Text and photographs by Alex Maroño Porto
When Colombian Alejandro Grajales arrived in New York City nearly a decade ago, he found work delivering restaurant meals on his bicycle. Grajales worked directly for the restaurants, making neighborhood deliveries, until apps like Grubhub and DoorDash took over the delivery business. After that, Grajales would cross the Queensboro bridge from Queens, where he lives, to Manhattan every day, open his phone, and race around the borough on his bike wherever the apps told him to go.
“They sent me to pick up [something] in the Upper West Side, then I was directed to the Upper East Side, and vice versa,” he said in an interview in Spanish, explaining that he spent considerable time crisscrossing Central Park on his bike each day. Despite the hectic schedule, Grajales said he was earning less than what he did when he worked directly for restaurants eight years ago. During that time, he would typically earn around $700 for 30 hours of work and, on top of that, restaurants would provide him with meals.“The apps started to pay very little and work became daunting,” he said.
So last June, when Mayor Eric Adams announced that delivery apps operating in New York City would have to pay an increased minimum wage —$17.96 before tips — and make annual adjustments to reflect inflation (Adams this month announced an increase to $19.56), the news was welcomed by Grajales and other city deliveristas.
“This is so much better,” said Grajales. While 30 hours of delivery work used to yield him about $450-$550 a week, including tips, Grajales says he now is more likely to earn $600 for the same amount of work – and with tips, his pay is even higher. The new minimum wage requirement means that workers are paid for the time they spend searching for orders and picking them up for delivery; in the past, their pay covered only the time spent making the actual delivery.
“Before, the time we spent from accepting the order until we reached the restaurant and the time we spent searching for the customer, that wasn’t paid to us,” said Grajales. “Right now, our time is valued.”
At the same time, Grajales and other deliveristas say the delivery companies have instituted new policies that take away some of what they’ve gained with the minimum wage.
One change: instead of allowing customers to designate a tip when they place an order, customers are now asked by the app to tip after they receive their meal. That makes it less likely they will actually tip, said Grajales. “When you order food, what you want is to eat it. A customer is not going to bother looking in the app how to tip,” he said.
Asked about the new policy, a DoorDash representative said in an email that it was done “to help ensure our platform remains affordable for all New Yorkers.” Customers “still have multiple points to add a tip during the delivery and for up to 30 days after they order.”
A Grubhub representative, also responding by email, said: “When the City implemented its minimum pay standard for delivery partners, it effectively transformed delivery from a tipped wage to a non-tipped wage, guaranteeing delivery partners at least $19.56/hour so they wouldn’t be as reliant on tips.” Then, implying that New York City deliveristas were better off before, the representative wrote: “Delivery partners should be paid fairly for their services, which is why our existing model that’s used in most markets and pays per delivery plus tips works so well.”
Some deliveristas have charged that the change in tipping policy is retribution for the city’s minimum wage guarantee. City Councilmember Shaun Abreu has introduced legislation that will reintroduce tipping at the checkout stage of the delivery and will include a minimum suggested tip of 10%, reported Gothamist.
Deliveristas also complain that, as a result of the adoption of the minimum wage, companies have limited the number of hours they are allowed to work. The apps “are telling workers that due to city regulations and the minimum wage, your hours are going to be affected,” deliverista Antonio Solís said in a phone interview in Spanish. “We have all been affected.”
According to DoorDash, a Department of Consumer and Worker Protection study published in late 2022 predicted that some workers would see their hours curtailed as a result of the implementation of the minimum wage. “The city acknowledged that platforms like ours would be left with no choice but to make changes to make dashing less flexible and force us to begin restricting where and when New Yorkers can choose to dash,” said DoorDash in an email. Meanwhile, Uber Eats adopted a New York City policy in December that limited “the number of couriers who can be online each hour of the day.”
For some like Juan, a deliverista who was interviewed by the Rag in late 2022 as he took a break at an abandoned Upper West Side dining shed, the delivery companies’ responses highlight the failure of the minimum wage policy. “New York harmed us. Previously, you could enter [the apps] whenever you wanted because supposedly no one was paying you; you entered because you were independent, you relied on tips,” he said in a recent phone interview in Spanish. “Not anymore, now everyone has set hours. There’s no option.”
This lack of flexibility makes it more difficult for workers to stay in a specific neighborhood like the Upper West Side, where tips are generous, said Juan, forcing them to take orders in more distant places.“Previously you were in the [Upper] West and they kept you there, or you were in the [Upper] East and they kept you there. Currently, you have to run wherever they send you. You’re in the Upper West, they send you to the East Side, and you have to go,” he said.
