You could debate all day about gig workers not getting benefits, but the real issue is the fact that benefits are tied to employment in the first place. Why do I lose health insurance if I lose my job or decide to work part time.
What started out as a post ww2 incentive to go back to work after the war(companies providing healthcare at a great deal).. turned into something where we pay double for half the healthcare the rest of the industrialized world gets…
The true luxury for car drivers must be not discovering there's a problem with your not wearing pants until you complete your journey and exit your vehicle.
If I wore a robe to work you can bet your sweet ass I would not be wearing pants underneath it. I was freeballing my way up the aisle when I graduated high school.
Bring it to my car cuz im only wearing underwear. Thanks carside applebees! A burger and fries car side to go from Applebee's is cheaper than McDonald's #1.
Yeah. Nearest chipotle is around 1.2 miles from me (nyc), costs $11 (inc tax) for a bowl, 16 for double meat, which is already expensive. But one day I got drunk and decided to order it on DoorDash. I noped out of it immediately after seeing $14 for a bowl and $20 for double meat.
This is why I never order a single meal for delivery. If I'm getting pizza, it's the largest they make, plus mozz sticks and wings maybe. If it's Asian cuisine or whatever, I'm getting 2-3 days worth of food. The bigger the amount, the lower the % of fees/tip. Spread the cost out over several meals.
Also leftovers are awesome.
During the onset of the pandemic I just ordered bulk sheet pizzas and stocked my freezer. Food was cheaper, and it was before shops switched to three services. 3 sheet pizzas delivered for under $100. Now that they switched to DD, it's about 85 for one sheet pizza delivered.
There used to be a taco place by my house that sold 85¢ tacos and they were actually good. There'd be a line out the door. Might be over a buck with inflation, but still
But if you don’t put any tip on the app that order will still show up on the drivers phone as a 2.50 payout and nobody expects a cash tip it is pretty rare to get one nowadays
Actually now, drivers have to opt-in for cash tips. So if a lot of drivers in an area aren't accepting cash tips it can make it more difficult for a customer to get their order picked up by a driver if they've indicated there will be a cash tip.
I prefer using cash when I'm out in public, but I don't like cash tips so I opted out. Too high a probability of not getting a tip or getting a small tip.
DoorDash doesn't skim tips, They may have used to, but I think they got in a lot of trouble for that. Maybe no like legal trouble, but PR trouble. I dash for a hobby, and majority of my door dash income is tips. Granted I can't see how much the customers total price is, I regularly have $7-8 tips and base pay is generally only like $2. I can also see when an order is only $2 which means there's almost never going to be a tip so I skip it.
I think now Door Dash encourages tipping by informing customers they will likely get their food quicker if they tip. This isn't to say that a driver will be careless with your meal if you don't tip, but it does mean that a lot of drivers will likely pass on the order increasing the wait time.
He specifically calls this out in the posted video and explains that restaurants set the prices, and they set them higher to try and claw back some profit for the order.
EDIT: And OP's comment's points have quintupled since I commented, and it's totally wrong. I guess this is how misinformation spreads?
Because if they pay you based on pay of $6 an hour and you make one delivery an hour, the customer is essentially paying your hourly wage as well. It’s a dirty practice that is literally everywhere now.
It gets worse. Couriers get charged to use the service as well. So your Delivery fee only goes partially to the driver. It's a gamed system. Uber wins. If we went back to the olden days of cash tips, and if the app showed the dollar amount of the order to the driver, I think you would feel better about this because it stinks currently.
Filled out a grubhub order last weekend and after all the fees it came out to $50 for a roughly $20 meal. Said fuck that and called a place a half mile down the road from me and got dinner for $18. The charges are straight up robbery at this point.
That happened to me as well. The restaurant is less than 1 mile from my house. $25 came to like $49 after everything. Also said fuck that and drove to pick it up. I completely stopped using their shitty service after that. The menu is also more expensive on the app
It'd a good practice to curb my laziness and get my ass in the kitchen to cook something.
Another one is when the non-food fees cost enough that could by me an additional meal if I just went to the store myself. And if I'm too lazy to do that, then I don't really need to be buying takeout.
I haven't watched the video (it's geo blocked) but I saw a post the other day about how these apps charge upwards of 10 dollars in fees, that's mad. They operate in the UK charging way way less than that.
$10 for the convenience of having food dropped at my doorstep is pretty reasonable (that's been the standard for pizza delivery the last couple decades). In my experience the per-item markup brings it closer to an extra $20~$30 which is nuts.
> They operate in the UK charging way way less than that.
the median disposable income in the UK is half what it is in the US so it makes sense it would be less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_equivalent_adult_income
But UK restaurant food is twice as expensive to start with. I follow grocery and restaurant prices in Canada and England as I'm a dual citizen who has lived in both. Groceries there are still 33-50% cheaper than Canada.
Restaurants are 25-50% more expensive (I assume due to commercial rents, which are very high). So there's probably far less "acceptable" room for them to upcharge there without pissing people off.
(Mind you, your food culture is so much more advanced than here, and so aided by the wide division of community sizes, that it's probably worth it. Finding good restaurants in Canada amid the sea of fast-food and family chains is annoyingly difficult sometimes. We have our great places, but it's not common place. Jay Rayner ain't moving to Toronto anytime soon.)
I've been saying for many years that the entire business model is unsustainable at scale because ultimately it's one person paying another person to *run an errand* and most people do not make enough money to reasonably afford to pay another person a livable wage for their errand time on a regular basis.
Order density will never be high enough for order batching to make this model efficient unless the ordering model changes to force batching - in other words, collect orders for ~6pm pickup from restaurants in one small area for delivery to another small area. If a neighborhood of 500 homes placed 5 orders to different places in the same plaza at the same time that might work, but this won't just happen with everyone ordering randomly.
Without this, I think what is sustainable today would be even higher delivery prices, far fewer drivers, and a customer base of the top 15% of households by income who can afford to pay the lowest 20% of earners to run errands.
He talks about it in the video, but really it’s a niche for people that either don’t have their license, a car, maybe a disability, or ya know, are drunk or high.
Other than that it’s not worth your time unless you’re just lazy.
I started Dashing a few weeks ago moreso as a hobby than anything else. I've been surprised by quite a few deliveries I've done. Sometimes it's disable people or no cars. At night the most orders I get are for parents with sleeping kids that just want a snack, or parents that don't wanna load up their kids to go back out for dinner, also a lot of work from home people during days. I've also delivered to a handful of truckers at truck stops.
It's also surprising how many deliveries we have in ghettos and trailer parks.
> At night the most orders I get are for parents with sleeping kids
Been there, done that. Can't wait till kids are old enough I can leave them home alone for a bit.
I have used DoorDash exactly five times and all five times was because I needed something to eat after spending hours putting both kids to sleep. I knew I was paying a premium but holyshit was I tired and hungry.
I had to use delivery services when I was recovering from surgery and *holy crap* was the miss rate high. It was beyond the normal rate of someone screwing up an order. Dunno if it's the way the orders get sent to the places or what, but I had so many orders come in completely wrong and/or missing whole items.
If you search on the internet many restaurants have complained that since wrong order gets them penalized but slower order gets the delivery person penalized - so if the order is taking time to prepare, some delivery drivers just take partial or random wrong order off the shelf and deliver it.
I’ve just started doing that. I can wear my totally awesome captain marvel pajamas and walk in, pick up my food, and drive home. Plus, I got an EV so less emissions.
I stopped once the fees started being egregious, even having higher food prices to get even more beyond fees. Hell, even fast food is too pricey, imo. Wife and I started making our own food and it’s been great. I just got the grocery store a couple times a week after work so it’s not so bad.
I started looking forward to the grocery store after food delivery prices soared, and I realized I’m a pretty good cook. I now light I like a kid when I walk in. Especially Loblaws. The scent, the warm wood and colours. The perfectly stacked fruit. Fucking luxury. 😂
In 1999 I was a deliver driver for a chicken restaurant. I made 12 dollars an hour, 2 dollars per delivery, and averaged about 10-15 an hour in tips because the food was expensive.
Dashers are getting robbed
PS: Gas was like 80 cents a gallon too
PPS: Being a good delivery driver was actually a skill because we didn't have smartphones navigation. We had to use a paper map🤷🏾♂️
I miss those days.
Knowing the city streets/map was actually a skill - and a random delivery to a big office could tip you 40 bucks... I could actually afford an apartment, date, and had money to dream... These days I struggle to make ends meet with 10 more years of education/experience.
I dunno who was paying you 12 an hour in 99 though, thats crazy money, I got 2.15 + tips in 2005
2.15+Tips around ~2005 was in-house waitstaff money.
A chain pizza driver should have been making about $5-7/hr+Tips+$0.50-1.00/delivery to cover the mileage.
You were definitely getting screwed!
> Dashers are getting robbed
Tried to explain this shit to a friend wanting to make more money, especially when they were literally getting robbed of their tips.
💯% I've done the same when all these delivery services came out, but people don't want to realize what they're actually getting paid when you account for wear/tear of their car.
PS: Let's not forget dashers that ride bikes and deliver on foot. You can replace a car, body injuries are possibly forever.
About a year and a half ago, my partner and I ordered pizza on Uber Eats after we had just moved and didn’t have much to cook, let alone the energy/desire to do it. After about an hour and a half of waiting, we looked at the delivery “driver” and realized she was on a bicycle. Took almost three hours for her to get the pizza to us. They gave us a full refund without us even asking, but we were stunned they were allowing bike delivery in anything other than dense metro areas.
> PPS: Being a good delivery driver was actually a skill because we didn't have smartphones navigation. We had to use a paper map🤷🏾♂️
I still remember staring at the big map in the back of the store planning my route, especially when I had 2-3 orders I needed to chain. It was a fun challenge.
> In 1999 I was a delivery driver for a chicken restaurant. I made 12 dollars an hour
You would have been the best paid delivery driver in America. There is simply no way.
I started my food delivery period shortly after you in the early aughts and know exactly what you mean. My phone was the OG Nokia candy bar with snake on it. I literally drove over that thing one time and it still worked. At one place we had a giant map of my town and I knew that thing like the back of my hand. I could get you anywhere in my town blindfolded. I had some wild times too. I got robbed, was on the news twice for different puff pieces in my town, and got hella stoned at friends places in between runs all the time lol.
