I've honestly never quite realized up until now how utterly ridiculous it is that people (especially in the US) regularly demand that their food be chauffeured to them.
a year ago by destructdisc to c/fuckcars
Well apparently there is considering it’s a popular service. I’m not sure what you mean by this.
I doubt we'll ever get data to support this but I suspect most drivers aren't drivers for very long. A few, who are otherwise entirely unemployable, may stick it out. It sounds like a much better deal than it is, I think most people realize that after a relatively short time.
My experience with doing deliveries was the only people who had been doing it for a while were a: broke as fuck and 2, exactly the opposite of the type of person you might want handling your food.
I drove down doordash for a while. Trust me, every driver knows how much they're getting screwed. You'll never be more class-conscious than having 30+ interactions with people as broke as you every day, and seeing every possible angle of fellow working class jobs. You do it for one of several reasons: you want some tiny modicum of control in your life through your schedule, you desperately need the money and it's easy as fuck to get a delivery job, or you started it for one of those reasons or something similar, got good enough to be ahead of the curve, and it's now more appealing than finding something else. The last one was where I was at.
I had done the job enough that I was making $18 an hour, well above the average in my area, and despite needing to pay for gas and taxes on a 1099a, it was still more appealing to keep control and flexibility over my life than to do something else. I could take days off whenever I wanted, see friends during the week, and coordinate my schedule with my fiancee easily. You're very aware that you're getting screwed, but you choose the devil you know, as they say.
It’s popular because the companies that run it are profiting enough to keep doing it.
Is this even true? I thought most of these companies were still in the "chuck VC money into the furnace" phase.
The actually drivers, however, don't realize how much they're being screwed over.
Stop assuming stupidity because a lower monetary class.
Everyone realizes and knows this, you can't do anything about it when you're struggling to feed your family and you just need extra money.
With the tax being $8.04, the order is not that small.
Pizza delivery has been popular for several decades. Pizza is cheap but they made the numbers work. It's actually weird that it was just pizza until recently.
The cost is middlemen needing to get their cut. Half the cost here is them getting their cut. $15 to use an app one time is what is unsustainable here.
These things for college campuses are great. They take up no more space than a person and can be a huge help when one is busy or sick.
NYC actually used to have a citywide system like this. It was for mail but there's no reason somebody couldn't have snuck a burrito or a rolled-up pizza into one of those cannisters.
hsssss....thwooooop...KChUNK
I remember being a kid in the mid 90s, in a hospital that had such a system to send messages and pills around, the vast majority of their computers were not actually networked.
exactly why airport pizza has such an amazing business model, because pizza can be delivered efficiently by aircraft to places up to a couple hundred miles away without relying on non-existant roads or rail
Varies. In Oslo Foodora started as bike deliveries; the cyclists unionised and got better pay and working conditions, and nooow it seems to be a lot of Romanians in beaters that don't look like they'd pass their next EU inspections, don't pay tolls or for parking, and apparently there seems to be something like trafficking going on.
Well I meant in NYC specifically but that’s interesting.
In a large metropolis, yes. Unfortunately most cities in the USA are spread out so much that you almost need a car to go to the bathroom.
In SF it's definitely done by electric moped
I mean in NYC specifically.
no. they are all delivered by car, even if they say it's by bike.
bikes are too slow for be good for delivery
Speed is measured differently in the US
yes, miles per hour instead of meters per second
Gridlocked traffic or having to deal with parking can change the math on this such that bikes make sense.
Even if done in a car in areas where a e-bike isn't really feasible, they usually take several orders at at time. I think 1 car picking up and delivering 3 orders is probably slightly more efficient than each person driving to the restaurant.
they usually take several orders at at time
I'd like to see some stats on this. When I see uber eats workers pick up at McDonald’s the orders seem to be singular.
But my anecdotal experience is not usable data.
Sometimes you will get lucky and get a couple of orders from the same restaurant, but it's usually stop at 2 or 3 different restaurants in the same area, then deliver. Occasionally I would take a single order if the money was good, but usually if I wasn't taking 3 orders or more at once I wasn't making enough money for it to be worth it.
It may have changed now, I fortunately got out of doing it a couple of yeas ago. It's stressful and hard on your vehicle, and the companies you work for are shit. I'm not defending the gig companies as they are now, but in theory having one person deliver to multiple people isn't a bad idea.
In most places I've lived for the past 40 years, I could just walk to the store. I have now four to choose from, all within 10 minutes of walking, and the city center is about an hour away. Ther are also bicycles.
By having groceries, you can make food yourself, at home. You can do this many times, for each time you actually have to get groceries.
As for eating at a restaurant, collective transport ranges from obvious to absolutely necessary, depending on the population density. When my family go out to eat, it's a lot more convenient to hop on a bus or tram to the city center. It takes half the time, if you consider parking, it's cheaper, and you can have a drink or two as well. You also get to engage with each other, during transit.
In the less car-retarded world, food delivery is also easier to do with non-car methods.
In any case, and because I know the kind of responses people reply with... Please don't. I just gave you some examples and a different perspective. Americans are culturally dumb as shit when it comes to considering the obviously better alternatives, in so many different aspects, and I don't really care all that much.
It should be way more efficient considering they could do a pickup from a restaurant near their last delivery. Play the traveling salesman game decently and you'll easily beat individuals driving themselves many times over. The driver might also do a pickup job from a restaurant they like and decide to get their own food at the same time.
More people need to learn about and think about externalized costs.
