Companies like GrubHub pay their delivery drivers the way you'd expect them to be paid and local pizza places and chinese restaurants have been profitably doing food delivery for decades.
There are certainly good examples of technology disrupting the current labor market in ways that take advantage of people, but DoorDash being shitty isn't really one of them.
The kitchen and wait staff were great fun. We worked in the kitchen in dead spots, we knew that business, we were actually employees.
Now I look at uber eats drivers and see people who are disenfranchised. The flexibility inherent in these models doesn't just create financial insecurity, it also creates social insecurity.
At least you used to be able to make up for it on tips back in my day.
You then deduct that mileage. But again, that sounds like a massive hassle if you're doing these gigs 365 days a year, and need to collect all documentations.
In a newspaper there are two or three teams: news and/or opinion, and business. The teams do not tell each other what to do. Business doesn't tell news what to report on or how to write their stories. News doesn't tell opinion what to write or publish. And news doesn't tell business what ads are OK to run.
News and opinion take direct responsibility for what they publish. Every piece of content is put into the paper on purpose, usually written in-house. Their goal is to inform, enlighten, provoke, etc. -- to serve their society.
The job of the business team is to keep the lights on so more journalism can get done.
In a tech company like Facebook or YouTube, there are no such distinctions. Every decision, content or otherwise, is made for a business reason, and only for a business reason.
That's why YouTube and Facebook publish horrible, abusive, ugly content every day that no news or opinion editor would ever have cleared for publication. Facebook and YouTube don't care; they have no sense of a duty to society, and have no master other than the pageview, the click, the ad sale.
There are no "Chinese Walls" in modern ad-driven tech companies. It's worth remembering that those walls were built in journalism for a reason.
> Their goal is to inform, enlighten, provoke, etc. -- to serve their society.
No. Their goal is to get eyeballs looking at ads and turn those into conversions so that the paper can sell more ads. If tabloid content achieves that goal, then that's what you will get. If pushing a narrative accomplishes that, or is more profitable in other ways for the shareholders, then you'll get that instead.
But, to my knowledge, no one has gone after Pizza Hut and the like for creating that underclass. (If people have gone after them then I was honestly unaware of it.)
But the pizza delivery industry as a whole was operating at the same unimaginable scale. And still does today.
None of this is new.
Pizza Hut and Dominos both have revenue in the billions of dollars per year. Does DoorDash?