Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?

The people making the app need a much bigger cut than Domino's. Domino's cut only needs to be big enough to pay their delivery drivers, they make their money selling pizza and the delivery is just an additional service that drives business.

The app maker needs a cut big enough to pay their delivery driver and also be the main revenue stream for their entire business since they're not making money off the pizza.

https://biz.dominos.com/about-us/innovations/

They're not just selling pizza to make money - but also looking at making cars.

https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/why-dominos-dxp-d...

While I'm not going to claim that was a good idea, the point is that Dominos sees making and delivering pizza as one and the same business.

> 154 examples of the DXP cars were built. Along with the delivery driver, each DXP car could carry up to 45 pizzas, 12 two-liter sodas, and all the extra dipping sauces one could ever want. Add to that the fact that the car’s still held their five-year 100,000-mile warranty, were cheap on gas, and created a surprising amount of buzz, it is hard not to look at the DXP program as a success, low production aside.

Edit: the Hagerty story was a nice read, thank you for linking to it

So I think a third-party delivery business must seek exclusivity contracts to be competitive with an in-house solution.

And if that could be done, maybe just 2 orders to start with (for example carpool benefits for 2 people), that will be awesome, but if you could pool 4-5 orders, that will make bank !

I guess this model, if scaled purely based on the model, will imply restaurants co-located (same parking lot) will benefit from such an arrangement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_restaurant

This is a super good point. I didn't think about that.

So expensive for a frustrating cold food delivery.

All the delivery app companies are NOT making the food so the blame game starts AND they are not employees so a bunch of gaming is going on.

I know my one experience with Uber eats is such that I'll never use it again, and instead travel myself.

(And I'm not sure if my experiences were representative of each country, just that they were consistent in each city.)

After ton of investment investors are finally looking for returns now. And consumers have decided convenience reigns supreme. Right from the SAAS products to daily breakfast customers there is lot of premium on convenience.

We need a quippy phrase for this, but unfortunately "Pump and Dump" is already taken for a kind of stock-market manipulation.

Instead, I would like to coin/nominate "Tease and Squeeze".

First consumers are teased by the idea that the disruptive new service has invented a magic new secret to low prices and great value... But after the company as achieved some kind of market strangehold, those consumers are squeezed with price-hikes and quality-drops as the investors--who bankrolled the early predatory pricing [0]--try to recoup their investment plus additional profit.

[0] Note that the term "Predatory Pricing" usually refers to artificially low prices to destroy competitors, although I can totally understand why some may assume it means preying on customers with high prices.

Granted, Tease and Squeeze has a nicer ring. Then again, the enshittification neologism became standard langue in no time and is understood by everybody.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

First, the issue of intent and overall history. Tease and Squeeze implies it was the plan all along, but an "enshittified" product doesn't have to be that way. For example, a company could have been successful without any "Tease"--no predatory pricing or monopolistic behavior--and then taken a nosedive later when the founder retired and sold it to a new owner, meaning it's Squeeze-only.

Second, "Squeeze" can technically be only a higher price while keeping quality high (although I admit a both getting worse together is far more likely) whereas "enshittified" products almost always mean a drop in quality, regardless of whether prices rise or not.

But at this point I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to mean.

I for one like it

when it’s just starting out in something, you get instant classics.

when it’s out of ideas but still has the levers of access tilted all the way to “got mine bitches”, you get the late MCU, Uber for X, and OpenAI Larry Summers Edition.

Problem is, when you get an economy acclimated to false prices set by adversarial “business” “strategy”, the only logical result is depression when it’s time to actually create money for investors

Cheap wages? Both of your examples paid decent wages, especially in the example of Uber.

It was just an unprofitable business model subsidized by VC money or Amazon corporate profits.

That sounds like a good thing?

There is no effectively borderless world in which most are both employed and not "underpaid". It won't happen both ways. In fact, the pay trend is about to tip massively against fairness. In a manner that even will make economic rationalists uncomfortable. These "fair pay" efforts are a distraction before that storm.

can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?

