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Re:DoorDash to Acquire Instacart by komali2 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @10:22PM (#50299115)
This seems to be you choosing to live in an idealized form of your future vs the actual reality of today. My question is, if you're choosing idealized anyway, why stop at a mundane ideal where anyone has to work for minimum wage at all? Unless you've baked the lower class labor category into your ideal future?

You not tipping doesn't improve anyone's material conditions. You choosing to give money to the exploitative companies does affect material conditions, negatively! To me it sounds like you're trying to doordash your cake, eat it, have it, not pay for it, and get paid for eating it, all at once!

Re:DoorDash to Acquire Instacart by BenjiWiebe on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:52AM (#50300312)
A good chunk of lower class labor isn't tipped.

I don't actually even have DoorDash available, but I can put my money where my mouth is when it comes to restaurants; PLEASE pay your workers a good wage, and then I won't eat there if I can't afford it. I don't know what your wages are, or your operating costs; don't make me guess how much I need to pay your employees for you!

Re:DoorDash to Acquire Instacart by komali2 on Friday October 30, 2026 @06:41AM (#50302143)
Nobody actually likes tipping btw, the question isn't whether it's good, but rather whether we should as individuals punish individual workers for our own failure to not raise minimum wage or ban tipping.

Regarding the restaurant industry, I used to run a restaurant, and my conclusion is that the economy is fake.

There is no profitable way to run a restaurant legally. Somewhere in the supply chain, if not in the restaurant then in the delivery truck or farm, there are undocumented laborers being underpaid and working in unsafe conditions. If we actually applied the typical worker protections we've come to expect for other blue collar jobs, with the expected wages, the already razor thin margins of the restaurant industry would completely collapse. The only thing left would be vertically integrated oligopolies like McDonald's.

Every meal out, somebody, somewhere, is subsidizing your meal to make it affordable enough for you to buy it. Adding the 28-32% margin that Uber eats charges is just increasing that pressure to the breaking point. It all barely survives through psychological tricks that make it seem cheaper than it is like hiding the tip or tax until after you actually get the full bill.

I think the only way the restaurant industry could function fully legally is if the government was the only landlord. There's just not enough margin to include the margins a landlord expects, and landlords pathologically increase rent to be just below causing a restaurant to collapse, or simply cycle through restaurant after restaurant, not caring about months of lost rent revenue because the high rent cost increases the value of the property.