Hacker News Reader

Comment by b3lvedere | Hacker News Reader

The driver argued the amount of time it would take to come back to return the bag would mean he couldn’t make enough deliveries to “pay my rent”.

There you have it. The actual “business model” of Doordash.

View on HN

This is common across so many industries now. The number of people stressed by student loans, childcare, and other typical expenses is extreme. It’s easy for someone to appear more productive by having fewer or no kids - but disastrous for the economy in the long run.

How much of the recent US economic growth can be attributed to monetization of public and private balance sheets?

It's hard to compare student loans--debts taken on willingly by the smartest and most privileged members of society--to childcare costs.

Not everyone who takes on this debt is "the smartest and most privileged members of society", and childcare costs are outrageous (according to several families I know; I haven't felt financially secure enough to have my own progeny and at this stage in life it seems unlikely I'll have the opportunity).

That's why I said "it's hard to compare them". One of them is a true problem, and the other is a debt that fully informed, smart people elected to take on and plan for.

Nobody is fully informed about anything, whether parenting or deciding to assume debt for potential education. Not everyone who goes to college is smart in all aspects(including finances), and not everyone graduates college. These are both true problems whether you choose to acknowledge this or not.

> fully informed, smart people elected to take on and plan for.

In practice, this is completely false. When I was about to graduate not too long ago, there was an entire cottage industry of (perhaps unwitting) propagandists pushing student loans on highschool students as a "no brainer" investment. "You'll make the money back in 2 years, tops! Now go and find yourself"

Placing blame on any of those students who were not able to make the money back quickly and are now struggling is either a display of ignorance or lack of empathy.

40% of people with student loans didn't graduate. Lots of those people probably aren't the "smartest and most privileged" you're thinking about.

This video "What everyone gets wrong about student loans" really taught me a lot of things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzY-b2Vj9Ug

Not issuing bags to the contractors seems like a bad business model.

They do issue insulated bags, they just don’t fit pizza boxes

Not in Australia. No hot bags for any orders including Pizza. It drives me nuts, I never order really now. It’s not cold enough for the food to be stone cold, but it’s like warm at best. Not enjoyable at all.

Using a standard supermarket freezer bag makes a HUGE difference.

I don’t understand how it’s not a hard enforced requirement by doordash, Uber eats, etc. It’s nuts. I have seen it more common in other countries where it gets colder. They’ll have branded delivery bags. Though more often they are also bike couriers rather than cars.

Especially since they so often drop two orders now.

How does that pass local food safety laws? There's normally requirements food be kept at XYZ temps.

If that were true then I shouldn’t be allowed to drive to a restaurant, order to go food, drive home to eat.

Food safety laws don't impact the end customer. You can legally take ham out of your fridge, leave it in the hot place for 24 hours and eat it. You just shouldn't.

Reminds me of my old employer. I was subcontracted to work on the controls network at a wastewater treatment plant and the PPE they issued me seemed like it was intended for elementary school students. Everything I needed was at the hardware store for around $15 total so it's not like they even saved that much money.

Does this still apply? I used to use DoorDash a lot, and I remember in the early years, all the dashers had DoorDash-branded bags. As the years went on, it seemed a lot of dashers no longer had any bag or just didn't use it. Maybe it was the latter, but it also feels like one of those price cutting measures that a successful startup starts making. Like their customer service which went from fantastic to terrible to not even talking to anyone, but getting refunds denied for no particular reason.

Is this not how every decision is make at a business? Yes it's more personal because of the word rent but "no we can't do this because the in the slowdown we wouldn't make enough sales to pay our employees."

I'm surprised people are siding with the restaurant owner here who's a millimeter away from just being a dick and making demands of a rando who he's not the boss of. Making "damaging my reputation" a thing just invents the very worst of copyright but for restaurants. The only thing objectionable about the interaction was the delivery app giving the impression they have a relationship with the restaurant when they don't.

Giving the impression they have a relationship with the restaurant is exactly why it's damaging the restaurant's reputation. The distinction you make doesn't exist.

The act of sending a dasher to a business they don't have an explicit relationship to deliver their food -- totally fine. The app not making it clear that the restaurant isn't partnered with DoorDash and that they're placing a pick-up order and delivering it to you -- not fine.

Making "damaging the restaurant's reputation" a thing is absurd in all aspects. By the restaurant owner's own logic picking up my own order without an insulated bad shouldn't be allowed -- after all what if I get home and the pizza isn't as good because it's cold? That could hurt their business. Utter nonsense. Do we now have to decide whether "it's fair" that something potentially hurts their reputation? Is a bad review fair if it's about the food, but unfair if it's about the wait?

What DD did is bad because they impersonated the other business, not because people got soggy fries. You stop getting to curate the dining experience the moment they walk out your door.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com