Hacker News Reader

Comment by user-the-name | Hacker News Reader

It is a whole new kind of thing to sit in your house, look at something you want, place the order, and then have it in your hands in 45 minutes.

View on HN

I did my first online grocery order in the middle of pandemic. I needed to wait to 6 days :D

My parents live in northern New Jersey, about an hour away from NYC. For the first two months of the pandemic, it was impossible to get them food delivery. The wait times were exactly that a week or longer. Now it's fine. But it was so frustrating at it first.

I've got same day delivery on certain items on some sites and while it's a nice novelty, I've found it's unnecessary. I'm quite happy (content even) to wait 2 days, as long as it is actually 2 days, and not 1-5 days depending on the position of the moon.

My supermarket offers 4 hour delivery windows that you book about a week in advance, and it's perfect (other than the occasional dodgy swap or missing item). I can work with that. But amazon (for example) offers same/next day delivery, and I'd estimate maybe 10% of my orders are late. That doesn't work if I'm relying on them for food

Check out Dunzo.com

Then hopefully suffer more than 45 minutes of guilt for the externalities of your decision, including the likely fact that your delivery person is not making a living wage. Why not walk to your neighborhood store and buy something from a fellow citizens in your own community? Bonus points if you manage to find a replacement for an import made by a local company.

Wolt does pay couriers decently, and carbon compensates deliveries. And the order comes from local shops.

So do you think in Finland 13-14e hourly charge rate for self-employed entrepreneur is a decent rate?

What is your source for this rate? Based on limited knowledge (e.g., the Finnish YouTuber who tried working as Wolt courier for a couple of days, and the recent articles about the courier who is trying to earn 8000e in January delivering with Wolt), it seems that the rate _when actually making deliveries_ is higher. I might be willing to accept that this quoted figure is the hourly rate when the courier is technically available for deliveries but not getting them all the time. So, the hourly rate would go up if more people made delivery orders, because there would be less downtime… Of course nothing prevents the self-employed couriers from doing other work in the meantime, e.g., delivering for another company or working on some personal project (studying comes to mind as a thing that can be done during downtime).

Now, admittedly if they were employees, they would be paid by the hour whether there were orders or not, but then both their salary and the number of couriers on duty would have to be adjusted accordingly, which means the majority of couriers would lose this job… Not a simple matter, IMO, I think there is a gap in legislation when it comes to this type of work.

For instance from this story ” Woltin mukaan Woltin kaikkien lähettien keskimääräinen laskutus on nykyään nykyään 13,44 euroa tunnilta.” (Source: https://www.is.fi/taloussanomat/art-2000006312759.html)

Most on these ”can earn so many thousands per month” seem to follow same formula 1) Assumes that somebody works >12h per day, 6-7 days per week and 2) Mixes salary and self-employed hourly rate

Chances are that you spend more time than that feeling resentful that the big bad strangers on the internet don’t feel even a pang of shame just because you told them to.

Wolt couriers in Israel make 3-4 times the minimum wage when all is said and done.

I'm not doubting you but if you have a source for this (Hebrew is fine) I'd appreciate it. This topic has come up in conversation before and I'd like some more info on this.

Maybe this: https://www.meshekil.com/ReadNews/hMLbbgJ2C-%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%...

I would say any wage is better than no wage at all, which is what delivery people make if there are no deliveries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com