Just fyi, like 99% of food delivery via gig workers in nyc is done via e-bike
A lot of these are delivered by bike nowadays, no?
Edit: since people keep asking without reading below, I mean specifically in NYC.
there’s no way to make delivery worth it for small items like this, be it by foot / bike / electric scooter / carrier pigeon
Well apparently there is considering it’s a popular service. I’m not sure what you mean by this.
Pneumatic tubes!
An instant burrito in every home!
rofl
NYC actually used to have a citywide system like this. It was for mail but there’s no reason somebody couldn’t have snuck a burrito or a rolled-up pizza into one of those cannisters.
BRING IT BACK BRING IT BACK
Good news, everyone !
hsssss…thwooooop…KChUNK
I remember being a kid in the mid 90s, in a hospital that had such a system to send messages and pills around, the vast majority of their computers were not actually networked.
These things for college campuses are great. They take up no more space than a person and can be a huge help when one is busy or sick.
With the tax being $8.04, the order is not that small.
Pizza delivery has been popular for several decades. Pizza is cheap but they made the numbers work. It’s actually weird that it was just pizza until recently.
The cost is middlemen needing to get their cut. Half the cost here is them getting their cut. $15 to use an app one time is what is unsustainable here.
exactly why airport pizza has such an amazing business model, because pizza can be delivered efficiently by aircraft to places up to a couple hundred miles away without relying on non-existant roads or rail
no. they are all delivered by car, even if they say it’s by bike.
bikes are too slow for be good for delivery
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Speed is measured differently in the US
yes, miles per hour instead of meters per second
In a large metropolis, yes. Unfortunately most cities in the USA are spread out so much that you almost need a car to go to the bathroom.
Delivery is good option for people with limited mobility
been disabled since 2017. pays half my salary. gave up driving last year. not good at those prices. wife grows vegetables in summer.
agreed. Just because something is unsustainable if everyone were to have limited mobility doesn’t mean it’s unsustainable.
Why does OP think every delivery is made by car? Often times they are made by bike.
Especially in NYC. Bike delivery has been a thing there long before uberdashhub. Hell, it was a fucking plot point in Spiderman 2 back in 2004:
I think it was TMNT 2 that had a delivery guy on a moped back in like 92.
I see you’ve never been to the Midwest. Or the south. Or anywhere that isn’t Boston/new York/San Francisco.
I mean the post clearly says $30 in fees in New York city
I see you think only america exists
I’ll add in addition to the “not where I live” replies, I live in pretty textbook white suburban america and I believe I have never seen anything delivered to me or a neighbor or relative by a two-wheeled vehicle of any kind, even motorized. Every single time it is a private 4-seat passenger vehicle or larger.
It is different in other areas of course, like when visiting cities and other countries.
But damn are such vast swaths of suburban and rural america designed so specifically around cars. It would take forever to change even with a progressive culture & government. With the culture and government we have now, I will be stunned if I am not driving my own vehicle for the rest of my life, and I will not be surprised at all if it’s mostly ICE vehicles. I drive a well maintained 13 year old Mazda3 that gets 40mpg, so it’s not ideal versus more efficient and environmentally friendly types of transport, but at least it’s a more efficient use of the existing infrastructure than most americans.
Not where I live.
I don’t disagree that it’s stupid but my problem is the stacking - Delivery fee and Service fee? The service is delivery! Why are they two fees? Either the cost of the delivery is being itemized in real time ($1.99 for gas, the rest for the human) or the delivery isn’t $1.99! If the cost to deliver an item is $20 and I make $50/hr working a project, maybe having food delivered makes sense.
But also, I know the delivery guy isn’t making all that and he’s delivering five orders so don’t charge me a service fee when I’m already subsidizing you paying him a shit wage.
Everything is shitty either way.
It’s so they can give “free delivery” and still charge a butt load of fees.
The service is delivery!
I read this and thought, “no, the service is that they were able to put pants on and leave their house today, unlike you.”
Please dont take that as a personal attack, I’m just sharing intrusive thoughts when they make me giggle
I use them fairly often because I’m just too fucking busy during the week. I have to get up at 5am to get ready for work, am too busy to take a real lunch break, and get home around 8-9 most nights. And that’s on nights I don’t have meetings (I work in municipal government, and public meetings like Council, P&Z, BOA, etc all meet at nights). We could hire more people, but that would require more income, and that requires council members to vote on raising their own property taxes, not to mention state law regarding tax increases.
Yeah, I could meal prep on the weekend, but that’s essentially allowing work to intrude on my weekends, and fuck that.
I’m essentially buying more time to relax in the very little relaxation time I have available.
How else can they get people to sign up for a $15/month subscription that gives "free delivery " while charging a fuckton for a delivery service?
This cuts both ways actually. you can have 10 guys going through a drive thru or one 1 making 10 stops. The one guy making ten stops results in less traffic and fewer emissions.
Does that happen in a meaningful amount? Drivers getting multiple orders for the same place with close by destinations? I think it’s vastly more common that you just have 10 drivers at different locations on behalf of 10 customers.
I do a lot of DD, and I’d bet that 75%+ of my restaurant orders are a single order going to a single house. I prefer grocery delivery, and it’s probably closer to 50% for those, as we often get a couple of orders at once.
Occasionally we get a single drop off with 2 stops (pick up food from a restaurant and something from a drug or grocery store, and drop them both off together).
I’ve never gotten more than 3 orders at once, and those are pretty rare.