So you can say the company is "greedy"...but that implies that the worker is also "greedy" - which is true for both IF you define it the way I described above. Or you could say that the company (owners) are trying to maximize their return on investment (time + money), and the the workers are trying to maximize their return on investment (of time).

Is that true though? I come from a family that works in the crafts, small business mostly (which is like 70% of businesses). Most employees are employed for life, what's being made generally costs a decent amount but quality is high, people are content when they make what's perceived as fair and enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle, and so on.

Nobody actually tries to rip each other off, cuts every penny and leaves for 5% higher salaries. People are around for decades. The MBA business logic isn't some universal truth, in fact it's not even how most people work.

If I pay a worker $20 per hour to make 20 doodads an hour in my doodad factory and then sell those doodads for $5 a piece, I make $5 for every $1 pay my worker. Of course that extra $4 per doodad has to account for the cost of the doodad factory itself (initial investment, maintenance, material) and the literal cost of doing business (taxes, permits, fees, paying an accountant) and of course market fluctuation (warehousing, building a financial buffer to remain solvent if sales lapse or production has to stop) but if the business is meant to be successful, that needs to add up to less than the extra $4 I'm making. And the bigger that difference is, the more profitable my company becomes and the more spare money I have to expand my business and get ahead of my competition up to the point where I can sell shares in my business to other people and pay dividends from my profits to them.

So in other words not only can't you pay workers exactly "enough" (i.e. 100% of the value they contribute to the company) but you're actively incentivized to pay them as little as you can get away with (and perversely, paying them more by reducing your profit margin may actually be worse for them by making your company less competitive and less resilient). This is before we even get into the politics of what work is overvalued or undervalued (e.g. the idea that CEOs should receive massively disproportionate compensation for their labor, which again creates pressure to compensate for this by underpaying lowly workers).

This, by the way, is why collective bargaining matters. No matter how cool and nice your employer is, the market actively incentivizes them to do the least for you they can get away with and punishes them for doing more. So by not taking advantage of collective bargaining (i.e. using the pressure of all employees to your advantage rather than just yours individually) you're leaving money on the table. Note that is still true if your role is proportionally overpaid relative to other workers in your company unless you literally co-own the company.

That's a silly definition of "enough" to label as a fact.

I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect, I think most people will agree that the worker getting 90% of the surplus value is "enough". (just as an example percent) There's no reason the bar should be the absolute extreme.

There's no "factual" definition of "enough" as "enough" is subjective.

I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue. I already said that it can't be 100% for practical reasons and that the market actively incentivizes companies to aim for as close to 0% as possible instead. You pick 90% as an arbitrary percentage. So it might be 99% or 50% or 1%. But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" in this case is in relation to what the product of that labor can be sold for (after deducting the various costs). In reality that percentage is often much closer to 50% than to 90% - in many cases (especially so-called unskilled labor) it is closer to 1% than 90%.

A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue. Especially because it's nearly impossible to value the relative contribution to the bottom line for all labor involved (and in fact trying to minimize "cost centers" can lead to a rude awakening about this).

So if we define "need" as "enough to sustain a healthy existence in society and access to moderate leisure activities" (i.e. having a roof over your head, food in the fridge, access to medical care and transportation and enough spare change to spend on things like streaming services, books or the occasional trip to a nearby cinema, amusement park or restaurant) we can define a minimum monthly income and if we assume a 40 hour work week (which should be uncontroversial given that overall productivity has only gone up since its introduction and we need to provide some leisure time to accommodate family formation and the aforementioned leisure activities) we can translate that into a minimum hourly wage. Something tells me that this minimum hourly wage would be significantly higher than the legal minimum wage in the US, even if we don't actually consider the lackluster state of medical care affordability (note that I didn't assume public single-payer healthcare so Medicare/Medicaid is just a crutch to account for medical care being unaffordable otherwise at that level of income).