"This plastic cup is free! ... if I ignore the fact that it's going into a landfill or worse"
"This delivery is free! ... if I ignore the fact that the delivery guy is getting fucked by capital"
You're last point doesn't hold if you tip generously, which i bet most people in this forum do. I've heard that delivery people in the right neighborhood can make bank. In which case they're still "getting fucked by capital" but no more than any of the rest of us
other countries deliver most things using motorbikes, it always sounded ridiculous to me to use a car to deliver food
Most food deliveries in NYC happen on two wheels.
Nicer in the winter to use a car. And depending on the type of service, these might otherwise be used as personal cars
?? I'm talking about the delivery people owning those cars and using them as personal cars after work, so they're not being bought just for deliveries
its also expensive, if you calculate the maintenance /insurance and gas into your vehicles. thats why there isnt more deliveries services for instore shopping outside of a few.
I've lived several places. In some, I could walk to get food, and I gladly did so. In others, I could not.
Should I have starved?
If your argument is "you should have driven," then you are depending on cars. Whether it's the buyer or an employee doing the driving has little effect on how much a car is being used. The environment doesn't care who's burning the gas.
That almost makes it a steal, $20 for delivery or $20k + fees (tag, insurance, license, etc) + the cost of the food.
I do get your point though, the shit we have in the US terrible, the are only really walkable places are only in a few overly-expensive areas.
Should I have starved?
I mean I'd say you could've cooked yourself and saved many trips by car. But fair enough if we assume you must order food (which is quite uncommon to do on a very regular basis where I live), then sure.
And how do I get the ingredients to cook exactly?
We're back where we were.
You don't need 1 car trip for every single meal if you cook yourself. You obviously buy in bulk, usually for a whole week. That's 6/7 car trips saved.
That's kinda the whole point of having a car, so you can transport a lot of goods home. At least, that's the point in my country.
In practice, sometimes you have to improvise, if something goes bad, or you realize you're missing a key ingredient, or you're too tired after a hard day etc
in history we learned how most civilizations starved to death until pizza hut started delivering food to people.
before then people would starve as there was no other way to get/prepare food at home.
So did you hunt for your dinner last night?
yes, because the optimal solution is clearly the most extreme counterexample you can imagine
An extreme counterexample is required in response to your extreme mischaracterization of the guy's argument. I'm just continuing down your logic of exaggerating the argument to the point of being nonsensical. It turns out you only like it when you do it to other people, but not when its done to you.
Provided you have time, and the groceries available, and the...
Point is, taking every observation personally is missing the forest from the trees. Objecting to overuse of cars is an objection to a systemic issue (usually insufficientpublic transport), and it won't be solved by individual action. Responding to it with "Well, I need a car, actually..." is missing the point. Same with delivery: getting into a "well, I can't walk to food" "well, you should cook", "well, I ..." is missing the point of "there's a whole mess of traffic that's both expensive and has been managed without earlier - that's weird, wonder what changed to cause it?"
Can't I do both though?
Can't I not order delivery but also think its absurdly expensive?
Delivery is good option for people with limited mobility
It was always obvious that the shared delivery model would result in massive delivery fees. Store employees doing deliveries were always at least partially subsidized by sales. Going third party means another company needs to suck more profit out of each delivery.
Especially in NYC. Bike delivery has been a thing there long before uberdashhub. Hell, it was a fucking plot point in Spiderman 2 back in 2004:
I think it was TMNT 2 that had a delivery guy on a moped back in like 92.
I’ll add in addition to the “not where I live” replies, I live in pretty textbook white suburban america and I believe I have never seen anything delivered to me or a neighbor or relative by a two-wheeled vehicle of any kind, even motorized. Every single time it is a private 4-seat passenger vehicle or larger.
It is different in other areas of course, like when visiting cities and other countries.
But damn are such vast swaths of suburban and rural america designed so specifically around cars. It would take forever to change even with a progressive culture & government. With the culture and government we have now, I will be stunned if I am not driving my own vehicle for the rest of my life, and I will not be surprised at all if it’s mostly ICE vehicles. I drive a well maintained 13 year old Mazda3 that gets 40mpg, so it’s not ideal versus more efficient and environmentally friendly types of transport, but at least it’s a more efficient use of the existing infrastructure than most americans.
That is, again, depending on the location. Where I'm from, the large majority of food deliveries are done on a moped.
According to doordash which tracks the means of delivery that their drivers use and separates moped and bicycles from cars ny category only 35% are done by moped or bicycle. That is certainly not the vast majority. I don't see why Uber eats would be any different.
Again, I said it depends on location. I'm not talking about the US here, and there are no Doordash or Uber Eats where I'm from.
Edit: According to this study (Link), in the UK, about 83% of delivery drivers use mopeds. The UK does have Uber Eats.
I see you've never been to the Midwest. Or the south. Or anywhere that isn't Boston/new York/San Francisco.
That just means the place you live has a serious car dependency problem.
It's actually one of the top cities for cycling infrastructure in the US but it's a large geographic metro area. So unless you're in a few neighborhoods, the people likely aren't that close to where the restaurants are.
What's more ridiculous? 10 people each driving to the fast food joint individually or one delivery driver making a round trip to 10 people?
We pay other people to do the things we can't or don't want to do all the time, this isn't different.
Or just make and eat your own food
We pay other people to do the things we can't or don't want to do all the time, this isn't different.
Did I stutter?
Make your own phone. Make your own toothpaste. Grow your own strawberries.
U OK, hon? You can take that shitty attitude back to reddit, mate.
No, you didn't stutter, your argument was just nonsensical.
Making your own food is a very basic and fundamental skill, which is also much cheaper than any other option, and it has nothing in common with your disingenous examples.
But I guess that is also a very American thing, that homecooked food is seen some sort of exotic fantasy, instead of the default solution.
