> Gig drivers don’t face an edict for speed like past Domino’s drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into the job, with drivers hurrying to make financial incentives, avoid bad ratings, and ensure the food is warm upon delivery.
Annoying corporate policy replaced by society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I
internet - that we unlike the bad policy can't get rid of.
This is just a social credit system designed to control behavior, but attached to your workplace instead of your person.
The proof is simple. If you move this system from a single workplace to multiple workplaces with an ID for the worker, you get social credit.
This is a system that many governments and corporatists are in love with, as it generally “punishes troublemakers” without having anyone who’s a lawsuit target get overly involved. In my opinion, social credit systems are repression and totalitarianism masquerading as systems of personal responsibility.
> society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet
Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.
The customer ratings concept even infected places like your local doctor’s office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or excessive drinking for decades. Doctors are also more likely to give in to patient demands for unnecessary antibiotics or controlled substances when they know it’s going to result in a hit to their ratings if those ratings are related to their compensation.
Every time I’ve visited a car dealer for service in the past few decades, the service manager is almost begging me to give them a “9 or 10” on the survey that will be sent to me afterward. He pleads that I work with him first to address anything that might reduce his rating.
Even vehicle drivers have had “How is my driving?” numbers on the back of their cars for a very long time.
Having customer satisfaction surveys tied to performance reviews isn’t new if you’ve worked in anything customer-facing. It’s just getting more attention now because “gig economy” has become a journalistic buzzword and people are more likely to be sympathetic to an hourly worker than, say, the doctor or service manager at their local dealership.
Even long before all of this, tipping was the standard way of linking customer feedback to compensation. This applied to delivery drivers, too! The hand-wringing over customer feedback being an internet-era gig economy thing is misplaced. It has always been this way.
My SO is a restaurant manager, and she has told me that the only reviews/ratings that have any positive effects are 5s out of 5. 4 out of 5? You might as well have put 0 or 1.
Yes, these ratings problems aren't new, but they are more pervasive and less useful than ever before. For my part, I just refuse to give ratings or pay attention to them.
The effective binary nature of ratings (if you don't give the best one, you may as well give worst one) was the last straw for me. Ratings are a game that harms both customers and the people providing good and services.
> Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.
Your electronic report card is now more persistent, and there's a much smaller number of companies dominating these gig industries, and they cross areas (food delivery + driving people, for example). It's not as easy to start over.
I had I think, a related issue. I moved, need a new dentist, called one, told them I wanted to take a sleeping pill because it helps me with my anxiety from previous painful dentist visits. They said they'd have their office manager call me back. He vehemently steered me to another dentist. It was ridiculous how much corp-speak he used to try to convince me it was in my best interest. They had a 5/5 rating. I assume it's because they reject anyone the think might lower it.
Doctors telling patients they're fat doesn't help them get skinnier. The literature is pretty clear that in every double blind study, the category of medical advice or helping make nutrition and exercise plans leads to 0lbs average weight loss over 5 years.
Because, delivery drivers, unlike uber or whatever, are frequently screwed by things outside their control. No parks near the restaurant, so delay in the pickup?
Bad driver!
Restaurant behind on orders?
Bad driver!
Something missing from order?
Bad driver!
Incentives can cause perverse outcomes, but it’s worse when you are not in control of the outcomes at all.
I was a delivery driver for Dominos during that time. My manager (bless her heart, truly) was always saying "DO NOT SPEED OR BE DANGEROUS"; we had literally zero incentives to be on time, or at least we weren't punished if we weren't.
The markup on delivered pizza at THAT time was in the 800% range, so a free pie now and again wasn't going to hurt that much. A lawsuit over a crash probably would, though.
This strikes me as one of those things where scale works against incentives. If you own one store, you're making good money. There's little reason to push your managers to try to drive that margin to 810% by eliminating the occasional free pizza.
But when you own a dozen stores (like one of the stories in the article) all you see are numbers, you don't care, you push as hard as you can to "drive efficiencies" and you end up with managers who are getting yelled at because they're at 97% sub-30m delivery instead of the 98.5% goal or whatever. And then you have a manager pulling a pizza out of a car wreck and giving it to another driver.
I think it is also the decoupling from real people doing real job. The farther you go from ground level work, the easier it is to theorize what they could do - whether it is asking drone operators to bomb some place, or set a policy without setting foot in the store on a daily basis, or do a leveraged buyout based primarily on a spreadsheet driven model, the farther you go away from people whose lives are being impacted, the easier it is for you to make decisions that do not think about them.