But of course the system is not set up that way. It's not about needs, it's about paying as little as you can get away with and this means that pay is proportional to power (i.e. C-level execs are paid a lot because they have a lot of control over the company and therefore "deserve" more even if all the value they "create" relies on the actual labor and competence of others) and the floor is theoretically infinitely low (i.e. you could realistically charge people to do labor for you, e.g. as a "training opportunity" to earn a meaningless qualification required to access other jobs) and ultimately the company needs to produce a lot of waste money (profits that are not re-invested in the company) that can be drained by its shareholders/owners (who ideally contribute literally no labor in return).

I agree. Which is why "enough" is not an objective threshold of 100% of surplus value.

> I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue.

I'm arguing that "less than 100% means not enough" is an incorrect statement. That's all. The bulk of your post isn't relevant to what I was saying.

(To be extra clear, that's my paraphrase of this line: "in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value, i.e. making more money from selling the product of labor than you pay for that labor.")

> But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" [...] A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue.

But I did address that. "I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect,"

This is just a fyi when trying to write out your thoughts.

I just think "100% of surplus value" is a wrong definition, so using that definition to argue that "in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough" is a very flawed argument.

I don't think I need to offer my own definition to claim that, do I? They later said it's subjective, which seems to favor my claim.

Does that clear things up? Is there a reason you thought I was trying to give a definition, and failing? Is there something wrong with my argument?

Unfortunately, much if not most of the time this calculation by the worker will be in error. As they tend to exclude the company scaffolding that they are not responsible for but that enables them to make their contribution.

Either way, its amazing that there is so much legal opportunity today for anyone to build an asset (eg: business) that they own. Asset ownership being the key to legal and ethical economic success in this world. I feel like more children should be taught as much at an early age, with less emphasis on the "nobility of work" that tends to exclude the importance of assets.

If group ownership is important, workers can certainly begin a business with that in mind.

Last, stock is sometimes sold publicly (direct ownership of the asset).

I literally addressed that "company scaffolding" in more detail than you do here (second sentence of the second paragraph). There's no error here though as running the company and owning the company are two different things and while there are plenty of business owners who need to work for their own company to keep it running, we're specifically talking about surplus value after the cost of paying all labor (including your own, at market rate), i.e. what ends up either being reinvested at the end of the fiscal year or drained by the owners/shareholders as dividends. You may need someone to run the business side of things, you don't need that person to also own the company, be able to drain any profits and fire you at will.

> If group ownership is important, workers can certainly begin a business with that in mind.

We like to proudly talk about individualism when it comes to seeking praise for personal achievements but times like this demonstrate how it can blind us to systems thinking. Yes, you can create a worker cooperative. And yes, you can be a business owner who tries to be "fair" to their workers. But you exist in competition with other businesses who don't engage in such "waste" and you compete in a system where the "benefits" of such an approach are considered externalities and have no direct value (even if you try to argue it's "positive PR" that will only get you so far). In other words, the system disincentivizes and actively punishes redistributing surplus value to your (co-)workers - because it's literally based on profit-seeking (i.e. maximizing that surplus).

> Asset ownership being the key to legal and ethical economic success in this world.

Yes, and asset ownership is only attainable if you have the necessary capital to buy assets. Being self-employed won't get you far because you're still selling your labor for money (just with fewer middlemen but in practice not really) and if everyone owned their own business that's all they'd accomplish. If you want to be economically successful from asset ownership rather than labor, you want your "asset" to "do the work for you" (i.e. passive income). But in real-world terms this ultimately means you need to get a cut (i.e. profit) from someone else's labor (and they therefore can't take this advice or else they wouldn't be in that position for you).

I'm a business owner. I've been at various stages self-employed, an employer and a business owner using external freelancers and subcontractors. But I have no illusions that essentially the easiest "legal and ethical" economic success I've seen involved little more than either rent seeking (i.e. being paid for continuous usage of something you already built/bought) or scalping (i.e. selling something someone else made/did at an inflated price and pocketing the difference).

Because there is no disincentive for labor to ever-advance the claim that their wages are enough.

In addition, the incentive to ever-claim that wages are not enough is unable to be quneched due to the fact that there is no risk. That logic is what supports my point.

