I agree with the sentiment of this article. The end-game of convenience and optimization is a soulless life with limited randomness and limited serendipity. There's also an element of limited choice or freedom, as the consolidation and centralization needed to make a profit will squeeze out smaller players. The path to get there requires that enormous amounts of capital and talent get expended on what ultimately amounts to decadence. I also worry about the broader impacts. For example, many of these services will remain low-profit businesses at best, and an economy built on vaporware valuations and convenience industries feels like a house of cards. And since all this convenience comes at the expense of getting outside and mingling with other humans, is that really a healthy lifestyle from a mental standpoint? Personally my motivation to push back on all this is less about the impact on workers - the long-term impact on the customers themselves is bad enough.
For a funnier version of what I am feeling, see Ronny Chieng's take on Amazon Prime: https://youtu.be/BGEAiUeiaKs
> And since all this convenience comes at the expense of getting outside and mingling with other humans, is that really a healthy lifestyle from a mental standpoint?
What are people doing with the time that they would have spent traveling to procure the item that is being delivered?
If anything, more convenient procurement services that require people to spend less time procuring their goods should result in more time to “get outside and mingle”.
I do not think services that reduce time required for people to procure things are to blame for not getting outside and mingling. It is probably more to do with broader cultural changes that lead people to prefer staying inside, possibly consuming more entertainment on their own or with existing peer groups. Maybe people are not able to spend the amount of money they want to spend on getting outside and mingling.
> Now, heavy loads and a strict time limit on each delivery make the job incredibly dangerous
C'mon, delivering groceries across town in a first-world country is "extremely dangerous"? I wonder how would he qualify the jobs that actually ARE extremely dangerous, such as soldiers deployed to a combat zone, underwater welders etc. I wonder if this was merely a hyperbole, or if the author is genuinely out of touch with reality.
I think an important factor to consider is that soldiers and underwater welders get paid more than minimum wage.
They usually also have other options for income if they wanted, and walked eyes wide open into their role knowing the risks involved. Most of that doesn’t apply to minimum wage couriers.
Yes and no. They aren't paying for health care, get housing allowances, and at least part of the time, don't have to pay for food. Despite all this, the starting pay is still 20,000 a year for the most basic of military jobs, which is more than the minimum wage worker is bringing home when they work 40 hours - and the minimum wage worker still needs to pay for basic things. And this is, of course, assuming that someone is just starting out in boot camp and doesn't get any special education to make their pay go up faster. (A lot of people start above minimum, after they get out of boot camp anyway).
All that said, the hours might work out to be less than minimum wage, but it might be difficult to figure out that number when you add in cost for housing, medical, and all the little details (like bonuses for being deployed or on presently on a submarine).
Consider that, in the US military, you may work eight hours a day, five days a week, but you're on call every hour until you separate. Including nights, weekends, and vacations a thousand miles away. Failure to show up can potentially lead to jail time, fines, or other punishments. It's hard to directly compare active duty military life to a civilian job, and I don't know how to adjust compensation for an accurate comparison.
Ok, but it's still not "extremely dangerous". Logging jobs have 4x the accident rate of delivery workers, what are they then - "omg, extremely, extremely for real dangerous"?
I think all of those jobs are relatively safe - a job with an accident rate of 0.027% per year is actually very safe - it's just less safe than say office jobs, which I would qualify as "extremely safe". For an actual extremely dangerous job, try working in Carnegie's steel mills around 1900, when hot metal or gravel would sometimes spill on happless workers, people would often get crushed or maimed etc.
I don't understand why comparing to needlessly unsafe workplaces of the past (or inherently dangerous jobs of the present) is useful. Is your argument about more than just the semantics of what constitutes "extremely dangerous"?
The point being made is that the number of deaths attributable to grocery shopping (!) will rise sharply due to these ventures. Would you support a policy that every employer over 10000 employees has to sacrificially murder an employee annually (0.01% fatality rate per year), because "it's not as dangerous as being a policeman so it's fine"?
The funny thing is that every job we've been talking about, including delivery driver, is more dangerous than being a police officer (may his service be thanked).
Sure the %'s are lower, but it's still a pretty small workforce comparatively. I expect the accident rate to increase over the next few years as they services become more abundant globally. Additionally, do you think it's worth sacrificing human lives/causing people injury just to deliver your groceries on a silver platter? From my perspective I think even a single death in this industry is too much.
