A pizzeria owner made money buying his own $24 pizzas from DoorDash for $16 (2020)
theverge.com
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With the steady erosion of the quality of the drivers, I don't even expect to receive my order in a timely fashion, in good condition, and without any drama from the drivers. I've essentially stopped getting delivery which is a bad sign since I'm basically the target audience: single, urban dweller, disposable income, willing to pay $5-10 premium to not have to pick it up from myself.
No particularly noteworthy stories, mostly just a series of odd encounters. Probably the funniest (in retrospect) was the taco order where I could see on the app the guy parked the next block over, and I get a call from him like 20 minutes later that he's "lost" my order and is going back to go replace it. Well he finally shows up at my place like an hour late with a fresh order of tacos reeking of weed. So he probably burned one down in the car and ate my tacos, but at least he made good. Why he couldn't deliver my original tacos and go get his own, I will never know.
I'd happily pay a premium if it went to the people doing the actual ground work, but that doesn't exist.
I’d be happy to pay extra for delivery and try out places outside of walking distance if I knew the money was going to restaurants and drivers. But for all their complaints about DoorDash, the restaurants aren’t making themselves accessible elsewhere. The delivery companies put in work that restaurants weren't, and aren't able or willing to do, and that's part of the reason they have such high revenue (all concerns about quality and sustainability aside).
Isn't DoorDash's "growth hack" to fake cooperation with restaurants and have their drivers just pickup food and pay for it like an ordinary customer?
Unfortunately it seems that only the predatory delivery apps have spread nationwide.
EDIT: I suppose I have to also mention that killing people by my drunk driving is also a good reason to use DoorDash. Just thought maybe that was obvious...
Thankfully there is no tipping culture here so none of the drivers expect to get tips. Obviously the actual delivery fees are just higher instead but the drivers don’t have to rely on the altruism of the customers to make sensible money.
Apps like these are relying on people who've already sunk some huge amount of money into a car and are not doing the fully loaded cost per mile calculation of operating a car in stop-and-go delivery service in an urban environment.
If you calculate the purchase cost of car, insurance, fuel, repairs/maintenance, tires, oil changes, depreciation etc, it's quite bad.
The actual amount of money earned by the delivery person after subtracting the fully loaded cost of the car is often near minimum wage in some states.
Much the same as Lyft and Uber actually.
b) it used to be a lot less costly to operate a basic car in the US/Canada on a dollar per mile or km basis
To point B, how is this tech-specific? The question was about why someone driving their car to deliver for Domino's is OK but driving their car to deliver for DoorDash is exploitation.
15 or 20 years ago if you order a pizza from your local pizza place, the price you pay for the pizza is fixed and known, and you tip the driver in cash. there's no extra 3rd charge line item for "delivery" anywhere.
point B, the advent of app based food delivery in the past 8 years happens to coincide with greatly increased cost of operating the car. I was explaining why traditional method of delivery used to be much more economically viable. Two things happening simultaneously, increase in cost of fuel and operating cars and the increased popularity of app based food delivery does not mean correlation equals causation.
Food delivery services, on the other hand, have to make the delivery itself not only profitable, but profitable enough to produce a somewhat livable wage for the driver once expenses like gas and car wear are accounted for, and the whole company has to live off of whatever it can siphon off from what the drivers get.
App drivers are constantly playing this game of guessing where the next order will come from and where they'll end up.
In the app case, the business may still benefit (except now the apps have pressure to try extract discounts from the business), but that -$1 for delivery is either being subsidised by VC funding which won't last, or by paying the delivery staff less than their real costs.
I think it's because of how badly they're doing it. They're operating at a significant loss, with unhappy customers, unhappy drivers, unhappy restaurants, and poor service.
You probably drive a nice new Camry or some other vehicle that is far from the "floor value for A to B transportation in a given mechanical condition" and will fall in value precipitously as it hits various milestones. The delivery driver has some 15yo car with over 150k on it where value is purely dependent on mechanical condition.
You probably replace your tires when your mechanic tells you. These delivery driver runs them until they're bald.
You take your car to the premium mechanic. The delivery driver has "a guy" who does 99% of his basic maintenance for cheap and only ever has big stuff done at the mechanic.
These people (the ones who understand the economics of what they do, which is most of them) don't maintain their cars like techies do. They take a page out of the age old "pizza delivery" playbook. With the highly variable nature of distance driven and compensation these people are generally well aware of operational costs vs gross income. You kind of have to be.
if you make $32k a year, a $4000 corolla is a lot of money.
it is not at all the same economics as the actual historical method of pizza delivery by cheap crappy car, because of the greatly increased cost of fuel (while delivery driver wages are nearly the same now as they were 20 years ago), and the fact that the traditional delivery driver is paid almost entirely in cash.
taking advantage of a car you already have still has a calculable financial cost in how much fuel and wear/tear you put on a car doing a theoretical 8 hour delivery shift.
app based delivery service things are relying upon the delivery people not calculating the fully loaded cost of their time and vehicle together to determine their own real net wage.
If you want more money you have the choice between picking up an inflexible 2nd or 3rd low hour job vs filling that time doing gig economy crap using stuff you already own (a car). Gig economy crap might not pay well after expenses, but is still very much net positive after expenses.
They know that cars cost money per mile to run. They might not know exactly how much but they have a pretty good idea on an annual basis. If picking up a crappy min-wage job that requires you to keep to their schedule is the alternative then gig economy crap is often the least worst option.
