The model works if you decrease the platform's cut.
IMO, it would be neat to see a government provided "gig brokerage" of sorts that handles the dispatch of things like this (even including long haul delivery, maybe even a mechanical turk equivalent).
When the service is ultimately provided by a contractor, what's the point of having middlemen compete?
The fundamental problem is just that the model of random delivery drivers grabbing (usually modest) amounts of food from random restaurants doesn't scale very well. It's inherently expensive because it's so time-consuming for the driver.
Pizza is a bit of a different model because pizza delivery is sufficiently popular for pizza places to orient around supporting delivery well in the local area and have the drivers vertically integrated in-house.
The on-demand deliver-anything business model just isn't sustainable. You can only have it when it's propped up by some combination of temporary subsidy (i.e., VC funding), price obfuscation (e.g., markups, fees, and tips), and shifting the costs and risks to drivers.
DoorDash et al. aren't innovators in anything other than creative contracting and marketing. There's no magic practical efficiency that makes their business work.
I dont agree. Their innovation was stitching a whole swath of the cheapest and least reliable labor (part timers with a pulse who have an hour or two to kill) into a fairly reliable system. Leguslated higher wages destroys that innovation and highlights just how price sensitive the delivery demand is. It can never be a career at volume.
Door Dash was unable to make a profit during a time period where restaurants weren't allowed to have indoor dining and most people were locked in their homes for a year. This was before drivers and law makers began realizing that with car wear and tear they were getting less than minimum wage.
>drivers and law makers began realizing that with car wear and tear they were getting less than minimum wage.
Source? At least according to this study[1] 92% of uber/lyft drivers in seattle made above minimum wage. True, this isn't exactly the same as for delivery workers, but given how fungible the two jobs are I think it's fair to treat them as approximately the same. Much more interesting is how much your earnings vary depending on your assumptions. The study calculated $17.40/hr by using pessimistic assumptions, and $23.25/hr using optimistic assumptions.
Arguably they make sense in terms of a wealth gap. There’s a fairly long history of such services operating at small scale for the 1% that can’s afford full time servants but can pay for 10% of one by using housecleaning services and someone pickup their food etc.
Where this falls down is trying to scale the business to less affluent people without some serious limitations. Pizza delivery places for example generally have a small delivery radius which makes a huge difference.
I don't know how DoorDash and other similar services work in the US, but Deliveroo in the UK is always local - bike riders rarely take any longer than 10-15min between the restaurants and my place. All restaurants I can order from are within walkable distance (30-45min tops on foot).
It seemed to be sustained until the government required that wages be increased, then it was not sustained. Was there some temporary subsidy or other artificial force propping it up? Do you mean welfare?
It's illogical to say a business is not sustainable because it dies after its been kneecapped by regulation.
It never "seemed to be sustained". It was always and obviously an artificial result of vc funding designed to get a market going and obscure the economics until it's established enough that they can get away with changing the deal like uber.
It's illogical to ignore the size of the market and think that there should somehow be a need for just any number of drivers instead of the required number of drivers.
It's illogical to ignore that when prices to customers are artificially low, customers will consume more than when they actually have to pay for what they consume.
Since the driver pool has been paid for by vc funding rather than consumers, there are more drivers than needed. A smaller number of drivers is perfectly sustainable.
Pizza has also traditionally been either independent shops or large chains, often with their own drivers, meaning there's either 1 party (the company with employees), or rarely 2 parties (the company, and a "contractor" driver). Now with the Uber/DoorDash/Deliveroo model there are 3 parties, the shop, the driver, and the network, all looking to take a cut. For a business that is relatively low margin already, adding a middleman trying to take their own cut is just not possible without either raising prices, or subsidising with investor cash.
Perhaps, but I see a similar pattern in the UK where there have been many competing options for a long time. ~20 years ago it was common to have Indian, Chinese, Fish & Chips, Kebabs, and Pizza available for delivery in most areas, often multiple of each. I'm not familiar with the US market but it sounds like Pizza was more common?
Based on this my guess is that it's less about the competition and more about the middleman taking a cut.
I'm in Australia and the only thing I ever remember being able to get delivered, prior to VC funded delivery companies, was pizza. I guess in the UK (at least in cities) they were big and dense enough to support it but it's never really seemed feasible, at least in my city.
