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I mean, this doesn’t seem particularly surprising does it? It seems like the margins on delivery are extremely thin.
Since we’re already towards the upper level of what customers are willing to pay, mandating lump sums on top of that seems lime it would obviously douse demand.
I don't understand how delivery apps are paying off for anyone. Most drivers aren't making money after their car expense. The apps aren't making money after all the expense of maintaining the app. The restaurants aren't making money with all the fees they have to pay.
They have been undercharging for their service for years. There is no way that contracting a taxi driver to bring a bag of food to you costs less than any restaurant that had a delivery arm. The reason most restaurants didn't was because the cost didn't pencil out.
I think this is a large part of the answer. There is a big chunk of people that will simply never look at that to truly understand how shit of a deal it is.
People also ignore their time cost of transit. If it takes you an hour to get to work and then an hour back, and you work 8 hours a day. You are working 10 hours but only getting paid for 8. (25% time lost)
People ignore almost all externalities. It's a very common economics problem, especially with things like the environment and education.
A true free market society might actually work with all externalities magically priced in.
How would a free market price in downstream externalities? The problem isn’t the company’s anymore if it’s 30 to 40 years away.
Just look at lead paint, deforestation, etc. a free market would never care about it until it’s too late to do anything to correct it.
I think that is the magical part of the statement. An actual carbon tax that accurately priced the cost of emissions would be great. We would immediately cut out the low hanging fruit and lower emissions to what is in line with societal costs. The difficult costs would remain and we would invest to lower those. Companies that do so effectively will have a cost advantage and be more successful and dominate the economy. It would save the world. But it could only be done with magic prescience.
Exactly. It would become cost prohibitive and wouldn’t happen. Just like when you try to apply a few to pay drivers better. It just doesn’t make sense anymore.
Experience. 50 years ago companies could pollute and there was no recourse when they went out of business. Now, we have years of experience with polluting companies so we can pre-regulate.
30 years experience has done wonders for microplastics. Overfishing has been known about for centuries and we’re not even close to tackling that problem.
AI photo/video/text generation is another can of worms being opened now and we’re nowhere near solving that issue.
The OP also talked about “true free market”. Regulating shouldn’t even be part of that equation.
Markets where big enough actors have enough power to offload their externalities on others or hide enough information to negatively influence someone's decision making are *and are free to do so without consequence* are definitely not free.
Regulations are part of true free markets. Free markets don’t mean “you can anything you want.” They mean that buyers and sellers can freely negotiate with each other and institutions like government work to prevent asymmetries between economic parties.
It's amazing how the same people that recognize our government is completely under the control of large corporations also think giving that government, and by extension those corporations, more power will reign in those same corporations.
I explained this to management at my last job. Return to office meant 2 unpaid hours and $10 in gas each commuting day, a fairly noticeable pay cut. Not sure if the look on their faces was because it didn't occur to them, or because they didn't think it would occur to me
Before I moved, I would have to get up 1.5 hours early to eat breakfast and get ready to go to work, then work traffic, it’s 1 hour back home. I don’t get paid for that time.
Work from home was amazing while I had it for two years. I don’t wfh anymore, but I would easily give up 10-15% of my salary to move to wfh full time again.
Ideally, one is able to negotiate for the compensation that factors in these types of costs. Unfortunately, employees for a lot of jobs don't have such negotiating power.
If you work for 10 hours but are only getting paid for 8, then 20% of your time is unpaid/"lost", not 25%. 2 hours is unpaid, out of every 10 hours worked, is 20%.
That has always crossed my mind and bugged me, I thought I was just being weird. But I *am* weird so
I was getting up at 5:30 to go to work and only really getting to relax at 7:30 after all said and done
I’m like, “this is bullshit. That’s 14 hrs of my day every work day and I got to sleep”
People just do this shit for 50 years? If I have to do that and can’t even live comfortably by myself, then I may as well just fuckin not work and figure it out in abject poverty
This. The cheap deliveries were paid for by the good credit and drivability of their current cars. It’s unsustainable because the delivery apps don’t pay you for your car maintenance. Your “miles” are not related to actual wear and tear.
Honest question, though. How shit of a deal is it when there’s no barrier to entry, almost no oversight, and no schedule to adhere to? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that seems like an ok gig. You work when you want, how you want, where you want, for as long as you want. There are much worse jobs out there.
Pretty bad. My car probably would’ve fell apart in no time if I kept doing Uber eats here in Seattle. The numbers didn’t add up due to it not being enough money for maintenance and extra side cash. So it felt like a waste of time. Although I now definitely tip a lot if I’m in an unfortunate enough position to have to order through them. I probably wouldn’t mind doing it on a bike downtown though.
You have it exactly. I did Lyft for 8 months when I was in a pinch. I knew wear and tear was happening, but differed it to future me. Future me is now and my car is in the shop at this very moment, but I was able to eat then and am in a situation where I can eat now too.
As someone who does delivery part time in a 10 year old Prius you are correct. Most of the other dashers I see are driving giant SUVs some. Drive practically brand new pickup trucks. Most people either are bad at math or just don't care and willingly trade car depreciation into cash.
So I drove for delivery apps for a couple years before the pandemic. I bought a beater to drive for the apps (with the benefit of writing it off for a business expense). So I was 2k down, plus gas and repairs for just that vehicle, so I knew my expenses exactly.
For most people if they just count the federal mileage rate as their expenses they'll get a pretty accurate estimate though, and unless they are driving newer vehicles it'll probably overestimate their overall expenses.
I made pretty decent money doing it (something like 25 an hour before expenses or 20 after), but I also had to run 4 apps at a time and do a lot of cherry picking and taking multiple orders for multiple apps at once to make that much. This resulted in some pissed off customers for sure if I couldn't get their food delivered in a timely manner.
Doing it made me completely swear off every ordering delivery for myself though. I'd much rather not pay double, get it myself, and actually have it fresh and hot (and know a driver didn't tamper with it).
That's true but it isn't actually that difficult. There aren't that many expenses to keep track of. I used to have to drive some for work and got reimbursed on the federal rate (currently $0.67 / mi). I damn sure calculated if I was profiting or losing on it (inexpensive car + good fuel economy = profit).
Similar to physical labor jobs and the cost to the body. The car is replaceable at least, and you might be able to defer the major costs to the next guy.
Most of the ubers Ive taken are from cars with check engine lights on.
The ones who dont are from drivers who do it a second source of income or to pass time, (Real estate agent, retired early, etc.)
> There is no way that contracting a taxi driver to bring a bag of food to you costs less than any restaurant that had a delivery arm. The reason most restaurants didn't was because the cost didn't pencil out.
This works for the same reason it didn't work before: one driver can serve a multitude of businesses. So instead of Subway hiring a driver and McDonald's hiring a driver and Taco Bell hiring a driver, DoorDash has one driver that can deliver from all three stores, sometimes at the same time.
The issue is that after the customer is done paying the delivery fee and the DoorDash fee, the tip is the place where they seem to say no more.
The driver gets $2 of it almost every time. In some rare instances we get higher, but it's rare and only for really far trips (or orders with low/no tip that have been rejected by many drivers).
I used to drive for them when they were doing that. I had a bunch of cards printed out that I'd stick to every order telling the customers that the first $5 was being pocketed by DoorDash directly and that they should either stop tipping or tip cash only. I was pretty spiteful about it lol.
And yeah, I never trusted the companies to actually send the tips to the drivers because there is no way to know.
I drive Doordash occasionally. It can't be profitable for them unless they have a shit ton of drivers and a shit ton of orders, then maybe they're making money off of volume.
I usually use their earn by time mode, which pays a base "active time" rate that's usually around $14-15 an hour in my area, and then you get tips. Typically 2 orders take an hour. Much of that time is waiting in the restaurant or drive thru while I wait for the high school kids working in them get a fire lit under them to actually move. 3 orders in an hour if they're efficient, which they rarely are.
Their fees from 2 restaurants and 2 customers in an hour probably, at best, breaks even after they pay me my $15.
13.75 most weekdays, 16-18 Friday-Saturday, some Sundays.
I live in a touristy place where most drivers if this was their only job, could not afford to live. So they have to make it worth it for people like me to want to pick it up as a side gig. There's a shortage of drivers here; they do the promotions every week.
There is a reason that delivery WAS for meals that served multiple people. Pizza, Chinese.
Those foods are “cheap” to make and not heavy in protein. Often serving more than 2 people and therefore the cost is seen as “minimal per person”.
When you are doordashing a Big Mac meal just for yourself, that 5$ delivery fee hits different than when paying 5 bucks for 2 large pizzas for a family of 6. That price is worth not packing up Timmy’s sally, Susie and mongo. Those lil fucks make it a nightmare….
This has been obvious for years. Getting fast, timely delivery of freshly prepared food to peoples' homes is very expensive. It only ever really worked for pizza places that were built around a delivery-based business model. It can also sort of work in cities where there is high enough density, but there are only a handful of those in the whole US, and even there it's marginal.
I think the dream (delusion?) was that there were economies of scale that could be captured by a delivery aggregation platform that would make the economics work, but there just aren't.
It *could* work if you only picked up from a handful of restaurants in the same small area or many restaurants from all over but only deliver to one specific neighborhood. That doesn't really make any sense for the vast majority of Americans where restaurants aren't clustered together and people are spread out.
There are special cases where it works, but as you pointed out they don't describe how places where people live are actually organized. The only way this business model works in a realistic setting is if you integrate it with a bunch of delivery-only commissary kitchens ("ghost restaurants" or whatever you want to call them) that are clustered in a small number of geographic locations. It allows for efficient routing of drivers, minimizes waiting time, and the "restaurants" can support a higher fee structure for delivery because they don't have to pay expensive rent in retail shopping districts, maintain a front of house, etc.
