Why I Quit Ordering from Uber-For-Food Startups
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> In the hypothetical future we can label Full Josephine, many people don’t cook, but some people cook a lot more, and better, than ever before, and all of us, cooks and non-cooks, derive pleasure from that."
Minus rhetorical flourishes, this is identical to the Sprig future, with the difference that in the case of Sprig the cooks are compensated with full-time employment rather than the joy of cooking. It sounds like the author doesn't really value that, but I bet a lot of Sprig employees do!
The actual future: Some people cook for Josephine, some work for Sprig, some work for traditional restaurants, some people eat the above food, lots of people still make their own food.
On the other hand, he thinks Josephine's model promotes a future where telecommunications helps connect people who are more akin to small-business owners than employees with customers. These people then have more agency in their cooking (in addition to the human connection with customers).
I personally think that eventually AIs will be able to master cooking as well so we won't have human cooks involved at all except as a fashion statement.
I have been starting to think, what if in the future we have all of these platforms - like Uber - and the just suck? Honestly the mediocre UberX drivers now are considerably worse than the average cab driver (city specific.)
Some combination of IP law and marketplace-platform dominance may enable fairly mediocre exchange platforms to exist at scale for a really long time and be difficult for anyone to disrupt. Craigslist, eBay, aren't that great and in some cases are downright horrible, but once all of the buyers congregate there, its hard for innovation to exist in either the classifieds or auction space. What if IP law, patents, trademarks, made it really hard to even offer specific types of services?
Contrarian thinking, and quite negative, but seeing Uber go from incredible and high quality to fair made me realize that maybe at scale some of this stuff won't be as joyful.
A lot of people are fine with living for the moment hoping they can make it rich before opportunities shift. Others think more about what future they want to see.
* Everyone is a private contractor, they are free to make their own choices and work (or not work) for a company.
* They can be flexible service providers and they can create their own reputation.
* Companies like airbnb/uber/sprig simply provide a platform . It is likely that many platforms will arise as for some of these businesses the barriers to entry are pretty low. The workers and producers can be on all platforms or go completely independent but Uber without driver's isn't a 50b company.
* If your options are make some money in the "sharing economy" or make no money in the "real economy" I think you would choose to hop in.
i see this as the new websearch model. Companies provide the best results and ratings, while offering ancillary support to users and charge them instead of showing adverts. the problem is if one gets really good, really powerful and effectively controls a lions share of virtually all of the search results routing all queries and related services through a single provider. lets hope that if that were to happen that not only would they not be evil but that they would good.
I don't know if Sprig hires cooks as contractors but that doesn't necessarily mean they have the same freedom contractors usually have. See the lawsuits that brought Honejoy down, and the class action one against Uber.
I actually think this is the biggest argument in favor of Josephine, that the author didn't bring up. Sprig needs to standardize user experience, so has to walk the line between enforcing policies on their cooks and still treating them as contractors. Josephine is literally a marketplace, where your interaction is directly with that contractor. Much better, from a legal risk question.
Hence, Amazon versus the mom and pop shop, Uber versus an independent cab company, Sprig versus the local Chinese delivery, etc. The future is megacorps and technology will enable them.
I guess one of the benefits for VCs funding young people straight out of school is how quickly they can make them accept the new normal. It's not even (only) Amazon versus mom and pop shop, it's Amazon vs eBay. It almost seems like the idea of the (unbiased) platform will be a footnote in history at this point.
I don't know if the enabling of greater economies of scale in itself is bad. Instead it's the extreme potential for anti-competitive behavior. I have no idea how to realistically stop the first one from leading to the later one though.
Because decentralization and democratization were central to the vision we saw in the 1990s when we discovered the public Internet that universities had been building. The early days were all about independence and progress.
Needless to say, I overestimated human nature and underestimated the inertia of trillion dollar institutions. I still want that original vision of a decentralized digital utopia, I just don't think much of it is achievable at a population-wide scale.
Hey, I did the same thing and that's why I agree with 'rayiner. Star Trek's utopian future is United Federation of Planets, which is a central world(s) government.
That said, I don't think the balance is quite that one-sided. Technology centralizes in a geographical sense, since it reduces that barrier, but it also allow for the decentralization by allowing small players to access big markets - for example, tech-aware small farmers around here are actually making a decent income by producing for niches, while before only large players could make anything above subsistence income. At the same time, some of the new behemoths are not quite so - they may operate in many markets, but they're often only a small slice of the transaction, and the barrier to entry is not that great. Uber might be large now, but the scale is more from the cash being dumped into it than from the economies of scale, in my opinion. We'll see how that plays out in a few years.
