Mom seems resentful. She doesn’t understand why Instacart always asks her to tip the driver. Aren’t they being paid enough?

No, they’re not. That’s the point.

Instacart and most of its competitors designed a business where they underpay drivers, then make customers feel guilty about it. The tip prompt isn’t from the driver, it’s from the company as they shift labor costs onto you while positioning themselves as the brilliant facilitator.

It’s clever in the way that charging people to use the bathroom is clever. It’s also pathetically unambitious.

You’ve seen this pattern elsewhere: airlines charging extra for decent seats, so passengers who didn’t pay board hoping someone who did will trade — which creates awkward mid-flight negotiations. Retail stores deliberately understaffing, forcing customers to compete for employee attention while tensions rise in the checkout line. Amazon inviting sketchy sellers onto their platform, then shrugging when broken-product returns get denied. (We’re just the platform, shrug.)

Isn't conflict commerce really just an admission that a company's core product isn’t good enough to stand alone?

If you're on the inside at a company like this: when you can reliably extract money this way, you’ve stopped trying to build something people actually want to pay for. And that’s value-creation bankruptcy disguised as strategy.

And then the cascade effect: great employees leave because nobody wants to be the human face of an inhumane system designed to pit customers against each other. Worse: they stay and they hate it. Competitors with something as simple as no hidden fees and truly easy returns make you look ancient.

How to fix: stop doing this, start doing that

Stop assuming customer-vs-customer friction is just how things work.

Start asking your teams: where in our experience do we make customers negotiate with each other for something we control?

Then, consider a framework to move forward: map the tensions (where do customers get frustrated with other customers?), trace it back (what policy or operational shortcoming of ours creates this?), then ask what would we build if we had to eliminate this friction entirely?

The choice is to build things that align people’s interests, or get extractive about it and find clever ways to set people against each other.