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So how many lemmy users are going to stop using food delivery to avoid being complicit? Especially asking if you refused to vote for Kamala Harris because of Gaza - or you can rant about how it's "not the same thing" lol.
I just can't use uber eats. It just feels weird. Like, I am fully capable of getting food myself, I know uber eats, doordash etc, pays shit, delivery folks have to wait at the restaurant if its not ready and then fix it if its not. Get my drink from the fountain if I ordered one. And then, drive all the way to my place. I then receive a cold, tossed meal. It's just depressing all around. I don't get it.
I'll pay for delivery of pizza or even something like jimmy johns who have delivery drivers, but having a third party involved just feels wrong.
It's also freaking expensive. When I used it occasionally at my last job we'd get reimbursed up to $20. I usually just got the $12 combo and by the time all the fees were added, I still ended up paying $2-3 out of pocket.
This is how I felt too. Eventually I just stopped using our corporate Grubhub “perk” because I was still paying for it when the entire idea was supposed to be a meal “on the company” once a week for weekly All-Hands meetings.
Another massive pet peeve that made me stop using these fucking delivery services is many times the restaurants would give you less food than if you went there. Take a place like Red Robin and their basket of fries was basically 25% a basket of fries at a marked up cost because they have to pay fees to these companies and lose money.
Plus they often got orders wrong. Not sure if that was on purpose or what, but I rarely got everything I asked for or the mods correct.
Now see, I kinda had the idea for a syndicated delivery service (not online orders, but the internet would have been used to create the order data that would assign drivers) decades ago. I did some part time work delivering food back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I always thought it was so inefficient. The place I was at, was very busy, he had a very large delivery area but even so. There would be times he was paying people to sit outside talking shit to eachother in their cars.
I thought it would make sense to have a larger pool of drivers that service multiple restaurants/take-aways. Adding the economies of scale to the problem to ensure that people were being utilised and lowering the cost to each place using the service. Of course also paying some money to the person running the business that brought it all together.
I don't think I ever considered paying less than this guy did (which wasn't a lot, but would likely translate to $5 or so an hour in the 90s/2000s).
One thing I find really interesting about uber eats/door dash (US)/Deliveroo (UK/EU). When you add up their fees, they take a delivery fee from the user, a service fee from the user, an even bigger service fee from the restaurant and pay the lowest possible fee that will keep drivers interested. Yet I always hear the services are losing money too. How is that even possible?
Take deliveroo in the UK. Looking now I can see (I don't live in a city, so most places are some distance away). A place 4.5 miles away is charging £4.29 for delivery. Let's make up an imaginary order:
Order total: £20 (including sales tax/VAT) User's service fee: £2.39 (it seems to be 11% including the VAT with a maximum set of which I am not sure how much) User's delivery fee: £4.29 (including VAT, since they need to charge VAT on a service) Restaurant service fee: £6 (30% on the VAT included total). I am really unsure how this works entirely in terms of tax though... Total for user: £26.68
Total deliveroo service revenue: Net: £10.57 VAT: £2.11 Total: £12.68
Reading between the lines from what I can see delivery riders are paid between £3 and £6 per delivery. Now, in the cities this is probably great. I do wonder how they do it in the towns and villages. When I look at the list of places available to me most are 3 miles or more away, with some up to 6 miles away. I do wonder how £6 compensates someone doing a 10+ mile round trip at times.
But OK the price they pay drivers doesn't include any tax. So it comes from the Net total. This means per delivery in revenue they are always making £4.50 or more per delivery.
Yes, they need to pay support staff, but they are in low cost geographies. Yes, they need to keep development staff and the usual management overhead And yes, they need servers/cloud time to host this stuff.
Looking this up (not sure how good the source is) their revenue in 2023 was £2.7billion, which I believe. However they lost £38million. Where all the costs come from, I am not sure.
I wonder how these numbers compare to US based operators?
Yet I always hear the services are losing money too. How is that even possible?
Massive amounts of money spent on advertising to get that sweet sweet venture capital. Leeching as much money as they can out of the business into the pockets of investors and C suite parasites. Paying lawyers to fight lawsuits due to skirting laws.
Just capitalism things.
Last Week Tonight has an episode on food delivery apps. They talk about how these apps don't seem to help anyone. The customer pays more than before, the restaurant loses money, the delivery drivers lose money, and the app loses money.
The general idea seems to be that venture capitalists believe they can change the way the system works so that everyone eventually relies on an app to order food. Once ordering food without using an app becomes impossible, they can charge whatever they want and make a killing.
The thing is, they do already have lock-in in some ways at least. Otherwise I cannot imagine a restaurant wanting to give away 30% of each sale this way. Unless the other option is virtually no traffic.
The key between UberEATS and a much better service you describe is that the drivers need to stay on site, and the site needs to be geographically in the same place.
But yeah, I agree a better model would be tiny GrubHubs that service one, very small restaurant area. Basically the pizza delivery drivers also deliver for the 4-5 restaurants around the pizza place.
