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Silicon Valley Turned Your Burrito into a Capitalist Nightmare

22 points by turtlegrids 8y ago

damian2000 8y ago
Can see the author's point, but I know people in their late teens who never would have bothered ringing up restaurants to get things delivered. They only do so now because its a single app with many choices ... similar to Uber in this regard - they managed to augment an existing service with a cool smartphone app & location tracking.
seibelj 8y ago
Ah yes, another 2000 word screed on how absolutely horrible and inhumane it is to order food from an app. This is the same genre of writing about how the latest iPhone is garbage or the touchpad on the MacBooks is proof of societal collapse. It’s wonderful that in 2019 these are the issues people care about. It shows how pleasant our lives have become.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
AznHisoka 8y ago
After a few bad experiences, I only call the restaurany directly to order now. A lot of these apps show choices that the restaurants may not have and they end up giving you an inferior substitute. If I have a good experience, I often just stick with that restaurant/order forever since I know its reliable.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Food delivery was broken - only a few restaurants did it. Now almost all of them can do it. That is truly disruptive. Does it suck sometime? Yes, probably even more than Sal's Pizza on a busy midterm week. But that you can do it at all, that's new and different. There will be growing pains of course.
scarmig 8y ago
I don't know why this irked me so much, but it did: > the roughly 50-square-mile area surrounding the San Francisco Peninsula SF itself is around 50 square miles. I know the article probably means something like "the area within 50 miles of San Francisco," but an editor should have caught this.
- anbop 8y ago
  But you can pick 50 square miles of the Bay Area they have most of the relevant tech headquarters
dmode 8y ago
I agree and disagree. Doordash have opened up deliveries from restaurants that would have never hired their own drivers. On the other hand their delivery mechanism sucks. Almost every other order is messed up. Yesterday, after a 2 hr delay, in which time there was to way to contact customer service, my deliver was abruptly cancelled. Imagine a toddler at this time. Also, most of the time the food arrives cold or there are items that are incorrect. It is bizarre
- retromagik 8y ago
  I currently work in a restaurant with doordash. While I rarely have to take to-go orders and doordash orders, I see my Coworkers who hate taking doordash orders. First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. On a busy night our Togo person makes ~50 in tips, so they just don't pay as much attention to the door dash orders. Second, no matter how long we quote the order, the driver always shows up immediately and gets in the way of the servers and bussers and other customers (its a fairly small restaurant with no waiting area) so usually we are rushing to try and finish the order to get them to leave. I don't know a single person in the restaurant except the owner who likes the doordash system, but as long as people keep ordering it'll stay
  - turtlegrids 8y ago
    > First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. Yes, there are indeed tips for doordash orders. I tip my doordash drivers. It's right there in the app, not hidden in some dark pattern or anything. https://fooddeliveryguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Screen-Shot-2018-01-29-at-9.39.56-PM.png https://fooddeliveryguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Scre...
    - bdcravens 8y ago
      You missed the point. No one at the restaurant is getting a tip. The same person who would package up the food if you picked up in person (and who you would customarily tip) is the same person packaging up DoorDash orders, but with no incentive. The person getting tipped is the delivery service employee.
blueboo 8y ago
At Hacker News, we sleep well in the confidence that if people didn't want the miserable existence of being a delivery app driver, they would've learned to code and made their own delivery app.
kirghiz 8y ago
> Look, there’s a machine in our pockets that allows us to take a thousand photos a day, access the world’s information, and do things we never could have dreamed of in the past None of these things originated in Silicon Valley.
Ericson2314 8y ago
The problem is cars. Food delivery works perfectly well in NYC. Bike transit times are wonderfully predictable.
ninth_ant 8y ago
From a customer perspective I couldn’t disagree more. Calling on the phone to order something is often infuriating —- dealing with thick accents and loud background noise it could be awful to communicate. With DoorDash and similar apps, you can place the order online and be precise about what you want, and get updates on where your order is. It’s not perfect to be sure, but the “nightmare” is ridiculously exaggerated in the article. P
Proven 8y ago
I believe there are reasons to be unhappy about those services, but you don't have to use them, whether you're a restaurant or consumer. And senseless leftist opinions are devaluing the article. Example: > They made sleek apps and clever algorithms, and paid people who couldn’t find a job a fraction of their labor value to pick up food and drop it off at your house. These exploited people didn't make any fraction of their labor value prior to betting exploited. Why do they work when they're free to avoid that exploitation? If the article had details on how customers get screwed, that would have helped. But overall repeat customers don't care about how items are organized, they look at the total price and whether the transaction makes sense for them. I don't give a crap if the burger I ordered is X% cheaper at the restaurant that makes it. If it can be delivered in time and the total price is lower than the value I attribute to this service, it's a good deal for me.