Is it a rate greater than the general population? (Once you adjust for the fact that they might have a higher-than-average number of people only recently trained to operate vehicles significantly larger and different than they're used to)
I like internet based delivery. Can we get a union based alternative so I don't feel bad about the person turning up to my door being an outsourced slave?
Short answer is no. Long answer is majority of people discriminate a lot on price, so the only way is make governments mandates about quality of the service and how the people are treated - which comes with all the externalities and side effects of regulation.
I am not so much worried about price in the case, but about barriers of entry - incumbents love regulation because it converts them into monopoly/oligopoly since they are able to extract economies of scale when complying (and of course lobby about favorable to them regulations).
Regulation of Uber class services means we will be stuck with Uber forever. Whether this is good or bad thing is left to the reader to decide.
In Denmark, our deliveries are currently not unionized, although there is a large debate around it. Denmark has no minimum wage either.
The people doing the deliveries for e.g. Wolt earn at minimum of 120 DKK an hour (~18,5 USD) on a scheduled shift and can often earn more, depending on how much they are willing to work. The last average I read is around 150DKK an hour (~23,30 USD) for delivery personel in that company.
The main issue with unionizing in Denmark is that it would require the companies to sign the delivery people to fixed-hour contracts (think nine-to-five), which doesn't work with the business model and isn't what most of the delivery people have expressed their wants about. Most of them enjoy the freedom and many in creative industries (e.g. musicians) use it as a way to supplement their income.
I think it is important to recognize what unionization actually means and whether or not that solves the problem, and before that; figure out what the actual problem really is.
Also foreigners who wants to study and get SU (State Study Support around 900 EUR/month, and yes, you basically get payed to study) use this to get what's called "equal status" which qualifies them for the SU and probably other benefits as well.
(Also, I am thankful that you are descripting the SU correctly; one gets paid to be enrolled at a qualifying educational institution - paid to study, not paid to get an education, even though this is luckily what happens most of the time.)
> The main issue with unionizing in Denmark is that it would require the companies to sign the delivery people to fixed-hour contracts
That seems like a conflation of two entirely different things. Plenty of unions represent people who work intermittently or weird hours, like basically every union related to film production.
Possibly, but this is the situation we're faced with here in Denmark, as our cartel of unions have divided the market in such a way.
I agree that this is not necessarily what "unionization" means specificly, but this is the concrete case here, and thus my caveat as to the importance of the exact definition.
> deliveries will cost $80 per hour with a 4 hour minimum
You don't pay per hour to get things delivered? Sure, if delivery workers unionized end customer costs would likely be a bit higher, but is that such a bad thing if it means the people working are not worked to the bone anymore?
It wouldn't be "a bit" higher, it would be out of the market. A completely analogous situation is how if we manufactured computers using something other than (effectively) slave labor, a macbook would cost $15,000.
These problems will go away in the same way similar problems have gone away in the past: with technology advancing to a point where no humans are required to be in the loop any longer.
It's not supposed to be an actual figure, but an increase of 0.5 to 1 orders of magnitude is realistic considering the price of similar products, like the Librem 5 USA.
Then again, if the Librem 5 were manufactured in the same volumes as a MacBook, that would probably save an order of magnitude in parts procurement, stocking, availability, and price negotiations, so in effect the costs would cancel out.
Devil's advocate: What's bad about that? Guess we would appreciate the value of the device way more if it would be that expensive. Also, by reducing the margin available to the company, it certainly wouldn't land at 15k. And yes, that would also mean that "shareholders" won't be able to make millions.
The downside would be that much fewer people would be able to afford it in the first place. Cheap personal computers are a very powerful force for good, this is a very unpalatable but reasonable compromise.
Taking the other side of the compromise is of course also reasonable, but pretending it's somehow a free lunch is not realistic.
Did cotton get more expensive after slavery was abolished? I feel like there might just be a small number of evil people extracting all the benefit and not passing those savings on to me.
By the Civil War era, there were suppliers of cotton in Africa and South-East Asia that were cheaper and more reliable than the Confederate states.
Hint: they didn't treat their workers much better than plantation owners treated slaves.
The point here isn't who is good and who is evil, I'm purposefully avoiding that. The point is that it's not possible to both have $1,000 laptops and decent wages for workers.
I find it very reasonable that one would say that no, it's not acceptable to treat workers like that, and if that means we can't have laptops, we'll do without.
I don't find it reasonable to claim you can have both.
As a middle class person, you can’t pay someone else a middle class living to fetch your groceries. Or clean your house, or drive you to the airport, or any of those things. You can only buy a service like this because the price that will get someone else to do it is small to you.