These people aren't idiots. Stop acting like they are. This is one of the things HN does that really pisses me off. As a rule poor people are much, much, much better at tracking cumulative expenses than the kind of people who shop at whole foods and only have a vague idea of what things cost because they can afford it either way and don't actually need to hone that skillset.
I didn't say that they're idiots, my point was that they're being taken advantage of in the current economic situation that they exist in.
Maybe you should question why these people are apparently forced to pick between nothing other than an effectively-minimum-wage gig economy job with no benefits or job security, or a minimum wage job assembling food at taco bell or something and nothing better, effectively operating as a permanent underclass. From the way you describe it you seem to be totally okay with that situation in the economy. I'm not.
> If you want more money you have the choice between picking up an inflexible 2nd or 3rd low hour job
oh for fuck's sake, why don't you just tell people that they should lick the boots of their gig economy no-benefits "employer" some more? get a 2nd or 3rd job just to exist in this late stage capitalist hellscape with 4 roommates in any major city.
The gig economy crap isn't bad. It's just another set of options in the sea of crap jobs. If anything it puts pressure on jobs that pay a little better to be more flexible.
If these people really thought they were getting the shaft they'd have gone and got other equally crap jobs. We're leaving what was probably one of the lowest unemployment periods in US history. It's not like the bulk of these people couldn't have been mixing paint at Lowes, pushing a broom, manning a cash register at Walmart, schlepping boxes around a warehouse or stripping drain plugs at Jiffy Lube had they felt so inclined to. But instead they took these gig jobs? Why? Because all things considered it was less crappy than the next best also crappy option.
>oh for fuck's sake, why don't you just tell people that they should lick the boots of their gig economy no-benefits "employer" some more? get a 2nd or 3rd job just to exist in this late stage capitalist hellscape with 4 roommates in any major city.
Stop being dense. Nobody is falling for it. These gig jobs are not typically primary jobs. They make shit primary jobs because the income is variable week to week. They're typically people's 2nd or 3rd job that they can schedule around their primary one.
If you want to sugar coat the reality of these jobs you're doing it for yourself, not for them. These jobs are low skill, low pay and low status and the people doing them know it. They have bigger problems then whether specific language choices do or don't offend the sensibilities of the ivory tower crowd.
You're going to have to pay a lot more. The model can't be sustained at this price. Once the driver pays for gas and (over time) wear and tear on the car, even with healthy tips this ends up being sub-minimum wage. We got used to that price when VC money was subsidizing it and gas was half the price it is now.
Yeah you can read someone's personal account on how they are able to clear $20 an hour regularly doing delivery, but they have to employ all kinds of strategies to do so, including taking multiple orders at once, purposely ignoring orders that are unlikely to have significant tips, and completely ignoring entire sections of the city that aren't "hotspots" with tons of restaurants cranking through orders. Not to mention they are still probably undercounting the cost of wear on their car, and most people touting their delivery driver profitability are probably exaggerating.
This is the weirdest straw man. Scooters are cheaper to operate and faster if there’s any traffic.
In any case, we’re discussing the sustainability of delivery services. Most of the world lives in cities, it really doesn’t matter if they’re unsustainable in rural areas.
While you’re at it, maybe also explain how this has anything to do with the subject at hand?
The 'sub' is a reference to the proximity to the (likely denser) city, not a step between urban and rural.
So for instance, the small town I live in is also considered urban (but is located in a rural county).
My town has just under 120k people and the majority of deliveries are done by car.
Truly, a shocking new development.
You said "americans avoid two wheeled vehicles for no reason".
They have cars anyway so they use them.
The reason they need cars is because it gets cold, there are highways that go fast and it's dangerous and illegal to take young kids or more than one kid on a scooter. This is not complicated.
People in developed economies shouldn't be carrying around sofas on the backs of mopeds as they do in Vietnam, but it should be reasonable enough to deliver a pizza on one where the weather allows in the USA.
FWIW: I'm very much a car guy.
Also the honda scoopy and yamaha scooters are 115cc and can't get up to american highway speeds. In Thailand it isn't even legal to drive scooters or even motorcycles on their highways.
Maybe you should go on holiday to Vietnam in the winter, you might realize there is no snow in Vietnam.
Americans usually need a car anyway so they already have one.
It has everything to do with your refutation of that claim, however.
My actual implicit claim is that there appears to be a degree of truth in the idea that US residents have a cultural aversion to two-wheeled transport that extends beyond the justifications you proffered to dismiss the claim.
No there isn't. People have jobs to go to and there isn't much public transportation, it gets cold, snows and people need to use the highways. People need to have a car so they already have a car and that's why scooters are usually something people buy for fun and not neccesity.
Depending on geographic location, no doubt. Can you imagine risking your life on a scooter weaving through idiots in their lifted pickups in any American metro?
Last I lived in Calgary, trucks were absolutely the norm.
>That's especially true in Alberta, where 89 per cent of spending on new vehicles this year has gone to trucks, vans and SUVs. That compares to about 80 per cent, nationwide.
>"We're basically a truck market," said Denis Ducharme, president of the Motor Dealers Association of Alberta.
And, I mean... I lived there. Saw many more trucks than anything else on the road.
Traffic camera feeds suggest this is not the case by a long shot? I don't have a particular stake in this race though.
For example, the Wagoneer is the SUV version of the RAM.
