Andrew Guerin

And in delivery, because people are tipping 15% on their meal, the tips are usually actually the majority of pay.

If you spend a half hour doing a delivery, usually you get paid something like $4 from the apps and $5 in tips on average.

And so people didn't want to tip as much as they got these extra fees.

And on top of that, the apps didn't want to, they say they didn't want to pressure people to tip as much.

Other people would say maybe they were trying to build opposition to this law, but they got rid of the opportunity or the option to tip at checkout on some of these apps where they change what the defaults are and that nudged people to tip less.

And that's been controversial in Seattle.

It was controversial in New York, which is why New York actually just said the apps can't do that anymore.

But the net effect, in any case, is that number of trips they were doing goes down per month, number of tips going down.

And when it all comes down to wash, the total earnings people are making is exactly the same as it was before.

I totally relate and support the goal of trying to make sure these workers can earn more.

The issue isn't that the intention was bad.

The issue is that in a market that anybody can hop in and join this queue, sign up for the apps and try and join the pool of people looking for rides, it's very hard to get this kind of per delivery pay regulation to move the needle on how much people are actually earning per day because of these supply and demand forces.

And this is what it's kind of brought me back to is if you think about before Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Uber Eats, all these different platforms, when you think about the old taxi industry for the gig economy, the way that

governments or local agencies tried to raise their pay wasn't through minimum wage laws and making them employees.

I'm not saying that they couldn't have.

That's not how we did it traditionally.

What most places did is have some sort of regulation on who could be a taxi driver.

And that made the fare system sustainable because there were certain sort of people who could drive taxis and there weren't people watering down the market for them.

And

I'm not defending that system.