Oh, the interShiitake is trying to keep up some reputation... Just the other day there was a posting on HN why no other Snowden files have been released. Go look for it.
I don't understand. What does Snowden stuff have to do with DoorDash's employment practices or an NY mayor? What is "interShiitake" supposed to reference?
the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VC’d their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasn’t been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it
Valuation yes, but if we take a step back, there must be value there. The idea of Uber really provided benefits to many groups. Example: minorities who were discriminated against by regular taxis, declining service level due to Taxi monopolies, etc. (Similar issues that Doordash solved as well.)
How can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between?
Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved:
1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves?
2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation?
3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors?
I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.
I am so trained now, that I didn’t even read what they were asking for. Just closed the tab and came here to see if there was anything of value. Too expensive to even read their wall.
Information wants to be free. But other than AI slop (where the tokens have become too cheap to meter), information costs money to produce. Pay with you info or your money. It's amazing how many people just cannot come to grips with that concept.
services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25. then delivery worker made $5 on that order. + the delivery worker expects a tip.
which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
I thought they were built on "time is money". If you make the equivalent of $70 an hour, do you care about spending $15 for someone to bring you lunch and save you 15-30 minutes of your workday?
...only because the company is committing wage theft to subsidize costs. I don't think it feels reasonable to say "Your employer has to meet certain wages, but they didn't so you're a sucker".
If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.
Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.
It was kind of fun doing this math back when I was a freelancer. An hour saved would literally produce more money than the order cost. But really, it would have been better to save the money by making food ahead of time.
Ya I dont get this argument. Takes me all of 2 mins to grab my lunch in the morning. It's also not a greasy burger that shortens my lifespan and physically disable's me.
The whole point of food delivery is for the occasions you can’t (e.g. sudden illness, or time management mishaps) or don’t want to (laziness/tiredness) cook or drive to grab a takeout. You pay a premium for the convenience, someone else takes care of it. Nothing wrong with that, no “suckers” in the general scheme.
From what I've seen its the fat lazy devs at work that order chipotle for lunch rather than walking downstairs to get it themselves. Mostly the younger ones too that are right out of school and should be saving their money.
I've always struggled with this thinking. Yes, you have finite hours in a day and if you spend an hour going to get food then you can't necessarily also be doing freelance work. But if you planned on working 8 hours to earn X dollars, you can still work 8 hours after spending an hour going to get food and still make X dollars. Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep. I guess it makes sense if you're trying to work every waking moment; and I can appreciate that some choose to and some have to.
> Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep.
Well, if you value an hour of your sleep or entertainment less than $15 dollars (if, for instance, you like to cook), then sure, spend it on cooking instead. Many of people would rather not, and their revealed preferences show it pretty clearly.
I don’t think paying someone to perform a service for you makes you a sucker.
I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
Eh, the difference is that DoorDash is a logistics company performing a service that restaurants do not like running (delivery). It’s not a middleman providing no value
The problem is they use exploitative labor practices (as we're seeing here) and price-dumping funded by infinite amounts of venture capital. It sets customer expectations to unsustainably low pricing and it forces restaurants to either heavily subsidise their own delivery drivers to keep customer prices low or, because barely anyone can sustain that, to shut down their own delivery service and use <gig company> instead.
And that in turn gives doordash, uber eats and whatnot access to a lot of data - who orders what and lives where or which restaurant is doing good and which is struggling - that can be sold to third parties. Governments (ICE and other agencies have been caught to just buy data from aggregators), advertisers, credit reporting agencies, political parties, you name it.
Sure. As a customer the value that doordash et al provide is hard to understate. A single point of contact, a single set of credentials, a unified UI compared to what used to be a ton of never-updated garbage wordpress installs, reliable tracking... but as a whole, we all lose.
> literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more
Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.
It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?
Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?
I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.
Skip the line passes are an obvious sucker play; they oversell tickets to the park so that people can go on like 1 ride every 4 hours, then charge again to actually be able to use the ticket you already bought (and simply don't deliver service to the others). Do you think they are unaware of the capacity at which reasonable latencies can be maintained?
In case you, or anyone else, actually care or are interested, there's a great deep dive video on the history of "FASTPASS" by the youtube channel Defunctland.
"It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. "
No - it's quite different and that's the point.
