Hate having tipping options shoved in your face? Too bad, says a City Council member.
Shaun Abreu (D-Manhattan) introduced a bill that will force delivery apps to put tipping options front and center when you order, with 10% as the default.
“All we’re asking for in this legislation is for the tipping option to return to what it use to be. More people are inclined to tip if they see the option prior to getting their meal. Once they have their meal they’re tapped out,” Abreu told The Post.
Abreu said after the city boosted wages for delivery workers this month, apps changed their procedures “in retaliation,” making it more difficult for consumers to tip the drivers.
For instance, DoorDash and UberEats removed the option to tip until after a customer receives their order, while GrubHub, which also encompasses Seamless, lowered the default rate of tipping being displayed.
‘We see this as an equity issue. Delivery workers are working really hard to bring us our food, and we want to bring the power back to consumers to decide if they want to tip,” Abreu said.
He estimated the city’s nearly 60,000 food delivery workers could collectively make $9 million in annual tips under the two bills.
A spokesperson for Uber told The Post that tipping should be a “reward”.
“Tipping is intended to be a reward for excellent service after service is provided. App workers in New York City already make a minimum of $19.56 per hour, and customers have the option to tip their delivery worker on every order,” Josh Gold said in a statement.
A DoorDash spokesperson said the new minimum wage adds costs that get passed on to customers, who order less delivery food as a result.
“The City’s blind focus on overregulating a single industry has already made costs skyrocket for customers and orders drop for local restaurants across the five boroughs,” the rep said in a statement.
“They had suggested platforms like ours could make changes to tipping based on this extreme policy, but now want to go even further in their overreach.”
The city on April 1 announced it would be boosting the minimum pay rate for food delivery workers by around $1.50 every hour to to $19.56 per hour starting on April 1, 2025.
It came after a September 2021 law ordered the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to review pay and working conditions for food delivery workers.
The department decided last year to set a $17.96 hourly wage — from the prior pay rate of $7.09 an hour on average.
But Abreu noted that workers only get paid for the “active time” they work, “from the moment you pick up the delivery to the time you drop it off.”
“A lot of apps are spreading misinformation and saying (delivery workers) get paid by the hour. It’s not by the hour. It’s for time worked. When they’re waiting for an order they’re not getting paid for the wait time,” Abreu said.
The apps have flexibility on how they can pay the workers — per trip or per hour — as long as their workers make the minimum rate on average.
To ensure enforcement, the city requires app-based food delivery companies to report statistics on numbers of workers and deliveries to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.
Abreu’s proposal will head to the Committee on Consumer and Worker Protection. The chair of that committee, Council Member Julie Menin, is a co-prime sponsor of both bills.
GrubHub did not return a request for comment.
