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> willing to pay $5-10 premium to not have to pick it up from myself You're going to have to pay a lot more. The model can't be sustained at this price. Once t
by skrtskrt 4y ago
> willing to pay $5-10 premium to not have to pick it up from myself
You're going to have to pay a lot more. The model can't be sustained at this price. Once the driver pays for gas and (over time) wear and tear on the car, even with healthy tips this ends up being sub-minimum wage. We got used to that price when VC money was subsidizing it and gas was half the price it is now.
Yeah you can read someone's personal account on how they are able to clear $20 an hour regularly doing delivery, but they have to employ all kinds of strategies to do so, including taking multiple orders at once, purposely ignoring orders that are unlikely to have significant tips, and completely ignoring entire sections of the city that aren't "hotspots" with tons of restaurants cranking through orders. Not to mention they are still probably undercounting the cost of wear on their car, and most people touting their delivery driver profitability are probably exaggerating.
- prvit 4y agoShockingly, most food delivery people don’t use cars… This is the weirdest straw man. Scooters are cheaper to operate and faster if there’s any traffic.
- pc86 4y agoMaybe most in large urban areas, but everywhere else 99.9% of delivery is happening in an automobile.
- Mo3 4y agoHere in NL 99.9% of delivery is not happening by automobile haha
- prvit 4y agoThere’s also fuck all food deliveries happening outside urban areas.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoNot true at all. It's stupid expensive in most suburbs but its definitely there.
- maxerickson 4y agoSuburbs are urban. The 'sub' is a reference to the proximity to the (likely denser) city, not a step between urban and rural. So for instance, the small town I live in is also considered urban (but is located in a rural county).
- prvit 4y agoYeah, it’s true. The amount of restaurants and amount of deliveries they make to suburbs is negligible when compared with urban areas.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoThat is a very different claim
- prvit 4y agoNo it’s not. It’s exactly the same claim. “fuck all” means nothing or very little, in this context it’s obviously “very little”. In any case, we’re discussing the sustainability of delivery services. Most of the world lives in cities, it really doesn’t matter if they’re unsustainable in rural areas.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoyou changed your claim again. Suburbs app delivery is negligible compared to urban, but its still pretty hot. My area has farms but you can still see delivery pickups running constantly at popular restaurants.
- 4y ago
- TremendousJudge 4y agoThis is a very US-centric view. In most of the world, poor people (who are delivery drivers) don't own cars.
- na85 4y ago>Shockingly, most food delivery people don’t use cars… Depending on geographic location, no doubt. Can you imagine risking your life on a scooter weaving through idiots in their lifted pickups in any American metro?
- spywaregorilla 4y agoPickups are more of a rural thing. They're hardly normative in urban areas.
- ziddoap 4y agoMaybe where your familiar with? Last I lived in Calgary, trucks were absolutely the norm. >That's especially true in Alberta, where 89 per cent of spending on new vehicles this year has gone to trucks, vans and SUVs. That compares to about 80 per cent, nationwide. >"We're basically a truck market," said Denis Ducharme, president of the Motor Dealers Association of Alberta.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoSUVs and vans are very different from trucks
- ziddoap 4y ago>"We're basically a truck market," said Denis Ducharme, And, I mean... I lived there. Saw many more trucks than anything else on the road.
- spywaregorilla 4y agohttps://www.calgary.ca/roads/conditions/traffic-cameras.html https://www.calgary.ca/roads/conditions/traffic-cameras.html Traffic camera feeds suggest this is not the case by a long shot? I don't have a particular stake in this race though.
- 4y ago
- rchaud 4y agoNot if you also moonlight as an Uber/Lyft driver
- CyberDildonics 4y agoAnywhere you have snow is going to have to have deliveries done by car.
- prvit 4y agoNo? That’s definitely not the norm in places like Finland. Sure, in the winter the proportion of couriers driving cars increases. You also see tons of people on fatbikes and similar.
- CyberDildonics 4y agoYou think "the norm" in Finland is for people to drive scooters through snow for delivery? Can you show a link that explains why you think that?
- prvit 4y agoI’m not sure how you could take that away from my comment which did not mention scooters at all.
- vector_spaces 4y agoNot a single delivery driver from any service has shown up at my home in a major city in the US southwest using a scooter. Every single one drives a car (I see them pull up on our cameras). You would die of heat stroke pretty quickly delivering food on a scooter in the middle of summer out here.
- prvit 4y ago>You would die of heat stroke pretty quickly delivering food on a scooter in the middle of summer out here. Scooter deliveries are the norm even in the warmest areas of Europe. Same goes for places like Tehran, in fact almost all of Asia.
- dijit 4y agoEvery single order (bar one) I ever got was delivered on a scooter. The exception was riding a standard bicycle. Sure, I live in mainland Europe, but you talk as if you talk for everywhere.
