Ah, a kindred spirit. I detest forced cheerfulness that is so frequently required from public-facing workers. Be neutral. Be professional. Don't be hostile. That's all acceptable. But that must-be-upbeat-at-all-costs straitjacket... Some people are naturally sunny, and they should be cherished. But the majority probably aren't, and please don't force them. Sometimes you can see the flash of resentment in their eyes, which probably isn't directed at you personally, but won't fail to make you feel shitty if you're attuned to it.

As someone who literally works for tips, I've found that I make more tips when I am sincere with guests (of the hotel that I work at).

That makes sense; most people can tell if you're just making conversation in order to suck up to someone vs. are genuinely interested in talking to them. So if you genuinely do care about a person and show that through your interaction with them, they'd be likely to appreciate it more, and show that appreciation.

I'm curious, though: if you have nothing to say to a person, and don't say anything, do you get more or less of a tip than if you were to (insincerely) attempt to make polite conversation?

Hate to break it to you but those drivers were talking to you because they want you to rate them well, and there is a financial penalty if they didn't talk and you rated them poorly.

Never thought about the economics of tipping before, but if having the customers being able to punish unhelpful staff increases the odds of having returning customers, that would increase the likelihood of Uber drivers being better paid under competition. The only issue is whether Uber drivers have a comparable outside option.

As for the bit on sincerity, can't say much as nowadays I just find it totally alien. People gotta live somehow, be it with others or just with ourselves. So getting hung up on the porcupine's dilemma and whether every interaction we make with another person is like a hundred tiny knifes running across their face is a great way to miss the point: sometimes their words hurt me too. But I don't show it, because I want to drop it and go back to the point.

Although I reckon this is more of a "honest" fakeness rather than the giddy fakeness which is sometimes found in customer service.

> if having the customers being able to punish unhelpful staff increases the odds of having returning customers, that would increase the likelihood of Uber drivers being better paid under competition.

Doesn't the rating system approximate this outcome well enough, though? Being able to rate a driver, and see the overall rating before I get in the car is of huge value to me as a customer. Feeling obligated to tip is a net negative for me.

In a restaurant (in the US at least) it's so expected to tip that if you tip lower than 15% for terrible service you're considered cheapskate. Even though Uber's tipping will presumably be anonymous-ish (assuming they implement it like Lyft has), I would still feel that social pressure.

Oh, I forgot about rating! It indeed should act in the same way as tipping, but not necessarily to the same degree. It's possible, for instance, that the change on a the driver's earnings conditional on any new rating is lower than the tip that he'd get from a new trip. Even more so as a driver's rating is the average rating from all his recent trips.

If pulls a 5-star service for 499 customers and a 0-star service for a single customer (for whatever reason) his rating drops from 5 to 4.99, which doesn't seem that relevant. Unless a 0.01 drop in his rating means a loss in earnings greater than that of a lost tip, the tipping system would provide better rewards for not dropping the ball.

Forgot about the social pressure, too (I'm not American). That could be a real issue, because if people don't actually consider not tipping then it's just dead as a incentive scheme. They'd have to make tipping anonymous.

By the way, I don't think pressure under anonymous choice is "social". You could attribute it to education and thus society and some way but ... that's rather roundabout. I think the more appropriate term is "consciousness".

Yes, I also believe that, in the US at least, the social pressure distorts the signal that the tip sends so it's meaningless. There is such a huge stigma associated with not tipping (or tipping poorly), that most people will tip a decent amount even for poor service.

Granted, the rating system is no better, even if for different reasons: since Uber/Lyft will deactivate drivers if their rating falls below what I'd consider to be a fairly high value (something above 4), most people (where I live, at least) give 5 stars unless there was something seriously wrong with the ride, so a mediocre driver will get the same rating as an exemplary driver.

How many Lyft trips per year for you? Because they've had tipping for a while, so you don't need to speculate about how this is going to ruin everything.

Not the person you're replying to, but I've been using Lyft exclusively for the past several months, and while I appreciate that Lyft's tipping is effectively anonymous and you're not put on the spot, I will admit to hating the cognitive/emotional load of seeing that tipping screen and momentarily agonizing over how much I should give.

It just happens to be that Lyft's tipping annoys me less than Uber's shitty corporate culture these days.

Uber drivers are already sufficiently obligated to make pleasant conversation with you. Do you really believe the lack of tipping somehow made your chats with Uber drivers more sincere and meaningful? A full-time driver for hire has dozens of these a day. They're not doing it for the sincere conversations.

> Every time I see someone making conversation with a waiter or waitress, it honestly seems rude to me. They have to talk to you, they have to agree with you, they have to smile and laugh at your joke. By having a conversation with them you're forcing them to do all of these things, and if they don't, you're going to take money off their tab. That is just rude.

This is just silly. You could just as easily (and just as incorrectly) say that someone not conversing with their server is consigning them to the indignity of being invisible and ignored all day, like an appliance instead of a person. Hell, I've had plenty of waiters that talked _my_ ear off more than I would've optimally preferred. The fact that social cues are attenuated in the conversation doesn't mean they don't exist; blanket statements like "every time someone makes conversation with the waiter they're forcing them to talk" are just dumb.

If Uber drivers' pay ends up at exactly what it was before this, I think Uber's going to have a big problem as all their drivers ditch the platform. Uber already pays their drivers shit, there's no way they can justify taking even more of the money from each ride away from the driver.

As for whether they should tip in the first place, this wouldn't be a problem if Uber charged enough to begin with. But they got into a price war, with a company that does do tipping already, and they simply don't charge enough now to pay the drivers enough.

Uber's margin on a ride is already 35-40% in US cities (source: UberPeople), thanks to their 'upfront fares' pricing (rider fare is not used for calculation of driver fares at all, drivers are paid per mile/km and min), their Booking fees, UberPool pricing disparities, and Surge disparities (a rider paying a 1.5x surge does not necessarily mean a driver is receiving 1.5x).

> (rider fare is not used for calculation of driver fares at all, drivers are paid per mile/km and min)

Is this still the case? Uber recently lost a class-action suit about this (and I got a silly $42 check in the mail from it).

They updated their ToS to reflect this.

Yes, Uber already takes a very high percentage. If they bump that up to e.g. 60% in order to capture the expected tip, it's hard to imagine drivers being ok with that.