The issues beyond 'apparent value creation are':
1) asymmetries in power between different actors that induces some to make ill advised actions - passing off hidden costs and especially risks
2) externalisations - aka damaging the environment, labour regs (which exist due to 1)
3) misrepresntations in value to end customer - dark patterns, hidden fees, risks not apparent in the transaction.
Entire industries would not work if we had to properly account for a lot of things.
"I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ri" <- it's not just the 'price' that is high and you're 'willing to pay' - that's fine.
That's definitely not 'rip off' because you're not coerced in any way for that - that's just 'high prices. Aka the $10 bottle of water at an event - that is a 'rip off'.
It's all the other things in the system that make it problematic.
Last mile delivery by poor people almost should not exist as a business because it depends on externalizing too many things.
If they provided healthcare, vacation, job security, didn't force people to run around, all that stuff that removes the 'power and information asymmetry' - and then - it still works as a business, fine but it generally wont.
Some businesses are structurally unsound, and people invest in them to take advantage of broken systems (social, regulatory) at the margins.
Now 'Robot Delivery' - that's an entirely different prospect.
That's an attempt at real value creation. If we got our act together, everything could be delivered by little robots - today - already in 2026. It would reuire a lot of coordination.
I wonder how quickly businesses would advocate for better land use and city planning if these externalities were more apparent and properly accounted for instead of providing “convenience” in a system that has been designed to be inconvenient.
fast-rise sugar infested bun, non-organic antibiotic infested horrendous animal welfare beef, etc. - the BOM is well under $5, i'd think $3 at best. So, you pay $25 for sub-$5 bill of low quality materials (not good to your health with thus additional expenses down the road). Who is the sucker?
I think there's a business there, for sure, but the markup is definitely a problem for some. I think below a certain order volume it might be hard to get enough delivery people at the ready. As they ask customers to absorb more of the cost the volume could drop. If they don't have enough delivery people then that adds to the delivery time which makes it less and less worth it, at least to me.
I really dislike the unreliable delivery times. 99% of the time I just use the apps, or more likely the restaurant's site, to place the order and pick it up myself.
I have the time to do this though, so maybe it's more valuable to busier people, like parents.
Doordash and grubhub are insane for single food purchases. But the fees are barely noticed when feeding my family of 5. We use it every other week or so just because of how chaotic school activity schedules can be. When we order sushi/chinese for the kids the bill before any delivery services is around $200 for enough food for dinner and another meal with leftovers. The service charge is like $7 and I make sure the driver gets at least $10 regardless of the distance. Cheaper than if we ate in the restaurant and were expected to give a 15-20% tip.
> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more
Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.
Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.
What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.
If you think "high earners with company subsidized plans"(where I assume you fall based on the general demographics of this site, but correct me if I'm wrong) were the target audience of the ACA, you're right to be pissed. It was for the un/underinsured, and people with preexisting conditions.
But your comparison is wrong, because you can...elect to not use the service. You could pay less for less coverage (so like, buying food without paying for a delivery fee because you don't need the convenience). Also, the individual mandate was killed (sucking funding out of the whole program), so you could opt out of the service entirely.
Nobody is forcing you to have insurance (at a federal level).
> Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to
In a sense, I agree with this assessment, and I think it should be corrected. We should allow people to have the older, less expensive plans with their lifetime caps and preexisting condition exclusion. We'd need to work out the details on whether or not we would allow someone choosing those plans from coming back to the ACA plans in the future, though. Maybe for the right price it could work out. Definitely adds complexity, however.
There should not be anything of note between you and the doctors and services you choose. The layers of complexity and interference in our system a both nonsensical and costly, both in dollars and lives or outcomes.
I have over the years become a believer in the first payer concept. When I pay for goods and services, I get better goods and services. It's that simple.
We should, of course, help and support the less fortunate (weather that means for financial or health reasons). That should not mean that you screw everyone else to the wall with a disaster of a system that causes such distortion that you can actually find yourself at a doctors office in the US that is worse than a third country clinic. I have seen it with my own eyes. That's just insane.
Your previous plans were subsidized by the insurance company stealing money, basically. As soon as we said “you can’t steal” then surprise! Your plan is more expensive.
