That would be more than enough if this was an accident -- but it wasn't. Dropping compensation when a customer tips is a deliberate choice that required engineering time and manager signoff to implement and ship. Building and shipping this feature was a calculated, deliberate decision.
Who made this choice, and how has the company changed things to ensure that they won't make this choice again?
How do you know that though? Simplest solution would be that that for each order, pay out $10 whether there were enough tips or not.
Instacart potentially thought that they are just guaranteeing a specific tip, regardless if there are tips or not, and not really thinking the model through. If a pizza delivery guy gets tipped nothing, or $1, I don't think the pizza company compensates? In some way you could see this an equalizing tips, everyone gets paid the same for each batch, as you would potentially do with normal wages.
Bigger issue for me coming from non-tip culture, that's ok not to pay any kind of employees enough and instead rely on customers to tip them.
The pizza company pays the delivery driver an hourly wage and possibly some compensation for mileage driven. The tip is added on top of the base compensation.
Your proposed simplest solution isn't guaranteeing a minimum tip. It's saying that the first $x of a customer's tip will go to the company instead of the employee. This is theft. The company already charged the customer a fee for this service and should be using this to pay their expenses.
It’s difficult to imagine thinking those words and not considering “what if there’s more than enough tips” to which was added “we’ll keep them, and lie to everyone.”
Who made this choice, and how has the company changed things to ensure that they won't make this choice again?