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Meanwhile, these companies can't make any money as it is.[0] At some point maybe we should consider that this model is completely broken. The gig workers hate

• jimbob45 6y ago
  Kudos to the legislators for allowing the experiment to run as long as it did to find potential solutions. Now it’s time to legislate it away, just like many have done with Uber/Lyft.
• bpodgursky 6y ago
  Someone should let the gig workers know! I bet they'd quit if they knew how miserable they were.
  • z3rgl1ng 6y ago
    Dope take.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • _Microft 6y ago
    Did it occur to you that some people could be in situations where they simply cannot quit a job no matter how miserable it makes them?
    • hsgdh3487 6y ago
      It probably did occur to GP, that's the whole point (if I'm right to be charitable). Top comment is arguing that these people should be laid off as part of a government initiative to reshape the economy. If these people can't quit, what will happen if they are laid off? Is there any policy that could help these workers? My best guess is UBI, but that is another discussion.
      • bpodgursky 6y ago
        I would be more charitable to calls to destroy the gig industry if the proposals were coupled with any realistic path to retraining or alternatively-employing the employees. When the comment is just "this job should not exist" I just know there's no intellectual consistency behind it. They want to punish employers they don't like, and don't especially care who is hurt in the process.
    • jdminhbg 6y ago
      That's going to be bad news when it gets legislated away then, isn't it.
      • MereInterest 6y ago
        The solution to a race to the bottom, or to other kinds of prisoner's dilemma, is frequently to outlaw the option of racing to the bottom. Healthy bread can't compete because bread with sawdust is cheaper? Outlaw adding sawdust to the bread. Environmentally conscious factories can't compete because it is cheaper to pollute? Outlaw polluting to make a level playing field. Companies that pay their workers a living wage cannot compete with those who don't? Outlaw paying workers below a living wage, so that companies paying a living wage can compete. In this case, I'd also want to see some form of UBI.
        • bpodgursky 6y ago
          The best kind of safety nets are ones you set up BEFORE you throw people off the bridge. If you want to protect the workers, set up a UBI now. Then destroy the jobs. Don't talk about hypothetical-might-maybe-work solutions to fix the problem you're about to create. Focus on making things not worse, not punting and hoping you can save the workers from homelessness later.
  • Narkov 6y ago
    I don't know you circumstances but it is possible to still do something out of desperation - possibly to feed your family - and hate it.
    • recursive 6y ago
      So in that hypothetical scenario, would that person be better or worse off if they were denied the option to do that thing they're doing that they hate?
      • Narkov 6y ago
        Worse off. Feeding their family is probably a higher priority than a shitty job. It doesn't change the fact that the job is rubbish.
  • srswtf123 6y ago
    On the off chance you’re unfamiliar with the term, I suggest you learn about wage slavery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
    • bpodgursky 6y ago
      That sounds bad! It sounds almost as bad as unemployment slavery, or homelessness slavery!
      • freeone3000 6y ago
        Yes, exactly. People shouldn't need money to live.
  • cwhiz 6y ago
    Lots of people do jobs that they hate. It’s common in practically every industry.
• tiborsaas 6y ago
  I think drones will save them. Can't wait to spend a romantic dinner in a small restaurant with my girlfriend and watch the delivery drones come and go, humming around us.
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  • steelframe 6y ago
    > Can't wait to spend a romantic dinner in a small restaurant with my girlfriend and watch the delivery drones come and go, humming around us. I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm.
• programbreeding 6y ago
  I'm not saying this is a reason to do it, but the part of the model that isn't broken is that people love it. The consumers are benefiting.
  • floren 6y ago
    Yes, people love getting stuff cheap. But if, say, an auto shop was offering cheap oil changes because they're just dumping the used oil down the sewer instead of properly disposing of it, "people like cheap oil changes" isn't justification for the continued harm.
    • standardUser 6y ago
      Tell that to nearly the entirety of the global textile, chemical and energy industries (to name a few). Causing harm is not, nor has it ever been, a deterrent to operating a business.
      • bobthepanda 6y ago
        No, but losing money on every transaction (or the majority of them) certainly is. In that sense, food delivery apps smell a lot like Moviepass. Customer love was not enough to save Moviepass, though it certainly didn't help that the actions they took to turn it around burned through all that goodwill in very short order.
