- Ben, a 42-year-old Dallas Uber driver, told Insider his tips were getting smaller.
- Many gig workers reported generous tips early in the pandemic but say customers have tightened up.
Ben, a full-time Uber and Uber Eats driver for five years, said he'd worked as many as 90 hours in one week to make ends meet. He said smaller customer tips had made this increasingly difficult to accomplish.
"Tipping has been getting worse every year," he told Insider.
Ben is not the Dallas-Fort Worth 42-year-old's real name. His identity is known to Insider, but he spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.
Last year, Ben earned roughly $77,000 pretax driving for Uber and Uber Eats. That's $47,500 in take-home pay from over 2,000 trips, according to documents viewed by Insider.
On average, customers tipped him roughly $4 a ride, according to another document, which broke down the details of his earnings and trips for nine weeks last year. Tips brought his average hourly rate from just under $19 to over $22 — though this doesn't account for the cost of gas.
"There have been days where I received zero tips, and there have been days where I receive a tip every single trip," he said. "It really depends on the mood of the city."
Compared with Ben, some ride-hailing drivers have fared worse when it comes to tips. A 2019 analysis of over 40 million Uber rides found that roughly 16% of rides were tipped, 60% of riders never tipped, and that only 1% of riders tipped every trip.
However, Alix Anfang, an Uber spokesperson, told Insider that tipping has increased since 2020.
"On the rides side, tipping frequency and the average tip on a trip roughly doubled over the last two years," Anfang said. "Food delivery has always had a high tipping rate, but the average tip on a delivery increased even further by about 20%."
While Ben didn't know exactly how much he'd made from tips in past years, he said he's confident he's earning less than he used to — and he's not alone. Last week, The New York Times published a story about the financial struggles of gig workers for companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash. Among drivers' key challenges, the Times reported, is that customers have cut back on tipping.
While many delivery drivers said they benefited from larger tips during the beginning of the pandemic, some said this generosity had since faded. Others blamed the persistence of "contactless delivery," which they said has cut down on interaction with drivers and contributed to smaller tips.
The Times story received over 3,800 comments in the first 48 hours after publication, and the most popular ones pushed back on the idea that customers should have to step up their tips to supplement the income of food-delivery drivers. Some commenters said drivers shouldn't expect the same tips as the waitstaff at restaurants, while others said they shouldn't be responsible for paying these workers a living wage.
Ben said there were some bright spots. During the week of Taylor Swift's three-night run from March 31 to April 2 at the Dallas Cowboys' stadium, Ben said the city was in a great mood.
"Because people were happy at the concert, I was getting tips," he said.
4 reasons some people don't tip like they used to
In recent years, Uber has said it's taken steps to encourage higher tips and reduce tip baiting, when customers offer high tips to attract drivers and then revoke them.
Anfang said these steps included allowing riders to tip during a trip — in addition to after — and moving the tip selection prompt up in the app, as well as reminding riders of inclement weather to encourage higher tips.
But Ben is still frustrated by the tips he's seeing. He cited two reasons he thought customers were tipping less than they used to.
First, he pointed to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok videos that show people receiving lavish tips.
"That has given a false perspective that everybody receives the same tips," he said.
He said he thought this had made some people comfortable with tipping less than they otherwise would have if they knew how stingy a lot of tippers were.
Second, Ben pointed to tip limitations for some business travelers. As a result of living in a city with the second-busiest airport in the world, Ben said that many of his ride-hailing and food-delivery customers were business travelers. Ben said some of them had limits on how much they could tip — one customer told him they had a 10% tip limit. While he doesn't know exactly how many customers have these limits, he said he thought this was a sizable factor in his tips.
Sergio Avedian, a 55-year-old Uber and DoorDash driver in the Los Angeles area, shares his gig-work experiences on The Rideshare Guy blog and YouTube channel, which has nearly 150,000 subscribers. He said the growth of the YouTube channel had helped him stay updated on the experiences of thousands of ride-hailing drivers across the country.
Avedian said that, in general, tips were down since the beginning of the pandemic and pointed to two other factors he believed were driving this.
He said that ride-hailing companies have raised prices over the past few years to increase profitability and help drivers offset elevated gas prices, and that as a result, customers have become less willing to tip than they used to be.
"I feel like the consumer goes, 'OK, gosh, I just took a 5-mile trip, cost me $25 on Uber or Lyft. I really don't have room to tip this poor guy,'" he told Insider. "In the old days, we used to get tipped more because the trips were so cheap and people would throw $5 or whatever."
While the number of Uber ride and delivery trips rose by 20% from fiscal year 2021 to 2022, the company reported, gross bookings — the total value of fares and deliveries excluding tips — rose by 28%. When reached for comment, Uber said that in April of 2022, for instance, government imposed fees accounted for over 18% of riders' payments, and that this was among the key factors driving any price increases.
Ultimately, Avedian said Uber riders' tipping habits today could be traced to the company's decisions several years ago. In-app tipping wasn't even an option for Uber riders until 2017, despite drivers pushing for it for years. The company's former CEO Travis Kalanick was resistant to adding a tipping feature because he thought it would add friction to the in-app user experience and didn't want riders to feel guilty for not tipping, Fortune reported in 2017.
Uber's public-policy team wrote in a 2016 blog post: "When we started Uber six years ago, we thought long and hard about whether to build a tipping option into the app. In the end, we decided against including one because we felt it would be better for riders and drivers to know for sure what they would pay or earn on each trip — without the uncertainty of tipping."
By the time Uber rolled out tipping in 2017, Avedian said it may have been too late.
"Consumers have been trained, basically, not to tip when it comes to rideshare," he said. "But I think it should be the opposite way around. When was the last time you were in a cab, you got out without a tip? So to me, rideshare drivers are getting stiffed on this deal."
Are you a gig worker willing to share your story about pay, schedule, and tipping? If so, reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@insider.com.