Walmart Spark driver questions where a customer’s $40 tip went after comparing it to his own payout: ‘Something isn’t right’

Tipping on delivery apps often comes down to trust between customers and drivers. One Walmart Spark driver is questioning what happened after saying the numbers on one of his own orders don’t seem to match.

The driver, who posts on TikTok as lychee, opens the clip directly, asking, “Is Walmart Spark driver stealing our tips?” He then says he has something to back up the question, telling viewers, “Let me show you guys what my customer showed me.”

According to lychee, the customer showed him a screen displaying a $40 tip amount. “She said she tipped $40,” the driver says in the video, adding, “You can see there. $40 on the tip.”

The driver’s app showed a different number

The video then cuts to a separate screen from inside the Spark driver app. “And then look at my earnings breakdown here,” lychee says, showing what he presents as the payout for the delivery. The breakdown includes a base pay of $16.17, an estimated tip of $13.15, and a total payout of $29.32.

That gap between a reported $40 tip and an app showing $13.15 in estimated tips is where the driver’s frustration sets in. By the end of the clip, he stops short of making a direct accusation, instead saying, “Something isn’t right,” before adding, “I, I, I think, I think they need to investigate.”

None of this proves that anything improper happened here, and the video itself does not establish whether the $40 tip screen and the earnings breakdown came from the exact same order. What it does show is a driver comparing two amounts and questioning why they do not appear to match. 

The issue of tip transparency has come up before: delivery platforms have faced documented disputes over how tips are handled. Amazon agreed to pay more than $61.7 million after the FTC accused the company of withholding customer tips from Amazon Flex drivers, while DoorDash reached a $2.5 million settlement with Washington, D.C., over allegations that its previous payment model used customer tips to subsidize the company’s own payments to drivers.

Questions over what customers tip and what drivers believe they receive have also spilled into more personal exchanges, including a case where a DoorDash driver confronted a customer over her $20 tip.

The comments were full of drivers sharing their own experiences, with some claiming they had noticed similar issues with tip amounts appearing differently than expected. One commenter described running a test on their own order, writing, “I proved this with $100 tip to myself when I picked up my own order. I tipped $100 and I only received $25 of that. I started a whole investigation that is currently going on.”

Others pointed to how the platform frames its tipping policy in the first place, with one person simply noting, “it says 100% of tip goes to driver,” while another suggested a low-tech workaround, writing, “Maybe we need to start tipping in cash.”

A few commenters brought up how similar disputes have played out at other companies, with one pointing to a similar dispute involving a delivery gone missing after the fact and writing, “Instacart had the same problem a couple years ago and then had a class action lawsuit, ended up getting all that money back, but they let go of anyone that signed up for that lawsuit.”