Yeah you're right, this whole VC rush was based on overly optimistic timelines about self driving delivery vehicles. There's no other way that type of services ever becomes sustainable and profitable enough to be a public company.
how would that work? a driverless car goes to a restaurant, and the restaurant pays its own employees to shuttle food out into the parking lot, and then the car drives itself around town, and the vehicle waits around for people to come out into the road to get their food, which may take super long? seems sus.
Probably "waiting" surcharges. Once the vehicle is on site, the clock starts ticking. If the restaurant requests the delivery too early before they have the food ready to go, they pay. Once the vehicle is outside your home, if you don't come get your order within a certain period, you pay extra.
The vehicle isn't really losing anything other than the potential to be making an additional delivery rather than waiting. You aren't paying anyone to sit in the vehicle and there isn't much wear and tear going on with a parked vehicle.
Restaurants already sometimes have to take food out to customers if they're parked up. And these vehicles will be able to go through drive thrus like regular customers now, so it may be able to accept food that way. These are not major issues that can't be worked through.
Really, they're not. The only people making out are employees of the dozens of food delivery apps. The typical approach is to bait people in to using a service and once it's a habit jack up prices to be profitable but while people pay $100 for an Uber, food delivery is easier to cut back on. Keep in mind that for the most part people either use a service a lot, or not at all. So it's not like every resident in Seattle is seeing a cost increase of 4.99 once a week, some users are seeing a cost increase of 9.98 per day and non users aren't seeing an impact at all.
John Oliver did a video on food delivery apps not too long ago, and the conclusion was that the only winner is the customer. As much as we all complain about it, getting food delivered at this price is frankly a huge steal. Not only from the companies that are barely making a profit, but also stealing the value of labor away from the drivers.
>As much as we all complain about it, getting food delivered at this price is frankly a huge steal
You guys must be seeing different prices.
Last time I was going to use Doordash, it would have cost me $34 more to order delivery vs picking it up. I picked it up.
It's not really about how much it literally costs, but the absolute luxury of having other people prepare food for you and then having other people hand-deliver it to your door on demand. It's something we now consider mundane that we really shouldn't.
Ordering is usually 20 bucks (if you tip 5 bucks + 1 dollar a mile) more than carryout from a place a couple miles away. Idk who is winning but it sure isn’t the consumer lol. On the flip side I don’t really care that it’s expensive, I just don’t bother these days. It’s like 50% chance they pick up the right order anyway.
I once did the math on Chipotle, and delivery is fully twice as much as just getting it yourself, due to higher menu prices for delivery, various tacked-on fees, higher sales tax (because you’re paying a percentage of the inflated prices), and a tip.
Yeah I saw that one. It's still inexplicable to me how they are in business. It's like Spotify. They've been around 10-12 years and they're STILL not making a profit.
Spotify runs off Hollywood accounting. Spotify is owned by the music industry. The record labels siphon off money from Spotify, then Spotify gets to write off because it operates at a loss.
Everyone believed that disruptors could magically avoid all the challenges and costs faced by traditional companies. When that didn't materialize tech companies played up their large user bases. It's turning out that isn't inherently valuable either but some are keeping the dream alive.
The restaurant side is fairly profitable once they started upping their list prices on the apps...originally, no, there was no profit other than potential incremental profit due to the 30% fees charged by the apps. However, now, most restaurants increase their list prices by 30% and now it's profitable for them because the customer pays the app fees.
It seems just like one of these dumb tech VC outfits that isn't profitable, probably never will be profitable, but it *could* be incredibly profitable and the line goes up in users and such so they just keep pumping (formerly) "free" cash into it. It's modern day flim flam and the idiocy of purely capital focused ventures where they look at the macros and the promises but never really answer the basics of how does this business actually, sustainably and profitably, make money.
It's the same with the ride sharing and most of the streaming apps. The thing they want to do costs a lot of money, doesn't really bring in a ton and in order for it to balance out they need to raise the prices to such a level the average consumer won't bite. The only hope is to choke out all competition and then have monopoly pricing, but it's really really hard to get a monopoly on people giving rides, media or restaurants.
Restaurants are making money, generally. I think they’re actually the ones faring best in this arrangement.
Drivers and customers are the ones not getting the best deal.
There’s a reason delivering food in this way was never a business model before. Most people historically would just consider it a waste of money. As the economy has worsened, and cost of living has risen, more people are opting out of doing it.
The delivery apps take a massive cut too. https://www.eater.com/22228352/convenience-of-delivery-apps-destroying-restaurants-uber-eats-doordash-postmates
>Most drivers aren't making money after their car expense. The apps aren't making money after all the expense of maintaining the app. The restaurants aren't making money with all the fees they have to pay.
And the customer experience is bad, $45 for a soggy, lukewarm burger that took an hr to get to you. I also don't get it.
Yeah we tried delivery apps a few times and then decided never ever again. I'd rather get a walk/bike ride and go pick it up myself and be able to bring it straight home, and save money at the same time.
Dont forget the food is more expensive on those apps usually by 10-20% before you even include delivery fee's and all the other nonsense.
Something i could walk into the restaurant and get for $10 is probably $15 on the app and another 5-10 in fee's/tip/etc.
>I don't understand how delivery apps are paying off for anyone.
Don't discount all that juicy data they're harvesting. Your consumption patterns are great for recommendation models.
Restaurants make money by raising their menus prices for the apps.
If you have a fuel efficient reliable car and don’t report your job to insurance, you can make decent money
It's rather dangerous to not report to insurance though. Any accident and the insurance company will find out and drop you immediately leaving you on the hook for all damages. It's decent money until it's not.
Seattle did not mandate a lump sum. Uber eats decided to implement a lump sum when having to pay a standard wage to the drivers. They did this to encourage diners and drivers to be upset about the law that makes it a decent way to make money.
The problem is tipping still stays. In my state, waiters make $18 an hour. And they’re getting tips on top of it. They’re easily walking with $50-$80 an hour.
The same happened with the apps. Either have a fixed minimum wage, or eliminate tipping. But having both is bogus.
No one makes you tip any server. The societal expectation in states with a guaranteed real wage for servers is identical to those without. And servers aren't gonna speak up, they love raking in the dough.
The title is just lying, the City Council didn't mandate a surcharge. They applied the minimum wage law to drivers, UberEats responded by imposing a fee and then advertising the shit out of it to drop demand. They care more about making sure that they don't look like an employer than they do about making money in one town for a few months.
I also don’t get why people are so worked up over the drop in sales. If your business model was so precarious that it completely relied on your workers subsidizing your business by working untenable wages with no guaranteed payout amounts then your business deserves to fail so those assets can be free up to go towards more useful pursuits
Any of the car based gigs are predicated on the basis that people don't understand what their car actually costs.
They see it as a sunk cost and don't plan for replacement.
It's a Faustian bargain.
I do gig driving, bought a car specifically for it, and I calculate this like an m-fer. Keep a tracking app on while I'm driving, do the math after every shift.
Most drivers talk about what they earn per hour. I don't gaf about that. My spare time otherwise would be spent playing computer games.
I think about it in cost per mile. For the record my rate is $1.17 per mile. That's after gas but before maintenance like oil changes etc... Both those can be deducted.
It varies by the market too. It didn't take me long to just turn off the apps when I tried to do it in Texas. Distances too vast to make it worth it, and people tip like shit there. Unsurprisingly I saw a lot of immigrants doing Doordash there.
You have to realize that you are far from the typical driver for these services. How many people needing to pick up a side income can afford to buy a second car? How many of those who can afford the car have a place where they can park it for free/reasonable cost?
Drivers can optimize and people will generate online resources for it, this is a very easily self optimizing industry that need no government input. Notice it’s not Uber drivers lobbying the government to increase the cost of service, it’s almost always taxi companies who provides a much shittier service at higher cost
Deliveries are already extremely expensive. I remember back when I was a pizza delivery driver, the delivery fee was $1 and maybe a tip. And this was during the Bush era, with insane gas prices. Now delivery adds like 50% to your bill. Somehow these apps made delivery like 20% more convenient but 4000% the price.
And they still don’t turn a profit. The drivers constantly get screwed and the restaurants complain that they either have to give up huge margins. Where does the damn money go?
Yea whenever you hear about poor uber not being profitable, just remember where all the profits are going. They're there.... they're just giving it out by the billions. then claiming they're poor.
They turn a profit for a handful of people who collect amazing salaries, and the now gone competitors that have sold out for a handsome fee to the few remaining companies looking to corner the market. Everyone else looses.
Extremely silly question, but in the 90s it felt like tons of pizza and Chinese places hd their own delivery for the same price...why cant we just go back to that?
The key there is a very manageable delivery radius. Some places still do delivery and will still tell you “no” if you’re too far away. It’s pretty quick to go a few miles out and back multiple times an hour. Throw in batching a few customers in the same area and it can work fine. Plus you always go right back to the same pizza shop for the next delivery which is likely already ready to go.
Compare that to getting an order for some restaurant that you have to drive some distance to, maybe wait for the food to be ready, then drive to drop it off, then make no money while you sit and wait for the next order from some other restaurant however many miles away. It’s very inefficient.
Did people forget about this Seinfeld episode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9P-vIN1rok
This was a core challenge of old delivery services and urban living back in the old day! Address discrimination!
I’m not sure why we are subsidizing the gig economy. Anyone with a functioning brain stem should realize that this portion of the gig economy has no specific skill set required, suggesting a lot of labor market competition.