But
We see Airbnb enabling bad actors on its platform, refusing to take action against them, posting ads all over san Francisco to sink prop f - acting like a mega Corp.
Josephine is not mega Corp, yet. But imagine if it became huge. I bet it'd look more like sprig, and all the other mega corps, than the author would like.
Pretty much the only wildly successful company I can think of that has not ended up acting like a mega Corp is craigslist.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/10/craigslist-ebay-law...
But it was not about profit maximization, Ebay argued that actions they took were harmful to the stake Ebay owned in the company. So it was just a more typical shareholder lawsuit.
(It's unlikely that Craigslist has overtly stated that the purpose of the company is to maximize profit, so as long as Newmark controls a huge chunk of the company a lawsuit along those lines is going to be a tough hill to climb)
I could be misremembering some of the details, however.
Craigslist is virtually unique in that they don't charge most users anything and don't have any plans to do so, and I'm happy to see them defend their platform despite its warts. They've hooked me up with 5 apartments, a SO, and at least 3 jobs.
What's tricky there is that they provided a wonderful user interface, but used Craigslist data. Since CL refuses to update their UI (and for potentially good reason), I find it hard to justify a monopoly on displaying their data. The links still go back to the CL listings, unless I'm misunderstanding the dispute. I fail to see what is unethical about that.
Let's not pretend padmapper was just making a nice interface; the clear goal was to use postings from CL, get people to use padmapper, then migrate them to padlister. Where they charge fees, with more fees on the way the second they get any business leverage, given they are/where a VC funded company.
People that write such articles should realize that they can cause a lot of damage to businesses. If you don't have significant evidence that people working for such companies are not treated well and are unhappy then go do your homework first, otherwise it's just unethical and irresponsible to publish your intuitions and project them as facts.
No coercion, no evidence, just innuendo and undergraduate forelock tugging.
Right now a lot of people cook meals not just because they enjoy to do so, but because having someone else cook healthy meals for you all the time is too expensive. A "Full Sprig" society can hopefully leverage specialization and economies of scale the same way that people no longer keep hens for eggs.
Yes, the feel-good-local-farm(kitchen)-to-table aspect is lost, but most people don't care about that.
Evolution took a long time to evolve our DNA. It doesn't change easily.
Like all habits developed over millenia, just because something worked back then, doesn't mean it makes sense now. We had our cost/benefit evaluation slowly tuned to the environment that rapidly (i.e. over last few thousand of years) ceased to exist. A lot of problems we have with each other can be explained in terms of executing adaptations we had from the time where survival involved hunting, and not filling out forms.
Not saying that normal eating is obsolete - just that arguments from nature tend not to be too strong in general case.
The daily hassle of sourcing ingredients, cooking them, cleaning up the mess from cooking etc is an absolute chore.
95% of the time I'd be happy to be able to order a nutrious well made meal and have it delivered, here in the UK where I am your options for delivery are largely "pizza/kebabs" and "chinese/indian" and neither is particulary healthy (the salt and fat levels in a lot of the chinese takeaway dishes are insane, like 80% your RDA).
Having said that, I agree that sourcing ingredients, cleaning up, and all the other upkeep costs turns into a big hassle. Some time ago I voiced the concern on HN and from the answers I learned that generally, like every other task, you can learn to optimize away lots of that startup/teardown costs - but it requires planning and adjusting you daily routine.
Not something I have time to do now, though - changing routines takes a lot of time and effort too.
Pizza was my kryptonite, after a few weeks I stopped craving everything else but Pizza :).
Cooking is not going anywhere. I simply cannot understand why common people with a kitchen would not cook. It just takes some planning and cooking enough food that it last 2-3 days.
"I stopped ordering from Sprig back in the spring, because ... they sent me a truly sub-par chicken sandwich."
"I will dismiss out of hand any article suggesting that the sharing economy can be about connecting people with others instead of separating them, and I will post something snarky and condescending instead of engaging with an interesting point"
I admit that the dystopian future the author sets out seems a little drastic, but it does remind me of Jobs' "below the API" argument.
"We make these choices, bit by bit. I stopped ordering from Sprig back in the spring, because (a) I don’t like that future and (b) they sent me a truly sub-par chicken sandwich."
FWIW, I found the article to be really well written.
We see the same pattern again and again. Small businesses should fight like hell to keep a direct relationship with their customers.
