Most of that money goes towards the driver, last I checked in on unit economics. It costs quite a bit of money to pay a person to go to the restaurant, wait around, and then bring it to you — far more than the "delivery fee" that you see and that customers would pay.

Customers are cheap and they're (partly) to blame. My theory is that Amazon conditioned people to view delivery as a free commodity and pizza places who had delivery baked into their model cemented it.

So if Doordash listed a delivery fee that covered their true cost of delivery, customers would balk. So they instead have to find creative ways to get enough. Maybe it's changed and Doordash cracked the secret, but when I'd looked into it years ago these companies barely got by — many of them actually losing money.