They stole through denying claims, denying coverage, and more. The reality is that if Obamacare didn’t exist, I would be uninsurable. Yes that might bring your price down. For a bit, until you also become uninsurable, then you’re also fucked.
Yes insurance can be very cheap if you only take on fit, healthy clientele who will never use your insurance. But yeah, for society that sucks so we stopped doing that.
> The reality is that if Obamacare didn’t exist, I would be uninsurable. Yes that might bring your price down.
There's nothing whatsoever wrong with covering everyone by having everybody contribute a bit more for those who might need more care. I am 100% for that.
That does not mean that a family's health insurance costs should TRIPLE or more. That's theft. Particularly when you barely use it. A couple hundred bucks a month, sure. Triple or quadruple? No, that's just wrong. Take that extra cost and multiply it by ten years. It's a shit-ton of money. They take away from retirement, kids college, etc.
What you cause it what a friend of mine has done for ten years: No insurance. If he needs something important he travels to Latin America, gets excellent care and at a reasonable cost that is LESS than the cost of insurance here in the US. Actual care costs less than paying for insurance. Go figure. And, on top of that, you get doctors who will spend 45 minutes talking to you rather than 5 minutes looking at a chart and see you next visit.
The only reason people accept the dumpster fire that US health insurance has become is because they have not been outside the US to understand how else it could be. This does not at all mean socialized medicine (which is, in general strokes, a disaster).
All the countries that the US is compared to have socialized medicine. I think it’s obvious socialized medicine just works better. The only reason you can even travel to get care is because of:
- currency exchange
- socialized medicine
Some countries, like the UK, also have private plans. What people miss is that the reason the private plans are so cheap is because of socialized medicine. When you have to compete with low cost or zero cost, then your price goes down. The US is the worst of all worlds, and a fully socialized system would work better.
The part you are missing is that these people are going to Latin America and paying for care, not using socialized medicine...which isn't the best at all.
Socialized medicine is another fantasy that has infected the minds of those who have never had to actually live under such fantasies.
Even before the penalty for non enrollment was set to zero, you could have still paid the $700 tax penalty and then had whatever plan for health insurance you wanted. If the market decided that there was no demand for those non eligible plans, then it means that the market collectively decided that keeping the old plans + 700 dollar additional annual cost was not a good value proposition compared to what replaced them. The net effect of everything taken together was that you would have to pay additional taxes.
You know, tariffs and gas prices going up have the effect of raising taxes. When the things you buy and the gas you buy costs more, you have to pay more in real dollars in sales and gas tax on those items. The tariffs and the gas prices also have the effect of killing industries locally, which might be more impactful nationally than predatory insurance plans that basically only cover going to the doctor's office for checkups. If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.
> Even before the penalty for non enrollment was set to zero, you could have still paid the $700 tax penalty and then had whatever plan for health insurance you wanted.
Nope, the net effect of the ACA was to make all those plans evaporate. No longer available. We tried. It was impossible to keep our plans and doctors.
You mention "the market" a few times. The ACA forced a paradigm shift, there was no market left. Not as it was pre-ACA. We have several doctors and medical professionals in our family. Believe me when I tell you that they all say the ACA is shit and it destroyed US healthcare. This is not to say it was perfect before the ACA, but it certainly was not this bad.
After a few experiences I concluded that the system the ACA has created is now worse than the DMV. I never thought I would find something that would top the DMV.
We had one horrific experience that I will not recount here in detail. My son tore his ACL. It took WEEKS to get his care sorted. It was incredible to witness the dysfunction and horrifically low quality of care we experienced.
I have friends who will travel to different countries in Latin America for medical care because of what the ACA did to their healthcare in the US. I was talking to one today over lunch in fact. He has been without US health insurance for a decade now. When he needs anything important he goes down to Argentina, gets better care and at a lower cost.
> If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.
The list of government abuse is long and wide. Don't get me started. My post was not intended to be a compendium. That said, yes, we have much to question...and if people ever got their heads out of their asses, we would.
Simple truth: Both major political parties deserve a solid spanking. They have caused more damage to the US over the last, say, 50 years (pick a number) than one could express in a simple post. Politics in this nation has become so disgusting it inspires projectile vomiting.
It's just a standard reintermediation play, inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides.
Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .
this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.
>inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides
And that is what OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to do. Currently they have to compete with each other due to anti-monopoly laws. Once they scare everybody into allowing collaboration between them ("or our AI will kill you all"), ie. removing anti-cartel provisions, they would be able to squeeze both sides - the suppliers of hardware and energy as well as the customers.
The enshittification model, but with an extra step because they actually have to employ labor.
First they exploit their own gig workers, to make an unsustainably cheap product and corner users. Then they exploit users, to monopolize distribution and corner restaurants. Then they exploit restaurants, threatening to cut off distribution entirely if they don't get an increasingly large share of profits.
Food delivery services offer convenience for a price. If I hire a courier service to bring some materials and tools to one of my electricians, it’ll cost me a minimum of $50.
I can pay a bit extra for food and $10 in tips and fees to have it delivered to me instead of spending half an hour driving to go get it myself. I know what I’m paying for and value the service they provide.
I was just ordering some food on Uber eats and noticed that my bill for 50 bucks of food came to $75 or something. So I decided it was wasteful and I'll drive and pick it up myself. I wasted half an hour of my life and driving at rush hour was also stressful. That wouldn't be worth it for 25 bucks but it turned out Uber somehow has a lower price than in person so that brought it down to 21 and then in the restaurant despite it being a counter place with no sitting they pressure you to tip way more than Uber app and I kind of autoclicked it, so my savings are down to like 10 bucks for 30 minutes of stressful driving and waiting in line.
I think the delivery charge is totally worth it, especially if you order multiple meals and make any amount of money at your job. You're just paying for convenience and I'm not convinced you're getting ripped off at all. Having some dude drive around town with your burger is expensive. If anything if the allegation is he is underpaid, it should be even more expensive.
> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25.
Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but when I use these services, the price comes out to something like 20%-30% more than the in-restaurant cost (yes, including the common practice of restaurants increasing menu prices on delivery sites to offset the delivery company's cut of their revenue).
Sure, it's often not cheap, but when I use these services it's because I do not want to go and do the pickup myself. I'm paying for that convenience, and I'm fine with it. If you're not, that's fine; no one is forcing you to use delivery services.
In any cases where they are actually violating labor laws or being deceptive with their pricing or practices, yes, they should absolutely be punished and stop doing that. But that doesn't change the fact that they provide a service -- delivering food to your door -- and businesses generally charge you when they provide a service. You can argue that the charge on offer is too high for you, but that's a personal decision for everyone to make.
And even if it does cost $15 to deliver a $10 burger in some scenarios, there are times when I am happy to do that to save myself 30-45 minutes of driving somewhere, finding parking, waiting, and driving home. My time has value to me, and sometimes I'd rather spend it sitting on my ass at home than driving around town. Lazy? Maybe. But it's my choice.
They knew that tons of other PACs and democracy-hating billionaires like Bill Ackman had their back. Cuomo spent $65 (!!!) per vote received, while Mamdani was at $15.
Just shows the power of being a politician that actually cares.
If they were honest about it and said something like "we believe our actions were fair and legal and disagree with this decision" it would at least be ideologically consistent.
> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
Even though the press likes to give Mamdani all the credit for these types of things, this started with a law passed under DeBlasio, and most of the investigation was done under Adams.
Mamdani deserves credit for taking this all the way.
Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."
I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.
Yes, the road is long and these sorts of investigations take time. Eric Adams is an old-school, working-class New Yorker. They tend to be corrupt, but they do get stuff done. His administration resolved a $20M Chipotle lawsuit, then launched and resolved a $39M Starbucks lawsuit.
Too bad having their names associated with this immoral politicking won’t cause them problems. An employee stealing a few hundred bucks would get a felony and probably never work a good job again. Founders stealing hundreds of millions from workers get to say whoopsie.
Not even a whoopsie. Look how many responders here defend this exploitative behavior that is only enabled through monopolization as "the market regulates this", or "nobody forces them to buy/work there". Pure libertarian brain rot, no better than the communists they always cry about.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760317/how-to-rule-... is eye opening. When many of us were in college, there was still some idealism about using technology to make the world a better place. Maybe that still exists at some universities, but Sand Hill Road wiped that out of Stanford.
