8 ms·

Deliveroo and Uber Eats Riders Strike on Valentine's Day

35 points by admp 3y ago

nness 3y ago
Deliveroo, and really any gig-economy services, have a real problem — their largest markets are also the ones with significant cost-of-living issues affecting both riders and customers. Customers are spending less, especially in London, and riders need are being priced out of the market (reducing the supply of riders across a number of competing apps.) There was a trending tiktok by economist Kyla Scanlon on the topic of "subsidizing affluence" and how these services were able to be offered so cheap because of incredibly low interest rates and investment. Rates have risen dramatically, affecting both the appetite of debt for start-ups and the spending power of consumers. Shareholders recognised this, and it showed through Deliveroo's historically bad IPO. Ultimately, I suspect Deliveroo will continue to underpay (relative to the cost-of-living) because of the poverty trap — poor people don't have many options, and being underpaid as a Deliveroo rider may be the only option for survival in London and other similarly major cities.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  The issue with companies like Deliveroo is more basic than that: It's plainly profitability of the business model, irrespective of interest rates (which are blamed for anything and everything lately) At the moment the whole business model, and any plausible path to profitability, relies on squeezing riders as much as possible because (1) they are the main cost, (2) they have very low productivity (number of deliveries per hour), and (3) customers do not want to pay that much for delivery. Fees paid by customers have increased, and restaurants also often charge a different, higher price when ordering through Deliveroo and maybe this is getting to the limit of what the market will bear... So there is not much wiggle room.
  - jpl56 3y ago
    If I'm having dinner in a quiet restaurant, I wouldn't accept to wait for the cooks to serve Deliveroo/Uber orders instead of taking care of mine. In France, some restaurants give a 10% discount if you order take away. But I hope they don't do it for deliveries through these companies. This lowers the global quality level. You can't have the same quality with one cook and 10 tables than one cook, 10 tables and 50 deliveries per hour.
    - mytailorisrich 3y ago
      That's for the restaurant to decide, it's not a Deliveroo issue. Some do not accept Deliveroo orders when they are too busy.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      > You can't have the same quality with one cook and 10 tables than one cook, 10 tables and 50 deliveries per hour. I mean, the solution is fairly obvious - hire more cooks if you are serving more food. Resturants will either handle this properly or quickly go out of business.
      - CogitoCogito 3y ago
        I’d expect them to just limit the number of take out orders so that they could handle it. Food establishments already do this.
      - Animats 3y ago
        For a while, the solution seemed to be "ghost kitchens" - central commissary operations that pretend to be restaurants in their ads. The first Doordash Kitchen is in Redwood City, CA, near the intersection of Woodside Road and El Camino Real. It seems to be much less busy than it used to be. That industry has collapsed.[1] [1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/05/business/ghost-kitchens-were-supposed-to-be-the-future-of-fast-food-theyre-flaming-out/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/05/business/ghost-kitchens-were-...
      - pjerem 3y ago
        More cooks = bigger kitchen which is impossible in tiny restaurants of city centers. I also doubt it’s a good decision to invest in bigger real estate and more employees while the delivery companies are always on the edge of going bankrupt or being regulated. Also, a restaurant is not an easy to scale business : most of their value is a mix between the location and the cooking team. You can’t easily change one (or both) without changing your restaurant uniqueness.
        bawolff 3y ago
bawolff 3y ago
I kind of doubt this will be effective. You can't get blood from a stone. There isn't a whole lot of money to be had in the delivery business. Consumers already feel costs are too high. Its not like these companies are insanely profitable and taking it all for themselves.
- askonomm 3y ago
  Yup, this. Most food delivery start-ups (Bolt food, Wolt, in northern Europe) operate at a loss actually, afaik. Few have already gone bankrupt.
  - troupo 3y ago
    Why is this a bad thing? Non-profitable companies are supposed to go under. And yet we have companies like DoorDash losing a billion dollars a year every year, we nod and tell each other "look at this great successful innovative business".
    - askonomm 3y ago
      Never said it is a bad thing. It being a good or bad thing wasn't even the discussion.
msravi 3y ago