The Suburban and Tahoe are the SUV versions of GM trucks.
The Land Cruiser, Sequoia, and Lexus LX are the same platform as the Tundra.
Etc.
Automakers don’t do one-off light trucks. They are all shared platforms.
Having been to both (but not having driven a scooter in Atlanta) I'd suggest scooting around Paris is very different than scooting around Atlanta.
Sure, in the winter the proportion of couriers driving cars increases. You also see tons of people on fatbikes and similar.
Scooter deliveries are the norm even in the warmest areas of Europe.
Same goes for places like Tehran, in fact almost all of Asia.
The exception was riding a standard bicycle.
Sure, I live in mainland Europe, but you talk as if you talk for everywhere.
Scooters are very limited in cargo capacity are not particularly viable in rainy or winter weather, not to mention just statistically increased injuries and danger for riders, which eventually translates into liability with scale. If you have to make multiple trips when one car trip would have sufficed, that completely undermines the cheap & fast argument. If you have to have cars around for bad weather days or bad weather seasons anyway…
> Scooters are very limited in cargo capacity
Only Americans would be regularly ordering so much takeout as to worry about scooters not being able to transport it. You really need to reconsider your dietary choices if this is a serious concern.
> Scooters […] are not particularly viable in rainy or winter weather
Scooters are perfectly viable in rainy weather. Nobody does food deliveries with a car in London.
Even in Dubai scooters are the norm, despite the city embracing a very American take on urban design.
No, I don't have data to back this up. I don't need to, this is obvious to anyone who has traveled the world. If you read this thread, you will only see Americans talking about food delivered by car.
I’m sorry you felt the need to get snarky. Making assumptions undermines your argument. It’s not hard for the orders for 2 families of light eaters to not fit in a single scooter.
This, again, is the norm in Europe.
Why should the average delivery guy be driving a car to be able to accept big orders that probably make up less than 1% of all deliveries?
Now I still dislike the services and it's really annoying that they caused this revival of motorscooters who are now driving recklessly on the bike paths, but transport volume is really not an issue.
I don’t need to present any evidence to the contrary because I didn’t make any claims to the contrary. I’m not claiming scooter usage isn’t high, I didn’t say it’s not more than cars or bikes. I was more careful than that.
You made a strong claim that you can’t back up, and you’ve already admitted that you’re just making up. That’s on you, not me. I’m simply sensitive to people making assumptions and insisting on calling them facts, and that is what you did.
Just like your unfortunate and unnecessary anti-American comments that got you downvoted, you could have ended this by simply acknowledging gracefully that it’s your opinion, and you believe it’s most, rather than continuing to add hyperbole after hyperbole, exaggeration after exaggeration on top. Claiming scooter usage of scooters for food delivery is the same as the sky being blue is a pretty bad analogy, and weakens your point.
Adding an ad-hominem on top accusing me of trolling just becuase you can’t answer my question also reflects poorly on you and tends to undermine what you’re trying to say. It would be so much stronger if you simply qualified your claim as your own belief and left it at that, or did some Googling to find stats. I’m sorry that asking for evidence of what you said upset you so much.
anti-American? Seek help buddy.
> It would be so much stronger if you simply qualified your claim as your own belief and left it at that, or did some Googling to find stats.
Look, my claim is obvious to anyone who isn’t completely out of touch with the world outside of North America.
“Googling to find stats”? There obviously isn’t going to be any meaningful numbers to be found on Google wrt this.
Using cars for food deliveries is a completely ridiculous idea in most cities of the world. There’s no parking! How are you going to deliver food with a car when there’s no free parking?
Shit, what do you think are the odds that a food delivery guy can even afford a car in most of the world? There’s something like 1 billion passenger cars in the world, that leaves you with something like 1 8th of a car per person.
This really is as obvious as “the sky is blue”.
To suggest that you’re trolling is simply the most charitable way to interpret your comment.
For the former, I wish there was an app that notified me when a neighbor orders from a restaurant I’ve frequented, near a time of day I’ve ordered. They could offer a discount for piggyback orders, since the cost to the driver is negligible and they can convince the restaurant that they provided the value-add of the additional revenue.
That’s a privacy nightmare.
Let's be clear, this will happen regardless if you get the notification or not. Your purchases are going to be analyzed down to the second you made the purchase.
> ... when a neighbor orders from a restaurant ...
More to the point, it stays "safe" until (let's be real) there is a data breach. That's less of a privacy nightmare when you consider there's a much smaller range of actors that will use the data from a breach. Contrariwise, the ability to just query their API for some of that data gets turned into an app that someone's stalker ex downloads so they can proceed with stalking.
Privacy nightmare indeed.
"Neighbors" is a loose term. It doesn't literally mean only the people you live immediately next to. Aside from the fact that the person receiving the notification has no information about the radius this notification was triggered by, there would also not be identifying information in the notification. You're not being told "That person across the hall, John Smith, bought a large pizza from ABC pizza ten minutes ago and is on his way to pick it up now".
A stalker would get no actionable information from "Someone in your area ordered sushi from XYZ".
There is also no indication that this would be available in any sort of publicly scrapable API, I really don't know where you pulled that from. Push notifications, by definition, are not queried for.
If a platform created this feature I imagine they would also prime the pump with dishonest notifications about “a neighbor ordered from X restaurant”, with the expectation that they could parlay a single fake order into many real ones.