- Macha 4y agoMeanwhile in my major european city, I'd say bikes have a 70% share among delivery drivers. (Although some of those bikes may have cost more than the cars the other 30% are driving, which is a bit of a "uber tesla driver" situation).
- dahart 4y agoWhy do you claim “most”? Are you certain? Do you have data? I saw a lot of delivery scooters in California, but they seem far less common in other cities. Lane splitting also isn’t legal everywhere either, so scooters aren’t necessarily faster. What cities & countries are you referring to? Scooters are very limited in cargo capacity are not particularly viable in rainy or winter weather, not to mention just statistically increased injuries and danger for riders, which eventually translates into liability with scale. If you have to make multiple trips when one car trip would have sufficed, that completely undermines the cheap & fast argument. If you have to have cars around for bad weather days or bad weather seasons anyway…
- prvit 4y agoDid you know that there are places outside of the US? > Scooters are very limited in cargo capacity Only Americans would be regularly ordering so much takeout as to worry about scooters not being able to transport it. You really need to reconsider your dietary choices if this is a serious concern. > Scooters […] are not particularly viable in rainy or winter weather Scooters are perfectly viable in rainy weather. Nobody does food deliveries with a car in London.
- dahart 4y agoSure I do, that’s part of my point. That doesn’t answer the question. Why do you claim “most”?
- prvit 4y agoBecause it’s the norm in Europe, in Asia and Africa. Probably Latin America too.
- dahart 4y agoDo you have any data or other backup for your claim besides opinion? You might be right, I’m just curious. Do you know where scooters aren’t the norm? Do you know how often alternatives are used and for what reasons?
- the_gipsy 4y agoHow come that many chains are able to employ (moped) delivery drivers above minimum wage, without surcharging the customer as much? Speaking of Europe.
- grumple 4y agoThey aren't paying thousands of software engineers for the work of a few dozen software engineers.
- chipgap98 4y agoIsn't that because there is a significant fee going to the delivery service in the DoorDash/UberEats/etc model? The chain doesn't need to pay for as much additional marketing/sales/support costs for their delivery service, its baked into their operating costs. Also there is a centralized hub for the drivers where they are going back and forth between a single chain location rather than driving around to many different restaurants. I would assume there are efficiencies in having a tighter loop like that.
- gnicholas 4y agoWhat if we factor in multiple deliveries per trip, and ghost kitchens? For the former, I wish there was an app that notified me when a neighbor orders from a restaurant I’ve frequented, near a time of day I’ve ordered. They could offer a discount for piggyback orders, since the cost to the driver is negligible and they can convince the restaurant that they provided the value-add of the additional revenue.
- vinni2 4y ago“ wish there was an app that notified me when a neighbor orders from a restaurant I’ve frequented, near a time of day I’ve ordered.” That’s a privacy nightmare.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- babyshake 4y agoThe messaging from the app wouldnt/shouldn't be about what your neighbor did, just that you have a limited time offer for a discount.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoThat they take the data gathering and analytics they already do to provide some customer benefit? Let's be clear, this will happen regardless if you get the notification or not. Your purchases are going to be analyzed down to the second you made the purchase.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y agoYes, but the metadata that is analyzed is not something that is being pushed to your neighbor's phone. > ... when a neighbor orders from a restaurant ... More to the point, it stays "safe" until (let's be real) there is a data breach. That's less of a privacy nightmare when you consider there's a much smaller range of actors that will use the data from a breach. Contrariwise, the ability to just query their API for some of that data gets turned into an app that someone's stalker ex downloads so they can proceed with stalking. Privacy nightmare indeed.
- LazyMans 4y agoI think the model is only really sustainable at "affordable prices" in high density areas. New York is a good example. You can watch videos following e-bike delivery drivers in these high density areas. They're sometimes retrieving and delivering multiple orders within a 15 minute period. Unfortunately New York isn't the greatest example because the high wages are offset by the extreme housing costs. It feels incredibly wasteful to send someone driving around to pick up some tacos, but as long as I can get it fairly cheaply, I'll continue to do it.
- fencepost 4y agoYeah you can read someone's personal account on how they are able to clear $20 an hour regularly doing delivery, but they have to employ all kinds of strategies to do so, So if they have the skills and tenacity to consistently make slightly better than a living wage (probably for only a few hours a day) they probably have what it takes to get and keep a regular job paying notably better?
- wiredfool 4y ago30 years ago or so, I made roughly 14 an hour driving pizzas part time, 3x minimum wage at the time. The strategy was basically go fast, know where you’re going (no cell/ google maps), don’t get stuck with single pie runs to the end of the earth. To see that 20/hr requires all kinds of strategies now — it’s a different world.