DoorDash and gig companies generally are a play to destabilize employment and turn as many people as possible from employees entitled to benefits and legal protections into contractors that can be discarded at whim. How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers?
Their appeal initially was that they would deliver for places that didn't have their own drivers. So you went from only getting pizza and Chinese delivery to anything being available.
Now, everyone is offloading their deliveries to DoorDash. Wendy's first-party delivery is just a wrapper for DoorDash. Pizza Hut used DoorDash if they don't have enough drivers available. Even PetSmart or Petco uses DoorDash for delivery now.
Not saying it's right or good, but you could order from Pizza Hut and still get a gig worker if their driver called out stick today.
To play devils advocate, pre-UberEats era, we maybe had deliveries from Pizza places and some Chinese shops. Being able to order from basically everywhere and any time is very convenient. Restaurants are generating more sales as well, so it’s mostly the consumer, by choice, spends more on their dinner.
I'll concede the point on variety but I don't think the platforms or their terms are fair to restaurants, delivery drivers or perhaps even customers (though they're clearly choosing to engage). Our favorite Mexican food place in town will fill the orders but isn't happy with them and I imagine they're not alone.
Your original post seems to suggest that DoorDash doesn't actually provide value (that we didn't have before) to customers, but that's trivially false. I think that's the thing people are arguing against.
But yes, their business practices suck, and that's our fault as a society for yet again allowing capitalism to run amok.
Indeed, I don't like how the delivery companies double-dip by charging both the restaurant AND the customer for a delivery. A modest fee of like 5% to the restaurant would maybe be fine (Especially considering the restaurant is already likely paying 3% for credit card processing), but based on the price differences between DD and the restaurant's own menu, it likely 15-20%.
The problem of course is that a restaurant that refuses to work with deliveries then ends up getting significantly fewer orders than ones that do. It creates a bit of a racket. Restaurants feel forced to cooperate, or lose significant business.
As a customer, I get around a lot of the extra costs because my credit card gives me the Dash Pass for free as a little bonus, and Costco sells $100 DD gift cards for $80, so I'm effectively getting every deliver at 20% off.
Pizza shops (and, say, Chinese takeout restaurants) are the classic kinds of businesses that employed dedicated delivery drivers (or, more likely, it's a family business, and a family member does double duty).
But delivery sushi? Delivery pasta? Delivery tapas? Delivery burritos? Delivery Korean fried chicken? Delivery acai bowls? Delivery kebab?
DoorDash etc. gives us a variety of options that we mostly didn't really have before.
I do agree with you on the bullshit of turning employment into disposable contractors. But maybe we should change our laws to make that not possible, instead of condemning the idea that it's actually neat to be able to get nearly any kind of food from nearly any restaurant delivered to your door. We didn't used to have that.
No. I’ve heard similar stories from baristas at small coffee shops. Any tips through the tap to pay systems get split between the processor, business owner and then the staff. This should be illegal. People should be ashamed
Should people not be ashamed for not tipping the chef in the back...?
Tipping is problematic no matter how you look at it. Rather than getting outraged, how about focusing on discontinuing this pointless practice? I've yet to find a single pro-tipping person who is consistent in their views on tipping. They'll happily support one tipping practice in one scenario, and be against the exact same practice in a different sphere.
BTW, what Doordash was accused of was not tip sharing, but using it to pay less than minimum wage. Which is standard practice for restaurants in the majority of states. That's why I was asking.
Agree that paying below minimum wage is bullshit. The small print does though state that if tips don't make up the difference between their wage and minimum wage, the restaurant owner is on the hook to make up that difference.
Regardless, every tip is a savings to the business owner.
> The small print does though state that if tips don't make up the difference between their wage and minimum wage, the restaurant owner is on the hook to make up that difference.
DoorDash was following this exact same fine print.
I’m against tipping in any scenario. I don’t think tipping for good service should be the norm. You don’t deserve a tip because you brought my food out correctly and timely, you don’t deserve a tip for delivering my appliances without damaging my walls, you don’t deserve a tip for ringing the register with a smile, all of that is what you’re supposed to do.
If the entire economic model hinges on the majority of people tipping variable amounts then the model seems broken. Charge proportionately more and don’t rely tips, everyone will have a better experience.