Americans are too lazy to travel to their lunch. However, for the vast majority of the people, you’re not 15 minutes of walk away from a healthy assortment of food. Even in NYC, depending on where you are, it may not be possible to always go to your food. The idea of your lunch being paid is also not common, and you’re expected to be back to working (not done eating) within 30 minutes or less. In many cases, your lunchtime is timed and unpaid. Nurses and hospital staff? Eat the shit downstairs in the cafeteria or nothing; if you’re late coming back from lunch, it’s almost as bad as being late to work itself.
Of all the modern capitalistic irritations (to put it mildly), this one I really detest. And not least because of how ridiculously popular it is, wtf people? I watch folks I know, who can barely afford the food itself in the first place, then inflate the price by like 40%, just to eat the already (very!) mediocre food…cold. Solely so that they don’t have to leave the house. Just completely unhinged from my POV, and honestly produces almost a sense of alienation in me, I find it so bizarre.
Disclaimer though - I will acknowledge both that I happily enjoy various different foolish things myself, so the point about glass houses is worth my keeping in mind, and also there are some great reasons to use it (limited mobility for one, as another user pointed out).
But sheesh folks. Restaurants largely hate it from my understanding, the drivers doing it hate it (cuz the job - oh excuse me, the preferred exploitation-hiding euphemism is “gig” - is utter shit, a literal minor improvement over straight up homelessness), the environment hates it, the wear-and-tear on a likely broke person’s vehicle and the wear-and-tear on already struggling infrastructure…I mean what the fuckity fuck, seriously. How is this so popular, we’re all insane and just conveniencing our way to oblivion. SMgoddamnH.
Aside from the aforementioned reasonable uses (largely edge cases, let’s be honest), there is precisely one group of people who truly benefit in any serious way from this amazingly destructive nonsense - and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the exact same group fucking us in every other way! Weird!
Sorry. This one really gets me.
The need this came out of COVID and a lack of people wanting to go out. It’s was a decent way to keep business open who would otherwise have to lay off all their staff. Once COVID ended, I assumed it would go away. However, money talks.
My wife was just saying how she thiks GPS is soon going to have a VIP tier to give you the best routes and the longer routes go to the people who don’t pay (but still have their data harvested).
That is a good point (re: COVID) that I had lost along the way, thanks. Those services did do good during that time, you’re right. I’m not so sure about the GPS thing, but hey, I never thought we’d see half the ugly shit we’re seeing these days, so why not?
My friends definitely think I’m weird cause I don’t use food delivery, but I see it from a germ perspective too. None of those drivers are certified food handler and their car is likely not a safe environment. I keep my cars spotless, but based on everyone’s car I’ve ever been in I’m the minority in that.
Every other point you made I agree with too, but man I just don’t see how people don’t also recognize that your food is travelling in someone else’s potential garbage. Just to save you from what? Getting up and grabbing some food yourself?
Yet another “wtf, y’all?”, good point. I can’t personally say that grosses me out, but I tend to be in the minority on that sort of topic myself, so I totally see what you’re saying. Aint no health inspector checking these vehicles (true of traditional delivery too I suppose).
And I mean…sometimes the drivers straight up eat some food, which is awful from the standpoint of your POV, but also just… truly hilarious to me.
I assume that most deliveries in NYC are by push bike couriers and vesper type scooters. Thats more typical than yank tanks for this sort of thing in most densely populated cities I’ve seen.
When you build infrastructure that requires you take cars everywhere you minimize people going to get things for themselves
I find it funny that the tip is already there before you get your food. I mean, did the driver make the burrito? He might be late and you get cold food, he might be a dick.
Mandatory tips in general is a silly concept for me. The driver should be earning a fair salary without it and the price of the food/delivery should account for the staff costs. And any tips should be a voluntary extra. I feel the same about adding taxes on top of the sticker price the way they do in the US. That was an unexpected culture shock for me when I went there a few years ago.
Especially given the high probability that the app doesn’t even pass on that full amount to the driver.
None of us need to purchase this goofy ass delivery powered by virtual slave labor. Spend no money, cause no harm. Let those capitalists seethe we no longer need to endlessly consume to be happy.
this is some quality ragebait right here
The delivery services are a boon and a bane for everyone. For the restaurant, you no longer need to pay wages or insurance for dedicated delivery workers, but now have service fees that cut into profits. The customer has to cover many of these costs in all these extras fees and service charges, but get did delivered to them. And the driver has to pay for gas and insurance out of the pitiful payments and tips they get. If you are in a rural area, forget about getting enough local orders to cover anything.
And the rich take a huge profit just to run an app.
Fuck Uber especially, those genocide supporting scumbags.
Will never use anything from themAre any of them actually profitable or are they still in the “drive established competitors out of business with unsustainably low prices” phase?
They get 5% to 30% from each order paid by the restaurant, then the customer has to also pay 5% to 20% service fee, they only have to pay for the cost of their servers and app development, and like $2.50 to each driver per order.
Doordash, Uber, and Grubhub are not food delivery companies, they are technology companies offering a platform that connects drivers and customers, basically a glorified facebook marketplace with automatic algorithm matching.
Plus legal fees, salaries of everyone at the office (which is a bit more than app development costs when you think of all the middle and upper managers involved), leasing office space itself (and other related costs), assuming they haven’t gone full remote. Marketing, lobbying (at national, regional, and local levels, since individual cities decide whether or not to allow them at this point), PR, finances, paying the team that convinces the investors to throw more money at it instead of pulling the plug (though I bet sunk cost fallacy does a lot of legwork for them).
…if you think delivery is too expensive, maybe don’t get your food delivered, then? Just a thought.
Can’t I do both though?
Both what?
Can’t I not order delivery but also think its absurdly expensive?
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, I was just asking what two options you were talking about. It was just a normal question with no motive.
I’m sorry sir, we abhor nuance around here