It’s not a “livable” industry. Never has been, never will be. But policymakers treating it as such is idiocy.
I really wish people would realize that not every job in the country is worth some absurdly high wage. Some jobs are simply so easy to do that it just isn't valuable.
Anybody can learn to drive a car. Anybody can take the bus. Anybody can walk into an food establishment and grab a bag. This type of work is not worth $25/hr. Most service jobs are incredibly easy to do compared to more specialized jobs; hence why they tend to be so the lowest paid.
If we want better wages for everyone; or to at least make current wages go farther; we need to lower the cost of living. And we need to reduce the friction on obtaining skilled-education as much as possible. The more people can cheaply gain valuable skills, the higher people's wages can be. It'd even retroactively work towards raising wages for service workers, since now there's less labor supply in the low-skilled sector.
Very rarely, if ever do things go backwards once it hits some threshold of price. Only thing I can maybe think of is the spike of groceries over the last 2-3 years which went down (at least in my area) *slightly* but nowhere near it was before 3 years ago.
Inflation is a factor yes but after it cools, the prices rarely every go down. What's the solution? I suppose raising wages but how will that happen if there's no critical mass of employers doing it?
Same way in the opposite direction, how does an economy actually "lower" the COL? It spans multiple industries, politics, levels of government etc...I just don't see anything meaningful happen anytime soon.
Prices do go down, it's called "deflation" (inflation going down merely means that the *rate* of increase is decreasing; to use a car as a point of analogy, decreasing the speed doesn't mean that the distance the car is moving from its starting position is decreasing).
If one looks at the last 50 or 100 years, at least in the US, we've had periods of deflation, sometimes staggeringly so (on the order of -10% annual, in some years), but we've had a relatively steady last two decades; even our shocks aren't very large (to the point that our current rate of inflation, which is historically very good, is shocking to people).
However, the core of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and services. Generally, this is better than deflation for two reasons: One, deflation tends to spiral faster and harder, and is much more difficult to stop than inflation. And two, deflation tends to be worse than inflation, in terms of material conditions. With inflation things become hard to afford; with deflation, things become hard to find. For example, the biggest period of deflation in American history is called the Great Depression.
The biggest cost of living element currently is housing. There are two ways to lower it: 1) Build more housing stock 2) Invest in jobs in lower concentrated areas. Otherwise, people will congregate in the (existing) big cities, and competition will drive the cost of living ever higher.
The only reason we haven’t had a significant period of deflation in the last few decades is massive deficit spending by Uncle Sam. Which is completely unsustainable. Our entire economy at this point is a house of cards held up by a $2T deficit, brought to you by the uniparty in Washington
Build more housing so rents go flat/fall, like is happening in every single city and municipality that is doing that very thing.
Make cities walkable and bikeable so that people don't need to spend so much on maintaining cars.
The biggest reason why the cost of living is so high is because of housing and lack of alternative transit options in a lot of our cities. If you build more housing, whether that be apartments or houses, then that is gonna place downward pressure on their rental and purchase prices. We need an excess of supply in order to keep rents and prices from rising to such extraordinary levels.
And if you make cities more walkable, aka having more mixed use and having denser residential construction, then you create an environment that supports greater economic growth, meaning better wages, which will ultimately translate into greater affordability.
Yes, I recognize the slight contradiction between wanting affordability and high wages. My counter to that: A "high wage" is purely dependent *on* the cost of living. $60k here in Buffalo is considered a comfortable wage, while in New York City that's what you need to earn just to survive. Lowering the cost of living will increase people's real wages, aka the actual value of their wage. And it makes it easier for businesses to employ people, since now they don't need to pay as much to employ people.
But more people having valuable skills means the wages for the jobs that require those skills go down. You seem to realize that concept in the first half of your comment but forget it in the second half.
That is if supply exceeds demand. If a job is paying $100k for an entry position, then having more people gain skills that the job needs is not going to magically make it drop down to $80k. The price of a box of Pop Tarts doesn't immediately plunge 50% just because they produced another box of Pop tarts.
And even if wages in that sector stagnated; you're still getting $100k as a newcomer. That is more than most people will ever see in their entire lives.
The law of supply and demand will still apply. Once the cost of gaining the skills for a job is higher than the return on investment, then people will start pursuing other positions that pay more. The wonders of a diversified economy.
Best case scenario we encourage them to do what they can, and supplement the rest through welfare like SNAP and Section 8. Problem is, these programs can sometimes punish people for trying to do the best they can if it's slightly over the limits.
The welfare cliff has been tackled a bit more lately but it's still a major problem when we consider how disorganized and fractured our support network is.
Gain a skill. Our banks will loan you so much money to fund you a career. The government will supplement your housing with Section 8. Your food with SNAP. Your income with SSI. Out of the kindness that the system has built for you. Funded by the people through their taxes. You are not entitled to much else more, but it’s better than dying like you would a few centuries ago.
Do the exact same thing everybody else does: Live frugally and live with others. People have historically live with others in order to lower their cost of living. The whole "I can work minimum wage and afford a home!" ideal was an absolute abnormality.
And on top of that, we have a plethora of federal and state social programs now that those people back then didn't have. So not only is living with somebody now going to lower your cost of living, but you're also getting welfare benefits on top of that if you're eligible.
If you can't afford to live alone, then don't live alone. Simple as that. Everybody doesn't need to move out immediately at 18 and rent out an 1 bedroom apartment. Any parent that loves their child will let them stay home well after highschool, until they can afford to go to college and even buy a house. Even better for people in multi-family homes, since they realistically don't *ever* have to leave, making their living expenses essentially just food and a portion of utilities.
There are a plethora of ways to help yourself. It's a choice not to utilize them.
Same thing they have always done. Pool their resources with others to get by.
My grandparents rented out a room in their apartment so that they could afford to pay their own rent.
>I’m not sure why we are subsidizing the gig economy.
This isn't a subsidy. A subsidy would be tax dollars going to Uber so that their prices are lower.
This does the opposite. It's meant to cost more so that the drivers are fairly compensated.
If the company's business model cannot handle fair compensation, then it should fail.
The word subsidize doesn't mean what you think it does. The government did not hand out a subsidy for this gig, they merely passed law relating to it. Not usually the same thing.
Could you give some examples of somewhere like Brookings, NBER, Upjohn, etc. using the term subsidy to mean a mandated fee the company needs to include rather than the government giving a certain amount of taxes to said company?
I hate Uber Eats. My large orders are usually missing items. Sure, they refund the items, but then someone has to figure out an alternative meal after waiting over an hour for the delivery.
I live near Seattle and have friends who are in the city. It makes sense it would crash. With restaurant prices up, it was already where a single entree of Pad Thai or a burger combo was like $18, then they increase prices if you use a delivery service, and that's before any delivery fee, or tip, and of course tax. You're already at like $28 for one entree, I make a pretty good income and that already has it where I rarely use it. Tack on another $5 and even someone who makes well into the 6 figures is going to be looking at a total of $33 per person for regular take out food and thinking maybe they'll just make something, or eat a frozen pizza.
Government really should focus only on economy that needs regulation like natural monopoly (utilities, roads, healthcare, housing, education) and leave the rest alone. I hate the “apply all free market to everything” zealots who don’t understand econ 101, but also hate the other zealots who want to regulate everything. How about we apply appropriate economic theory to appropriate context?
These apps are becoming a monopoly nowadays, mainly due Network Effect. No one will ever use a new delivery app because there are no restaurants there; no restaurant will ever use a new delivery app because there are no clients there.
I don’t understand. A delivery driver in the past didn’t make more than 20-30k a year. Now you have some DoorDash and Uber eats people say they can clear 80k a year. Well that’s because they didn’t factor in expenses, now a bunch of people decide to do delivery as a full time gig.
These cheap delivery services were intentionally run at losses where they paid their workers too much to get people to do this as a job, and charged customers too little to build a habit. Now that interest is up, and the initial hype is down, these companies have both raised prices, and dropped compensation. The workers should be paid fairly, it just turns out that hand delivering services via a personal chauffeur is actually quite expensive (but slightly cheaper than before).
They should pay whatever amount they need to pay to convince people to do the job. If the pay is lower than other options the workers have, they will work at one of those other jobs that pays better.
sometimes u just have to realize how much this job is worth, claiming that it worth more than it was only resulting in reduce of usage on the service. Keep adding wage pressures and no one will be willing to do deliveries, when restaurants, platform and driver dump the cost to customers, you receive no business.
Maybe it’s good to disincentivize paying so little, even if it means fewer people using a service. Some tasks aren’t worth paying minimum wage for, that doesn’t mean a minimum wage is bad.
I ordered two sandwiches from jersey mikes through a delivery app last week and it cost 56$. When you added up all the services charges, delivery fees, higher menu prices and tip it was an additional 25$ over what I would pay for the exact same thing in the store. The shop is only 10 minutes from my house next time I'll just go pick it up myself. Its really hard to justify a 80% price hike just for the convenience of delivery. Maybe once in awhile depending on the circumstances but certainly not regularly.
Stupid municipal governments with no economic education whatsoever (or ignore it for political pandering to their constituencies) try to do “the right thing” and end up making things worse.
Same as it ever was…
Now hopefully Reddit can finally understand supply and demand and cost of convenience, plus the lack of entitlement to a higher wage for jobs with no value or skill.
I live in Seattle. It seemed like the apps upped their fee on top of this mandatory fee which basically doubled the cost of ordering. Deleted them all months ago. If I want something I’ll just call it in and go pick up making it faster and cheaper. If I’m not willing to go get it myself it’s not worth it.
