suppose, as long as it's made clear this is just an 'intended' tip, and the 'buyer' can be downgraded by you if they act in bad faith, then it's ok.

I guess I'm just not cut out for any of these services. I want my food piping hot, so if I want restaurant food I go to the restaurant and sit there to eat it. On the rare occasion I have picked up food (myself) to bring home, I only choose things like Indian food which can generally survive a touch-up in the microwave (though the Naan bread tends to suffer - it's only ever 'perfect to eat' once!). Things like French Fries ... they need to be eaten within seconds of 'production'! I've always thoroughly enjoyed grocery shopping and can't imagine delegating that to someone else. I'm almost fully retired now, so have time on my hands but even when I was a workaholic, I never did 'home delivery' of food or groceries.

ETA - of course, I live in an area where parking isn't an issue and the weather is generally fine. If parking were an issue, I'd probably reconsider and use delivery for everything

kodokan

There’s no recourse for us if the customer removes the tip in bad faith - it hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve seen posts in our Facebook group from other shoppers who’ve experienced this. They’re basically given the brush-off by the ‘Shopper Happiness’ team with a cut’n’paste response about how customers have the right to edit the tip post-delivery, blah blah blah. Customer is always right, don’t ya know.

I’ve also luckily had only one time where the customer has committed outright fraud, claiming that the $50+ of rib eye steaks I delivered were a ‘missing item’ to be refunded. Yeah, right - in your 5 item tiny order, during which we exchanged several texts with photos while I was in the store to make sure I just got the steaks you wanted, I then decided to simply keep them, AND you didn’t notice their absence when I handed over the bags. I won that one, and got the customer blocked from my account for any future orders, always assuming they were even allowed to remain on the platform 🙂

The range of customers using the service is very interesting. My city is fairly economically diverse, so it’s everything you’d expect: busy professionals who already don’t get enough quality time with their kids and don’t want to drag them round the store after daycare pickup fighting over the eleventeenth box of trash cereal they’ve just lobbed in the cart. People with mobility issues, or on oxygen lines. The elderly (often where the order is placed by a concerned family member, which is sweet - I enjoy giving them a bit of company for a few minutes, and sometimes coming inside and putting their heavy or frozen items away, to help out). People who simply don’t have a car, and adding $20 a week to their grocery order which is magically delivered to their door without them spending two hours of their limited free time, makes far more economic sense than owning a car.

it’s actually a really satisfying, fun job, one of the best I’ve ever had. The pay is a little more than I could otherwise be making anywhere doing entry level drone work after my divorce and a 20-year resume gap, and it’s completely flexible so I can set my own hours and be available when my kids are home from school, I’ve made friends with the store employees at my regular supermarkets so I feel like I have colleagues, and it’s a genuinely useful service for which most people are very appreciative. Plus I’ve never been able to enjoy listening to so many audiobooks in my life!

Steerpike

That is wonderful to hear! So you, at least, would not be happy if this service got shut down. Do you think, in your opinion, that if they were forced to provide minimum wage and benefits, etc, that they could still 'make it work' or would that price the service out of existence? I ask that because several people on this forum has said that no one should be in business if they can't afford to pay their workers minimum wage.

sid nv

Tipping up front for a service you have yet to receive is definitely undesirable, but this is how the "technology platforms" (they use this phrase to try and combat legislation such as California's AB-5, but that's another topic) operate. Here is an example of how the customer can suffer from a low up-front tip.
I work for 2 food delivery gigs, let's call them A and B. Company A is the evil unethical outfit referred to in my earlier link, and Company B is better to work for but pickings can be thin. Company A's food ordering app apparently has radio buttons on the app for suggested tip of $1, $2, $3, or "other", so encourage low tips. Company B encourages large tips.

So I receive an offer from Company A to pick up from a Mexican restaurant at the far end of town, to be delivered to the High School. It seems some customers really have no clue about how far away the restaurants are, because there is no shortage of Mexican restaurants here, but this particular restaurant is the furthest away from the High School. This is a high mileage run, so I know from the amount offered that the tip is low, but I take it anyway. While in the restaurant waiting for the food, I receive an offer from Company B to pick up at Taco Bell, which is directly in line with my route to the High School. The staff at this Taco Bell get their orders out fast, so I accept the second order, pick up the first order, drive to Taco Bell, the 2nd order is waiting on the desk so all good, no time lost. I now get stuck in heavy traffic, and due to a combination of the late time in receiving the offer and the distance involved, I arrive at the High School 1 minute after the end of lunchtime break. I drop off the order at the School front office with the pupil's name and the office staff accept it.

When I get back to the car, I see I have a text message from the customer: "Where is the food I ordered? I called the restaurant and they said they gave you the food. You are horrible at your job and I am going to report you." And she did indeed report me for non-delivery. Presumably the poor school child went hungry that lunchtime.

So what is the moral of this story? If the customer had tipped well - say, $6 - I probably would driven direct without picking up a 2nd order, and maybe arrived 2 minutes earlier for school lunch time. The offer would also likely have arrived earlier, but because the customer was a low tipper - as I recall it was a $1 tip - the offer had probably been bouncing around between different drivers, and getting rejected, resulting in late acceptance.
Now, I should say that I do not routinely deliver late, in fact I spend a lot of unpaid time waiting in restaurants for food to be prepared and make my best effort to deliver the food hot and ASAP. In hundreds of deliveries this is the only complaint I have ever received.

It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Company A I believe is operating on huge amounts of venture capital, and has yet to show a profit. Company B I think does not have the benefit of venture capital, but due to the unethical tactics of Company A are having to play copycat in order to compete. Customers, Restaurant operators, and Drivers are all getting screwed.

Giantaxe

If it's actually a tip, then I can't see the objection to this - bad service should result in little or no tip, If it's not actually a tip, it shouldn't be handled as such, but stated up front as a service or delivery fee. By going down the tip route and paying drivers so little that it's uneconomic for them to deliver without tips, they are putting the customer in an insidious position where they're obliged to be a "good tipper" regardless of the level of service provided.

Steerpike

But that's exactly what exists today in the restaurant business ... one is obliged to pay a hefty tip not as a reward for great service, but as a way to supplement the lousy wages the waiter makes. I gave up 'fighting' this long ago, and play the game.

Giantaxe

It's not how Uber and Lyft operate - you specify any tip after ride completion within a number of hours.However, as I pointed out earlier in the thread, drivers indirectly get some indication of the size of a likely tip through the ratings system. On Uber (not sure about Lyft) drivers see the size of a passenger's tip before giving the passenger a rating. You can probbaly safely bet that "good" tippers tend to get higher ratings than "bad" tippers.And now that Uber drivers can reject any ride for any reason, many will likely "cherry pick" rides based on high passenger ratings that may lead to higher tips post rides.

Giantaxe

True, of course, but the difference is this "up front" tipping. You don't pay a tip when you walk into a restaurant. You thus don't get waiters giving you crap service because your tip was paltry. And you do have a more defined way of giving little or no tip if the service - or lack thereof - warrants it. I guess the nearest restaurant equivalent is when a place automatically adds a certain sized tip when the party is larger than a threshold.

scrubbedexpat091

In places like California and BC and some other states where serving wages dont exist, I feel less obligated to tip.

Not my job to top up wages of employees nor do I have the income where I can just tip others. What makes the server making $14 per hour more worthy of a tip than say my wife who is shopping for people but cant accept tips.

Or the McDonalds employees.

Servers here in a busy restarsunt can clear 25 plus an hour with tips, and in about a year base wage will be $15 per hour.

I try to never utilize a service where tips are expected so I can avoid having to feel obligated to tip.