Come downstairs or we’ll eat your order, delivery workers tell customers
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
I'm a bit torn here. On the one hand, I fully empathize with the delivery drivers (particularly if the rules / policy of the app is NOT doorstep delivery) and where theft is a real issue.
However, as a (US) consumer, where the apps DO allow us to request doorstep delivery, I think there is no issue with consumers wanting to get the service they paid for. Uber Eats / Doordash charge a pretty hefty premium in terms of markup & delivery fees, and we're paying for the service of having food delivered to our door. You can call us lazy or whatever other names you want, but consumers do have the right to expect to receive a service they've paid for. And it is not our responsibility to make sure the delivery services are paying the drivers properly.
Humans are addicted to convenience no matter the cost.
Another way of stating this is that people pay for convenience, and why not?
In this example one is getting paid to do a task, security controls make the task longer, less convenient, the human will find ways to subvert the inconvenience of the security controls.
Is that really the most charitable way you could read parents comment? Obviously they're not arguing for that, but rather arguing for "voting with your money", so stop using services where abuse is evident/apparent.
And yes, it's a fairly large list, but it's not unmanageable. Me and my family try to do the same, it's not a huge hassle and it's not like you have to look up every single company before you buy anything, but if something comes up about a specific brand like "Nestle" or whatever, then we change to something else.
Lastly, the list is smaller than you think, I think. Most common consumer stuff you have at home is made by few huge corporations owning all the brands. "The Illusion of Choice in Consumer Brands" (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/illusion-of-choice-consumer...) is a famous view that shows you the situation.
It feels like you allude that I don't. Is there something specific you'd like to mention here, or am I supposed to guess?
It's just entitlement that you should be free to buy such products made with literal slave labor with no moral qualms. We should call it the Nestle argument, that caring about slave labor would be very inconvenient, so we shouldn't.
Instead, you should probably petition the FTC to not allow a company profiting from slave labor to buy up all it's competition.
I agree, provided there is actually clear evidence of it. A generic "Well we all know these services don't pay their workers enough" doesn't suffice.
And the solution is to find an alternative, and not "Let me pay this guy a nice tip because I know he is poorly treated, so that I can enable those who hire him to continue to pay poor wages."
For example, I have type one diabetes. I'd love to not give Eli Lily another cent but I don't have that option. I know it's not the same as abusing workers, but abusing a captive market is also boycott worthy.
If people want different things there could be an option in the app to decide what you want (with an appropriate price difference).
That's great, and apparently you are not the kind of app user that the deliverers are up upset about.
> "According to Rappi and iFood, which control over 90% of Brazil’s app delivery market, drivers do not need to make doorstep deliveries. On paper, representatives from both companies told Rest of World, their rules already require delivery workers to only go as far as a street-level point of contact, from which customers are asked to collect their meals."
With this setup:
The feature exists if the company wants to support it in certain areas.
It is not supported in RdJ and other dangerous areas.
Expectations are clearly communicated.
But they should make it clear on their interface. I'm sure it's on some terms of use somewhere, but this information is missing from the entire UI of the app.
(Not that this would impact most people. Closed spaces in Brazil usually disallow delivery people from entering too.)
If you don't build your system with them in mind, they will abuse anything and everything they can.
That doesn't mean make things suck for people with few resources though, as anti-social behavior is MORE common the higher up in the corporate chain you go, meaning they are usually not poor.
I guess they don’t operate on tips in Brazil? In New York, a delivery driver demanding a customer come down to collect would be wagering their tip for time.
If you purchase in a place where tipping is the convention (e.g US, Brazil), then do the simple algebra and figure out the real cost. If you do not have the money to tip according to your regional convention, then do not make the purchase. Full stop.
How much should I tip? Can you answer that?
Welcome to the end stage of "The customer is always right."
Rating systems do not work--eventually they get gamed and become a battlefield.