I wonder if it's a cultural thing too. Immigration in the UK happened in a particular way, and it does seem limited to Indian/Chinese/Turkish takeaways in particular. Pizza takeaways are a thing but they're mostly US chains like Dominos.
Maybe there's something about pizza. It's cheap, easy to produce at the needed scale, somewhat fungible, and can be delivered in a form that's tolerably edible.
When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out ... once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
I dont think its a scale thing, its an opportunity cost thing where there is very much a narrow price band where delivery can do high volume and with the price increase to drivers you cause more people interested on driving while also kneecapping demand. The pizza thibg is also more that the verticle integration lets you cut out atleast one middleman's worth of markup keeping your business profitable ehile also keeping your end user price in that high demand price band.
We didn't get delivery for as much stuff. In the US, I felt like delivery restaurants were mostly just pizza before (and in areas places you might have another type of cuisine known for doing delivery, like Chinese takeout places). Was born in 85 and I don't really remember getting delivered food from places other than pizza. Well, office catering would be a different story, but for regular folks yeah.
Yup sounds about right. Pizza delivery or pick it up yourself in the suburb I grew up in.
These days I live in a somewhat dense city and yet I still prefer to order nearby and go walk to pick it up, at least when I'm just ordering for myself. It's probably an extra $5-10 and usually at least 20 minutes more to have someone else pick it up.
As for the economics... If you force higher wages, then higher prices are likely and demand then goes down. Not surprising.
The alternative might be for business to respond by working on higher efficiency, to get the average price of a delivery down by sharing the labor - that would require figuring out how to give the delivery workers multiple orders from the same or nearby restaurants to deliver in the same direction. Might be possible to build but when the restaurants aren't cooperating (it's wasteful for the delivery guy to wait for your food to be ready) and there's not enough orders from one area to another it's tough. Add that a lot of food delivery is relatively time sensitive as not all food keeps well / stays warm long enough. I suspect pizza delivery is the main type of business that has solved it this way. For everyone else, it's clearly a tricky problem and the net result either way is to need less labor for food delivery, higher prices, or a mix of both.
Which is fine as long as we have other jobs those delivery drivers are willing to switch to instead. Imo that's a big part of the problem - mandating certain jobs will pay better without necessarily having a plan for creating other jobs for the folks who end up underworked/jobless as a result. Now if gig companies downsized their workforces like regular employers some of the extra jobs should result from the extra discretionary income spent by the remaining workers... But probably a tiny fraction of what's needed to avoid more unemployment. Complicating this may be that gig workers are subject to underemployment if not enough if them quit, and I suspect the unemployment safety net works poorly for them.
>Only pizza was ever "delivered" because you could batch up multiple pizzas and deliver them simultaneously.
Can't you do the same with regular restaurants? I've been to many non-pizza restaurants where delivery drivers regularly come in to pick up food. Surely those restaurants could do the same?
Also: Pizza delivery is one-to-many, in terms of locations.
Traditionally, one shop had one or more drivers who would deliver multiple orders in one trip, and then return back to that same shop to pick up and deliver the next round.
This is very different from services like Doordash, which are many-to-many in terms of locations. There's a huge efficiency loss here.
Also different: Pizza delivery was single-source. If there was a problem with the order, the driver could fix it. Things like "Hey, man. You forgot our bucket of soda" could be fixed pretty quickly and painlessly -- they'll just bring it over on the next round, usually rather quickly.
The problem is that "we" (the government) is making it illegal for people to work for the best offer that they had. So now some portion of them aren't making a wage at all.
>So on one hand we want to ensure everybody gets paid a decent wage. ... But then that gets countered by not wanting to pay too much for a luxury service,
Yup. It's a tale as old as time.
Simply raising raising wages just means fewer people will be employed/contracted, thereby maintaining ultimate cost.
Another side effect is with higher wages, people have more money, which means more money in circulation, which means merchants will charge more for goods/services rendered. Aka inflation.
"Just raise wages." is an easy and seemingly simple thing to say and do, but economics aren't easy nor simple.
> I don’t use them. I always pick up my own food..