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Tipping has to go away. If people are getting paid a living wage we should need to add to their salary.
That is correct….. I no longer tip
Go get your own food if you don’t want to give the person a few dollars after they have brought your food in the rain or when is 90 degrees outside. $19.56 an hour before taxes and only 30hrs and you call that a “living wage”. Tell me if a family of 3 can live on that “living wage”.
Really? $19.56 for a job that requires no skill? They don’t even pedal as they’re all on e-bikes and scooters. All they do is steer in the direction that the turn by turn directions are their smart phone tell them.
America is already considered the land of opportunity which is why people immigrate here in large numbers. They shouldn’t come here and then expect us to make drastic changes to existing compensation schemes especially if they claim they’re coming here for asylum. and not economic improvement.
I think this is what many are doing/will do. So there will be fewer delivery jobs. Good for those whi hate the eBikes. Not so good for former deliverestas. And isn’t that part of Antonio Solís’ problem? Fewer work hours available for him.
Lived on a lot less. Worked all sorts of jobs, no minimum wage, no tips. So did my then figure wife. We understood we can’t have 3 children on our salary back then. Later on, when we achieved stability, we had our beautiful children.
What you are saying is that you come to this country without any skills and no English, yet you want to support a family of 3 from day 1?
That was my salary as a junior computer programmer. I survived as did many others. We were very happy to be paid that much as a starting salary.
How selfish.
How about, if they ride on the sidewalk they don’t get anything?
Absolutely. We also should enforce jaywalking fines.
All of this seems like it was easily imaginable before the new law. If you make an hourly wage obviously you can’t set your own hours. If you get paid more per hour customers will tip less.
Why would you tip less????….. because you oppose to other people making a better living?? There isn’t another reason why one would tip less once one has learned that the delivery ppl are making a hourly wage.
That only speaks to the sad reality of the human race.
Are you for real? People tip because they know how little delivery people make. They got less than minimum wage so tips made up for that.
For the very obvious reason that the customer is paying more and the delivery people are getting that money. You didn’t really expect to get the higher guaranteed wage without people adjusting their tips accordingly did you? This is very unskilled labor. You’re lucky to get paid that much.
I only tip $2 less than I would because there’s now a $2 line item for delivery that, according to the companies, pays for the $19/hr minimum wage. Besides that, I still tip the same. I only order takeout from one or two places so it’s pretty easy for me to just check that my total is the same and hit order.
It shouldn’t be that way. Tipping should have nothing to do with what the deliverista makes or doesn’t make per hour. It’s not complicated, but it’s been made so.
I am not going to tip less because I think they do a hard and dangerous job. That being said, the whole reason why tapping is mandatory foramy people is because of how little the worker makes.
Traditionally we have tipoed people who didn’t make that much money per hour. Wait staff made a significantly lower minimum wage that others. We tip cab drivers but not airline pilots. We tip nail salon workers but not doctors. So I would say if job is suddenly paid more it makes sense that people would tip less.
Summary of legislation introduced by Abreu: “This bill would require third-party food delivery services that solicit gratuities for food delivery workers to conspicuously solicit gratuities before or at the same time an online order is placed.”
I can’t wrap my head around this attempt to dictate to companies the stage at which they should include the tip option and to tell them to display a minimum suggested tip of 10%. If a tip is optional, why do they even have to offer a tip option on the app? Customers might want to tip in cash or prefer that the tipping scheme not be in their face before they have received the service.
There are aspects of tipping that are inherently nonsensical which percentage tipping doesn’t address. If I tip 20% and order a $100 menu item, the delivery worker will get $20. But if the item is $50, the server gets only $10. What’s different about the service I received and why should the server benefit more when it’s the restaurant owner who invests in carries the risk of not selling those higher priced wines?
I always give a few dollars to the person at the door bringing me my food and I don’t mind doing so. What I hate is the expectation that I tip on the app as well.
Since Covid many residential buildings don’t let delivery people go to individual apartments. I tip on the app.
Which means I am getting inferior service comoared to beinging it to my door and the delicery person is spending less time on my delivery. Lower tip.
I don’t know in what other service industry customers are expected to tip before receiving service. Tips are supposed to reflect the level of service received. You don’t tip a waiter in a restaurant when you’re being seated at the table – you tip at the end of the meal. Why is this even a debate?
Because it’s reasonable to assume that your food WILL be delivered to YOU. If there is a problem with your delivery or food, there are simple mechanisms in place for you to get satisfaction. If you think it’s unfair, here’s a suggestion. Go do their job for a week or two. Perhaps your attitude will change.