Couldn't agree more. I think this central to any discussion about the 'sharing economy'. Uber et al claim to be disrupting established monopolies and their marketing seeks to establish themselves as champions the free market. In reality, they are seeking to build a new monopoly, where they control the information about relationships in a system.
Memory fails me at the moment, but I remember hearing a piece on a podcast recently (it might have been Radiolab) where they discussed how the 'live' view presented by Uber was a prediction coming from their algorithms and that no actual location data was available to the app on your phone until you booked a ride. I thought it was ironic that the new darlings of the free market were operating what was essentially a soviet-style central planning system, albiet with a very modern gloss.
Legal codes requiring certain minimum standards exist for good reasons. Home-scale kitchens are impossible to scale to commercial levels of quality and service without cutting corners that can make food dangerous.
And sometimes for bad reasons. Couple of examples - cooking meat to 160 F / 71 C, Nycity inventing dangers of sous vide. The whole zone thing. Food codes sometimes grossly misinterpret or twist science. Or are made towards large scale operation - you will almost certainly have contamination when cracking 1 000 000 eggs. But with basic chance of even having salmonella in the egg 1/20000 even very sloppily prepared breakfast will be safe.
I am rather obsessed with food safety in my own kitchen but I don't see that obsession something that ought to make the cooked food business as highly regulated as it is. As with the sous vide example or the ridiculous import ban on certain French cheeses, the government overreach is stifling. For example, a chipped tile in a NYC kitchen could result in a health code violation. Does a chipped tile really pose that much of a food safety risk? Regulation seems to be a mild form of extortion, especially in NYC. You get a C rating but want an A? If you know the right people in NY, that 'problem' can be easily fixed -- irregardless of the actual violations in question! The shakedown aspects of local health departments is astounding.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/01/29/c...
[2]: http://www.agriculture.ny.gov/fs/consumer/processor.html
They take $50 million in VC money and come up with that POS website. And they they think they're "winning".
I'm a young single dude in his 20s, and the most I can do is boil some pasta. I work from home so time is not really a huge issue, I just don't know where to start. Any tips?
More personally, let me say that the best way to learn how to cook is to go to the market, find some stuff that looks interesting, and then figure out what to do with them. Pretty soon you'll have an intuitive idea of techniques to use with almost anything you can find, which is when the fun stuff really starts. Don't get intimidated! If you can cook pasta without ruining it, you have it in you to make duck-egg carbonara with house-cured bacon and Swiss chard over homemade fettuccine.
Oh, and get some good knives and keep them sharp. Trust me.
You can also just look up recipes and read them beforehand to see if they're too complicated. Lots of delicious things are actually pretty simple to make. For example, you can take some chicken thighs, pour some olive oil, salt, pepper and lemon juice on top and stick them in an oven at 425F and you have a meal in about half an hour or so.
Pick one or two things and try to make it every week and improve upon it, or add in slight variations.
Look at the processed food you buy and see if you can come up with tastier and healthier homecooked versions.
Since you said you already know how to boil pasta, learning how to make your own tomato sauce or pesto is satisfying and easy.
Borrow cookbooks from the library and read them. Since Mark Bittman was mentioned, his "How to Cook Everything" is a good general reference, and he's also a good writer.
It also helps to have the ingredients with a longer shelf life on hand, such as spices and other staples, so you have everything you need.
There isn't a bad place to start when you don't know much. I recommend against starting with the "technique-first" approach unless it appeals to you personally, at least until you get some experience. You really want to do something that captures your interest so you stick with it.
You don't even need recipes to get good results quickly, just being able to saute some garlic in olive oil and chop vegetables to add to it (just buy whatever looks delicious in the market) can make your pasta a bazillion times better...
Practice makes perfect (but getting started is pretty easy too)... :]
Sautees, Stews, Bakes
* Sautees: *
Oil your pan. Personally I use coconut oil & a cast-iron pan but do your research and find what works for you & your budget.
Start heating your pan (low, 25%)
Chop your toughest vegetables first. For me these are sweet potatoes & carrots & beets. Many recipes online say start with gaplic & onions but I've found that they burn too easily.
I slice the tough veggies into slices so that a lot of surface area covers the pan. Experiment.
Throw the tough veggies into pan, turn heat up between 35-50%.
While they cook, prepare "softer" vegetables - Broccoli, Brussel sprouts, Ginger (great for circulation!). Chop and throw in.
As the tougher vegetables soften (6+ minutes), throw in Kale or Spinach for vitamins & flavor. These will shrink significantly so you may have to load multiple handfuls into the pan in sequence.
