Are we the baddies?

So yes. Status seeking, and differential price seeking probably is a-social as a pattern when it's weaponised against the consumer.

That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door (how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me) and they continue to export all the profits offshore, but taxi services had become shit and now we have got used to Uber and I just don't worry about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.

My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.

The European push to mandate included luggage in flight is seeing a fair bit of trolling. So there are still true believers who think needing clean underwear is weak.

Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.

> about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.

Not sure how it is in the US (I used uber there on vacation in the past, but on vacation, I don't worry about prices too much), but here prices jump heavily during surge; often from 40->50->38 euros in a few minutes; I'll just keep an eye on the app for a few minutes and pick it at a good point. Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price. I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them (these two are related). The last one I took was 3 weeks ago; I was 10 minute drive to the airport from some horrible 'business hotel' and I had an early flight, so I checked out, ordered an uber at 5am and waited; in front of me stopped a 'real' taxi (both are now legal and need licenses, but Taxi have Taxi on top); the driver got out to welcome his client which was not me but obviously he thought I was. We talked for a bit waiting for his real client and then he asked how much uber was; E15 I showed him. He said; cancel it and give me E15. Ok, so I got in front, the other client in the back. We arrived, and while waiting to park up, he shoved a terminal in my face with E15 on it, so I paid. We got out, he got the luggage from the other guy who asked 'how much is it'; E72,-. Cheers bro; made almost E90 for a 10 minute trip.

Point being; hating uber (and I used to refuse to use them) is making your life very hard for very little benefit. The taxis needed a kick up the arse and they still didn't learn anything. Still need to order far upfront, their app sucks and far more expensive. Not sure how they can exist (of course I do, they don't know uber exists, how to use it or they refuse to use it). I find if you are with 2+ people, they are often cheaper than the trains which is quite mental really in a country where 'people should take the train if they can'.

Washing clothes was discovered several thousands years ago.

And boarding plane is much faster. I really do not want to pay for your luggage!

I avoid checking a bag but because it’s price sensitive; its because so much of the airline experience is just idle dead time and I’d like to avoid spending an extra 45 minutes waiting around at baggage claim.

Having everyone check bags is just trading waiting at one area for waiting in another area

Yup. The price jump isn't just a "surge." It's the algorithm calculating the highest price you'll tolerate without abandoning the app long-term, no matter availability of cars (which can be related, but from CFOs perspective that's not the metric to optimize)

This personalized price discrimination is precisely the kind of manipulation geohot is describing.

It's the same principle as (an old story) booking.com charging Mac/Safari/iphone users more.

However it's not rare to find bad drivers on Uber. On Christmas this year I took an uber from the airport, the driver had supposely arrived but he was nowhere to be seen. We called each other and I could hardly hear anything. After wasting about 30 minutes (and battery almost depleted) we finally found each other. It turns out he didn't know how to speak English or the local language. He had two phones, one he used to call a colleage who could (barely) translate english for him, the other phone he used to talk to clients, and both phones were placed mic-to-speaker to bridge the calls. What about the extra time that the driver wasted? I was billed for it and I had no way to dispute it. I could only report this behavior in a review to a driver that didn't seem to be him (was the main driver subletting his account?).

So you carry high quality detergent, and clean washing machine with delicate setting, and then air dry your clothes? Nice.

Eh I wouldnt speak for all of us. I like having the ability to reward contractors with some extra cash for a job well done. The issue is structurally relying on it.

Shit, when I was 14 or so I worked as a baggage handler. And I will never forget the time we took on an overflow job from an american cruise liner at circular quay. Not only was I getting 20 bucks an hour (decent pay at the time), but I took home an extra 1100 or so completely tax free. Nothing as australian as cash in hand.

>That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door

Its always moral to break unjust laws. The taxi monopolies needed to be broken. Having those laws challenged thanks to the donation of US VC money was just a bonus.

Actually theres still work to be done. Sydney CBD is still extremely hostile to rideshare.

So you have to vote with your wallet. If you can't, or won't, then it just proves that their pricing algorithm has found "your" price, and so you don't get to keep your surplus value as it gets transfered to uber.

This is why i, even if i can afford it, go for lowest price, most economically valuable buys. Always, without exception. Cannot allow them to win.

