I'd estimate in NYC that 90% of deliveries I get are made by bicycle, so their average expenses are comparatively very low.

The delivery vehicles being used in NYC are almost entirely e-bikes, so the expense is not as big as you might be thinking. It's certainly nothing close to the cost to gig workers for running an Uber car.

I door dash mainly in Queens & sometimes in Manhattan using an electric scooter. I have not had any extra expense so far. 80% of the time I charge my scooter at work or at the gym so I'm not really paying extra on my electricity bill lol. Also, I stick to following traffic rules and stay on the bike lane as much as possible for safety reasons. If I see a large truck coming through, and it is a narrow street, I get on the side walk and let the truck pass. It has been easy accumulating active time, especially when dashing in Manhattan. So far, I have had a good experience and it has been an easy $30+ hourly.

Can they not offset these expenses against their tax? If you’re running a business out of your vehicle, the cost of operating that vehicle is the cost of running the business which should be treated like that by the tax code.

Not in a city the size of NYC.

In between deliveries, they are on their shift, and they should be paid for their time.

> Either we want people to do things for us, want it super fast, and want to pay everyone for every second of their time.

Yes, you either pay people for every second of their time, or pay enough money for their work hours. There's no way out of this.

A courier or a taxi driver does not chose to sit on their ass the entire day. You can get a hundred orders in a row, or you can have no orders for an hour or two, and you have no control over that. And it's not like they can just get up, get a cup of cofee and go to a second job in the meantime.

Nit: Most food delivery workers in NYC are on e-bikes or mopeds. There are surely some drivers but it is prohibitively difficult to use a car for food deliveries in nearly all of Manhattan and decent portions of Brooklyn/Queens/the Bronx.

As it is there is public outcry about dangerous and aggressive riding behavior from food delivery workers. It is not strictly a bad idea to tilt the incentive structure so that while you can earn a little extra on tips for completing more deliveries, it's not such a huge part of your earnings that you need to cut corners, ride the wrong way on one-way streets, ride on sidewalks etc. to hyperoptimize your delivery rate.

I'm pretty sure Doordash tracks that and will boot drivers that don't deliver quickly as that affects their bottom line.

Indeed, it would be better if doordash would just hire full time employees. And vet them before hiring with a regular interview process. Instead of constant punitive surveillance with the threat of instant unemployment.

Can you imagine if your dev job was like this? Picking up jobs to write a single function. And if youre too slow, or one too many tests fail you get sacked.

I deliver for door dash as a side gig (supplemental income). If drivers try to milk the system and take an exaggerated amount of time to deliver orders, those drivers will not receive as many offers for orders (messes up their algorithm in the long term). I think the new model encourages people to drive safely and not rush and risk getting into an accident just because they work on tips and are trying to rush through traffic to get their money worth/ time worth for labor. It also does not put pressure on the consumer to tip since the delivery drivers will earn a livable wage. Employers should pay their workers a fair wage, not the consumer.

... or incentivize them stop instead of running over pedestrians, ride on roads/bikelanes instead of sidewalks.

I know I stay the hell out of the way of by-the-minute "communal" rental cars.

And as an additional incentive, DoorDash has decided to fuck with tips!

Only if you ignore tips.

That's a generalization with no supporting data. As an actual sample size of 1; I lived in a smaller city of only about 250k people and there was a huge selection of restaurants that offered delivery, not just pizza.

Honestly DoorDash when it did come reduced restaurant profits, lowered quality of food delivered, and increased consumer costs. Zero advantage for anyone other than DoorDash unless you consider being able to search for the food in a single app and paying extra for it to be cold on arrival an advantage.

Doordash could just employ delivery drivers to solve this problem. No need for a 100% at will temp work force. They could just hire people part time or full time. And if work is really that surgy they could just have workers on call.

Why does “innovation” have to go hand in hand with fucked up labor practices?

At the end of the day this is all driven by market dynamics that affect everyone. Uber Eats doesn't have a secret sauce that makes it cheaper for drivers to deliver food in cities with lower restaurant density. Someone has to pay for gas, someone has to pay for drivers' time. Even in large cities Uber Eats is now more expensive than ordering directly from restaurants in the past, why would it be different for cities with fewer restaurants?

We had friends who got Domino's every Thursday. On days when they hadn't called by a certain time, Domino's would call them and ask if they wanted their usual.