And it is your responsiblity, it is clownlike to fall on your back and flail your hands in the air and shout about how there is nothing you can do about this and your hands are tied etc. Put on your flip flops, and squeak your way down to meet the man downstairs who doesn't speak english and has your McCheesy with McCrusty sauce. Delivery apps prey and set at odds with one another customers who are gouged and drivers who are miserably underpaid all for the sake of... burning VC capital. Both parties, drivers and customers, as long as they continue to participate in the carnival act, should treat one another with good faith and respect as much as is possible, instead of retreating into their castles and pointing at Arial carved into glowing stones that indicate the beginning and end of what they owe one another
If delivery is not possible it's up to the service provider to refuse service. If they accept the order they agreed to deliver it.
if that's not possible, it's up to you to refuse ordering. If you place the order, you agreed for it to be delivered according to the terms and conditions.
Their $8 McDonalds order with a $14 delivery fee.
Look, the customer base for Uber eats is lazy. That’s why they are ordering McDonalds delivery in the first place. Guilting them for meeting at the door isn’t going to work.
In New York, if I’m coming to the door to meet the delivery, then I may as well just walk the 1/4 block to get it myself.
Delivery has figured out how to get to hallway doors for 50-100 years. This is a solved problem.
If drivers don’t want to fully deliver then don’t do delivery.
Now I live in the burbs and ordered Uber eats for my family and the driver wouldn’t drop off food to my door and called to say come out to the driveway to pick up my food. It was kind of weird. They sat in the driveway and wouldn’t bring the food to the door.
This is very different from Brazilian inner city or even an urban setting but it was strange that the driver didn’t want to walk the 30 steps from my driveway to the door.
It seems everyone is dancing around the obvious central fact: the drivers get an embarrassingly small amount of that $14 fee. The customer pays a premium, the driver is paid a pittance, it’s hardly surprising there’s an expectations mismatch around customer service.
If the delivery apps charged a fee that accurately represented their role in the transaction (running automated software matching driver with customer) it might be a better experience for both customers and drivers. But the companies have sky high valuations they now need to deliver on, so they can’t.
> Delivery has figured out how to get to hallway doors for 50-100 years. This is a solved problem.
Right. Pre delivery apps I’d order in NYC and have no problems with doorstep delivery. So apply simple logic: what’s changed? The customers haven’t. The drivers haven’t. But there’s a new middleman.
Most new-ish developments I've seen have a central lobby or mail room that handles all deliveries. All external doors are locked and require a keycard. No one is delivering to your front door.
Of course, whether they're staffed at 1am to handle your Doordash delivery is a separate issue.
Yep, I'd agree that paying that fee for a service which doesn't have to deliver to your door is silly, but some people still do it
> In New York, if I’m coming to the door to meet the delivery, then I may as well just walk the 1/4 block to get it myself.
As a fellow city dweller: yep, I'd agree there, too (that's why I don't order $8 mcwhatevers with $14 delivery) but to each their own
It seems unreasonable to expect every driver to know how to legally park around, efficiently gain access to, and navigate the twists and turns of every building, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect every building tenant/employee to do so for their own. If your building was a house, you wouldn't expect the driver to know how to gain entry and navigate to a specific room in it. That's what an apartment building is: a way bigger and more difficult to navigate house.
Then people in this situation should do that.
I had the delivery driver do a half ass attempt at contact, he ignored my instructions and then he simply went home. No, that's not acceptable. I reported them to the company.
I sympathize with delivery folks, to the point where I almost never order delivery in the first place, but when I need it, I expect it to be full service.
In the US we take the utilitarian perspective that the thief who took my bike has gained more happiness than I have lost without it, so maybe bike theft is a good thing[0].
In Brazil a bike is probably a fair bit more dear and may more likely be the user's only form of rapid personal transportation.
And I'm not saying that as a bad thing, necessarily; if anything, it's probably worse to think in the neurotic PTSD terms of defending your bike to the death because you saved a long time for it and can't afford to replace it. Moreso when you can trivially afford to replace it and the person stealing it is probably in a much worse global situation than you.
For a lot of people, that moped is their life. Deadly force is appropriate. Horse thieves were hung right?
Haha not a snowflake's chance in hell. In much of the USA you can use deadly force to defend against property crime on private property. Conditions do apply, but that's beside the point (and are rarely enforced in self defense cases unless you went full retard on the crim).