Wouldn't the market purist argue that this just means the good is mispriced, and tickets should actually be what the price is with the premium added? What you really need is to just raise the prices of the tickets and the price to jump the queue?

It is simpler and faster than dealing with hotel laundry, laundromat or carrying extra 10kg of clothes around!

You should check if there are taxi apps where you live. In Europe a lot of these apps consolidated under bigger brands (e.g. FreeNow) so it's a good bet that you'll find one and then you have the same experience as Uber. Just check which gives you a better price.

When the service providers feel cheated by the app they have to use to reach any audience (Booking, Uber, etc.), they'll find ways to make more money. Hotel owners gave me hefty discounts just to cancel a Booking reservation and pay directly, Uber drivers did the same. And with taxis it's getting ever so slightly harder to cheat when people have a recording device in their pockets at all times. I know cases where friends used Strava to record a trip and could show it's impossible for the trip to cost that much at advertised prices. Driver complied.

Startup idea: Strava for taxi rides, disrupt the market of shady taxi drivers with an app dedicated to tracking the trip to calculate/estimate costs.

Also all kind of cashback or discount offers just bake even higher premium than Cashback they offer.

So yeah booking hotels is more and more like a whack-a-mole game if you don't want to pay 30% more.

Why would you want to be on the plane earlier than necessary? Only thing I can think of is better access to the overhead lockers, which fill up fast these days.

That’s because the ”priority” queue for those carriers is really a ”paid for a proper carry on”-queue. But the airlines realised that they could brand it as a priority queue to make the upcharge to bring a bag more palatable. You’re not spending €40 just to bring a bag that used to be included in the ticket, you also get to feel more important. At least the first time until you realise 2/3rds of the plane is also important.

In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.

"Sorry, I've got like 20 lith-ions in there. I can pull them out if you'd like to see them." cue shiteating grin and grumping from the airline staff.

On the one hand I feel good about it because your dumb rules are dumb and fuck that shit. On the other hand, it's not the air steward's fault Frank Lorenzo was a lizard person puke pustule.

edit: Appropriate use of 'cue'

This guy International Travels.

Not where I live. Here, Uber is 50-100% more* than the price of a local taxi, at all times of day. Uber is also at least 30% more expensive than hailing a black cab.

So even though I have the app, after optimistically checking the Uber price, I invariably choose to book a taxi instead.

The shorter arrival times shown in the Uber app are sometimes tempting, but after waiting nearly 30 minutes for a car that Uber continuously said was 4 minutes or less away, with their location moving around (so not stuck in traffic) and driver repeatedly changing, I don't take the time seriously any more.

I just wanted to correct the impression that's often put out that Uber is cheaper (or faster) for the customer. It's evidently true in some places. But where i live, other than when they ran a 50% discount for the first few months after arriving in town, I've never seen Uber be anything other than the most expensive option.

It's not due to lack of drivers: I've been told most drivers at the biggest local firm switched to Uber as soon as they arrived in town, and that's backed up by seeing Uber-marked cars everywhere.

I never understand why people make comments like this and leave it to the reader to guess where they live. Your profile has your email and linkedin, so it's not like you're trying to stay anonymous.

And to your point, local taxis being less expensive is unusual in my travels from 50+ countries. Uber/Grab/Bolt/Gojeck/Maxim are almost always significantly cheaper and more reliable in my experience, especially for foreigners who aren't familiar with typical fares.

Getting on the flight 15 minutes early also beats dawdling in a slow moving like for 20.

Lounge access is worth it alone! Especially on international connections!!

There's a freedom that comes with not caring and just accepting I am last in the line. I don't pay the premium and I can sit and relax in the lobby while the sheep that paid wait in line. Only when the queue is nearly depleted it is my turn.

The actual strategy is not that you are last, but that you choose to be part of the smallest group.

In my country (Spain) there can't be more than 1 Uber (or similar) per 30 taxis by law (obviously pushed by the taxi lobby). That's actually enforced, at least in my region (I think in some regions, like Madrid, it's not). Additionally, in my region Ubers are further nerfed by requiring booking 15 minutes or more in advance and not allowing trips inside of a city, but they just disregard that law and at the moment it doesn't seem to be actually enforced, although taxis are protesting a lot about it so it might be in the future.