So if they have the skills and tenacity to consistently make slightly better than a living wage (probably for only a few hours a day) they probably have what it takes to get and keep a regular job paying notably better?
To see that 20/hr requires all kinds of strategies now — it’s a different world.
Let the poor rookie go get stiffed on a tip.
* Address changed, but 25 year later I actually still remember the real address.
Grubhub, for example, will charge you an 18% service fee, a $1 "big/expensive city" fee, a tip (for the driver), and then also a delivery fee on top of that.
That's before the inflated menu prices and price gouging they do to the businesses.
Still, it's a lot more economical for reasonably busy delivery places to just employ their own drivers that can take care of a few deliveries in one shot.
If you think delivery is unsustainable because cars cost money, I got news for you: You live in a bubble, and it's the cars that are unsustainable.
Outside of the car-centric world of US suburbia, most of the western world is actually doing deliveries on scooters and ebikes, which are very quick to navigate medium-to-high-density cities and can do several deliveries per trip.
I've ordered a lot on Takeaway, at least once a week on average. The last time I saw somebody pull up in a car was during the COVID lockdowns, and I suspect it's because there was basically nobody on the streets.
The business model is broken, because car-centrism is broken. In the civilized world, things are ok.
Either way, fuck Uber. There's better alternatives.
Many big US cities really aren't densely populated. e,g, including 2 of the 4 largest: LA & Houston.
I used UberEats once (in Sydney) because I had one of those coupons. UberEats was garbage. Cost too much and I could have gone to the place myself and returned in half the time.
I can’t advice beyond that but Uber is awful awful awful. Every time I give them a chance I regret it, be it on price, support, ethics, quality …
Just because you might have a different experience doesn't mean this is US centric. The same happens across Canada and in several big cities in South America.
I ... think I'm calling NYC part of the "civilized world" and I'm not sure how to feel.
I remember seeing a map of the US denoting whether the majority of commute was done by personal car vs public transport. The entirety of the US was by personal car… except for NYC. It had a bit of an Astérix feel to it.
It will be much cheaper once there are self-driving cars. You don't have to pay for the drive, just for somebody doing the final delivery from the car to the door.
It will be even cheaper, if customers are willing to leave their house and fetch the food from the car at the street. Then you don't have to pay anybody, just some cents per mile for the vehicle.
I think that a solid portion of workers will accept significantly higher costs in exchange for slightly higher income, even if they come out worse. Lots of people will just look at the paycheck and won't think about their gas bill or how much time they actually spent.
Plus, one hour making $30 lets people rationalize 20 hours making $5/hr. That's how gambling works.
Add on the ability to "be your own boss," work when you want and start earning immediately, and I think people will keep doing delivery work even if the pay is shit.
This was in 1990.
When I wasn't driving, I was grating cheese, or folding boxes, or cleaning. There were always slow times during the shift for this work.
I had a used car, and as a teenager, and later as an adult in college, the job paid quite well at the time.
Tips on busy nights would double or triple my wage.
Drivers can very much make a good wage delivering pizza! This is because a traditional pizza place only delivers within a certain range, has its own drivers, and each driver(when busy) can take 2 to 5 orders, and deliver them in an optimal route.
As a driver, you get very, very good at driving your neighborhood, knowing all the slow and fast spots, and the best route to deliver 4 orders in one trip optimally.
I'd often deliver 20 pizzas an hour on Friday nights, all hot, all fresh!
Yet an uber driver delivers for a dozen companies, each to different places, may drive miles to get to each company, then drive that single order to the customer. Uber drivers cannot optimize the same way.
Just the fact that when idle, I did work (so not a loss for the company), yet when a pizza popped out I was there, ready!.. is an optimization uber eats loses at. Idle for them is a loss.
Uber eats, all external delivery services are the worst. If your main business is delivery(pizza), you are nuts to even allow them to pick up at your establishment.
Nowadays, I just order for pickup and go get it most of the time. None of the delivery services care about quality _at all_.
I might watch a short series based on food delivery folks, customers, and the dystopian/ dehumanizing tech algorithms that set the stage for the context. Maybe it'd be wacky. Maybe it might just end up feeling like HBO's High Maintenance.
Same, rarely ordered delivery pre-pandemic but then was ordering two or three times a month but eventually got sick of food taking over an hour to arrive from places only a mile or two away so stopped entirely (until discovering a nearby restaurant that does their own delivery and it's great - arrives within 20 or 30 mins and the food is always piping hot).
At that point, why would you even bother? I could have /walked/ 2.3 miles there and back, sat down for dinner in the restaurant, and still done it in less than 75 minutes while saving $14.
The "gig economy" is driving everything to the lowest common denominator /and/ exploiting workers at the same time. I don't want somebody who can barely fog a mirror and is desperate delivering my food, I want somebody that gives a damn and is compensated well enough they can afford to give a damn. I don't mind paying a premium for delivery, but I do mind paying a premium and getting nothing in return. The reality is that the economics just probably don't support delivery even being a thing unless it's a very large order because of the increased cost of fuel and maintenance.
I worked in a single-location pizza shop when I was in high school and there is a lot more customer-benefitting coordination going on between the inside and the drivers than may be obvious. (These applied to my shop; I’m not sure if the big chains actually do this kind of stuff.)
* Most shops have a delivery radius of less than 10 miles and it’s pretty impressive how detailed a driver’s address knowledge of the area can get after just a few months.