(This was in Tegucigalpa in the '90s, fwiw)

Ehh some restaurants still know you on a first name basis even with DoorDash. I used to order from this one Philippine spot like twice a week and after a month a decided to go there in person to sit down and when they asked for my name they immediately asked if I wanted my usual DoorDash order

> And if you called the restaurant enough, you typically got on a first name basis with them and had incredible customer service.

Also Caller ID isn’t that new.

I definitely miss the experience of hearing “the usual?” once I tell them my address.

In my experience, the more "corporate" restaurant groups are growing but the less well capitalized small businesses are in a world of hurt trying to balance the books with the leftovers after the rise in physical rent and advertising/platform company costs.

I live in the NYC suburbs.

COVID killed a number of restaurants, but some, thrived. A couple of local sit-down restaurants switched to take-out only, fired all their waitstaff, and probably got a lot of financial assistance. They made out well.

A couple, never went back to in-house dining. They are still take-out only.

Doordash became huge around here (Ubereats, too). Pretty much every restaurant does them.

The prices have gone way up, for many of these places. A few places have doubled their prices, in just a few months.

Not sure of all the causes, or the long-term effects, but I am not seeing too many "Help Wanted" signs.

There are still more amazing places to eat in NYC than you could comfortably visit in a lifetime. I can't even keep up with the new places that open in my own neighborhood.

Wait. What? For the first time in my life I am not being a wise ass. Can you please tell me more about this?

> The only way it works is if someone else's time is an order of magnitude less valuable than yours.

Ish.

There's clearly a logistics problem here. 1-meal being delivered promptly on time scales poorly. But 15 meals delivered to 15 different people within 45 minutes is in fact, a net gain.

Alas, Doordash and Uber have gone about it in all the wrong ways. Its the drivers who double-book this process (ie: picking up more orders than they can handle), leading to inconsistent quality, cold food, late deliveries and more.

Its a legitimate model though. A more "proper" company that's doing this officially is Foodsby, where one Restaraunt makes a single delivery to 15-ish people in one trip at a designated time and location (usually within 5 minutes walking distance of an office complex. IE: One particular office building has a Foodsby drop-off point).

Everyone pays $2 each, the driver is happy, the restaraunt is happy (their personal staff deliver and therefore ensure quality food / hot food at the appropriate, predesignated time), and a ~5 minute walk for a bunch of office workers is a good idea anyway cause we're all sitting on our asses all day.

---------

It double-benefits because professional chefs like doing ~15 or 20 of the same order all at once, its more efficient for them... especially if they can plan such an order ahead of time (Foodsby isn't offered every day for a Restaraunt, they pick-and-choose the days that they'll offer the service).

So the chefs can cut-down on scheduling if they're burning out, or they can plan ahead and offer more days if they know some days are lulls / they have extra freetime.

Doordash / Grubhub / Uber is almost malicious for everyone involved. There's some ideas of convenience to some people, but its not good enough for the overall environment. In contrast, Foodsby (and hopefully more companies that adopt that model) has proven itself sustainable, at least in my area.

>The only way it works is if someone else's time is an order of magnitude less valuable than yours.

Targeting mainly the wealthy isn't necessarily a bad business strategy.

It should also be noted that it's also useful for bulk order to people and those unable to physically move themselves to a place (disability, lack of car, etc). It's not a "use everyday" mechanism, but it has uses.

Indeed, the only way it is working right now is because a significant piece of their revenue is from discounted gift cards so their revenue grows while taking a loss. In the future, they will have to replace the driver with something automated if they want to make money.

>It takes 10 minutes for a chef to make my meal, and 25 minutes for someone to come to the restaurant, pick it up, and drive it to my house.

And in that 25 minutes, the food has gotten cold and its chemistry has changed too. You could reheat it in the microwave, but now it'll just taste like reheated leftovers.

Why do people buy this crap?

> The only way it works is if someone else's time is an order of magnitude less valuable than yours.

Food delivery also seems to work with vertically integrated geo-segmented services like pizza and Chinese takeout. My best guess is that the profit margin and delivery packing are high enough to make it worthwhile.

I wish there were Indian curry vans instead of ice cream vans, driving around the streets playing distinctive music from 5-8pm. Group buy discounts for individual streets to promote pre-purchase, etc. Do a different suburb each night of the week. Please someone make this.

Most of my favorite local restaurants use other platforms now. It's been 3 years since I've last used Uber or DD. If they don't deliver, I just go pick it up myself.