This is a reminder to the naive people who think things are getting worse financially because covid/immigrants/gas/AI/supplychain/[insert BS reason], and not just the 1% greed. Things got bad and living wages are not enough substantially after covid at the same time when billionaires are getting exponentially richer, and all above excuses up there are only to distract the public from this simple fact: your life is getting worse because someone way wealthier is stealing your money, and unfortunately legally too because who writes and approves these legislation and laws is part of the game.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 82.4 ms ] threadHow can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between?
Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved:
1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves?
2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation?
3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors?
I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.
Didn't read - too expensive.
which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.
Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.
Well, if you value an hour of your sleep or entertainment less than $15 dollars (if, for instance, you like to cook), then sure, spend it on cooking instead. Many of people would rather not, and their revealed preferences show it pretty clearly.
I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
I'd rather the price of goods be fixed, and they tell me what the delivery fee is.
And have a small delivery fee.
And have a small “city wants DoorDash to pay its workers fairly, so it’ll charge you an arbitrary amount extra” fee
And a bag fee.
And sales tax.
And a tip
Oh and don’t forget the service fee.
I’m not kidding, this is from a recent receipt. There are 6 fees PLUS the cost of the actual food.
Other delivery platforms are similar
You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.
I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.
And that in turn gives doordash, uber eats and whatnot access to a lot of data - who orders what and lives where or which restaurant is doing good and which is struggling - that can be sold to third parties. Governments (ICE and other agencies have been caught to just buy data from aggregators), advertisers, credit reporting agencies, political parties, you name it.
Sure. As a customer the value that doordash et al provide is hard to understate. A single point of contact, a single set of credentials, a unified UI compared to what used to be a ton of never-updated garbage wordpress installs, reliable tracking... but as a whole, we all lose.
Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.
It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?
Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?
I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.
No - it's quite different and that's the point.
The issues beyond 'apparent value creation are':
1) asymmetries in power between different actors that induces some to make ill advised actions - passing off hidden costs and especially risks
2) externalisations - aka damaging the environment, labour regs (which exist due to 1)
3) misrepresntations in value to end customer - dark patterns, hidden fees, risks not apparent in the transaction.
Entire industries would not work if we had to properly account for a lot of things.
"I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ri" <- it's not just the 'price' that is high and you're 'willing to pay' - that's fine.
That's definitely not 'rip off' because you're not coerced in any way for that - that's just 'high prices. Aka the $10 bottle of water at an event - that is a 'rip off'.
It's all the other things in the system that make it problematic.
Last mile delivery by poor people almost should not exist as a business because it depends on externalizing too many things.
If they provided healthcare, vacation, job security, didn't force people to run around, all that stuff that removes the 'power and information asymmetry' - and then - it still works as a business, fine but it generally wont.
Some businesses are structurally unsound, and people invest in them to take advantage of broken systems (social, regulatory) at the margins.
Now 'Robot Delivery' - that's an entirely different prospect.
That's an attempt at real value creation. If we got our act together, everything could be delivered by little robots - today - already in 2026. It would reuire a lot of coordination.
fast-rise sugar infested bun, non-organic antibiotic infested horrendous animal welfare beef, etc. - the BOM is well under $5, i'd think $3 at best. So, you pay $25 for sub-$5 bill of low quality materials (not good to your health with thus additional expenses down the road). Who is the sucker?
I really dislike the unreliable delivery times. 99% of the time I just use the apps, or more likely the restaurant's site, to place the order and pick it up myself.
I have the time to do this though, so maybe it's more valuable to busier people, like parents.
You should run that experiment. Get two identical meals, one via delivery the other at the restaurant. Pay close attention to menu prices.
Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.
Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.
What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.
See the difference there?
Nope. It's a marketplace. Your above argument is perfectly applicable to it as well.
But your comparison is wrong, because you can...elect to not use the service. You could pay less for less coverage (so like, buying food without paying for a delivery fee because you don't need the convenience). Also, the individual mandate was killed (sucking funding out of the whole program), so you could opt out of the service entirely.
Nobody is forcing you to have insurance (at a federal level).
See the difference there?
In a sense, I agree with this assessment, and I think it should be corrected. We should allow people to have the older, less expensive plans with their lifetime caps and preexisting condition exclusion. We'd need to work out the details on whether or not we would allow someone choosing those plans from coming back to the ACA plans in the future, though. Maybe for the right price it could work out. Definitely adds complexity, however.