      • floren 6y ago
        Sure! But "other industries do bad things too" does not excuse these companies doing bad things. The Italian government can't do much when a Chinese factory pours chemical waste into the ocean. They can stop Uber Eats from screwing over Italian delivery drivers.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    There are tons of services I would use if I could get them for well below cost.
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > What in the fresh hell are we doing where nearly every part of this "economy" is mad about it? We're at the point in the hype cycle where the service has become popular, so the media has flipped to the contrarian takes about how it's bad, actually. It wasn't that long away that we were reading stories about how food delivery services were providing restaurants an opportunity to keep their doors open during COVID lockdown. Restaurants only hate food delivery when the companies try to force them to lower prices (so the delivery service can capture the margin) or when they perform bad-faith actions like misrepresenting themselves as an official partner of the restaurant when no such deal has been made. The restaurants who simply prepare orders at their normal retail price and hand them off to delivery drivers who deliver to customers who know what they're getting into are actually loving this boom. It's extra business without the hassle of dealing directly with customers. That's actually the driver of the problems: Restaurants have been so eager to get a piece of this booming business that some of them have given up their own margin to partner with delivery services looking to squeeze every dollar out of the restaurants. I suspect that era won't last long as restaurants do the math on what it's costing them.
  • kgog 6y ago
    > It wasn't that long away that we were reading stories about how food delivery services were providing restaurants an opportunity to keep their doors open during COVID lockdown. Can you link to some stories? I didn't see any in my bubble.
  • LegitShady 6y ago
    >That's actually the driver of the problems: Restaurants have been so eager to get a piece of this booming business that some of them have given up their own margin to partner with delivery services looking to squeeze every dollar out of the restaurants. I suspect that era won't last long as restaurants do the math on what it's costing them. They don't have a choice, with covid etc. Many restuarants would rather not have delivery, or delivery that didn't cost them 20% of gross.
    • nickff 6y ago
      Most restaurants would rather not pay rent/lease and property taxes that eat more than 20% of gross, yet those are recognized as 'costs of doing business'. These restaurants are unfortunately locked in to a business model that is incompatible with COVID.
• ransom1538 6y ago
  " Meanwhile, these companies can't make any money as it is.[0]" Food creation & delivery: A hyper competitive, low margin, inventory rotting, regulated, logistical & insurance nightmare.
• bilekas 6y ago
  Gig workers don't hate how its set up, they make a nice bit of cash for hard work when they need or want. Restaraunts don't hate it because they don't have to have staff hired to deliver, infact all the logistics of delivery are removed for them. > The San Francisco-based company reported a fourth-quarter loss of $312 million Excuse me while I shed a tear for the billion eur company over the riders who will get screwed for this ruling. DoorDash's business management is not reflective of its customers, who are the riders and restaurants. Who, in this scenario are the losers.
  • InitialLastName 6y ago
    Under a dumping accusation, their competitors are the victims here. Operating at a substantial loss as a strategy to expand your market footprint is pretty textbook anticompetitive.
    • bilekas 6y ago
      I'm sorry but why are competitors not allowed throw money away beating out the other imitators ? > Operating at a substantial loss as a strategy to expand your market footprint is pretty textbook anticompetitive. No it's not actually. That would entice people with a better twist on the idea to do things differently. Regardless of both our ignorance of market philosophy. The riders will get screwed here. I'm not gonna applaud the debt of companies like Deliveroo, Ubereats, JustEat etc etc being shafted to riders long term. Bravo
• readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  At what point do hundreds of millions of dollars in operating losses begin to constitute "dumping," where a product (service in this case) is priced below its cost in order to accumulate market share and harm competitors? Other comments mention that delivery "worked fine" before, which implies DoorDash can't argue that they were perfectly innovative against a "dumping" accusation.
  • nradov 6y ago
    In legal terms "dumping" is only applicable to imports. There's generally nothing illegal about delivering a local service at a loss, except in limited cases when one company has an effective monopoly and uses that pricing to drive out competitors. For now the food delivery market is still highly competitive.
    • kqvamxurcagg 6y ago
      I don't think existing competition law or theory applies to this new phenomenon. The delivery companies are essentially selling at a loss to obtain an overwhelming network effect to become a long term monopoly.
    • bagacrap 6y ago
      in this case, Uber eats is importing foreign capital and "dumping" it into the system as subsidies to the consumer which are designed to establish a monopoly. They will either fail to establish a monopoly and close shop, or succeed and jack up prices. Whatever term you want to apply here, this doesn't seem like a business practice that should be permitted.
