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Comment by cdrnsf | Hacker News Reader

DoorDash and gig companies generally are a play to destabilize employment and turn as many people as possible from employees entitled to benefits and legal protections into contractors that can be discarded at whim. How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers?

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> How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers?

One word: variety.

My local sushi place isn't going to have enough delivery orders to justify having delivery drivers on staff.

Heck, I remember years ago (Was it the late 90s?) when McDonald's tried to do delivery.

I'll concede the point on variety but I don't think the platforms or their terms are fair to restaurants, delivery drivers or perhaps even customers (though they're clearly choosing to engage). Our favorite Mexican food place in town will fill the orders but isn't happy with them and I imagine they're not alone.

Your original post seems to suggest that DoorDash doesn't actually provide value (that we didn't have before) to customers, but that's trivially false. I think that's the thing people are arguing against.

But yes, their business practices suck, and that's our fault as a society for yet again allowing capitalism to run amok.

Indeed, I don't like how the delivery companies double-dip by charging both the restaurant AND the customer for a delivery. A modest fee of like 5% to the restaurant would maybe be fine (Especially considering the restaurant is already likely paying 3% for credit card processing), but based on the price differences between DD and the restaurant's own menu, it likely 15-20%.

The problem of course is that a restaurant that refuses to work with deliveries then ends up getting significantly fewer orders than ones that do. It creates a bit of a racket. Restaurants feel forced to cooperate, or lose significant business.

As a customer, I get around a lot of the extra costs because my credit card gives me the Dash Pass for free as a little bonus, and Costco sells $100 DD gift cards for $80, so I'm effectively getting every deliver at 20% off.

Pizza shops (and, say, Chinese takeout restaurants) are the classic kinds of businesses that employed dedicated delivery drivers (or, more likely, it's a family business, and a family member does double duty).

But delivery sushi? Delivery pasta? Delivery tapas? Delivery burritos? Delivery Korean fried chicken? Delivery acai bowls? Delivery kebab?

DoorDash etc. gives us a variety of options that we mostly didn't really have before.

I do agree with you on the bullshit of turning employment into disposable contractors. But maybe we should change our laws to make that not possible, instead of condemning the idea that it's actually neat to be able to get nearly any kind of food from nearly any restaurant delivered to your door. We didn't used to have that.

To play devils advocate, pre-UberEats era, we maybe had deliveries from Pizza places and some Chinese shops. Being able to order from basically everywhere and any time is very convenient. Restaurants are generating more sales as well, so it’s mostly the consumer, by choice, spends more on their dinner.

Their appeal initially was that they would deliver for places that didn't have their own drivers. So you went from only getting pizza and Chinese delivery to anything being available.

Now, everyone is offloading their deliveries to DoorDash. Wendy's first-party delivery is just a wrapper for DoorDash. Pizza Hut used DoorDash if they don't have enough drivers available. Even PetSmart or Petco uses DoorDash for delivery now.

Not saying it's right or good, but you could order from Pizza Hut and still get a gig worker if their driver called out stick today.

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