I tried it once. I'm in a suburban area. Food took 90 min to arrive. The driver went to/from the front door 3 times, trading food, before we wound up with our pizzas. They were cold.
What put me permanently off was the mistreatment of restaurants by the delivery corporations.
Growing up (upstate new york) the only places that delivered were pizza places. When I was a bit older, Jimmy Johns would deliver if you were in the office parks near their location. Right by colleges a few more places would deliver, things like calzones, cookies, beer, etc. But they were propped up by the density of the university.
Good point. Delivery was only in a small area that was easy to cover by the restaurant. That area was figured out by the restaurant in order to maken it practical/efficient.
Getting a meal delivered from a restaurant for a single person or a couple was always a luxury item. You got food delivery when you had a lot of people together.
Pizza was different, as mentioned in a sibling comment, because the pizzas themselves were cheap and shitty, there were only 3 pizza shops that delivered in your area: Domino's, later Papa Johns, and usually some popular local chain (not Little Caesars, not Pizza Hut, neither delivered.) They frequently took way longer than they said they would, each driver was delivering pizzas to 5 locations average on a run, and if it showed up cold you would eat it anyway, or throw it in the oven for a few minutes.
This individual attention did not exist, because it was obviously too expensive to provide. Only upper-middle class professionals got non-pizza restaurant deliveries, it was more expensive than it is now.
Chinese might be an exception, too. A lot of people would get Chinese delivered. But it would always be a ton of stuff in those neat, stackable white boxes, and the person delivering rarely spoke English (recent immigrant.)
I was in Shanghai years ago and we had a pile of menus from local restaurants and the number of someone who would go collect food from any of them for around a dollar. No app needed.
>What did this people do before all of these apps came into play?
Simple, the same thing many of us still do today:
1. We make our own food at home, using stuff we bought at the grocery store.
2. If we want restaurant food, we get up and leave home and go to the restaurant and eat there, and enjoy freshly-made food instead of cold food that was made 45+ minutes ago.
3. If we really wanted to eat professionally-made food at home, we ordered pizza. The pizza industry figured out how to do delivery cost-effectively decades ago (and keep the food hot too, something the new app-delivery industry apparently still hasn't quite figured out). Also, take-out has been around for ages.
The sort of situation where I order DoorDash now (too busy to go out, going through a major depressive episode and don't have the emotional energy to cook) I would have microwaved a frozen meal 10 years ago.
The steelman argument for minimum wage is that it acts as collective bargaining for groups that are otherwise too big and too sparse to cooperate with each other.
But yeah there's obviously a some point at which the returns are diminishing, e.g. if it was $100/hour nothing would get done. Legally at least.
The flip side of minimum wage is often overlooked: people on the bottom end of the spectrum, who struggle to compete with other minimum-wagers, are cut out of the workforce. At $15 or $20/hour, the job requirements are higher than at $10/hour, and these folks stand no chance.
Likewise, the low-end employers are priced out of the market.
It's the same survival of fittest, except the weakest constituance is hurt most. They are very sparse so their voice is never heard.
> It's the same survival of fittest, except the weakest constituance is hurt most. They are very sparse so their voice is never heard.
their voice is heard to a disproportionate extent because there are entire companies like Walmart and really entire industries like food service that built a business model around being able to pay sub-living wages (usually with the difference made up by tax dollars or tips).
In a few states you are allowed to pay people with 'severe' disabilities under minimum wage.
The idea is to incentivize companies to hire these people for otherwise unprofitable work and mostly to get the disabled out of the house and earning some money that they otherwise would not.
For example, most of the prescription glasses made in the US are made by blind people under such a scheme.
Honestly, it sounds terribly exploitative. But, from what I understand, these schemes are mostly successful in that the disabled are happy with it along with the employers.
You'd be amazed how many people forget about supply and demand. Then those people are surprised by the perfectly predictable outcomes that they didn't intend.
I don’t mind a $5 fee, but it’s the markup above regular menu prices that generally kills it. I also had multiple issues with incomplete DoorDash deliveries. I doubt the drivers were stealing food, but the restaurants obviously thought they could get away with theft and not be penalized. It was ALWAYS the most expensive entree missing. Had to get into credit card disputes with DoorDash more than once before they were banned from our household. Oddly never once had the issue with Uber Eats.