So called "independent contractors" also have the right to decide which contracts they will and will not take. Do Uber Eats and Doordash allow them to deny these "doorstep delivery for apartments in theft-prone cities" jobs?
This is absurd. Why doesn't an american have a responsibility to their fellow man to avoid companies that mistreat their workers? What kind of entitlement is that? Don't you have any solidarity for your fellow human workers?
It's slightly annoying and I probably order less because of it, but it's not the end of the world.
If it's that much of an issue, then insurance/replacing the bikes needs pricing into the delivery. It's not like the delivery drivers are currently earning good money, as far as I know they usually struggle to make minimum wage in most countries.
*The article is very clear that the delivery app's Terms of Service specify "street-level entrance only". [Added footnote. Credit: ballenf.]
I personally go down to meet them, but mostly because it’s faster for me to run down than wait for them to take my slow elevator.
It's a 17% theft if the delivery driver doesn't come up.
> ...representatives from both companies told Rest of World, their rules already require delivery workers to only go as far as a street-level point of contact, from which customers are asked to collect their meals.
2. Have some compassion, delivery drivers are not rolling in cash
2. If they don't like the game they should stop playing it. If it's not worth it for them to do deliveries where they actually have to deliver, then they can look for a job that is more worth their time.
You could say the same about anyone being underpaid or treated poorly; this is what regulation is for. These people are trying to make a living and not everyone has good job opportunities available to them.
So basically it's a big pain in the ass for delivery people who are already not being paid a livable wage.
Virtually all middle class and above housing is a tall tower with gates and security around it. Often double gate or triple gate. Just the time to get across that can be 5-10 min. If it’s your first time due to the need for ID.
The driver who leaves his bike outside risks losing it, but the person who comes down to get their food risks the driver being armed and robbing them or kidnapping them. Thus you have a sort of a Prisoner’s Dillema where nobody wins and everyone loses (except the app).
For the customer the safest thing is to get the driver through the triple lock, then have him drop off the food at your door inside the building and leave it there.
For the driver the safest and most efficient is to drop it off at the security at the door, but these days the security sometimes is virtual only anyway, there is no one to drop it off to, just cameras and fingerprint sensors.
So there is no way out of the game, except like many have said the apps should just charge for doorstep delivery. But this makes their lives more complicated, so they’d really like not to even if it results in death and robbery for both parties.
Capitalism in Brasil hits different.
Some cities will have different systems and every tower is a bit different. I imagine it’s the same thing as any other solution - it will cost money and any opening in the tower security will be gamed and exploited by criminals. That’s likely why it’s not common.
The level of criminality and insecurity in Brazil is unusual even for global standards I think. The level of gaming and exploration of any security system by criminals is surprising for people from the outside, and there’s a lot of externalities. Some stories I’ve heard (and was not surprised about):
- during the pandemic criminal groups in Recife pretended to be City workers dealing with COVID to get inside the towers and assault apartment buildings
- a person in Fortaleza (one of the least safe places) went to the bank to make a large withdrawal to help her father buy a 2nd hand car (I think). As soon as she drove away an armed possy stopped her car and told her to give them the money (which they knew she had). Someone at the bank tipped them off (After that she decided to move)
Brazilians are a wildly creative culture. You see this in song and music and whenever you see a Brazilian running a business
Food delivery most places mean to the door of the apartment, not the apartment complex entrance.
This is terrible for food delivery agents, since it slashes the efficiency of most deliveries.
I always run downstairs, since I am humbled that anyone would cook and bring me food. But as long as this is not the norm, food delivery agents are at the bottom of the food chain. In the past, this was a job for unions.
Postal workers of Denmark had passed by law that mailboxes must be at street level. So all apartment complexes nationwide had to install extra mailboxes at the ground floor if they hadn't already. It can be quite bad for your knees to walk thousands of stairs every day.
But in New York? You might spend most your life in elevators.
Here in France it seems like the apps say the delivery should be upstairs if the customer asked for that, but drivers have the same issue with going upstairs as in Brazil.
And I can see why if they get paid the same.
