The sad thing is that they’re probably just gonna shut down shop there and hurt these workers. Not justifying their low payment at all. Just fuck. Capitalism is fucked up.
Restaurants used to just have their own delivery drivers. Crazy, right? Like Phillip J. Fry.
I delivered pizza and later Chinese food for years, working directly for a restaurant. I get the sense you got a way better level of service from that arrangement, as well, versus the Uber Eats randos you get these days. You sure as shit did from places where I was a driver.
My wife and I have gone back to when we order food, like our pizza night, ordering directly from the place. I know the drivers are getting paid a decent wage and without all the extra fees it’s more reasonably priced. Plus the food actually arrives in a timely fashion and is still hot rather than the driver doing a bunch or other deliveries before us and the food being cold.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it – we’re talking trade balances here – once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here – once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel – once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity – y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else:
I was blown away the first time. Only had the audio book but sat there, ok he’s describing the internet, vr, and a country ruled by corporate interests… Big Whooop. Wait, published in 1992? There’s some interesting predictions, and ideas surrounding technology but still grounded in reality. A bit of Alt-history.
Guess who’s about to keep all employee tips… A minimum wage is a great first step, but stricter regulation will be needed to curtail the absurd levels of greed from these megacorps.
It’ll be exciting to see who steps in and provides this service to in the void being left… Surly Netflix won’t try and stop somebody coming in and running a boutique service for those still interested in this…
Also I’ve now learned that gamefly both still exists and has a DVD by mail service
I’m all for ending the exploitation of workers in this country, but I’m curious how this bill will pan out. One big part of someone doing contracted work is that they cannot be required to abide by specific work hours dictated by the company. As of now, these delivery people decide when they want to work. Will DoorDash now set specific hours for their drivers? Will drivers only get paid the hourly wage when actively on deliveries? There are a lot of details I’m curious about here
This is the real answer. If your business relies of billions in VC money every year to stay afloat, then you don’t have a sustainable business and probably shouldn’t keep doing what you’re doing. Last time I checked Uber eats has a negative margin on every order…
If your business relies of billions in VC money every year to stay afloat, then you don’t have a sustainable business and probably shouldn’t keep doing what you’re doing.
This right here. We need to see unprofitable “disruptors” close before they wreck existing systems and drive up the cost of living and/or drive down the quality of life for everyone. How many previously profitable businesses who provided decent jobs closed because they couldn’t complete with Amazon while Amazon wasn’t even technically making a profit? How much of the current housing crisis is driven by AirBNB and such? They drove up housing prices in the name of cheap weekend rentals and now the weekend rentals aren’t even cheap anymore.
There used to be lots of delivery models that were profitable while paying people fairly. Door dash and others just convinced us all to cut each other’s throats for a brief window of savings.
Remember when minimum wage driver work went up for a vote in California under prop 22 and we still voted against it? Im always so mad every election cycle i feel like everyone is a complete moron working against themselves
In those workers’ defense, the delivery companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a disinformation campaign to trick the public into thinking that voting for 22 was in their own interest.
It’s absurd that it was on the ballot in the first place.
Is it fair to call people stupid when they’re facing a literal corporate propaganda campaign? I’d sooner reach for “corporations are evil” than “people are stupid” in that case. Remember how people used to treat you if you were against the Iraq war? And today, we know that thing was unnecessary and awful. Sometimes powerful people just manage to convince us of things that aren’t true.
I agree in so far as the human brain is pretty fucking stupid and easily “hacked.” Especially when companies literally pay psychologists to get better at brain hacking.
If you are too lazy to pickup your own food and need someone to deliver it to you, then yeah it is your job to pay those people. You expect someone to want to bring you food for free?
No, I think he expects their employer to pay them through the fees they collect. If the tip is mandatory, it’s not a tip, it’s a fee and it should be included in the up front costs with payroll taxes etc deducted.
Instead of a bribe, I call it a Bid. I’ll give a tip for good service, somebody waiting around an extra 10 minutes at the restaurant because they’re giving us BOTH the runaround? Absolutely, have an extra bit of cash, you didn’t have to do that for me and I want to compensate that extra effort so they’re more likely to go that extra mile in the future without fear of it hurting potential profits they would have made by dropping me and picking up another order.
Invalids and disabled people use these services too. The problem isn’t they expect it for free, the problem is the people who do the work are not being paid a living wage to do it.
There is a deeper problem that doesn't get discussed enough: namely, that customer may not actually value delivery enough to pay workers a livable wage. Delivery companies are bleeding money left and right, and none of them are meaningfully profitable. They were riding the money tap from low interest rates for a while, but now that that's dried up and people are starting to hit their limit of how much they'll pay in fees for delivery, we're gonna hit a breaking point, especially as governments start to tighten the rules like this.
Either customers will actually pay enough for this to be a financially viable business, or they won't. Pretty much every sign has pointed in the negative so far, and the companies are eventually going to run out of money to throw at this. From a teeny bit of research, it seems like the average delivery worker gets somewhere around 3-4 trips per hour. To hit $20 a hour, which isn't exactly a high wage, each person ordering delivery is going to have to accept adding at least five more bucks or so on top of the cost of their food, and on top of a fee to actually keep the platform itself running, and those engineers aren't exactly cheap, and even more fees to start paying down the company's debt (Uber has about 9 billion dollars of debt right now), and even more fees to pay shareholders.
There's simply quite of lot of cost built into a single delivery trip, and I don't think the average consumer is really willing to pay it just to save a bit of time and effort getting food. But hey, we'll see.