The point can be proofed to economic mechanisms, as well. The exchange of money for goods naturally sets prices via an auction mechanism that, in turn, naturally creates an economic hierarchy in purchasing power.

Which is a verbose way of saying that raising the wages of the working class, while periodically necessary, will always lead to rising prices to create relatively par pourchasing power over time. When speaking of wages, purchasing power is all that matters (assuming lack of debt).

Artificially and dramatically forcing wages up only creates economic churn in job availability, housing equality, and asset ownership. All negative for the working class. If forces them into unemployment, out of urban centers, and creates firesale auctions for assets that wealthy people take advantage of.

To make matters worse, the "forced equality" economics of communism are only feudalism in disguise (which is hidden on the balance sheet of the State and Feudal Lord). The closer that the working class gets to forced economic equality, the closer that they get to slavery.

The storm that's coming is a cyclical return to various feudalists battling it out for workers who are paid the lowest possible wages and who have no labor protection. But on a wider scale than we are used to seeing.

The problem with wage debates is that there is no solution aside from a delicate balance that is easily corruptable. In fact, its natural state is corrupt imbalance.

This problem is unsolveable because it is inherent in the system of money.

The storm may or may not come depending on how long your prediction time window is.

In any of these discussions about wages and fairness, I wonder if the people with strong opinions have ever tried to hire unskilled labor.

I don't think they literally mean "unskilled" vs "something that can be learned within a month".

I think everything is easy, given the right approach and mindset, or everything is approachable given the right approach and mindset and will to put enough effort to get to a given outcome.

On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill_(labor)

> Skilled workers have long had historical import...

Value, import(ance); potatoe, potartoe.

Whether someone is getting "underpaid" or a "fair wage" on the other hand is entirely subjective, and you can come to whatever conclusion you want depending on your politics. On one side of the spectrum you could argue any sort of situation where the employer is capturing surplus value from the employee is inherently exploitative[1] and therefore "underpaid" and a "unfair wage". On the other end of the spectrum you argue that supply and demand curves are the ultimate arbiter of what's "fair", and any wage that is determined by the free market can't by "underpaid" or "unfair" by definition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

If you‘d have chosen a burger flipper and an aeronautical engineer or a surgeon, I‘d have agreed with you.

Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.

On an absolute scale, comparing skills of burger flippers, accountants, aeronautical engineers and surgeons, the first two basically lump together.

I look at skill gap more in terms of „how hard is it to completely automate/autonomize this job“. Which is fiercely easy both for the burger flipper and the accountant, yet a bit harder (though not impossible) for the other two.

It doesn't literally mean the workers don't know how to do anything. It's certainly not a myth - it's a classification of work, at least in the US.

https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/cfr20/416/416-0968.htm

This is nearly all jobs.

All unskilled labor jobs.

You're not going to learn welding in 30 days. Nor are you going to learn how to design a bridge. Or program in C++. Or diagnose a patient. Or be a lawyer. Or drive a race car. Etc.

The thing about "unskilled" jobs, everyone seems to look down their noses at, is that they facilite the people doing the lofty jobs of: lawyer, doctor, c++ programmer, etc. Without them getting done for you you couldn't do what you're doing.

Can the brickie work without their "unskilled" laborer? Sure, but good luck getting you house built in a reasonable time.

Neither are jobs like carpenters, roofers, pipelayers, cooks, truck drivers, clerks and many, many others.

There is nothing wrong with honest work - skilled or unskilled.

That makes it unskilled labor.

Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the instruction booklet and fly an airplane.

There are of course tons of ways a good, seasoned barista distinguishes themselves from a trainee with 3 days of onboarding but those are externalities. The difference between skilled and unskilled labor is not whether competence and experience can make a difference but whether that difference is measured as performance or only affects externalities.

I.e. "unskilled labor" is not about the worker but about the company. Notably these often do involve skill that directly contributes to performance but because the job is considered unskilled, it's instead treated as some nebulous a priori form of intelligence and personal aptitude. What's more, beyond a certain point skill is often actively punished (e.g. by raising quotas to take advantage of higher productivity, resulting in more work for the same pay).