That being said, the in restaurant experience sure as hell isn’t what it used to be, either. Rarely bother with a sit down place anymore.
Grocery delivery seems to be a winner, though. Costs about $20 more and I don’t have to spend two hours dealing with it? Count me in.
Grocery delivery is the worst for me. The store gives you the worst produce possible, and if something’s not in store, the substitution is often nonsensical.
Agreed. Just go in-store for the stuff you want to pick out, and do pickup for all the items that don't require selection. Usually pickup is free or very cheap. Sure, it's not as convenient as delivery, but it's also much cheaper and you get to pick out the stuff you want.
There’s a range of quality and options. My sister does in story pickup and then picks up produce on her own. It’s free and still saves her a half hour per week which adds up.
> I doubt the drivers were stealing food, but the restaurants obviously thought they could get away with theft and not be penalized.
I wouldn't doubt the drivers were stealing food. We've had occasions where the "wrong driver" picked up the food, but then "got a flat tire" and couldn't bring it back. This was a multi-hundred dollar order. I don't buy that crap for one minute. Some driver stole the food, and the restaurant may also have been at fault for not checking to make sure the proper driver got the order.
I wonder if the problem is that they're trying to coordinate/optimize drivers and routes after the orders have been placed.
What if they tried to coordinate before the order was placed? There have been many days where I would have been happy to eat food from one of 10 different places, and we picked a restaurant more or less at random.
If a platform could coordinate my choice with the choice of 4 very close by neighbors, then they could send one driver to pick up maybe $300-500 of orders ($60-100 food per household) and give us some sort of discount.
I would actually allow notifications from an app that sometimes messaged me to say "several of your neighbors have ordered from X Restaurant, which you've liked in the past. Do you want to order also, for a 10% discount?".
Of course, if they bullshitted and tried to fake-it-till-you-make-it with the order momentum (telling 50 neighbors that several already ordered), that would be annoying and potentially fraudulent. But I would be happy to see a competitor arise and shift the coordination from delivery to ordering. It could make the business model work much better, and would also cut down on travel time, food sogginess, etc.
>There have been many days where I would have been happy to eat food from one of 10 different places, and we picked one more or less at random.
That seems like a nightmare. I sure don't want to go through the trouble of making 10 different orders just to save 10%. If I wanted to jump through that many hoops I'd pick it up myself.
> That seems like a nightmare. I sure don't want to go through the trouble of making 10 different orders just to save 10%. If I wanted to jump through that many hoops I'd pick it up myself.
I believe GP is saying they don’t care which of the 10 restaurants they place their single order, and if they knew which one would deliver most efficiently, they would choose it.
As another commenter said, I wouldn’t make different orders. I’d just pick a restaurant based on what other neighbors have picked, and be content with whatever it is.
Sounds like they are still campaigning with investor dollars. I doubt they had a viable business before the wage increase. They should make like a good capitalist and just go out of business.
> DoorDash said the new laws collectively led to a reduction of some 1% of its overall orders in the first quarter
Not according to their own financials: orders were up 1M the first quarter for Door Dash compared to Q1 the previous year (+45M ‘23, +46M ‘24).
Door Dash don’t even mention the new laws in their most recent financials:
> In Q1 2024, Total Orders increased 21% Y/Y to 620 million and Marketplace GOV increased 21% Y/Y to $19.2 billion. We remain pleased with our execution against volume goals in all major areas of our business”
Between my various credit cards and bank accounts GrubHub and Door dash premium services are free
I slowed ordering when it became obvious the drivers were going to multiple restaurants, driving in the opposite direction to do other deliveries, and then my food from a relatively nearby restaurant was ice cold by the time I got it.
I stopped completely once they IPOed and it became a 30 minute back and forth for partial credit for missing food when they used to just issue you a full refund in 30 seconds.
> ...a 30 minute back and forth for partial credit for missing food when they used to just issue you a full refund in 30 seconds.
Back when I regularly had to go to an office, my coworkers and I tried out a bunch of the delivery services. The one we settled on was Bite Squad because they apparently paid their drivers as actual employees[0], so an hourly wage and benefits, and had actual performance standards. If an item was left off, Bite Squad would dispatch a driver to go get it and bring it to us.