I guess cooking for many people at once should be more efficient in principle.
Consider you're running a restaurant that serves warm food from 10am to 2pm. One cook prepares 100 warm dishes of 2 or 3 different categories in advance, by using big kettles and a large amount of ingredients.
It's more efficient to buy many ingredients at once, then cook them in a big kettle, then serve them in a 100 plates,
instead of every one of these 100 people going grocery shopping, spending 30 - 90 minutes in the kitchen cooking, and then eating alone.
The argument isn't about walking, biking or driving, it's about delivery. A lot of take out is also delivered by bike.
Highly depends on local infrastructure. Unfortunately the most common city planning philosophy in the US (from what I have seen) is pedestrian hostile. And really it's not great for driving either. It just sucks to go anywhere.
practical if you live in a major city but if you live in a commuter city, the burbs, or BFE walking or biking reallying isn't an option.
I used to live in a small to medium sized city that was literally cut in half by the high way and it was 100% impossible to get from one part of the city to the other if you weren't in a car or taking the bus.
is that a manhattan thing, or does that apply to other boroughs?
no, most are probably motorbikes, or bicycles. in the west they have the same too. Only instore shopping is all cars.
I don't disagree that it's stupid but my problem is the stacking - Delivery fee and Service fee? The service is delivery! Why are they two fees? Either the cost of the delivery is being itemized in real time ($1.99 for gas, the rest for the human) or the delivery isn't $1.99! If the cost to deliver an item is $20 and I make $50/hr working a project, maybe having food delivered makes sense.
But also, I know the delivery guy isn't making all that and he's delivering five orders so don't charge me a service fee when I'm already subsidizing you paying him a shit wage.
Everything is shitty either way.
How else can they get people to sign up for a $15/month subscription that gives "free delivery " while charging a fuckton for a delivery service?
The service is delivery!
I read this and thought, "no, the service is that they were able to put pants on and leave their house today, unlike you."
Please dont take that as a personal attack, I'm just sharing intrusive thoughts when they make me giggle
I use them fairly often because I'm just too fucking busy during the week. I have to get up at 5am to get ready for work, am too busy to take a real lunch break, and get home around 8-9 most nights. And that's on nights I don't have meetings (I work in municipal government, and public meetings like Council, P&Z, BOA, etc all meet at nights). We could hire more people, but that would require more income, and that requires council members to vote on raising their own property taxes, not to mention state law regarding tax increases.
Yeah, I could meal prep on the weekend, but that's essentially allowing work to intrude on my weekends, and fuck that.
I'm essentially buying more time to relax in the very little relaxation time I have available.
Delivery fee and Service fee? The service is delivery!
No, the service fee is either charged by the payment provider (or at least to offset the fee the payment provider charges). Has nothing to do with delivery (you also have to pay it when you pre-pay for takeout online)
I don't know what payment service was used here. It is only around 2-3% on my invoices.
edit: Seems in the US a bunch of other stuff (like cost of running a website, insurance) can be included in the service fee.
I don't get it either. That shit is so much more expensive. Not only are they charging you delivery fees and "convenience" fees, the base prices of what you're ordering at are also inflated through apps like Doordash and Uber Eats. Something that is only $5 if you went and got it yourself is now $8, plus a delivery fee, plus other fees. And then there is also a chance that the person delivering it is a piece of shit who just steals your food.
And even if your food does show up ... it's cold. Do people just not know that food tastes worse the longer it's been out of the oven?
Agreed 100%. It takes longer, costs more, and it's worse. My credit card gives me a premium membership and monthly vouchers and I still don't order that shit because it still costs more and stuff from the freezer tastes better.
Wife and I can also make better food, which may contribute to my distaste for delivery apps.
Sometimes you need the convenience.
If I have to work late and don't have time to cook, and my kids need to be in bed in an hour and a half, then I'm going to pay a little extra, and that's fine.
Not everyone has a wide open schedule every night.
Having one person deliver multiple meals to different people in a single trip sounds more sustainable than each individual person making the round trip...
The big cities in India have this thing (tiffin) where the husbands ride the trains in to work and the wives stay at home and make their lunches, which they pack into metal containers and take to the train station later in the morning. Workers gather up all the tinned meals and pack them into giant racks which then ride the trains into the cities, and other workers deliver them. It's actually pretty efficient and makes use of rail capacity which would be otherwise unused.
And despite the scale of this operation, they never - like never - make a delivery mistake.
If you "think" enough about it everything but living in cave fucking a rock is unsustainable and a result of you being too dumb to do everything yourself.
Bet you lazy bastards don't even sew your own leathers. You'd rather "trade your surplus income for goods and services."
Goddamn millennials.
And then how does that food get from the centralized wholesale place to your kitchen? Im not just talking out my ass, this is a heavily studied topic.
bringing people food is ableist
It's kind of wild how the standard fare of pizza and chinese food delivery was absorbed by gig work. They used to be employees of the restaurant.
Technology should have made restaurant deliverer's lives easier and increased their efficiency. They should have made more money and worked less.
Instead we got gig workers who are basically impoverished wage slaves. They get no rights and no benefits. What is worse is whatever temporary profits they made have been sucked up by corporations by now.
This is a great case study for how to not use technology and how Tech Bros are not disrupters, they are destructors who profiteer, choke out, and then destroy markets.
that's what capitalism does to technology.
it isn't there to improve lives, it's there to funnel as much capital to shareholders as possible
One chinese restaurant out here still does it I since they had a fleet of cars. But the local pizza joints and all the chains just contract through a delivery service app. It isn't usually doordash or ubereats, but the driver almost always is anyway.