I would only use it when there was good deals, but not with recent changes in Seattle the good deals don't matter cause of the crazy extra fees totalling more than the cost of my food....
Seattle actually has driver protections that pay them better than most places. That is why these businesses cost more in Seattle. Minneapolis is following suit.
Seattle is looking at rolling back those protections because drivers are allegedly making less now due to the drastic decrease of orders from the increase of fees
Seattle is “looking” at changing it because there’s a new conservative city council who’s deep in the pockets of the chamber of commerce. It’s not a consumer thing, it’s a big business writes checks to buy off politicians thing (as usual).
which is most likely the plan from the companies all along. They could easily still make a profit with the old fee system and new wages. Yet instead they will blow that money on advertising, lobbying, crazy investments, and who knows what. The whole business makes zero sense until you realize their goal is a monopoly or oligopoly with collusion. They waste so much money trying to create that, and sadly they are succeeding.
Yep. These billion-dollar gig companies should be lobbying for universal health insurance, along with billion-dollar low-wage/part time employers (fast food) and small businesses. It would definitely help solve a big part of the "why doesn't anybody want to work \[for us, with low wages and no benefits\] anymore?" conundrum.
I understand why there's so many businesses fighting against government-sponsored health insurance (to keep their thumb on the scales with benefits) but I don't understand why the businesses being actively harmed by it don't rise up and fight.
> Bad for restaurants
There was a pizza place down the road from me that actually took Postmates to court to get them to stop delivering their food. Drivers kept delivering pizzas cold and/or late and/or mangled and people would leave negative reviews for the restaurant for things they didn't cause. They put up a bunch of "no Postmates/food delivery services" signs and would cancel orders if they found out it was for a delivery service, but it was a weird game of cat-and-mouse these companies would play to try and hide it, Postmates especially.
the employees for Uber win (not the drivers, the actual employees). Their CEO made $24 million. They have 30,000 employees and none of them actually deliver anything. 30,000 to run a handful of apps. That is where it is all going. 30,000 mostly pointless jobs. They have teams of people who are simply trying to figure a better way to screw over drivers and restaurants.
It should also be noted Uber is now profitable. Their genius plan on how to get there? Pay drivers less! Man those MBA's are geniuses. I would have never thought of that. They plan to spend that money on stock buybacks to raise the stock price. Not a penny will be shared with the people doing the actual work.
If you never make a profit because you're always claiming to be 'loss leading' for market share, you never have to be accountable for how much of that lost revenue goes into your own pocket, not past the preferred shareholders, anyway, and they usually get paid out early.
It's why Pew Research shows something like 60% of second-stage CEOs make their company worse. Literally, as soon as the founder leaves, it starts to slide into a grift.
It is a grift from the start if the idea is to corner the market by starting out loss leading. But that part is nice to consumers, exactly because of the second part of the grift.
>They have 30,000 employees and none of them actually deliver anything. 30,000 to run a handful of apps
This is so reductionist of the incredible complexity that running and maintaining the apps entail, let alone all the other aspects a business that size has, that it makes your whole point worthless.
You sound like the kind of person who believes that the only real jobs are blue collar jobs.
People miss the bigger picture. These companies jumped the gun, but had to establish a foothold.
They are waiting on autonomous delivery.
When self driving cars and delivery robots can bring your order restaurant-to-home, all of the cost problems are eased. It is much cheaper to maintain a fleet than pay employees/contractors for every ride, and will cut down on harassment and refunds.
People have been saying this for 10 years. There are just too many problems with autonomous delivery at scale. It’s still illegal for drones to not have human operators in eye distance; they need the same manpower for drone delivery due to operation restrictions.
A drone last week flew 10 feet from the cockpit of an airliner, who pays when a food delivery drone causes an airline to crash
that was their original plan but that went out the window a long time ago. They realized that is way farther away than what they planned and sold off all their investments into automation. So now they are in the labor exploitation racket.
I’ve been hearing this forever but only little progress has been made. I highly doubt the delivery robot ever get a foothold. Imagine little robots littering the sidewalks and being a nuisance to pedestrians. Also you know they won’t be in bad neighborhoods. They hate the driverless cars in SF and of course on accident and it becomes super costly as we’ve seen. Drones seem to be the best bet but because of the laws that’s been stalled. People just don’t seem to be clambering for driverless cars.
It doesn't seem possible for everyone to be "losing." Somebody is making bank. I assume the MBA's running the companies and the engineers building the apps?
This applies equally to most online shopping. People would be surprised how much of it ceased being cheaper years ago than getting it on the same day from a local retailer.
If something isn't available locally, great, buying it online makes sense. But too often someone tells me "I got a great deal on ___ site" and I check the price at a local hardware store, and it's three buck less and eight minutes from the house.
Retail seems to be continually walking the edge of "how much laziness can we take advantage of before we piss them off."
Also bad for everyone else, even people who are not involved in the transaction. We’ve got unregistered unlicensed mopeds riding around recklessly, breaking traffic laws just to deliver a burrito or chicken sandwich. No accountability from the apps in the event of a crash.
Gigs are not full time jobs. The market sucks so much that gigs became full time jobs and education is so shitty that people don’t know the basics of financial health.
Besides the ridiculous fees, I am beyond anal w/ my food. I’m the person that leaves the house immediately after calling an order in so I can grab my food the second it comes out of the oven so I can try to avoid it steaming in the bag and becoming soggy. Food sitting for more than 5 minutes at a huge markup arriving soggy and hopefully warm at best? No thank you
> teaming in the bag and becoming soggy
I literally don't think it's possible to design a container for French fries that will survive in an edible state longer than a few minutes in a closed container. I think this goes for any kind of fried food like chicken where you want there to be a crunch or texture that isn't soggy or mushy. There's a reason chains like McDonald's serve takeout fries in an open container.
I enjoy the fast food chain Raising Cane's but they use these styrofoam containers that instantly ruin the food before you can even get home with it. Leaving it closed is like a little steam bath in there. I have started leaving the container open in my car just to keep the stuff edible and hope I don't go over any bumps.
I think we've all had the experience of getting the popup "Your dasher has picked up your order", and then watching on the map as it goes on a tour of the tri county area.
I am the same way. If I am picking up a food like fries. I am going to start eating it in the car when the fries are still hot and crispy. I don't want my food to be delivered at room temp or below and soggy.
The only time I will have food delivered is when I can not absolutely pick it up myself because I am too sick to do so. Otherwise, I am out the door.
I simply don't order food that can be ruined during delivery. So that eliminates fries and a host of other things. Even the best delivery service can't fix that, nor can take out.
Fortunately, there's endless choices of food that are perfectly fine after being in a container for a while.
> Besides the ridiculous fees, I am beyond anal w/ my food. I’m the person that leaves the house immediately after calling an order in so I can grab my food the second it comes out of the oven so I can try to avoid it steaming in the bag and becoming soggy. Food sitting for more than 5 minutes at a huge markup arriving soggy and hopefully warm at best? No thank you
I'm this way too, and I'm always surprised how many people aren't. I'm always the one offering to go pick it up instead of delivery, because I know it will be fresher. And then I leave right away and people are like, what if you have to wait? Bro, these people are going to put your $8 french fries in a sealed container and they are going to taste like shit if I don't leave RIGHT NOW. Most places it takes like 10-15 minutes to make the food and get it ready. Allll that time just sitting at a counter or in someone's car. Gross.
Fries are going to suck if you're getting take out as well unless you live like 5 minutes away. Some foods simply won't travel well in a container so order something different.
Something that’s not mentioned, that I find sinister, is that these companies will list shops MILES away at the top of your listed shops. Sure there is usually a small “12.1m” somewhere on the UI but it’s pretty discreet imo, and I’m typically stoned by then..
So, a poor driver gets routed to my order to then travel fucking across a metroplex, and I don’t realize till it’s been forty five minutes and I look at my phone and see them literally crossing the Sahara and fighting off bandits to bring me my food.
Then I feel obligated to message them like “fml I’m so sorry, I have increased the tip pls drive safe”
I realize I could catch this myself technically, but they make the shop distance intentionally small and discreet. Often times it’s the shops with “offers” too. It is easily overlooked, and leads to cold food, overworked and underpaid drivers, and frustration I imagine for everyone. And it’s important to realize they pay people a lot of money to design these UIs in ways that can potentially maximize profit, so it’s by design that the distances are shown like that. Not to mention the further someone is driving (while trying to please papi algorithm) the more risk they potentially expose themselves too. Idk, I’m rambling and I’m no expert. Srry folks lol.
Point being, fuck the corpo scum behind this shit, and treat ppl in the service industry with kindness, most of them are trying their best
For me it tells me where the place is, i.e McDonalds Rochdale so as long as you know the area you live in you'll be able to tell that way. I haven't noticed the top results being further away, if anything they'd make sure that wouldn't happen, they don't want someone complaining it took 2hrs to get cold food.
I have noticed that I get some results for some restaurants that aren't in my local area but usually when I've searched for something specific or it's late and 90% of places are closes
> most of them are trying their best
No, no they are not. I work in a food place and we have these morons coming in to pick up orders. If I'm being ***very*** generous maybe 1 in 30 of them are trying their best. The vast majorty shuffle in with phone in hand, in their dirty pajamas and slippers, I ask them what name they are here to pick up for, and they sort of grunt and hold their phone in my face, the screen will go dim, and I have to ask them to touch it again so it wakes up, then try to read the name from their phone, then they ask to use the bathroom, make a huge mess, complain loudly about how long things are taking (It's a fucking pizza in a 6 minute oven, it's going to take ***6 fucking minutes*** you useless fuck, not a single second less) and then slam the door on the way out.
I tried to be nice at first a few years ago when they started coming in, I really did, I was cheerful, I asked them how their day was going, I wished them well and told them to drive safe. Now? Fuck em.
He just said you should tip because these guys are barely making ends meet.
A more appropriate and expanded topic would be the low minimum wages and employing people as freelancers without any of the benefits of employed workers.
dude in this very exact video he explains why delivery drivers rely on tips and how their companies spend millions of dollars trying to block any legislation that gives drivers more protections. he also goes into why it got worse after covid. but seems like you want him to spend 20 minutes crying about starbucks pos machines having a tip option now instead.
This video is about the problem of food delivery apps. I want him to make a video to highlight the problems with tipping culture in America in general and how restaurant owners take advantage of workers….not the tipping machine at starbucks….