> The only way it works is if someone else's time is an order of magnitude less valuable than yours

I mean, you've basically just described the entire service industry and virtually any job in North American where tips are expected.

There is an entire class of people ready to serve you.

The basic concept of food delivery existed long before tech and VC and was viable.

The only reason these companies can't turn a profit is because all those microservices, ads and "engagement" don't come for free.

Not sure why you got downvoted, its true. These platforms are all a race to the bottom to capture market share and then jack up of prices to recover lost revenue. Overall, it ends up being a terrible experience for the customer and the driver/deliverer.

I've never really gotten this. We can speculate about the intelligence of VCs, but I assume most of them know a bit of basic math. I wonder if perhaps they are so deep into a bubble of wealth and privilege that to them, spending $50 for a (cold by the time it arrives) burger seemed reasonable. Perhaps they thought that once everyone could experience this for an amount of money they find trifling, it would catch on?

I've used these services a time or two just to see what the fuss is about and I don't get it myself.

That's a somewhat outdated narrative to still be parroting.

Uber just got included into the SP 500. One of the pre-requisites for that is being profitable on a GAAP basis.

I mean I think it can be, given that there's a $20-$30 markup per order, but it definitely requires some particular circumstances.

The bigger thing is that if you're thinking of Lean manufacturing principles or Theory of Constraints, where the goal is to get the noise out of the system, you would never maximize a business the way that Uber Eats and Doordash are. It'd instead be something like the following pipe dream:

- We sell "pizza delivery as a service" to businesses who want it -- at first we're trying to partner with Target and Walmart, etc. Our value proposition to them is "hey Amazon is eating you alive, how about we help you offer ultra-rapid delivery and the people you're working with basically become fellow trusted Target employees?" (Of course, we'd be happy to double-dip -- ideally we'd convince Amazon that we're a cheaper way to reach their customers than their own delivery drivers. But that's a really hard sell.)

- The company rents delivery people from us per day, we provide the delivery network. If you need to "burst" we can provide extra folks to augment at a premium. Ideally someday we'll get some lucrative Amazon contract where the Amazon warehouse, but to start with we're doing laundry delivery and other odd jobs. The company maintains their brand; we're just a courier service. You don't go to the FedEx website to order something, you select FedEx at the end with "how would you like this to come to you."

- On the side, we do sell a service of "we will give you a new pickup/delivery portal web site that works with our delivery service" to smaller businesses so that they can get started with us.

- We are a courier service but we only operate in cities where we can sufficiently average out the volumes needed. Amazon, UPS, FedEx can be the kings of the countryside, that's fine.

- The company, assuming food, sends their delivery-person right when the food is cooked, they are our employee and package it to our standards and bring it straight out to our delivery hub. In general they will not be going to the final address. We use this as a process buffer to maximize our throughput for the people actually driving to the home addresses, we can make sure that certain people get to know neighborhood X better, etc.

- The shipping price should come in two tiers, give people a generous shipping discount for advance orders where we can have more opportunity to batch and optimize.

- Because the company pays us (and the user pays them for "shipping"), under no circumstance does the user tip; that workflow is just too indirect to sustain tipping.

- Which means we have to do a 180 on how we treat the delivery folks; ideally they'd be full-time employees and we'd proactively unionize them.

That last bit sounds like suicide but really there's a ton of noise in terms of all of this "well the question of who are our delivery people is fraught, they can drop off the map at any time" and it's like, no, I want to be able to say at the central hub, "here's the route you're about to follow, review it while you wait 2 more minutes for Tina to arrive with order 6AF12B, that's your third one, we've got the motor running for you and you know these streets better than anybody," and under no circumstance is that person saying "eh, I have a party I want to go check out, I'm just going to go with these 2 orders and leave Tina in the lurch." And, we can sell it to city-goers as "this is the ethical way to deliver, the union makes sure that we maintain the cars and that we pay as well as we can."

And the rest of it is making the profit back up in volume.

It's 50% off the base price, which excludes the delivery fee, the convenience fee, the inconvenience fee, the COVID recovery charge, the Livable Wage surcharge etc.

The last time I ordered UberEats, all the fees plus tip nearly doubled the cost of my order.

I did wonder if being a top-tier dasher meant you got great ratings from customers, or if it meant you did DD's bidding...

> Because Door Dash can't force people to tip, someone has to take the financially bad orders.

Well, they're trying, by not-so-subtlely telling customers that if they don't want their orders to get cold, they need to pre-emptively tip.