So these days even the delivery apps are middlemen between the restaurant and the drivers. (They provide the menus and the transaction service and coordinate with all available driver delivery apps.)
Obviously we can't pretend that VC funded services like Uber are sustainable nor are the environmental and economic costs. But this aren't new concepts. Pizza delivery has been a thing my entire life (I'm in my 40s) and services for the elderly, disabled, and needy like Meals on Wheels have also existed for a long time.
We should be having a lot of discussions about support for services like meals on wheels, or on sustainable means of making small courier businesses viable (via bikes or scooters maybe). Instead we constantly get sidelined into this "only the Treatler Youth use Uber Eats to feed your hamburger addictions, why can't you just cook healthfully for yourself for every meal?!" version of discourse that doesn't help anyone and doesn't advance the needle on any actual solutions.
Pizza delivery sure, but meals on wheels it's for the disabled and elderly. It's not just food delivery, it's a social call, a check in on those who might not have anyone else to check on them. Meals on Wheels also doesn't deliver one meal. It delivers many in one vehicle.
I'm sure there are things to criticize about the program but most of that is probably a lack of funding not delivering meals and food to those who need it.
Sure, that's kind of my point though. I was discussing with a friend recently what role restaurants would have in the glorious anarchic communist utopia. We hit on the notion that what we call "hot bars" would probably become much more common.
It doesn't make sense for everyone to cook for themselves or be deeply concerned with the logistics of food. It would be efficient for larger kitchens to make regular group meals and you go pick one up when you're ready to eat. Something like Meals on Wheels would still exist for all the reasons you say, probably sourcing from their own kitchen or from one of the larger group ones.
I could even see a case for group meal delivery to save time on everyone having to leave job sites to go get food.
I guess my main point here is that I find it more productive and hopeful to imagine these kinds of futures: where everyone is working together systematically to provide convenience and support for everyone. I also find it much more believable as a possible future than rather some cottage core vision of everyone become subsistence smallhold farmers.
(Happy cake day BTW! I hope that cake wasn't delivered!)
For a couple of years in college, I was part of a food coop of six people who each cooked one night a week for the rest of the group. It worked great, but only because our dorm had a full kitchen which I think is not very common.
We should be having a lot of discussions about support for services like meals on wheels,
My (admittedly limited) understanding of Meals on Wheels is that they would have a bulk load of meals that they delivery to individual homes. This would be more similar to how, for example, a package delivery service would work in contrast to an individual trip for one meal.
Properly organized services that are willing to sacrifice some flexibility can operate with vastly greater efficiency.
Of all the modern capitalistic irritations (to put it mildly), this one I really detest. And not least because of how ridiculously popular it is, wtf people? I watch folks I know, who can barely afford the food itself in the first place, then inflate the price by like 40%, just to eat the already (very!) mediocre food...cold. Solely so that they don't have to leave the house. Just completely unhinged from my POV, and honestly produces almost a sense of alienation in me, I find it so bizarre.
Disclaimer though - I will acknowledge both that I happily enjoy various different foolish things myself, so the point about glass houses is worth my keeping in mind, and also there are some great reasons to use it (limited mobility for one, as another user pointed out).
But sheesh folks. Restaurants largely hate it from my understanding, the drivers doing it hate it (cuz the job - oh excuse me, the preferred exploitation-hiding euphemism is "gig" - is utter shit, a literal minor improvement over straight up homelessness), the environment hates it, the wear-and-tear on a likely broke person's vehicle and the wear-and-tear on already struggling infrastructure...I mean what the fuckity fuck, seriously. How is this so popular, we're all insane and just conveniencing our way to oblivion. SMgoddamnH.
Aside from the aforementioned reasonable uses (largely edge cases, let's be honest), there is precisely one group of people who truly benefit in any serious way from this amazingly destructive nonsense - and wouldn't you know it, it's the exact same group fucking us in every other way! Weird!
Sorry. This one really gets me.
Also, $8 is tax and not part of getting it chauffeured to you, also the point still stands I never get food delivered it’s always worse than collecting it yourself.
I assume that most deliveries in NYC are by push bike couriers and vesper type scooters. Thats more typical than yank tanks for this sort of thing in most densely populated cities I've seen.
I use doordash because I'm tired AF and it's 9pm (stores are closed) and there is nothing in the fridge.
Paying an extra 10 bucks to get food delivered while I can relax for 30m an drink a beer is priceless.
I used it when I was working 100 hour weeks and wanted to spend every hour after 9 pm too stoned and drunk to move. It was an expensive luxury, but also the one maintaining me at the stress level where I wouldn’t want to kill myself. I’d order enough to split over multiple days so it wasn’t as obscene.
I don't care.
edit: seriously, the shame you people feel is pathetic. I don't need you to confess or explain your takeout life to me ffs. I guess you just need people to tell you your decisions are OK. Man the fuck up
Taking a taxi 20 minutes away can be like $50 each way and involve an hour-long wait. Taxi service has changed a lot in some areas.
not sure what point you're making -- it seems like you're criticizing anyone who engages in this ? regardless of context, circumstance, ability, or reason???
It's not ridiculous. Time is the most precious resource.
so I assume societies with lots of underpaid gig jobs is a society where people tend to have a lot of free time saved to enjoy life?
For the individual though, it certainly makes sense to just order food online if you have to sit still and complete 3 different projects.
and how are those "individualistic" societies doing?
The implication was that getting food delivered to you in this way makes no sense. I gave an example of why it does make sense.
If you don't like it, you could get lobbying to get everyone UBI supported by automation, so we don't have to work.