• oconnor663 6y ago
  I mean, speaking personally as a customer, I'm a pretty big fan of being able to search for food online and order it. When we're trying to figure out whether a market is broken, the question of whether customers are happy is a pretty important starting point. (But maybe I'm just a weirdo and everyone else who uses Yelp etc. is miserable?)
• cedricgle 6y ago
  The gig economy is just a return to the basics of the industrialization and the machine age; where people went to the factories' gates to seek a job for the day. During this period, such flexibility brought a huge boost in production, innovation and revenue. So this model isn't necessary broken.
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• nullserver 6y ago
  Gig work and Airbnb saved my life and kept family off street. I got injured and disability decided to play hard ball. Working whatever hours I could be functional and being able to stop and rest, or wait for medication side effects to ease off. These are the only thing that kept us off the street.
  • lwkl 6y ago
    That's great but gig work is possible without false self-employment. Most European countries have laws for this. That's why you see articles like this. Eat operates similar to Uber Eats here while paying a higher wage than Uber Eats after they payed social security and provide a bike. Meanwhile Uber eats drivers have to pay social security and their vehicle from a lower wage. The social security is what keeps them off the street in the case they are out of work or disabled. Why are some people defending companies that try to go around existing labor laws by claiming their employees are different contractors just because everything is done over an app? Luckily our laws are relatively clear and the courts will probably keep on ruling against Uber.
    • nullserver 6y ago
      If you can get on disability. I was in bed 16 hours a day nearly blind and extreme agony for nearly a year. Disability laughed at me. Said I had a desk job so it was fine, all I had to do was sit their.
  • bigiain 6y ago
    I'm glad that worked out for you, but having VC backed SV Unicorns become _the_ social safety net seems very wrong to me.
  • Jochim 6y ago
    I'm glad you managed to stay afloat through gig work but this example really seems to point out that it's prevalence is due to failing social systems (job market/safety nets) driving people into insecure forms of work.
• jpdaigle 6y ago
  I'm kinda surprised that food delivery apps and ride-hailing apps are all money-losing. Why? It's a modernization of an already-proven business model. Chinese food and pizza was orderable by phone, and delivered for free or a small fee, 30 years ago. So, the pizza restaurants proved that there's enough margin in a 25$ pizza to pay a minimum wage driver to drive it to your house. Delivery platforms come in and break this up: instead of the restaurant having someone on payroll to deliver orders, you just outsource that to another party (and pay them a fee, which is passed-through to the customer, and replaces money you would've paid the on-staff driver otherwise). Why can't the food delivery companies provide delivery services for basically the same total cost as before, and subsist on extracting a small percentage of the value, which is freed up by the massive economy of scale that they can create by aggregating orders from several restaurants into a single pool? Ditto for Uber... it's possible to operate a taxi company profitably, and has been for a hundred years. Shouldn't Uber have basically the same economics / cost per mile as a traditional taxi company, except be more efficient thanks to top-notch demand prediction that no local taxi company could ever build?
  • bpicolo 6y ago
    Managing an enterprise doing it at scale requires a larger-than-small percentage of revenue. Catch 22. Also note that plenty of delivery workers have, historically, been paid under-the-table. Can't get away with that if you're uber
    • ghaff 6y ago
      And deliveries were historically mostly for a small class of food items where it made sense--mostly pizza and Chinese--for various reasons.
      • bpicolo 6y ago
        I definitely don't understand the demand for soggy fries and burgers at 60% upcharge, but to each their own ;)
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• Aunche 6y ago
  How many restaurant owners and delivery gig workers do you know? From my (admittedly very limited) experience long-term gig workers have a "system" that tends to work well enough for them, though they're not so successful that you'd hear about it on the news.
  • cwhiz 6y ago
    Everything is anecdotal. I live in NYC and I talk to restaurants, or I used to before the pandemic. I know the owner of this restaurant, and he absolutely hates these delivery companies. He’s not alone. https://ny.eater.com/2020/4/23/21231943/grubhub-nyc-phone-order-expat-harlem-charges https://ny.eater.com/2020/4/23/21231943/grubhub-nyc-phone-or...
• tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  > The gig workers hate it ... but for some reason they keep doing it. Also, I assume the consumer is very happy that he's getting a venture capital subsidized food delivery service.