But pizza places have been doing delivery for decades with employee cars. Why is it now "bad" when a tech company does it? The scale?
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.
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.
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.