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.
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’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.
Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.
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.
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.
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. Gambling, day trading. A lot of zero-sum stuff.
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 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.
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?
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.
Edit: Spelling. “right” to “sick”.
You might say "going home from the office 30 minutes earlier is absolutely worth $15" to me, but that has little to do with what your effective hourly wage is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You should run that experiment. Get two identical meals, one via delivery the other at the restaurant. Pay close attention to menu prices.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Nope. It's a marketplace. Your above argument is perfectly applicable to it as well.
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.
How did you arrive to this conclusion?
Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.
Didn't read - too expensive.
Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.
(⌐_⌐)ノ Empathy
(•ᴗ•)つ Apathy
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
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.
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.
> 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.
But it's too impractical. It'll probably be on throughout the year.
> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race
Just shows the power of being a politician that actually cares.
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.
I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.
Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.
I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752
> “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
"Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."
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 know you think you're dunking here, but unfortunately you're just proving that either: - You genuinely don't understand how the real works for vast amounts of people, in which case it would behoove you to educate yourself (maybe start by looking into topics like food deserts or Walmart's business practices in small towns) - You're consciously making a strawman argument, in which case please don't insult us with that BS
- tax structure: investment income get taxed less than payroll etc etc
- tax avoidance: offshore, trusts, using companies to write off the tax plus the benefit provided by the government on these write offs. Using assets to loan more with speculation, worse, the buy borrow die model where they borrow against the asset and the heirs inherit the gains never taxed, among many ways and loopholes.
- asset inflation: low interest rates increase the stock and property, good for who owns it, while the poor get to pay higher rent, the cantillon effect
- the housing and zoning topic, and how it’s one of the pillar of such indirect money stealing, a topic that needs a book to describe but the solution is simple, depreciating housing as assets.
- monopolies and few (or one) companies controlling the price, or hold down the wages, to keep poor people poorer and shifting the money more to who controls the scheme
- poor people end up usually paying even more with overdraft fees or higher interests, punishing the poor even further, and these interests goes to lenders and shareholders.
- that leads the wealthy to be able to lobby to shape the interests and taxes to their liking, the subsidies etc. when a crisis or hard time happens, all tax payers get to pay and shoulder that but in times of booms the profit stay and remain private.
And many more cases or situations, hell, not just monetary stuff, even remote work was attacked because it shifts a slight of power dynamics to employees rather than the employers.
Wages not catching up with inflation? Everything getting more expensive? The BBB giving massive tax cuts to the rich, while cutting government programs (which are a form of redistribution)?
> We get to choose
Up to a point, and it's naive to think that people are getting poorer only because of bad personal choices. The younger generations not being able to afford homes isn't because they're all bad with their finances. Treating housing as a speculation vehicle instead of an essential commodity is a political choice, and it was made by a political class completely permeated by moneyed interests.
Look, you don't even need to know about the "how". The gini index is getting worse, billionaires are turning into trillionaires while public infrastructure and social services are crumbling. It's natural, and correct, to connect the dots.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 yes, their business practices suck, and that's our fault as a society for yet again allowing capitalism to run amok.
Home ownership of Gen Z is aligned with millennials’ home ownership at their time. I agree about the K shape economy stuff, but it’s a bit more tricky than “everyone is poor”.
And even in his own party, the dominant """moderate""" branch does everything it can to hide his success and popularity, from fear that the electorate would wake up to how utterly corrupt and ineffective the DMC is.
I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png
Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.
And how come China does a much better job than the US while they have the same surface area? Why aren't you overlapping those two maps?
America underfunded? Yes.
There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.
I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.
But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.
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'm not sure why DoorDash should be responsible for disclosing that; DoorDash may not even know what the regular in-person menu prices are in the first place.
The solution to this is to stop allowing delivery services to take a cut of the restaurant's revenue. Instead they should be required to raise their delivery/service fees charged to the customer. Of course, this will likely result in fewer customers, so they don't want to do that, but it's the only honest thing to do.
I get that the delivery services do provide value to the restaurants in many cases, but ultimately the customer pays for it either way, so that cost should be made explicit to the customer.
For a DoorDash delivery driver, the problem is transparency. Consider a $7 delivery with a customer tip of $5, and the difference between being told:
"This delivery offers you $7", or
"This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $5 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $2, so the total you receive is still $7."
In both cases the customer behavior and end result for the driver is the same, but in the first case DoorDash doesn't even mention the tip, and quietly pockets it. Another example, with a driver tip of $10 instead:
"This delivery offers you $7, and the customer added a tip of $3", or
"This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $10 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $0, so the total you receive is $10."
The 2nd statement in both cases is the honest one, but of course that would make drivers feel cheated, so DD says the 1st thing, and completely hides that they offset "wages" with tips.
Regardless, I personally think this practice (for regular hourly employees or delivery drivers) is garbage; in my state, the tipped minimum wage is set to the same value as the non-tipped minimum wage, so employers don't get to pull that crap.
So like $1 per driver?
Also it's not like the tips they earn correlate with service drivers can provide. At most you can be a bit faster, but generally bound to traffic? (I haven't used them tbh).
If it's worth it to me at the price offered, I'll buy it. If it's not, I won't.
Does the theft of $16mm become worse if DoorDash was half the size?
If I steal $16mm I’d go to jail but it’s no big deal because a corporation did it? The apologia for this is baffling to me.
Not sure why you seem to think that the company only matters here, and the workers are irrelevant.
(And no, it's not $1 per driver, way to argue in bad faith.)