You can onboard welding in less than 30 days too.

> As there is no meaningful metric for competence beyond that (or at least no metric that is measured and used) "good" doesn't apply.

Barista quality isn't much harder to measure than weld quality. "and used" is a cop-out.

You can be doing useful work as part of a welding group in 30 days, but you will not be a master. Grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't and all that.

But you won't be a master barista right away either.

And speed matters too.

Also, there are other coffee places than Starbucks. Saying barista is an unskilled job because Starbucks coffee is particularly bad is like saying programmer is an unskilled job because all Squarespace websites are equally bad.

A good weld is a thing of beauty.

Welding is also pretty dangerous. It takes a good welder to do it safely, and do it without ruining very expensive parts.

There's good reason that competent welders get paid a lot of money.

In 30 days, the new welder probably has learned how not to set himself on fire, blind himself, fill his lungs with poisonous gasses, etc.

There's a lot you can learn in many basic service jobs, and become much more effective than if you don't learn it.

But if the standard is "onboarding", then both are quick.

> In 30 days, the new welder probably has learned how not to set himself on fire, blind himself, fill his lungs with poisonous gasses, etc.

I am not a welder, but I've had some welding safety training. It doesn't take a month.

In any job there is a spectrum from bare minimum to a master. This goes for welding and baristas. Is someone who pushes a button on a Nespresso a barista? If I go get a soldering iron am I a welder?

You overlay the normal distribution of all baristas and welders and look at the difficulty in learning various skills. I'm sure they are not exactly equal.

I can be pretty sure welder beats barista, but by how much, how it relates to other jobs, how we set various bars, that's all a lot more difficult.

So in other words, we could have an objective, empirical look at whether welders or baristas actually need "more skill" and which skillset is easier to master for the average person (which is its own rest nest of considerations again) but if we did the necessary (if not impossible) prep work to even get started on that, we'd have to already agree that "unskilled" is a descriptor for jobs that has very little to do with the actual skill requirements and more with attitudes towards those skills or the people doing those jobs.

That part really stood out to me.

While a lot of us can agree that barista is an unskilled job, I heard people call barmen labor a skilled labor. Which is crazy, because it's essentially the same job (mix stuff up and serve in a cup). But it makes sense if "unskilled labor" is a function of an employer not an employee

From what I heard from a former Starbucks barista, the biggest challenge was to not scald the milk during steaming (which is not very difficult, basically just requires holding it at the correct angle to induce a whirlpool effect and keep things moving).

The skilled aspect is dealing with customers efficiently and pleasantly, and all the nuance/craziness that can entail.

Because I have gone to the same Starbucks every day for many years, and see many new hires as the staff turns over. It takes about 3 days to go from "cannot operate the cash register" to "efficiently fulfills customer orders".

Starbucks hires juniors and trains them to be good baristas. That takes a long time. Just because someone is able to work a coffee machine after a few days doesn't mean they're not skilled eventually. Your argument is like saying 'it only takes a few days for junior devs to be onboarded, so there's no real value in senior devs'.

It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is.

All you're saying here is that you've failed to see the value in customer service, hospitality, speed, accuracy, politeness, etc that go with a retail coffeeshop job. The coffee is the same in pretty much every Starbucks, but the experience can vary wildly depending on how good the baristas are at everything else besides making coffee. Those skills take years to master.

Just sell me the damn coffee and bugger off with "experience". It doesn't require a "skilled" person to politely serve me a coffee. Just make sure the coffee doesn't taste like shit and I'll come back to you unless you spit at me or offend me. Again - no need to be "skilled" to not do that.

The other side takes "unskilled" to be a derogatory term that means the worker isn't a human being with thoughts and wants and needs, and deserving of a wage.

We've generally decided it's unreasonable for someone to need to work more than 40 hours a week so the minimum pay for 160 hours of labor had better be enough to live on without being on welfare or other government assistance. It might not be a glamorous life but you at least have to be able to make rent, pay for heat, AC, food, clothes, water, toilet paper, health insurance, a cheap cell phone, transportation to and from work, and some basic possessions like a bed. And if it's not then you're being underpaid. I think that's a pretty fair measure, it roughly represents the cost of a person's undivided labor.