All of the contractor-based services would just refund for food and be done with it. The problem is, that isn't what we wanted. If we'd wanted money instead of food, we wouldn't have ordered. The service expects us to do the management of additional attempts instead of it being part of their service.
Ever since Bite Squad left Seattle, and especially now that I don't have to go to an office more than once or twice a month, I've not bothered with the food delivery apps.
0 - This was pre-pandemic, before Bite Squad "overhauled" their business model.
89 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadIMO, it would be neat to see a government provided "gig brokerage" of sorts that handles the dispatch of things like this (even including long haul delivery, maybe even a mechanical turk equivalent).
When the service is ultimately provided by a contractor, what's the point of having middlemen compete?
Any of us are free to start such a thing right now, if they wish to spend the time putting it together and running it.
(But even as a socialist, I think that this is approximately the last thing that the government should be in the middle of.)
Remember to factor in investors' motivation to extract capital above all else. Short term profit taking is an invisible fist.
I remember Postmates used to be able to deliver from any restaurant or store in your local area. Those were the days.
How big of a thing must it be?
Pizza is a bit of a different model because pizza delivery is sufficiently popular for pizza places to orient around supporting delivery well in the local area and have the drivers vertically integrated in-house.
DoorDash et al. aren't innovators in anything other than creative contracting and marketing. There's no magic practical efficiency that makes their business work.
Source? At least according to this study[1] 92% of uber/lyft drivers in seattle made above minimum wage. True, this isn't exactly the same as for delivery workers, but given how fungible the two jobs are I think it's fair to treat them as approximately the same. Much more interesting is how much your earnings vary depending on your assumptions. The study calculated $17.40/hr by using pessimistic assumptions, and $23.25/hr using optimistic assumptions.
[1] https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/161915a8-b0b8-4dc4-b5ff-d...
It just doesn't seem to scale globally very well without a continuous cash injection.
Where this falls down is trying to scale the business to less affluent people without some serious limitations. Pizza delivery places for example generally have a small delivery radius which makes a huge difference.
It's illogical to say a business is not sustainable because it dies after its been kneecapped by regulation.
It's illogical to ignore the size of the market and think that there should somehow be a need for just any number of drivers instead of the required number of drivers.
It's illogical to ignore that when prices to customers are artificially low, customers will consume more than when they actually have to pay for what they consume.
Since the driver pool has been paid for by vc funding rather than consumers, there are more drivers than needed. A smaller number of drivers is perfectly sustainable.
Based on this my guess is that it's less about the competition and more about the middleman taking a cut.
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
But then that gets countered by not wanting to pay too much for a luxury service, such as delivery, when I can just jump in the car and pick it up.
One question: What did this people do before all of these apps came into play?
These days I live in a somewhat dense city and yet I still prefer to order nearby and go walk to pick it up, at least when I'm just ordering for myself. It's probably an extra $5-10 and usually at least 20 minutes more to have someone else pick it up.
As for the economics... If you force higher wages, then higher prices are likely and demand then goes down. Not surprising.
The alternative might be for business to respond by working on higher efficiency, to get the average price of a delivery down by sharing the labor - that would require figuring out how to give the delivery workers multiple orders from the same or nearby restaurants to deliver in the same direction. Might be possible to build but when the restaurants aren't cooperating (it's wasteful for the delivery guy to wait for your food to be ready) and there's not enough orders from one area to another it's tough. Add that a lot of food delivery is relatively time sensitive as not all food keeps well / stays warm long enough. I suspect pizza delivery is the main type of business that has solved it this way. For everyone else, it's clearly a tricky problem and the net result either way is to need less labor for food delivery, higher prices, or a mix of both.
Which is fine as long as we have other jobs those delivery drivers are willing to switch to instead. Imo that's a big part of the problem - mandating certain jobs will pay better without necessarily having a plan for creating other jobs for the folks who end up underworked/jobless as a result. Now if gig companies downsized their workforces like regular employers some of the extra jobs should result from the extra discretionary income spent by the remaining workers... But probably a tiny fraction of what's needed to avoid more unemployment. Complicating this may be that gig workers are subject to underemployment if not enough if them quit, and I suspect the unemployment safety net works poorly for them.