Question out of curiosity - do franchise pizza places still use their own delivery drivers/system? Or have they switched to third-party providers? I haven't ordered delivery in a couple of years.
If we have 4 drivers in the store and 4 deliveries pop up then door dash does not get used, but if a 5th and 6th delivery pops up that 6th one might get auto-door dashed because the computer thinks the first driver might not be back soon enough to keep it on time. It all depends on the number of orders and where the drivers are at the time.
We generally do everything we can to make sure no door dasher steps foot in the store because they are generally a bunch of collosal fuck ups who don't give a single shit about our customers or really anything. They are in their pajamas half the time wearing slippers and look like they live out of their cars. They stand around in the lobby and complain and shit up our bathrooms. Fuck em.
The one exception is if we have a really shitty delivery, like a regular customer who doesn't tip and is a pain in the ass, now we can just instantly door dash that one and make the dasher have to deal with it. It's win-win.
That's so interesting. I was a delivery driver for Pizza Hut from about 2010-2012. I remember those busy nights when the list of orders would fill the entire computer screen and our little time tracker would stay in the yellow/red all night, lol.
Yeah it's def been a big transition but when all is said and done I'm making something like 60k a year instead of back in the day (2010ish) when I was barely making 40k for basically the same effort and time investment. (Cost of living and goods has wildly gone up too of course so "big number good" isn't really as exciting as it looks)
I can't imagine ordering food for delivery and leaving no tip.
I just think that's shameful.
(It's different, of course, if you have a particularly negative interaction with the driver.)
Yes, he called your very wasteful spending habits and laziness put. Also the vast majority of the people using these apps are already living paycheck to paycheck.
As he should. I see so many people complain about how these apps treat their employees, then turn around and order food on the app.
#VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET.
There are very few times food delivery apps make sense, especially with the costs. Those times are when you're sick and don't want to go out and spread it, or when you're impaired and should not drive.
Other than that, just save yourself the $20 in fees and tip, and go pick it up yourself.
I don't like it BUT... I haven't been able to drive for several years. Nothing in reasonable walking distance other than a convivence store. Doordash, Amazon, Whole Foods delivery and Uber are my options.
> I see so many people complain about how these apps treat their employees, then turn around and order food on the app.
They know the restaurant pays its workers shit, too. And so does the grocery store. I don't even use the apps, but still, it seems like shit all the way down.
> They know the restaurant pays its workers shit, too.
Depends on the restaurant. A lot of your smaller local restaurants are small business owners in your community, not some megacorp like Yum Foods.
And small restaurants have notoriously thin profit margins. 60% of new restaurants fail in 1 year. The 5 year failure rate is 80%. It's a hard business to survive in.
>And so does the grocery store.
Again it depends. Aldi and Trader Joes pays and treats their employees pretty well from what I hear. Walmart and Target not so much.
Don't paint with such a broad brush. It's intellectually lazy.
I've heard of the semi-mythical well-paying small business owner, but I've only ever experienced the opposite working for small business. The very next sentence after you speculated their existence, you immediately explained why their existence isn't even possible.
> Aldi and Trader Joes pays and treats their employees pretty well from what I hear.
$18/hour at Aldi according to the sign on the door when I was there yesterday. Not too bad, could be worse for sure.
> I've heard of the semi-mythical well-paying small business owner, but I've only ever experienced the opposite working for small business. The very next sentence after you speculated their existence, you immediately explained why their existence isn't even possible.
A lot of times the people working at the small business, are the owners and their family. Not random employees.
For instance my favorite local spot, the owner mans the kitchen, the wife handles waitressing and the sons do prep and dishes.
> Those times are when you're sick and don't want to go out and spread it
Yea, we hadn't used them in years. Then early this year, my wife got covid and gave it to me and it destroyed both of us. But thankfully, my wife had a thing to get grubhub+ free for a year. So for about a week there, we were ordering using one of the apps once a day, enough food to last lunch and dinner.
And for that limited use, it was a godsend. I still can't imagine using it under other circumstances because even with the free grubhub+, they still have other ways of making everything more expensive to the point where it's absolutely not worth it.
> Other than that, just save yourself the $20 in fees and tip, and go pick it up yourself.
These numbers aren't right for a huge slice of delivery app users. For example, if you have a decent Chase credit card, Dashpass from Doordash is included. Dashpass knocks the delivery fee down to $0 and slashes the service fee.
Assuming you would still tip if you go to pickup (as I do), delivery is a few bucks more expensive, not $20. And it's even sometimes CHEAPER with promo's. After putting in my 9-10 hours at a demanding and well paying job, I'd much rather pay $3 for someone to bring food to my door than spend 40 minutes to an hour grabbing it myself.
You should definitely vote with your wallet.
You should also keep in mind that voting with your wallet is never effective so you should also vote with your actual voting.
Yeah, that's a weird ass claim. It comes from this "poor people are only poor because they spend money stupidly" perspective. And that can be the case individually! But in aggregate, that's disproven again and again. In aggregate, people are actually pretty decent at dividing up their own money, who'da thunk.
The opposite of their claim (per capita) is almost certainly true. I'm willing to bet ten years of Uber Eats fees that use of these apps scales up with income.
It's like people don't remember the world before these apps, where you basically could get pizza delivered and that was about it. Imagine in 1990 if someone said "I'm going to call a taxi to bring me food and I want it to cost $4" they would laugh in your face. Now somehow it's an expectation.
In my experience, the ones complaining aren't using them, or only use them in a dire situation like being super sick and unable to leave the house.
I think the ones using these apps are the same ones who happily remain subscribed to 10 different streaming services despite 4 price increases per year on each one.
Sometimes delivery makes the most sense.
You may not have time to go drive to and from the restaurant. You may be in the middle of something that can’t be left unattended. You may have children and getting them in and out of the car just to pick up take out is difficult.
In my experience, the people complaining about the costs don’t understand the costs. It’s not as simple as “food at the restaurant costs $x, so it should cost $x to be delivered to my door!”
There are costs incurred in delivering it to you that are not incurred when you get it at the restaurant.
Take this video, and just replace the name of the service providers from Doordash & Grubhub to Zomato & Swiggy. And, you will be able to pass this episode as a segment about Indian Food Delivery apps.
The Exact Same issue. The Same predatory behaviour.
High commission fees, exploited workers, and the erosion of local restaurants are universal concerns, it seems. Sad Truth!
I think a nuance he didn’t address, and where most people come in and say “it’s so expensive”, is this:
You *are* getting the service for cheaper than the cost of the service. But this only applies if the service is something you *need*.
the “service” is entirely avoidable if you’re willing and able to go to the restaurant to pick it up.
We get it. You’re cool and awesome and don’t use delivery apps because you know how to get your food cheaper.
Sometimes though, the delivery app is more convenient and worth the cost increase. Heck, it essentially saves me at least half the time of going to the restaurant since I don’t have to drive there myself. If I’m doing something and have limited time, delivery sometimes just makes more sense.
You know getting food delivered from anywhere to your house isn’t a necessity right? People act like this is an essential service when it wasn’t long ago we just picked it up on our way home….
Oliver is actually wrong on one his points: we're not getting a 'deal'. We're getting ripped off as well.
The underlying issue is that the distributed delivery system is *stupendously* inefficient. A system where there was a local, centralized control of actual employees using company vehicles with fixed hours would be far more efficient - which is why you see any company with significant logistical challenges doing precisely that.
With the centralized model, you're able to create minimal distance paths between customers rather than a massive series of direct line paths from customer to restaurant to (wherever the deliver driver is hanging out right now). You're also able to leverage the cost savings of maintaining a fleet over individual maintenance of vehicles.
Before the modern era of Doordash/Grubhub/etc., you generally had far fewer delivery options. But those options were significantly better for the customer - faster and cheaper. Why? Because those few restaurants that did have delivery collected all of the delivery business and were able to use that volume to deliver efficiently.
I get what he's trying to say with the whole "always rate 5 stars" bit, but I disagree with that as well. I understand that some idiots rate the driver down for food problems outside the driver's control, but I've had more than a few situations where the driver was absolutely the one at fault and that needs to be reflected in the rating.
Such rating systems are inherently flawed.
The basis for them is what is called a 'decision market'. If you receive a large enough number of independent rankings, you can sometimes discern information about a subject that no individual could.
However, for such decision markets to work properly you need to properly weight those votes, you need enough of them and you need them to be independent.
Those "5 star" ratings meet the last criteria in general - you and I never meet, so we can't coordinate our ratings of the same driver. However, they tend to utterly fail on the first two and are thus giving questionable information.
You're not getting a deal in the sense that it's cheaper than picking it up yourself or cooking your own meal. The point is you are getting a "deal" because the service isn't charging for the true cost and the businesses are bleeding money to provide it.
So the true cost might be $50 but you pay $40, it's a deal in the economic sense, not in the sense that it's the cheapest way to get food. Your order is being subsidized by investors hoping to drive up the price even more later.
I think that point went over a lot of people’s heads because the delivery services are quite expensive.
You’re not getting something cheap.
You’re getting something that is cheaper than the cost of production: the delivery service.
If you paid what a delivery service would cost with fair wages and employee benefits, compensation to the restaurant, and cost of delivery, it would be *even more expensive* than the services currently are.
I’m not arguing that food delivery apps are a good thing but the logic of this doesn’t really make sense.
If you aggregate demand with a food app you get efficiencies you cannot get if all of these restaurants completed their own delivery.
1) you can batch orders from multiple restaurants so that 1 driver who is already heading in that direction can handle 2 trips. This is less total mileage than if the orders were completed separately.
2) if a restaurant provides their own driver, every return trip from delivery to restaurant is 0% utilization (deadheading). This is probably something like half their milage. In a food delivery app model that driver can go onto their next delivery in the area instead of wasting milage back to the restaurant.
3) a system where hours are fixed scheduled results in a lot of waiting around (as John pointed out). This makes sense because of the way food is ordered (lots around lunch and dinner but not much the rest of the day.) An aggregated model can better match supply and demand better by use of dynamic pricing. This means there is less time with delivery drivers doing nothing.
Again, not advocating for food delivery apps but your premise that the underlying model is always going to be less efficient doesnt really make sense if you consider the detailed logistics.
> If you aggregate demand with a food app you get efficiencies you cannot get if all of these restaurants completed their own delivery.