This cuts both ways actually. you can have 10 guys going through a drive thru or one 1 making 10 stops. The one guy making ten stops results in less traffic and fewer emissions.
Does that happen in a meaningful amount? Drivers getting multiple orders for the same place with close by destinations? I think it’s vastly more common that you just have 10 drivers at different locations on behalf of 10 customers.
I do a lot of DD, and I'd bet that 75%+ of my restaurant orders are a single order going to a single house. I prefer grocery delivery, and it's probably closer to 50% for those, as we often get a couple of orders at once.
Occasionally we get a single drop off with 2 stops (pick up food from a restaurant and something from a drug or grocery store, and drop them both off together).
I've never gotten more than 3 orders at once, and those are pretty rare.
Americans are too lazy to travel to their lunch. However, for the vast majority of the people, you’re not 15 minutes of walk away from a healthy assortment of food. Even in NYC, depending on where you are, it may not be possible to always go to your food. The idea of your lunch being paid is also not common, and you’re expected to be back to working (not done eating) within 30 minutes or less. In many cases, your lunchtime is timed and unpaid. Nurses and hospital staff? Eat the shit downstairs in the cafeteria or nothing; if you’re late coming back from lunch, it’s almost as bad as being late to work itself.
Back in the day they’d have free delivery and a free pizza if it took more than 30 minutes.
Okay maybe not the 30 minute deadline but free delivery was awesome
If you place your order by using the restaurant's own website or call the them on the phone then you still get free delivery today. Or at least that's how it is in nyc almost always
Most restaurants around here just outsource that to DoorDash.
And if you order for pickup they sometimes give your food to a random driver because it says “DoorDash” on the ticket
We used to be a proper civilization
I only demand the raw ingredients to be grown halfway around the world, shipped by climate-controlled container in giant cargo boats, trucked from the port to the backstore, kept in refrigerated display cases, and sold in disposable containers.
But it's the last mile that's going to change the world, you see.
It actually is the last mile that matters. When shipped half way around the world it's in bulk. The amount of fuel per unit of food is surprisingly low.
For the last mile you're not getting 100 meals delivered even though they would fit in the car. The fuel to food ratio is insane for 1 meal.
Of course buying local is better when you have the option, but it doesn't make nearly as much of a difference as last mile delivery.
Not only fuel to food ratio, but also the amount of labor. If it takes someone 20 minutes to deliver your food, including their return trip), that is 1/3 of an hour of labor.
I know this sub is focused on the vehicle use and ridiculous inefficiency of this in terms of fuel, but the labor to have someone do this is what really runs up the bill. I suppose that's a good thing, because it limits demand.
Gig delivery method is also the most inefficient way to do this. Some people cite medical reasons why they can't leave the house, but many grocery stores manage their own deliveries. When the store handles it, the delivery goes from Store to Point A to Point B... Gig goes from Home to Store to Point A to Store to Point B...
Are you trying to say food delivery could be efficient? I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly, because even as someone who isn't involved in shipping logistics but is involved in some conceptually adjacent logistics, it's absolutely clear to me why the last mile is harder/more expensive than the "other miles". Especially in takeout food delivery because of the additional constraints.
Or is this sort of like, pro super-independence and we should avoid shipping in general and prefer local resources?
Mandatory tips in general is a silly concept for me. The driver should be earning a fair salary without it and the price of the food/delivery should account for the staff costs. And any tips should be a voluntary extra. I feel the same about adding taxes on top of the sticker price the way they do in the US. That was an unexpected culture shock for me when I went there a few years ago.
Especially given the high probability that the app doesn't even pass on that full amount to the driver.
I understand. FWIW, I'm American and I think it's a valid criticism. Tipping culture is just a smoke show to distract from wage suppression and exploitative labor practices. I say this as someone who also worked in fine dining for a decade before switching careers.
By and large, restaurant culture in the US is disgustingly oppressive and completely reliant on immigrant labor, hence the lack of any meaningful headway in legislating protections for said laborers. However, the trick in America is to push the middle class just to the edge of their means so they punch down on service workers, but not enough for them to develop class consciousness.
I just set the tip to zero and put "Will tip cash" in the delivery instructions on the rare occasions I do something like DoorDash.
Unless I order from a.local Chinese place that will deliver. I tip them generously, basically giving the older Chinese guy who usually runs the deliveries an amount akin to what all the fees from DoorDash would have been because at least then it's the restaurant getting the money.
Isn't NYC one of the most walkable cities in the US?
NYC encompasses 5 boroughs with varying levels of walkability and transit even within the same borough. Especially in winter, when not all property/business owners de-ice sidewalks like they’re supposed to.
Do Americans really get their shit delivered by car?over here it's motorcycles 99% of the time (and bicycles the other 1%)
Seems rather.... Sluggish and inefficient for delivery drivers to go by car.
Just walk and buy the stuff. In a way, I miss how before apps, places just had two or three delivery guys
Related video; "Why Convenience is Killing Us" Levi Hildebrand - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpe8te3PdkA
Just walk? Okay, I can do that if I want... Subway. 22 minutes. That's fine. The next closest place to eat is FOUR HOURS there and back just walking. That is not a universal solution in the US.
You're 100% correct and it's very appropiate that we are discussing this in c/fuckcars .
If you live in midtown high-rise shit, you will pay $20, and waste 4 hrs of time and energy, now your kids crying and fiance fighting with you to not why just pay $30 and order delivery instead. It's 200% not worth it but also means this shitty urban planning that priorities corporal revenues on its residents expense should change. Look it up btw even local restaurants suffer; The only winner here is Uber eats.