And I think it's fair to say that for almost all Americans that cost has gone up and not insignificantly over the past 5 years. Folks that make good money by can take the hit but people on the bottom rung have nowhere to go. And people will given the opportunity begrudgingly sell their labor for unsustainable prices because it's better than nothing but that road leads to the record scratch in the economic game of musical chairs we're playing when money stops moving.

And that's when Socialist-inspired policies we have kick in and gov't has to forcibly redistribute wealth through higher taxes and even greater government spending to start the motor again. We've done it before and I'm sure we'll do it again. But I'm of the opinion that a little regulation to keep us out of the death spiral and letting the market allocate resources is better than when the government has to step in and do it.

"...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath.

Which argument are you recruting? Political intervention or the free market? Both? That's nice hand waving, no offense. Seemingly to make it as if your position is so elevated that it satisfies all political ideals. Instead, choose. Unless you mean to imply that the (free) market is also the political market. But your language should be a lot more precise if that's your point, so as to eliminate the look of vague line straddling as a rhetorical tactic.

Your rebuttal over-simplifies my response and therefore seems like a word dump.

Your view, absent your muddled (imo) rationale described above, is included in my response. The complicating factors were a). the common simultaneous advocacy for importing millions of unskilled workers and b.) the implied fact that increasing wages decreases available jobs.

Those factors are included in my total "complaint" (observation). Which is not a "political conviction".

> "...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath.

I meant:

complaining about (workers demanding higher wages instead of letting the market sort it out) is pointless

Not:

(complaining about workers demanding higher wages) instead of (letting the market sort it out) is pointless.

Agreed my wording could have been more precise there.

No, and I'm guessing you're just under the spell of market fundamentalism. An unfair wage is something like when the worker either

1. can't achieve a socially-acceptable living standard with the job,

2. when there's too-great of a mismatch between the labor-theory-of-value price and the market-theory-of-value price for their labor, or

3. or when the wage is below the actual the market price.

I made those up on the spot, so there may be some holes, bit it gets the gist.

> Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact.

Being underpaid is different than "wants more money."

> It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion.

No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid.

> Yet the same people who demand that everyone earn a living wage, sometimes punctuating their points with riots, tend to be the same crowd who wants to import unskilled workers by the millions.

I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense.

If you think that accusing me of "being under the spell of market fundamentalism" is a succesful rhetorical strategy, then you neither understood my post nor are you worth arguing with.

My comment was made in the context of mentioned complex factors that you are ommitting.

Your 1 and 2 numbered responses are pure nonsense. Response 1 reveals to me who I am dealing with. This is going to go nowhere. Response 2 is ideological hand waving. 3 is true, but I included points that addressed it in my post.

There is zero political (effective) difference in the labor market between being underpaid and wanting more money, if the ask is for more money.

If they are truly underpaid, then they should ask for more money and get it. If they are not underpaid and ask for more money lest penalty x, then the market effect for employers is the same.

A further problem, as illustrated by your definitions of underpayment with which I disagree, is who is to decide what being underpaid means?

The answer to that question is that what constitutes underpayment will always be murky as far as the market is concerned and therefore, again, my point stands. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact.

>No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid.

"Never". That's a perfect example of the self-centered view of much of labor advocacy. Not only do they publicly only take the other side of the market into account when it opportunistically suits them (ie: when bucking for asset ownership or when owning assets themsevles), they have trouble comprehending how their own principles might scale to different skill levels in the labor pool.

> I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense.

I disagree with your single-axis categorization. I disagree with the implication that this is largely a moral argument.

I disagree with the assumption you would be able to make moral assertions that had any impact on the economic forces that determine pay and job availability, given the mentioned constraint (mass immigration). My original point is that the labor market will not be able to have it all. It has to choose, and clearly it has made its choice.