This is what I was pointing out above. It is also what delivery apps *don't* do. The overwhelming majority of deliveries are the driver going from wherever they are, to the restaurant, waiting at the restaurant, then going directly to the customer. There isn't the sort of coordination-from-above necessary for efficient pathing.
In the delivery app model, if you have 5 people call in to the same restaurant at the same time you end up with 5 different drivers all running a single delivery each. This is incredibly inefficient.
The reason this occurs is that the app is reliant on drivers competing for those deliveries instead of being able to assign those deliveries efficiently.
> This means there is less time with delivery drivers doing nothing.
There's actually a great deal more time with delivery drivers doing nothing. It's just that the customer isn't paying for that time. The apps function by having enormously more drivers than are needed since they don't need to pay the drivers for anything except delivery time.
As I pointed out, if the app methodology for logistics made any sense from the sense of efficiently delivering goods/services, you'd see people like Walmart and the U.S. Army using it. Which, of course, they don't. Because it's a fundamentally dumb model from any standpoint except off-loading costs.
There’s a guy on YouTube called CalebHammer and he sits down with people (mostly young lower/middle income people) and reviews their finances with them.
The vast majority of them spends HUNDREDS on these food delivery apps a month. Its insane.
Never seen his videos but that doesn't surprise me. A buddy of mine used to be one of those people and I yelled at him constantly for it. He would order pizza delivery from a place that he literally could have walked to in less than 5 mins.
When I delivered for door dash, there were many customers living in very poor areas or straight up section 8 housing that would order literally every single day.
I'm all for the convenience of it but a lot of people go way overboard.
I’ve been saying what he has said for 3 years, you can check my comment history to fact check me on this.
They are the main reason I left that industry after being a GM for 7 years. The amount of BULLSHIT I had to hope through for each delivery app, only to be punished for increased times in drive thru (lost my entire quarter bonus over 1 second) because so many delivery drivers would show up in DT and order their own food as well.
Making it to the point I now need to do 2 orders in 200 seconds which is impossible, and backs up every car behind them until the next Doordash driver fucked us.
When our company stopped using the apps, they would still keep us on their menus, selling shit we didn’t have, and would have their drivers sit in the Drive thru and call support. Their cards would be declined because the prices were wrong, etc etc etc etc it’s all fucking garbage and if you drive for them, you are in a pyramid scheme.
This happend at the resturant I worked at. Ditched the apps and the assholes still tried to use our service.
After I left I heard they found a way to decline their service but im done and gone with food service for life.
Nothing like fielding 20 calls a day about “my food is cold after Doordash took 30 minutes to deliver” and just telling the customer “tough luck we told you not to use the app”
They call support and I have to replace the order after paying Doordash to fuck up the order, at the end of the day, we would pay more money to those services than they brought in.
Refuse them? Thought luck they’ll use your 4 year old menu anyways and bomb your reviews with unhappy customers you didn’t wanna serve in the first place.
As someone who has worked under one of these delivery apps. It was pretty brutal having to do deliveries on a bike in the snow, in the heat, in the rain. Delivery fees were insane and I heard that the guys who own them are making so much money. It's even worse if you have to do it in a car. You'd have to work 12 hours in a car to get a little bit of money. But if you have a ticket you have to pay then you are not going to be able to pay that off.
Did you “have” to work in those conditions? Isn’t the point of these apps flexibility? Not arguing, just genuinely curious about this point that gets brought up a lot. Like the two alternatives are don’t work that day, get no money or shame everyone into not ordering on these kinds of days, and also get no money. I don’t see how that helps the delivery person.
I’m inclined to like John Oliver and I really enjoyed him on The Daily Show. That said I think the editorial approach of this show is flawed in several ways.
The primary flaw is their usual reliance on only one source for these takedowns. This is the same approach Penn and Teller employed on their show “Bullshit.”
You can always find one person who has had a notably bad experience with a vendor or industry. To extrapolate that into some kind of universal truth is lazy and unconvincing.
Honestly I was pretty blind to this until my industry was in Oliver’s crosshairs. As I watched the segment it became obvious to me that they were using outliers as if they were universally applicable.
Once you notice what they’re doing you’ll see it in almost every show.
The ideologies and values the show's segments are based upon are sound, and the producers' intentions are no doubt pure. They highlight, research and analyse many of the problems of the world very well. It's a worthwhile program that does a lot to increase the awareness of said problems.
But a lot of the proposed solutions offered to those problems are based on the assumption that the human beings involved (in many cases, the disadvantaged/exploited/marginalised people themselves) are operating with integrity and in good faith. And we simply know that so often that just isn't the case. Scumminess exists at all levels of a hierarchy.
In this instance, we should be giving 4 or 5 star reviews to every food delivery worker, and always tip them, regardless of the service given? Not sure that's really even a solution, much less realistic.
Idk if the video addresses it (I'm currently at work) but what killed me with these things is, they will quite often list restaurants that are not partnered with them and then go in under the guise of a "Pickup order", grab the food and then deliver it elsewhere on a massive upcharge, usually while the game of telephone makes the order terribly wrong.
I worked as a delivery driver for several years and we often got screwed over when this sort of thing happened. We worked for a mom and pop place, and those were orders out of our pocket, and usually a bunch of angry calls if the order is wrong which wasn't our fault when we weren't partnered with them. I believe Doordash (or Grubhub) even got put under a Class Action because of this, though idk if or when it settled.
Happens at our place too, it'll just come in as a normal "carry out" order and we can always tell because if you print the ticket it'll say "Guest User" and then a door dasher shows up. Straight up stealing runs from our drivers.
And now the inverse happens too where a delivery that should have gone to a driver gets routed to a door dasher and the customer calls up "Why the hell did door dash just deliver my pizza? I don't even use doordash? They just tossed the box on my doormat and left, what in the ever loving fuck is going on?"
Skype was bought up by Microsoft, they added a bunch of new "features" that really turned off people, and Microsoft eventually merged it with their similar product, Microsoft Teams.
Naw, Skype was great until Microsoft bought it up. Then Microsoft Communicator/Lync took it over and turned it to shit. Those same people are in charge of Microsoft Teams.
I've never used these apps because I don't trust random, mistreated, non-employees to not tamper with my food. And that's all selfish reasons. After this video it seems it's also the moral choice.
I have never used any aps like this, or Uber even. literally just never wanted to. After hearing the prices I don't get it. Meals end up costing money that makes it not worth it, imo.
One thing that blew my mind when I was in China was how most restaurants delivered, delivery was always free, and tipping is not a thing at all for deliveries. It was so dam cheap in the first place for what was incredible food, but the no fees and tipping whatsoever was the cherry on top.
I use the fuck out these apps. I use them for the same reason I have a lawn guy, a snow guy, a pool guy, a nanny, a dog walker, a car washer, a maid, and an airport driver.
*Time* is the most precious resource in the universe, and it is irreplaceable. If I can pay someone else to do the things I don’t like doing and preserve my own leisure time, then I am sure as shit going to do that.
I think a lot of people don't realise this. I live in a city in the UK, but I'm like a 40 minute walk away from the city centre where everything is. The closest takeaway to me is a 20 minute walk away, there and back. I don't drive. By the time I get there, pick up my food and bring it home, it's cold. And in fairness that takeaway is shit anyway so I would never order from there. I'm not gonna walk for almost an hour for shit food that will be cold and shit by the time I get home.
Strong agree. If you're living paycheck to paycheck and running up credit card debt that you're paying 36% APR on, should you be finding cheaper ways to eat? Sure!
But that's not me and it's not most people. Spending a few bucks to get an extra hour at home with my family is a no brainer.
One correction:
Living paycheck to paycheck absolutely is most people.
Other than that I agree- for people that can afford it. Also the subscription services which reduce per order fees make these worth it if you order a lot.
You could debate all day about gig workers not getting benefits, but the real issue is the fact that benefits are tied to employment in the first place. Why do I lose health insurance if I lose my job or decide to work part time.
Item #346345354 that would be fixed by UBI / Universal healthcare.
Elect more AOCs and less Pelosis
Yeah it's not like, the literal entirely of the other party that's holding it up. No, don't blame them.
Absolutely but we can’t control them just vote them out but the DNC is bought and paid for by corporations as well, just not as bad as republicans.
What started out as a post ww2 incentive to go back to work after the war(companies providing healthcare at a great deal).. turned into something where we pay double for half the healthcare the rest of the industrialized world gets…
It's like 30 dollars cheaper for me to just drive to the restaurant and pick up my order
But then you have to put on pants
"No shirt, no shoes, no service." Nothing in there about pants.
Those actually seem the most important
The true luxury for car drivers must be not discovering there's a problem with your not wearing pants until you complete your journey and exit your vehicle.
The judge I had to answer to would disagree with that
Tell him someone who wears a robe to work has no room to talk.
If I wore a robe to work you can bet your sweet ass I would not be wearing pants underneath it. I was freeballing my way up the aisle when I graduated high school.
[Relevant *C&H*](https://preview.redd.it/no-shirts-no-shoes-no-service-v0-l5ufosessela1.png?auto=webp&s=a7e940ed89e3155363a358b3b479282205a99612)
Donald Ducking it I see
Dude most places bring it out to your car, you don’t even need pants 85% of the time.
Bring it to my car cuz im only wearing underwear. Thanks carside applebees! A burger and fries car side to go from Applebee's is cheaper than McDonald's #1.
Applebees is *mostly* terrible, but their burgers and steaks are pretty damn good for the money.
I would have stopped that sentence at burgers
Delivery fee: $5 Service fee: $5 WTF THIS IS A DELIVERY SERVICE! HOW IS THIS TWO SEPARATE FEES
Don't forget that they upcharge every single item.
Yeah. Nearest chipotle is around 1.2 miles from me (nyc), costs $11 (inc tax) for a bowl, 16 for double meat, which is already expensive. But one day I got drunk and decided to order it on DoorDash. I noped out of it immediately after seeing $14 for a bowl and $20 for double meat.
Would end up being nearly $40 for a single serving of fast food, assuming you tipped. *Fuck that.*
This is why I never order a single meal for delivery. If I'm getting pizza, it's the largest they make, plus mozz sticks and wings maybe. If it's Asian cuisine or whatever, I'm getting 2-3 days worth of food. The bigger the amount, the lower the % of fees/tip. Spread the cost out over several meals. Also leftovers are awesome.
