Truly, madly, deeply, I like to eat. To do that, I occasionally need to get a service to deliver me food. The ones that come the closest to delivering you your choice of foods for a sawbuck, and getting mostly what you ordered from them, is Sobey's Voilà and Longo's Grocery Gateway. I'm mad at the first for the most recent deliveryman's ability to spread my delivery all the way to the far end of the porch and for Grocery Gateway for their creative use of the phrase, pricing.
But here's what you can expect from neither company, is a surprise on the payment page under the heading TIP.
I LOATHE the idea for tipping, have long come around to the view that restaurants pay their workers a living wage and leave the customers to look at the prices in the menu and quickly tote up how much longer the kids will have to wait to go to college in order to order from the menu. In fact, I still think tipping can be added, since service above and beyond should be appreciated. By a single bill, not a percentage.
So, why the Scrooge act?? Well, let's start with a lady I called Sunshine in the days when once a week (or sometimes twice), I'd end up in a local bar playing NTN, which stood for Network Trivia Network, or somesuch silly thing. I played in Brampton ON where the trivia competing was actually pretty tough. My team, the BUMMS (Brampton Union of Marvelous Mugford Sympathizers) and a team of teachers from one of my alma maters, Balmoral Public School, were regulars in the North American top ten. More them than us, but we had our moments. I was offered the chance to jump ship (from my OWN team, which would have simply been The Bums, but the network wouldn't allow that name), but being overly competitive decline with malice aforethought. Occasionally, I'd show up at their bar and give a good accounting of myself, all by myself, just to be contrary.
Sunshine was our waitress at Tom O'Malley's bar. She was a pretty, young lady who didn't smile nearly enough. She HATED being called Sunshine and I was too immature to care. I never tried in the least to get flirty, personal or touchy. And I tipped well. I could afford to since my share of the bill was always as close to peanuts as I could get. Basket of french fries, one or two orange sodas. That was the fullness that the restaurant/bar got out of me. I could afford to tip better than 30 percent and I did. But I admit, one thing she said to me bugged me till the day I retired from active trivia competition (concurrent with Tom selling the bar). According to her, TIPS was short of To Insure Prompt Service.
And that bugs the heck of me, still, after all those years. It's NOT my responsibility to insure Tom paid Sunshine well. That was between him and her. Off-loading paying her enough onto the shoulders of the customers MIGHT have been all right, but honestly, TIPPING has ALWAYS been a bad system made worse in SOOOOO many ways. Tip sharing is common. Why should hard-working Sunshine share with one of her co-workers who spent most of her time flirting with well-dressed customers than doing her job? Or the other workers?? Well, because they all assumed tipping was off-setting the wages Tom was NOT paying them. And I don't want to single Tom out. That was the way the bar/restaurant biz ran back then. And still does for all I know.
But shaming customers into paying to avoid some spittle in the drinks? NO. Just NO. Paying is what I do at the cash register, not looking over my shoulder to see that no customer or worker or owner helps themselves to the money meant for the single person it was meant for.
And I THOUGHT about my tips. I have tipped a single penny to a particularly rude and incompetent server. And on that occasion I went over to the owner, or manager, I didn't know which, and said that I wouldn't be back and the server I was pointing at was why. Mean?? You betch'em Red Ryder. Everybody has a bad day and incompetency's happen. Being rude for something that is essentially your fault?? Not on my watch. EXCUSING that behaviour is how it happens again. And again. And again. You owe it to your fellow diners and drinkers to stop the boorishness now. A word to the manager, commiserating without being nasty, should be the reward for a server who apologizes for lack of good service. But tick me off, then blame me?? Well, reap the wind.
So, imagine my surprise earlier this year when I got to the payment page trying out Real Canadian Superstore and saw a TIP in place. Fifteen percent no less. And I had neither met the shopper from Insta Cart doing my shopping, nor had a lick of service from them to adjudge a tip. And oh, it gets worse. The instructions on my order for NO replacements didn't mean much to my ad hoc replacement. That shopper was getting a PERCENTAGE of my bill as a tip. So, ignoring my no-replacements comment, the shopper merrily replaced a whole lot of stuff. I have allergies. Wrong trust and I could be in hospital assuming I could dial 911. So, the food bank did well with my groceries that day.
