Deliveroo and Uber Eats Riders Strike on Valentine's Day
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> To make the minimum national wage we have to make at least four deliveries, which is not as easy as it seems.
On what timeline? Per hour? Per day?
> Delivery Job UK claimed its delivery riders were braving the "cold, rain and absurd distances" for deliveries paying "ridiculous values", ranging from £2.80 to £3.15.
On what distance? "Absurd" is not a quantity.
> ...striking Deliveroo riders wanted an increase to a minimum of £5.
Per delivery? Per hour? Per kilometer? Per mile?
> On a Friday night you could make £100 over 4-5 hours, now that's gone
First data point that actually makes some sense. But what do they make now? Why leave an obvious question unanswered and hanging?
> With a minimum fee of £2.80, most might only be making three orders an hour, and then they have to subtract their costs too. Some are making £7 an hour, which in London is barely liveable
Ah, finally!
Why do news organizations do this?
When discussing wages, wage conditions are commonly understood to mean "per hour" since wages are hourly.
Per delivery? Per hour? Per kilometer? Per mile?
This was actually discussed in the article. Per delivery.
That's the whole issue with delivering food: It takes time and is extremely low productivity.
Similarly for wage, I don't know what the national minimum wage is in the UK or how it's defined. It's not like they're cutting a whole lot of print by adding a /hr to those numbers.
National minimum wage in the UK is not enough to remotely live on, most places that have an established deliveroo market.
This is an article on British events on a British website. Those "4 deliveries" did make it obvious they meant minimum wage "per hour" (and it's implied that's it's not easy), even without British context. [traffic, radius only matter wrt. making it hard or easier, but again in context it is implied that 4 deliveries an hour are not easy]
But, anyway, this is all details. The big picture is that food delivery is very low productivity so it is very hard to earn much.
No. It's what I felt as I first read the article.
> This is an article on British events on a British website.
Of course. But it was posted on HN with an international audience. Perhaps BBC needs to geofence and make their articles unavailable globally.
> Those "4 deliveries" did make it obvious
No, it did not, and I explained why. 8 deliveries a day would be hard in Bangalore in a 4 km radius. Besides, it is still unclear what the delivery radius is in the article.
I live in the US and had no problem following along with the article. Why should everyone else be denied access to the BBC because of your reading comprehension issues? Perhaps, in the future you should just ignore HN posts based on BBC articles.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/minimum-wage-rate...
Surely a pinch of critical thinking answers this? 4 deliveries a day isn't going to pay a daily minimum wage. If it did, then we wouldn't have this situation - surely most riders manage more than one delivery every 2 hours and make more than the minimum wage!
I’d assume this was per hour or possibly per shift. If they did a 4-5 hour shift in an evening etc. Best never to make assumptions in these cases though…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39394839
TLDR: 4 deliveries does not make the "per hour" derivable by critical thinking without further data.
They have terrible editors.
Food delivery isn’t a technology problem. It’s a trivial hiring and logistics problem. One that can literally be solved successfully by teenagers. There might have been a market for an ultra-lean driver-as-a-service with an SLA suitable for pizza delivery but I’m not even sure that’s viable.
Pizza shops are vertically integrated, staffed by entry level workers, and still have razor thin margins. It’s not a career, it’s a way to build skills and get a better job.
What an incredible blunder.
And on paper it was attractive for delivery people, who in theory have jobs all the time instead of only a few hours at the busiest time of night, to be sent home when it went quiet.
But that was all on paper. In practice the intermediary company creamed off the money that would otherwise go entirely to the restaurant and the delivery person. And it wasn't enough.
I remember when Silicon Valley made fun of the concept 10 years ago and I have made a point of never installing any such apps on my phone.
Suddenly we have access to a whole range of restaurants, and even convenience stores, instead of only the dodgy takeaway pizzas, kebabs, and 'Chinese' for what is a very cheap price.
This may not be viable long term because of the low productivity of riders but it's great while the VC money lasts.
What I did notice, was the prices going up if looking at the delivery company websites, so now I just go to the restaurants sites again so I'm not paying additional markups.
The biggest "win" is that they all have some form of delivery tracking, so I at least know if they've delivered to someone down the road by accident and I don't have to call up after an hour to find out I'm not getting my food ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In my area both DoorDash and UberEats are ridiculously expensive. GrubHub seems to be the most reasonably, fairly, and transparently priced, but even then it’s a significant premium for a worse experience.
I could just have Amazon, Safeway, or WalMart deliver me frozen microwaveable or stovetop dinner with the rest of my groceries. I would get better food for less money with similar effort at the price of a little planning ahead. When delivery apps charge what it actually costs alternatives become far more appealing.
