Shopify is a Canadian company and Canadians are usually referenced as sane Americans, but offer their customer the ‘American option’ and here they go. There are a few good words about ‘optional tipping’ psychology near the end.
"Displaying a tip button at the online checkout with suggested levels of tips creates a sense of psychological pressure to tip…
Those good words about the psychology are spot on.
I think of tipping as a thank-you gift for excellent service. It is the customer who decides a tip is warranted, and it’s given to the staff who provided the service. Not to the business itself.
And how dare an online business expect tips when its customers are paying in advance and the service / goods are yet to be experienced / received? What are we tipping them for? Protection against the nasty consequences of not tipping?
I’d be more likely to cancel the order than to add a tip under those circumstances.
As someone in the article said, a large number of abandoned baskets would send a pretty clear message.
DON’T DO IT!
It is very simple. Just don’t it. Don’t feel guilty.
Using the service, is your payment for it, full stop. If its good use it again. If not, get it somewhere else.
Even in the USA, apparently, “pre-tipping” - asking for a tip before delivering any service / goods - is something relatively new.
This seems to me less like ordering food and more like participating in an online auction. You’re trying to anticipate and exceed other bids (that you can’t see). If your pre-tip’s high enough, you might get your food while it’s still hot.
The driver preference for pre-tipped orders may be linked to DoorDash’s somewhat convoluted courier payment method, which was reworked following revelations that DoorDash was not giving drivers the full amount of customer tips.
In 2019, DoorDash restructured its payments to drop the controversial “tipped wage” method and pay a base rate with 100 percent of tips going to drivers. The knock-on effect of this, however, makes orders without tips less appealing to drivers.
For the drivers, choice is obvious: start with the jobs that already include the tip, because that’s guaranteed income. A customer might or might not give a generous tip, or any tip at all, on receipt of the food, even if delivery was quick and the food’s still piping hot.
Shock horor. The media have nothing better to do than report on our tipping habits. The last sentence says a lot. One has to wonder if it was a slow news day?
The number of payments with tips has remained stable throughout the last year with 0.52% of payments including a tip in August 2023
Maybe they were frantically casting around to find a good news story for a change … 
We don’t tip in Australia. Thank goodness. Instead we pay a living wage.
When you pay for anything, expect to get the change. Don’t feel bad about it.