My guess is, the apps know the issue, but explicit "street-level" deliveries don't sell as well.
Whenever drivers don't actually dash to my door as requested, it turns a simple meal into an agonizing journey.
In fact, for several years now I have used this feature, signaling that I would like the order to be delivered to my door.
Fingers crossed for when the majority of delivery drivers actually start reading it!
> explain your situation, potentially offer a better tip for the service
At some point, it's my business and I would rather not have to explain my disability to strangers every single time I want a meal.
You have to understand something here, before moving to shift responsibility off of the delivery workers: There are kind and unkind people. The kind people are no problem. They deliver the order according to instructions, and get a tip. The unkind people, who are more likely to not follow door dash protocol to begin with, are also more likely not to read my driver notes, are more likely to be rude even when I am forced to explain my disability. In some cases, these people will even harass you before and after delivering your order.
I once had a small animal seizing in my lap who needed emergency items, but I was unable to leave my home and the closest exotic vet was hours away and didn't open till the next morning. An Instacart delivery driver accepted the order, which included a tip of $50, harassed me for 4 hours and literally just lied about ever visiting the store, because they had a bad day. They sat in their car as this animal continued to seize, with zero feeling. They sent me photos, cursed at me, taunted me, all sorts of things.
After speaking with support, they agreed the behavior was unacceptable and allowed me to reorder... I got the same driver again. After wasting 4 hours with this person, support finally figured out how to assign a different driver. This driver immediately went to the store, called me to discuss which items were best to get, and delivered my order with zero fuss. They were happy to receive a large tip, and they assured me I wasn't in the wrong.
The animal ultimately died, that 4 hours was crucial. Should I rely on Instacart for emergency services? Of course not, but that is the nature of an emergency. I would have gladly paid that $50 toward an app specifically geared for that kind of thing.
Except the next guy completed the service as requested, and I handed him a $50 cash tip?
> But don't act like we live in a paradise that doesn't have extreme inequality and class tension when you use an app that summons a member of the underclass to do your bidding for $18k per annum and they are rude or have a fucking attitude with you.
Maybe you're projecting your own ignorance. The majority of my life has been spent in great poverty. I am part of this "underclass". My sister does Door Dash, and it doesn't pay her bills, and I have to compensate for the difference. I'm extremely aware of the exact economics behind Door Dash.
I've usually been at the bottom end of this "extreme inequality and class tension". For you, this might be a realization, for me, it's a reality I've long known. Did it even occur to you that in this situation I obviously didn't have a car myself? This person was already one step above the economic ladder than myself, as they owned a vehicle.
> and they are rude or have a fucking attitude with you.
I spent my youth deeply broke, working as as server for the upper class of my state in a rural area with little economic opportunity. My mom can't hold a job, my dad is not in my life, and I was homeless at 15. All I knew was poverty and sickness for a long time.
If I can not catch a fucking attitude while shaking my governor's hand and getting paid $12 an hour, then some guy who is getting $50 tip + fees for a 3-item order can shut the fuck up and do the job they literally accepted to do, instead of cursing at me and mocking me and intentionally sabotaging my order. I wish I got paid that kind of money back then.
If they have a problem with their socioeconomic position, I'm not the guy to take it out on.
Why yes, I did!
> Not to necessarily lay the blame on you because I probably don't fully comprehend the details of the situation
Yes, you are, and no, you don't.
> I would have many other contingency plans for events like these
This was a medical emergency, it was 2am and the only delivery app which featured a store that had the items I need was on Instacart. I checked all of them.
> how could I be expected to get help for myself or someone else close to me
Call an ambulance? An ambulance isn't going to help me take care of a seizing animal, and an Uber driver wouldn't either because it makes them potentially liable. I was also very low on cash. The $50 was quite a lot for me, but it was the life of another animal at stake, and I value the time of a person who has agreed to complete a critical, time-dependent task for me.
Before you berate me further for having an animal without being rich, this was a friend's animal who was out of state and left the animal in my care. The animal was developing diabetes and the timing was completely unfortunate.
Does this satisfy you?
