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> The company still operates in cities like São Paolo, Mexico City, and Bogotá. The article kind of glosses over this, but delivery is much more viable in citi

> The company still operates in cities like São Paolo, Mexico City, and Bogotá. The article kind of glosses over this, but delivery is much more viable in cities where labor is cheap. Delivery is hugely popular in eg China and South-East Asia, where the few dollars of unsubsidized delivery fees paid by the middle class can actually sum up to a living wage for the poor doing the jobs.

standardUser 4y ago
I lived in Colombia for a while and you can use the Rappi app to have anything delivered, usually pretty quickly. They'll even bring you cash (like an ATM) or go to any store and buy a specific thing you ask for. And delivery costs are so incredibly cheap that locals can easily afford it (in the city at least).
PeterisP 4y ago
More accurately, this is much more viable in cities with a big wage gap between the lower class and middle class. The upper class uses different services and there's simply not much of them to make a scalable business; but if a middle-class worker earns 10 times more than a poor worker, that means that service jobs will be much more used than in the West. Like, almost no Western doctors, lawyers or engineers afford a chauffeur or a full-time domestic servant, but there are areas of the world where that is quite plausible, just as it was in the West hundred+ years ago with minimum wages that were proportionally much lower than now.
- ghaff 4y ago
  That's a really good way of putting it. Essentially, there is this whole class of businesses that are fundamentally trying to make services available to (some definition of) middle class consumers who mostly couldn't/wouldn't afford them previously except as an occasional treat or a special case situation. The problem is that technology doesn't make the labor cost cheaper and adds costs of its own.
tablespoon 4y ago
> Delivery is hugely popular in eg China and South-East Asia, where the few dollars of unsubsidized delivery fees paid by the middle class can actually sum up to a living wage for the poor doing the jobs. I don't think you're using "living wage" in the same sense as it's typically used in the US. IIRC, those delivery people in China work very long hours to live extremely precariously. They're also often treated extremely unfairly (e.g. having to eat the cost of a failed delivery that was in no way their fault).

standardUser 4y ago

I lived in Colombia for a while and you can use the Rappi app to have anything delivered, usually pretty quickly. They'll even bring you cash (like an ATM) or go to any store and buy a specific thing you ask for. And delivery costs are so incredibly cheap that locals can easily afford it (in the city at least).

PeterisP 4y ago

More accurately, this is much more viable in cities with a big wage gap between the lower class and middle class. The upper class uses different services and there's simply not much of them to make a scalable business; but if a middle-class worker earns 10 times more than a poor worker, that means that service jobs will be much more used than in the West. Like, almost no Western doctors, lawyers or engineers afford a chauffeur or a full-time domestic servant, but there are areas of the world where that is quite plausible, just as it was in the West hundred+ years ago with minimum wages that were proportionally much lower than now.

ghaff 4y ago
That's a really good way of putting it. Essentially, there is this whole class of businesses that are fundamentally trying to make services available to (some definition of) middle class consumers who mostly couldn't/wouldn't afford them previously except as an occasional treat or a special case situation. The problem is that technology doesn't make the labor cost cheaper and adds costs of its own.

tablespoon 4y ago

> Delivery is hugely popular in eg China and South-East Asia, where the few dollars of unsubsidized delivery fees paid by the middle class can actually sum up to a living wage for the poor doing the jobs. I don't think you're using "living wage" in the same sense as it's typically used in the US. IIRC, those delivery people in China work very long hours to live extremely precariously. They're also often treated extremely unfairly (e.g. having to eat the cost of a failed delivery that was in no way their fault).