SF vs. Uber Eats: Service stops food delivery to Treasure Island citing fee cap | Hacker News Reader

SF vs. Uber Eats: Service stops food delivery to Treasure Island citing fee cap

sfexaminer.com

37 pointsReedx21 comments

I don't use Uber eats, or any other service. How does it work? Does the restaurant pay the full cost? I would have assumed it was free to the restaurant and the customer pays the delivery free. If that was the case, then why is there a cap? But I'm assuming that isn't the case... Then how did deliver services ever get to charging the restaurant?

> They are upset about regulation, so in the middle of a pandemic, they are retaliating by punishing and redlining Treasure Island residents who live in a food desert. That’s actually despicable

Does anyone find this kind of rhetoric convincing?

I find it inaccurate. Treasure Island does have a grocery store (Island Cove Market). Not a supermarket (e.g., 10,000+ items), but probably 1,000+ different items.

Real food deserts are places where you'd have to have to walk 10, 20+ miles for access to something like that. More akin to areas in the rural midwest.

There are plenty of real food deserts in major cities where residents without access to cars or reasonable public transportation cannot reasonably access grocery stores and they aren't anywhere close to 10+ miles away from their nearest grocery store. When you don't have a car and the public transportation infrastructure is non-existent, a few miles can out you in a food desert.

No, it's insulting.

SF meddled with no regard for the obvious effects of price controls. You would expect to see previously viable delivery options or radius reduced as a result.

Any company is free to do business wherever and with whomever they want to.

That is not true. At certain points in history, e.g. WWII, rationing was in effect wherein the government forcefully replaced the market with rationing stamps and created limits on how much each family could consume to ensure there was enough for the war effort and each household [1].

It's crazy to me how quickly people forget such interventions and then think that any government action of such a nature is unprecedented. It's not.

If, for example, we start to have COVID decimate migrant farm labor who pick our crops and often live in very tight quarters, then we might end up in a situation with systemic food insecurity. At that point, it might be become more reasonable for more extreme interventions to happen.

Similarly, society would be better served if people who are under forced quarantine orders due to exposure COVID were provided meal delivery services so they don't have to leave their house (ideally designed to minimize moral hazard or cheating). Providing those services will most likely come through governments using market services. But we shall see.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Stat...

Not at all. You can say "no shies, no service", but you can't say "Whites Only" anymore, for an extreme example.

Yeah, and a group of people in a common geographic area are free to bargain collectively to ensure that businesses don't take advantage of them. In fact, it's so core to human society that the idea is universal.

I think it would be really interesting to see what would happen if cities explored more of using their regulatory powers to get better deals for their citizens.

You may initially recoil at that framing of it, but really most regulation can be thought of in those terms. Look at environmental regulation, which forces a cost on companies that they wouldn't otherwise be paying to serve some area's interest in protecting the environment. Look at licensing for any profession. Take contractors for example, the people of an area, via their elected representatives, decide that they want to force all contractors to meet some form of licensing (and insurance) requirements if they want to serve any of the people in that area. Now, particularly the insurance one, puts a burden on the contractors who wouldn't otherwise get it, but it protects the ones who would (from being undercut in an unsustainable way) and it leads to an industry that serves that area better than it would otherwise.

There are caveats on both the "wherever" and "whomever" from the legal perspective in the US (and probably most countries).

"wherever": there's a legal concept of "disparate impact" wherein even if all of the policies themselves are neutral, if the policies end up impacting certain groups of people (in a protected characteristic) more than others, then the company in question is considered guilty of violating anti-discrimination laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

"whomever": businesses cannot refuse service based upon multiple; e.g. you can't refuse to only serve males vs. females, whites vs. Asians, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

Right now, 9:30 PM on a locked-down Friday night, it's 12 minutes by car from 3rd and King (you can get closer to the onramp, but not that much) to Treasure Island. 5 miles. So a round trip is 10 miles, 24 minutes, and it has to be a round trip because there's nothing there. So $6 in IRS mileage, $7 in wages. With a 15% cap, means the bill needs to be $87 to break even on bare minimum delivery costs.

Are restaurants downtown open for delivery with ~no office workers? I know people live downtown but not a lot. I would have guessed only the neighborhoods have enough takeout foot traffic to keep the doors open.

Do delivery companies actually pay IRS mileage rates and minimum wage, though?

Nope. Also, it shows a lack of understanding of costs that those who made the decision/are defending it only mention the amount of time - which is certainly a factor, but ignores mileage and the fact that as another comment mentioned, it’s likely an inefficient roundtrip in most cases…

And last but not least there’s the sneaky little reference to the fact that there’s legislation in play potentially to make the cap permanent. So even IF lack of traffic is enough to offset increased costs (when it’s almost certainly not) the truth is this is a political ploy to backdoor a manipulation of the market during a time of emergency, not an ACTUAL emergency order for the public good.

And shocking that the representative for that area is aghast at this response from UberEats and in support of the original decision… that’s their job!

I suspect it's a longer drive to other points in SF, like the Candlestick end of Bayview or up in the hills.

Could someone with knowledge of SF explain what Treasure Island is, and who lives there?

It's an island between SF and Oakland. Some people live there, probably in the few thousand I'd imagine. Very few businesses on the island.

It was a Navy base wayback that was used to clean nuclear warships and may or may not be radioactive.

"In April 2013, caesium-137 levels three times higher than previously recorded were found (the island hosted "radioactive ships from Bikini Atoll atomic tests and was a major education center training personnel for nuclear war"—the USS Pandemonium (PCDC-1) mockup had begun nuclear training in 1957."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island,_San_Francis...

As others have said it’s part of Yerba Buena island, essentially a landfill project built initially for Golden Gate International Exposition (Worlds Fair like) as a celebration of the recently opened Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. It sits between the two sections of the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_International_Ex...

It was used by the Navy during the war and up to 1997. After that management, and I think now ownership, of the island was transferred to SF. It’s been used as lower cost housing for the City, as well as other things. I saw a recording of Battle Bots there once for example. If anyone watched the show OA, the psychotherapy ward scenes (season two I think) were filmed in one of the cool looking buildings there.

I had friends who lived there after college, I’d say it feels very isolated. Before the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge opened, the only way on or off Yerba Buena and Treasure Island was by car or bus (Bus to SF, car in either direction). Today there is a foot/bicycle path across the Oakland side. There is a plan, yet to be funded, for the western span to get a foot/cycle path connected to SF. https://mtc.ca.gov/our-work/plans-projects/bicycle-pedestria...

Can't ubereats set a $200 minimum order or similar?

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