Seattle Law Mandating Higher Delivery Driver Pay Is a Disaster

Making a per order tax/fee isnt the right method to achieve their goals, and actually hurts these delivery drivers. To write a living wage law, you need to look at the income not a fee/tax on the task performed.

Thats why route delivery (like grocery/elderly meal delivery/lunch runs) can keep the costs down.

Truck drivers are also having lots of issues with lowering incomes also, and corporations are trying to push the expenses on them. Another area you need to look at the entire model and figure out how the truck driver makes money and what is hurting them. (dispatch services, gas prices, insurance, lines, etc)

Long wait times are hurting many delivery type services with rising expenses.

I can't say I'm sad about properly pricing in the externalities of the world's least efficient and most wasteful food delivery mechanism.

It would be useful if more people could look at this from the driver’s perspective (in a nonjudgmental way). Most drivers I know are well aware of the costs associated with delivering but they do it anyway out of necessity. The job market isn’t great out there and I know many people, myself included, who’ve been job hunting for over a year. And delivering has been a decent fallback to make some ends meet. These fees are absolutely nuking a lot of potential deliveries and hurting drivers substantially.

Gonna dump some hard truths here.

You don't have a fundamental right to having someone else pick up your latte.

Food delivery has very little economic value. Yes it saves you a small amount of time but the people doing it aren't somehow more efficient at it and their labor can't then be allocated to anything that does provide an efficiency.

If you want to reduce the amount of time it takes you to get food you should stop fighting mixed zoning and start supporting the construction of walkable communities.

The problem isn't that there aren't enough people willing to make slave wages to hand deliver a burger to you, it's that the burger is in a strip mall five miles away across an eight lane highway.

This is just pricing being adjusted to reflect reality. It’s always been clear if you looked closely that if you’re getting food delivered for super cheap, something doesn’t add up.

There were a lot of delivery drivers in seattle last year when I lived there - many I saw delivering trivial amounts of product.

Maybe the law is just disguised as improving driver pay but the real objective is to decrease traffic congestion.

If that is the real reason then I support it. If it’s an unintended effect then I’m against.

This can and does happen when a law pits one city (or other subset of the nation) against national (or international) corporations. Basically, management will maintain or deploy policy to see the franchisees in this jurisdiction wither on the vine: this contains the legal "contagion" in order to preserve longterm capital.

I daresay if this were a federal regulation evenly administered -- like, say, the 32-hour workweek Sen. Sanders is proposing -- corporations would more likely expend some capital to keep prices reasonable enough to stay in business.

Seems like a lot of app economy friction boils down to two main things. (1) There's now a new middleman between the restaurant and driver. And (2) costs of living are so much higher today than before the app economy began that the delivery driver job may have been workable fifteen years ago but wouldn't be today even if not for a new predatory player in the mix.

$26 for a cup of coffee, hand delivered. Is that an outrageous price? Compare with a circuit board I designed and had manufactured in China, and shipped to my front door for $10.

The difference, of course, is that my order wasn't the only thing on the boat. There were probably dozens of shipping containers full of stuff. Even the last mile, it was on a UPS truck, with dozens of other packages. Huge economies of scale mean low overhead per item.

I think this warps our perception of how much a delivery driver should be paid. Frankly, I'm amazed that delivering a single cup of coffee, to a single customer, where the driver had to drive to the store, buy the coffee, drive to the customer, and drive back, can even be done for that cheap really.

"But it was so much cheaper, and the drivers were making so much more money before this stupid law was passed!" you might say.

We'll.....I wonder whether they were really tallying up all of the externalities. E.g. if I fill out an expense report for a trip where I had to drive, I get comped 75 cents a mile for gas, insurance, wear-n-tear on the car, etc. If a driver has to drive 5 miles to the store, 5 miles to the customer, and 5 miles back to home base, that eats up a fair bit of the $26 right there. And that's before the driver even bought the $7.50 grande latte.

When the article reports the utopic amounts of money they were making pre-bill, I don't think either the reporter, or even the drivers themselves, were properly discounting those figures to reflect the true costs. Not to mention that venture capitalists are also subsidizing those prices, because they want keep prices low so they can expand fast enough to get a network-effect lockout of other competitors.

The article deftly deploys some fine rhetoric borrowed from bleeding heart liberals--"think of the elderly who are relying on these deliveries!! Think of the CHILDREN!!!" But yeah, not that long ago everybody was doing without delivery services, and we didn't even notice that we didn't have it.

I guess it would be nice if there were a permanent underclass, who you could afford to hire for this kind of thing. If you weren't in the underclass, of course.

Remember, kids: the real minimum wage is still holding steady at $0.

Once all of the Really Smart People are done bethinking themselves smarter than the market, voters can hopefully overthrow the RSP clique and get back to having, you know, an economy.