The problem is that one often relies on Instacart when sick or disabled and the tolerance for mistakes and bad interactions is lowest. Perhaps there is an opportunity for something like vocational nursing companies to offer more skilled shoppers at a premium price...
He lied about ever going to the store, then after one and a half hours (already wasting two) just cancelled the order, saying nothing was in stock. The next driver went to the same store and got my requested items.
I haven't used Instacart since and never plan to; That was the worst customer experience of my life. The fact that I was promised by support that I would receive a different driver, then was immediately reassigned the same exact driver, was indescribably frustrating to me as a business owner and application developer myself.
> Perhaps there is an opportunity for something like vocational nursing companies to offer more skilled shoppers at a premium price...
That would be amazing. I imagine the only way it would economically work is if it were government owned/subsidized, since the kind of people who need this most (at least in the US) are already spending an exorbitant amount on health care and often don't have that kind of extra money lying around.
I've never had an experience anywhere near that bad, but InstaCart is the slider set all the way to the "this is a random person, we vaguely know what's in the store, and you work out what you're actually getting with the random person as they're shopping" end of the spectrum. The good thing about it is that its store flexibility is extremely high.
Prime Now is the slider set to the other extreme: inventory is accurate, your "shopper" might as well be a robotic arm, and your driver is a separate, nameless delivery system. The downside is the store flexibility is limited to Whole Foods.
I lived in a high-rise with elevators. From about 2000 until the late aughts it was like clockwork. They'd ring my buzzer, I'd buzz them in, and they'd stop at my door. In the late aughts it started to shift. More and more drivers would call me from downstairs and tell me I could pick up my food.
I can only imagine what it's like these days in a building like that. I live in a single family house now and 9 times out of 10 they won't even walk the 5 feet to my door from their car.
I don't disagree with the larger point per se, I just find it interesting that it changed.
Not really. Minimum wage adjusted for inflation - and especially rent - is down in most places.
You can't pay people $2 for something and that $2 goes less and less far and expect your quality of service to not get worse.
Heckers, the companies could use "machine learning" (read: simple SQL scripts) to determine how much time going up to your apartment "costs" and charge you based on such. Then buildings with faster elevators would be more valuable!
ADDED: I suspect that the fact that a lot of delivery is "free" these days makes at least some people resentful when it's not.
If the man calls and says come down to get your food, your options at that point are a) come down to get your food, or b) refuse delivery.
Anything else is out of scope here, _including_ the notion that the delivery person was supposed to deliver upstairs and is refusing. While it might be an inconvenience, it's really not your problem as a customer. What are you going to do about it anyway? Argue? That'll just get you posted on tiktok.
It's the company's problem, and it's a self-correcting evolution - given enough instances, presumably that person won't be allowed to handle deliveries anymore, OR you wouldn't patronize that service any longer.
Now, you may have already switched delivery services when the recalcitrant delivery person is replaced with someone more amenable to delivering upstairs. But either way, the problem is solved.
What did these people do before doordash? Can they not just call the restaurant and explain that going downstairs is a burden?
But as to your suggested solution, I think it’s not appropriate to require a disabled person to explain their burden to every restaurant on every order, or similar. That’s too emotionally harsh. And as I said, delivery to the door is usually not a problem in my experience, but we are discussing a context quite different from my experience.
Be mad at the companies for not accommodating you like they should legally be required, not the individual employees. The companies have worked very hard to push these "gig workers" to be as "efficient" (read overworked) as possible because that directly increases profit.
The company could add functionality to their app: "Click here for specialty service at an additional cost" but they don't want to do that because that's another nail in their claim that they are just facilitating contracting, so instead their system just pretends every order is the happy path trivial order, and punishes you if you take an order with a giant tip for extra or special instructions.
The company building the app is choosing to fuck you over so they can also continue to fuck over the people stuck working for them. That's who you should get angry at.
I am just responding to and disagreeing with your argument that street delivery is generally enough, although I admit that Brazil might be a special case due to the level of theft risk that drivers in Brazil would have to deal with in order to deliver to the door.