It'd be better service for the users, likely cheaper, and better for the restaurants who have 4-7 consistent drivers, and it'd be better for the drivers who actually get an hourly wage on top of their delivery fees.
Someone just has to build the infrastructure for this, have the capital to get started, sell the restaurants on it, and advertise the service.
Also, they handle multiple orders. So, by the time you get your food it’s lukewarm at best, but likely cold and soggy.
Last time I checked out of curiosity, this Mexican place near me sells burritos for $12. After fees and tips, it would’ve been $28 on Uber Eats. It’s just not worth it to me to pay extra, when I can easily drive the 10 minutes myself.
During the pandemic I can see why these services blossomed, but I have only used them once or twice - and only in NYC where I didn't have a car, and even if I did, getting around by car and parking is more challenging anyway. (Delivery drivers in NYC get around by scooter which they drive anywhere they want (street, sidewalk, wrong way on the street, they do not care. They'd probably get on the elevator if they could).
To me the service charges and tips are higher than I want to pay and I'll just pick up the stuff myself. It'll probably be hotter anyway since there aren't other deliveries that need to be made before mine. The one exception is pizza where they already have their own delivery people.
I've never delivered for Uber Eats specifically, but I don't know how they managed less than $2 an hour without doing obviously impractical things like trying to deliver at off hours, or in a poor area for it. I average about $27/hour. This is however, with GrubHub that has a wait list for drivers and they deliberately don't overcrowd regions. Area really has a lot to do with it. I can imagine that if Uber doesn't cap the amount of drivers in an area, a full on city is probably the worst example of a place to try it. I know that DoorDash is the same way in Atlanta, and the few times I have tried there, it wasn't worth the trip. One thing you learn very fast through observations is that the "hot zones" mentioned in the article don't matter. All they mean is that someone ordered from a place there before the map refreshed.
I guess my point here, is that the pay isn't necessarily shit. You have to put in some leg work and learn the best areas around you as well as the times to work.
I do have a lot to say about doing this line of work with over 1k deliveries done across 3 apps, but it is kind of out of the scope of this comment unless someone asks.
Editing to add because people asked:
To address some comments here; I already had an LLC, and insured my car through that which made it cheaper. No, the driver doesn't get basically nothing if you don't tip. It's around $1/mile driven with an order (sorry, but I'm not up to doing the approximate .625 km/mile conversions here). I hate to say it, but if you are doing this even as a side job, you need to find overly gentrified suburbs, or a town that has almost nothing as far as restaurants go. I happen to be in a sweet spot between the two. My "assigned area" is Woodstock, GA but that still covers all the way up to Jasper. Woodstock is the overly gentrified suburb, and Jasper has almost nothing.
A discussion of the apps I've delivered for
- DoorDash: Extremely low barrier to entry. Good to start with. However, if you don't do 100 deliveries in your first month it falls apart (trust me, that's more than you realize). You will need to schedule everything and it is extremely competitive and low pay since DoorDash focuses more on fast food.
- InstaCart: You're entering waiting list territory here. My wait time was 3 months. It seems fantastic at first until you have to do an order that the customer will pick up. Do not accept these orders, because you will not only have to shop for potentially 40+ items, you will also have to do a large bagging job.... for maybe $15 that takes you an hour. The key with InstaCart is to do the smallest (in terms of distance) delivery orders.
- GrubHub: This is what I currently do. I had to wait 7 months. Because of marketing stuff, it focuses on sit down restaurant orders. This means the pay for the driver is much higher (not only tips, the orders tend to be high cost by themselves, also the $1/mile driven with an order thing still applies). The giant benefit for driving for GrubHub is that it is unique in that as a driver it is almost like being a taxi driver. You can turn on the meter whenever. You are, however, limited to an area (and that is, as I stated earlier, the most important thing).
Is it worth it?
Many have noted the operational costs. With the mileage deduction of ¢60 per mile for tax purposes, it adds up a lot. Remember that you make roughly $1/mile driven with an order. I net around $19/hour with expenses, including tax. For me, that very much makes it worth the time. There are roughly 7 hours a day for my area that are worth driving for. 11 AM-1 PM, and 5-9 PM. Expenses included, I can make around $500 on weekends. I do, however, own a compact car with very good mileage. That's an extra $2000/mo. So, yes, if you really do the leg work it is worth it. You can not, as shown in this article, show up with a bike in a major city and every hope to make money. Bare minimum, you'd need a car.
Tips Vs. Bids
I've seen comments here saying that your tip is not a tip, but a bid. This is partially true. I do need to reiterate that I've not done much of this work in a full fledged city (Atlanta being the only one I've covered). Your tip is not a bid. What happens is that your order (if just plain unprofitable) gets bounced from driver to driver. Your "tip" never has to escalate. What happens is that the pay from whatever service escalates. Say, someone makes an order and the total the potential driver might make is $10. If one driver declines, it gets passed to the next "best driver" - so on an so forth. Each time the pay from the company initially providing the service increases. There is no increased cost to the customer. This is why there is no reason, as a driver, one should never accept a low offer. That's how the bids work. It isn't from customer tips. There tends to be, however, a charge that will get you priority as a customer. Usually, drivers will have more than one order. You can pay to not get the meme of "lol took 20 mins over time, cold, and thrown around."
