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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

It's none of your business what 10% of people are doing. I don't know how it degrades quality of life. I don't have to use the service and the business is paying rent and taxes to provide a service to the 10% of people who do find it beneficial.

Imagine being a single mom that works a lot and struggles to do grocery shopping. Imagine having a crying child with an ear infection and wanting to have someone deliver some medicine quickly so you can get to bed. But no, that's not allowed because it bothers the delicate sensibilities of some busy body who has nothing better to do than to but in to the lives of other people.

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There have been a lot of complaints to the city council about these dark stores. The gig workers hang out outside the store waiting for their orders, causing noise issues. They don't follow traffic rules since they are under immense time pressure. And converting these retail locations to distribution centers takes away from the limited retail space available in the city. I don't find your example compelling, pharmacies already deliver and these stores are not allow to deliver actual medication. The city of Amsterdam also stops people from starting new Nutella stores or souvenir stores because these decrease liveability. This is nothing new in that regard.

If we're going for hyperbolic examples, imagine being a single mother who works a lot and also has a limited income. Her convenient local shop has been replaced by a mini delivery warehouse burning through VC capital that was able to offer the landlord a better rental rate, but charges customers twice what the older shop did for the kid's medication...

The difference is in my example you're preventing someone from using a service that someone agreed to provide for an agreed upon price.

Your example is a hand-wavy hypothetical about how allowing some service impacts others by second and third order effects by what could be there instead.

Do you see the difference?

The hand-wavy hypotheticals were there in both of our posts.

And where you said "It's none of your business what 10% of people are doing. I don't know how it degrades quality of life" you were also explicitly hand-waving away the costs that these businesses impose on those not directly involved in the transactions.

So yes, in my post I was at least considering these costs. In your post, you were choosing to wave them away as inconsequential. I certainly do see the difference.

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