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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

A major negative consequence for restaurant workers as a result of food delivery apps is that they are busier than ever because they are now fulfilling orders all day from these apps in addition to orders from people that walk in.

I went to Popeyes last week and there’s just a stream of receipts from online orders constantly printing, and they have to fulfill all those while dealing with everyone that comes in. And of course they aren’t getting paid any more to do maybe 3-4x the work they did before these apps got popular.

In that world being paid per job seems better than making the same to do much more work.

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Yes but they quickly run the risk of ruining the in-person customer’s experience. In NYC the use of ghost kitchens[1] is booming. There are 2 within a block of my office - one is a multi-tenant space that serves several restaurants and the other is a pickup-only storefront for a salad chain. These outposts increase capacity but also require way less staff to manage and fewer skills to train.

It makes sense but it’s also sad to see that the best use of valuable retail-level real estate is restaurants designed for no one to go to.

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

> And of course they aren’t getting paid any more to do maybe 3-4x the work they did before these apps got popular.

Restaurants have always adjusted staffing based on order volume; so while the restaurant may have 3× the order flow, the work per employee probably hasn't increased that much.

no it appears they are working way more.

Anytime I go to a place that does heavy app delivery I remark to myself how much more frenetic all the workers seem now. I mean it was only in last 3 years this has become as widespread as it is now. It’s actually a bit depressing.

The Popeyes by me has a 25 or so minute drive thru line, I've gone twice for some reason recently. I watch as people wait in line, eventually park and walk to the door and realize the doors are locked. They don't even have patrons inside the restaurant. I never considered it being due to deliveries. Both times I went was during rain and right after work. The chicken sandwich drama is over.

Those workers are slammed, I can see them from the window. I assumed it was just fried chicken taking forever.

I guess the deliveries are waiting in the drive thru line. I see a lot of people not order.

"The chicken sandwich drama is over."

I had Popeye's for the first time one afternoon last week. There was a handwritten sign in the window saying they'd run out of chicken sandwiches for the day :(

Oh maybe I'm wrong then! I figured after they made it a normal item everywhere they were well stocked, I quit hearing about it!

That would be the ideal. In the short term almost any excess demand can be soaked up by the existing labor pool. It is only after a few weeks of extra work that most worker's output diminishes. By then the owner/manager just views the employees as slacking. See any game company or startup, and look for write ups on burnout. It isn't just white collar.

Aren’t minimum wage raises responsible for this? If restaurants are forced to pay $15 an hour minimum, how can it be profitable without them being more productive?

It may surprise you to learn that most businesses employ minimal staffing no matter what the min. wage is.

I worked for $5.25 an hour as a teenager, and that doesn't mean they just employed more people and we all took it easy. I would challenge the assertion that a business would not optimize worker output just because they are cheaper (and cheaper is relative, I'm sure even when it was lower the business owners still claimed it was too high).

Lastly, there are many ways a business divides its costs and there are many ways to be successful, even if sharing more profits with workers. Just ask Costco.

Good point. Why would a business voluntarily pay more than they have to?

Businesses used to be a part of their communities.

We’ve suffered a breakdown of the sense of community, and a failure in education resulting in growth in the number of people that continue to believe the fallacy that a business primary function is to maximise value to shareholders.

A business is ultimately a collection of people coming together for mutual benefit. If it stops being mutually beneficial and/or only becomes beneficial for some people if some other people are exploited, it probably shouldn’t continue to be.

They aren't forced to pay $15/hour so it makes no excuse to the current circumstances.

Also, this article isn't about making restaurants pay...it's about making DoorDash pay fairly

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