DoorDash users who don’t tip may start getting chided by the app.
A new feature the San Francisco-based food delivery titan is rolling out will drop a passive-aggressive hint to stingier customers to drop a few dollars for their delivery driver—in DoorDash parlance, their dasher.
“Orders with no tip might take longer to get delivered—are you sure you want to continue?” reads a pop-up for customers who choose to tip nothing. The pop-up suggests that non-tippers will likely face “slower delivery” times than their more generous equivalents.
“As independent contractors, Dashers have full freedom to accept or reject offers based on what they view as valuable and rewarding,” DoorDash spokesperson Jenn Rosenberg said in a statement to The Standard.
The program is not in place for everyone quite yet, as it’s currently only in effect for a selection of customers in some U.S. and Canadian markets. But already, DoorDash says it has “seen a meaningful decrease” in non-tipping customers since the pilot began.
According to a Bankrate survey published in June, 50% of Americans said they always tip food delivery workers, compared with 25% who said they only sometimes or never tip. (The former number could be inflated, however, as individuals surveyed may not want to seem miserly.)
The pilot launch comes during a particularly good time for DoorDash: The company beat analyst expectations in its third-quarter earnings, reporting $2.2 billion in revenue and a 24% increase in orders from last year. Its stock price currently sits at just over $92 a share Friday afternoon, near its peak for the year.
The company’s net loss dropped to $73 million from $295 million during the same period a year ago.
Curiously, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu also fielded a question from a Barclays analyst about the effect, if any, that weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have had on the company’s bottom line. There are no “immediate or noticeable impacts” to the company’s financials, Xu said, but he thinks the drugs are “solving a worthy problem.”