As everything cooks down softly (sample it as you feel the veggies getting soft), add in: Eggs and/or Meat.
If you do eggs I recommend pouring into a bowl, mixing yolk & white, adding spices (cumin, paprika, salt, cinnamon) first. Definitely add spice to your meat - and cutting your meat will help you gauge its Done-ness well.
Cook until done, stir throughout every 20-45 seconds or so so nothing burns. Add oil if needed to avoid burning your pan. Be liberal on this to prevent burnt food and hardware.
When it's all ready, turn your fire off and use an oven mitt to grip the skillet. Use a spoon to pour into a bowl. Let cool for 30 seconds and enjoy!
* Stews: *
Same principle as before - prepare heat, start with the tough ones.
Boil your water in a pot. Add in lentils & quinoa - these each take ~20+ minutes. Let boil for a few minutes while you chop tougher vegetables.
Through in the tough veggies, turn your fire down to medium. Add spices.
Add greens - I recommend mustard greens, bok choy for flavor and vitamins.
Drop a stick of butter in to add some much needed fat and improve the consistency. Or, mix tomatoes in after cooking to thicken the consistency.
Make sure you use more water than you need -- better to use too much than burn your food.
20-30 minutes later, you've got yourself a nice meal. I use 1 cup of lentils + 1 cup of quinoa or oats at at ime, with all the veggies & eggs & meat from the sauteeing, you'll have plenty of food for at least a day.
* Granola Bakes: *
Open your oven, clean it. Remove burnt chunks and food. Close the door & preheat your oven to 325. Before this started, you shopped bulk and filled mason jars with nuts of your choosing to avoid wasteful & unhealthy plastic bags. I recommend: Excess Peanuts or Virigina Peanuts. A massive Oat base. Walnuts, Pecans, Almonds. Pour all of these onto a baking sheet inside of a baking pan. Pour several spoons of honey. Add salt. Add cinnamon. Mix around.
Stick in oven, cook for 30 minutes, remove. Enjoy.
I pretty much live off of these meals. Actual ingredients vary with the season and mood but the principles apply. Hopefully you can follow along and try these! Vary spices for more variety. You can freeze food to store for a long time - I recommend freezing half of a huge stew and fridging the rest to save yourself time.
There's a very good reason chefs generally do things in certain orders, and it's not just consistency and cook time. You did not "figure out" what billions of people before you could not. A lot of the reasons why people do not cook things as you describes have to do with basic chemistry. Chemistry is what you are really neglecting given your 3 categories - things like caramelization, absorbing flavors, catalysts, reactions. Not all your choices are bad (cast iron is great), but many have consequences for flavor (coconut oil is tasty, but strong, and has a high smoke point) and others are just head scratching.
I don't even know where to start with your cooking technique, but let's discuss sautés. Firstly, you do not have to cook everything together, at the same time, same temperature, all mixed by the end. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but some of the reasons around cook time and temperature are there precisely so things blend together well. Other reasons include removing things like water, salts, bitter tastes, etc. from food. For example, you can actually often cook your meat first to some level such as a simple browning. This will season the pan nicely, allow you to do things like sear your meat correctly, and provide some tasty fat to add flavor to your veggies while they cook. Later, you can add back the meat to finish it off and make sure it's safely cooked to the proper temperature. Your way of cooking meat is not always wrong, but for many dishes it will often have consequences - soggy meat, veggies overdone, meat not safely cooked, lack of flavor from fat, no sear, textural issues, and so on.
Pretty much the same applies to stews. For one, many if not most stews taste infinitely better if you caramelize a lot of the veggies directly in your cooking pot, then pour your liquid base on. Never mind you seem to be making stews generally without any concept of stocks and using things like butter as thickening agents (shudder). Too much water is definitely not a good thing for stew and something that is not easy to fix. Thickening stews is somewhat of an art, but there are also many well-known ways that don't involve what you describe.
I've already written a novel, but I highly suggest you buy one of those textbooks from a cooking school (CIA for example). You may look down on professional texts, but cooking is one area where learning the academics are very important. While there's always room for tweaking and personal touches in cooking, completely ignoring cooking techniques will get you no where. I am sure your food makes you happy, but if you want to challenge yourself and grow, you should really do as I have suggested and buy some books. I do not mean to harshly criticize you, but rather you seem someone interested in cooking that could maybe enjoy it more but lacks some basic knowledge to be a better cook.
