$187 order. 61 items. Three substitution photos, all approved. Got there twenty minutes inside the window, carried six bags up to a second floor landing because she asked nicely.
Zero.
Every shopper has that story and most of us have twenty of them. So it's worth understanding what's actually going on, because the reasons aren't what the Facebook groups say they are.
They think they already paid for it
This is the big one.
A Shipt member pays a membership fee. Then, depending on the order, delivery fees on top. From the customer's side that looks like the cost of having someone shop and drive. Job priced, job paid.
None of that money reaches you. Membership and delivery fees go to Shipt. Your pay is base plus the tip, and the tip is the part that's optional.
The Coworker.org petition on Shipt tipping puts it about as directly as anyone has: customers are led to believe tips are a bonus rather than the thing shoppers depend on to pay bills. That's a design problem, not a character problem. Somebody paying $99 a year genuinely does not know that the person carrying their milk up two flights is netting a few dollars on the trip.
The prompt shows up after you've left
Shipt gives customers three shots at tipping. At checkout, cash at the door, or afterward by logging back into the app or the website.
Look at where two of those three land. After you're gone.
A customer who meant to tip closes the app, puts the groceries away, and forgets. Not malice. The prompt arrived while they were carrying a watermelon to the kitchen.
Which is also why the tip you see at the door is not the final number. Shipt lets customers add a tip after delivery, and plenty do, hours or a day later. If you write someone off at drop-off you're judging an incomplete order.
The Circle Rewards wrinkle
A real one, and specific.
Target Circle 360 members can pay for orders with Circle Rewards dollars. They can't tip with them. Shipt's own help page says Rewards dollars cannot be used to add a tip, and any tip goes to the saved payment method instead.
So a customer sitting on a pile of Rewards dollars, feeling like the whole order is already covered, has to reach for a different card to tip you. Some do. Plenty look at that and decide they're done.
The Target myth, though
Something you'll hear constantly in shopper groups: customers ordering through Target can't tip at all.
I believed that for a while. It doesn't hold up.
Target's own Circle 360 page says shoppers do accept tips, encourages members to tip, and states that shoppers receive 100% of them. Shipt's help pages say the same, including for orders placed in the Target app. The tip option exists on those orders.
What does have support is narrower. The Coworker.org petition documents shoppers reporting tips that were submitted and never paid out, and members on certain devices not being shown the chance to tip. That's a bug-shaped complaint about specific surfaces, not a policy that Target orders are untippable.
The distinction matters because the myth makes shoppers pre-decide. You see a Target order, assume no tip is even possible, deliver accordingly, and skip the two things that most reliably produce tips. Then you get $0 and it confirms what you already believed.
Some of them just aren't going to
Worth saying plainly. A share of customers have decided they don't tip for delivery, the same way some people don't tip for takeout. No photo of a substitution shelf is changing that.
You can't fix those. You can identify them.
What actually moves it
Two habits, and they're not glamorous.
Text when you start shopping. "Hey, starting your order now!" Five seconds, and most shoppers don't bother.
Photograph every substitution. Not a text description, a picture of the shelf with the empty slot, sent so they can choose. Customers aren't upset about subs. They're upset about opening a bag and finding a decision somebody made for them.
Both of these do the same thing: they turn an anonymous transaction into a person doing work. Tipping an anonymous service is easy to skip. Tipping the person who texted you a photo of the yogurt shelf is harder.
At the door, be brief and normal. Ask where they want the bags. Say have a good one. Don't pitch, don't linger, don't mention tips. Shipt frowns on asking and customers find it grubby.
And then stop guessing
The part that changed my week wasn't a better script at the door. It was noticing that tipping is a property of the customer, not the order.
Someone who tipped $12, $15, and $11 across three orders tips in that band basically every time. Someone who's stiffed you four times is not undecided. Once you have a few visits to the same address, the question of what this order pays stops being a mystery and becomes a number you already collected.
That's the useful move here. Not squeezing tips out of people who've already decided, but knowing which door you're driving to before you accept an eleven mile run.
Auto Tip Map is an Android app that automatically records every order, tip, and address, including tips added hours after delivery, and puts an address's history on the offer screen so you know what a customer has actually done before you accept.