You're going to have to pay a lot more. The model can't be sustained at this price. Once the driver pays for gas and (over time) wear and tear on the car, even with healthy tips this ends up being sub-minimum wage. We got used to that price when VC money was subsidizing it and gas was half the price it is now.
Yeah you can read someone's personal account on how they are able to clear $20 an hour regularly doing delivery, but they have to employ all kinds of strategies to do so, including taking multiple orders at once, purposely ignoring orders that are unlikely to have significant tips, and completely ignoring entire sections of the city that aren't "hotspots" with tons of restaurants cranking through orders. Not to mention they are still probably undercounting the cost of wear on their car, and most people touting their delivery driver profitability are probably exaggerating.
For the former, I wish there was an app that notified me when a neighbor orders from a restaurant I’ve frequented, near a time of day I’ve ordered. They could offer a discount for piggyback orders, since the cost to the driver is negligible and they can convince the restaurant that they provided the value-add of the additional revenue.
That’s a privacy nightmare.
Let's be clear, this will happen regardless if you get the notification or not. Your purchases are going to be analyzed down to the second you made the purchase.
> ... when a neighbor orders from a restaurant ...
More to the point, it stays "safe" until (let's be real) there is a data breach. That's less of a privacy nightmare when you consider there's a much smaller range of actors that will use the data from a breach. Contrariwise, the ability to just query their API for some of that data gets turned into an app that someone's stalker ex downloads so they can proceed with stalking.
Privacy nightmare indeed.
"Neighbors" is a loose term. It doesn't literally mean only the people you live immediately next to. Aside from the fact that the person receiving the notification has no information about the radius this notification was triggered by, there would also not be identifying information in the notification. You're not being told "That person across the hall, John Smith, bought a large pizza from ABC pizza ten minutes ago and is on his way to pick it up now".
A stalker would get no actionable information from "Someone in your area ordered sushi from XYZ".
There is also no indication that this would be available in any sort of publicly scrapable API, I really don't know where you pulled that from. Push notifications, by definition, are not queried for.
If a platform created this feature I imagine they would also prime the pump with dishonest notifications about “a neighbor ordered from X restaurant”, with the expectation that they could parlay a single fake order into many real ones.
If you think delivery is unsustainable because cars cost money, I got news for you: You live in a bubble, and it's the cars that are unsustainable.
Outside of the car-centric world of US suburbia, most of the western world is actually doing deliveries on scooters and ebikes, which are very quick to navigate medium-to-high-density cities and can do several deliveries per trip.
I've ordered a lot on Takeaway, at least once a week on average. The last time I saw somebody pull up in a car was during the COVID lockdowns, and I suspect it's because there was basically nobody on the streets.
The business model is broken, because car-centrism is broken. In the civilized world, things are ok.
Either way, fuck Uber. There's better alternatives.
Just because you might have a different experience doesn't mean this is US centric. The same happens across Canada and in several big cities in South America.
Many big US cities really aren't densely populated. e,g, including 2 of the 4 largest: LA & Houston.
I ... think I'm calling NYC part of the "civilized world" and I'm not sure how to feel.
I remember seeing a map of the US denoting whether the majority of commute was done by personal car vs public transport. The entirety of the US was by personal car… except for NYC. It had a bit of an Astérix feel to it.
I used UberEats once (in Sydney) because I had one of those coupons. UberEats was garbage. Cost too much and I could have gone to the place myself and returned in half the time.
I can’t advice beyond that but Uber is awful awful awful. Every time I give them a chance I regret it, be it on price, support, ethics, quality …
This is the weirdest straw man. Scooters are cheaper to operate and faster if there’s any traffic.
Scooters are very limited in cargo capacity are not particularly viable in rainy or winter weather, not to mention just statistically increased injuries and danger for riders, which eventually translates into liability with scale. If you have to make multiple trips when one car trip would have sufficed, that completely undermines the cheap & fast argument. If you have to have cars around for bad weather days or bad weather seasons anyway…
> Scooters are very limited in cargo capacity
Only Americans would be regularly ordering so much takeout as to worry about scooters not being able to transport it. You really need to reconsider your dietary choices if this is a serious concern.
> Scooters […] are not particularly viable in rainy or winter weather
Scooters are perfectly viable in rainy weather. Nobody does food deliveries with a car in London.
I’m sorry you felt the need to get snarky. Making assumptions undermines your argument. It’s not hard for the orders for 2 families of light eaters to not fit in a single scooter.