It's a very unfortunate vicious cycle. Urban planning makes it easy for people to drive around and hard to walk around, which puts stores and eating places farther away, which makes online ordering more likely, which increases car traffic, which reinforces the need of urban planning for cars...
consequences of having human living spaces designed to prioritize non human entities,
Agreed, I miss delivery being associated with a restaurant. There was better accountability.
But I also live in a walkable area, so it's easy for me to say 'just walk'.
If you walk the roads near me you won't live long.
Where the fuck do you live that’s so dangerous?!!
Shitty suburban Ohio. No shoulder on the road, no bike lanes, no sidewalk. Two lane roads with relatively high speed limits and lots of heavy truck traffic.
Lots of crosses from dead pedestrians and cyclists. The last time I walked home two miles from the tire shop I had three people stop to offer me a ride. Everyone knows you shouldn't be on these roads without a vehicle.
Oh, I’ve experienced that near Windham, OH. Makes total sense.
Where the fuck do you live that’s so dangerous?!!
Ok, but like if I pick it up, then I'm driving both to the restaurant and from the restaurant. Is it not more efficient to have 1 person that drives between all houses to drop off food from a single collection point as opposed to all houses using their vehicles to drive both to and from the restaurant?
I mean if it isn't more efficient, then why doesn't everyone pick up their own mail from the post office?
I'm with you here. Delivery this way is unsustainable, but so is going to pick it up yourself. The real answer is bringing the restaurants and housing closer so that there is no need for a vehicle at all
And this level of response is why we're still here.
I think it's reasonable to say that, strictly in terms of green house gas emissions, it's hard to determine whether delivery or pick up is the better option.
The mail is delivered in batches, house after house, so one trip by the mail delivery driver hits a whole batch of houses.
It would be far less efficient for the mail delivery driver to drive back to the post office between every single house.
Duh?
I must not have been clear.
A mail delivery person loads up on all the mail they are delivering once, and then they travel from mailbox to mailbox to deliver it.
A food delivery person has to drive back and forth from restaurants to houses over and over, which is much less efficient than mail.
Some people have food delivered because they have disabilities. Some have deliveries because they are under influence of alcohol or medications.
First time I ever had Burger King delivered was in Bahrain. That was in 2005. The U.S. didn’t start across the board deliveries through apps until about 2015ish. If I recall correctly. It is expensive no doubt.
I mean, yeah, some disabled people do make a lot of money or have upper middle class family who won’t miss the ordering out money. And if you’re disabled and on SNAP you can be eligible for them to go towards hot meals (ie, restaurant meals and hot prepared foods) rather than only groceries.
They still existed before you thought about them, they just either used local delivery through the restaurant instead of Doordash or relied on someone else to prepare food for them.
NYC tipped worker minimum wage is like 13 an hour. Not that The food delivery services are paying minimum wage ...
In one of the most expensive cities in the world, an on-demand courier is not going to be cheap. Even if they're on a bike.
What we're actually suffering from is that the cost of business and minimum wage has increased but the middle and upper wages have not. That, and the delivery services are a bit out of control. They're taking $10 out of every transaction to connect a web page to a mobile app.
It's not just delivery services, basically everything has been co-opted by tech bros that take a huge cut for transactions that are between two parties that have nothing to do with them, just for providing a "shiny" platform. Hotel bookings, AirBnB, marketplaces, Uber, and so on and so forth. All platforms that could be managed by 3 Devs in a basement, or public and managed by the government, but somehow they require 10k employees and vacuum up billions?
You might be interested in this book
this is some quality ragebait right here
The cost of eating out alone is ridiculous now. There's no way I'm paying an additional $30 to have it delivered, and risk the delivery guy eating half the order, having it arrive late and cold, or not showing up at all.
The delivery services are a boon and a bane for everyone. For the restaurant, you no longer need to pay wages or insurance for dedicated delivery workers, but now have service fees that cut into profits. The customer has to cover many of these costs in all these extras fees and service charges, but get did delivered to them. And the driver has to pay for gas and insurance out of the pitiful payments and tips they get. If you are in a rural area, forget about getting enough local orders to cover anything.
Are any of them actually profitable or are they still in the "drive established competitors out of business with unsustainably low prices" phase?
At this point it is hard to tell because most of the large US tech companies have decayed into this being the only way they can pursue the growth in profits Venture Capital, Private Equity and the US finance system in general demand existentially.
I think there are plenty of ways to make a profit here and these US tech companies will likely kill as many as possible to defend an inefficient, dead end business strategy.
Though I do wonder about profitability. My cousin wanted to start a similarish app (though for connecting yard work providers with seekers) and asked me to join him. I ended up declining because a) there's already a bunch of players in the area, both online and locally, b) the legal liabilities involved in providing a service where people go to someone's house and either party could be a sociopath, pervert, or thief. I figured lawyers would end up getting most of the money.
Those also apply to rideshare and delivery services. They thought they could drive taxi services and local delivery services out of business, but didn't think that others could come along and do the same thing, plus for delivery services, at least, operational costs are already pretty low and adding the infrastructure at the scale required to serve all the areas they want to serve is in addition to all the normal costs. Local delivery services I knew about from before uber and doordash just used cell phones to call the one or two drivers directly and since it was all so informal, they could add less legal options like selling drugs to make even more money, as long as they made sure to build a relationship of trust with clients before opening that up. The online services need to avoid a relationship between driver and client or they risk getting cut out entirely.
And personally, when I need a ride, I'll still call a cab because I don't want the services to win because I know they just want to build a monopoly and charge even more than the taxis were.