Try the Hungarian mushroom soup. I guarantee you will like it.
This year I bought into a Community Supported Agriculture deal, where every Tuesday I pick up a load of vegetables and fruit from a farm, usually picked a day before.
I made a rule for myself that I wouldn't waste any of it. It began with a flood I could barely keep up with. Many vegetables I had to figure what they were and what to do with them -- daikon radishes, chard, tomatillos, squashes, etc. Some I had never used, like fresh jalepenos. Without the flood, I was always planning, never doing. With the flood, I acted. That's where we learn -- by doing.
My fallback with something I didn't know was to steam, then put on olive oil, salt, and pepper or to saute with garlic and onions. I ended up eating everything and much of it was the best I'd ever tasted (eating the cherry tomatoes was nearly a religious experience).
In the process, I learned a lot about food and cooking. I don't consider myself a good cook, but at a farmers market yesterday I recognized everything, knew what to look for, and came home with radishes, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, Jerusalem artichokes, and a few other things I never or rarely would get.
This year I'm just keeping up -- meaning a lot of steamed vegetables with olive oil, salt, and pepper, which is usually pretty tasty. Next year, with the experience, I'll make more recipes. One thing is for sure, I'll do this for the rest of my life. It's one of the best things I've done for myself.
Side benefit: six-pack abs developing despite eating as much volume of food as ever, as vegetables replace less nutritious stuff that is no longer appetizing. Plus I enjoy this food more than what I used to eat.
Side benefit 2: I spend less money on food now. Restaurants aren't as good in comparison, with all their rice/bread/other filler.
Side benefit 3: I spend less time on food. I bring lunches with me, which saves time going out.
Tldr: Buy into local farm share with so much vegetables you have to figure it out. Eat more, save money, save time, and lose fat.
I think all of these startups are "solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand"[0] and do so by taking advantage (and perpetuating) massive income inequality.
[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/change-the-worl...
Yeah, it's not like people with kids ever get take-out or delivery, right?
Maybe this kind of issue is more relevant to affluent young people, but it's hardly irrevelant to others. There's nothing wrong with targeting a luxury market. Even middle class people can afford some luxuries.
Which of course is a propagation of the very thing you claim they so nobly rescue these lost souls from!
You're joking, right? Taxi drivers are practically indentured servants who begin each shift $100+ in the hole to some asshole rent-seeking capitalist who happened to buy the medallion at the right time 40 years ago.
But even that being so in Uber's case, why are people championing the replacement of one abusive relationship with another?
Doordash brings you food from local restaurants (the same ones you eat at when you go out with your friends). It costs a little more than sprig, and it takes a couple more minutes.
But the food is individualized and made to order. It's familiar, made by the human beings you can go talk to the next time you're in there during a night out.
In short, it's the perfect in-between. And given the tone of the article, not all that surprising the author totally ignored it.
"Sprig" as I see it isn't likely to replace/centralise all of cooking. It's nothing more than an easier 'takeaway', a 'cometo' if you will.
This sort of thing's been around for years in the UK: HungryHouse, JustEat, precursors to Deliveroo, etc. - I was shocked recently in the US when I couldn't find an equivalent (I guess I didn't search long enough to find Sprig, or it's not yet widespread enough).
For me at least, but I'm pretty sure for most people, HH or JE is like the 'one stop' place you can go to choose a takeaway. I don't have to think "I want Chinese food, let me find a Chinese place that delivers", or "I want pizza today, let me find a pizza takeaway site" - it's all in one place.
But that certainly doesn't mean that all my food comes from a "centralised" place, and I never cook...
You are correct, and those services just wrap what's been around for even longer - the local curry house that keeps a couple of moped drivers and a telephone operator on staff. It's a fairly old-fashioned business model.
You are gaining convenience at the theoretical expense of small businesses at some point in the future. This is hardly the stuff of Orwellian nightmares.
[In fairness, I assume the "dystopian" subheading was chosen by an editor, and not by the writer himself (his own phrase: 'hardly utopian').]
If SF was a more spread out city like Sacramento or Houston, driving to a grocery store or a Chipotle or an inexpensive eatery would be trivial to get your food. If it was much more dense (and easy to get around) like Manhattan or Bangkok or Tokyo, it would be trivial to get prepared food at any price since restaurants and street side cooks of all kinds can effectively get to dense districts to sell food.
But grocery stores (at least Safeway / Trader Joes / Whole Foods) generally have attached parking and aren't too bad to park at. Though I still try to go during off-peak hours.