This, again, is the norm in Europe.
Why should the average delivery guy be driving a car to be able to accept big orders that probably make up less than 1% of all deliveries?
Now I still dislike the services and it's really annoying that they caused this revival of motorscooters who are now driving recklessly on the bike paths, but transport volume is really not an issue.
I don’t need to present any evidence to the contrary because I didn’t make any claims to the contrary. I’m not claiming scooter usage isn’t high, I didn’t say it’s not more than cars or bikes. I was more careful than that.
You made a strong claim that you can’t back up, and you’ve already admitted that you’re just making up. That’s on you, not me. I’m simply sensitive to people making assumptions and insisting on calling them facts, and that is what you did.
Just like your unfortunate and unnecessary anti-American comments that got you downvoted, you could have ended this by simply acknowledging gracefully that it’s your opinion, and you believe it’s most, rather than continuing to add hyperbole after hyperbole, exaggeration after exaggeration on top. Claiming scooter usage of scooters for food delivery is the same as the sky being blue is a pretty bad analogy, and weakens your point.
Adding an ad-hominem on top accusing me of trolling just becuase you can’t answer my question also reflects poorly on you and tends to undermine what you’re trying to say. It would be so much stronger if you simply qualified your claim as your own belief and left it at that, or did some Googling to find stats. I’m sorry that asking for evidence of what you said upset you so much.
anti-American? Seek help buddy.
> It would be so much stronger if you simply qualified your claim as your own belief and left it at that, or did some Googling to find stats.
Look, my claim is obvious to anyone who isn’t completely out of touch with the world outside of North America.
“Googling to find stats”? There obviously isn’t going to be any meaningful numbers to be found on Google wrt this.
Using cars for food deliveries is a completely ridiculous idea in most cities of the world. There’s no parking! How are you going to deliver food with a car when there’s no free parking?
Shit, what do you think are the odds that a food delivery guy can even afford a car in most of the world? There’s something like 1 billion passenger cars in the world, that leaves you with something like 1 8th of a car per person.
This really is as obvious as “the sky is blue”.
To suggest that you’re trolling is simply the most charitable way to interpret your comment.
Even in Dubai scooters are the norm, despite the city embracing a very American take on urban design.
No, I don't have data to back this up. I don't need to, this is obvious to anyone who has traveled the world. If you read this thread, you will only see Americans talking about food delivered by car.
The exception was riding a standard bicycle.
Sure, I live in mainland Europe, but you talk as if you talk for everywhere.
Scooter deliveries are the norm even in the warmest areas of Europe.
Same goes for places like Tehran, in fact almost all of Asia.
Depending on geographic location, no doubt. Can you imagine risking your life on a scooter weaving through idiots in their lifted pickups in any American metro?
Last I lived in Calgary, trucks were absolutely the norm.
>That's especially true in Alberta, where 89 per cent of spending on new vehicles this year has gone to trucks, vans and SUVs. That compares to about 80 per cent, nationwide.
>"We're basically a truck market," said Denis Ducharme, president of the Motor Dealers Association of Alberta.
Having been to both (but not having driven a scooter in Atlanta) I'd suggest scooting around Paris is very different than scooting around Atlanta.
For example, the Wagoneer is the SUV version of the RAM.
The Suburban and Tahoe are the SUV versions of GM trucks.
The Land Cruiser, Sequoia, and Lexus LX are the same platform as the Tundra.
Etc.
Automakers don’t do one-off light trucks. They are all shared platforms.
And, I mean... I lived there. Saw many more trucks than anything else on the road.
Traffic camera feeds suggest this is not the case by a long shot? I don't have a particular stake in this race though.
Sure, in the winter the proportion of couriers driving cars increases. You also see tons of people on fatbikes and similar.
My town has just under 120k people and the majority of deliveries are done by car.
Truly, a shocking new development.
You said "americans avoid two wheeled vehicles for no reason".
They have cars anyway so they use them.
The reason they need cars is because it gets cold, there are highways that go fast and it's dangerous and illegal to take young kids or more than one kid on a scooter. This is not complicated.
Also the honda scoopy and yamaha scooters are 115cc and can't get up to american highway speeds. In Thailand it isn't even legal to drive scooters or even motorcycles on their highways.
Maybe you should go on holiday to Vietnam in the winter, you might realize there is no snow in Vietnam.
Americans usually need a car anyway so they already have one.