The Ways You Can Stick It To A Bad Delivery Person
- Rate them low. Seriously. It's based on an average. 1 ⭐ out of 5 can very easily get them fired. Most services require at least a 4.2 average, or they will be terminated. You need to be willing to do that, though. That's it. You can fire people almost on the spot for slow, cold, incorrect, or undelivered food. And, honestly - you should. There are those of us that give a shit.
I will definitely be interested to hear about your experience.
This was in Toronto, and to call the ebike courier job market here "oversaturated" would be an understatement.
What a sad country, where people have to accept being paid so little.
I've been arguing for decades that EU needs to tax imports from USA, because USA is using social dumping to compete unfairly.
The US minimum wage is not a living wage, and employers can even go below that if they can claim tips are part of the wage. And they don't even provide healthcare for all. This is causing extreme poverty unbecoming of a developed country, and is social dumping.
USA has created a system where employers are not paying the actual cost of labor. By tilting the power balance to vastly favor employers, and fail to regulate against abuse.
Apparently this is in Canada, which surprises me a little, I thought they were better regulated. This gig economy shit should clearly be illegal, and workers should be paid a reasonable living wage.
Chattel slavery ended but we are ruled by people who think of themselves as modern slavers though.
Have you heard the claim "Slavery wasn't that bad."?
That has actually been pushed by the extreme right for a couple of years now!
Like WTF? Are they arguing we should have slavery again?
Had a colleague that did it as a side gig and no matter how many times I told him to do it, he always refused to do the calculation to figure out how much he was making after expenses.
I was going to do it as a side hustle, but then I found out that I would have to change the type of car insurance I have, and my rate would go up. If I didn’t and had an accident while delivering, my insurance company would 100% deny all claims - assuming they found out I guess. I wasn’t willing to risk it , and the higher premium cost made it unprofitable.
Well this is a more or less solved problem in BC:
https://www.moneysense.ca/earn/careers/gig-worker-rights-in-canada/
The gig worker min wage is 20% more than min wage to account for the "non-engaged time".
Food delivery only made sense as an operating cost of the business, so third party delivery would have only made sense as something that the businesses subsidized. It also only makes sense if it is structured around the busy times of day as well.
I worked in a few businesses in the late 90s that offered delivery. In every case the delivery drivers were basically kitchen staff who went on deliveries OR the business itself was primarily delivery based in the first place and they still had the drivers do some other work around the place during downtime between meals. Both approaches spread the cost of the employees over more than the literal time delivering, because otherwise the cost per hour would be ridiculous. They also delivered food that held up to delivery times, so the food waiting 10-15 minutes before being delivered wasn't an issue.
There was a reason that pizza places and Chinese restaurants frequently had delivery even in smaller towns while things like McDonald's did not. The food held up to delivery and was frequently of a volume that made the restaurant subsidizing the cost of delivery feasible.
I think the trick is you'll never make it just driving for one service, you have to do Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, maybe even Instacart as well if you want to do it for a living.
Just like the people who drive for both Uber and Lyft.
We don't have to use that service. Who's with me?
I've never used the third party delivery apps because it was clear their business model was going to screw over the drivers from the beginning.
And be very expensive for the customer at the same time. Food is expensive enough already without adding more fees and overhead.
I think the problem is: what they call a "Tip" is more like a "Bid"/"Offer". People see "Tip" and thus believe its optional, I mean it technically is optional, but the base pay is like $2.50 so its customarily required. I think for even the shortest delivery of a place 10 minutes away with a 2 mile distance is supposed to tip at least $5. and if the delivery is done in 30 minutes, that's an effective wage of $15/hour, that is, if they get orders back-to-back.
Customers don't understand how this works and puts $0 as the "Tip", buts its really a "Bid", effectively making anyone who is willing to accept the order, to work below minimum wage. And also new drivers doesn't understand how this works and acceepts orders without a good enough "Bid", effectively working below minimum wage.
I mean, why even call it a "Tip" if its customarily required, just change the base pay to $7.50 (which I'm sure those companies will charge the customer for it, but anyways...). So for an order that takes 30 minutes, its an effective wage of $15/hour, assuming they get orders back-to-back. Much less confusion amongst both customers and drivers.
I think for even the shortest delivery of a place 10 minutes away with a 2 mile distance is supposed to tip at least $5. and if the delivery is done in 30 minutes, that’s an effective wage of $15/hour, that is, if they get orders back-to-back.
Since these shitty companies don't provide vehicles or gas money most of that $15 is going to vehicle costs.
When I delivered for a pizza place in the late 90s in a midwest college town with my own car I got 15-20 per hour between base pay, gas and car use subsidy, and tips. That business was 90% deliveries, so the delivery was baked into the cost.
Americans be crazy. I never tipped in my life and ain't about to start.