Hey, please lay off with the nastiness.
Seriously.
You can make a point without being a jerk to everyone you disagree with.
No intention to be nasty. I think it’s reasonable to suggest someone to walk in someone else’s shoes when they are critical of something. Sorry you were offended.
I guess each of us looks at this differently.
1. I save time and travel cost and the biggest savings is not buying beverages at the restaurant.
2. $20 an hour x 40 hours x 52 weeks divided by 12 months = $3467 per month. Who can live off of that in NYC?
Tip these folks! They make your life easier.
They don’t make my life easier they actively make it worse. I have to dodge them as they dangerously violate road rules, be yelled at as they want to buzz by me in a sidewalk and teach my 7-year-old to fearfully look for them at every intersection.
Like any reasonably not-lazy person with able-bodied legs I walk down the block and pick up my own food. Often it means I get my food faster and I’m better condition.
These guys used to use the tips like a bribe. They’d wait for a high tip to come through before agreeing to get the order.
These are the problems that are created when we try to transform an historically tipped worker to one who has a guaranteed considerably higher non-tipped wage. Many customers don’t want to be squeezed after being told for years that tipped workers survive on mostly tips and now the script has been flipped. FYI, the workers are protesting that under the old system, they were able to cherry pick deliveries based on higher tipped orders. Now they don’t like that the apps force them to take any orders. Rubs me the wrong way that delivery workers want so much control over the business model that provides them with work they otherwise wouldn’t have.
The whole delivery app industry needs to go away. Consider that restaurants pay a significant percentage of their revenue to the company that provides the app. Consumers pay a fee on top of that. The delivery people (sorry – I’ll gag if I say “deliverista”) get paid next to nothing and endanger pedestrians and themselves in their efforts to make a few extra dollars. And in spite of this, every delivery service is losing millions of dollars every year. Not one of them is even close to being profitable. So who benefits? Not the restaurants. Not the consumers. Not the delivery people. Not the investors. Can someone explain to me why this industry even exists?
No one is holding a gun to a restaurant’s head forcing them to join the app delivery system. Restaurants have decided that they need to be in the game which puts all the restaurants on the same playing field. All restaurants build the app costs into their prices.
They kind of are holding a gun to the restaurant’s head. First, many apps add restaurants without their consent and just start taking orders. Once that happens, it becomes a public relations nightmare for the restaurant if they refuse to fill orders placed by customers in good faith. Second, whether we like it or not, the apps have changed what people do when they want to order in; if restaurants aren’t available on a given app, they’re likely to lose business.
And yes, many restaurants do bump up their prices to make up for the cut that the apps take, but that’s to no one’s benefit. I’ve stopped ordering through any apps, but a few years ago, I stopped into a restaurant that I’d frequently ordered from through Seamless, and I noticed that my usual item was $3 less on the menu in the restaurant vs. on the Seamless website. I asked the manager and he told me that Seamless got a 22% commission, so he had no choice but to raise prices on Seamless orders. After that, I’d just call the restaurant directly to place a delivery order. I got the lower price, the restaurant gets a higher profit margin, the delivery guy gets a cash tip from me and everyone is happy. Or happier, at least :-).
Who delivers the order when you call the restaurant directly? I thought that restaurants eliminated their own delivery crews and rely on the app workers.
Kitaro, Osteria Cotta, Pizza Pete, Land Thai do their own deliveries … to name a few.
I think the consumers are the ones benefitting. Now you can get delivery from almost any restaurant in the city. Before delivery apps you could only order from restaurants that employed people who delivered. Orders are not limited to pizza and Chinese food anymore.
Really? How many local restaurants didn’t deliver (in their neighborhood, at least) prior to the appearance of the delivery apps? Even if they didn’t have dedicated delivery people, pretty much any restaurant would send out a busboy to do a quick delivery if they weren’t totally swamped. I’m not sure what city you live in, but here in NYC you could get more or less anything delivered. My stack of printed menus back on the pre-app days had pizza, Chinese, sushi, burgers, diner food, Italian, Greek, Jewish deli, Turkish, Thai and certainly a bunch of others that don’t come to mind at the moment.
And you know what? In the three years or so since I’ve stopped using any apps, I haven’t encountered a single restaurant that won’t take a phone order. They keep the cut the app would have gotten, I don’t pay a “service fee”, and I still get my food. What’s not to like?
The apps do, of course, serve a purpose for someone like me. Since no one distributes printed menus anymore, they’re a good place to browse menus :-).