It has everything to do with your refutation of that claim, however.
My actual implicit claim is that there appears to be a degree of truth in the idea that US residents have a cultural aversion to two-wheeled transport that extends beyond the justifications you proffered to dismiss the claim.
No there isn't. People have jobs to go to and there isn't much public transportation, it gets cold, snows and people need to use the highways. People need to have a car so they already have a car and that's why scooters are usually something people buy for fun and not neccesity.
People in developed economies shouldn't be carrying around sofas on the backs of mopeds as they do in Vietnam, but it should be reasonable enough to deliver a pizza on one where the weather allows in the USA.
FWIW: I'm very much a car guy.
The 'sub' is a reference to the proximity to the (likely denser) city, not a step between urban and rural.
So for instance, the small town I live in is also considered urban (but is located in a rural county).
In any case, we’re discussing the sustainability of delivery services. Most of the world lives in cities, it really doesn’t matter if they’re unsustainable in rural areas.
While you’re at it, maybe also explain how this has anything to do with the subject at hand?
This was in 1990.
When I wasn't driving, I was grating cheese, or folding boxes, or cleaning. There were always slow times during the shift for this work.
I had a used car, and as a teenager, and later as an adult in college, the job paid quite well at the time.
Tips on busy nights would double or triple my wage.
Drivers can very much make a good wage delivering pizza! This is because a traditional pizza place only delivers within a certain range, has its own drivers, and each driver(when busy) can take 2 to 5 orders, and deliver them in an optimal route.
As a driver, you get very, very good at driving your neighborhood, knowing all the slow and fast spots, and the best route to deliver 4 orders in one trip optimally.
I'd often deliver 20 pizzas an hour on Friday nights, all hot, all fresh!
Yet an uber driver delivers for a dozen companies, each to different places, may drive miles to get to each company, then drive that single order to the customer. Uber drivers cannot optimize the same way.
Just the fact that when idle, I did work (so not a loss for the company), yet when a pizza popped out I was there, ready!.. is an optimization uber eats loses at. Idle for them is a loss.
Uber eats, all external delivery services are the worst. If your main business is delivery(pizza), you are nuts to even allow them to pick up at your establishment.
Grubhub, for example, will charge you an 18% service fee, a $1 "big/expensive city" fee, a tip (for the driver), and then also a delivery fee on top of that.
That's before the inflated menu prices and price gouging they do to the businesses.
Still, it's a lot more economical for reasonably busy delivery places to just employ their own drivers that can take care of a few deliveries in one shot.
It will be much cheaper once there are self-driving cars. You don't have to pay for the drive, just for somebody doing the final delivery from the car to the door.
It will be even cheaper, if customers are willing to leave their house and fetch the food from the car at the street. Then you don't have to pay anybody, just some cents per mile for the vehicle.
So if they have the skills and tenacity to consistently make slightly better than a living wage (probably for only a few hours a day) they probably have what it takes to get and keep a regular job paying notably better?
To see that 20/hr requires all kinds of strategies now — it’s a different world.
Let the poor rookie go get stiffed on a tip.
* Address changed, but 25 year later I actually still remember the real address.
I think that a solid portion of workers will accept significantly higher costs in exchange for slightly higher income, even if they come out worse. Lots of people will just look at the paycheck and won't think about their gas bill or how much time they actually spent.
Plus, one hour making $30 lets people rationalize 20 hours making $5/hr. That's how gambling works.
Add on the ability to "be your own boss," work when you want and start earning immediately, and I think people will keep doing delivery work even if the pay is shit.
Apps like these are relying on people who've already sunk some huge amount of money into a car and are not doing the fully loaded cost per mile calculation of operating a car in stop-and-go delivery service in an urban environment.
If you calculate the purchase cost of car, insurance, fuel, repairs/maintenance, tires, oil changes, depreciation etc, it's quite bad.
The actual amount of money earned by the delivery person after subtracting the fully loaded cost of the car is often near minimum wage in some states.
Much the same as Lyft and Uber actually.
You probably drive a nice new Camry or some other vehicle that is far from the "floor value for A to B transportation in a given mechanical condition" and will fall in value precipitously as it hits various milestones. The delivery driver has some 15yo car with over 150k on it where value is purely dependent on mechanical condition.
You probably replace your tires when your mechanic tells you. These delivery driver runs them until they're bald.