I would say that in the UK it was really only pizza places that offered delivery.
Now with these apps you can get virtually any type of cuisine delivered from a wide range of restaurants.
The issue really is only profitability: a single delivery is expensive in labour cost while consumers do not want to pay a lot for it.
It doesn't matter how you classify the problem; food delivery apps have a ton of advanced logistics going on behind the scenes that the basic "pizza shop delivery" of decades past don't have.
Consider route optimization with multiple restaurants and multiple stops, area incentives for drivers, recommendation algorithms for consumers that take into account time of day + location, etc.
It does if you care about building a viable business.
> food delivery apps have a ton of advanced logistics going on behind the scenes that the basic "pizza shop delivery" of decades past don't have.
Pizza shops don’t have advanced logistics because they don’t need it. A pizza shop can already saturate multiple drivers.
> Consider route optimization with multiple restaurants and multiple stops, area incentives for drivers, recommendation algorithms for consumers that take into account time of day + location, etc.
But this complexity isn’t necessary and the tiny increase in efficiency is less than the cost of the algorithms and systems to run them.
That's obviously not true, since those companies would simply stop doing it if it cost them more than it was earning them.
> It does if you care about building a viable business.
A business is either viable or not viable. It doesn't matter how it's classified.
Big food delivery is a fundamentally doomed business because the existing companies are treating this like a logistics problem to be solved by technology when really it’s a product problem. To make this business work you need to sell cheap, simple food that’s still satisfying. That means delivery-specific dishes.
Even the better ones cheap out on toppings, size and you don't get as much choice in what you have.
I like frozen pizza well enough, and I'll get it from time-to-time, but if I'm going to get pizza, it's more likely to be takeout, because it just tends to be better and take a similar amount of time. It really is expensive though, so it's not something I have often.
Delivery pizza is a sustainable business when it’s the only place around that will deliver you hot and ready food right now. Everyone else wins on quality.
Pizza delivery is rarely done for one or two eaters. Only makes sense at >5
There was a trending tiktok by economist Kyla Scanlon on the topic of "subsidizing affluence" and how these services were able to be offered so cheap because of incredibly low interest rates and investment. Rates have risen dramatically, affecting both the appetite of debt for start-ups and the spending power of consumers. Shareholders recognised this, and it showed through Deliveroo's historically bad IPO.
Ultimately, I suspect Deliveroo will continue to underpay (relative to the cost-of-living) because of the poverty trap — poor people don't have many options, and being underpaid as a Deliveroo rider may be the only option for survival in London and other similarly major cities.
At the moment the whole business model, and any plausible path to profitability, relies on squeezing riders as much as possible because (1) they are the main cost, (2) they have very low productivity (number of deliveries per hour), and (3) customers do not want to pay that much for delivery. Fees paid by customers have increased, and restaurants also often charge a different, higher price when ordering through Deliveroo and maybe this is getting to the limit of what the market will bear... So there is not much wiggle room.
In France, some restaurants give a 10% discount if you order take away. But I hope they don't do it for deliveries through these companies. This lowers the global quality level. You can't have the same quality with one cook and 10 tables than one cook, 10 tables and 50 deliveries per hour.
I support capitalism, but I feel like these are exactly the things where govt should regulate to create fairness. Let's just squeeze each other because markets.
I mean, the solution is fairly obvious - hire more cooks if you are serving more food.
Resturants will either handle this properly or quickly go out of business.
Whenever I read something like this on HN it makes me realise just how out of touch tech people are with the real world. Most of the people here work on companies that never were or never will be profitable or break even, it's just burning investors money or building your business on huge amounts of money until you get a monopoly on the market. Restaurants are working in the real world, where you don't get all that free money, you can't realistically scale, the margins are thin and the employees are hard to keep.
Money being tight doesn't mean you no longer have to provide good service to attract customers. Running a business is hard for a reason. If it was easy, everyone would do it.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/05/business/ghost-kitchens-were-...
I also doubt it’s a good decision to invest in bigger real estate and more employees while the delivery companies are always on the edge of going bankrupt or being regulated.
Also, a restaurant is not an easy to scale business : most of their value is a mix between the location and the cooking team. You can’t easily change one (or both) without changing your restaurant uniqueness.
There isn't a whole lot of money to be had in the delivery business. Consumers already feel costs are too high. Its not like these companies are insanely profitable and taking it all for themselves.
So many couples went out for dinner, the effects from striking delivery workers was probably minimized a bit at least.
Keep in mind maybe you were so busy because your fellow delivery drivers were striking and you just picked up their slack.
Maybe there's enough couples out there where we can both be right?
Strike ? But they are not employees. /s