Normally I would be indignant at a foreign big corp disregarding laws, but it's hard not to support Uber when taxis are clearly not enough to meet demand (sometimes you need to wait half an hour for one, in a small city where if you are fit you get to most places walking in that time anyway. If I want a taxi it's because I'm in a hurry and walking or taking a bus won't cut it, if I have to wait 30 minutes for a taxi it becomes useless) and they constantly push not only to limit the number of Ubers, but also the number of taxis themselves. They prefer to be guaranteed to always have customers waiting and see the taximeter numbers go up constantly, and screw the people who have to put up with a terrible quality of service because they don't meet demand. In the past I used to take a taxi to the train station if I'd rather work some more instead of stopping 30 minutes earlier to take the bus, now I don't even bother because you might need the same time to go by taxi than by bus due to scarcity of taxis.

Add to that that many taxi drivers are rude, and many drive Dacias which are the cheapest low-end car here... come on, I'm not saying they should be luxury cars, but you are serving customers in a car that is your whole means of production, your image and your calling card, and that will be amortized very fast, and you go for the absolute cheapest that you can find in the market? What does that say about your care for the customer?

I take Ubers whenever I can (which is also seldom, because obviously with the 1 to 30 rule they are even further than taxis from meeting demand) because taxis really go the extra mile to make me hate them.

The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate. Boarding last means there's no more bin space and the gate agent will put the bag in the belly of the plane. This adds extra hassles of waiting an extra 30+ minutes at the arrival terminal to wait for the bag on the conveyor belt and/or the bag getting lost.

Yes, it can look "irrational" to hurry up and get in line because as some like to say, "No point in fighting to get on the plane first since we're all leaving on the same plane at the same time!" ... The issue isn't the departure time -- it's the limited bin space.

EDIT add reply to : >bag put in the belly lf the place, and my bag was never lost.

There are more complications because at some airports with widely separated terminals, going outside of the security zone to pick up a bag at the conveyor belt also means using slower buses instead of the tram to go to another terminal to get a car. E.g. at Dallas airport, the faster railway trams are only available inside the secured area. So not getting that bag in the overhead bin has domino effect of waiting for buses (another +30 minutes) which can add up to 1 extra hour of waiting at the arrival destination. Getting in line early for boarding is a small price to pay to avoid all of that.

I get that time back by being able to go to the gate when they are about to close :)

The big problem with traveling without any bags at all is that you get flagged by security for extra attention. Turns out terrorists are too cheap to buy a set of luggage and a return ticket if they're just going to blow themselves up.

Generally I still had much nicer uber drivers than taxi drivers. What do I do if a normal cabby is a shit? With uber I get to vote 1 star AND I will get my money back the same day. That's not happening here with the normal taxis: you can complain, fill forms, and maybe, after you expire of old age, your family will enjoy that 10 euros refund.

I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.

Airport food & coffee is expensive and often not very good. At least with lounge access, I get that subpar food & coffee for free plus somewhere to sit. With a family, that can save a significant chunk of money off the cost of a holiday.

I think that in a world with no priority queueing, I would still not care about the only queue and show up at the gate at the last possible time.

Problems would arise if everyone behaved like me. You would have everyone showing last minute and chaos would be the result.

I wonder how the system would adapt to that.

That's simply discovering the true price of a product. We're living in a mega-inflationary period, but most people won't accept that a dollar or a euro is actually worth no more than 30 cents. So sellers are putting things which used to be included at a premium price. If people pay, then that is the price.

It's highly annoying as a customer, but the general public won't accept that product and services they pay for cost double than they used to. At the same time the general public demands that their real estate and stock investments should be valued at triple or quadruple than what they used to.

Now, anyone anywhere can get a ride, often quickly. I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.

I had two incidents in the UK recently where my app of choice failed me and I was quickly bailed out cheaper by googling "taxi $TOWN" and having a one minute conversation with an operator.

So which of the laws that uber broke to get big are what prevented these new issues, and which are what made the old way bad?

I don’t mind the old ways.

Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).

The problem probably never was incumbent taxis, it was how they were regulated (or not).

My guess is the hidden fees end up making businesses more money

Sure, they’re mandated to not refuse service, but you try getting picked up in Manhattan with a suitcase mid afternoon (when it’s obvious you’ll be taking the fixed fare to JFK in heavy traffic). To this day, the meter being “broken” is a tactic used in taxi strongholds like Las Vegas, even with this regulation.