On Seamless/Grubhub you can add tips to the order. The defaults include 15&20% where the restaurant uses its staff for delivery but tops out at 12% if they use the app’s staff. By clicking Custom Tip you can increase the tip for non-staff delivery.
I believe that the delivery companies should pay a fee to NYC to allow better enforcement of safety (riders adhering to road signs and giving right of way to pedestrians). They regularly endanger our lives and we have to pay ,thru our taxes, for enforcement. NOT RIGHT.
At a fundamental level I’m philosophically opposed to the concept of tipping because it transfers the burden of providing adequate compensation for workers from the employer to the consumer, and that is simply wrong. But I do tip workers (including our food delivery friends) because their wages are so miserably low.
Here’s a simple solution to fix all of our tipping woes: pick up your own food. The fees charged by delivery apps are ridiculous, and I’d rather help the small businesses in the neighborhood by ensuring that 100% of my money goes to them.
Are the deliveristas entitled to overtime, sick leave, vacation, bereavement leave, maternity leave, lunch and coffee breaks and health benefits?
I tip in cash, usually about 20%, more if weather is bad. Perhaps some customers can’t afford that, but keep in mind that the delivery workers can’t afford to stay home and order out.
Then this new model of tipping after delivery should benefit you. In the old model if you put $0 tip in the app and planned to hand them cash nobody would pick up your order.
Are the apps limiting workers’ hours or is the work just getting done with the current number of delivery people? Are there are orders sitting around not getting delivered? If not then they’re not limiting your hours.
The granularity of the City Council’s interference in this issue is really amazing. They want to specify special minimum wages for this one class of worker and then also tell their employers where the tipping option should be in their apps and what the minimum suggested tip should be. Maybe it’s enough already.
I have no problem tipping. To my knowledge, none of these people who work delivering are making enough money to live on in any of the boroughs. My problem is the fees these delivery services add on. I would rather order directly from an establishment anyway.
The one I hate the most is Instacart. Even with membership, you are always paying extra fees for this, that or the other thing. PLUS the inflated prices, which are almost always much more than the retail price. In the end, between fees and tips and inflated prices, you spend 20 to 40% more than you would if you were in the store shopping. That’s way too much of a markup. Too many intermediaries making money and, in fact, the stores that still use Instacart and the DoorDash and the Grub Hub are saying they don’t make money either.
I am sure some stores that use these services do get more business but I’m sure there are others who lose money.
I will always prefer to order direct and I hate it when I call and am told to go online and use an app. If a restaurant doesn’t want to deal direct, I will reconsider whether I want to order from them for delivery. I’m not willing to support huge markups and additional fees all around. If the inflated prices on products on instacart aren’t enough to get a cut for both the store/restaurant AND Instacart, that’s their problem. I’m not going to make it mine when I have to pay inflated prices, delivery fees and tipping. And I always tip in cash based on how the delivery goes. I refuse to do a tip in advance because no, you never assume the delivery will arrive complete and in good condition, and on time. Because too many times it does not.
And I would rather put cash in the hands of the delivery person than have them have to wait till their online tips are tallied and distributed. And if I can’t afford a decent tip, I don’t order. Why should the person who makes it all work, the delivery person, get short-shrifted?
Low paying jobs have been in existence forever. When I was a child during the 1950s and 1960s, my father worked 3 jobs, my mother had 1 job and my brother and I both worked after school and on weekends to help out. No one complained, we all just did what we needed to do. I grew up with a tremendous work ethic and a great sense of pride.
That was when it was about equal opportunity vs equity. People were given the opportunity to better themselves and their families. Now it’s about righting wrongs that were done to people centuries ago. The thing is, will the debt ever get paid, who gets to decide this, and is equity ever achieved as long as there is one person standing who feels that life hasn’t been fair to them? Personally , at $20 an hour, and where many service jobs make less, I rethink how much I tip. I don’t tend to rely upon delivery workers to bring me things. I can still walk to pick up my food and will continue to do so.
What is the minimum wage for other NYC professions? What is the purpose of tips? We need a refresher. I remember when delivery workers lived off tips. Is a tip now “charity”
I just ordered via seamless and tipping came up just like it used to before placing order
Rarely order delivery food and never have tipped. I am cheap.
The economic illiteracy on display here and among our political leadership is disheartening. If you increase the cost of something the demand for it will go down. This is true of labor, like everything else. Raising the cost of employing people will reduce the amount of demand for them. Either less hours or less jobs. Have a look at California, where restaurants are laying off workers *by the thousands*. Higher wages – good for people who keep their jobs, terrible for everyone who loses theirs. Can not make it any more simple
Google “inelastic demand” and get back to me.