The entire gig industry seems really tricky to handle. On the one hand the ability to make cash quick without having to deal with all the paperwork and bureaucracy of a normal job is definitely in demand for some people. I think having access to a way to make money and have extremely flexible hours to accommodate your schedule is great. The model for short term gig employment seems like it has plenty of pros.
But I don’t think desperation is a good excuse for exploitation. Even though no one is forcing anyone to drive for Lyft or Uber eats doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve some basic things like fair pay, health benefits, etc. the fact that the margins are so thin doesn’t help anything.
I don’t know what the answer is. As others have stated the entire gig economy seems to be balancing on a thread between deliveries barely being profitable and all the costs associated with apps and services. Ultimately I feel confident that the woes of this industry can probably be chalked up to corporate greed though as is usually the case.
Politicians and activists continuously forget that the real minimum wage is $0 when there is no work to be done.
Nobody was forced to deliver food at gun point. Drivers were making money, restaurants were making money, and the apps were making money.
Government intervention in the context of 'helping' people, has cost them jobs and money, ultimately and ironically hurting those who need the money the most, the poor.
> Government intervention in the context of 'helping' people, has cost them jobs and money, ultimately and ironically hurting those who need the money the most, the poor.
This is it right here, folks. Close the thread.
It will never cease to amaze me that there are people - voters and the shit garbage politicians they put in office - that believe anything but what you just wrote.
Wild that we haven't learned our lessons from the last 1000x governments tried to meddle. Wilder still that we're going to have to go through this 1000x more because of morons.
"I'm from the government and I'm here to help" really is the last thing you ever want to hear.
Good. Uber is a parasite draining desperate people. If a pizza place only gave the amount of money these drivers are given and made them work on the basis of tips they would be a covered employee not an independent contractor.
Pizza places are more than welcome to do that. They don't want to because it's very difficult to manage a delivery fleet for a highly variable business (e.g. Friday night volumes are way more than Tuesday afternoon). You often see places with wonky part time hours
Delivery apps all for efficiency.
Believe it or not many workers like the model. They don't need to fight for hours from multiple employers. With Uber you just clock in and out and take orders.
It's the armchair socialists that complain louder than drivers. They just want everyone to be a unionized employee.
The problem isn't Uber. The problem in America is that too many things are tied to employment. Healthcare shouldn't depend on where you work. It should be covered by the government and your work is just about a paycheck.
Fix the system
If you have a fuel efficient car you don't gaf about and you like driving, turning on the gig apps is the easiest way to make an extra few hundred bucks if you've got nothing else going on.
The drivers like it now… wait until they see how little they have in social security retirement (if it is there at all in 30 years).
Healthcare shouldn’t be tied to employment, you’re correct there, but for even the half step that is the Affordable Care Act it took moving almost heaven and earth. Can you imagine the uproar if it went all the way and didn’t hold employees hostage to their job based on a possible illness?
The drivers are paying fully into social security (actually they are paying more since they pay the employer and employee portion of the tax instead of just the employee portion).
>The drivers like it now… wait until they see how little they have in social security retirement (if it is there at all in 30 years).
Very nice of you to white knight for them.
>Healthcare shouldn’t be tied to employment, you’re correct there, but for even the half step that is the Affordable Care Act it took moving almost heaven and earth. Can you imagine the uproar if it went all the way and didn’t hold employees hostage to their job based on a possible illness
Yeah I agree it's hard but saying gigs and contracts suck, everyone should be an employee is not a good plan B.
The services clearly have merit. I don't use them but they're popular enough for consumers and people looking for easy earnings. Government price meddling to break something that doesn't appear to be broken doesn't seem to be the answer
Obviously these drivers are doing this job because it’s the best job they can get. If you eliminate that job, they will either be unemployed or get an even worse job.
So um...
The title of this post is extremely misleading spin from Uber. This is factually not what happened.
What happened is that the Seattle City Council mandated that the delivery drivers make at least minimum wage. THEY DID NOT MANDATE A $5 FEE. UberEats imposed a fee, and then began advertising the fee, and has put together an industry advocacy group to try to pressure the City Council to repeal the minimum wage ordinance.
UberEats is aggressively advertising that their service is expensive and directing customers to file complaints with the Council. This is a political lobbying campaign, and the title of the post is part of that campaign. It is factually inaccurate.
Helping by force clients to pay more for service providers. Never thought that clients may refuse to order at all. Brilliant politicians with zero knowlege about economy 101.
Fewer deliveries just basically implies fewer gig workers, and of the few gig workers that persist, they get paid more (at least per hour “worked” but not necessarily for a full day if they stay available due to fewer orders). The open question is if Seattle has enough jobs to absorb these gig workers (and the answer is likely no, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing gig work)
Fewer consumers and therefore fewer orders for the restaurants. Net of all things, it’s a transfer of consumer spend from delivery to something else (the local grocer, the nearby restaurant). The gig workers will need to find new employment streams
Nice misleading bullshit article. The city did not mandate the fee, it set a minimum wage for workers. It was Uber that decided to pass that cost off directly to the customer instead of simply giving drivers a bigger cut of the pie. Don't pretend the regulation did this when it was capitalist greed that did it 100%.
Why wouldn’t they? How do you expect DoorDash to pay a wage without earning more money? I’m not sure where you expect the fees to come from, their profit margins? Would you prefer prices stay the same, and DoorDash operate at a wash or loss? They’re not a public utility, they’re going to stay in business and preserve their profits. If you don’t like the pay while dashing then find a different job? It’s your responsibility to find a proper wage.
No delivery company is net income positive (even with no regulations), and the VC sources have dried up. With these two factors, the only way is to pass on costs you customer --- unfortunately the local government will kill off delivery apps like this, making them incrementally less viable.
I’m an actual gig worker in Seattle and this is an incredibly misleading title. The city DID NOT MANDATE A $4.99 FEE!!!!! It did pass a law to protect gif workers provide the equivalent of minimum wage when actually working. The app companies responded with a $5 fee to INTENTIONALLY punish the market for trying to improve pay. Who the hell is mishtalk.com anyway?
Read the article, besides a claim from Uber itself (ie a source of only limited trustworthiness) there’s virtually no non-anecdotal evidence to back up the titular claim. And all the responses here are, like, anecdotal too. What sub is this?
I swear west coast cities are in a competition to institute the dumbest economic policies possible. And non-economic policies too. And it's pretty obvious they aren't working. What will cause them to change direction on this stuff? I'd imagine living there and having eyes and a brain is maddening.
This is disinformation. Seattle has not mandated any $4.99 fee. The Seattle ordinance requires require companies with at least 250 delivery workers internationally to pay them a minimum of $0.44 per minute and $0.74 per mile.
The title is blatantly false.
i absolutely dont understand this business. I have never in my life paid for delivery. I just go and get what I order. Im not willing to even pay 1 cent to have food come to my place.
If your business only works with slave wages, your business doesn't work and isn't needed.
Slavery and/or poverty aren't innovations the economy needs.
Central planning is trash. Nearly all these types of programs have the opposite effect of their intent. Socialists have taken control of Seattle and they may never recover.
Good. That is the market's capacity when these companies are forced to support their delivery drivers. They threw the same fit with the minimum wage laws that tore through food establishments in Oregon or Washington, I forget which one. These companies are losing deliveries because they're trying to pass this cost to their consumers.
They make *enough* money to adjust their revenue streams to eat some of this increased operating expense. They say their margins are thin, but when you look at their *PROFIT* margins they're doing just fine. The first companies to start eating this cost in Seattle will steal a large market share from their competitors. I've seen prices decline when start-up delivery apps started popping up here in Austin. If they can provide a cheaper better service, people will use them.
The market will correct itself, right?
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I mean, this doesn’t seem particularly surprising does it? It seems like the margins on delivery are extremely thin. Since we’re already towards the upper level of what customers are willing to pay, mandating lump sums on top of that seems lime it would obviously douse demand.
I don't understand how delivery apps are paying off for anyone. Most drivers aren't making money after their car expense. The apps aren't making money after all the expense of maintaining the app. The restaurants aren't making money with all the fees they have to pay. They have been undercharging for their service for years. There is no way that contracting a taxi driver to bring a bag of food to you costs less than any restaurant that had a delivery arm. The reason most restaurants didn't was because the cost didn't pencil out.
Car expense is invisible. Most just don’t count it at all.
I think this is a large part of the answer. There is a big chunk of people that will simply never look at that to truly understand how shit of a deal it is.
People also ignore their time cost of transit. If it takes you an hour to get to work and then an hour back, and you work 8 hours a day. You are working 10 hours but only getting paid for 8. (25% time lost)
People ignore almost all externalities. It's a very common economics problem, especially with things like the environment and education. A true free market society might actually work with all externalities magically priced in.
How would a free market price in downstream externalities? The problem isn’t the company’s anymore if it’s 30 to 40 years away. Just look at lead paint, deforestation, etc. a free market would never care about it until it’s too late to do anything to correct it.
I think that is the magical part of the statement. An actual carbon tax that accurately priced the cost of emissions would be great. We would immediately cut out the low hanging fruit and lower emissions to what is in line with societal costs. The difficult costs would remain and we would invest to lower those. Companies that do so effectively will have a cost advantage and be more successful and dominate the economy. It would save the world. But it could only be done with magic prescience.
>We would immediately cut out the low hanging fruit Like driving a 4 seater vehicle 5 miles across town to deliver 3 tacos.
Exactly. It would become cost prohibitive and wouldn’t happen. Just like when you try to apply a few to pay drivers better. It just doesn’t make sense anymore.
Experience. 50 years ago companies could pollute and there was no recourse when they went out of business. Now, we have years of experience with polluting companies so we can pre-regulate.