The sweet spot for taxis was London, but I will go out of my way to avoid taking one lest I get forced to listen to the drivers views on Brexit for the entire ride.

They are still sheep. Fighting for better spot on the butcher's table.

So let me get this straight. Rather than fighting airlines for better flying conditions, they fight each other for earlier boarding time.

Not sure who said it, but consumerism truly is slavery perfected.

Asocial people are great because they lack exactly this kind of status seeking and don't feel the need to engage in zero-sum social games. They just do what they like, which often is something actually productive or fun.

This behavior is anti-social. It actively harms everyone else except the person (or group) doing it.

How long are y'all sitting around in lounges?

If a small meal / snack saves a significant chunk of money off the cost of a holiday then one of us is not doing it right.

Flights and accommodation are the lions share of costs as far as my limited experience goes.

(P.S. I was meant to be leaving for Japan this morning, but family medical emergency has ruled it out. Flights were $5,500. I'd hope that airport food costs wouldn't raise a blip on a radar set to that scale).

As in most rules on the books, not in actually enforced rules I presume?

The apps did three things that the call services did not do:

1) subsidize drivers with vc money for many years making drivers plentiful and fares cheap

2) use unlicensed cabs so they could saturate areas like Manhattan that had previously limited the amount of cabs that could operate

3) Deprive drivers of info they might use to reject fares they don't want (like destination).

1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.

2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"

3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.

4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.

5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.

In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.

The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/te...

I lived in NYC and other metropolitan US cities for the few years before the Uber and I don’t remember a single car service that had any of that and wasn’t a lottery of if they’ll pick up the phone in time to get me somewhere

This assumes that “most regulated” correlates with less atrocious. Or that the intentions behind regulations are always good. Regulations can indeed makes things less atrocious, but other regulations can just as easily make things more atrocious. I’d argue that many taxi regulations were more the latter than the former. (I.e arbitrary limit on total number of taxi vehicles, while allowing an unlimited number of non-taxi vehicles)

Maybe the fact that they were the most regulated services around was exactly why they were atrocious. Regulation often erects barriers to competition. It's impossible for a regulatory body to spell out every way in which a company can be exploitive and disallow it. The only thing that prevents bad behavior is meaningful competition.

It was this regulatory body that limited the number of cabs that could be on the road at any given time and set "fair" meter pricing. What resulted was that if you lived in a poor isolated neighborhood, there would be no cabs willing to take you there or driving around to pick you up. Uber solved this pretty much overnight.

tips introduce a situation where harder/faster-paced workers get a higher pay per hour than workers with average productivity. a pizza driver that optimizes their routes and memorizes stop light patterns in their delivery zone will get more deliveries per hour than that of a new hire. so even though they work the same number of hours, the higher skilled driver earns more because they get more tips.

this "work harder => more pay" incentive is pretty unique in the industry; in manual labor jobs where each day has a set limit on the amount of work that can be completed, like grocery merchandising, workers that work harder get paid less than average workers. stock incentives are the closest comparison, but it's too far removed from the individual worker's output when the company's size grows above 100 employees.

the point is, part of the problem is the lack of other incentives that reward the hardest/best skilled workers.

This is how capitalism is supposed to work. It's supposed to seep into every crevice of society and pull money out of the poorest, weakest people and into the hands of the richest and strongest. This isn't a coincidence, it is in fact the most important aspect of the system.

Tipping went from some generous gesture to recognize exceptional service and it's turned into a mandatory, arm-twisting shakedown by businesses that simply do not want to pay their employees. Not just avoid paying a living wage (those days are long gone) but not even a _minimum_ wage. Many people involved in or invested in the restaurant businesses wouldn't have thought about getting in if they had to pay employees for an honest day's work.

Many restaurants these days aren't just local mom and pop family run businesses but large corporations who own many franchises and operate in the billions of dollars yet people like you and I are expected to pay most of the wages of the servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darden_Restaurants

Sure, you can never eat out or only eat at locally owned small businesses. But that's just one small slice of society. The only realistic solution for many of us is to try to run the rat race faster.