* The people taking orders over the phone were often delivery drivers waiting between runs and will clarify addresses and locations as well as delivery instructions (drop off locations, gate codes, etc.).
* The inside crew will typically batch deliveries headed for the same area and time the oven to get all the food out around the same time.
* If for any reason a delivery can’t be made (car accident, flat tire, made a wrong delivery and no longer have the right food for the order, etc.) the driver will call the shop which will remake the order and send it with either another driver or an inside crew member.
I delivered pizzas back in the day as well. One night as I was headed out to my car, a woman asked me if I could help her find an address. I said sure, I'll give it a shot. With just a street name and number I was able to rattle off turn-by-turn directions, ending with, "It'll be the third house on your left. Maybe the fourth".
My delivery area wasn't a grid or anything. The house numbers didn't neatly align with streets. It was a typical suburban area with random bendy streets and addressing that didn't correlate with a central "State and Main" center.
But after a year or so of passing damn near every house in the area, I had fantastic intuition about these things. I had a knockoff, generic, store-brand version of The Knowledge. :)
1. Too lazy to drive 2. Too drunk to drive 3. Too lazy to walk (see 1) 4. COVID or other potentially contagious illness 5. Delivery driver is cute and you are lonely 6. Live event, can't take a break to go get food 7. You may not own a car or bike. (see 3) 8. Agoraphobia
For example, my local McDonalds "closes" at 9pm but is actually open on Uber Eats 24/7. Deliveroo has Five Guys just down the road in a warehouse kitchen, but the nearest actual Five Guys is a 30+ minute drive.
I mostly don't order food any more, but when I do, it's hard to avoid the apps.
Take 100 customers ordering food from 10 different restaurants, and 5 delivery drivers. There's an optimal delivery schedule where everyone gets their food warm and relatively promptly, and all the drivers are somewhat busy. That's a valid logistical problem that a middleman can solve.
If all the driver is doing is pickup, delivery, pickup, delivery, ad infinitum, then yeah, there's no unique middleman position there.
Food marketing.
Delivery orders for companies without a website or app for ordering. This is worth Pennie’s per order not a hefty %.
Delivery service (logistics and Human Resources). This is hard and not solved.
The hardest part of the problem has not been solved and the tech firms don’t deserve a big cut of food companies revenue for the incomplete service.
a food logistics service should exist, as (if done well) it should scale better than local restaurants doing their own delivery.
One specific example, but Pizza delivered by apps is basically garbage. Actual pizza delivery drivers that work for the restaurant have special boxes that control temperature and humidity, enable them to easily carry lots of pizzas and keep them relatively horizonal, etc. Pizza from the app delivery drivers inevitably ends up cold and sad and bunched up to one side the box.
Pizza drivers only need one bag thing, but your food logistics service would definitely to give the drivers a few different sized containers that can keep some things hot, other things cold, be able to be carried a medium-length walk (sometimes you have to park far away), etc. and they definitely don't do that today.
The typical delivery model of my 4 favorite local restaurants was to not do delivery at all. With DoorDash, they're offering a middle-man as a service when the overworked and understaffed local restauranteur doesn't feel like adding a hat to his collection for managing a delivery service.
The problem, though, is that this service does not come without added risk for said restauranteur - ther business lives and dies on a combination of online reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations, both of which can be harmed by DoorDash.
Managing a fleet of drivers on top of managing your kitchen (and often a front-of-house too) is a nightmare. You have to surge in ways that go beyond day of the week, you have to handle short-time route management and work out how much return to base will affect your availability. Plus insurance. Plus fraud. Plus systems handling. Doing this independently might cost more both up-front and in running costs.
Using a third party, most of those problems are now not yours. It's on the intermediary to make sure they have a driver available, and another, and another, and another because everybody decided they want Chinese tonight. And if nobody wants Chinese, you're only paying the standing fee.
We have a nearby Thai restaurant that just stops taking delivery orders when their one driver is fully booked for the next hour. They lose money. And on a slow night, they're paying for a delivery driver they're not using.
People who happen to be drunk, or stoned, or don't want to take their eyes off the football game, or don't have a car, or their partner is using the shared car, etc.
But yeah if you're able to drive, it almost always makes more sense to just phone in the order and drive to the restaurant to pick it up. It's faster, cheaper, the food is actually still warm, you're not forcing the local restaurant to pay a 30% cut to a middleman, and so on.
This. If you live alone and can't drive, it's a nice to have option for some variety. I never thought I'd use DoorDash, Grubhub, etc. for the reasons you mention; then, I lost my right foot. I'm not yet to the point where I can drive a modified vehicle; so, I sometimes use them. (The same thing applies for grocery delivery service.) Most of the time, though, I order from a pizzeria or Chinese place which have their own delivery drivers.
The goal is not to save money -- cooking is even more efficient -- the goal is to trade money for time. Presumably you still could have worked all of those 75 minutes and gotten some value that way. Now the service could probably work better along other metrics but it does seem like the value delivered is non-zero.
If you're only trying to consume nutrition, there are any number of ways to do that both cheaper and faster.
The first order I had with them after that was terrible. The driver got the food from the store at 7am, to be delivered before 10am. By 3pm that afternoon—no delivery yet—I cancelled it. I didn't trust that the produce, meat, and other perishables weren't just baking under a hatchback window all day.
That kind of pizza can be put in an insulating cardboard box, and then a warmer, and driven 20-45 minutes to a customer's house and it arrives in a condition that is comparatively palatable. It can also be made rapidly in bulk using conveyor-belt ovens.