Pizza delivery is generally handled by each individual restaurant with some dedicated employees, so it's a pretty different model than something like Uber Eats. Pizza is also fast, cheap, and simple, so that helps to drive down costs. It's also generally a complete meal for at least two people, if not a whole group, and so the delivery cost gets split across more people.
I get the comparison, but I don't think they're really as analogous as they seem. One is a pizza place hiring a delivery person or two to drive some pizza around; the other is a large tech company settled with debt and inventor obligations paying very expensive engineers to manage incredibly complicated logistics networks and deal with tens of thousands of distinct parties.
This is really kinda my point. Why is pizza delivery so much cheaper? Because it doesn't have to deal with all these extra costs that a massive delivery network like Uber inherently has to manage. I imagine we'll eventually hit some kind of equilibrium where a lot of restaurants that can manage it have their own in-house delivery people, while the large networks will have to dramatically downsize or die.
It’s similar in some ways but overall a very different business model which doesn’t work out nearly as efficiently.
When you’re delivering pizza, you generally just work out of one location. You have a relationship with the business you’re working at which includes an area set aside for deliveries where drivers can both plan the orders into batches of ones that work well together, considering when they’ll come out of the oven, their destinations, and what the other drivers are doing. When it’s busy, drivers can go in, look over all the current orders (ready or not), and take deliveries to their cars without needing to interact with employees at all. In some locations, they might also be considered kitchen staff and can also do things like pick orders or cook items that aren’t yet ready, allowing them to both provide value to the business (further justifying a wage) and get deliveries out the door sooner.
A lot of that isn’t the case for delivery services. The food pickup can be anywhere, so you can’t just go back to the restaurant and wait, and the pickups need to be optimized just like the dropoffs (if the service even allows you to batch deliveries together). You don’t have that relationship with the business; you’re basically just another customer, so no going to the back to see what’s up or helping the employees when they are swamped.
I’ve done pizza delivery in the past. I didn’t mind it. I don’t think I would like delivering for one of these apps, it sounds like a giant pain in the ass.
If I take everything you say as true at face value. Then the business was a shitty idea. The owners of the company who have gambled away the VC money should be the ones on hook for it, not the customers.
It is the employer’s responsibility to ensure their workers get paid. Period.
That's precisely my point. It's ultimately a shitty business idea, and will probably eventually fail.
I don't really understand what you mean by being on the hook for it. Investors will ultimately lose quite a lot of money, workers will lose their jobs, and customers will endure the horror of walking or driving a bit to grab food.
A tip is merely subsidizing a company’s inability to pay its employees appropriately. I really could care less seeing Stanley Tang (door dash founder/ owner) gamble (and lose) hundreds of thousands of dollars on hustler casino live playing poker while simultaneously claiming his company can’t pay a living wage.
Don’t worry the drivers will just refuse to pick up your order. Basically the way it works given the companies show the tip to drivers. Especially door dash. Which create an extremely toxic problem where drivers can decide what they think is worth their time or pick something up and fuck with someone’s food cuz they didn’t get “tipped”
In this specific case, I’d unironically agree, though it’s more the free market than something that would be specific to capitalism. Users put out offers of “pick up this food for me and I will pay you x”, and drivers have the option of taking or leaving any of the offers. If none of them think your order is worth their time, I don’t think forcing any of them to do it anyways is the right thing to do.
Lmao L take. I seriously have to bid on a delivery service? What if I have a cash tip? Which is better cause it don’t technically need to be taxed for them. I am happy to render a tip after service is delivered. But the thought of bidding for something is ridiculous. And it already creates an extremely toxic environment and makes it even more toxic.
In an ideal world perhaps one managed by a federated system sure. But the companies they work for take part of their profit should they not be obligated to then treat these people as employees?
I don’t see how this doesn’t kill business for these companies.
Edit: I’m not defending the decision not to pay people more in general. It’s more about the service going away altogether because the wage cost will be passed into the customers. But if that’s what you fuckers want ok. I don’t live in NY so it doesn’t affect me. Enjoy losing access to all your delivery services.
Normally I wouldn’t give a shit. But for these P2P businesses the unit economics for the business to be profitable requires passing on that expense to the end customer.
I’m not going to pay an extra $10+ dollars or whatever for my meal when I’m already tipping, paying tax, and service charge.
So I’m saying while it sounds awesome to pay people more, in this case it will just cause these services to go away.
Everyone down voted me like I’m defending the companies, but that’s not my intention. It’s more that these services as they are won’t exist, so everyone loses. The employees lose the job and their customers lose the service. The company goes out of business too but that’s not the issue I care about. We will effectively all lose delivery services except those willing to pay a lot for it, which stifles demand and makes the problem worse.
Anyway… I’m totally willing to hear counterarguments and certainly on the side of the workers, but the knee-jerk downvote and talk about how everyone needs a living wage isn’t helping dive into the nuance of how these businesses operate and make money and what impact this decision will have on the business model.
Capitalism requires regulation. If you don’t have regulation you can only have capitalism for an incredibly short amount of time. This was all detailed in Adam Smith’s book when he invented capitalism.
Lemmy seems to dream up this strawman of Capitalism while having a very rose tinted outlook on Communism. Everyone seems to miss that these are all problems with humans, not your favorite economic system.
Especially if it’s a service. Maybe if your service business can’t generate enough revenue to pay your employees then it’s a service that doesn’t need to exist?
They can make less profit in order to cover paying employees a fair wage.
They will still be make a profit, which means all of their business expenses are covered. Those who pocket that profit will also be richer than you can ever hope to be.
I don’t see how this doesn’t kill business for these companies.
That’s because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
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