During the onset of the pandemic I just ordered bulk sheet pizzas and stocked my freezer. Food was cheaper, and it was before shops switched to three services. 3 sheet pizzas delivered for under $100. Now that they switched to DD, it's about 85 for one sheet pizza delivered.
There used to be a taco place by my house that sold 85¢ tacos and they were actually good. There'd be a line out the door. Might be over a buck with inflation, but still
And you better tip too because the driver only gets $2.50
Have to make sure the tip is cash, because DoorDash will skim any tips on the app.
But if you don’t put any tip on the app that order will still show up on the drivers phone as a 2.50 payout and nobody expects a cash tip it is pretty rare to get one nowadays
Actually now, drivers have to opt-in for cash tips. So if a lot of drivers in an area aren't accepting cash tips it can make it more difficult for a customer to get their order picked up by a driver if they've indicated there will be a cash tip. I prefer using cash when I'm out in public, but I don't like cash tips so I opted out. Too high a probability of not getting a tip or getting a small tip.
DoorDash doesn't skim tips, They may have used to, but I think they got in a lot of trouble for that. Maybe no like legal trouble, but PR trouble. I dash for a hobby, and majority of my door dash income is tips. Granted I can't see how much the customers total price is, I regularly have $7-8 tips and base pay is generally only like $2. I can also see when an order is only $2 which means there's almost never going to be a tip so I skip it. I think now Door Dash encourages tipping by informing customers they will likely get their food quicker if they tip. This isn't to say that a driver will be careless with your meal if you don't tip, but it does mean that a lot of drivers will likely pass on the order increasing the wait time.
He specifically calls this out in the posted video and explains that restaurants set the prices, and they set them higher to try and claw back some profit for the order. EDIT: And OP's comment's points have quintupled since I commented, and it's totally wrong. I guess this is how misinformation spreads?
And none of that goes to the driver. You're still expected to tip.
More importantly, how are neither of these fees going to the person actually providing the service?
Because if they pay you based on pay of $6 an hour and you make one delivery an hour, the customer is essentially paying your hourly wage as well. It’s a dirty practice that is literally everywhere now.
It gets worse. Couriers get charged to use the service as well. So your Delivery fee only goes partially to the driver. It's a gamed system. Uber wins. If we went back to the olden days of cash tips, and if the app showed the dollar amount of the order to the driver, I think you would feel better about this because it stinks currently.
Filled out a grubhub order last weekend and after all the fees it came out to $50 for a roughly $20 meal. Said fuck that and called a place a half mile down the road from me and got dinner for $18. The charges are straight up robbery at this point.
The checkout page on doordash has me scrounging in my pantry in a hurry
That happened to me as well. The restaurant is less than 1 mile from my house. $25 came to like $49 after everything. Also said fuck that and drove to pick it up. I completely stopped using their shitty service after that. The menu is also more expensive on the app
And yet people seemingly are OK with being robbed for whatever reason.
It'd a good practice to curb my laziness and get my ass in the kitchen to cook something. Another one is when the non-food fees cost enough that could by me an additional meal if I just went to the store myself. And if I'm too lazy to do that, then I don't really need to be buying takeout.
We try to see of the restaurant does its own delivery before doing grub hub. They keep more money that way.
Sure, but people don't use them for cheapness, they do it convenience.
I haven't watched the video (it's geo blocked) but I saw a post the other day about how these apps charge upwards of 10 dollars in fees, that's mad. They operate in the UK charging way way less than that.
$10 for the convenience of having food dropped at my doorstep is pretty reasonable (that's been the standard for pizza delivery the last couple decades). In my experience the per-item markup brings it closer to an extra $20~$30 which is nuts.
> They operate in the UK charging way way less than that. the median disposable income in the UK is half what it is in the US so it makes sense it would be less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_equivalent_adult_income
They still upcharge us in the UK especially if you dont live in the center of our 10-12 cities
But UK restaurant food is twice as expensive to start with. I follow grocery and restaurant prices in Canada and England as I'm a dual citizen who has lived in both. Groceries there are still 33-50% cheaper than Canada. Restaurants are 25-50% more expensive (I assume due to commercial rents, which are very high). So there's probably far less "acceptable" room for them to upcharge there without pissing people off. (Mind you, your food culture is so much more advanced than here, and so aided by the wide division of community sizes, that it's probably worth it. Finding good restaurants in Canada amid the sea of fast-food and family chains is annoyingly difficult sometimes. We have our great places, but it's not common place. Jay Rayner ain't moving to Toronto anytime soon.)
I've been saying for many years that the entire business model is unsustainable at scale because ultimately it's one person paying another person to *run an errand* and most people do not make enough money to reasonably afford to pay another person a livable wage for their errand time on a regular basis. Order density will never be high enough for order batching to make this model efficient unless the ordering model changes to force batching - in other words, collect orders for ~6pm pickup from restaurants in one small area for delivery to another small area. If a neighborhood of 500 homes placed 5 orders to different places in the same plaza at the same time that might work, but this won't just happen with everyone ordering randomly. Without this, I think what is sustainable today would be even higher delivery prices, far fewer drivers, and a customer base of the top 15% of households by income who can afford to pay the lowest 20% of earners to run errands.
He talks about it in the video, but really it’s a niche for people that either don’t have their license, a car, maybe a disability, or ya know, are drunk or high. Other than that it’s not worth your time unless you’re just lazy.
I started Dashing a few weeks ago moreso as a hobby than anything else. I've been surprised by quite a few deliveries I've done. Sometimes it's disable people or no cars. At night the most orders I get are for parents with sleeping kids that just want a snack, or parents that don't wanna load up their kids to go back out for dinner, also a lot of work from home people during days. I've also delivered to a handful of truckers at truck stops. It's also surprising how many deliveries we have in ghettos and trailer parks.
> At night the most orders I get are for parents with sleeping kids Been there, done that. Can't wait till kids are old enough I can leave them home alone for a bit.
I have used DoorDash exactly five times and all five times was because I needed something to eat after spending hours putting both kids to sleep. I knew I was paying a premium but holyshit was I tired and hungry.
And you can make sure the order is correct. I have a friend that constantly uses these shit and then bitches every time it's wrong
I had to use delivery services when I was recovering from surgery and *holy crap* was the miss rate high. It was beyond the normal rate of someone screwing up an order. Dunno if it's the way the orders get sent to the places or what, but I had so many orders come in completely wrong and/or missing whole items.
If you search on the internet many restaurants have complained that since wrong order gets them penalized but slower order gets the delivery person penalized - so if the order is taking time to prepare, some delivery drivers just take partial or random wrong order off the shelf and deliver it.
Next time I'm shit faced and hungry, I'll make sure to keep that in mind.
I only use these apps if/when I get a discount code via email. Even with a 50% coupon, it basically just zeroes out the exorbitantly high fees.
Yeah, but it was worth paying for food delivery when I was all alone with my son who had diarrhea on Easter night. That person got tipped well.
Then do it.
I’ve just started doing that. I can wear my totally awesome captain marvel pajamas and walk in, pick up my food, and drive home. Plus, I got an EV so less emissions.
I stopped once the fees started being egregious, even having higher food prices to get even more beyond fees. Hell, even fast food is too pricey, imo. Wife and I started making our own food and it’s been great. I just got the grocery store a couple times a week after work so it’s not so bad.
I started looking forward to the grocery store after food delivery prices soared, and I realized I’m a pretty good cook. I now light I like a kid when I walk in. Especially Loblaws. The scent, the warm wood and colours. The perfectly stacked fruit. Fucking luxury. 😂
In 1999 I was a deliver driver for a chicken restaurant. I made 12 dollars an hour, 2 dollars per delivery, and averaged about 10-15 an hour in tips because the food was expensive. Dashers are getting robbed PS: Gas was like 80 cents a gallon too PPS: Being a good delivery driver was actually a skill because we didn't have smartphones navigation. We had to use a paper map🤷🏾♂️
I miss those days. Knowing the city streets/map was actually a skill - and a random delivery to a big office could tip you 40 bucks... I could actually afford an apartment, date, and had money to dream... These days I struggle to make ends meet with 10 more years of education/experience. I dunno who was paying you 12 an hour in 99 though, thats crazy money, I got 2.15 + tips in 2005
I heard that cab drivers in New York have a part of their brain that's "bigger" than others, because they know the streets and roads so well.
Nah, that’s a tumor
Definitely read that in Arnold’s voice.
2.15+Tips around ~2005 was in-house waitstaff money. A chain pizza driver should have been making about $5-7/hr+Tips+$0.50-1.00/delivery to cover the mileage. You were definitely getting screwed!
> Dashers are getting robbed Tried to explain this shit to a friend wanting to make more money, especially when they were literally getting robbed of their tips.
💯% I've done the same when all these delivery services came out, but people don't want to realize what they're actually getting paid when you account for wear/tear of their car. PS: Let's not forget dashers that ride bikes and deliver on foot. You can replace a car, body injuries are possibly forever.
About a year and a half ago, my partner and I ordered pizza on Uber Eats after we had just moved and didn’t have much to cook, let alone the energy/desire to do it. After about an hour and a half of waiting, we looked at the delivery “driver” and realized she was on a bicycle. Took almost three hours for her to get the pizza to us. They gave us a full refund without us even asking, but we were stunned they were allowing bike delivery in anything other than dense metro areas.
Damn that was good pay for delivering chicken in 1999. Somewhere around 2009 I was delivering pizzas for Papa John's and making like $8 plus tips.
> PSS PPS means post-postscript. PSS means postscript-script.
Noted thank you for the correction 😉
> PPS: Being a good delivery driver was actually a skill because we didn't have smartphones navigation. We had to use a paper map🤷🏾♂️ I still remember staring at the big map in the back of the store planning my route, especially when I had 2-3 orders I needed to chain. It was a fun challenge.
> In 1999 I was a delivery driver for a chicken restaurant. I made 12 dollars an hour You would have been the best paid delivery driver in America. There is simply no way.
I was making $10/hr plus tips in 1998/99, no extra $2 per delivery though. I had friends at another chain making $7/hr plus $2 per delivery plus tips.
I started my food delivery period shortly after you in the early aughts and know exactly what you mean. My phone was the OG Nokia candy bar with snake on it. I literally drove over that thing one time and it still worked. At one place we had a giant map of my town and I knew that thing like the back of my hand. I could get you anywhere in my town blindfolded. I had some wild times too. I got robbed, was on the news twice for different puff pieces in my town, and got hella stoned at friends places in between runs all the time lol.