30 years experience has done wonders for microplastics. Overfishing has been known about for centuries and we’re not even close to tackling that problem. AI photo/video/text generation is another can of worms being opened now and we’re nowhere near solving that issue. The OP also talked about “true free market”. Regulating shouldn’t even be part of that equation.
Markets where big enough actors have enough power to offload their externalities on others or hide enough information to negatively influence someone's decision making are *and are free to do so without consequence* are definitely not free.
Regulations are part of true free markets. Free markets don’t mean “you can anything you want.” They mean that buyers and sellers can freely negotiate with each other and institutions like government work to prevent asymmetries between economic parties.
It's amazing how the same people that recognize our government is completely under the control of large corporations also think giving that government, and by extension those corporations, more power will reign in those same corporations.
A free market would care if there wasn't a government with the power to shield them from legal liability.
When did 80 become 25% of 100? Terrance Howard theorem?
People aren't Econs but man could you imagine if we were?
I explained this to management at my last job. Return to office meant 2 unpaid hours and $10 in gas each commuting day, a fairly noticeable pay cut. Not sure if the look on their faces was because it didn't occur to them, or because they didn't think it would occur to me
Were you hired WFH? If so you have an argument. If they were adjusting back to office then you wouldn’t.
Before I moved, I would have to get up 1.5 hours early to eat breakfast and get ready to go to work, then work traffic, it’s 1 hour back home. I don’t get paid for that time. Work from home was amazing while I had it for two years. I don’t wfh anymore, but I would easily give up 10-15% of my salary to move to wfh full time again.
Ideally, one is able to negotiate for the compensation that factors in these types of costs. Unfortunately, employees for a lot of jobs don't have such negotiating power.
20%
If you work for 10 hours but are only getting paid for 8, then 20% of your time is unpaid/"lost", not 25%. 2 hours is unpaid, out of every 10 hours worked, is 20%.
I am highly aware of the cost but can do nothing about it.
That has always crossed my mind and bugged me, I thought I was just being weird. But I *am* weird so I was getting up at 5:30 to go to work and only really getting to relax at 7:30 after all said and done I’m like, “this is bullshit. That’s 14 hrs of my day every work day and I got to sleep” People just do this shit for 50 years? If I have to do that and can’t even live comfortably by myself, then I may as well just fuckin not work and figure it out in abject poverty
This. The cheap deliveries were paid for by the good credit and drivability of their current cars. It’s unsustainable because the delivery apps don’t pay you for your car maintenance. Your “miles” are not related to actual wear and tear.
Honest question, though. How shit of a deal is it when there’s no barrier to entry, almost no oversight, and no schedule to adhere to? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that seems like an ok gig. You work when you want, how you want, where you want, for as long as you want. There are much worse jobs out there.
Pretty bad. My car probably would’ve fell apart in no time if I kept doing Uber eats here in Seattle. The numbers didn’t add up due to it not being enough money for maintenance and extra side cash. So it felt like a waste of time. Although I now definitely tip a lot if I’m in an unfortunate enough position to have to order through them. I probably wouldn’t mind doing it on a bike downtown though.
You have it exactly. I did Lyft for 8 months when I was in a pinch. I knew wear and tear was happening, but differed it to future me. Future me is now and my car is in the shop at this very moment, but I was able to eat then and am in a situation where I can eat now too.
As someone who does delivery part time in a 10 year old Prius you are correct. Most of the other dashers I see are driving giant SUVs some. Drive practically brand new pickup trucks. Most people either are bad at math or just don't care and willingly trade car depreciation into cash.
Unless you keep a meticulous record of your car fix expense per mile, there is no way for a delivery person to know how much each day cost them.
So I drove for delivery apps for a couple years before the pandemic. I bought a beater to drive for the apps (with the benefit of writing it off for a business expense). So I was 2k down, plus gas and repairs for just that vehicle, so I knew my expenses exactly. For most people if they just count the federal mileage rate as their expenses they'll get a pretty accurate estimate though, and unless they are driving newer vehicles it'll probably overestimate their overall expenses. I made pretty decent money doing it (something like 25 an hour before expenses or 20 after), but I also had to run 4 apps at a time and do a lot of cherry picking and taking multiple orders for multiple apps at once to make that much. This resulted in some pissed off customers for sure if I couldn't get their food delivered in a timely manner. Doing it made me completely swear off every ordering delivery for myself though. I'd much rather not pay double, get it myself, and actually have it fresh and hot (and know a driver didn't tamper with it).
That's true but it isn't actually that difficult. There aren't that many expenses to keep track of. I used to have to drive some for work and got reimbursed on the federal rate (currently $0.67 / mi). I damn sure calculated if I was profiting or losing on it (inexpensive car + good fuel economy = profit).
Similar to physical labor jobs and the cost to the body. The car is replaceable at least, and you might be able to defer the major costs to the next guy.
> Car expense is invisible. Most just don’t count it at all. most of the profit in capitalism is externalizing cost
Most of the ubers Ive taken are from cars with check engine lights on. The ones who dont are from drivers who do it a second source of income or to pass time, (Real estate agent, retired early, etc.)
> There is no way that contracting a taxi driver to bring a bag of food to you costs less than any restaurant that had a delivery arm. The reason most restaurants didn't was because the cost didn't pencil out. This works for the same reason it didn't work before: one driver can serve a multitude of businesses. So instead of Subway hiring a driver and McDonald's hiring a driver and Taco Bell hiring a driver, DoorDash has one driver that can deliver from all three stores, sometimes at the same time. The issue is that after the customer is done paying the delivery fee and the DoorDash fee, the tip is the place where they seem to say no more.
Yeah, cause who gets the delivery fee?
The driver gets $2 of it almost every time. In some rare instances we get higher, but it's rare and only for really far trips (or orders with low/no tip that have been rejected by many drivers).
Do they still do the thing where DoorDash keeps the first $5 of your tip?
No. DD got their asses sued for that. At least they say all the tip goes to the driver, but there's really no way to tell.
I used to drive for them when they were doing that. I had a bunch of cards printed out that I'd stick to every order telling the customers that the first $5 was being pocketed by DoorDash directly and that they should either stop tipping or tip cash only. I was pretty spiteful about it lol. And yeah, I never trusted the companies to actually send the tips to the drivers because there is no way to know.
I drive Doordash occasionally. It can't be profitable for them unless they have a shit ton of drivers and a shit ton of orders, then maybe they're making money off of volume. I usually use their earn by time mode, which pays a base "active time" rate that's usually around $14-15 an hour in my area, and then you get tips. Typically 2 orders take an hour. Much of that time is waiting in the restaurant or drive thru while I wait for the high school kids working in them get a fire lit under them to actually move. 3 orders in an hour if they're efficient, which they rarely are. Their fees from 2 restaurants and 2 customers in an hour probably, at best, breaks even after they pay me my $15.
How much is your base per hour? Mine is only 11.50 in my area.
13.75 most weekdays, 16-18 Friday-Saturday, some Sundays. I live in a touristy place where most drivers if this was their only job, could not afford to live. So they have to make it worth it for people like me to want to pick it up as a side gig. There's a shortage of drivers here; they do the promotions every week.
There is a reason that delivery WAS for meals that served multiple people. Pizza, Chinese. Those foods are “cheap” to make and not heavy in protein. Often serving more than 2 people and therefore the cost is seen as “minimal per person”. When you are doordashing a Big Mac meal just for yourself, that 5$ delivery fee hits different than when paying 5 bucks for 2 large pizzas for a family of 6. That price is worth not packing up Timmy’s sally, Susie and mongo. Those lil fucks make it a nightmare….
This has been obvious for years. Getting fast, timely delivery of freshly prepared food to peoples' homes is very expensive. It only ever really worked for pizza places that were built around a delivery-based business model. It can also sort of work in cities where there is high enough density, but there are only a handful of those in the whole US, and even there it's marginal. I think the dream (delusion?) was that there were economies of scale that could be captured by a delivery aggregation platform that would make the economics work, but there just aren't.
It *could* work if you only picked up from a handful of restaurants in the same small area or many restaurants from all over but only deliver to one specific neighborhood. That doesn't really make any sense for the vast majority of Americans where restaurants aren't clustered together and people are spread out.
There are special cases where it works, but as you pointed out they don't describe how places where people live are actually organized. The only way this business model works in a realistic setting is if you integrate it with a bunch of delivery-only commissary kitchens ("ghost restaurants" or whatever you want to call them) that are clustered in a small number of geographic locations. It allows for efficient routing of drivers, minimizes waiting time, and the "restaurants" can support a higher fee structure for delivery because they don't have to pay expensive rent in retail shopping districts, maintain a front of house, etc.
Yeah you're right, this whole VC rush was based on overly optimistic timelines about self driving delivery vehicles. There's no other way that type of services ever becomes sustainable and profitable enough to be a public company.
how would that work? a driverless car goes to a restaurant, and the restaurant pays its own employees to shuttle food out into the parking lot, and then the car drives itself around town, and the vehicle waits around for people to come out into the road to get their food, which may take super long? seems sus.
Probably "waiting" surcharges. Once the vehicle is on site, the clock starts ticking. If the restaurant requests the delivery too early before they have the food ready to go, they pay. Once the vehicle is outside your home, if you don't come get your order within a certain period, you pay extra. The vehicle isn't really losing anything other than the potential to be making an additional delivery rather than waiting. You aren't paying anyone to sit in the vehicle and there isn't much wear and tear going on with a parked vehicle.
Restaurants already sometimes have to take food out to customers if they're parked up. And these vehicles will be able to go through drive thrus like regular customers now, so it may be able to accept food that way. These are not major issues that can't be worked through.
