Can see the author's point, but I know people in their late teens who never would have bothered ringing up restaurants to get things delivered. They only do so now because its a single app with many choices ... similar to Uber in this regard - they managed to augment an existing service with a cool smartphone app & location tracking.
Ah yes, another 2000 word screed on how absolutely horrible and inhumane it is to order food from an app. This is the same genre of writing about how the latest iPhone is garbage or the touchpad on the MacBooks is proof of societal collapse.
It’s wonderful that in 2019 these are the issues people care about. It shows how pleasant our lives have become.
After a few bad experiences, I only call the restaurany directly to order now. A lot of these apps show choices that the restaurants may not have and they end up giving you an inferior substitute. If I have a good experience, I often just stick with that restaurant/order forever since I know its reliable.
Food delivery was broken - only a few restaurants did it. Now almost all of them can do it. That is truly disruptive. Does it suck sometime? Yes, probably even more than Sal's Pizza on a busy midterm week. But that you can do it at all, that's new and different. There will be growing pains of course.
I don't know why this irked me so much, but it did:
> the roughly 50-square-mile area surrounding the San Francisco Peninsula
SF itself is around 50 square miles. I know the article probably means something like "the area within 50 miles of San Francisco," but an editor should have caught this.
I agree and disagree. Doordash have opened up deliveries from restaurants that would have never hired their own drivers. On the other hand their delivery mechanism sucks. Almost every other order is messed up. Yesterday, after a 2 hr delay, in which time there was to way to contact customer service, my deliver was abruptly cancelled. Imagine a toddler at this time. Also, most of the time the food arrives cold or there are items that are incorrect. It is bizarre
I currently work in a restaurant with doordash. While I rarely have to take to-go orders and doordash orders, I see my Coworkers who hate taking doordash orders.
First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. On a busy night our Togo person makes ~50 in tips, so they just don't pay as much attention to the door dash orders.
Second, no matter how long we quote the order, the driver always shows up immediately and gets in the way of the servers and bussers and other customers (its a fairly small restaurant with no waiting area) so usually we are rushing to try and finish the order to get them to leave.
I don't know a single person in the restaurant except the owner who likes the doordash system, but as long as people keep ordering it'll stay
You missed the point. No one at the restaurant is getting a tip. The same person who would package up the food if you picked up in person (and who you would customarily tip) is the same person packaging up DoorDash orders, but with no incentive. The person getting tipped is the delivery service employee.
I am surprised that to-go orders are tipped in the first place.
Aren't waiters tipped because the law allows them to be paid below minimum wage?
AFAIK, behind the counter service people get paid commensurately, so tipping them doesn't make sense.
On the west coast waiters make minimum wage and there is still a tipping culture. Because of this, being a server or a waiter can be a very high paying job. To-go orders usually get tipped, but closer to 5-10% as opposed to the standard 15-20 for a sit down restaurant.
Let’s see: someone other than the restaurant usually inputs the menu, the menu can change, and prices change whenever costs go up.
Not every business owner necessarily wants to maintain a Doordash page because they have work to do, the same work they’ve been doing for 30 years, and every other Silicon Valley company wants to “partner” with them. Yelp wants them to advertise and maybe put those asinine digital wait lists out. Doordash wants them to maintain their online menu, them and 47 other delivery startups, most of whom also want to send you and iPad loaded with their own delivery receipt system. Google wants you to maintain your Maps listing and a million “SEO” whorehouses will spam call you to death to try and maintain it on your behalf. FiveStars would like to stick a little loyalty kiosk right on your counter, and all of this while juggling suppliers. Then there’s the random new credit card processors that pop up every now and then, staffing companies, job boards, et cetera and all of this is just the tip of the ice berg.
When I used to work in a café, I saw that someone listed our menu on Doordash. Every now and then a deliveryman would walk up to the counter and shove a phone in my face, and after making it clear to them that this is bad etiquette, I proceeded to point out: 1. The prices are all wrong, 2. Some of those things we don’t even have anymore, 3. Also they selected two types of bread because for some inexplicable reason, there was a separate bread and roll category, 4. Occasionally we would be out of a particular item, because oftentimes suppliers run out of things as well, or we decided to replace it with a different item. They would then try to call their customer, the customer would reject the call, and I would improvise with what was left. In a regular situation, I could talk to my customers directly, and deliver a good customer experience, but I couldn’t do that when there’s a middleman, a middleman who often didn’t speak English very well and was more often than not, shoving their phone right under my nose while I’m in the middle of making sandwiches for customers that were sitting in the store.
There is your primer on Doordash and also Postmates if they’re still kicking. I recommend you order from places that have setup a real pipeline for deliveries and have changed their business to accommodate it rather than assuming they did just because Doordash exists.
At Hacker News, we sleep well in the confidence that if people didn't want the miserable existence of being a delivery app driver, they would've learned to code and made their own delivery app.