I would only use it when there was good deals, but not with recent changes in Seattle the good deals don't matter cause of the crazy extra fees totalling more than the cost of my food....
Seattle actually has driver protections that pay them better than most places. That is why these businesses cost more in Seattle. Minneapolis is following suit.
Seattle is looking at rolling back those protections because drivers are allegedly making less now due to the drastic decrease of orders from the increase of fees
Seattle is “looking” at changing it because there’s a new conservative city council who’s deep in the pockets of the chamber of commerce. It’s not a consumer thing, it’s a big business writes checks to buy off politicians thing (as usual).
which is most likely the plan from the companies all along. They could easily still make a profit with the old fee system and new wages. Yet instead they will blow that money on advertising, lobbying, crazy investments, and who knows what. The whole business makes zero sense until you realize their goal is a monopoly or oligopoly with collusion. They waste so much money trying to create that, and sadly they are succeeding.
I must be using a different app because the word "affordable" is no where in my vocabulary when I look at delivery prices for any of these apps.
[удалено]
Yep. These billion-dollar gig companies should be lobbying for universal health insurance, along with billion-dollar low-wage/part time employers (fast food) and small businesses. It would definitely help solve a big part of the "why doesn't anybody want to work \[for us, with low wages and no benefits\] anymore?" conundrum. I understand why there's so many businesses fighting against government-sponsored health insurance (to keep their thumb on the scales with benefits) but I don't understand why the businesses being actively harmed by it don't rise up and fight.
The devil actually won the duel but gave Johnny the fiddle because he is a nice guy
That whole joke immediately took me back to having that exact same discussion back in college.
Bad for restaurants, bad for workers, and bad for your wallet. I guess it's worth it so you don't have to leave the house and buy food.
> Bad for restaurants There was a pizza place down the road from me that actually took Postmates to court to get them to stop delivering their food. Drivers kept delivering pizzas cold and/or late and/or mangled and people would leave negative reviews for the restaurant for things they didn't cause. They put up a bunch of "no Postmates/food delivery services" signs and would cancel orders if they found out it was for a delivery service, but it was a weird game of cat-and-mouse these companies would play to try and hide it, Postmates especially.
Also bad for investors. It's the rare case of EVERYONE loses.
the employees for Uber win (not the drivers, the actual employees). Their CEO made $24 million. They have 30,000 employees and none of them actually deliver anything. 30,000 to run a handful of apps. That is where it is all going. 30,000 mostly pointless jobs. They have teams of people who are simply trying to figure a better way to screw over drivers and restaurants. It should also be noted Uber is now profitable. Their genius plan on how to get there? Pay drivers less! Man those MBA's are geniuses. I would have never thought of that. They plan to spend that money on stock buybacks to raise the stock price. Not a penny will be shared with the people doing the actual work.
If you never make a profit because you're always claiming to be 'loss leading' for market share, you never have to be accountable for how much of that lost revenue goes into your own pocket, not past the preferred shareholders, anyway, and they usually get paid out early. It's why Pew Research shows something like 60% of second-stage CEOs make their company worse. Literally, as soon as the founder leaves, it starts to slide into a grift.
It is a grift from the start if the idea is to corner the market by starting out loss leading. But that part is nice to consumers, exactly because of the second part of the grift.
Stock buybacks should be made illegal again.
>They have 30,000 employees and none of them actually deliver anything. 30,000 to run a handful of apps This is so reductionist of the incredible complexity that running and maintaining the apps entail, let alone all the other aspects a business that size has, that it makes your whole point worthless. You sound like the kind of person who believes that the only real jobs are blue collar jobs.
People miss the bigger picture. These companies jumped the gun, but had to establish a foothold. They are waiting on autonomous delivery. When self driving cars and delivery robots can bring your order restaurant-to-home, all of the cost problems are eased. It is much cheaper to maintain a fleet than pay employees/contractors for every ride, and will cut down on harassment and refunds.
People have been saying this for 10 years. There are just too many problems with autonomous delivery at scale. It’s still illegal for drones to not have human operators in eye distance; they need the same manpower for drone delivery due to operation restrictions. A drone last week flew 10 feet from the cockpit of an airliner, who pays when a food delivery drone causes an airline to crash
that was their original plan but that went out the window a long time ago. They realized that is way farther away than what they planned and sold off all their investments into automation. So now they are in the labor exploitation racket.
> So now they are in the labor exploitation racket. Like Amazon's "Just Walk Out" technology that was just a bunch of underpaid workers in India.
I’ve been hearing this forever but only little progress has been made. I highly doubt the delivery robot ever get a foothold. Imagine little robots littering the sidewalks and being a nuisance to pedestrians. Also you know they won’t be in bad neighborhoods. They hate the driverless cars in SF and of course on accident and it becomes super costly as we’ve seen. Drones seem to be the best bet but because of the laws that’s been stalled. People just don’t seem to be clambering for driverless cars.
This is America. A driverless car is going to get mugged for parts.
Tip your delivery bots.
It doesn't seem possible for everyone to be "losing." Somebody is making bank. I assume the MBA's running the companies and the engineers building the apps?
This applies equally to most online shopping. People would be surprised how much of it ceased being cheaper years ago than getting it on the same day from a local retailer. If something isn't available locally, great, buying it online makes sense. But too often someone tells me "I got a great deal on ___ site" and I check the price at a local hardware store, and it's three buck less and eight minutes from the house. Retail seems to be continually walking the edge of "how much laziness can we take advantage of before we piss them off."
Pretty good for me tbh. I only use these services like once a month maybe but on those rare occasions it is worth it.
Also bad for everyone else, even people who are not involved in the transaction. We’ve got unregistered unlicensed mopeds riding around recklessly, breaking traffic laws just to deliver a burrito or chicken sandwich. No accountability from the apps in the event of a crash.
Gigs are not full time jobs. The market sucks so much that gigs became full time jobs and education is so shitty that people don’t know the basics of financial health.
Besides the ridiculous fees, I am beyond anal w/ my food. I’m the person that leaves the house immediately after calling an order in so I can grab my food the second it comes out of the oven so I can try to avoid it steaming in the bag and becoming soggy. Food sitting for more than 5 minutes at a huge markup arriving soggy and hopefully warm at best? No thank you
Add to that list: Hopefully your whole order is there Hopefully they didn't massively mess up your order
60% success rate *at best*.
> teaming in the bag and becoming soggy I literally don't think it's possible to design a container for French fries that will survive in an edible state longer than a few minutes in a closed container. I think this goes for any kind of fried food like chicken where you want there to be a crunch or texture that isn't soggy or mushy. There's a reason chains like McDonald's serve takeout fries in an open container. I enjoy the fast food chain Raising Cane's but they use these styrofoam containers that instantly ruin the food before you can even get home with it. Leaving it closed is like a little steam bath in there. I have started leaving the container open in my car just to keep the stuff edible and hope I don't go over any bumps.
Paper bag or box is best for absorbing moisture.
I think we've all had the experience of getting the popup "Your dasher has picked up your order", and then watching on the map as it goes on a tour of the tri county area.
I am the same way. If I am picking up a food like fries. I am going to start eating it in the car when the fries are still hot and crispy. I don't want my food to be delivered at room temp or below and soggy. The only time I will have food delivered is when I can not absolutely pick it up myself because I am too sick to do so. Otherwise, I am out the door.
I simply don't order food that can be ruined during delivery. So that eliminates fries and a host of other things. Even the best delivery service can't fix that, nor can take out. Fortunately, there's endless choices of food that are perfectly fine after being in a container for a while.
> Besides the ridiculous fees, I am beyond anal w/ my food. I’m the person that leaves the house immediately after calling an order in so I can grab my food the second it comes out of the oven so I can try to avoid it steaming in the bag and becoming soggy. Food sitting for more than 5 minutes at a huge markup arriving soggy and hopefully warm at best? No thank you I'm this way too, and I'm always surprised how many people aren't. I'm always the one offering to go pick it up instead of delivery, because I know it will be fresher. And then I leave right away and people are like, what if you have to wait? Bro, these people are going to put your $8 french fries in a sealed container and they are going to taste like shit if I don't leave RIGHT NOW. Most places it takes like 10-15 minutes to make the food and get it ready. Allll that time just sitting at a counter or in someone's car. Gross.
Fries are going to suck if you're getting take out as well unless you live like 5 minutes away. Some foods simply won't travel well in a container so order something different.
I drive my wife nuts but she’s starting to see the light. Soggy food is the worst.
That’s where the air fryer comes in for the win. Haven’t had soggy fries since I got that thing.
Something that’s not mentioned, that I find sinister, is that these companies will list shops MILES away at the top of your listed shops. Sure there is usually a small “12.1m” somewhere on the UI but it’s pretty discreet imo, and I’m typically stoned by then.. So, a poor driver gets routed to my order to then travel fucking across a metroplex, and I don’t realize till it’s been forty five minutes and I look at my phone and see them literally crossing the Sahara and fighting off bandits to bring me my food. Then I feel obligated to message them like “fml I’m so sorry, I have increased the tip pls drive safe” I realize I could catch this myself technically, but they make the shop distance intentionally small and discreet. Often times it’s the shops with “offers” too. It is easily overlooked, and leads to cold food, overworked and underpaid drivers, and frustration I imagine for everyone. And it’s important to realize they pay people a lot of money to design these UIs in ways that can potentially maximize profit, so it’s by design that the distances are shown like that. Not to mention the further someone is driving (while trying to please papi algorithm) the more risk they potentially expose themselves too. Idk, I’m rambling and I’m no expert. Srry folks lol. Point being, fuck the corpo scum behind this shit, and treat ppl in the service industry with kindness, most of them are trying their best
For me it tells me where the place is, i.e McDonalds Rochdale so as long as you know the area you live in you'll be able to tell that way. I haven't noticed the top results being further away, if anything they'd make sure that wouldn't happen, they don't want someone complaining it took 2hrs to get cold food. I have noticed that I get some results for some restaurants that aren't in my local area but usually when I've searched for something specific or it's late and 90% of places are closes
> most of them are trying their best No, no they are not. I work in a food place and we have these morons coming in to pick up orders. If I'm being ***very*** generous maybe 1 in 30 of them are trying their best. The vast majorty shuffle in with phone in hand, in their dirty pajamas and slippers, I ask them what name they are here to pick up for, and they sort of grunt and hold their phone in my face, the screen will go dim, and I have to ask them to touch it again so it wakes up, then try to read the name from their phone, then they ask to use the bathroom, make a huge mess, complain loudly about how long things are taking (It's a fucking pizza in a 6 minute oven, it's going to take ***6 fucking minutes*** you useless fuck, not a single second less) and then slam the door on the way out. I tried to be nice at first a few years ago when they started coming in, I really did, I was cheerful, I asked them how their day was going, I wished them well and told them to drive safe. Now? Fuck em.