We went to a restaurant and ate there. Or we got takeout.
Only pizza was ever "delivered" because you could batch up multiple pizzas and deliver them simultaneously.
I don't even remember any delis doing delivery and at least their products travel well.
Can't you do the same with regular restaurants? I've been to many non-pizza restaurants where delivery drivers regularly come in to pick up food. Surely those restaurants could do the same?
"Chinese" places are probably the only ones that I think can get close.
Traditionally, one shop had one or more drivers who would deliver multiple orders in one trip, and then return back to that same shop to pick up and deliver the next round.
This is very different from services like Doordash, which are many-to-many in terms of locations. There's a huge efficiency loss here.
Also different: Pizza delivery was single-source. If there was a problem with the order, the driver could fix it. Things like "Hey, man. You forgot our bucket of soda" could be fixed pretty quickly and painlessly -- they'll just bring it over on the next round, usually rather quickly.
Things are not this way with Doordash.
Sometimes, the options in an area extended to sandwiches or Chinese food or a little bit beyond.
So that's what we did if we were either lazy or busy: We ate pizzas, or sandwiches, or Chinese food. These things can all transport fairly well.
We simply did not get soggy Whoppers, cold fries, or tacos delivered. (Some of us still don't, as we feel that it is the path of madness.)
In doing genealogy, I've seen the end results of allowing powerful corporations to decide the best offer people would have.
Mass die-offs of 45yo's from Black Lung disease springs to mind.
> I don't think gig workers are remotely comparable to coal miners from 50 years ago.
I wasn't comparing gig workers to coal miners. I was illustrating how "best offers" are designed by corporations and trend toward being exploitive.
Yup. It's a tale as old as time.
Simply raising raising wages just means fewer people will be employed/contracted, thereby maintaining ultimate cost.
Another side effect is with higher wages, people have more money, which means more money in circulation, which means merchants will charge more for goods/services rendered. Aka inflation.
"Just raise wages." is an easy and seemingly simple thing to say and do, but economics aren't easy nor simple.
I always pick up my own food, but I’m aware that makes me an anachronism.
I tried it once. I'm in a suburban area. Food took 90 min to arrive. The driver went to/from the front door 3 times, trading food, before we wound up with our pizzas. They were cold.
What put me permanently off was the mistreatment of restaurants by the delivery corporations.
The same thing we do now: get takeout, sit down at the location, or cook at home.
Hell, even before these apps were invented I always just went and got my pizza or grabbed it on the way home.
Pizza was different, as mentioned in a sibling comment, because the pizzas themselves were cheap and shitty, there were only 3 pizza shops that delivered in your area: Domino's, later Papa Johns, and usually some popular local chain (not Little Caesars, not Pizza Hut, neither delivered.) They frequently took way longer than they said they would, each driver was delivering pizzas to 5 locations average on a run, and if it showed up cold you would eat it anyway, or throw it in the oven for a few minutes.
This individual attention did not exist, because it was obviously too expensive to provide. Only upper-middle class professionals got non-pizza restaurant deliveries, it was more expensive than it is now.
Chinese might be an exception, too. A lot of people would get Chinese delivered. But it would always be a ton of stuff in those neat, stackable white boxes, and the person delivering rarely spoke English (recent immigrant.)
Simple, the same thing many of us still do today:
1. We make our own food at home, using stuff we bought at the grocery store.
2. If we want restaurant food, we get up and leave home and go to the restaurant and eat there, and enjoy freshly-made food instead of cold food that was made 45+ minutes ago.
3. If we really wanted to eat professionally-made food at home, we ordered pizza. The pizza industry figured out how to do delivery cost-effectively decades ago (and keep the food hot too, something the new app-delivery industry apparently still hasn't quite figured out). Also, take-out has been around for ages.
The sort of situation where I order DoorDash now (too busy to go out, going through a major depressive episode and don't have the emotional energy to cook) I would have microwaved a frozen meal 10 years ago.
But yeah there's obviously a some point at which the returns are diminishing, e.g. if it was $100/hour nothing would get done. Legally at least.
Likewise, the low-end employers are priced out of the market.
