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Comment by astatine | Hacker News Reader

We had an office virtual get-together and we got prepaid vouchers to everyone on a popular food delivery app. Everyone could order whatever they wished to, from their favorite restaurants. This accounts very easily for varying dietary needs, who else might be physically with them so that they can order more or less. I can't see the simplicity of this being beat easily.

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Downside, when the company gives you a voucher for £20 to order food (that ought to be enough for anyone!).

Turns out the delivery app automatically adds £10 in delivery/service fee, and there's hardly any food you can pick for the remaining £10. Had to buy out of my own pocket.

And the alternative of having each person order what they want and expensing it isn't much better. You don't pay anything, but it forces everyone to spend a fair amount of time. Plus accounting for different timezones means everyone isn't eating at the same time.

Yep. Filing expenses can take an unreasonable amount of time especially when some percentage are bounced for some trivial reason.

I get the gesture but just let people grab the food and beverage of their choice like they do with any other friends on Zoom thing--assuming a remote team party is a good idea in the first place.

We have two competing food delivery services here, Foodora and Wolt.

Foodora kept doing these "FREE DELIVERY" promos and blasting me with push notifications. And when I'd open up the app to browse through all of the available places, pick what food I'd like to order, add it to my basket and then go to checkout... My 14€ pizza has turned into a 19€ minimum order pizza + free delivery. Also, the minimum order was separate for each and every restaurant, but I could not find any way to find it other than the checkout page.

When I open up Wolt and select a restaurant, the first two things I see, even before the actual name of the restaurant, are the minimum order sum and the delivery fee.

I only have one of these applications installed on my phone these days. Anyone wanna guess which one?

I'll add that when you live outside a city and there are food delivery companies, first or third party, the value of the voucher is meaningless. I got a thank you credit for some delivery app that around $100. There was literally nothing that could be delivered, no matter the price. Sometimes being remote actually means you're remote.

I'm not even truly rural and I have never used any of the food delivery services. There are deliveries I could get but nothing I'd want.

Plus, there are several delivery services that I won't use, voucher or not.

My company has done this and I hate it because 20+ people all ordering some fast(ish) food for individual delivery through a disintermediary service has so many things wrong with.

I can't reconcile trying to discourage wasteful, race-to-the-bottom, lowest-price-first lifestyles and yet clueless acts like food delivery apps.

I tend to find swag somewhat wasteful even under normal circumstances, but over the past 18 months or so I've gotten a bunch of team and speaker/attendee event swag individually mailed to me and I feel a bit of guilt given that pretty much none of it is anything I remotely need. And, in many cases, will ever use. (Some is nice though so I hesitate to say just get rid of all this sort of thing.)

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