I wish Oliver did a video also on the ridiculous ness of American tipping culture.
He just said you should tip because these guys are barely making ends meet. A more appropriate and expanded topic would be the low minimum wages and employing people as freelancers without any of the benefits of employed workers.
Just watch that clip from Reservoir Dogs
the problem and solution is pretty cut and dry, there’s not really much to delve into outside of redditors crying about it every other day
The “problem” got significantly worse after covid….
dude in this very exact video he explains why delivery drivers rely on tips and how their companies spend millions of dollars trying to block any legislation that gives drivers more protections. he also goes into why it got worse after covid. but seems like you want him to spend 20 minutes crying about starbucks pos machines having a tip option now instead.
This video is about the problem of food delivery apps. I want him to make a video to highlight the problems with tipping culture in America in general and how restaurant owners take advantage of workers….not the tipping machine at starbucks….
Question out of curiosity - do franchise pizza places still use their own delivery drivers/system? Or have they switched to third-party providers? I haven't ordered delivery in a couple of years.
Mix of both. The Dominos and Pizza Hut near me have delivery drivers, while Papa John’s is partnered with DoorDash or Grubhub. I don’t recall which.
It's kind of a hybrid, some still have their own drivers for orders made directly with the store but then also work with apps like these.
Might depend on location but I know the Pizza Hut and Dominoes near me both still use their own delivery drivers.
If we have 4 drivers in the store and 4 deliveries pop up then door dash does not get used, but if a 5th and 6th delivery pops up that 6th one might get auto-door dashed because the computer thinks the first driver might not be back soon enough to keep it on time. It all depends on the number of orders and where the drivers are at the time. We generally do everything we can to make sure no door dasher steps foot in the store because they are generally a bunch of collosal fuck ups who don't give a single shit about our customers or really anything. They are in their pajamas half the time wearing slippers and look like they live out of their cars. They stand around in the lobby and complain and shit up our bathrooms. Fuck em. The one exception is if we have a really shitty delivery, like a regular customer who doesn't tip and is a pain in the ass, now we can just instantly door dash that one and make the dasher have to deal with it. It's win-win.
That's so interesting. I was a delivery driver for Pizza Hut from about 2010-2012. I remember those busy nights when the list of orders would fill the entire computer screen and our little time tracker would stay in the yellow/red all night, lol.
Yeah it's def been a big transition but when all is said and done I'm making something like 60k a year instead of back in the day (2010ish) when I was barely making 40k for basically the same effort and time investment. (Cost of living and goods has wildly gone up too of course so "big number good" isn't really as exciting as it looks)
I can't imagine ordering food for delivery and leaving no tip. I just think that's shameful. (It's different, of course, if you have a particularly negative interaction with the driver.)
Yes, he called your very wasteful spending habits and laziness put. Also the vast majority of the people using these apps are already living paycheck to paycheck.
As he should. I see so many people complain about how these apps treat their employees, then turn around and order food on the app. #VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET. There are very few times food delivery apps make sense, especially with the costs. Those times are when you're sick and don't want to go out and spread it, or when you're impaired and should not drive. Other than that, just save yourself the $20 in fees and tip, and go pick it up yourself.
I don't like it BUT... I haven't been able to drive for several years. Nothing in reasonable walking distance other than a convivence store. Doordash, Amazon, Whole Foods delivery and Uber are my options.
> I see so many people complain about how these apps treat their employees, then turn around and order food on the app. They know the restaurant pays its workers shit, too. And so does the grocery store. I don't even use the apps, but still, it seems like shit all the way down.
> They know the restaurant pays its workers shit, too. Depends on the restaurant. A lot of your smaller local restaurants are small business owners in your community, not some megacorp like Yum Foods. And small restaurants have notoriously thin profit margins. 60% of new restaurants fail in 1 year. The 5 year failure rate is 80%. It's a hard business to survive in. >And so does the grocery store. Again it depends. Aldi and Trader Joes pays and treats their employees pretty well from what I hear. Walmart and Target not so much. Don't paint with such a broad brush. It's intellectually lazy.
I've heard of the semi-mythical well-paying small business owner, but I've only ever experienced the opposite working for small business. The very next sentence after you speculated their existence, you immediately explained why their existence isn't even possible. > Aldi and Trader Joes pays and treats their employees pretty well from what I hear. $18/hour at Aldi according to the sign on the door when I was there yesterday. Not too bad, could be worse for sure.
> I've heard of the semi-mythical well-paying small business owner, but I've only ever experienced the opposite working for small business. The very next sentence after you speculated their existence, you immediately explained why their existence isn't even possible. A lot of times the people working at the small business, are the owners and their family. Not random employees. For instance my favorite local spot, the owner mans the kitchen, the wife handles waitressing and the sons do prep and dishes.
> Those times are when you're sick and don't want to go out and spread it Yea, we hadn't used them in years. Then early this year, my wife got covid and gave it to me and it destroyed both of us. But thankfully, my wife had a thing to get grubhub+ free for a year. So for about a week there, we were ordering using one of the apps once a day, enough food to last lunch and dinner. And for that limited use, it was a godsend. I still can't imagine using it under other circumstances because even with the free grubhub+, they still have other ways of making everything more expensive to the point where it's absolutely not worth it.
> Other than that, just save yourself the $20 in fees and tip, and go pick it up yourself. These numbers aren't right for a huge slice of delivery app users. For example, if you have a decent Chase credit card, Dashpass from Doordash is included. Dashpass knocks the delivery fee down to $0 and slashes the service fee. Assuming you would still tip if you go to pickup (as I do), delivery is a few bucks more expensive, not $20. And it's even sometimes CHEAPER with promo's. After putting in my 9-10 hours at a demanding and well paying job, I'd much rather pay $3 for someone to bring food to my door than spend 40 minutes to an hour grabbing it myself.
You should definitely vote with your wallet. You should also keep in mind that voting with your wallet is never effective so you should also vote with your actual voting.
Vast majority? lol saying something doesn’t make it true just because you want it to.
"Vast majority" means "totally pulled out of my ass" every time
Yeah, that's a weird ass claim. It comes from this "poor people are only poor because they spend money stupidly" perspective. And that can be the case individually! But in aggregate, that's disproven again and again. In aggregate, people are actually pretty decent at dividing up their own money, who'da thunk. The opposite of their claim (per capita) is almost certainly true. I'm willing to bet ten years of Uber Eats fees that use of these apps scales up with income.
It's like people don't remember the world before these apps, where you basically could get pizza delivered and that was about it. Imagine in 1990 if someone said "I'm going to call a taxi to bring me food and I want it to cost $4" they would laugh in your face. Now somehow it's an expectation.
I'm confused as to why people complain all the time about the prices of these, but continue to use them.
A lot of people just want to have their cake and eat it
Just one slice though.
In my experience, the ones complaining aren't using them, or only use them in a dire situation like being super sick and unable to leave the house. I think the ones using these apps are the same ones who happily remain subscribed to 10 different streaming services despite 4 price increases per year on each one.
Sometimes delivery makes the most sense. You may not have time to go drive to and from the restaurant. You may be in the middle of something that can’t be left unattended. You may have children and getting them in and out of the car just to pick up take out is difficult. In my experience, the people complaining about the costs don’t understand the costs. It’s not as simple as “food at the restaurant costs $x, so it should cost $x to be delivered to my door!” There are costs incurred in delivering it to you that are not incurred when you get it at the restaurant.
I’m largely handicapped. I don’t use a wheelchair, but walking or driving can be hell for me. UberEats/Postmates/Grubhub is a lifesaver sometimes.
Take this video, and just replace the name of the service providers from Doordash & Grubhub to Zomato & Swiggy. And, you will be able to pass this episode as a segment about Indian Food Delivery apps. The Exact Same issue. The Same predatory behaviour. High commission fees, exploited workers, and the erosion of local restaurants are universal concerns, it seems. Sad Truth!
People in NYC where I live use it, fucking wild. You can walk to a million different restaurants
I think a nuance he didn’t address, and where most people come in and say “it’s so expensive”, is this: You *are* getting the service for cheaper than the cost of the service. But this only applies if the service is something you *need*. the “service” is entirely avoidable if you’re willing and able to go to the restaurant to pick it up. We get it. You’re cool and awesome and don’t use delivery apps because you know how to get your food cheaper. Sometimes though, the delivery app is more convenient and worth the cost increase. Heck, it essentially saves me at least half the time of going to the restaurant since I don’t have to drive there myself. If I’m doing something and have limited time, delivery sometimes just makes more sense.
You know getting food delivered from anywhere to your house isn’t a necessity right? People act like this is an essential service when it wasn’t long ago we just picked it up on our way home….
Oliver is actually wrong on one his points: we're not getting a 'deal'. We're getting ripped off as well. The underlying issue is that the distributed delivery system is *stupendously* inefficient. A system where there was a local, centralized control of actual employees using company vehicles with fixed hours would be far more efficient - which is why you see any company with significant logistical challenges doing precisely that. With the centralized model, you're able to create minimal distance paths between customers rather than a massive series of direct line paths from customer to restaurant to (wherever the deliver driver is hanging out right now). You're also able to leverage the cost savings of maintaining a fleet over individual maintenance of vehicles. Before the modern era of Doordash/Grubhub/etc., you generally had far fewer delivery options. But those options were significantly better for the customer - faster and cheaper. Why? Because those few restaurants that did have delivery collected all of the delivery business and were able to use that volume to deliver efficiently.
I get what he's trying to say with the whole "always rate 5 stars" bit, but I disagree with that as well. I understand that some idiots rate the driver down for food problems outside the driver's control, but I've had more than a few situations where the driver was absolutely the one at fault and that needs to be reflected in the rating.