Forcing disabled or quarantined people to pay extra is discriminatory, and forcing them to out their medical condition to a delivery service in order to avoid a surcharge is rather extreme. Delivery to the door was standard before the pandemic, and the deterioration of service is something we should reverse without undue harm to the workers rather than defend.
But I do sympathize with the delivery workers as well. They need stronger rights and I don’t want them to be overworked. But I would prefer that to be handled differently, like legislatively allowing them to sue the companies for 1 year’s full-time salary plus legal fees for every day they are given a (properly defined) abusively unreasonable set of expectations or abusively low pay per day. That way obligations to deliver to the door would not overwork or undercompensate them, and more workers would be hired to satisfy the part of the demand that currently leads to overwork. If they still don’t make enough income to find it a viable job, then as per supply and demand the apps will have to raise their compensation in order to attract enough workers when the number of deliveries or hours per day is legislatively capped.
Once the situation has happened enough the driver will be banned and finally you will be able to get the service you paid for.
> "According to Rappi and iFood, which control over 90% of Brazil’s app delivery market, drivers do not need to make doorstep deliveries. On paper, representatives from both companies told Rest of World, their rules already require delivery workers to only go as far as a street-level point of contact, from which customers are asked to collect their meals."
> "A common worry among drivers is that their cycles, motorbikes, or bags might be stolen if left unattended. Most buildings don’t allow them to park inside, workers told Rest of World, forcing them to leave their vehicles and delivery bags on the street. The bags frequently contain two or three orders as the apps assign them multiple deliveries along the same route. To avoid having the other orders stolen, the bags must also go up with the drivers."
I lived on the 36th floor of a building in Chicago with a doorman, and I would consistently get the driver coming to up to my door. I don't think I ever once had to meet them in the lobby.
When I lived in Seattle very very few drivers would come in from the sidewalk even when I lived in a first floor unit maybe 50' from the street. I'd buzz them in and they'd wait in the threshold with the door open. Beyond that, maybe 20% of drivers would only call me, never buzz, and expect me to come out to their car to grab my food.
I lived in Chicago again more recently in a 4th floor walk up, and I'd usually try to go down and meet them (habit from Seattle, and also it was a lot of stairs and I felt bad), but they'd consistently come hustling up the stairs before I got the chance to come down and meet them.
Other places I lived fell somewhere between Seattle and Chicago on this spectrum.
Could be only way to make it sustainable in long run.
If I'm making already poor decisions to eat fast food I might as well bike, walk, or drive to go get it and save myself another $10.
The default should be delivery to the door unless mitigating circumstances. And if you can help them out by going to meet them downstairs then great.
So you could see delivery apps requiring "door delivery" for ADA purposes, and then people abusing that (because charging more for ADA compliance is usually a non-starter).
If you really want you can have the tip automatically set to 15% instead of 10% for door deliveries but allow the user to reduce that if they want, should get around the ADA stuff I assume (but not sure).
If your apartment block has a front desk then that's fantastic but mine doesn't - if it is left outside it will probably be stolen.
> you are just piggybacking on their tears to make yourself feel better
Seems a little ad hominem, but taking it positively, a delivery worker should assume the worst and deliver to the door just in case there's a reason they've ordered a delivery and can't come downstairs unless something else has been agreed. They might be self isolating for covid for example. There's so many examples of why it should be delivered to the door, and there's no way to know if it is or isn't valid for that delivery, so that's what should happen.
> I love how when the consumer class talks about the service class ... but its a scenario that is certainly not the tear jerker you were expecting
That's why I added the other examples. Chill out a little.
Okay, the context that you established in your prior comment is you've already decided to eat take out food. We're not talking about home cooking, which obviously is the main solution for parents. There's no point to getting sanctimonious about situations that people find themselves in for practical reasons.