It’s a large scale trend. As an economy gets more productive, a would-be servant’s alternatives get better, and we wind up doing more of our own chores. Generally a healthy sign.
It appears that I must be in the minority but I really like going for grocery shopping. I keep discovering new products and often get inspiration for dishes when I am walking through a supermarket.
Just wait until online grocery apps fully start maximizing user engagement ;) I think product discovery and suggesting dishes haven't reached it's peak yet in this market.
I'm like OC and that won't work. I scan the produce aisles for good veg -- the ripe, flavorful stuff that didn't get bashed in shipping. Sometimes, it's the meat aisle -- I might find a better than average cut. With a handful of excellent ingredients, I've got a basis for a meal. Apps can't touch that, because I don't get the fully informed selection that I get in the store.
I like brick-and-mortar shops as well, especially bookstores. What I don't like is getting in the car and driving for however long it takes to get there only to learn they don't have that book and they need to order it on Amazon.
Their two-seconds pitch could be "we'll do the driving for you".
Which is why I want room in my cart to get those new things. So you get all the regular staples and bulky items delivered ahead of time. Which also allows you to replace any missing out of stock items from the delivery.
What I dislike about shopping is self checkout. It feels like scabbing and stealing jobs from workers while making customers do their work for free. It seems like customers will eventually have to stock the shelves should it become any more "self-service."
I'm exactly the opposite. I prefer self-checkout because it gives me something to do so I'm not just standing there. I also get to pack the bags exactly how I want them done.
I don't see it as "stealing jobs" (what does that even mean, anyway?) anymore than pumping my own gas is.
My GF and I used to always go grocery shopping together. We had a pretty good system, and Publix is a great store, so we didn't dread shopping. But, for about 2 1/2 years, I only had 1 day off a week, and I was working 10-12 hours a day, not counting lunch or the commute, and my GF really doesn't like shopping on her own.
We're currently using Kroger delivery. There are no Kroger stores here, and they deliver the day after you order, but drivers are employees, and they're paid by the hour ($12-$20, average of $17 according to glassdoor). I'd like them to make more, but I'd also like the employees at Publix to make more, so getting Kroger delivery doesn't seem worse for labor than going to the store. Possible I'm missing something, of course. The service has been exactly what we'd hoped. The produce is good quality, and they have most everything that Publix does. If Kroger delivery is more expensive, the difference isn't noticeable.
Conversely, before Kroger, there were times when we'd use gig-based delivery apps to get our groceries from Publix, and that was an all-around poor experience. I felt bad for the drivers; the drivers didn't do a good job of picking produce and substitute items; and, it was a LOT more expensive.
In general, Americans don't know how bad they have it. They work like indentured servants in a third-world country for below living wages and don't have lives.
For sure. It lasted longer than it should have, and it was more severe than expected, but new people filling in the cracks by working crazy hours is kind of built into the structure of the company. Thankfully, I cleared that hurdle, and I have a lot more control over how much I work.
I actually picked the job because of work/life balance, and it's been really good the last few months. But, you're absolutely right, and I appreciate the concern :^)
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadFor a funnier version of what I am feeling, see Ronny Chieng's take on Amazon Prime: https://youtu.be/BGEAiUeiaKs
What are people doing with the time that they would have spent traveling to procure the item that is being delivered?
If anything, more convenient procurement services that require people to spend less time procuring their goods should result in more time to “get outside and mingle”.
I do not think services that reduce time required for people to procure things are to blame for not getting outside and mingling. It is probably more to do with broader cultural changes that lead people to prefer staying inside, possibly consuming more entertainment on their own or with existing peer groups. Maybe people are not able to spend the amount of money they want to spend on getting outside and mingling.
Scrolling Instagram and watching Netflix.
C'mon, delivering groceries across town in a first-world country is "extremely dangerous"? I wonder how would he qualify the jobs that actually ARE extremely dangerous, such as soldiers deployed to a combat zone, underwater welders etc. I wonder if this was merely a hyperbole, or if the author is genuinely out of touch with reality.
They usually also have other options for income if they wanted, and walked eyes wide open into their role knowing the risks involved. Most of that doesn’t apply to minimum wage couriers.
All that said, the hours might work out to be less than minimum wage, but it might be difficult to figure out that number when you add in cost for housing, medical, and all the little details (like bonuses for being deployed or on presently on a submarine).
https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...
