Comment by thworp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thworp | Hacker News Reader

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I fully agree that these "blitzscale" business have a horrible business model that is not sound, both economically (depends on free funding) and morally (the goal is to corner the market or at least get an oligopoly and then exploit your position).

That said I don't think a win here would help the current workers. Like all minimum wage laws this will reduce demand (obviously people don't want to pay a 12$ delivery fee for an order of $20), push business towards even shadier employment practices and medium term towards automation / "self-service".

As much as I would want it not to be true, the low-skill end of the employment market will always be easily replaceable and consumers won't be willing to pay unlimited amounts for something they could easily do themselves. As such it would help people a lot more if there was an easy path towards acquiring skills, guaranteeing that these bottom-rung jobs will be only temporary.

> obviously people don't want to pay a 12$ delivery fee for an order of $20

I realize there's psychology at play here but to an extent aren't we already doing that through essentially obligatory tips?

> As such it would help people a lot more if there was an easy path towards acquiring skills, guaranteeing that these bottom-rung jobs will be only temporary

When the service industry worker has to spend all their time working in order to make even a marginally livable wage the path is to pay them more money, directly or indirectly. The problem is exacerbated in high COL areas, and sure you can say "ok well just move", but broadly speaking you still need someone to do these tasks and that pool is dwindling.

There are lot of think could be done not to pay $12 delivery fee over a $20 order. For example, the cost of delivering a $100 order is pretty close to a cost of a $10 dollar order. This could be used for subsidizing the cheaper delivery cost by the more expensive ones, like saying delivery fee is 25% of the order and no tip, but minimum $5 (or something). So you pay $5 for a $10, $5 for a $20, and $25 for a $100 delivery, which is way easier to swallow. But this is just one of the most primitive ideas to handle that, the point is the make companies to figure out what is feasible, instead of letting them run rampant with whatever shady sh*t they can come up with.

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