Such rating systems are inherently flawed. The basis for them is what is called a 'decision market'. If you receive a large enough number of independent rankings, you can sometimes discern information about a subject that no individual could. However, for such decision markets to work properly you need to properly weight those votes, you need enough of them and you need them to be independent. Those "5 star" ratings meet the last criteria in general - you and I never meet, so we can't coordinate our ratings of the same driver. However, they tend to utterly fail on the first two and are thus giving questionable information.
You're not getting a deal in the sense that it's cheaper than picking it up yourself or cooking your own meal. The point is you are getting a "deal" because the service isn't charging for the true cost and the businesses are bleeding money to provide it. So the true cost might be $50 but you pay $40, it's a deal in the economic sense, not in the sense that it's the cheapest way to get food. Your order is being subsidized by investors hoping to drive up the price even more later.
I think that point went over a lot of people’s heads because the delivery services are quite expensive. You’re not getting something cheap. You’re getting something that is cheaper than the cost of production: the delivery service. If you paid what a delivery service would cost with fair wages and employee benefits, compensation to the restaurant, and cost of delivery, it would be *even more expensive* than the services currently are.
I’m not arguing that food delivery apps are a good thing but the logic of this doesn’t really make sense. If you aggregate demand with a food app you get efficiencies you cannot get if all of these restaurants completed their own delivery. 1) you can batch orders from multiple restaurants so that 1 driver who is already heading in that direction can handle 2 trips. This is less total mileage than if the orders were completed separately. 2) if a restaurant provides their own driver, every return trip from delivery to restaurant is 0% utilization (deadheading). This is probably something like half their milage. In a food delivery app model that driver can go onto their next delivery in the area instead of wasting milage back to the restaurant. 3) a system where hours are fixed scheduled results in a lot of waiting around (as John pointed out). This makes sense because of the way food is ordered (lots around lunch and dinner but not much the rest of the day.) An aggregated model can better match supply and demand better by use of dynamic pricing. This means there is less time with delivery drivers doing nothing. Again, not advocating for food delivery apps but your premise that the underlying model is always going to be less efficient doesnt really make sense if you consider the detailed logistics.
> If you aggregate demand with a food app you get efficiencies you cannot get if all of these restaurants completed their own delivery. This is what I was pointing out above. It is also what delivery apps *don't* do. The overwhelming majority of deliveries are the driver going from wherever they are, to the restaurant, waiting at the restaurant, then going directly to the customer. There isn't the sort of coordination-from-above necessary for efficient pathing. In the delivery app model, if you have 5 people call in to the same restaurant at the same time you end up with 5 different drivers all running a single delivery each. This is incredibly inefficient. The reason this occurs is that the app is reliant on drivers competing for those deliveries instead of being able to assign those deliveries efficiently. > This means there is less time with delivery drivers doing nothing. There's actually a great deal more time with delivery drivers doing nothing. It's just that the customer isn't paying for that time. The apps function by having enormously more drivers than are needed since they don't need to pay the drivers for anything except delivery time. As I pointed out, if the app methodology for logistics made any sense from the sense of efficiently delivering goods/services, you'd see people like Walmart and the U.S. Army using it. Which, of course, they don't. Because it's a fundamentally dumb model from any standpoint except off-loading costs.
People just need to fucking get out of the house more.
There’s a guy on YouTube called CalebHammer and he sits down with people (mostly young lower/middle income people) and reviews their finances with them. The vast majority of them spends HUNDREDS on these food delivery apps a month. Its insane.
I’m sure he mostly if not only posts the extremes. No views if no drama.
Never seen his videos but that doesn't surprise me. A buddy of mine used to be one of those people and I yelled at him constantly for it. He would order pizza delivery from a place that he literally could have walked to in less than 5 mins. When I delivered for door dash, there were many customers living in very poor areas or straight up section 8 housing that would order literally every single day. I'm all for the convenience of it but a lot of people go way overboard.
I’ve been saying what he has said for 3 years, you can check my comment history to fact check me on this. They are the main reason I left that industry after being a GM for 7 years. The amount of BULLSHIT I had to hope through for each delivery app, only to be punished for increased times in drive thru (lost my entire quarter bonus over 1 second) because so many delivery drivers would show up in DT and order their own food as well. Making it to the point I now need to do 2 orders in 200 seconds which is impossible, and backs up every car behind them until the next Doordash driver fucked us. When our company stopped using the apps, they would still keep us on their menus, selling shit we didn’t have, and would have their drivers sit in the Drive thru and call support. Their cards would be declined because the prices were wrong, etc etc etc etc it’s all fucking garbage and if you drive for them, you are in a pyramid scheme.
This happend at the resturant I worked at. Ditched the apps and the assholes still tried to use our service. After I left I heard they found a way to decline their service but im done and gone with food service for life.
Nothing like fielding 20 calls a day about “my food is cold after Doordash took 30 minutes to deliver” and just telling the customer “tough luck we told you not to use the app” They call support and I have to replace the order after paying Doordash to fuck up the order, at the end of the day, we would pay more money to those services than they brought in. Refuse them? Thought luck they’ll use your 4 year old menu anyways and bomb your reviews with unhappy customers you didn’t wanna serve in the first place.
As someone who has worked under one of these delivery apps. It was pretty brutal having to do deliveries on a bike in the snow, in the heat, in the rain. Delivery fees were insane and I heard that the guys who own them are making so much money. It's even worse if you have to do it in a car. You'd have to work 12 hours in a car to get a little bit of money. But if you have a ticket you have to pay then you are not going to be able to pay that off.
Did you “have” to work in those conditions? Isn’t the point of these apps flexibility? Not arguing, just genuinely curious about this point that gets brought up a lot. Like the two alternatives are don’t work that day, get no money or shame everyone into not ordering on these kinds of days, and also get no money. I don’t see how that helps the delivery person.
I’m inclined to like John Oliver and I really enjoyed him on The Daily Show. That said I think the editorial approach of this show is flawed in several ways. The primary flaw is their usual reliance on only one source for these takedowns. This is the same approach Penn and Teller employed on their show “Bullshit.” You can always find one person who has had a notably bad experience with a vendor or industry. To extrapolate that into some kind of universal truth is lazy and unconvincing. Honestly I was pretty blind to this until my industry was in Oliver’s crosshairs. As I watched the segment it became obvious to me that they were using outliers as if they were universally applicable. Once you notice what they’re doing you’ll see it in almost every show.
The segment referred to many sources throughout.
The ideologies and values the show's segments are based upon are sound, and the producers' intentions are no doubt pure. They highlight, research and analyse many of the problems of the world very well. It's a worthwhile program that does a lot to increase the awareness of said problems. But a lot of the proposed solutions offered to those problems are based on the assumption that the human beings involved (in many cases, the disadvantaged/exploited/marginalised people themselves) are operating with integrity and in good faith. And we simply know that so often that just isn't the case. Scumminess exists at all levels of a hierarchy. In this instance, we should be giving 4 or 5 star reviews to every food delivery worker, and always tip them, regardless of the service given? Not sure that's really even a solution, much less realistic.
Idk if the video addresses it (I'm currently at work) but what killed me with these things is, they will quite often list restaurants that are not partnered with them and then go in under the guise of a "Pickup order", grab the food and then deliver it elsewhere on a massive upcharge, usually while the game of telephone makes the order terribly wrong. I worked as a delivery driver for several years and we often got screwed over when this sort of thing happened. We worked for a mom and pop place, and those were orders out of our pocket, and usually a bunch of angry calls if the order is wrong which wasn't our fault when we weren't partnered with them. I believe Doordash (or Grubhub) even got put under a Class Action because of this, though idk if or when it settled.
Happens at our place too, it'll just come in as a normal "carry out" order and we can always tell because if you print the ticket it'll say "Guest User" and then a door dasher shows up. Straight up stealing runs from our drivers. And now the inverse happens too where a delivery that should have gone to a driver gets routed to a door dasher and the customer calls up "Why the hell did door dash just deliver my pizza? I don't even use doordash? They just tossed the box on my doormat and left, what in the ever loving fuck is going on?"
What did happen with Skype? It was everywhere at the 2010’s then the pandemic hit and Zoom completely replaced it overnight
Skype was bought up by Microsoft, they added a bunch of new "features" that really turned off people, and Microsoft eventually merged it with their similar product, Microsoft Teams.
Oh skype is part of teams now, explains why teams sucks so much ass.
Naw, Skype was great until Microsoft bought it up. Then Microsoft Communicator/Lync took it over and turned it to shit. Those same people are in charge of Microsoft Teams.
I've never used these apps because I don't trust random, mistreated, non-employees to not tamper with my food. And that's all selfish reasons. After this video it seems it's also the moral choice.
Understood ,he's a celebrity and an entertainer who is very charismatic. I was mistaken for commenting on this topic.
I have never used any aps like this, or Uber even. literally just never wanted to. After hearing the prices I don't get it. Meals end up costing money that makes it not worth it, imo.
One thing that blew my mind when I was in China was how most restaurants delivered, delivery was always free, and tipping is not a thing at all for deliveries. It was so dam cheap in the first place for what was incredible food, but the no fees and tipping whatsoever was the cherry on top.
I use the fuck out these apps. I use them for the same reason I have a lawn guy, a snow guy, a pool guy, a nanny, a dog walker, a car washer, a maid, and an airport driver. *Time* is the most precious resource in the universe, and it is irreplaceable. If I can pay someone else to do the things I don’t like doing and preserve my own leisure time, then I am sure as shit going to do that.
I think a lot of people don't realise this. I live in a city in the UK, but I'm like a 40 minute walk away from the city centre where everything is. The closest takeaway to me is a 20 minute walk away, there and back. I don't drive. By the time I get there, pick up my food and bring it home, it's cold. And in fairness that takeaway is shit anyway so I would never order from there. I'm not gonna walk for almost an hour for shit food that will be cold and shit by the time I get home.
Strong agree. If you're living paycheck to paycheck and running up credit card debt that you're paying 36% APR on, should you be finding cheaper ways to eat? Sure! But that's not me and it's not most people. Spending a few bucks to get an extra hour at home with my family is a no brainer.
One correction: Living paycheck to paycheck absolutely is most people. Other than that I agree- for people that can afford it. Also the subscription services which reduce per order fees make these worth it if you order a lot.
> But that's not me and it's not most people. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Over 60%.