The gig economy is more about having workers without giving them benefits and with making the workers shoulder the burden of shifting demand throughout the day.

The gig economy is more about having workers without giving them benefits and with making the workers shoulder the burden of shifting demand throughout the day. With food delivery you have the lunch rush and the dinner rush and outside of those windows your demand is a lot smaller. The gig economy means the company isn't on the hook for predicting or satisfying that demand; if there's too many workers for the demand, it's the workers who take the pay hit rather than the company. And if demand spikes unpredictably the company has an easy lever to push to get more workers out there (just notify workers of the spike, and surge pricing as needed to make the unplanned demand more attractive to the workers). So the gig economy is really just auto scaling applied to human resources instead of computing resources.