Delivery pizza thrived on this model, and still does. Delivery pizza from a local operation (or a national chain) that employs their own drivers is still affordable and decent.
Other kinds of food are delivered disappointingly for a reason. The only styles that come close to pizza in terms of suitability for delivery are bulk noodle dishes and sandwiches (and both of these styles had delivery cultures before the rise of software middlemen).
Gig jobs do not equal employment. Employment comes with benefits and stability that allows one to plan ahead and invest and grow and even take some risks.
Gig work is essentially the illusion of work. On the surface, it makes you money and your bosses money and your customers good (food, transport, whatever). But it hollows out your society and makes it a little less future-focused, a little more insecure. Gig workers can’t plan their retirements or growing their families like normally employed people do.
Great for profits. Terrible for society at large.
1. Their "automated" systems are trash. I was supposed to receive some perks for being one of the better drivers (higher ratings, consistently accept offers, etc.). And I did receive them. Then I didn't. Then I did. Then I didn't. Over and over again over the course of a day, and none of their support staff could speak proper English, so trying to communicate that problem was absolutely miserable. Over all it was such an awful experience that I just gave up on delivery all together.
2. Hours were long. 12-14 hour days, 6-7 days per week. Great for learning discipline. Not so great for enjoying life.
Does that include car-related expenses? If not, what did they amount to?
Isn't that the crux of the issue? No one except the business owner should be able to edit the Google Listing.
Maybe they have their own heuristics, who knows. When my FIL started a sunflower farm, I wrote a nice review and google offered to have me claim the page.
Or something in between: you should be able to "suggest" an edit and then when enough people confirmed it the information would show up but with something like "not confirmed by the owner".
Otherwise Google would lose all this free workforce that is the people who go to restaurants and then fill the missing bits because the owners don’t know they have a listing on Google Maps / don’t know they can edit it.
Each city is pretty independent so there's not much incumbent advantage.
Seems like a reasonable discount would get someone to try a new app.
Drivers aren't loyal. If a restaurant uses any app they probably don't care where the order comes from.
Taco bell and other chains might be hard to get but is the market for taco bell or mcdonalds that big for delivery? and seems like it clutters the app anyway.
DashPass what does it get you? lower fees they should be charging anyway?
Am I missing something?
The theory is that restaurants may not be fungible to all diners and that by contracting with as many restaurants as possible, the competition becomes less attractive.
They don’t have a monopoly, that’s why.
Kind of like Etsy and Ebay.
As a user, I don't want to install another app, create an account, fill out my address and delivery details, and put in my billing information. Some restaurants have their own online ordering system which lets you automatically fill everything out with PayPal and such.
Besides, what is there to compete on?
Anti corporate Local only option.
In app clutter. Walgreens coming up when you search for desserts.
None of these seem to make sense in a dynamic free market with healthy competition.
Some drivers probably drive for multiple companies, and cherry-pick the best order that comes up.
I know I've seen drivers who drove for Uber and Lyft at the same time. Seems like the same is likely true for the food services.
If there aren't any coupons available to me, then I sometimes try to optimize an order around a delivery minimum. Typical fast food restaurants are surprisingly good targets for this.
I think of the delivery fees + tips I pay as the cost of convenience. They mean I can sit around in my pajamas, playing a game or watching a movie, while slightly intoxicated. Or, I can read a book outside while I wait, if it's nice out.
Technically you are not even-ish, you just spend more money. It's like buying a piece of clothing that's on sale - you don't save money unless you intended to purchase that exact (or an equivalent) item anyway. So unless you were anyway going to buy that specific food (rather than e.g. cook your own food, make a sandwich, or bake a frozen pizza) you are not at all profiting.
* Annual card fee is cheaper than DashPass * Decent points rewards from the card itself * DashPass significantly reduces fees * I use promotional discounts when I can
I expect to order food for delivery at least twice per month anyways, and the savings I get from this scheme offset the annual fee on the card. Plus, I keep some other delivery apps on my phone in case they send me desperation coupons.
I do also keep some frozen goodies, but I consider ordering out to be a treat. I just like to eat, and sometimes, KFC is what's gonna hit me right. Other times, a frozen pizza, which I greatly prefer to cheap chain-store pizza.
Also, you get reviews and discoverability of options. I can go to a different city and see all the delivery options immediately.
Unlike a lot of people here, I've had great experiences with food delivery apps. Not doordash (not a thing where I live), but others. I knew people working as delivery bikers and they said it can be a decent way to earn a living while you're studying. The flexible nature of the work lends itself well to that.
Two and three are melding a bit, but the word has been twisted and abused, and for some reason liked enough by influencers now that it's come around again. Sort of like Toto's Africa.
There are only so many brands that fit inside a person's brain, so for every category there's usually only one brand in memory.
Would this be fraud? Not necessarily ordering pizza from your own restaurant, but, say, ordering pizza from your own restaurant but only putting dough into the boxes?
It's hard to imagine. The restaurant clearly has no contractual relationship with Doordash. I don't know why they even bothered with the dough and boxes.
So it wouldn't be fraud. They had to deliver what was ordered.
Or as the The PHB in Dilbert once said "It's better than legal we are using the law to keep justice away."
Certainly the owner was not defrauded, nor anyone working with him to purchase the dough. Nor was Doordash defrauded: they offered to sell anyone pizzas for $16, and the owner took them up on the offer.