Plus legal fees, salaries of everyone at the office (which is a bit more than app development costs when you think of all the middle and upper managers involved), leasing office space itself (and other related costs), assuming they haven't gone full remote. Marketing, lobbying (at national, regional, and local levels, since individual cities decide whether or not to allow them at this point), PR, finances, paying the team that convinces the investors to throw more money at it instead of pulling the plug (though I bet sunk cost fallacy does a lot of legwork for them).
None of us need to purchase this goofy ass delivery powered by virtual slave labor. Spend no money, cause no harm. Let those capitalists seethe we no longer need to endlessly consume to be happy.
Yea, both Pizza Hut and Papa Johns can send orders from their own systems out to Doordash when they are too busy to handle them, when they are outside of their delivery zone (or I suspect when their own drivers don't want the order based on the tip or drive time).
The Pizza Hut in the small town near us doesn't even have their own drivers anymore, just sending them to all to DD.
I drive for DD, and besides a ton of Dollar General and grocery store orders, we also do some Pet Smart, Pet Supermarket, Tractor Supply, Home Depot, Lowes, and Best Buy (I'm sure there are others big box retailers I'm forgetting as well).
Sadly this is rapidly becoming untrue. There are at least two small mom and pop restaurants near me that have gotten rid of their delivery driver and just deliver via one of the app services.
Why was the subtotal of the actual food being ordered omitted?
Likely because it would give meaningful context to the amounts of the fees, and the ragebaiting OOP wants to avoid that.
Funny how Chinese and pizza places could do this all day everyday and it cost 5% of the cost of the food. Not double it. Delivery food has been hit with inflation and market 'innovation' just like everything else. But let's pretend working people wanting convenience services is somehow the problem...the avocado toast on wheels argument.
I worked as an engineer at a food delivery company and I almost never used my own companies app, these companies charge both the customer and the restaurant and the restaurants raise the prices of their menu on the app to compensate for it, plus the delivery takes a long ass time and the food arrives cold. And the business is still mostly unprofitable and these companies stay afloat from investments while they suffer losses.
It's a natural consequence of decoupling value from productivity; and instead relying on data harvesting for predictive analytics as an alternative for anything truly valuable.
We're living in a world in which the wealthy keep coming up with ways to hand money back and forth, while creatinf new schemes to cut out the working class from any resulting 'value' creation.
AI will fuck over workers just like every other technological marvel that preceded it.
It absolutely baffles me that people are willing to spend that kind of money on low-quality takeout food that often arrives cold. I live just five minutes away from several five-star restaurants. If I wanted to, I could call ahead and pick up a fresh, high-quality meal in half the time it takes for a soggy, lukewarm fast food burger to show up at my doorstep—and I’d pay only a third of the price.
I genuinely don’t understand the appeal.
Most people don't live so close to good restaurants. And driving is so miserable that they'll pay others to do the driving for them.
Was going to say i and most cant afford even a single star restaurant but then i Realised those only go up to three and you’re talking about fake internet points.
One of the best restaurants (zero stars) i have regularly been too has no website and most people don't even know what its called because its not on the storefront or the menu. People refer to it using the chef/owners name.
I have something I call the Styrofoam Plate Theory.
Gourmet French cuisine is based on peasant foods. I.E. making cheap ingredients taste good. Coq au Vin was a way to cook a tough old rooster and it tastes amazing.
So, gourmet is often based on poor people food.
Soul food/Southern home, Mexican, Indian: all poor people food.
So, if you go to a restaurant or gas station and the food comes on a styrofoam plate, it is strongly correleated with good food. A language barrier, menu with pictures and numbers, rundown dining room, and a clean bathroom all increase the likelihood of truly wonderful cuisine.
Especially for comfort food i can see that being true.
I am not sure how this translates to my example though, it was definitely a restaurant. Though it was known to be an eccentric bordering on rudely rushed experience. He had some contacts to get incredibly high quality fresh ingredients.
I fucking hate paying delivery fees, or getting food delivered. I have a car, and feet. I'll gladly just pick the food up myself
I have feet and a car. I'd rather pay an extra $5 and save myself 30-45m of time.
I personally find delivered food worse as it’s often sat around due to maybe not being the first drop. I’ll collect all day.
I haven't ordered delivery food in literal years (think last time was 2021?). If I want to eat something that I didn't make myself, I'm just going out to eat. Saves me from a bunch of trash plus I prefer not having the smell of some food at home. And the kebab place close to me where eating is uncomfortable doesn't deliver anyways, I'm just getting it there and eat at home. Walking those five minutes isn't really an issue…
This is dumb, hating for the sake of hating just shows a low level of thinking. Cars are very useful tools that have practical applications that aren't going away any time soon, and delivery services are an example of that.
The issue with cars is that we decided to designed our cities and towns around them at the expense of pedestrians, culture, and the environment. This has spawned societies that are plagued with long commutes, inactive lifestyles, dangerous infrastructure, smog, and an arms race to get comically huge cars. Criticizing the car industry, the car lobby, specific aspects of cars, or our urban layouts is perfectly valid. Blindly hating on cars just because they're cars is counterproductive.
The thing is that these types of services eat away at money anyway. It's better to go get the food yourself just to save yourself the money. If you must eat out rather than cook. Although, I understand that this may be more difficult for those who live in major cities such as NYC or LA, as examples. Food delivery has always been a thing for a lot of major U.S. cities. In my opinion, food delivery apps such as Uber Eats and Door Dash are not worth it or smart for many, if not most people.
NYC primarily does not use cars for food delivery, there's a 99.8% chance they will deliver it via bicycle.
