Also as a consumer I have absolutely zero information on how busy drivers are, if my tip needs to be > $X to get picked up faster, if more drivers will login if I tip $X or greater, nor do I have a way to increase my tip if drivers aren’t “biting”.
IF I had that information/ability I’d concede to part of your point but I don’t and even if I did I hate that idea with a fiery passion. If that’s the world we are going to live in then why am I paying a membership fee AND service fees?
I’d say you don’t get to eat your cake and have it too but that’s absolutely what these companies are doing.
Why do you expect that the app won't have such information displayed? The UX isn't hard. It seems pretty trivial to show a bid/ask chart of delivery prices, along with stats like how many drivers are online and how many orders are coming in. You could even use those pieces of information to come up with an estimate for how much you have to bid to get a driver within n minutes.
edit:
I re-read my original comment and realized that it was worded in such a way that implied that I supported the state of affairs that the gp described. To be clear, I'm only advocating for letting the price be determined dynamically.
>If that’s the world we are going to live in then why am I paying a membership fee AND service fees?
I don't see how this is relevant to my proposal. It's already the case today that you can get charged a membership fee (eg. uber one) and get charged delivery/service fees.
As an idea… it might be neat to try at least. But I think you’d have to build the whole service around delivery bidding, there must be abuses in this sort of market, right? As a customer, make 10 accounts and “take” every bid higher than yours, that sort of thing.
I realized that after reading some of the replies. I made various edits accordingly.
>As an idea… it might be neat to try at least. But I think you’d have to build the whole service around delivery bidding, there must be abuses in this sort of market, right? As a customer, make 10 accounts and “take” every bid higher than yours, that sort of thing.
This is probably a non-issue. My impression is that it takes a non-trivial amount of work to get a driver account on such platforms. At the very least you need to give some sort of driver license scan and/or background/SSN check. That alone makes it fairly hard to set up fake accounts to take out competing bids, just so you can save $5 or whatever on your delivery.
I've used them. They don't. You seem to be conflating a description of how things are today with how things could be run instead.
In practice, drivers don't see the tip amount until after completing the order. They have to infer the tip amount by looking at an aggregate payout that combines transit time, tip and incentives.
The services would no doubt claim that this is to ensure every consumer is treated the same, regardless of tip. However, sometimes services run "top-up" incentives where they guarantee a driver a minimum fee per delivery. In this scenario, if the incentive is $10 and I tip $10, I'm not visibly different from a customer who tips $0 -- the driver makes the same pay.
Worse, as a consumer, I can't tell if my tip is influencing the driver's behaviour. Some apps (looking at you, Skip the Dishes) will affirmatively lie to you about the progress of your order, hallucinating GPS traces to make you think that your order is en route to you, when, in fact, no driver is assigned. (You will learn this from the customer support team only after several minutes of agonizing back and forth where they painstakingly avoid answering direct questions.)
If we're going to retcon tips as an auction for services, then I should be allowed to claw back my tip if the service wasn't performed in a timely manner.
And what I'm saying is that there's already uncertainty. The current interface of DSPs showing that it'll arrive within 30 minutes or whatever, is a leaky abstraction of how the underlying system (ie. restaurants and delivery drivers) work. Just as how DSPs likely have some sort of system to estimate delivery times based on current supply and demand, they can build a system that also factors in price, and give consumers various price options and their associated estimates.
No, you aren’t, because there is no clear signal to the buyer about acceptable price (except, the outright fraudulent, if one accepts that the tip is actually part of the delivery charge, membership + delivery free charged by the intermediary).
> It strengthens the case for DSPs treating their delivery workers as contractors, because the price isn't set by the DSP.
Unless you are a shareholder of the DSP, this isn’t a benefit.
See my edits.
>Unless you are a shareholder of the DSP, this isn’t a benefit.
The existence of gig jobs is a benefit for people who can't work regular hours, and therefore can't get jobs as "employees" (delivery or otherwise).
Employees with irregular hours are a thing, and were even moreso before the trend of forcing them into more precarious designated-as-contractor-roles (often contrary to labor law) became popular with the “gig economy”.
Note that I never made any claims about whether it's actually better for every employee, or even the average employee. I was only responding to your claim that "Unless you are a shareholder of the DSP, this isn’t a benefit". Moreover, I'm skeptical your claim that people are being "forced" from being employees to being contractors. At least when it comes to restaurants, the DSPs were basically servicing restaurants that didn't do deliveries before. Therefore it's highly unlikely that anyone who was previously a delivery employee was forced to switch to being contractors, because those jobs didn't even exist before.
Honestly this is great, for two reasons:
1. You're letting the market figure out the right price for delivery service at any given moment, which reduces deadweight loss. For instance, if you're price sensitive you can order during off-peak times to get a discount. On the other hand, if it's peak hours and you need food urgently (impatient kids?), you can be assured that your order arrives ASAP rather than 1 hour later.
2. It strengthens the case for DSPs treating their delivery workers as contractors, because the price isn't set by the DSP.