Before I became a doordasher, I’d read more than once that no, dashers had no way of knowing how much you’d tipped (or if you’d tipped at all, for that matter) before they delivered your order to you. That’s why I was so surprised, immediately after I started dashing, to learn that yes, of course we can. And it’s not like you have to be a math wizard. It’s fairly simple, especially if you choose to be paid per delivery instead of a flat hourly rate.
The prevailing opinion seems to be that you make more money getting paid per delivery. That’s also my experience — the rate I’m offered to work hourly is $14.50, and that’s far less than my average hourly pay working per delivery. Something’s gotta go terribly wrong on a delivery for me to end up making less than that working per-delivery, so it’s per-delivery for me.
When you work per-delivery, you get an alert on your phone that tells you what you’re guaranteed to make for that delivery. This number is the sum of both ways you get paid: the amount DoorDash itself pays you for the delivery, and the customer’s tip. You don’t see it broken down into how much was DoorDash and how much was tip (but more on that in a second).
Let’s say that number is $9, and let’s say I accept the offer to deliver that order. I go to the restaurant and pick up the order; then and only then (after picking up the order) do I find out where I’m taking it. And that’s important, because the distance I have to drive to the customer’s house is the biggest factor that DoorDash considers when deciding their half of how much to offer me for that order. If it’s very close to the restaurant and a trip of less than 5 minutes, DoorDash is going to give me their minimum, which is $2. The longer the trip, the bigger their offer. From what I can tell so far, the “length” of a trip is a measure of distance, not time. The longest one-way trip I was given was 31 minutes — due to it being rush hour traffic the entire way — but only a handful of actual miles. DoorDash paid me $7 for that delivery. But I’m received $10-11 from DoorDash on multiple orders that covered more miles but took half the time because they were in relatively empty parts of the city on empty roads.
So while there are other factors in DoorDash’s algorithm for offering its pay per job, distance is the biggest one, and for a rough calculation of the customer’s tip we can use it by itself. Let’s go back to our $9 order, then. If I collect that food and see that my trip to the customer is going to take me 5 minutes, I can be relatively sure that only $2 of that $9 came from DoorDash, and the rest is a tip from the customer. A customer I’m happy to bust ass for and get there asap, because if everyone tipped $7, we’d all be making more than we do now.
Now, here’s another example. Let’s say I get an order from Pizza Hut that pays $5.50 (my personal boundary is around $5 — anything less than that, I decline). So I go pick up the pizza and find that I’ve got a 14-minute drive to get to the customer. I know immediately, then, that the customer tipped very little or nothing at all. How do I know? Because on a 14-minute drive, DoorDash is going to offer me more than the minimum $2; it’ll be more like $4-5. So if $5 of the $5.50 came from DoorDash, then the customer only ponied up fiddycent. Or possibly nothing at all.
Our other, super-obvious example, is a Taco Bell order where the total offer is $2. I decline these every time, but I do still get them. This one’s easy — the customer tipped nothing, because DoorDash’s minimum pay per job is $2. If we get a $3.50 offer, we know the customer couldn’t have tipped more than $1.50. If we get a $5 offer and it’s 10 minutes away, we know the customer barely tipped, if at all.
Now, notice I haven’t said anything about low tippers or those who don’t tip at all. Mainly that’s because I don’t want DoorDash getting mad at me and kicking me out of a job. I do understand that ordering DoorDash, between tips and delivery fees and other DoorDash fees and prices that are inflated specifically for DoorDash customers, is getting outrageously expensive. And the only one of those fees the customer can control is the tip, so I’m not too surprised that there’s a contingent who tries to limit the damage by not tipping. (Note: I said I understand and I’m not surprised, which, mind you, is not the same as saying I agree with the decision.) But, because I do this for money, the basis for my accepting or rejecting of an order is based on total payout, regardless of who paid what, and that filters out a lot of folks who don’t tip.
But do I still find orders in my history where the customer didn’t tip? Yes, every day. A customer tipped one cent last Friday. Another customer ordered a huge cart full of groceries from Safeway, including four cases of bottled water, and was quite persnickety about how they were to be delivered (e.g., “DO NOT PULL IN MY DRIVEWAY”) — and tipped zero. Oof.
You can track bad tippers very easily — all you’d need to do is take a screenshot of the order and another screenshot of the customer’s address while dashing, and then after the dash is over, match it up with the detailed view of the orders you handled in your dash. (As soon as we sign off, we can see the breakdowns of DoorDash pay vs. customer tip). But I don’t recommend this, at all, because a) you never know who the order’s coming from unless you accept it (and once you’ve accepted it, it’s tough to get out of delivering it), so it’s too late anyhow. Honestly, I’d rather not know in the moment whether I was getting stiffed or not. Nothing good can come of it in the moment. :)
BUT DOORDASH CUSTOMERS, remember this as well, there’s a flip side: If you want to make sure you get your order fast, add a few more bucks to your tip. This will make the order very high-paying, which increases the chance that it’ll be given to a Platinum or Gold driver who has a history of good service, and you’ll likely get your food right away. None of us wants to screw up an order for someone who has tipped generously.
Happy Dashing!
