Food delivery platforms: customer service.

Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan’s measure reframes how food delivery platforms operate by foregrounding price integrity, tipping protections, and transparent pay disclosures, paired with a robust customer-service requirement and a comprehensive refunds framework for nondelivery, misdelivery, and partial fulfillment. The core changes focus on preventing overcharging beyond posted prices, ensuring tips designated for delivery go entirely to the driver, and prohibiting tipping from offsetting base pay. It also expands itemized cost disclosures to customers and facilities, mandates a clear driver pay breakdown, introduces restrictions on listing sites’ direct communications and third-party fees, and obligates ongoing order-status updates plus a customer-service mechanism that must include access to a live person when automated systems cannot resolve an issue.

Key mechanisms require platforms to provide a detailed, itemized breakdown of transaction costs to customers and facilities, including the purchase price, each fee or cost charged to the customer, and any tip or gratuity; to deliver an identical, clearly identified pay breakdown to drivers (base pay, tips, and promotional bonuses); to restrict listing sites from forwarding direct communications that would incur fees and to disclose any third-party costs tied to those communications; and to regularly disclose delivery status, including method, estimated delivery time, and confirmation of delivery or non-delivery. The measure also creates a new, structured refund framework: customers receive a full refund (including taxes, commissions, fees, and gratuities) for nondelivery or incorrect delivery unless the platform determines the customer was responsible or evidence suggests refund fraud; gratuities must be refunded to the customer and may not be deducted from the driver; partial deliveries require charging only for received items with appropriate adjustments to related taxes and gratuities, along with a mechanism to adjust gratuities pre-delivery and to refund the amount to the original payment method or an alternative method if needed. It also allows platforms to remove a customer for reasonable fraud concerns, and requires refunds to be processed in a manner consistent with the original or alternative payment methods.

Enforcement, implementation, and broader context: the text does not specify penalties, a dedicated enforcement agency, or an explicit appropriation, and it does not identify an effective date. The provisions would interact with existing consumer protection and business-practice frameworks to address unlawful pricing, tipping practices, and disclosure requirements, while imposing new operational obligations on platforms, drivers, facilities, and listing sites. The changes would require platforms to overhaul systems for real-time cost disclosures, driver-pay accounting, refund workflows, and customer-service workflows, with implications for payroll processes, tax reporting, and fraud-prevention practices; drivers’ gratuities are protected from being used to offset base pay, and customers receive clear avenues to seek refunds or adjust gratuities tied to orders.