Can you imagine what the press would do if Doordash actually sued the local pizza place because it was dumb, or filed a police report? I think it wouldn't be pretty, and the stock price could go down, and doing something that makes your stock go down can lead to an investor lawsuit.
Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, I'd love to see a lawyer analyze this though.
It might be fraud. I doubt the damage would be worth the possible backlash for doordash to pursue this.
No. This is not fraud.
Doordash and the pizza company had no contractual relationship. The pizza company did not contract with Doordash to run an "$8 off" pizza promotion. Rather, Doordash, in an attempt to claim a near monopoly on the food ordering market, chose to sell food at a loss. The goal of this strategy is to get consumers used to buying from Doordash (while prices are low). Once a sizable percentage of orders are going through Doordash, Doordash can raise fees and refuse to list companies that don't pay up. The only way to get this sort of market share is through tactics like the one described (selling food at a loss).
When the pizza man chooses to buy his own pizza on Doordash, he is merely affording himself of the same cheap pizza that Doordash is providing to anyone else. Doordash is behaving rationally here. They need to capture the mindshare of users. By providing pizza delivery at prices that are lower than economically viable, Doordash will get this. The pizza man is simply choosing to benefit while he can. Long live the pizza man!
Don't Doordash and the pizza company owner have a contractual relationship when the pizza shop owner agrees to the Terms of Service for using the Doordash app to order food?
I have no clue if the doordash TOS forbids such usage, but it might?
That’s… the restaurant owner, though.
That's the part I'm talking about. The restaurant owner agreed to something in order to use the app to buy pizza.
EDIT: But I'll humor the premise, here are some lines from the customer TOS:
> (e) You will not use the Services to cause nuisance, annoyance or inconvenience.
> (q) You will not try to harm other Users, DoorDash, or the Services in any way whatsoever.
> (t) You will not abuse our promotional or credit code system, including by redeeming multiple coupons at once or by opening multiple accounts to benefit from offers available only to first-time users.
> You agree that promotional offers: (i) may only be used by the intended audience, for the intended purpose, and in a lawful manner;
What are the actual legal implications of these lines? I have no clue. Could they be construed by lawyers to forbid this scheme? I don't know.
But in case you really can’t tell, no the terms don’t apply here. Lawsuits generally assume people have put on their big boy pants, if sell a painting for 10$ that ends up being worth millions that’s on you. You decided 10$ was a reasonable price at the time of sale and you don’t get to say but your honor I am an idiot.
Could Door Dash argue that person was being a nuisance?
It's like harm, you are either inconvenienced or you arn’t.
Is that your legal opinion as a lawyer?
It says that customers agree to only use promotional discounts "for the intended purpose"; what does that mean and how can you be sure a business owner using promotional discounts to profit from arbitrage is the "intended purpose" of the promotional discount?
Finding the cheapest order possible and making repeated orders to DOS the company locally wouldn’t be.
e: Yes, the original article makes it clear that he didn't sign up for this: https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
I don't know, what does the TOS actually say? The app's TOS might say something like "you can't use this app to order food from a business you own", or something else that might forbid this scheme. Maybe it doesn't though, I don't know and haven't read it, but I think it could.
> (f) You will not use the Services, or any content accessible through the Services, for any commercial purpose, including but not limited to contacting, advertising to, soliciting or selling to, any Merchant, User or Contractor, unless DoorDash has given you prior permission to do so in writing.
This hinges on if trying to make money by using the service as a consumer counts as commercial use. But you can tell they were thinking about very different scenarios when they wrote this term.
The T&C attempts to bind “merchants” to the “Self-Delivery Product Addendum”, which states: Merchant shall ensure that pricing of Merchant Products under the PickUp Program is not greater than the pricing of the same Merchant Products for pickup (a) in-store - https://help.doordash.com/merchants/s/us-addendum-self-deliv...
So it’s expressly prohibited. But are they bound to the additional merchant provisions if they never signed up to be a merchant?
In English law, if it’s dishonest, it’s fraud. The pizza shop owner’s conduct was plainly dishonest by the standards of “ordinary decent people”. Where was this, anyway? What’s the local standard? Probably a variation of exactly the same.
I like DoorDash’s chances on this.
I was providing an analysis of the situation. The name calling is not appropriate.
Nothing about not ordering from your own business.
Clearly the better option for Doordash is to simply not engage in predatory pricing to begin with.
To buy from Doordash, you have to agree to some TOS on their app. Sales, as has been pointed out, no. But buying, yes. He could be violating that TOS, if they try to prevent this sort of thing. Since this loophole was reported on in a fairly well-known publication years ago, it isn't ridiculous to think they have something in there.
IANAL, but I wonder if he could coordinate with somebody to have them order the pizzas instead, so he doesn't have to agree to anything.
A funny idea might be to start offering Doordash's discount to in-person customers who were going to buy the pizza anyway. "Just order on this stupid app and set your delivery location to our address, then we'll Doordash it across the room or whatever."
A further extension of this would be, if he can figure out what Doordash is parsing wrong on his online menu, then maybe he could try to work out how to get that field to show up as $1. I'm not sure if it was this one, but there was some place that had had their fancy custom pizza listed with their plain cheese pizza price. So maybe they could start their menu with something like:
Plain pizza raw (subheader: It is literally a lump of uncooked dough, don't buy this): $1
This is called price dumping for anyone that wants to read up on it.
so basically (and i am just guessing here) a company becomes dominant the moment its competitors start going out of business because of this companies predatory pricing.