Hauling kids to the shop to get take out is not always easy or desirable. Obviously, this is all very contextual. If you have teenagers, you can send them down to the shop and have them bring it back to you. If you live in a suburb, you can strap everyone into their car seats and go to the drive through. But for the context which is the point of the discussion -- a person who lives in an apartment with a small child and wants to get take out that night -- it's not crazy to want it to come to your door instead of having to go to the front desk. It might not be possible to haul N boxes of food and M children in the elevator as a single parent. Obviously, this is tricky because the delivery person also has the problem of not wanting their bike stolen. It seems like a good compromise solution is the deliveries mostly go to the front desk, but you can pay an extra fee to get them to come to your door, but again, this is all practical stuff, not a matter of getting snotty that how dare someone be too lazy to walk to the farm and pull up the carrots themselves, blah blah…
If anything, having kids is a reason to not do delivery apps. Having kids is expensive enough I don't need to spend an extra $10 a meal just to have someone bring it to me.
If we're talking convenience, its pretty much the same level of effort as throwing frozen foods in the air fryer or in the steaming tray of the rice cooker and coming back in like 10 minutes. Or reheat a meal-prepped food. Or cook one of the several quick recipes of things we usually have on hand. Or having fun slicing soft fruits and vegetables with plastic knives with the kids.
Most of the time that we do order takeout its because one or both of us are already out and about and will just swing by some restaurant on the way home. Or we'll pick up food to go and stop by the park on the way home and have a picnic.
So many options that are all massively better than ordering delivery foods from an app.
Something these "disruptors" just don't get. They either have to charge too much, pay too little, or often the combo platter of both.
They've increased the number of unique parties involved to four and have removed the possibility of real accountability from all of them. Of course it's a shitshow. Everyone has different incentives and they are often at odds with the incentives of the other parties.
These days I order food, knowing that it will allow me uninterrupted work (I'll just receive a package and get back to work). If I have to interrupt my "flow-ish" state anyway, I'll just go out or make an omelette in 10 minutes.
Context: I live 10 minutes away from a high street in London.
I couldn't imagine eating takeaways during my lunch break or snacks during the workday. What sort of food is it?
(If I lived in a city though and had options within a 5 minute walk, I'd probably just pick up takeout myself.) Honestly, I usually have something in the freezer if I just want something quick but sometimes I don't feel like thinking about cooking even something simple.
(And indeed like sibling I picked 11 for the nearby good restaurants, to which I do bike but only outside of winter).
In the end it's sort of a feel-good story. Watching that video I'm reassured that I'm not the only one whose culture is in decline...
I stopped ordering out and started preparing meals ahead. No more nervous days wondering if the food will come, no more angry phone calls trying to get items fixed, no more delivery fees+tip+taxes+plus insane cost of food.
To add to what you said, environmentally it's awful. Where I live it, most of the food deliveries were bicycle based a few years ago. Now it's all cars, mopeds and e-bikes (the best of a bad bunch) as anything less makes the delivery driver less competitive against the others.
The bikes/e-bikes ignore traffic lights and flow, causing close-calls and collisions in pedestrian areas (where they pick up the food).
None of the economic, environmental and moral (laziness) waste can possibly be justified for the sort of rubbish that is being sold on a takeaway app. It's always just junk like burgers, chips, and cakes.
> Two Brazilian cities and one state are discussing bills to allow drivers to refuse deliveries at the door — three cities have already approved them.
Kick out delivery apps who don't adhere to the law, simple as that. Important to remember that these workers are humans; remember the human.
In some parts of some countries, it still is.
I think in this situation the problem is not reading the article.
While we're talking about missed reading, perhaps you should check out the commenting guidelines.
The solution seems to be either to get customers to come down, or to eliminate crime. I'd take a guess that having customers come down is a quicker and cheaper solution to implement.
I do think the food delivery model should only work for customers willing to pay delivery people $25+/hr, especially considering you’re not just paying what should be a living wage for labor but also renting the capital that the delivery person brings to the job (car, bicycle, locks, etc)
So now you need to lock it to something, causing even more time lost.
Now we're becoming quite capable of optimizing it so that the panic crunch-time is the entire shift (and if it isn't you make less than minimum wage) via these "Silicon Valley gig apps".
Because that's the reality these delivery apps set up.
Picking the lock, in the other hand, is pretty fast and won’t attract much attention. Thief just needs to be sophisticated enough to have the correct picking tool and practice with it a bit.
Oh you might want to visit the Lock Picking Lawyer’s YouTube channel today… he’s tested all the U-locks and picks them open in 30-60 seconds.