But in its defense, the pro-labor market was co-opted generations ago by Business. That dissonance that you percieve and interpret as "moral complexity" is exactly their influence.

What Amazon is doing is different because they're actually doing something that adds value, and they're solving a problem that actually exists. Maybe I'm naive for believing any of this matters.

To be honest, I never thought much about how the whole system worked. I've only been in an Amazon Fresh twice. It had the "just walk out" thing but I don't have a Prime account so I never used it. I just figured it was UHF RFID. Seems like an obvious solution, but I'm not the engineer responsible for figuring out what to do if you put two exits next to each other.

1. The single website/app is not just useful for discovery, but also to provide a consistent ordering experience. An individual restaurant might take orders over the phone, via their website, or via their own app. Those options will vary from one restaurant to the next. Not great for customers.

2. In the old model, restaurants would have to decide how many drivers to have on hand at any given time. During quiet periods they would have to decide between not offering delivery at all, or having a driver sitting around doing nothing. A delivery service that aggregates demand & supply is very useful for restaurants & drivers. Pooling of resources & layering on surge pricing creates a lot of elasticity.

I would argue that what they should have done is tried to at this value at minimal cost to customers, drivers & restaurants. If they were leaner businesses the overall proposition could be a lot better.

Like the only success I can see is AirBnB and that's because houses are expensive and in short supply.

In the UK, outside of corporate chains, it was largely a cash in hand operation for both the restaurants and drivers.

Drivers would typically be paid a small sum for showing up on the night and then keep the delivery charge and any tips. The cost to the restaurant was pretty much negligible.

The middle-men, in addition to their own cut, have likely lead to a larger tax burden on many of the drivers and restaurants.

Under that model, wouldn't drivers only want to work for the busiest restaurants?

With delivery apps, a restaurant can have just a few orders per night and still be open for delivery.

I would bet that there's an order of magnitude more deliveries happening (and drivers working) these days vs pre-Uber.

It doesn't take many orders to keep an individual driver busy. Typically the restaurants would manage how many, and which, drivers worked each night. If the night was unexpectedly quiet then a driver might finish early.

> With delivery apps, a restaurant can have just a few orders per night and still be open for delivery.

Yeah, the main benefit of delivery apps is enabling restaurants who primarily serve sit-in diners to deliver also. The overall benefit to delivery focused restaurants is much more tenuous.

> I would bet that there's an order of magnitude more deliveries happening (and drivers working) these days vs pre-Uber.

Perhaps, but if a driver was already busy all night under the previous model, then they're potentially harmed by the current model.

The main drawbacks to these services are the outrageous fees they charge to make money, and that there's more than one so drivers and businesses have to manage an array of phones or tablets. This would address both of those things.

Aye. Arguably this is why old-school streaming Netflix won so well -- all of your options in one place. Likewise, there is one app for all food choices nearby.

Also agree on the second point, though presumably larger chains in built up areas could play the same game; e.g. Domino's in a borough of NYC has an "all-drivers-in-Queens" pool.

Vendored web POS is widely available, and was emerging before UberEats and DD ever did. See: Toast

> A delivery service that aggregates demand & supply is very useful for restaurants & drivers.

This is only true in theory. You aren't giving enough credit to the logistical skills of small business owners, they are really good at allocating and dispatching drivers. If you're small enough to have no deliveries for several hours, then don't schedule any drivers during that time. If a delivery comes in, tell your cashier the address and have them run the delivery. Besides being quite efficient, there's an added bonus that you're cross-training your staff. That's how we always did it, at least.

It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but every delivery driver I have asked (half a dozen from several different cities and states) has said that their job is harder and pays worse today than 10 years ago.

"Well, just be more lean!" What a concept, I'm sure they haven't thought of that. It's much easier said than done. Logistics software is extremely complicated at scale- there's a reason governments subsidize delivery logistics through services like USPS, Royal Mail, etc. However, at the one-business microcosm, it's a simple enough problem that a seasoned owner/manager can organize an optimal dispatch in their head, on the fly.