That said, I think that delivery services for food itself will probably become more common too. If restaurants could just make food, and ping an uber-like service for a driver to do the pickup/delivery it could work out better. Some restaurants aren't busy every day, being able to combine nearby pickups and deliveries for multiple restaurants could be a huge success.
I do think it would take more than the combined infrastructure of grubhub + uber though. Simply because orchestration on grubhub is usually limited/partial menus, and the deliveries themselves can go from simple to complicated... living in a gated apartment (where there's a separate gate to the walk-up entrance, etc) makes deliveries difficult for someone who hasn't been there.
I'd love to see restaurants able to share delivery drivers... and delivery drivers able to stay active, when a single location isn't busy, another may be, and to top that, it would allow more places to offer local delivery.
Why does he not learn to cook instead, and meet people on the market where he would go buy ingredients?
"...things should be possibly be made more complex or more complicated for people to make them smarter and to make them happier... it's flying in the face of quite a lot of the wisdom that we've been building up for the last 15-20 years in usability."
I think one of the author's points is that he appreciates that Josephine actually satisfies a higher level of Maslow's hierarchy than Sprig not in spite of its lower level of convenience, but because of it.
1) Uber For Food: Immediate satisfaction of fatty, salty food.
2) Sprig: Higher-level satisfaction of food better for long-term health.
3) Josephine: Slower, more conscious choice; face-to-face connection with your neighbors.
Sprig-type operations drain agency and expertise out of
the world. They centralize, aiming to build huge hubs
with small spokes; their innermost mechanisms are hidden.
They depend on humans behaving as interchangeable units
of labor.
But I could tell even as a child that spending an hour and a half cooking and cleaning every day doesn't make any sense when you're earning $40/h each and takeout for three costs $20 and requires no clean-up.
Sort of like grocery home-delivery, after awhile you realize the premium you're paying for something you can easily do yourself.
I feel like this class of startups are needlessly attempting to add services on top of existing things that people can do themselves for much cheaper.
People have been delivering food since before tech startups ~~~disrupted~~~ delivery, but enjoy that self-congratulatory pity
For the urbanites among the ancient Romans, food vendors (and even things like grab-and-go street vendors and fast food restaurants) were a normal part of life, since their apartments generally didn't have personal kitchens.
I can't find a source for it, but I have to imagine they had at least some personal food delivery services.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/pompeii/9850077/Pompeii-e...
So I imagine it is possible many would do some kind of deliveries as well.
Pizza only came to be much later, when the tomato got introduced to Europe, from South America. And when people eventually found out that many varieties of tomatoes are not only not poisonous but also well tasting. :)
Why would you feel that someone who makes your food is beneath you?
I doubt either applied in Roman times. I'll stand corrected if:
a) There is evidence people submitted food schedules where the food could be delivered on a regular basis, or
b) There were evidence of a pre-telephone method of instantly transmitting an order, or
c) It were a practice to send out a messenger to place and bring back the order for the non-wealthy.
They'd probably rather have a *tip*
Now paying a small extra on the basis of quality of service, does make sense. But again, that's different from supplementing a worker's deficient salary. The former is merit based, the latter is, on average, a necessary, expected and you could almost say culturally mandatory pity/solidarity payment by the customer that ought to simply be priced in the product or service and arranged between employer and employee.
Paying extra based on merit does make sense in some industries, like say a tour guide who didn't just tell you the facts of whatever artefact you walked by, but made sure you had an amazing time, catching your interests and focusing on things that resonate with you, waving stories into a unique experience, that's tip-worthy. A restaurant worker who puts in extra effort might be, too. But a delivery man who mostly has 1 actually important parameter of quality 'being on time or not', mostly, that's not a tip-worthy parameter in my opinion, that's just his normal job, and if he's getting a decent salary, I wouldn't tip for that.
I'll happily tip anyone doing his job if it's necessary to supplement a deficient salary, but I wouldn't tip anyone just for doing their job if their salary is sufficient. Whether that's the case for this particular uberised delivery industry will play out soon enough. I'm over in the Netherlands, generally tipping is not done and not necessary either as salary levels are quite decent. (the only exception is youth-wages, which are beyond ridiculous and a movement is on the rise to do away with the concept).
I hope it's a better reason than "they'd like to evade taxes". Even the usual justifications about "you can reward more for better service" are hard to apply here: what's the variation? Is it a bonus for not eating the food?
In software, I'd prefer the end customer throw bank notes at me, but I don't equate that with an actual superior model for how software development incentives should work.