I have over the years become a believer in the first payer concept. When I pay for goods and services, I get better goods and services. It's that simple.
We should, of course, help and support the less fortunate (weather that means for financial or health reasons). That should not mean that you screw everyone else to the wall with a disaster of a system that causes such distortion that you can actually find yourself at a doctors office in the US that is worse than a third country clinic. I have seen it with my own eyes. That's just insane.
They stole through denying claims, denying coverage, and more. The reality is that if Obamacare didn’t exist, I would be uninsurable. Yes that might bring your price down. For a bit, until you also become uninsurable, then you’re also fucked.
Yes insurance can be very cheap if you only take on fit, healthy clientele who will never use your insurance. But yeah, for society that sucks so we stopped doing that.
There's nothing whatsoever wrong with covering everyone by having everybody contribute a bit more for those who might need more care. I am 100% for that.
That does not mean that a family's health insurance costs should TRIPLE or more. That's theft. Particularly when you barely use it. A couple hundred bucks a month, sure. Triple or quadruple? No, that's just wrong. Take that extra cost and multiply it by ten years. It's a shit-ton of money. They take away from retirement, kids college, etc.
What you cause it what a friend of mine has done for ten years: No insurance. If he needs something important he travels to Latin America, gets excellent care and at a reasonable cost that is LESS than the cost of insurance here in the US. Actual care costs less than paying for insurance. Go figure. And, on top of that, you get doctors who will spend 45 minutes talking to you rather than 5 minutes looking at a chart and see you next visit.
The only reason people accept the dumpster fire that US health insurance has become is because they have not been outside the US to understand how else it could be. This does not at all mean socialized medicine (which is, in general strokes, a disaster).
- currency exchange
- socialized medicine
Some countries, like the UK, also have private plans. What people miss is that the reason the private plans are so cheap is because of socialized medicine. When you have to compete with low cost or zero cost, then your price goes down. The US is the worst of all worlds, and a fully socialized system would work better.
Socialized medicine is another fantasy that has infected the minds of those who have never had to actually live under such fantasies.
You know, tariffs and gas prices going up have the effect of raising taxes. When the things you buy and the gas you buy costs more, you have to pay more in real dollars in sales and gas tax on those items. The tariffs and the gas prices also have the effect of killing industries locally, which might be more impactful nationally than predatory insurance plans that basically only cover going to the doctor's office for checkups. If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.
Nope, the net effect of the ACA was to make all those plans evaporate. No longer available. We tried. It was impossible to keep our plans and doctors.
You mention "the market" a few times. The ACA forced a paradigm shift, there was no market left. Not as it was pre-ACA. We have several doctors and medical professionals in our family. Believe me when I tell you that they all say the ACA is shit and it destroyed US healthcare. This is not to say it was perfect before the ACA, but it certainly was not this bad.
After a few experiences I concluded that the system the ACA has created is now worse than the DMV. I never thought I would find something that would top the DMV.
We had one horrific experience that I will not recount here in detail. My son tore his ACL. It took WEEKS to get his care sorted. It was incredible to witness the dysfunction and horrifically low quality of care we experienced.
I have friends who will travel to different countries in Latin America for medical care because of what the ACA did to their healthcare in the US. I was talking to one today over lunch in fact. He has been without US health insurance for a decade now. When he needs anything important he goes down to Argentina, gets better care and at a lower cost.
> If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.
The list of government abuse is long and wide. Don't get me started. My post was not intended to be a compendium. That said, yes, we have much to question...and if people ever got their heads out of their asses, we would.
Simple truth: Both major political parties deserve a solid spanking. They have caused more damage to the US over the last, say, 50 years (pick a number) than one could express in a simple post. Politics in this nation has become so disgusting it inspires projectile vomiting.
Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .
this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.
And that is what OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to do. Currently they have to compete with each other due to anti-monopoly laws. Once they scare everybody into allowing collaboration between them ("or our AI will kill you all"), ie. removing anti-cartel provisions, they would be able to squeeze both sides - the suppliers of hardware and energy as well as the customers.
