The part where they didn’t tell the customers they were doing this is definitely scummy. The pure economics of it is more complicated—DoorDash was redistributin

The part where they didn’t tell the customers they were doing this is definitely scummy. The pure economics of it is more complicated—DoorDash was redistributing the “tips” to effectively guarantee higher minimum payment per order (a lot of customers don’t tip at all as the social expectations with the delivery apps are not as well established), and after they’ve changed the policy a number of dashers see their overall pay has decreased through no fault of their own (there can be many factors that are correlated with giving more 0 tips in a given area/route that have nothing to do with the driver). The honest thing to do would have been to raise the delivery fees across the board, but that doesn’t attract customers. The seemingly optional “tip” preys on the customer’s mistaken assumptions and was used as a sneaky way to achieve the same thing.