The expectation comes from SoftBank investing billions into Uber to kickstart the ride share industry.
need to use it, it’s pretty wasteful expenditure.
At home, when we moved, we ordered a few times. The food ended up cold, late, wrong, AND 75% more expensive.
We used to order GH and DD at work a lot, they just priced themselves out of the market. on WFW days, we just either go there together or order form a place that has their own app and one person picks up for everyone.
We have a pizza place in the neighborhood that delivers to us for free, they're expensive but end up being the same price as ordering other places through GH/DD. When we want something outside the hood, I just go and get it. We get it faster, hotter, it's right and it's cheaper.
I've never ordered food to my door. Not even pizza. The rare times I order takeout pizza I pick it up myself. Unless you're a senior citizen it just seems so wasteful and lazy and comically expensive to have food delivered to you. I mean I get that we're absolutely going to destroy this planet, but holy shit are we speedrunning it.
In my area, I'm going to have to drive 15 minutes one way to the nearest place to pick anything up, so it's not much different than having it delivered. We have never gotten delivery out here, since no one delivers but the third party ones (DD/UE), but someone delivering out here could possibly waste less fuel than I would to pick it up if they end up bring multiple orders out here.
If it were easier to walk or bike to get food it would be different. Sometimes I don't want to spend 30 minutes in a metal death box for a burrito. We cook most of our meals at home but occasional delivery is nice.
I was talking to a T-Mobile rep about something, and she gave me a head's up that this week's T-Mobile Tuesday included a Door Dash subscription for a year. It even said that it can be cancelled in a year, but they'd be doing the same promotion on July 2026, so the customer can just resign up for free again!
I've already used it, and the place I ordered from had a free item for ordering over $25. After the discount and free delivery, the $55 bill was down to $30.
And this was in NYC.
Yeah, I use delivery services when they offer discounts. And you can often get 2 meals for the price of 1.
It's not that expensive if you are smart about it and your use is limited. I spend less than $100/mo for delivery once a week or so.
The issue is way too many people get addicted to these services and are paying $25 for a $10 single burrito
I have never ordered via delivery service for my food except the traditional pizza delivery. I can’t see spending that much to drop off a meal for myself. I go pick it up if they don’t deliver, or I just don’t order in.
Food trucks do exist, and they're pretty great - taco truck, halal truck, etc. but they're usually stationary most of the time because it'd be expensive to drive the entire kitchen around frequently, and they're only permitted to be in certain areas, etc
I'm certainly skipping down the road with all the neighborhood dads toward the burrito truck.
Hope they have churros.
hear tequila played on a synthesizer
"MOM! THE BURRITO TRUCK IS HERE!"
I can't be arsed to wait for food delivery. I'll pick it up if I don't have the supplies and time to cook it. I was thinking I want a CWS for om Taco bell, but I still have planned-overs in my fridge. Also, the upcharge on food delivery apps are insane. I'll bake a frozen pizza instead for 5 dolla.
I've honestly never quite realized up until now how utterly ridiculous it is that people regularly demand that their food be cooked for them.
I've honestly never quite realized up until now how utterly ridiculous it is that people regularly demand that their food items be prepared and packaged for them.
I've honestly never quite realized up until now how utterly ridiculous it is that people regularly demand that that the animals they eat are slaughtered for them.
I've honestly never quite realized up until now how utterly ridiculous it is that people regularly demand that their grain be milled for them.
Society evolves buddy. I don't churn my own butter, but my grandmas did, and would find it ridiculous I have 247 access to a supermarket selling some. And it's even being kept at an exact temperature, all the time? Packaged without any sweat on it? Ridiculous!
$8 is the full 8-5 working daily wage in many developing countries. I know NY rent is not the same as nigeria, but I'm just putting things in prespective when you see economic immegrants delivering your food
many of the delivery drivers are economical immigrants who came from developing countries where the median average salary is $8/day, which is the driver tip for one single delivery.
I mean its a thing useful for disabled people and even currently in NYC if the time limit to delivery was more variable a personal vehicle would be far from necessary given public transportation.
who's out there driving a deuce and a half as their daily driver?
Rodney Cheng did a comedy skit on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGEAiUeiaKs
Is this about cars or society and industry? Because what if they're really efficient and have wheels and run on passive energy collected from the power of the sun and processed through rare minerals dug from the earth?
A "Driver tip" isn't a "fee". It's a tip.
But on top of everything else, I'd like to point out that nobody is making big bucks on this. Last time I checked, food delivery services mean the consumer is paying more, the restaurant is making less, and the delivery service itself would be lucky to break even. The drivers are making money, but it's not a lot of money.
What does it all mean, though? Let's look at it another way. What if, instead of hiring somebody to do that, you go out and eat at a restaurant? Basically, you're doing all of this work of driving for free. It's a hidden cost of the meal. It's about $22 of work in this example. Just lost time. No physical benefit to driving a car.
You'd be much better off taking public transit or cycling.
The thing about all these delivery service is, i feel like they're all using venture capitalist money to make the business seems lucrative, grow their userbase and business as much as possible, and then sell it off. Doesn't even need to make big profit the time they run the businesses, just have to sustain enough to reach the point where they sell off. All venture capitalist funded business works that way.
Isn't that obvious? If you don't start with that assumption, then you're not paying attention.
The reason I brought that up is that, if nobody else is making money, then the fees are not inflated and reflect the actual cost of the driving.
Anyone who refers to delivery as “chauffeuring” should be forced to listen to unrecognizable music at volume level 1.
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@lemmy.world
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
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You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
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A lot of these are delivered by bike nowadays, no?
Edit: since people keep asking without reading below, I mean specifically in NYC.
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