By Mark Reilly February 18, 2020
Target Corp. has been boosting its minimum wage rates for store and warehouse workers in recent years. But pay at its Shipt subsidiary seems to be going in the other direction, according to complaints from some of the delivery service’s contract workers.
“Every single person is losing money,” one “Shipter” told Gizmodo, after Birmingham-based Shipt introduced a new algorithmic pay scale in several markets. The old model, workers said, was relatively transparent — a flat fee for deliveries, plus a given percentage of the sale and tips. That structure was fairly generous by gig-economy standards (especially when compared to companies like DoorDash, which infamously tried to collect tips meant for its drivers.)
But the new model, rolled out in high-density markets like New York but also places like San Antonio and Kalamazoo, Mich., is much less transparent, Gizmodo reports, and Shipt doesn’t disclose its formula for how payments are determined. But according to receipts from one worker, weekly income dropped from $530 to $150 after the change, even with the same number of orders.