The main amazing thing about Uber is that you can go most places in the world, not know what you're doing with obscure public transport/payments/etc and just get an Uber to your hotel, no problems. It's so, so much better than what came before.

This is mostly a problem with the people you pay taxes to who would invent systems to restrict the driver numbers.

It's intentional, because the location has nothing to do with the actual point. Stating it invites people to focus on the location too much instead of the actual point, or to say things like "oh that's just your country / town, we can assume that's anomalous".

Which would be missing the point entirely.

If you're interested in the location you can find out. It's no secret, though I would advise against trusting people's locations on LinkedIn, they are often not where the person currently works or lives.

But I'm not interested in stating it. For the point I was making, the specific location, or even the country, detracts from that.

You've traveled in 50+ countries. Just from that, you're an extreme economic and social outlier. You are almost certainly taking journeys that are systematically different from those taken by the majority of people, and the price brackets and journey routes you're comparing between services are different than those used by other people. It may well be that the comparison works out differently as a result.

Not to disregard your experience. You've plenty. But you are very unusual, and it's impossible to travel that much without taking journeys that other people never or very rarely take.

I would not be surprised if the "obvious foreigner" premium is there for taxis, even if you're experienced. I'd find it unlikely that you became so intimately familiar with all 50+ countries as to get the true "favour for a friend" fare in all 50+ including those where that's more common, and that you took the same journeys as locals do in all of them.

On the other side (and on the original topic), Uber has reason to optimise for traveller cohorts. If Uber wanted to seem cheaper than local taxis to people in your cohort, to a greater extent than for other people, they could probably do that, and it would make economic sense if their algorithm statistically optimises for that. Profit-maximising algorithms with "personalised" pricing default-optimise for trade with wealthier customers who use their services more often, for journeys associated with other spending, such as to/from travel hubs and hotels, and for separating out cohorts in subtle ways that maximise the inability of cohort members to detect the separation.

2. Only people working front get tips. If you have a lazy busboy working front for the most talented chef in the world, the chef pockets $0.00/hr in tips.

3. If any computer science job ever contemplated adding tipping to my compensation package, I'd go get my pink slip within the hour.

Markets are great when they are well administered by competent and uncorrupted authority. And this is not an oxymoron! Brooksley Born should win the Nobel Peace Prize or something, she saw the road ahead and gave everything in a bitter battle against Clinton's goons and if we hadn't kneecapped her we wouldn't be here today.

More recently Lina Khan was a one-woman nightmare calamity for scammers, thieves, and other assorted bottom dwellers, and if Trump's goons hadn't had their way she'be ramming data privacy laws so far up FAANG's ass that Lt Colonel Boz would think he actually had been through legit basic.

The system can work, we get excellent people in charge of the important stuff with some frequency, but we have got to drop this red/blue crap and get behind leaders like the ones I mentioned or this goes one fucking way.

And there's a pretty optimistic message not in what George wrote, but that people like George are starting to ask if they're the baddies. He's always been brilliant but I was starting to wonder if he had gone TESCREAL on us, and I think we can see he (metaphorically) sobered up off the kool aid. If he can, idk, maybe Lex can, maybe pmarca can. If those guys took a cold shower? The world changes that day.

im not saying that the current tipping system is a good design - your example is one of the most glaring flaws. to put it another way, my point is that the current system will stay in existence due to the lack of other incentives that reward harder working individuals. in order to get rid of tipping culture, you can't simply appeal to morality/shame tippers; you have to replace it with a new system that also incentivizes harder work.

The custom of tipping came to America from Europe after the First World War, and tipping was seen as deeply un-American until the 1950's.

It is sometimes mentioned in films and radio dramas of the period. See the Bettie Davis movie Petrified Forest for one example.

if I had anyone at all nag me over tipping them more than that as if it were something you're supposed to automatically do, id flat out tell them to fuck off without a shred of guilt. Luckily it's not so ingrained where I live.

I’m a regular at this bakery / coffee store and I buy a doughnut there every day and I never tip.

You can just do things.

I’d love to seem them incentivize actually not putting a whole pizza’s worth of toppings on just 3 slices.

And also putting enough of a topping where it becomes visible. When I add “onion” to “pizza”, I don’t intend for them to add a single tiny spec to a single slice — finding it should be easier than Where’s Waldo.