- function_seven 4y agoWhenever I saw "9735 Birchwood Ave"* pop up in the order queue, I would suddenly get inspired to go wash dishes or fold boxes or pop dough bubbles. Sometimes that inspiration would strike 2 or 3 of us at once! Let the poor rookie go get stiffed on a tip. * Address changed, but 25 year later I actually still remember the real address.
- MAGZine 4y agoI suspect the avg take from an order is at least $10. Grubhub, for example, will charge you an 18% service fee, a $1 "big/expensive city" fee, a tip (for the driver), and then also a delivery fee on top of that. That's before the inflated menu prices and price gouging they do to the businesses. Still, it's a lot more economical for reasonably busy delivery places to just employ their own drivers that can take care of a few deliveries in one shot.
- scrollaway 4y agoIncredibly US-centric comment and responses. If you think delivery is unsustainable because cars cost money, I got news for you: You live in a bubble, and it's the cars that are unsustainable. Outside of the car-centric world of US suburbia, most of the western world is actually doing deliveries on scooters and ebikes, which are very quick to navigate medium-to-high-density cities and can do several deliveries per trip. I've ordered a lot on Takeaway, at least once a week on average. The last time I saw somebody pull up in a car was during the COVID lockdowns, and I suspect it's because there was basically nobody on the streets. The business model is broken, because car-centrism is broken. In the civilized world, things are ok. Either way, fuck Uber. There's better alternatives.
- WheatM 4y ago
- wizofaus 4y agoAre food deliveries in densely populated US cities really done using cars? Why? All e-bikes/scooters here (city of >5 mil in Aus).
- ska 4y ago> densely populated US cities Many big US cities really aren't densely populated. e,g, including 2 of the 4 largest: LA & Houston.
- wizofaus 4y agoWhich is why I specified that. Outside of the inner 15km radius big cities in Australia aren't at all densely populated either, and cars probably are used for delivery there. But 90% of the deliveries I observe are in that radius!
- jackson1442 4y agoIn Seattle, all of my DoorDash deliveries were people using cars.
- closedloop129 4y ago>You're going to have to pay a lot more. The model can't be sustained at this price. It will be much cheaper once there are self-driving cars. You don't have to pay for the drive, just for somebody doing the final delivery from the car to the door. It will be even cheaper, if customers are willing to leave their house and fetch the food from the car at the street. Then you don't have to pay anybody, just some cents per mile for the vehicle.
- val314159 4y agowhere I live, some restaurant's don't use cars, they use remote controlled robots. They are also extremely cute.
- jsiva 4y agoLabour costs would be cheaper with self-driving cars, UberEats/SkipTheDishes/Arbritrary Food Delivery App would most likely own the cars. They would definitely factor the vehicle depreciation cost into delivery fees. If the gig worker provides the car, I'm not even sure if it would be that much cheaper to pay someone to sit in a self-driving car for the car to door delivery.
- welshwelsh 4y agoIt might pay less than minimum wage - but will the drivers actually do the math? I think that a solid portion of workers will accept significantly higher costs in exchange for slightly higher income, even if they come out worse. Lots of people will just look at the paycheck and won't think about their gas bill or how much time they actually spent. Plus, one hour making $30 lets people rationalize 20 hours making $5/hr. That's how gambling works. Add on the ability to "be your own boss," work when you want and start earning immediately, and I think people will keep doing delivery work even if the pay is shit.
- b112 4y agoWhen I used to deliver pizza, I received minimum wage, and tips, and 75 cents per delivery. This was in 1990. When I wasn't driving, I was grating cheese, or folding boxes, or cleaning. There were always slow times during the shift for this work. I had a used car, and as a teenager, and later as an adult in college, the job paid quite well at the time. Tips on busy nights would double or triple my wage. Drivers can very much make a good wage delivering pizza! This is because a traditional pizza place only delivers within a certain range, has its own drivers, and each driver(when busy) can take 2 to 5 orders, and deliver them in an optimal route. As a driver, you get very, very good at driving your neighborhood, knowing all the slow and fast spots, and the best route to deliver 4 orders in one trip optimally. I'd often deliver 20 pizzas an hour on Friday nights, all hot, all fresh! Yet an uber driver delivers for a dozen companies, each to different places, may drive miles to get to each company, then drive that single order to the customer. Uber drivers cannot optimize the same way. Just the fact that when idle, I did work (so not a loss for the company), yet when a pizza popped out I was there, ready!.. is an optimization uber eats loses at. Idle for them is a loss. Uber eats, all external delivery services are the worst. If your main business is delivery(pizza), you are nuts to even allow them to pick up at your establishment.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI wonder if the holy grail of food delivery is then is actually like a supply chain/transportation algorithm - instead of point-to-point deliveries, you could have order pickup and delivery distributed within an area and have drivers handoff as needed. If I can think of it, then I'm sure someone in the companies already has looked into it and has a reason why they can't, but I'm still proud of the insight at least.