> Look, there’s a machine in our pockets that allows us to take a thousand photos a day, access the world’s information, and do things we never could have dreamed of in the past
None of these things originated in Silicon Valley.
From a customer perspective I couldn’t disagree more. Calling on the phone to order something is often infuriating —- dealing with thick accents and loud background noise it could be awful to communicate.
With DoorDash and similar apps, you can place the order online and be precise about what you want, and get updates on where your order is.
It’s not perfect to be sure, but the “nightmare” is ridiculously exaggerated in the article. P
I believe there are reasons to be unhappy about those services, but you don't have to use them, whether you're a restaurant or consumer.
And senseless leftist opinions are devaluing the article. Example:
> They made sleek apps and clever algorithms, and paid people who couldn’t find a job a fraction of their labor value to pick up food and drop it off at your house.
These exploited people didn't make any fraction of their labor value prior to betting exploited. Why do they work when they're free to avoid that exploitation?
If the article had details on how customers get screwed, that would have helped. But overall repeat customers don't care about how items are organized, they look at the total price and whether the transaction makes sense for them.
I don't give a crap if the burger I ordered is X% cheaper at the restaurant that makes it. If it can be delivered in time and the total price is lower than the value I attribute to this service, it's a good deal for me.
21 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] threadIt’s wonderful that in 2019 these are the issues people care about. It shows how pleasant our lives have become.
> the roughly 50-square-mile area surrounding the San Francisco Peninsula
SF itself is around 50 square miles. I know the article probably means something like "the area within 50 miles of San Francisco," but an editor should have caught this.
First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. On a busy night our Togo person makes ~50 in tips, so they just don't pay as much attention to the door dash orders.
Second, no matter how long we quote the order, the driver always shows up immediately and gets in the way of the servers and bussers and other customers (its a fairly small restaurant with no waiting area) so usually we are rushing to try and finish the order to get them to leave.
I don't know a single person in the restaurant except the owner who likes the doordash system, but as long as people keep ordering it'll stay
Yes, there are indeed tips for doordash orders. I tip my doordash drivers. It's right there in the app, not hidden in some dark pattern or anything. https://fooddeliveryguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Scre...
Aren't waiters tipped because the law allows them to be paid below minimum wage? AFAIK, behind the counter service people get paid commensurately, so tipping them doesn't make sense.
Not every business owner necessarily wants to maintain a Doordash page because they have work to do, the same work they’ve been doing for 30 years, and every other Silicon Valley company wants to “partner” with them. Yelp wants them to advertise and maybe put those asinine digital wait lists out. Doordash wants them to maintain their online menu, them and 47 other delivery startups, most of whom also want to send you and iPad loaded with their own delivery receipt system. Google wants you to maintain your Maps listing and a million “SEO” whorehouses will spam call you to death to try and maintain it on your behalf. FiveStars would like to stick a little loyalty kiosk right on your counter, and all of this while juggling suppliers. Then there’s the random new credit card processors that pop up every now and then, staffing companies, job boards, et cetera and all of this is just the tip of the ice berg.
When I used to work in a café, I saw that someone listed our menu on Doordash. Every now and then a deliveryman would walk up to the counter and shove a phone in my face, and after making it clear to them that this is bad etiquette, I proceeded to point out: 1. The prices are all wrong, 2. Some of those things we don’t even have anymore, 3. Also they selected two types of bread because for some inexplicable reason, there was a separate bread and roll category, 4. Occasionally we would be out of a particular item, because oftentimes suppliers run out of things as well, or we decided to replace it with a different item. They would then try to call their customer, the customer would reject the call, and I would improvise with what was left. In a regular situation, I could talk to my customers directly, and deliver a good customer experience, but I couldn’t do that when there’s a middleman, a middleman who often didn’t speak English very well and was more often than not, shoving their phone right under my nose while I’m in the middle of making sandwiches for customers that were sitting in the store.
There is your primer on Doordash and also Postmates if they’re still kicking. I recommend you order from places that have setup a real pipeline for deliveries and have changed their business to accommodate it rather than assuming they did just because Doordash exists.
None of these things originated in Silicon Valley.
With DoorDash and similar apps, you can place the order online and be precise about what you want, and get updates on where your order is.
It’s not perfect to be sure, but the “nightmare” is ridiculously exaggerated in the article. P
And senseless leftist opinions are devaluing the article. Example:
> They made sleek apps and clever algorithms, and paid people who couldn’t find a job a fraction of their labor value to pick up food and drop it off at your house.
These exploited people didn't make any fraction of their labor value prior to betting exploited. Why do they work when they're free to avoid that exploitation?
If the article had details on how customers get screwed, that would have helped. But overall repeat customers don't care about how items are organized, they look at the total price and whether the transaction makes sense for them.
I don't give a crap if the burger I ordered is X% cheaper at the restaurant that makes it. If it can be delivered in time and the total price is lower than the value I attribute to this service, it's a good deal for me.