I still paid the TIP I'd promised. Later, I found the despicable amongst us, most of whom could laughingly be described as the well-to-do, rich slimeballs, would log in after the fact and CANCEL THE TIP!?!?! And why would these (frequently rich) jerks do this?? Well, the tip wasn't a pedestrian ten or 15 percent. No, the number would be in excess of 60, sometimes even 100 percent. They weren't going to pay it, so why not promise the moon??
Why?? Because the highest tip got the best treatment by the shopper. None of this queue business with first in, first shopped for. No, the orders get prioritized. That means shopping first, getting to the customer domicile first. Freshest food, items to those early in the priority, items not necessarily being available at the tail end of the queue. Survival of the richest. And to that, a plague on all your houses. Delivered as is, thank you.
So, a guy like me with my modest tip, well I get what's left over. Literally. And to my shopper, no schadenfreude from me when you get bamboozled. Your integrity should be to ALL your customers, not to the robber barons first, but to the customers who have ordered through the web, through apps, however.
Of course, that ignores one thing. A guy's gotta eat. Should I come down on the shoulders of somebody willing to risk his or her life out in a pandemic to do what I won't do? Honestly, I'm housebound. I don't have much in the way of choice. Shoppers have a choice. I don't want to enforce a choice on them, but if they take the job, then playing favourites isn't the way to conduct yourself doing that job. And to the company that once again avoids paying its workers a living wage, SHAME ON YOU.
This past week, still seething at the latest delivery from Voilà and the smacking around my credit card got from Grocery Gateway, I decided to try CornerShop. I'd looked at their site in the summer and seen emblazoned there-on, "NO TIPPING, WE PAY OUR SHOPPERS A GOOD WAGE!" So, imagine my disconcert when there, on the payment page, was a five percent tip already sitting there with options to make it bigger. I shook my head and decided to finish the order out, having wasted an hour 'shopping.' The food would be here in less than six hours.
The shopper called me and asked me about no replacement. "None," I said. He argued anyways. The potato chips were available in the half-as-large size (for sixty percent of the price). "Okay," too tired to argue. I sat ten feet from my front door waiting for the delivery, which had the instructions, "Knock on door, Ring Doorbell, Phone in advance."
He was zero for three. I only noticed the groceries sitting on the porch when I got up to do something I do once a decade, look behind my TV.
When I was finished hauling in the groceries I got on-line and made an attempt to cancel my account with the organization. I got one of those RATE OUR SERVICE emails and in a fit of blind fury, stabbed at the single star (zero not being available) and when faced with yet another TIP field, zeroed THAT out. Only later, I realized it might NOT have been an extra tip, it might have been the ONLY tip, And then, freshly revitalized at raging, I thought to myself that zero was more than he deserved. What if the order had been hot food on the very cold morning?? Or cold food in the midst of July?? The sheer callousness to deliver food and NOT let the customer know is ... well callous is about the right word. I didn't get my full order (which included fresh-baked bread) which was because my tip screwed my queue emplacement. My shopper didn't earn my money. Didn't earn his employer's money either. Cost them a customer. But the company that proudly proclaimed paying people a living wage, no longer bothers to do so. It would be a lie.
I'll probably place an early spring order with Grocery Gateway. I've made my point. After a couple of months after that, I'll probably do a Voilà order again. Voilà does the best job of providing you with an order without resorting to unrequested replacements. I won't ever use a surrogate shopper service again. I have friends and extended family who regularly want to do it for me and I refrain during these troubled times. I love them too much to send them out into the cold, cruel world, with me having a LARGE WELL-FILLED PANTRY. It's NOT like I'm belt-tightening. So, I will wait until the Pandemic eliminates the excuses for these shopping services doing odious things in the future.
And yes, I understand I'm choosing their lives to endanger over those of my loved ones. And I'm being callous. But I'm not going to support the failure of organizations to pay their workers either. That day is done.