Outside rush hour there's already not enough work in the sense that there will be long periods of waiting for orders in even very large cities. It seems like if anything they could afford to raise standards for the consumer by offering less to lower performing drivers to make contracting unappealing.

That seems less problematic for Airbnb if you’re getting the actual listing as described.

> DoorDash is effectively eliminating it (or at least making it truly optional)

it was truly optional before, no? you just had to decide if you were taking an option or implicitly being a jerk before ordering. now you decide after.

perhaps companies need to stop implying such things altogether. such as could be done by not even mentioning a tip until food is in hand. as that is what a tip is.

that the delivery person be paid more upfront and outside of tips is part of the problem that needs solved. a big part, but not the only one.

in fact the case study advocates for more than dd did.

so this doesn’t seem to be what the commenter wanted. progress but not completion. maybe not time to celebrate yet.

Well, you can't pay a tip forward to guarantee good service; it's supposed to be a reward after good service.

I think it should be illegal to ask for a variable tip before a service is substantially completed. Go ahead and charge a fixed gratuity, but prepaying tips is silly.

Tipping in the US has become an obligation or entitlement and is rarely associated with the actual service anymore.

It works as a bid but only up to a certain amount, above which Dasher just shows the offer with e.g. "$6+ tip", hiding the full tip amount until after the order is delivered.

Keep in mind that in NYC tips are exempt from sales tax, but bids for services are not. So customers would pay 8.875% more if DoorDash stopped pretending the payments are tips.

(there is a sales tax exemption for mandatory gratuities, but that only applies where the ultimate recipient is an employee whereas DoorDash deliverypeople are independent contractors - https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/tg_bulletins/st/gratui...)

I know they want to control pricing, obfuscate things, take advantage, extract surpluses etc., etc., but the 'two-sided market' thing would be way more convincing with real legible price discovery. Let people that want their food _now_ throw in an extra $20 for the privilege. If someone in Long Beach wants something from SGV, let them pay whatever it takes to get someone to get someone to drive two hours. Give Dashers tools to build auto-bidding strategies that align with their preferences. Show people ordering what similar trips cost recently. This doesn't have to be an awful dystopic extractive system...

Waiting time for the next order is the same distribution for each one of them. So to minimize the number of pay gaps in a day, you will want to stretch out each delivery as long as possible.

If you are a true believer in the impossibility of good service in the absence of heavily tip-based pay, you set up incentives like this and your belief system won't ever be challenged.

That seems to "match" what I quickly saw. I'm in no way an expert on this, but I did some quick spot checking of what I could find online. From 5-10 screenshots I saw of people's earnings drivers seem to have about 70% or 75% of "dashing time" as active time.

There were exceptions I also saw, someone at 50%, some other people said they were at ~90% although I didn't see screenshots.

I assume this varies heavily by if your in a city or not or how close to meal time it is which I've got no insight into.

And note this could be all entirely wrong - it's people who chose to post their screenshots online so huge risk for selection bias to it being higher paid workers.

What law are you referring to, and a minimum of $20 per hour for what? Wouldn't your interpretation mean I can sign up for DoorDash, keep the app open, never accept a delivery, and be guaranteed $20/hr?

> Wow I totally missed the “active” part, thanks for pointing that out.

Years of less than honest players have taught me to read press releases like a lawyer redlining a contract. Every last word is in there for a reason.

Dashed for 3 years, it's highly variable. I probably averaged 50% or less tbh. Also, un-tipped orders are weighted more into the pay-by-time in my experience, since you can't say no. It also means you can't avoid slow/bad restaurants, or unsafe/low-tipping neighborhoods.

So, I did doordash for three years during the pandemic, working through college. In that time. I received 5 tips post-delivery, out of nearly 2000 deliveries. It was so uncommon that I remember all of them. At the same time, regardless of distance or time, DoorDash would only offer $2-$3.50 per delivery. So yes, if you didn't tip up-front, I was unlikely to take your delivery after I ealized that. My rule of thumb was no less than $5, and $2/mile, decreasing to $1/mile with a long enough distance. Otherwise, between maintenance and gas, I was losing money. I only broke that rule if my numbers were too low. They implemented this style of pay shortly before I left the service, but in my experience, it paid nowhere near well enough to be worthwhile.

It is, and apparently a common shitty thing the drivers experience is big tips that evaporate shortly after delivery.