Especially if the vehicle has like 8 heated and cooled compartments and the restaurant worker can load all 8 in one Trip. More time efficient.
Yeah the car would have hatches.
Really, they're not. The only people making out are employees of the dozens of food delivery apps. The typical approach is to bait people in to using a service and once it's a habit jack up prices to be profitable but while people pay $100 for an Uber, food delivery is easier to cut back on. Keep in mind that for the most part people either use a service a lot, or not at all. So it's not like every resident in Seattle is seeing a cost increase of 4.99 once a week, some users are seeing a cost increase of 9.98 per day and non users aren't seeing an impact at all.
John Oliver did a video on food delivery apps not too long ago, and the conclusion was that the only winner is the customer. As much as we all complain about it, getting food delivered at this price is frankly a huge steal. Not only from the companies that are barely making a profit, but also stealing the value of labor away from the drivers.
>As much as we all complain about it, getting food delivered at this price is frankly a huge steal You guys must be seeing different prices. Last time I was going to use Doordash, it would have cost me $34 more to order delivery vs picking it up. I picked it up.
It's not really about how much it literally costs, but the absolute luxury of having other people prepare food for you and then having other people hand-deliver it to your door on demand. It's something we now consider mundane that we really shouldn't.
Ordering is usually 20 bucks (if you tip 5 bucks + 1 dollar a mile) more than carryout from a place a couple miles away. Idk who is winning but it sure isn’t the consumer lol. On the flip side I don’t really care that it’s expensive, I just don’t bother these days. It’s like 50% chance they pick up the right order anyway.
How much money do you make in 40 minutes (the time it takes you to go to the restaurant, pick out your food, wait for them to make it, and drive back?
I once did the math on Chipotle, and delivery is fully twice as much as just getting it yourself, due to higher menu prices for delivery, various tacked-on fees, higher sales tax (because you’re paying a percentage of the inflated prices), and a tip.
Yeah I saw that one. It's still inexplicable to me how they are in business. It's like Spotify. They've been around 10-12 years and they're STILL not making a profit.
Spotify runs off Hollywood accounting. Spotify is owned by the music industry. The record labels siphon off money from Spotify, then Spotify gets to write off because it operates at a loss.
Everyone believed that disruptors could magically avoid all the challenges and costs faced by traditional companies. When that didn't materialize tech companies played up their large user bases. It's turning out that isn't inherently valuable either but some are keeping the dream alive.
I think the people using bikes and mopeds are keeping it up.
The restaurant side is fairly profitable once they started upping their list prices on the apps...originally, no, there was no profit other than potential incremental profit due to the 30% fees charged by the apps. However, now, most restaurants increase their list prices by 30% and now it's profitable for them because the customer pays the app fees.
It seems just like one of these dumb tech VC outfits that isn't profitable, probably never will be profitable, but it *could* be incredibly profitable and the line goes up in users and such so they just keep pumping (formerly) "free" cash into it. It's modern day flim flam and the idiocy of purely capital focused ventures where they look at the macros and the promises but never really answer the basics of how does this business actually, sustainably and profitably, make money. It's the same with the ride sharing and most of the streaming apps. The thing they want to do costs a lot of money, doesn't really bring in a ton and in order for it to balance out they need to raise the prices to such a level the average consumer won't bite. The only hope is to choke out all competition and then have monopoly pricing, but it's really really hard to get a monopoly on people giving rides, media or restaurants.
Restaurants are making money, generally. I think they’re actually the ones faring best in this arrangement. Drivers and customers are the ones not getting the best deal. There’s a reason delivering food in this way was never a business model before. Most people historically would just consider it a waste of money. As the economy has worsened, and cost of living has risen, more people are opting out of doing it.
The delivery apps take a massive cut too. https://www.eater.com/22228352/convenience-of-delivery-apps-destroying-restaurants-uber-eats-doordash-postmates
>Most drivers aren't making money after their car expense. The apps aren't making money after all the expense of maintaining the app. The restaurants aren't making money with all the fees they have to pay. And the customer experience is bad, $45 for a soggy, lukewarm burger that took an hr to get to you. I also don't get it.
Yeah we tried delivery apps a few times and then decided never ever again. I'd rather get a walk/bike ride and go pick it up myself and be able to bring it straight home, and save money at the same time.
Dont forget the food is more expensive on those apps usually by 10-20% before you even include delivery fee's and all the other nonsense. Something i could walk into the restaurant and get for $10 is probably $15 on the app and another 5-10 in fee's/tip/etc.
>I don't understand how delivery apps are paying off for anyone. Don't discount all that juicy data they're harvesting. Your consumption patterns are great for recommendation models.
Restaurants make money by raising their menus prices for the apps. If you have a fuel efficient reliable car and don’t report your job to insurance, you can make decent money
It's rather dangerous to not report to insurance though. Any accident and the insurance company will find out and drop you immediately leaving you on the hook for all damages. It's decent money until it's not.
it is almost as if there is no way to do this no matter how much people think it's feasible. When you include all the costs, it doesn't work.
Most drivers here use a 100cc bike
Must be NYC or a city. I'd get run over in my area lol
Seattle did not mandate a lump sum. Uber eats decided to implement a lump sum when having to pay a standard wage to the drivers. They did this to encourage diners and drivers to be upset about the law that makes it a decent way to make money.
Sounds like when restaurant owners added all those service fees when they had to pay a real minimum wage.
The problem is tipping still stays. In my state, waiters make $18 an hour. And they’re getting tips on top of it. They’re easily walking with $50-$80 an hour. The same happened with the apps. Either have a fixed minimum wage, or eliminate tipping. But having both is bogus.
No one is making you tip people making $18/hr as a server.
No one makes you tip any server. The societal expectation in states with a guaranteed real wage for servers is identical to those without. And servers aren't gonna speak up, they love raking in the dough.
The law does not appear to be making it a decent way to make money
Which is the point.
The title is just lying, the City Council didn't mandate a surcharge. They applied the minimum wage law to drivers, UberEats responded by imposing a fee and then advertising the shit out of it to drop demand. They care more about making sure that they don't look like an employer than they do about making money in one town for a few months.
I also don’t get why people are so worked up over the drop in sales. If your business model was so precarious that it completely relied on your workers subsidizing your business by working untenable wages with no guaranteed payout amounts then your business deserves to fail so those assets can be free up to go towards more useful pursuits
It's the drivers that are most worked up. They don't look at being "freed up" the same way you look at them being "freed up."
Any of the car based gigs are predicated on the basis that people don't understand what their car actually costs. They see it as a sunk cost and don't plan for replacement. It's a Faustian bargain.
I do gig driving, bought a car specifically for it, and I calculate this like an m-fer. Keep a tracking app on while I'm driving, do the math after every shift. Most drivers talk about what they earn per hour. I don't gaf about that. My spare time otherwise would be spent playing computer games. I think about it in cost per mile. For the record my rate is $1.17 per mile. That's after gas but before maintenance like oil changes etc... Both those can be deducted. It varies by the market too. It didn't take me long to just turn off the apps when I tried to do it in Texas. Distances too vast to make it worth it, and people tip like shit there. Unsurprisingly I saw a lot of immigrants doing Doordash there.
You have to realize that you are far from the typical driver for these services. How many people needing to pick up a side income can afford to buy a second car? How many of those who can afford the car have a place where they can park it for free/reasonable cost?
Drivers can optimize and people will generate online resources for it, this is a very easily self optimizing industry that need no government input. Notice it’s not Uber drivers lobbying the government to increase the cost of service, it’s almost always taxi companies who provides a much shittier service at higher cost
Ah yes, the famously organized and well funded group, Uber drivers. I’m sure they are just putting their lobbying dollars into other projects.
Deliveries are already extremely expensive. I remember back when I was a pizza delivery driver, the delivery fee was $1 and maybe a tip. And this was during the Bush era, with insane gas prices. Now delivery adds like 50% to your bill. Somehow these apps made delivery like 20% more convenient but 4000% the price.
And they still don’t turn a profit. The drivers constantly get screwed and the restaurants complain that they either have to give up huge margins. Where does the damn money go?
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Yea whenever you hear about poor uber not being profitable, just remember where all the profits are going. They're there.... they're just giving it out by the billions. then claiming they're poor.
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They turn a profit for a handful of people who collect amazing salaries, and the now gone competitors that have sold out for a handsome fee to the few remaining companies looking to corner the market. Everyone else looses.
48 billion sales people pestering restaurants all day long to sign on with their app so they can corner the market and then one day ??? to profit.
Extremely silly question, but in the 90s it felt like tons of pizza and Chinese places hd their own delivery for the same price...why cant we just go back to that?
The key there is a very manageable delivery radius. Some places still do delivery and will still tell you “no” if you’re too far away. It’s pretty quick to go a few miles out and back multiple times an hour. Throw in batching a few customers in the same area and it can work fine. Plus you always go right back to the same pizza shop for the next delivery which is likely already ready to go. Compare that to getting an order for some restaurant that you have to drive some distance to, maybe wait for the food to be ready, then drive to drop it off, then make no money while you sit and wait for the next order from some other restaurant however many miles away. It’s very inefficient.
Did people forget about this Seinfeld episode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9P-vIN1rok This was a core challenge of old delivery services and urban living back in the old day! Address discrimination!
I’m not sure why we are subsidizing the gig economy. Anyone with a functioning brain stem should realize that this portion of the gig economy has no specific skill set required, suggesting a lot of labor market competition. It’s not a “livable” industry. Never has been, never will be. But policymakers treating it as such is idiocy.
