I looked at my most recent receipt for something more realistic: A $12 (in store) pizza was listed on doordash at $14.25 and I paid $17.30 in app with the Chase CSP discount. I guess not everyone has the card, but IMO it’s financially irresponsible not to.
Note that this restaurant is a 20 minute drive each way. Even if I worked minimum wage ($15/hr in CA) it would have cost me a lot more ($10 time + $5 gas!) to pick it up myself.
Can we stop doing this? Our free time has zero monetary value. Every minute of our lives is not billable, and it's disingenuous to frame it that way.
Sure, avoiding 40 minutes of driving time might be worth $10 to you (it is to me, too), but... just say that, maybe?
And I agree with you in general that the grandparent's example was maybe not the common case. Sure, sometimes people get late-night munchies and make a small delivery order to Taco Bell, but I would hope that most orders are at least for a single, full, lunch- or dinner-sized meal, and will often be for multiple people. Delivery is still certainly more expensive than going into the store, but not having to deal with driving somewhere to pick it up also has value to many.
You could spend 30 minutes to pick something up, or that same 30 minutes has a value of half your hourly rate (minus taxes). Why would you be opposed to anyone doing the calculus on how to best utilize their time?
The framing of something “costing me my time” has never made sense to me especially when someone tries to actually quantify it.
Most events can be moved around, so even if there's a big delay on changing your work hours you can still exchange extra free time with extra money.
And people generally can choose how many hours they want to be paid for.
It's easy to quantify, it's just something that happens in bigger shifts. One hour by itself probably doesn't make you change your work hours. But as more and more hours pile up, eventually you might chose to reduce your work week by half a day. Or if you find yourself doing unimportant and uninteresting things very often, and with a shortage of cash, you might increase your work week by half a day.
> avoiding 40 minutes of driving time might be worth $10 to you
My point was that avoiding 40 minutes is worth the price increase for almost everyone, not just me! You’d have to go out of your way to find exceptions such as the GP’s McDonald’s deal.
And yeah doordash pretty much forces you to order at least $12 off food which often works out to 2 meals. I’m sure a lot of orders are larger too.
You're right... it's priceless. Some of us really do place a high value on our finite quantity of time that we have on this planet.
I remember being absolutely flummoxed by how much time people were willing to just throw away to camp overnight for some hot commodity Black Friday sale at Best Buy back in the day.
That aside, you’re mostly right about people losing money: Doordash nets -10% of revenue. Most restaurants also pay a commission to Doordash which effectively gets passed on to me as a discounted delivery fee, but I dunno if you’d count that as “losing money”.
I think it would be pretty easy for them to turn a 10% profit though. All they have to do is increase prices by ~15% and cut their R&D budget in half (currently 10% of revenue). I’ll enjoy the cheap deliveries while it lasts.