What a depressing way to live…

If anything; tipping leads us to “leverage information to ensure you get a large amount of high-tipping customers => more pay.”

Continuing that logical process, we might realize that “make your coworkers have to deal with the bad tippers => more pay.” Which might lead us to “socially manipulate management to get optimal shifts and locations => more pay.”

If you really want “work harder => more pay,” then just pay a high/fair/livable hourly rate, and add a bonus for number of orders fulfilled in the shift (or total sales volume during the shift). Certainly, some perverse incentives remain with this approach. But nothing nearly so bad as tipping. And like with tipping, the higher the hourly rate compared to the bonus, the more those problems are reduced.

But yeah… tipping has very little to do with “work harder => more pay.” You need to examine your logic more. Or just, like… have a few beers with a single person who’s ever worked in a restaurant as an adult.

1. You're not hurting the big wigs who exploit workers. They don't care if you don't tip.

2. You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.

Waiters/drivers/bartenders/barbers, all are classic tipped jobs and you tip them after they serve you.

Smoothie Shop instead asks for a tip before they do anything. And they are paid a full wage anyway.

The tipping process works for servers who have the performative and service skills to work a crowd of tables, modulo peculiarities of the patron population. There can be a very strong connection between a server who works tables hard and their tip take-home versus one who merely gets the food to the table.

This is just hope for the hopeless. If an adult needs the few dollars, they have bigger problems.

If you can solve the coordination problem between diners and the explosion of tipping (largely due to employers trying to fight for unskilled workers by promising some extra tip revenue) the tipping might be extinguished entirely and a correction can occur.

Food delivery is the perfect example. Right before covid, and during lockdowns, in my country, it was a lucrative job with easy work that earned a decent chunk of change, while being so cheap for consumers, that I've once or twice skipped out on going around the apartment block to the pizza place and just ordered it to my door.

Nowadays, prices are sky high and the wages are so low, and the system so punishing, is the only delivery drivers you see are illegal immigrants hanging on for dear life.

I’m paraphrasing an old girlfriend of mine because you gave her a substandard tip.

I have had more than a few conversations with tipped service workers. Some are even friends of mine. While a lot of what you say is true (the manipulation of shifts and spotting/monopolizing desirable customers) it really fails to capture what most folks tell me about these jobs.

They like tips. The ones that hustle and build up a bank of "regulars" do quite well. It takes a lot of work, and if you hustle on your shifts you usually get more tables assigned to you or drinks poured per hour, etc. This means even more pay.

A slow unskilled bartender is making far less money than a highly skilled efficient experienced bartender with a stable of regulars taking up half the bar stool seats every slow night. It is a night and day difference in total pay rates - all to do with skill. This can be two bartenders behind the same bar on the same nights. The unskilled bartender is not going to be known in these closely knit industry circles as good talent, and will likely never get the opportunity for a position at the top-tier establishments known for good tippers. Those positions are highly competitive.

While we can pontificate about how businesses "should" reward the top tier employees, it isn't happening. In this area of work these are often the only types of jobs available that offer significantly more hourly pay by working harder or being better at your job than your peers. Tilting at windmills only goes so far - sometimes you take the only options available to you to immediately improve your lot in life.

And yes, some of that is "manipulation" of your work environment - just like how we call it "managing upwards" in our white collar world. Same thing.

He's concerned not about allocating the suffering optimally (to the people least willing to pay to reduce it, for example because they are in excellent health or couldn't afford the flight otherwise) but about reducing the total amount of suffering, which is far more important.

In other contexts, the main benefit of market mechanisms is precisely that they vastly reduce suffering, for example by stimulating the production of socially valuable goods. Is there a way market mechanisms for boarding order could have such a benefit? For example, by rewarding people who board in an order that minimizes overall boarding delay? I'm skeptical.

What? No, you're not hurting anyone. You're going out to eat and expecting to pay for what you ordered, not the life subsidy of someone whose employer can't be bothered to pay them well enough. Either way, it's not and shouldn't be your obligation even if it does screw with the waiter's finances. I too might have financial squeezes that make it difficult for me to fork over an extra 14 to 20% every damn time I've already paid for all that I bought.

Your claim just keeps reinforcing the foolish notion that it's a consumer's fault/responsibility if wait staff aren't paid enough by their employers.