You take your car to the premium mechanic. The delivery driver has "a guy" who does 99% of his basic maintenance for cheap and only ever has big stuff done at the mechanic.
These people (the ones who understand the economics of what they do, which is most of them) don't maintain their cars like techies do. They take a page out of the age old "pizza delivery" playbook. With the highly variable nature of distance driven and compensation these people are generally well aware of operational costs vs gross income. You kind of have to be.
if you make $32k a year, a $4000 corolla is a lot of money.
it is not at all the same economics as the actual historical method of pizza delivery by cheap crappy car, because of the greatly increased cost of fuel (while delivery driver wages are nearly the same now as they were 20 years ago), and the fact that the traditional delivery driver is paid almost entirely in cash.
taking advantage of a car you already have still has a calculable financial cost in how much fuel and wear/tear you put on a car doing a theoretical 8 hour delivery shift.
app based delivery service things are relying upon the delivery people not calculating the fully loaded cost of their time and vehicle together to determine their own real net wage.
If you want more money you have the choice between picking up an inflexible 2nd or 3rd low hour job vs filling that time doing gig economy crap using stuff you already own (a car). Gig economy crap might not pay well after expenses, but is still very much net positive after expenses.
They know that cars cost money per mile to run. They might not know exactly how much but they have a pretty good idea on an annual basis. If picking up a crappy min-wage job that requires you to keep to their schedule is the alternative then gig economy crap is often the least worst option.
These people aren't idiots. Stop acting like they are. This is one of the things HN does that really pisses me off. As a rule poor people are much, much, much better at tracking cumulative expenses than the kind of people who shop at whole foods and only have a vague idea of what things cost because they can afford it either way and don't actually need to hone that skillset.
I didn't say that they're idiots, my point was that they're being taken advantage of in the current economic situation that they exist in.
Maybe you should question why these people are apparently forced to pick between nothing other than an effectively-minimum-wage gig economy job with no benefits or job security, or a minimum wage job assembling food at taco bell or something and nothing better, effectively operating as a permanent underclass. From the way you describe it you seem to be totally okay with that situation in the economy. I'm not.
> If you want more money you have the choice between picking up an inflexible 2nd or 3rd low hour job
oh for fuck's sake, why don't you just tell people that they should lick the boots of their gig economy no-benefits "employer" some more? get a 2nd or 3rd job just to exist in this late stage capitalist hellscape with 4 roommates in any major city.
The gig economy crap isn't bad. It's just another set of options in the sea of crap jobs. If anything it puts pressure on jobs that pay a little better to be more flexible.
If these people really thought they were getting the shaft they'd have gone and got other equally crap jobs. We're leaving what was probably one of the lowest unemployment periods in US history. It's not like the bulk of these people couldn't have been mixing paint at Lowes, pushing a broom, manning a cash register at Walmart, schlepping boxes around a warehouse or stripping drain plugs at Jiffy Lube had they felt so inclined to. But instead they took these gig jobs? Why? Because all things considered it was less crappy than the next best also crappy option.
>oh for fuck's sake, why don't you just tell people that they should lick the boots of their gig economy no-benefits "employer" some more? get a 2nd or 3rd job just to exist in this late stage capitalist hellscape with 4 roommates in any major city.
Stop being dense. Nobody is falling for it. These gig jobs are not typically primary jobs. They make shit primary jobs because the income is variable week to week. They're typically people's 2nd or 3rd job that they can schedule around their primary one.
If you want to sugar coat the reality of these jobs you're doing it for yourself, not for them. These jobs are low skill, low pay and low status and the people doing them know it. They have bigger problems then whether specific language choices do or don't offend the sensibilities of the ivory tower crowd.
App drivers are constantly playing this game of guessing where the next order will come from and where they'll end up.
In the app case, the business may still benefit (except now the apps have pressure to try extract discounts from the business), but that -$1 for delivery is either being subsidised by VC funding which won't last, or by paying the delivery staff less than their real costs.
b) it used to be a lot less costly to operate a basic car in the US/Canada on a dollar per mile or km basis
To point B, how is this tech-specific? The question was about why someone driving their car to deliver for Domino's is OK but driving their car to deliver for DoorDash is exploitation.
15 or 20 years ago if you order a pizza from your local pizza place, the price you pay for the pizza is fixed and known, and you tip the driver in cash. there's no extra 3rd charge line item for "delivery" anywhere.
point B, the advent of app based food delivery in the past 8 years happens to coincide with greatly increased cost of operating the car. I was explaining why traditional method of delivery used to be much more economically viable. Two things happening simultaneously, increase in cost of fuel and operating cars and the increased popularity of app based food delivery does not mean correlation equals causation.