I think all of those jobs are relatively safe - a job with an accident rate of 0.027% per year is actually very safe - it's just less safe than say office jobs, which I would qualify as "extremely safe". For an actual extremely dangerous job, try working in Carnegie's steel mills around 1900, when hot metal or gravel would sometimes spill on happless workers, people would often get crushed or maimed etc.
The point being made is that the number of deaths attributable to grocery shopping (!) will rise sharply due to these ventures. Would you support a policy that every employer over 10000 employees has to sacrificially murder an employee annually (0.01% fatality rate per year), because "it's not as dangerous as being a policeman so it's fine"?
Basically, yes. Words have meaning, and misusing is bad writing, or worse (i.e. conscious manipulation).
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/11/26/ubereats...
https://fbiradio.com/the-delivery-riders-dying-to-work/
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/24/food-...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-09/exclusive-uber-eats-d...
Hopefully these bring you closer to my reality :)
Just as the the top two causes of US police deaths are COVID and cars: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/data-shows-covid-19-... (the third is the one you'd naievely expect, gunfire)
Regulation of Uber class services means we will be stuck with Uber forever. Whether this is good or bad thing is left to the reader to decide.
The people doing the deliveries for e.g. Wolt earn at minimum of 120 DKK an hour (~18,5 USD) on a scheduled shift and can often earn more, depending on how much they are willing to work. The last average I read is around 150DKK an hour (~23,30 USD) for delivery personel in that company.
The main issue with unionizing in Denmark is that it would require the companies to sign the delivery people to fixed-hour contracts (think nine-to-five), which doesn't work with the business model and isn't what most of the delivery people have expressed their wants about. Most of them enjoy the freedom and many in creative industries (e.g. musicians) use it as a way to supplement their income.
I think it is important to recognize what unionization actually means and whether or not that solves the problem, and before that; figure out what the actual problem really is.
(Also, I am thankful that you are descripting the SU correctly; one gets paid to be enrolled at a qualifying educational institution - paid to study, not paid to get an education, even though this is luckily what happens most of the time.)
That seems like a conflation of two entirely different things. Plenty of unions represent people who work intermittently or weird hours, like basically every union related to film production.
I agree that this is not necessarily what "unionization" means specificly, but this is the concrete case here, and thus my caveat as to the importance of the exact definition.
You don't pay per hour to get things delivered? Sure, if delivery workers unionized end customer costs would likely be a bit higher, but is that such a bad thing if it means the people working are not worked to the bone anymore?
These problems will go away in the same way similar problems have gone away in the past: with technology advancing to a point where no humans are required to be in the loop any longer.
Devil's advocate: What's bad about that? Guess we would appreciate the value of the device way more if it would be that expensive. Also, by reducing the margin available to the company, it certainly wouldn't land at 15k. And yes, that would also mean that "shareholders" won't be able to make millions.
Taking the other side of the compromise is of course also reasonable, but pretending it's somehow a free lunch is not realistic.
Hint: they didn't treat their workers much better than plantation owners treated slaves.
The point here isn't who is good and who is evil, I'm purposefully avoiding that. The point is that it's not possible to both have $1,000 laptops and decent wages for workers.
I find it very reasonable that one would say that no, it's not acceptable to treat workers like that, and if that means we can't have laptops, we'll do without.
I don't find it reasonable to claim you can have both.
It’s a large scale trend. As an economy gets more productive, a would-be servant’s alternatives get better, and we wind up doing more of our own chores. Generally a healthy sign.
Economy of scale, friend.
Their two-seconds pitch could be "we'll do the driving for you".
Makes the store a more pleasant experience.
I don't see it as "stealing jobs" (what does that even mean, anyway?) anymore than pumping my own gas is.
We're currently using Kroger delivery. There are no Kroger stores here, and they deliver the day after you order, but drivers are employees, and they're paid by the hour ($12-$20, average of $17 according to glassdoor). I'd like them to make more, but I'd also like the employees at Publix to make more, so getting Kroger delivery doesn't seem worse for labor than going to the store. Possible I'm missing something, of course. The service has been exactly what we'd hoped. The produce is good quality, and they have most everything that Publix does. If Kroger delivery is more expensive, the difference isn't noticeable.
Conversely, before Kroger, there were times when we'd use gig-based delivery apps to get our groceries from Publix, and that was an all-around poor experience. I felt bad for the drivers; the drivers didn't do a good job of picking produce and substitute items; and, it was a LOT more expensive.
Just want you to know that these kind of working conditions are illegal in parts of the worls. Do not accept this as normal.
I actually picked the job because of work/life balance, and it's been really good the last few months. But, you're absolutely right, and I appreciate the concern :^)