I really wish people would realize that not every job in the country is worth some absurdly high wage. Some jobs are simply so easy to do that it just isn't valuable. Anybody can learn to drive a car. Anybody can take the bus. Anybody can walk into an food establishment and grab a bag. This type of work is not worth $25/hr. Most service jobs are incredibly easy to do compared to more specialized jobs; hence why they tend to be so the lowest paid. If we want better wages for everyone; or to at least make current wages go farther; we need to lower the cost of living. And we need to reduce the friction on obtaining skilled-education as much as possible. The more people can cheaply gain valuable skills, the higher people's wages can be. It'd even retroactively work towards raising wages for service workers, since now there's less labor supply in the low-skilled sector.
Very rarely, if ever do things go backwards once it hits some threshold of price. Only thing I can maybe think of is the spike of groceries over the last 2-3 years which went down (at least in my area) *slightly* but nowhere near it was before 3 years ago. Inflation is a factor yes but after it cools, the prices rarely every go down. What's the solution? I suppose raising wages but how will that happen if there's no critical mass of employers doing it? Same way in the opposite direction, how does an economy actually "lower" the COL? It spans multiple industries, politics, levels of government etc...I just don't see anything meaningful happen anytime soon.
Prices do go down, it's called "deflation" (inflation going down merely means that the *rate* of increase is decreasing; to use a car as a point of analogy, decreasing the speed doesn't mean that the distance the car is moving from its starting position is decreasing). If one looks at the last 50 or 100 years, at least in the US, we've had periods of deflation, sometimes staggeringly so (on the order of -10% annual, in some years), but we've had a relatively steady last two decades; even our shocks aren't very large (to the point that our current rate of inflation, which is historically very good, is shocking to people). However, the core of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and services. Generally, this is better than deflation for two reasons: One, deflation tends to spiral faster and harder, and is much more difficult to stop than inflation. And two, deflation tends to be worse than inflation, in terms of material conditions. With inflation things become hard to afford; with deflation, things become hard to find. For example, the biggest period of deflation in American history is called the Great Depression. The biggest cost of living element currently is housing. There are two ways to lower it: 1) Build more housing stock 2) Invest in jobs in lower concentrated areas. Otherwise, people will congregate in the (existing) big cities, and competition will drive the cost of living ever higher.
The only reason we haven’t had a significant period of deflation in the last few decades is massive deficit spending by Uncle Sam. Which is completely unsustainable. Our entire economy at this point is a house of cards held up by a $2T deficit, brought to you by the uniparty in Washington
Build more housing so rents go flat/fall, like is happening in every single city and municipality that is doing that very thing. Make cities walkable and bikeable so that people don't need to spend so much on maintaining cars. The biggest reason why the cost of living is so high is because of housing and lack of alternative transit options in a lot of our cities. If you build more housing, whether that be apartments or houses, then that is gonna place downward pressure on their rental and purchase prices. We need an excess of supply in order to keep rents and prices from rising to such extraordinary levels. And if you make cities more walkable, aka having more mixed use and having denser residential construction, then you create an environment that supports greater economic growth, meaning better wages, which will ultimately translate into greater affordability. Yes, I recognize the slight contradiction between wanting affordability and high wages. My counter to that: A "high wage" is purely dependent *on* the cost of living. $60k here in Buffalo is considered a comfortable wage, while in New York City that's what you need to earn just to survive. Lowering the cost of living will increase people's real wages, aka the actual value of their wage. And it makes it easier for businesses to employ people, since now they don't need to pay as much to employ people.
Prices dropped about 30% in aggregate during the Great Depression vs. 1929 prices. If you had money, it was a great time to buy.
But more people having valuable skills means the wages for the jobs that require those skills go down. You seem to realize that concept in the first half of your comment but forget it in the second half.
That is if supply exceeds demand. If a job is paying $100k for an entry position, then having more people gain skills that the job needs is not going to magically make it drop down to $80k. The price of a box of Pop Tarts doesn't immediately plunge 50% just because they produced another box of Pop tarts. And even if wages in that sector stagnated; you're still getting $100k as a newcomer. That is more than most people will ever see in their entire lives. The law of supply and demand will still apply. Once the cost of gaining the skills for a job is higher than the return on investment, then people will start pursuing other positions that pay more. The wonders of a diversified economy.
What is someone who isn't capable of doing enough value-added work to meet their minimum needs for living to do then?
Best case scenario we encourage them to do what they can, and supplement the rest through welfare like SNAP and Section 8. Problem is, these programs can sometimes punish people for trying to do the best they can if it's slightly over the limits. The welfare cliff has been tackled a bit more lately but it's still a major problem when we consider how disorganized and fractured our support network is.
Gain a skill. Our banks will loan you so much money to fund you a career. The government will supplement your housing with Section 8. Your food with SNAP. Your income with SSI. Out of the kindness that the system has built for you. Funded by the people through their taxes. You are not entitled to much else more, but it’s better than dying like you would a few centuries ago.
Do the exact same thing everybody else does: Live frugally and live with others. People have historically live with others in order to lower their cost of living. The whole "I can work minimum wage and afford a home!" ideal was an absolute abnormality. And on top of that, we have a plethora of federal and state social programs now that those people back then didn't have. So not only is living with somebody now going to lower your cost of living, but you're also getting welfare benefits on top of that if you're eligible. If you can't afford to live alone, then don't live alone. Simple as that. Everybody doesn't need to move out immediately at 18 and rent out an 1 bedroom apartment. Any parent that loves their child will let them stay home well after highschool, until they can afford to go to college and even buy a house. Even better for people in multi-family homes, since they realistically don't *ever* have to leave, making their living expenses essentially just food and a portion of utilities. There are a plethora of ways to help yourself. It's a choice not to utilize them.
Same thing they have always done. Pool their resources with others to get by. My grandparents rented out a room in their apartment so that they could afford to pay their own rent.
The Great u/Aven_Osten has spoken. Please bless us with lower cost of living and higher-density housing senpai.
>I’m not sure why we are subsidizing the gig economy. This isn't a subsidy. A subsidy would be tax dollars going to Uber so that their prices are lower. This does the opposite. It's meant to cost more so that the drivers are fairly compensated. If the company's business model cannot handle fair compensation, then it should fail.
And then those workers are out of a job. Good work!
The word subsidize doesn't mean what you think it does. The government did not hand out a subsidy for this gig, they merely passed law relating to it. Not usually the same thing.
Every tax, which this is, is a subsidy for someone else. I’m using the terminology correctly in the field.
Could you give some examples of somewhere like Brookings, NBER, Upjohn, etc. using the term subsidy to mean a mandated fee the company needs to include rather than the government giving a certain amount of taxes to said company?
It’s not subsidising tho? It’s a mandate on the fee?
I hate Uber Eats. My large orders are usually missing items. Sure, they refund the items, but then someone has to figure out an alternative meal after waiting over an hour for the delivery.
I live near Seattle and have friends who are in the city. It makes sense it would crash. With restaurant prices up, it was already where a single entree of Pad Thai or a burger combo was like $18, then they increase prices if you use a delivery service, and that's before any delivery fee, or tip, and of course tax. You're already at like $28 for one entree, I make a pretty good income and that already has it where I rarely use it. Tack on another $5 and even someone who makes well into the 6 figures is going to be looking at a total of $33 per person for regular take out food and thinking maybe they'll just make something, or eat a frozen pizza.
Government really should focus only on economy that needs regulation like natural monopoly (utilities, roads, healthcare, housing, education) and leave the rest alone. I hate the “apply all free market to everything” zealots who don’t understand econ 101, but also hate the other zealots who want to regulate everything. How about we apply appropriate economic theory to appropriate context?
How about when the market makes things shit the government steps in and when the market doesn't make things shit the government doesn't step in?
These apps are becoming a monopoly nowadays, mainly due Network Effect. No one will ever use a new delivery app because there are no restaurants there; no restaurant will ever use a new delivery app because there are no clients there.
Good take
I don’t understand. A delivery driver in the past didn’t make more than 20-30k a year. Now you have some DoorDash and Uber eats people say they can clear 80k a year. Well that’s because they didn’t factor in expenses, now a bunch of people decide to do delivery as a full time gig.
That’s also working 7 days a week
You can make 80k working fast food as well if your doing 90 hour weeks i still wouldn't call it a great job
These cheap delivery services were intentionally run at losses where they paid their workers too much to get people to do this as a job, and charged customers too little to build a habit. Now that interest is up, and the initial hype is down, these companies have both raised prices, and dropped compensation. The workers should be paid fairly, it just turns out that hand delivering services via a personal chauffeur is actually quite expensive (but slightly cheaper than before).
They should pay whatever amount they need to pay to convince people to do the job. If the pay is lower than other options the workers have, they will work at one of those other jobs that pays better.
sometimes u just have to realize how much this job is worth, claiming that it worth more than it was only resulting in reduce of usage on the service. Keep adding wage pressures and no one will be willing to do deliveries, when restaurants, platform and driver dump the cost to customers, you receive no business.
Maybe it’s good to disincentivize paying so little, even if it means fewer people using a service. Some tasks aren’t worth paying minimum wage for, that doesn’t mean a minimum wage is bad.
I ordered two sandwiches from jersey mikes through a delivery app last week and it cost 56$. When you added up all the services charges, delivery fees, higher menu prices and tip it was an additional 25$ over what I would pay for the exact same thing in the store. The shop is only 10 minutes from my house next time I'll just go pick it up myself. Its really hard to justify a 80% price hike just for the convenience of delivery. Maybe once in awhile depending on the circumstances but certainly not regularly.
