Signage in Mark Hall's car he drives for Uber informs passengers about tipping in San Jose, Calif. on Tuesday, April 26, 2016. Uber drivers can now inform passengers that tipping is allowed.
Signage in Mark Hall's car he drives for Uber informs passengers about tipping in San Jose, Calif. on Tuesday, April 26, 2016. Uber drivers can now inform passengers that tipping is allowed.
Photo: James Tensuan, Special To The ChronicleUber driver Mark Hall receives a tip from one of his passengers in San Jose.
Uber driver Mark Hall receives a tip from one of his passengers in San Jose.
Photo: James Tensuan, Special To The ChronicleSignage in Mark Hall's car he drives for Uber informs passengers about tipping in San Jose, Calif. on Tuesday, April 26, 2016. Uber drivers can now inform passengers that tipping is allowed.
Signage in Mark Hall's car he drives for Uber informs passengers about tipping in San Jose, Calif. on Tuesday, April 26, 2016. Uber drivers can now inform passengers that tipping is allowed.
Photo: James Tensuan, Special To The ChronicleUber driver Mark Hall has a tablet in his car as one way of processing tips.
Uber driver Mark Hall has a tablet in his car as one way of processing tips.
Photo: James Tensuan, Special To The ChronicleUber wants to make one thing perfectly clear: You don't have to tip your driver.
"Tipping is not included, nor is it expected or required," Uber's policy team wrote Friday in a blog post on Medium,[1] reiterating that this policy has not changed, despite last week's settlement of two class-action lawsuits brought by drivers.
Uber agreed to clarify its approach to tipping[2] as part of the settlement because drivers had claimed that customers believed that tips were included in their fares and thus did not offer gratuities.
That confusion is arguably Uber's fault: When the service started, it told passengers tips were included in the cashless transactions, which was part of its appeal. After facing a class-action lawsuit[3] from drivers who claimed that Uber was skimming those ostensibly included tips, the company changed its tune.
Uber claimed in the post that it's not doing an about-face on its basic attitude about tipping. "When we started Uber six years ago, we thought long and hard about whether to build a tipping option into the app," the post said. "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."
Riders are welcome to offer tips and drivers are free to accept them, the post said, saying the company predicts that will happen "on only a very small percentage of trips in the U.S."
Without naming names, Uber acknowledged that Lyft has a tipping feature in its app — something that Uber staunchly resists doing. Lyft separately has said that the option has generated $85 million in tips since the company's founding. The gratuities stay anonymous.
"I think Uber went out of its way (from its beginning) to discourage tipping because it fits their business model," said Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior and marketing at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, who studies tipping. "They want to be all about convenience and to appeal to the sizable segments of the population that don't really want to tip."
Many people tip out of a sense of social obligation and don't enjoy it, Lynn said, while others actively prefer to tip. He said in an interview that creating an atmosphere where tipping is now allowed "will put social pressure on the other people who don't want to tip."
The Uber drivers' lawyer, Shannon Liss-Riordan, had suggested that drivers may post signs in their cars explaining that tips aren't required but are welcome. Under the settlement Uber cannot retaliate against drivers who do so. However, passengers who feel pressured to tip could penalize drivers by giving them lower ratings.
Uber's post cited Lynn's research that tips can be skewed by bias, with minorities receiving fewer tips, for instance. It also said tipping could persuade drivers to roam richer neighborhoods for passengers who are more likely to tip.
Overall, Lynn said, the characteristics of the Uber driver lend themselves to tipping.
"They have ample opportunities for service customization in terms of routes taken, music and temperature choices, and social interaction during the ride, they perform a relatively low status job, and they often face hours of work while many of their passengers are headed to positive places/events," he wrote in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Economic Psychology. "These occupational characteristics suggest that consumers will be highly motivated to tip."
Uber's best bet on discouraging tipping is to convince customers that drivers "are happy, professional, and well compensated," Lynn wrote.
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com[4] Twitter: @csaid
References
- ^ a blog post on Medium, (medium.com)
- ^ agreed to clarify its approach to tipping (www.sfchronicle.com)
- ^ facing a cla ss-action lawsuit (www.sfchronicle.com)
- ^ csaid@sfchronicle.com (www.sfgate.com)