It's the same survival of fittest, except the weakest constituance is hurt most. They are very sparse so their voice is never heard.
their voice is heard to a disproportionate extent because there are entire companies like Walmart and really entire industries like food service that built a business model around being able to pay sub-living wages (usually with the difference made up by tax dollars or tips).
The idea is to incentivize companies to hire these people for otherwise unprofitable work and mostly to get the disabled out of the house and earning some money that they otherwise would not.
For example, most of the prescription glasses made in the US are made by blind people under such a scheme.
Honestly, it sounds terribly exploitative. But, from what I understand, these schemes are mostly successful in that the disabled are happy with it along with the employers.
Wouldn't be a problem if we had ubi instead of minimum wage, but alas, voters don't want it
His weekly earnings are down about 60% ..."I'm struggling to survive"
The unsaid implication: He used to make so much money from Uber Eats that he could afford the full set of NYC living costs.
Seriously? He made six figures as an Uber Eats driver?
That would seems like a pretty relevant detail to Jaget's story.
However, I'm with you that some chasm-filling speculation is needed to make the columns balance here.
That being said, the in restaurant experience sure as hell isn’t what it used to be, either. Rarely bother with a sit down place anymore.
Grocery delivery seems to be a winner, though. Costs about $20 more and I don’t have to spend two hours dealing with it? Count me in.
I wouldn't doubt the drivers were stealing food. We've had occasions where the "wrong driver" picked up the food, but then "got a flat tire" and couldn't bring it back. This was a multi-hundred dollar order. I don't buy that crap for one minute. Some driver stole the food, and the restaurant may also have been at fault for not checking to make sure the proper driver got the order.
What if they tried to coordinate before the order was placed? There have been many days where I would have been happy to eat food from one of 10 different places, and we picked a restaurant more or less at random.
If a platform could coordinate my choice with the choice of 4 very close by neighbors, then they could send one driver to pick up maybe $300-500 of orders ($60-100 food per household) and give us some sort of discount.
I would actually allow notifications from an app that sometimes messaged me to say "several of your neighbors have ordered from X Restaurant, which you've liked in the past. Do you want to order also, for a 10% discount?".
Of course, if they bullshitted and tried to fake-it-till-you-make-it with the order momentum (telling 50 neighbors that several already ordered), that would be annoying and potentially fraudulent. But I would be happy to see a competitor arise and shift the coordination from delivery to ordering. It could make the business model work much better, and would also cut down on travel time, food sogginess, etc.
That seems like a nightmare. I sure don't want to go through the trouble of making 10 different orders just to save 10%. If I wanted to jump through that many hoops I'd pick it up myself.
I believe GP is saying they don’t care which of the 10 restaurants they place their single order, and if they knew which one would deliver most efficiently, they would choose it.
Not according to their own financials: orders were up 1M the first quarter for Door Dash compared to Q1 the previous year (+45M ‘23, +46M ‘24).
Door Dash don’t even mention the new laws in their most recent financials:
> In Q1 2024, Total Orders increased 21% Y/Y to 620 million and Marketplace GOV increased 21% Y/Y to $19.2 billion. We remain pleased with our execution against volume goals in all major areas of our business”
I slowed ordering when it became obvious the drivers were going to multiple restaurants, driving in the opposite direction to do other deliveries, and then my food from a relatively nearby restaurant was ice cold by the time I got it.
I stopped completely once they IPOed and it became a 30 minute back and forth for partial credit for missing food when they used to just issue you a full refund in 30 seconds.
Back when I regularly had to go to an office, my coworkers and I tried out a bunch of the delivery services. The one we settled on was Bite Squad because they apparently paid their drivers as actual employees[0], so an hourly wage and benefits, and had actual performance standards. If an item was left off, Bite Squad would dispatch a driver to go get it and bring it to us.
All of the contractor-based services would just refund for food and be done with it. The problem is, that isn't what we wanted. If we'd wanted money instead of food, we wouldn't have ordered. The service expects us to do the management of additional attempts instead of it being part of their service.
Ever since Bite Squad left Seattle, and especially now that I don't have to go to an office more than once or twice a month, I've not bothered with the food delivery apps.
0 - This was pre-pandemic, before Bite Squad "overhauled" their business model.