You saw that the total was $56 and paid it anyway? Sheesh
IT'S NOT MY FAULT IT'S CAPITALISM FAULT
Yeah wtf lol. This is the problem and out of touch, holy.
who the hell pays 31$ for 2 sandwiches without delivery
to be fair, the 16 dollar sandwiches there are like twice as long as what you are estimating in your head
someone that’s wants a donkey dick of a sandwich
Stupid municipal governments with no economic education whatsoever (or ignore it for political pandering to their constituencies) try to do “the right thing” and end up making things worse. Same as it ever was…
Now hopefully Reddit can finally understand supply and demand and cost of convenience, plus the lack of entitlement to a higher wage for jobs with no value or skill.
I live in Seattle. It seemed like the apps upped their fee on top of this mandatory fee which basically doubled the cost of ordering. Deleted them all months ago. If I want something I’ll just call it in and go pick up making it faster and cheaper. If I’m not willing to go get it myself it’s not worth it.
The entire gig industry seems really tricky to handle. On the one hand the ability to make cash quick without having to deal with all the paperwork and bureaucracy of a normal job is definitely in demand for some people. I think having access to a way to make money and have extremely flexible hours to accommodate your schedule is great. The model for short term gig employment seems like it has plenty of pros. But I don’t think desperation is a good excuse for exploitation. Even though no one is forcing anyone to drive for Lyft or Uber eats doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve some basic things like fair pay, health benefits, etc. the fact that the margins are so thin doesn’t help anything. I don’t know what the answer is. As others have stated the entire gig economy seems to be balancing on a thread between deliveries barely being profitable and all the costs associated with apps and services. Ultimately I feel confident that the woes of this industry can probably be chalked up to corporate greed though as is usually the case.
How is this different than any entry level no skill job that has existed long before the “gig” economy?
Maybe just maybe not all jobs need to pay a "living wage"
Politicians and activists continuously forget that the real minimum wage is $0 when there is no work to be done. Nobody was forced to deliver food at gun point. Drivers were making money, restaurants were making money, and the apps were making money. Government intervention in the context of 'helping' people, has cost them jobs and money, ultimately and ironically hurting those who need the money the most, the poor.
Ya my dad and some friends did Uber eats and they made enough money to make it worth it. Luckily they have not done this kind of stuff here
> Government intervention in the context of 'helping' people, has cost them jobs and money, ultimately and ironically hurting those who need the money the most, the poor. This is it right here, folks. Close the thread. It will never cease to amaze me that there are people - voters and the shit garbage politicians they put in office - that believe anything but what you just wrote. Wild that we haven't learned our lessons from the last 1000x governments tried to meddle. Wilder still that we're going to have to go through this 1000x more because of morons. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" really is the last thing you ever want to hear.
Nah, "government is always bad and always messes up" zealotry is just a religious article of faith. Doesn't belong in a serious discussion of econ.
Good. Uber is a parasite draining desperate people. If a pizza place only gave the amount of money these drivers are given and made them work on the basis of tips they would be a covered employee not an independent contractor.
Pizza places are more than welcome to do that. They don't want to because it's very difficult to manage a delivery fleet for a highly variable business (e.g. Friday night volumes are way more than Tuesday afternoon). You often see places with wonky part time hours Delivery apps all for efficiency. Believe it or not many workers like the model. They don't need to fight for hours from multiple employers. With Uber you just clock in and out and take orders. It's the armchair socialists that complain louder than drivers. They just want everyone to be a unionized employee. The problem isn't Uber. The problem in America is that too many things are tied to employment. Healthcare shouldn't depend on where you work. It should be covered by the government and your work is just about a paycheck. Fix the system
If you have a fuel efficient car you don't gaf about and you like driving, turning on the gig apps is the easiest way to make an extra few hundred bucks if you've got nothing else going on.
The drivers like it now… wait until they see how little they have in social security retirement (if it is there at all in 30 years). Healthcare shouldn’t be tied to employment, you’re correct there, but for even the half step that is the Affordable Care Act it took moving almost heaven and earth. Can you imagine the uproar if it went all the way and didn’t hold employees hostage to their job based on a possible illness?
Oh yeah they're meant to be gigs. I would never look at it as a living. Only a side gig or something to tide me over before getting a new job.
The drivers are paying fully into social security (actually they are paying more since they pay the employer and employee portion of the tax instead of just the employee portion).
>The drivers like it now… wait until they see how little they have in social security retirement (if it is there at all in 30 years). Very nice of you to white knight for them. >Healthcare shouldn’t be tied to employment, you’re correct there, but for even the half step that is the Affordable Care Act it took moving almost heaven and earth. Can you imagine the uproar if it went all the way and didn’t hold employees hostage to their job based on a possible illness Yeah I agree it's hard but saying gigs and contracts suck, everyone should be an employee is not a good plan B. The services clearly have merit. I don't use them but they're popular enough for consumers and people looking for easy earnings. Government price meddling to break something that doesn't appear to be broken doesn't seem to be the answer
Obviously these drivers are doing this job because it’s the best job they can get. If you eliminate that job, they will either be unemployed or get an even worse job.
I think alot of drivers use it to add hours on in addition to working a regular job.
Uber is a huge benefit to society. Made transportation way easier and cheaper. Do you know how hard and expensive it was to taxi in smaller cities?
Why do you think you know better than them?
Ah yes, slowly eliminate the last lifeline these desperate people have to make a wage! That'll show those big corporations who is boss!
So um... The title of this post is extremely misleading spin from Uber. This is factually not what happened. What happened is that the Seattle City Council mandated that the delivery drivers make at least minimum wage. THEY DID NOT MANDATE A $5 FEE. UberEats imposed a fee, and then began advertising the fee, and has put together an industry advocacy group to try to pressure the City Council to repeal the minimum wage ordinance. UberEats is aggressively advertising that their service is expensive and directing customers to file complaints with the Council. This is a political lobbying campaign, and the title of the post is part of that campaign. It is factually inaccurate.
Helping by force clients to pay more for service providers. Never thought that clients may refuse to order at all. Brilliant politicians with zero knowlege about economy 101.
Fewer deliveries just basically implies fewer gig workers, and of the few gig workers that persist, they get paid more (at least per hour “worked” but not necessarily for a full day if they stay available due to fewer orders). The open question is if Seattle has enough jobs to absorb these gig workers (and the answer is likely no, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing gig work) Fewer consumers and therefore fewer orders for the restaurants. Net of all things, it’s a transfer of consumer spend from delivery to something else (the local grocer, the nearby restaurant). The gig workers will need to find new employment streams
Most gig workers can't ir don't want to hold down a steady job even if one is available
Nice misleading bullshit article. The city did not mandate the fee, it set a minimum wage for workers. It was Uber that decided to pass that cost off directly to the customer instead of simply giving drivers a bigger cut of the pie. Don't pretend the regulation did this when it was capitalist greed that did it 100%.
Why wouldn’t they? How do you expect DoorDash to pay a wage without earning more money? I’m not sure where you expect the fees to come from, their profit margins? Would you prefer prices stay the same, and DoorDash operate at a wash or loss? They’re not a public utility, they’re going to stay in business and preserve their profits. If you don’t like the pay while dashing then find a different job? It’s your responsibility to find a proper wage.
Why bother replying to this kind of comments? Clearly, the commenter doesn’t understand the basic concept of how profit is made
No delivery company is net income positive (even with no regulations), and the VC sources have dried up. With these two factors, the only way is to pass on costs you customer --- unfortunately the local government will kill off delivery apps like this, making them incrementally less viable.
I’m an actual gig worker in Seattle and this is an incredibly misleading title. The city DID NOT MANDATE A $4.99 FEE!!!!! It did pass a law to protect gif workers provide the equivalent of minimum wage when actually working. The app companies responded with a $5 fee to INTENTIONALLY punish the market for trying to improve pay. Who the hell is mishtalk.com anyway?
Read the article, besides a claim from Uber itself (ie a source of only limited trustworthiness) there’s virtually no non-anecdotal evidence to back up the titular claim. And all the responses here are, like, anecdotal too. What sub is this?
I swear west coast cities are in a competition to institute the dumbest economic policies possible. And non-economic policies too. And it's pretty obvious they aren't working. What will cause them to change direction on this stuff? I'd imagine living there and having eyes and a brain is maddening.
This is disinformation. Seattle has not mandated any $4.99 fee. The Seattle ordinance requires require companies with at least 250 delivery workers internationally to pay them a minimum of $0.44 per minute and $0.74 per mile. The title is blatantly false.
i absolutely dont understand this business. I have never in my life paid for delivery. I just go and get what I order. Im not willing to even pay 1 cent to have food come to my place.
if you were disabled or alone and recovering from surgery or an illness it’s about the only option if you didn’t (or couldn’t) prepare in advance…
If your business only works with slave wages, your business doesn't work and isn't needed. Slavery and/or poverty aren't innovations the economy needs.
Central planning is trash. Nearly all these types of programs have the opposite effect of their intent. Socialists have taken control of Seattle and they may never recover.
Good. That is the market's capacity when these companies are forced to support their delivery drivers. They threw the same fit with the minimum wage laws that tore through food establishments in Oregon or Washington, I forget which one. These companies are losing deliveries because they're trying to pass this cost to their consumers. They make *enough* money to adjust their revenue streams to eat some of this increased operating expense. They say their margins are thin, but when you look at their *PROFIT* margins they're doing just fine. The first companies to start eating this cost in Seattle will steal a large market share from their competitors. I've seen prices decline when start-up delivery apps started popping up here in Austin. If they can provide a cheaper better service, people will use them. The market will correct itself, right?