22 points by turtlegrids 8y ago

damian2000 8y ago

Can see the author's point, but I know people in their late teens who never would have bothered ringing up restaurants to get things delivered. They only do so now because its a single app with many choices ... similar to Uber in this regard - they managed to augment an existing service with a cool smartphone app & location tracking.

seibelj 8y ago

Ah yes, another 2000 word screed on how absolutely horrible and inhumane it is to order food from an app. This is the same genre of writing about how the latest iPhone is garbage or the touchpad on the MacBooks is proof of societal collapse. It’s wonderful that in 2019 these are the issues people care about. It shows how pleasant our lives have become.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

AznHisoka 8y ago

After a few bad experiences, I only call the restaurany directly to order now. A lot of these apps show choices that the restaurants may not have and they end up giving you an inferior substitute. If I have a good experience, I often just stick with that restaurant/order forever since I know its reliable.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Food delivery was broken - only a few restaurants did it. Now almost all of them can do it. That is truly disruptive. Does it suck sometime? Yes, probably even more than Sal's Pizza on a busy midterm week. But that you can do it at all, that's new and different. There will be growing pains of course.

scarmig 8y ago

I don't know why this irked me so much, but it did: > the roughly 50-square-mile area surrounding the San Francisco Peninsula SF itself is around 50 square miles. I know the article probably means something like "the area within 50 miles of San Francisco," but an editor should have caught this.

anbop 8y ago
But you can pick 50 square miles of the Bay Area they have most of the relevant tech headquarters

dmode 8y ago

I agree and disagree. Doordash have opened up deliveries from restaurants that would have never hired their own drivers. On the other hand their delivery mechanism sucks. Almost every other order is messed up. Yesterday, after a 2 hr delay, in which time there was to way to contact customer service, my deliver was abruptly cancelled. Imagine a toddler at this time. Also, most of the time the food arrives cold or there are items that are incorrect. It is bizarre

retromagik 8y ago
I currently work in a restaurant with doordash. While I rarely have to take to-go orders and doordash orders, I see my Coworkers who hate taking doordash orders. First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. On a busy night our Togo person makes ~50 in tips, so they just don't pay as much attention to the door dash orders. Second, no matter how long we quote the order, the driver always shows up immediately and gets in the way of the servers and bussers and other customers (its a fairly small restaurant with no waiting area) so usually we are rushing to try and finish the order to get them to leave. I don't know a single person in the restaurant except the owner who likes the doordash system, but as long as people keep ordering it'll stay
- turtlegrids 8y ago
  > First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. Yes, there are indeed tips for doordash orders. I tip my doordash drivers. It's right there in the app, not hidden in some dark pattern or anything. https://fooddeliveryguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Screen-Shot-2018-01-29-at-9.39.56-PM.png https://fooddeliveryguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Scre...
  - bdcravens 8y ago
    You missed the point. No one at the restaurant is getting a tip. The same person who would package up the food if you picked up in person (and who you would customarily tip) is the same person packaging up DoorDash orders, but with no incentive. The person getting tipped is the delivery service employee.

blueboo 8y ago

At Hacker News, we sleep well in the confidence that if people didn't want the miserable existence of being a delivery app driver, they would've learned to code and made their own delivery app.

kirghiz 8y ago

> Look, there’s a machine in our pockets that allows us to take a thousand photos a day, access the world’s information, and do things we never could have dreamed of in the past None of these things originated in Silicon Valley.

Ericson2314 8y ago

The problem is cars. Food delivery works perfectly well in NYC. Bike transit times are wonderfully predictable.

ninth_ant 8y ago

From a customer perspective I couldn’t disagree more. Calling on the phone to order something is often infuriating —- dealing with thick accents and loud background noise it could be awful to communicate. With DoorDash and similar apps, you can place the order online and be precise about what you want, and get updates on where your order is. It’s not perfect to be sure, but the “nightmare” is ridiculously exaggerated in the article. P

Proven 8y ago

I believe there are reasons to be unhappy about those services, but you don't have to use them, whether you're a restaurant or consumer. And senseless leftist opinions are devaluing the article. Example: > They made sleek apps and clever algorithms, and paid people who couldn’t find a job a fraction of their labor value to pick up food and drop it off at your house. These exploited people didn't make any fraction of their labor value prior to betting exploited. Why do they work when they're free to avoid that exploitation? If the article had details on how customers get screwed, that would have helped. But overall repeat customers don't care about how items are organized, they look at the total price and whether the transaction makes sense for them. I don't give a crap if the burger I ordered is X% cheaper at the restaurant that makes it. If it can be delivered in time and the total price is lower than the value I attribute to this service, it's a good deal for me.