Alternatively it's simply time for people to learn to cook simple foods again, a pasta with alfredo sauce, fried potatoes with eggs and a salad, or a spinach quiche (with a 1€ supermarket crust) are all quicker to make myself than I get through any app's ordering process (ignoring here the waiting time for both processes to finish).
And Im sure this ordinance is "hurting gig workers". Well, so is working the fucking gig jobs, but that hurt comes 'down the road' with much more wear and tear on the vehicle, higher incidence of wrecks, no workers compensation, pay double tax for "self employed".
But those billionaire gig companies are doing the rake JUST FINE.
Why do you assume that those workers are so stupid, as to not be able to calculate whether the job in question is worth their while? Perhaps they, with better insight into their own financials, have decided that you may be incorrect?
Other times, its cause the costs are well hidden UNTIL its time to pay them. And the "gig" seems to pay quite well, until it doesn't. The company side has actuaries to assess risk and understand accurate costs, all the way down to the make/model/year/mileage of your car. You, well, dont. Its all about information asymmetry.
Many times, its simple desperation. When there isn't anything else, you do what you can, even though you're being taken advantage of.
Some might call this just getting by, some might say this is what climbing the ladder looks like, and some might call this a poverty trap -- the longer you just scrape by, the harder it is to escape.
The debate is about do you call these opportunities or exploitations. It's realistically both, and so you gotta ask yourself how much exploitation are you willing to tolerate before the pizza starts to taste a bit icky? And when it does, how much are you willing to pay to make that pizza conflict-free?
Are you kidding? All the investors in this space are taking an absolute bath. You can look this up if you want, but I don't think GrubHub, PostMates, DoorDash or Uber Eats have ever made any money.
At this point in time, the only people getting any value out of these services are the drivers, the consumers and the employees (who are, by and large, doing middle class sales, marketing and software jobs).
They never made any money, the same way Titanic, Avengers, Lord of the Rings never made a cent. Those poor studio execs.....
Its a mixture of Hollywood accounting, and an intentional plan to dump all profits back into growing the business all the while undercharging to gain monopoly status. Then, of course once the "gig" is up, they're the only players and can charge high rates and pay pennies cause they're the only mega-delivery place around.
And it doesnt hurt when all the locals fired their drivers and rely on said gig companies.
No, they never made any money in the old-fashioned sense that their revenues were less than their costs. This is not hard to look up. GrubHub was doing so well last year that it canned 15% of its workforce.
Full disclosure: I worked at Domino's many decades ago and I ordered pizza in Seattle for over 20 years.
That being said— nothing seems to have changed with regard to pizza places offering direct delivery. The changes on “the apps” are very noticeable but direct ordering seems normal.
I should note this is based on almost completing the order flow, I’m not so dedicated to data gathering that I ordered a bunch of food to test this.
It is possible that this was feasible for the owners only because it hadn't occurred to pizza shops en masse that it was possible to get the drivers to provide their own cars. But this was before I ever saw thermal sleeves for pizza boxes. The food was kept warm by a sheet metal contraption in the back seat, with sterno as the heat source, something it would have been awkward to be putting into and pulling out of civilian cars.
It worked well as a part-time job for me at the time because I had no rent to pay and very few other regular expenses.
I don't think the same would be true today.
I will absolutely call a place and order on the phone if it avoids grubhub extracting an extra $10 in fees from both sides of the transaction... and give the delivery driver the difference in tips. But yeah, less frequently than I did when VCs were subsidizing the cost.
Either bundle in the driver's payment into the fees entirely, or don't at all. Let's drop this game of having to guess how much to tip to make up for what the company is not paying the drivers.
Take the humans out of the delivery business and you get more flexibility on pricing. Self driving cars could do it if you are willing to meet the outside. Drones also, although I think the power costs will never work for air delivery, so it will need to be grounded somehow.
Which is what all of the gig economy services are - you have always been able to get driven around - they were called limos and chauffeurs. Likewise the wealthy have been having servants fetch their dinner for decades, if not centuries.
With a container ship full of VC money our industry was able to sustain an illusion for some years that servants can be had for cheap. Turns out the basic economics of having servant(s) hasn't been disrupted by technology.
... or taxis, but that's not quite so consistent with the class-war narrative.
Try standing at an intersection in SF for 5 min with kids without them getting scared. I had to do it unfortunately in SOMA (long story why) and a sketchy guy mostly on drugs scared the hell out of my kids. That is not normal and is what I personally consider "falling apart" - kids should be able to roam around freely in a healthy city.
If you took a straw poll, I think you'd find a lot of drivers in favor of higher pay and not so many in favor of higher pay but zero hours.
> I'm not sure the point is to actually help people for whom something is better than nothing, it's to demonstrate resentment and frustration and a worldview that sees all wage labor as exploitative.
The "gig" companies are the ones taking the bulk of the money, and then disbursing pittances and stealing tips. They can definitely pay better.
So, how many hours do I need to work before this logic kicks in? Presumably not just one per week, right? Does my employer get the right to pay me less because my needs are met in part by an inheritance or because I share the rent with someone else who works? At what level of granularity does the basic cost of living get decided? i.e. if I flip burgers at the McDonald's at the corner of Chambers and Greenwich (in the middle of TriBeCa) does that mean I should be paid enough to live there too?
The basic ideal of dignity of work is fine, you just can't get there from here.