It would have been much more elegant to add some crazy overpriced option to your pizzas where you could make a huge margin. Like "gift wrap +$100" which would mean putting a $0.01 ribbon around the box. You could make much more money this way from Doordash with less hassle than switching certain orders to plain dough.
IANAL, but I am going to go against the prevailing trend and suggest that it might actually be fraud. In ordering the pizzas from Doordash, he misrepresented himself to Doordash as a genuine customer (for financial gain).
As far as not actually delivering complete pizzas, that may not be fraud as he did not misrepresent the product to . . . himself. However, I could also see an argument for it being fraud as Doordash bought pizzas from him, and he did not deliver pizzas (regardless of the fact that Doordash then sold the "pizzas" back to him for less).
No, the endgame is to IPO and unload that money furnace on the public. If you can get big enough certain funds will even be required to buy the shares. Part of the problem here is that general public have outsourced stock picking to mutual funds or ETFs via the 401K plan. Good plans won't buy this, but a simple ETF will if the criteria are met right?
I think that's such a great summary. This has arguably already been completed with the music industry and streaming. Although another option other than "increased prices" is to have it be a loss-leading part of a larger profitable media portfolio. Either way, songwriters still get screwed.
(Five imaginary bucks to the first person who replies that songwriting is just supposed to be a marketing expense for touring and merch! :) )
I have a couple of friends who make/made music and they all say this problem is overrated. What you've lost in royalty-per-cd you're more than making up for in availability.
If you tried making music 30 years ago, and you got the 1-in-a-thousand record deal, you only make a cut per CD after you pay back the record label.
Today, if you just want to make some jams in your basement, you can find a niche and end up on a few playlists and start pulling in some money.
The only people losing out are the big name pop artists - but the distribution tail got a lot fatter for everyone else.
Now, if the mathematical modeling has been done to show that any increase in streaming royalty rates is 100% correlated with a decrease in listenership, such that songwriter revenue decreases; in other words, if it's been mathematically shown we are at a maximum from the songwriters' perspective, that would be convincing. I just doubt that that is the case.
You could say that VC set the customer expectation for cheap music (although, Zune Music Pass was available a full decade before streaming took off) but even before streaming you could argue consumer expectation for music was pretty dang cheap. Music was free on the radio, albums where shared widely, music was copied and pirated rampantly. It's a stronger argument that streaming services convinced labels that that everyone could make more money if they started competing with piracy on cost and convenience.
So is this just a DoorDash pricing mistake or evidence of the strategy to which they ascribe it?
Another key quote from the article: >>"the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices. But is that even viable?"
No, it is not viable, because as soon as Uber/Grubhub/Doordash/whatever start thinking they have enough of a monopoly to raise prices, ppl will get sick of it, and your scenario of the locals, perhaps with an app, will overtake them because they don't have the global overhead. I don't see this as a business with advantages of scale, but disadvantages of scale - it's all about getting the local market right?
In this way I ate for almost an entire week for free and never use most of those services again after that.
Sounds like they were successful
How can localities ban (perhaps outright or through heavy taxation) these services, and perhaps roll their own.
I'm aware of all the pro-free-market economic religiosity one would have to cut through to get there, but I really don't care about any of it.
There is no reason any rando Silicon Valley person or company should get ANY money from a $mycity driver delivering $mycity restaurant food to a $mycity customer. Not any more.
Sort of like cable TV, satellite radio, Youtube, et al. I remember all were initially introduces as 'no commercials, that is what the monthly fee is for', or 'you will not see commercials in our videos'. Today, none of these media can be watched without advertisements.
Step one, present something slightly more convenient, or less costly than status quo.
Step two, wait till every frog is comfortably swimming in the pot and abandons original something.
Step three, put lid on pot, but keep telling frogs that it is for an improvement. Maybe even get Gov to declare original something was dangerous, think of the children!
Step four, turn up heat and start charging big bucks.
It tells patrons that Uber Eats et al. charge up to a cool app-store-esque 30% premium on deliveries.
I'm not sure how that works out for the business or affects their pricing or margins, but they say it pushes them down for their side of the transaction. Uber Eats already gets out of hand for the consumer, so I assume the only winner involved is the corporate body, because it certainly isn't the driver.
The government subsidizes companies that run city transportation services. The subsidy amount is determined by the overall mileage (of clean energy buses) a company has served during one year.
So those companies raise their clean energy buses with a jack and let them run continuously to update the odometers in order to collect the money.
It's not that I directionally disagree with you on VC waste, but this example isn't supporting your point.
The valuation seems completely arbitrary, almost fake, when you take that into account.
In the long run, consumers lose because they have reduced (and shittier) options, and the overall economy loses because one giant monopoly isn't going to contribute as much as a competitive market would in terms of innovations, technologies, GDP, etc.
One might say it’s the same difference, but the framings are clearly not the same, and makes my argument seem ridiculous.
Antitrust laws exist (even though it may not seem like it). These business models that involve dumping mountains of cash into unsustainable businesses in order to kill the competition is very clearly anti-competitive behavior. The long term harm to consumers is clear.
But HN loves to talk about how terrible DoorDash is so this gets upvotes (and I agree, I hate the delivery apps personally)
If you ask OP for a proof of what they say, please at least do the same for your own claims.
I have no sympathy for them.