"The rise of microwaves and frozen dinners made Americans more accustomed to convenience and averse to going out in public. (One food industry exec described these consumer habits as “cocooning.”) "
Would love to see what this person would think after Covid. If microwaves wrecked this person's outlook on people, covid would have blown their mind
I don't think this one is actually true. I remember TV dinners replacing home cooked meals not eating out.
Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare treat rather than a daily occurrence.
> Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare treat rather than a daily occurrence.
Fwiw some of us still cook at home and go out rarely. It’s cheaper, tastier, healthier, and can be a pretty relaxing evening activity
I first heard about cocooning in a Faith Popcorn book a friend was reading.
It was some of what was written, but also about how we don't sit on the front porch and visit with neighbors in the evening, and rarely see our front doors, much less our neighbors.
"wrecked this person's outlook on people"? "Cocooning" was not an insult or meant to imply there was anything wrong with people, it was just a description of a "trend".
(And was probably in part about the large "boomer" generation aging and having kids and thus going out less)
I have recently re-read Snow Crash but, lacking the context (since I live in a difference country), I missed how closely the setting in the book parodied what is described in this article. For instance, the boss of the pizza chain being ex-military was an important plot point later in the book, but I didn't know that the real-life boss being parodied was also ex-military.
i heard snow crash was a great book so i start reading it. immediatley it gets deep into pizza, the deliverator, the extreme attention to on time delivery, universities that specialize in franchising a pizza shop
and then a little farther on you learn part of the book takes place in the virtual internet world. and i’m absolutely sure the pizza stuff is all part of this virtual world…
Hiro/the deliverator, YT, and most of the characters inhabit meatspace and "jack in" to the metaverse. Plenty is virtual but the dystopian pizza delivery is real
My dad tells a story that happened in 198X while the 30-minute guarantee still existed. He was living in DC and traffic in his neighbourhood was absolutely abysmal at peak hours when gov employees were leaving work. Apparently it could take 20 minutes just to get drive a few blocks.
So he ordered pizza with the delivery time carefully planned to coincide right when traffic was greatest.
Yet somehow the drive was able to get it to his house in 28 minutes. He tried to ask the driver how this was possible, but the driver was allready rushing back to his car.
I drove delivery in the period shortly after 30-minutes-or-N guarantees went away and customer expectations hadn't really caught up to the change. From cutting through park access trails at 60 miles an hour to using an elementary school soccer field as a shortcut between neighborhoods, nothing and I mean nothing was off the table if it shaved minutes off your drive time.
What a nice example of 1980s corporate greed maximizing profits over human life. Modern delivery food delivery services can be seen making the same delivery-by guarantees, so we haven't fully learned our lesson.
> In Domino's annual report last year, Mr. Monaghan said that ''failing to honor the 30-minute delivery guarantee was one of the big disappointments of 1987.'' He added that the delivery performance ''is still totally unacceptable and therefore must be our biggest priority in 1988.''
> ''Not fulfilling a promise is inexcusable,'' he stated in the report. ''It not only goes against everything we believe in, but it's also bad business.'' [1]
Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30 minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered to across thousands of franchisees without introducing significant risk to staff.
> Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30 minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered to across thousands of franchisees without introducing significant risk to staff
Could it not? I'm sure I could organise a pizza restaurant with a 99.9% success rate delivering pizzas within 30 minutes (the nationwide top- performing restaurant in TFA had 99%) and no more crashes than, say, the national per- mile rate for short journeys.
But to achieve this, I'd need the restaurant to be overprovisioned in delivery drivers and conservative in rejecting requests that were too far away or too busy. My restaurant would lose money. The #1 priority is never really punctuality or timeliness or customer service - those are just means to an end. It's always money in the end.
Hypothetically - why wouldn't not having a set amount of time for delivery be corporate greed too? I mean, if a corporation saves money by screwing over the customer it's corporate greed. If it screws over the employees it's corporate greed.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of people left over to screw.
"corporate greed" is gen z talk... The current economic climate has a lot of gen z's suffering, they see capitalism as the problem, thus everything is corporate greed.
It is a low quality signal, along the lines as a fiduciary duty to screw customers for profit.
The article elaborates about that at the end. This isn't "1980s corporate greed". It's just corporate greed, and it's just as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.
When the 30 minute guarantee ended I had a recipient of my pizza delivery pull a gun on me when I refused to give a free pizza! (I handed it over) An anecdote I tell at parties
You act like most probable place for such an event, when discussing on HN, ain't simply some rural US. Some folks are crazy and vastly unbalanced, period. If they have access to guns, bad shit happens frequently.
The amount of folks in US who legally own guns and never ever should be allowed to touch one is staggering.