If the average bike thief gets as good at picking locks at LPL, we’re very screwed!
Maybe it's not common because it is VERY loud and sparkly.
I think if a chain that thick wobbles it would just break the angle grinder blade?
The least customers could do is to take care of their end.
Then imagine complaining that you had to go outside your house to get it. I think the act of getting off the couch and going downstairs before consuming your food is probably a good thing for your health; and the primary reason for all of this is the delivery driver, who is likely living a harder life than you, doesn’t want to lose their livelihood.
Imagine being in a world where you can wave your finger over some little glass shard, and a hot meal of your choosing is prepared for you, and all you have to do is go get it. Obviously it's absurd to imagine that anyone would ever want it to also be brought to them.
The first has to go down and get their food, a minor inconvienience.
The other has to risk losing their delivery vehicle / property when it gets stolen while they are in the building (an enormous, possibly income-destroying inconvienience)
I'm saying that the person in the building should maybe have a little gratitude for their position and empathy for the delivery driver
When you try to trade resources, you make say 4% income on the trade. So if you trade say 2-million you can win about 200k or 400k, depending on server state. However the risk is your ship blows up, which could be because of a buggy crash or a server crash. The risk was "is the value I get from the work worth it if a single crash can undo days worth of effort".
Same is happening here. They are risking a month of income in order to do a single delivery. However if they leave it by the door "I never got the order" and thus they get penalized. So basically damned if you do, damned if you don't. So they basically said "well if I get penalized ANYWAYS... might as well eat it, because it is equivalent to me"
I see zero ethical issues with what is happening.
Now if the motorbike was provided by the company, and it gets stolen? Cool, the employee doesn't care, and I assure you, the company would change its policy in a day "nope, you come downstairs!"
Edit: The root of the gig economy is that all the risk is shifted to the employee, but none of the benefits. A friend of mine is an HVAC tech, and he gets a company car. If he is about to be late to an appointment because of parking issues... "well, leave the car, we'll pay for the ticket, just get to the job" and he doesn't care. Why? Because the company assumes the risk as they should. He's not a gig worker.
> I see zero ethical issues with what is happening.
I think that's an equivalent economic outcome, but not an equivalent ethical outcome.
So imagine paying for one thing and then extorting an additional service out of the driver because the service gives you more power than the driver.
Seems to me the legislation should be focused on the delivery app companies -- force them to pay workers extra if an order requires the extra time and risk of inside delivery. And maybe even cover the cost of anything stolen while they're workers are on the job. They'd very quickly figure out a solution.
To blindly expect those people to do whatever you want because you have the money makes you look closer to a Disney Villain than a human being who wants to build a society with these people.
I think the issue is that maybe the customer doesn’t have the money to make the laborer do what they want. At a much higher wage, the delivery person would be happy to risk their bicycle / other capital.
But I think I maybe understand what you’re saying?
How does this square with the fact that a greater and greater proportion of the population is of non working age?
Problem solved.
You're using a delivery service like Uber Eats, Deliveroo or Doordash that are well known to underpay, overwork and unjustly punish workers that do not maximize their deliveries per hour, and you have the gall to complain that they're not taking pride in their jobs from your ivory tower.
Your feet are not going to die because your fat ass has to get up from the couch. Put on some slippers, some pants and go down. Do it early too, every app offers tracking, don't make them wait for five minutes while you find your keys.
I expect the working conditions and pay of your delivery driver exceeds that of the person who made your pants. Don't you also owe those workers a fair shake?
By all means, blast Uber, blast <shitty gig economy company>, but passing on the blame onto the guy that barely makes minimum wage and destroys his car/bike in the process is downright moronic.
Either way, some people can’t leave their flats, period.
So you ask for that nicely, and be respectful to others, like always, right?
This is independent from my being Portuguese and having Brazilian relatives who have witnessed (and been victims of) violent (and murderous) acts during robberies.
Want to keep being snarky, or should we move on to discuss that life is _really hard_ in some places?
The obesity rate in Brazil isn't actually too terrible, by modern standards. Most of the customers are probably not fat asses.