First they exploit their own gig workers, to make an unsustainably cheap product and corner users. Then they exploit users, to monopolize distribution and corner restaurants. Then they exploit restaurants, threatening to cut off distribution entirely if they don't get an increasingly large share of profits.
I can pay a bit extra for food and $10 in tips and fees to have it delivered to me instead of spending half an hour driving to go get it myself. I know what I’m paying for and value the service they provide.
I think the delivery charge is totally worth it, especially if you order multiple meals and make any amount of money at your job. You're just paying for convenience and I'm not convinced you're getting ripped off at all. Having some dude drive around town with your burger is expensive. If anything if the allegation is he is underpaid, it should be even more expensive.
Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but when I use these services, the price comes out to something like 20%-30% more than the in-restaurant cost (yes, including the common practice of restaurants increasing menu prices on delivery sites to offset the delivery company's cut of their revenue).
Sure, it's often not cheap, but when I use these services it's because I do not want to go and do the pickup myself. I'm paying for that convenience, and I'm fine with it. If you're not, that's fine; no one is forcing you to use delivery services.
In any cases where they are actually violating labor laws or being deceptive with their pricing or practices, yes, they should absolutely be punished and stop doing that. But that doesn't change the fact that they provide a service -- delivering food to your door -- and businesses generally charge you when they provide a service. You can argue that the charge on offer is too high for you, but that's a personal decision for everyone to make.
And even if it does cost $15 to deliver a $10 burger in some scenarios, there are times when I am happy to do that to save myself 30-45 minutes of driving somewhere, finding parking, waiting, and driving home. My time has value to me, and sometimes I'd rather spend it sitting on my ass at home than driving around town. Lazy? Maybe. But it's my choice.
Just shows the power of being a politician that actually cares.
> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
This is villain shit.
Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."
I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.
Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.
Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.
(⌐_⌐)ノ Empathy
(•ᴗ•)つ Apathy
Now, everyone is offloading their deliveries to DoorDash. Wendy's first-party delivery is just a wrapper for DoorDash. Pizza Hut used DoorDash if they don't have enough drivers available. Even PetSmart or Petco uses DoorDash for delivery now.
Not saying it's right or good, but you could order from Pizza Hut and still get a gig worker if their driver called out stick today.
One word: variety.
My local sushi place isn't going to have enough delivery orders to justify having delivery drivers on staff.
Heck, I remember years ago (Was it the late 90s?) when McDonald's tried to do delivery.
But yes, their business practices suck, and that's our fault as a society for yet again allowing capitalism to run amok.
The problem of course is that a restaurant that refuses to work with deliveries then ends up getting significantly fewer orders than ones that do. It creates a bit of a racket. Restaurants feel forced to cooperate, or lose significant business.
As a customer, I get around a lot of the extra costs because my credit card gives me the Dash Pass for free as a little bonus, and Costco sells $100 DD gift cards for $80, so I'm effectively getting every deliver at 20% off.
But delivery sushi? Delivery pasta? Delivery tapas? Delivery burritos? Delivery Korean fried chicken? Delivery acai bowls? Delivery kebab?
DoorDash etc. gives us a variety of options that we mostly didn't really have before.
I do agree with you on the bullshit of turning employment into disposable contractors. But maybe we should change our laws to make that not possible, instead of condemning the idea that it's actually neat to be able to get nearly any kind of food from nearly any restaurant delivered to your door. We didn't used to have that.
Tipping is problematic no matter how you look at it. Rather than getting outraged, how about focusing on discontinuing this pointless practice? I've yet to find a single pro-tipping person who is consistent in their views on tipping. They'll happily support one tipping practice in one scenario, and be against the exact same practice in a different sphere.
BTW, what Doordash was accused of was not tip sharing, but using it to pay less than minimum wage. Which is standard practice for restaurants in the majority of states. That's why I was asking.
Regardless, every tip is a savings to the business owner.
DoorDash was following this exact same fine print.
If the entire economic model hinges on the majority of people tipping variable amounts then the model seems broken. Charge proportionately more and don’t rely tips, everyone will have a better experience.
I've used one of these delivery services directly only once since they've all existed. They have been pretty blatant scum since the rip.
But it's too impractical. It'll probably be on throughout the year.
1790224159 | DoorDash's $131.5M Settlement with the City of New York | https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/dcwp | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49826260 | 1 comment