Readit News
> Gig drivers don’t face an edict for speed like past Domino’s drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into the job, with drivers hurrying to make financial incentives, avoid bad ratings, and ensure the food is warm upon delivery.
Annoying corporate policy replaced by society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet - that we unlike the bad policy can't get rid of.
The proof is simple. If you move this system from a single workplace to multiple workplaces with an ID for the worker, you get social credit.
This is a system that many governments and corporatists are in love with, as it generally “punishes troublemakers” without having anyone who’s a lawsuit target get overly involved. In my opinion, social credit systems are repression and totalitarianism masquerading as systems of personal responsibility.
Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.
The customer ratings concept even infected places like your local doctor’s office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or excessive drinking for decades. Doctors are also more likely to give in to patient demands for unnecessary antibiotics or controlled substances when they know it’s going to result in a hit to their ratings if those ratings are related to their compensation.
Every time I’ve visited a car dealer for service in the past few decades, the service manager is almost begging me to give them a “9 or 10” on the survey that will be sent to me afterward. He pleads that I work with him first to address anything that might reduce his rating.
Even vehicle drivers have had “How is my driving?” numbers on the back of their cars for a very long time.
Having customer satisfaction surveys tied to performance reviews isn’t new if you’ve worked in anything customer-facing. It’s just getting more attention now because “gig economy” has become a journalistic buzzword and people are more likely to be sympathetic to an hourly worker than, say, the doctor or service manager at their local dealership.
Even long before all of this, tipping was the standard way of linking customer feedback to compensation. This applied to delivery drivers, too! The hand-wringing over customer feedback being an internet-era gig economy thing is misplaced. It has always been this way.
It's extremely toxic.
The effective binary nature of ratings (if you don't give the best one, you may as well give worst one) was the last straw for me. Ratings are a game that harms both customers and the people providing good and services.
Your electronic report card is now more persistent, and there's a much smaller number of companies dominating these gig industries, and they cross areas (food delivery + driving people, for example). It's not as easy to start over.
Having people with little to no understanding of work evaluate and exercise power over it has been foundational for capitalism since its beginning.
Incentives can cause perverse outcomes, but it’s worse when you are not in control of the outcomes at all.
Unfortunately though, those same incentives also incentivise risk taking and dangerous driving.
The markup on delivered pizza at THAT time was in the 800% range, so a free pie now and again wasn't going to hurt that much. A lawsuit over a crash probably would, though.
I suspect I was lucky there.
But when you own a dozen stores (like one of the stories in the article) all you see are numbers, you don't care, you push as hard as you can to "drive efficiencies" and you end up with managers who are getting yelled at because they're at 97% sub-30m delivery instead of the 98.5% goal or whatever. And then you have a manager pulling a pizza out of a car wreck and giving it to another driver.
Would love to see what this person would think after Covid. If microwaves wrecked this person's outlook on people, covid would have blown their mind
Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare treat rather than a daily occurrence.
Fwiw some of us still cook at home and go out rarely. It’s cheaper, tastier, healthier, and can be a pretty relaxing evening activity
It was some of what was written, but also about how we don't sit on the front porch and visit with neighbors in the evening, and rarely see our front doors, much less our neighbors.
(And was probably in part about the large "boomer" generation aging and having kids and thus going out less)
and then a little farther on you learn part of the book takes place in the virtual internet world. and i’m absolutely sure the pizza stuff is all part of this virtual world…
one of my favorite books
So he ordered pizza with the delivery time carefully planned to coincide right when traffic was greatest.
Yet somehow the drive was able to get it to his house in 28 minutes. He tried to ask the driver how this was possible, but the driver was allready rushing back to his car.
> ''Not fulfilling a promise is inexcusable,'' he stated in the report. ''It not only goes against everything we believe in, but it's also bad business.'' [1]
Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30 minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered to across thousands of franchisees without introducing significant risk to staff.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/29/business/fight-on-quick-p...
Could it not? I'm sure I could organise a pizza restaurant with a 99.9% success rate delivering pizzas within 30 minutes (the nationwide top- performing restaurant in TFA had 99%) and no more crashes than, say, the national per- mile rate for short journeys.
But to achieve this, I'd need the restaurant to be overprovisioned in delivery drivers and conservative in rejecting requests that were too far away or too busy. My restaurant would lose money. The #1 priority is never really punctuality or timeliness or customer service - those are just means to an end. It's always money in the end.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of people left over to screw.
It is a low quality signal, along the lines as a fiduciary duty to screw customers for profit.
The amount of folks in US who legally own guns and never ever should be allowed to touch one is staggering.
(Somalia: 7.02 per 100K, US: 10.84 per 100K)