>You're not hurting the big wigs who exploit workers. They don't care if you don't tip.

And I shouldn't have to care if they don't care. At bottom, like I said in my point above, it's not my job to subsidize their wages either way. I didn't make my argument as a description of protest, instead i'm saying it as a practical thing anyone should and has a right to do.

I think that's what got them banned in London at some point.

You are, and it's objective.

Does this worker have more, or less, money than before? It's not a matter of opinion. The answer is less, and we know that's the answer because that's specifically what you're seeking out.

What you're arguing is if this harm is justified. Maybe, maybe not. In your opinion, it is. My opinion is that the marginal effects of me not tipping will have zero impact on the culture, so, for now, I play by the rules. The rules are stupid, I agree, but I still play by them.

Today though, Uber has definitely developed anti-competitive and frankly disgusting traits - they're just different ones to the taxi industry.

over time, your experiences with any company will vary, due to the cycle of new workers joining the company and experienced workers leaving. tipping after a good experience incentivizes the skilled worker to stay longer in their position, thus increasing the odds that your future interactions will also be handled by a skilled worker.

OP missed the point though, also in the US, you can bring what's called a "personal carry on" and put it under the seat in front of you. Now overhead space is a non-issue. Just pack light.

There is also no massive and obvious corruption risk in me paying either of those people to do a job as there is with a support engineer.

Maybe I should tip customs officers too, for processing my passport quickly and not looking too closely at my luggage?

Or perhaps if I take a speeding ticket to court, maybe I should tip the judge based on the outcome?

this assumes that an org is able to perform a robust performance evaluation. i posit that the lack of a quality-based incentive, like tipping, decreases the accuracy of an org's performance review process.

organizations that are unable to retain skilled workers, will also experience a drop in the rate of skilled workers that transition to management positions. over time, management positions are then filled with individuals that do not have experience with the company's product. this lowers the accuracy of performance reviews, which causes a downward spiral: frontline engineers learn which KPI's are important in performance reviews, and focus on achieving those KPI's, rather than focusing on the customer experience. skilled workers are the workers most likely to spot the problem, and either adapt to lower the quality of the experience they provide to the customer, or they begin to seek greener pastures. this is textbook organizational collapse.

In which country is Uber more expensive?

I'm from a country where there're no tips, and I'm not defending tips at all. But I do think the tiktok gifts are basically tips right? Is it a good idea to live off the gifts like the tips?

I can believe if you were going to/from the suburbs it may have been harder. The cabbies could know your destination and could just ignore the dispatcher if they didn't want to run the trip.

just scale premiums in cost and number...

You have, objectively, less money than before. Ergo, tipping is self-harm.

Playing by stupid "rules" (which these aren't in any case, they're social tendencies that can be slowly changed) is the passively damaging thing, a logic of, "yeah, this aspect of the world is shit but i'll chide you for not participating in it because I myself am too inert to not do so".

>Does this worker have more, or less, money than before? It's not a matter of opinion. The answer is less, and we know that's the answer because that's specifically what you're seeking out.

Do you own a restaurant in which you underpay employees? I'd almost guess you do to come up with such topsy-turvy nonsense. The worker having less money has nothing to do with any fault of your own. You're paying for what you ordered, and stealing nothing from anyone; you're simply seeking not to be squeezed further for no good reason. The owner of the place is however literally underpaying because they're hoping to guilt you into subsidizing part of wages, and convincing their employees that this is the correct thing.

A person having less money because you refuse to participate in a subtle bit of exploitation doesn't make you guilty of the exploitation or "seeking it out"

Checking the iOS App Store reviews on the local taxi app I am currently using they go back to 2011, and that's not the oldest one. It has also been available on Android since March 2012. All prior to the dates Uber started operating here.

Tilting at windmills doesn't pay the bills.

Tipping, as an American culture, exists to reward "above and beyond" behavior from service workers. Tiktok performers, bedroom musicians and FOSS developers aren't service workers, and most of the time they aren't salaried either. Expecting to live off those wages is an unfortunate mistake.

Not remotely my experience in Chicago, and I lived in a relatively primary service area (Wicker Park). Calling them was basically pointless, you needed to walk to a cab stand and hope there was a cab standing by if you needed to go to the airport at a weird off-peak time.