Food delivery services, on the other hand, have to make the delivery itself not only profitable, but profitable enough to produce a somewhat livable wage for the driver once expenses like gas and car wear are accounted for, and the whole company has to live off of whatever it can siphon off from what the drivers get.
I think it's because of how badly they're doing it. They're operating at a significant loss, with unhappy customers, unhappy drivers, unhappy restaurants, and poor service.
EDIT: I suppose I have to also mention that killing people by my drunk driving is also a good reason to use DoorDash. Just thought maybe that was obvious...
That just makes sense?
From the car's perspective, the current law is great. Many people who would consider alternative transportation such as cycling or walking are discouraged by the fact that these activities are much more dangerous for you than driving. If you get hit by a reckless SUV at 40mph while you are in a car, you have a pretty good chance of surviving. Your chances of surviving as a pedestrian or cyclist are drastically lower. Rationally, many people then opt for the car (for me, must American roads are too dangerous for cycling so I only walk to get around even though I do enjoy cycling). This is a vicious cycle that ensures that cars will perpetually dominate our streets. I fear self driving cars (or an infinite series of failed attempts at self driving cars) are only going to make this worse. For all of the benefits that cars do offer us in our daily lives, from my perspective, it seems clear that the scales have tipped way too far in favor of the car.
Different legal regimes are possible. For example, we could change the law so that by default drivers are assumed responsible for any collision they were a part of. In the case of a driver killing a pedestrian, the burden should fall on the driver to prove that it was the pedestrians fault. The current enforcement of the law seems to almost imply that pedestrians and cyclists are suicidal so if they die in a collision, it must have been their fault somehow. Surely we could require drivers to drive in such a way that they have very low probability of injuring anyone? Or would that be an unimaginable infringement on the rights of the driver (and car)?
The beauty of a system that actually holds drivers accountable for the consequences of their actions is that we actually wouldn't have much need to enforce laws like speeding and running red lights because few would want to take the risk of losing their license if they were involved in a crash.
Thankfully there is no tipping culture here so none of the drivers expect to get tips. Obviously the actual delivery fees are just higher instead but the drivers don’t have to rely on the altruism of the customers to make sensible money.
Nowadays, I just order for pickup and go get it most of the time. None of the delivery services care about quality _at all_.
I'd happily pay a premium if it went to the people doing the actual ground work, but that doesn't exist.
I’d be happy to pay extra for delivery and try out places outside of walking distance if I knew the money was going to restaurants and drivers. But for all their complaints about DoorDash, the restaurants aren’t making themselves accessible elsewhere. The delivery companies put in work that restaurants weren't, and aren't able or willing to do, and that's part of the reason they have such high revenue (all concerns about quality and sustainability aside).
Isn't DoorDash's "growth hack" to fake cooperation with restaurants and have their drivers just pickup food and pay for it like an ordinary customer?
Unfortunately it seems that only the predatory delivery apps have spread nationwide.
I might watch a short series based on food delivery folks, customers, and the dystopian/ dehumanizing tech algorithms that set the stage for the context. Maybe it'd be wacky. Maybe it might just end up feeling like HBO's High Maintenance.
Same, rarely ordered delivery pre-pandemic but then was ordering two or three times a month but eventually got sick of food taking over an hour to arrive from places only a mile or two away so stopped entirely (until discovering a nearby restaurant that does their own delivery and it's great - arrives within 20 or 30 mins and the food is always piping hot).
With the steady erosion of the quality of the drivers, I don't even expect to receive my order in a timely fashion, in good condition, and without any drama from the drivers. I've essentially stopped getting delivery which is a bad sign since I'm basically the target audience: single, urban dweller, disposable income, willing to pay $5-10 premium to not have to pick it up from myself.
No particularly noteworthy stories, mostly just a series of odd encounters. Probably the funniest (in retrospect) was the taco order where I could see on the app the guy parked the next block over, and I get a call from him like 20 minutes later that he's "lost" my order and is going back to go replace it. Well he finally shows up at my place like an hour late with a fresh order of tacos reeking of weed. So he probably burned one down in the car and ate my tacos, but at least he made good. Why he couldn't deliver my original tacos and go get his own, I will never know.