That is 3 customers tip 10%, 15% and 20%, for an average 15%. But when you fix the service charge at 15%, the 10% tipper now orders less frequently. That might be made up for by the 20% tipper ordering more, but it depends on the shape of the demand curve.
Should I just not tip delivery people at all, since I like to keep money?
I'm struggling to see the model that drives your claim. As stated, it would justify "pay what you feel like" for every other good, to some extent.
That's true, except in the United States, in the case of delivery people and servers there is an extremely robust societal norm to tip. Such a norm doesn't exist for most other transactions.
Your question was "What difference would it make if done as a regular delivery fee rather than [a tip]?", which was precisely the question I tried to answer. That is, you can't aggregate a block of voluntary exchanges and average the price.
You were giving justifications at a system level, which why I said it would imply that other systems should shift to "pay what you feel like", irrespective of which ones currently use it.
And it's not an exchange, if one side has nothing to withhold, but a gift.
(In USA, the delivery person probably can't get away with reporting nothing to the IRS, they will have to declare some tip income or risk getting chased around)
If you get paid in tips only sure but around here it's minimum wage + tips. No-tip order still pays to your employer - of course it sucks for you but it still keeps the business going.
>(In USA, the delivery person probably can't get away with reporting nothing to the IRS, they will have to declare some tip income or risk getting chased around)
I meant reporting to the owner and waiting to get the money back trough paycheck.
The table-waiting model of using tips instead of pay sucks, but tipping for delivery can be a lot of money.
I know. My point was that, to the extent the driver has a legitimate preference, it's for receiving a fixed delivery fee, not for being "yet another person I'm expected to pay under the table".
Thus, I'd love for them to say what money amount satisfies my obligation to them, rather then guessing each time how much I'm supposed to secretly give the driver.
I'm looking for a model that would make me believe oppositely. Do you have one?
If you could wave a legal wand and cause a fixed $2 per delivery to go into their paycheck, that's fine. But that's not going to happen.
Wait-staff in a world without tips can get paid more. I don't think a delivery driver gets paid more.
And yet, it is in the driver's interest to keep this knowledge from you. What they are getting is the minimum you feel comfortable about, which may very well be above what is the minimum they would consider satisfactory.
It's not obvious at all that they would prefer a fixed fee.
The game theory dynamics aren't in dispute. The question is, why do you defend a system that boils down to "they take advantage of people's ignorance", of what they're obligated to pay, and that they're paying more in return for nothing.
Quality of service questions aside though the bottom line of whether or not you should tip comes down to if the person in question is working for the tipped employee minimum wage or the standard minimum wage.
If they are paid according to the tipped minimum and you don't tip based on your ideological view of the appropriateness of a tip for their job function then you are an ass.
It if didn't arrive in good shape, I would be asking for a refund, or at the very least not ordering form that place anymore.
I don't know, it's weird - I currently live in UK, where tipping waiters is defacto standard(and not because they make below-living wages), but I would never ever think to tip a delivery driver. Like....why would I? This makes absolutely no logical sense, just like I wouldn't tip a plumber or a car mechanic for fixing my stuff on time - they are already taking money for the service.
There's your issue. Tipping culture in the UK is very different to the US. Mainly because, as you say, they do not make below-living wages.
But within you example, I still don't see the distinction. Waiters can treat you badly or well - and you tip them accordingly. Delivery drivers can treat you badly or well - and you tip them accordingly.
In contrast, my experience with the delivery driver is limited to the 10 second it takes for them to hand me my food. Literally every single takeaway takes payment online, so for years now my food was already paid for before it was even delivered. So all the driver has to do is give me my food. He doesn't even have to say anything, there's no conversation to be had, "delivery experience" to experience. So why tip?
But more to the point, there are various jobs widely known to be totally underpaid and depend on tips. For instance, you tip bartenders in the US even though all they are doing is pouring you a beer. Is it "right"? Of course not. But it's a widely accepted societal norm in many countries, and is an assumed part of that person's income.
If you want to be righteous call the manager at the place you're ordering food from and complain, don't stiff the guy delivering pizza for a living.
I don't see how Sprig is any different from a multi-national pizza delivery chain. Really the only difference is that Sprig is solely available as app, whereas you can walk-in or call a Domino's.
Does this author even pizza?
Generally speaking about delivery, tipping, restaurants, food service - treat people well, as humans, and if you order something you do not like, either try again or move on. You don't always win in life and it really is not a big deal unless you were mortally wounded or something truly terrible happened.