And my friends all had similar experiences to mine as well. It was a trope that you'd call dispatch and schedule a ride, and then maybe it would show up within 90 minutes of the actual time assigned. You could even listen to the dispatch radio and realize how much of a shitshow it was with cabbies assigned to a pickup ditching it for a street fare randomly. And how little dispatch cared about it all.

Uber was a night and day overnight change for the better.

The only "good" cab experiences were flag pulls from the street within short city trips. Usually the loop to back home during peak after-work or bar traffic times. Anything else was frustrating to outright unusable.

In part it's buying yourself a place without waiting.

I know a bartender who runs the entire bar area (the actual bar plus maybe eight four-top tables) at a nearby restaurant during lunch. I can text him at 10:30 and say I'd like a table for 2-4 people at lunch at 11:45, and there will be one waiting for me. He just brings one menu to the table, with our drinks (I'll have water, my wife will have Diet Coke, he already knows this) and we usually spend about ten seconds looking at the menu before we order.

We're both busy professionals, so getting us in and out in thirty minutes matters. And he does.

I'm directly paying the guy who provides service to me for a much higher level of service. I'm sure his manager would like a cut of that, but it's the price they have to pay to retain high-skill servers.

Consider the negation: you’re not hurt if I give you 100 dollars. Or, rephrased, you're better off if I give you 100 dollars. Is this true? Yes. If I queried all 7.5 billion people on Earth, they’d all say yes.

Again, the tricky part is I don't care. That's a different thing.

Like I said, the rules are stupid but, for now, I play by them.

You might as "why are you hurting yourself?". Because I can afford to hurt myself, the waiter probably can't. 5 bucks is a drop in the bucket for me, but, presumably, not for them.

And, on the topic of self-harm, we all make decisions every day that harm us. We sometimes get something in return, but often we don’t. We do it purely for the benefit of other people, often people we don’t know and will never see again.

Consider holding a door open. For me, I get in the building 10 seconds later. That’s worse than getting in the door 10 seconds earlier. What did I gain? Nothing. Some stranger got 100% of the benefit, with nothing for me.

Again: does the worker have less, or more, money than before if you don't tip? It's not a trick question, it's not a rhetorical question, it's a very simple question.

Okay... they have less. So, the worker is worse off when you don't tip. Again, what you're arguing is that's okay and justified. Which is fine, and lots of people will agree.

> The worker having less money has nothing to do with any fault of your own.

This is blatantly not true.

When you don't tip 5 dollars, the waiter does not have 5 dollars. Who did not give them that 5 dollars? You.

You're arguing that isn't your responsibility. That's a different argument. But who didn't give it to them? You.

> The owner of the place is however literally underpaying because they're hoping to guilt you into subsidizing part of wages, and convincing their employees that this is the correct thing.

Correct, this is exactly right. And, I agree with you: this is absolutely what is happening. I want this to end 100%.

But, in my opinion, I do not believe, personally, for me, in my life, that I will be enacting any change or furthering this cause in any way by not tipping. So, for me, I tip.

If you do not want to tip, I think that's fine. Go for it. What you cannot claim is that this doesn't hurt your particular waiter. Obviously it does, you made his night a little bit worse. If you still don't believe me, just ask next time, the waiter will tell you.

And, notice my wording here, it’s very careful. That particular waiter is worse off. It’s possible to help waiters, as a group, as a collective, while simultaneously harming that particular waiter. You believe you’re deconstructing or undermining tipping as a system, ergo helping waiters as a whole. But in the process, you’re hurting that particular waiter.

They like money. Service workers tend to like tips (which provide variable income) over stable higher wages mostly I think because the latter is one they just haven't experienced. Instead they get a choice between low wages and tips or low wages without tips. Hardly a choice.

Also, tips do not always go to the harder working employees. With tip request spreading far and wide, I often see them in places where there is little work even involved. If I buy a bottle of water from a take-out fast food place I'm expected to tip, but the same bottle of water from a convenience store I'm not expected to tip? Who was working harder here exactly?

and FAANG size companies dont have random bonuses for frontlines; stack ranking is supposed to reward top performers, but when manager kpi's conflict with work that benefits the customer experience, managers will intentionally rank the best performers as average.