The value of convenience is significant. I happily pay to avoid the mental overhead of shitty restaurant websites or repeating a paragraph-long group order back and forth across a poor kitchen speakerphone call.

Yes the current system has many flaws but let’s not pretend it was utopia before.

These companies also made it possible for restaurants to be taken hostage and be registered for delivery services or marked as closed/unavailable on those platforms against their wishes, or pay even 60+% commission on an order for the service. Once only a couple of these companies are left standing and have all restaurants in a chokehold I'm convinced the situation will be even "better".

> the the fact that many (most?) people still use UberEats/DD is instructive

Yes, it says that too many people do what's best for them and them alone. It's not as instructive as you think. Many people had slaves because it was good for the owner. What did you learn from that case of "many people do it"?

> I happily pay

You don't and don't even realize that. You get an overall cheaper service but someone pays. Usually the restaurant owner, employees, and delivery people. Maybe some VCs too, for now, while they don't completely own the market. Just like Amazon's same day delivery means some driver has to pee in a bottle for close to minimum wage but otherwise it's absolutely a huge win for everyone who is you, needing the delivery now.

You're right, it sucked. Here's the thing: we can have the shiny, sleek ordering system without the stupid parts of the Uber/GrubHub/whatever business model. You've probably used Toast before.

> in areas like Manhattan, where city cabs and delivery options abound - the the fact that many (most?) people still use UberEats/DD is instructive

I would have leaned towards "destructive" but I get your point.

To me it is ridiculous that anybody thought local personal services like food delivery, dog walking, and taxi driving could ever be converted into durable, efficient, profitable national or global monopolies. In the absence of monopoly power such low barrier to entry commodity services invariably see their profit margins squeezed to cost from competition. All this is freshman or highschool level economics.

This shook a bit of illusion from my eyes, thank you. I never thought of Amazon's efforts in this as solving a real problem or adding real value! This is because for me, it doesn't, and I never thought it through beyond that.

Once again, the human tendency to think that our own situation represents the norm fooled me.

I made my case here, if you care: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39976007

In my country taxis were (and price wise still are) the worst; Uber is a vast improvement; better cars, nicer drivers, convenient booking (until very recently you had to call 1 day in advance to book a taxi) and a bizarrely lower price. The same trip with a normal taxi costing 130 euros is 30 with Uber. So yeah, no. Oh but the taxi companies made their own app! Which is of course a horrible failure.

Granted, the taxi service hardly any better in many countries. In the US, it's rapidly building a new underclass of indentured cheauffeurs, chained down by vehicle maintenance costs and massive fees from service providers.

is scanning your groceries manually really so cumbersome to say the "just walk out" model is adding value?

It's nice, but like you said. it's not really that better than existing solutions, and knowing the underworkings makes it much worse. Maybe the tech will catch up in a decade, but it was definitely unviable with the current system.

I always go to a human cashier whenever the option presents itself, simply so I don't have to deal with the miscarriage of engineering that is the self-checkout machine. Unfortunately, my local grocery stores don't staff their registers very often anymore.

Previously I've noticed another kind of meta-comment, the top level complaint by a self-appointed moderators about the overall shape of the discussion elsewhere, instead of engaging directly with the actual posts in question.

With intellectual pursuits, you can always find diamonds in the rough. Simply due to the effort YOU are putting in, given your then state of mind, knowledge and experience.

You can wade through a conversation on creationism and evolutionary denial and understand humanity or even deepen your skills.

However that's you - your unique circumstances bringing more to the table.

Others would very much appreciate a warning, because they already have working definitions, have seen this argument before and would prefer spending their time on other pursuits.

Even if there is the need, who should be the judge for others over the quality of a subthread? I would feel presumptuous to pass judgement beyond my vote for each comment.

Aren't those diamonds all that matter anyway? Recently I increasingly find new and curious beginnings dampened and limited by intellectually lazy attitudes, by comments that start with "I mean...", that reiterate the default state rather than entertaining a new thought. Inadvertently, well-meaning soft-moderation like yours might steer even more people away from interesting topics.

I'd say, leave your vote and move on.