Regarding tips, here's an interesting thing to try for when you are unsure - ask. Delivery guys and restaurant workers are people. Most will answer honestly about their working arrangements, especially if you explain yourself. They are people like you and me, and most likely they work just as hard as both of us. These people normally do deserve a tip for good service, even if they are paid in part.
A simple example - if someone needs to come up 12 flights of stairs or take the elevator to floor 14 for you, while still managing to deliver many other orders on time, you do in fact owe it to them to tip them. While you might tip less if they are already compensated on some level, you should always reward anyone for good and extra service. If it's too much with tip, don't order deliver. Get up and get it yourself. Why is this so hard for some other commenters here to understand? If the service is bad, you can say so or simply not tip and not order again.
Someone mentioned delivery vs. pickup - I've lived in countries where there's no opportunity to pull up your car, SUV, land boat to pickup your meals. You either buy it on the street and eat there/walk it home, or get it delivered by someone usually on a motorcycle or bike. Delivery is a privilege and a service, so you pay for it.
As far as tip amount, in some countries, you tip a lot less than the US. But you also tip more kinds of people and act more civil to people doing things in your life that are not generally tipped in the US - plumber, electrician, etc. For instance in Israel, it is extremely rude if someone comes to do home repairs, plumbing, movers, whatever to not offer them a cup of fresh (not instant unless they ask) coffee/tea/beverage and possibly food in addition to paying the full fee. In fact, you offer them at the beginning; they are a guest in your home, so you treat them warmly and you will receive warm and diligent service in return.
Regarding the systems food companies and restaurants use, wtf. If you can't run a solvent business without cutting all these corners, then don't. Treating people badly and not paying livable wages should not be an option. If you cannot afford to pay and treat your workers fairly, then you simply failed at you business. This capitalistic notion of cutting corners to win, because everyone is doing it, or whatever else is silly. I could have won at Monopoly that one time, but I needed to pass Go on more time. Deal with it.
Finally, if you have a bad experience, solve it in a normal way. Talk to the business, do not order the same thing again, order from somewhere else, etc. What you don't do is throw a tantrum and especially in food service, come to quick judgements about nothing. Listen, I've often ordered bad Chinese, and that's just part of life. I eat the bad Chinese if I can, and then try to remember to order something else or somewhere else the next time. None of this is complicated - don't be a dick and learn to live with consequences.
I mean, I'm sure you could find out.
This isn’t a new problem... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q030WNZvXrA
(Clock scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927))
On demand food businesses are just catering companies. Catering companies have always existed. Bolt on pizza delivery magic, paired with remote-button access from your little black mirror that constantly tracks your coordinates/altitude and now it's a daily faustian dilemma weighing too heavy?
Do you want another app to help you with that too?
From the article the author's main point is this:
Sprig-type operations drain agency and expertise out of the world. They centralize, aiming to build huge hubs with small spokes; their innermost mechanisms are hidden. They depend on humans behaving as interchangeable units of labor.
He just doesn't like that a store exists to cater to his demand. How gauche to have to interact with a store that's not a store!
He then wax romantically about some weird hippie future where it's much more fun to have your neighbors cooking for each other like one big timeless block party.
That's called a marketplace. An unregulated, cottage protected, open marketplace! That must be better better than a store but as lovely as that sounds to mingle with a range of people to get a bowl of pho or some sandwich one has to face the fact that every marketplace ends up centralized.
Every one.
An open marketplace is a winners take all video game.
Look at eBay and its class of power-sellers that dropship or flip their Alibaba account. Look at Fiverr and its class of power-users that end up dominating the search results.
You just end up dealing with the most polished store for the sake of what being a store brings to the table. The consistency, quality, and ease.
So wait, really what's the point here? What are we really trying to discover and realize about ourselves today? That treating people as interchangeable economic units is bad but this hippie fuzzy feeling way is less bad? As opposed to just cooking yourself or going to a restaurant?
Maybe this is just a promoted native post. Who knows. But it notches up another line about how frustrating annoying Berkeley and its residents are.
For extra credit contrast this piece to another post today by New York Times on the culture of GoFundMe community and a response by nostrademons
Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526447
On the whole, I think this is a good trend - it makes the economy more efficient, it encourages people to celebrate diversity instead of shunning it, and it's how the upper classes have operated for a long time, which is the source of a major power imbalance where corporations & rich people feel entitled to ask for anything and then working-class people feel ashamed to refuse.
I hope you take that, stuff it in your pipe and smoke it, guy.