This article is so frustrating on data presentation: > To make the minimum national wage we have to make at least four deliveries, which is not as easy as it seems. On what timeline? Per hour? Per day? > Delivery Job UK claimed its delivery riders were braving the "cold, rain and absurd distances" for deliveries paying "ridiculous values", ranging from £2.80 to £3.15. On what distance? "Absurd" is not a quantity. > ...striking Deliveroo riders wanted an increase to a minimum of £5. Per delivery? Per hour? Per kilometer? Per mile? > On a Friday night you could make £100 over 4-5 hours, now that's gone First data point that actually makes some sense. But what do they make now? Why leave an obvious question unanswered and hanging? > With a minimum fee of £2.80, most might only be making three orders an hour, and then they have to subtract their costs too. Some are making £7 an hour, which in London is barely liveable Ah, finally! Why do news organizations do this?
- gamblor956 3y ago
  On what timeline? Per hour? Per day? When discussing wages, wage conditions are commonly understood to mean "per hour" since wages are hourly. Per delivery? Per hour? Per kilometer? Per mile? This was actually discussed in the article. Per delivery.
  - itake 3y ago
    "wage" in the UK usually means per week or per month. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/wage_1 https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
    - Celtis 3y ago
      When talking about the minimum wage, that’s usually per hour as seen on gov.uk https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates
    - saaaaaam 3y ago
      National minimum wage is very explicitly an hourly rate established in law. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/minimum-wage-rates-for-2024 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/minimum-wage-rate...
Magi604 3y ago
Valentine's day was probably a bad day to go on strike. So many couples went out for dinner, the effects from striking delivery workers was probably minimized a bit at least.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  You're making a lot of assumptions and/or generalisations there, because plenty of people would prefer a quiet night in.
  - Magi604 3y ago
    I drive Uber (non-food delivery) weeknight evenings and it was super busy shuttling couples to and from restaurants, easily the busiest night of the year. That was what I was basing my comment on. Maybe there's enough couples out there where we can both be right?
- buggeryorkshire 3y ago
  Food delivery company I worked for, one of those mentioned, Valentine's Day was the second busiest of the year.
  - Magi604 3y ago
    Interesting, I as a non-food delivery Uber driver was super busy all night shuttling couples to and from restaurants. Biggest night of the year thus far. Keep in mind maybe you were so busy because your fellow delivery drivers were striking and you just picked up their slack.
    - buggeryorkshire 3y ago
      I left the company last April, but was there 5 years. It is definitely one of the busiest days on the calendar, along with New Year's Day, in the UK anyway.
- fakedang 3y ago
mulmen 3y ago
Gig work in general and food delivery specifically is the poster child for the tragedy of ZIRP. These companies somehow took what pizza shops and Chinese restaurants have been doing profitably for decades and with the power of unlimited free money… made it a losing proposition for restaurants, couriers, customers, governments, and even themselves. Food delivery isn’t a technology problem. It’s a trivial hiring and logistics problem. One that can literally be solved successfully by teenagers. There might have been a market for an ultra-lean driver-as-a-service with an SLA suitable for pizza delivery but I’m not even sure that’s viable. Pizza shops are vertically integrated, staffed by entry level workers, and still have razor thin margins. It’s not a career, it’s a way to build skills and get a better job. What an incredible blunder.
- itake 3y ago
  At least in my area, customers have more choices beyond mediocre pizza and chinese restaurants.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I have had all kinds of food delivered but the quality really suffers. Pho, BBQ, burgers, teriyaki, burritos, none of it really works for delivery. I have never had great delivery food. It’s always inferior to the restaurant, even from take-out places. Delivery pizza and Chinese places offer dishes specifically suited to survive the rigors of delivery. That’s why their food is mediocre in person. It’s optimized for delivery. Big food delivery is a fundamentally doomed business because the existing companies are treating this like a logistics problem to be solved by technology when really it’s a product problem. To make this business work you need to sell cheap, simple food that’s still satisfying. That means delivery-specific dishes.
    - jkepler 3y ago
      I still don't understand though why people do delivery pizza when decent-quality frozen pizza is often far cheaper than delivery, and it comes out of one's oven piping hot. Unless we're considering folks without ovens.
simonbarker87 3y ago
I really hope these services become unviable and disappear. They all but ruin the in restaurant experience by having half a dozen couriers sat around. They all seem like very nice people just trying to make a living so it’s not their fault but a restaurant isn’t a take-away.
forgotusername6 3y ago
A rider posted on Reddit yesterday how much they made by not striking on valentine's day. They made ~£70 from 10 deliveries. In their area at least that strike seemed to more than double the amount they got on average per delivery. https://www.reddit.com/r/deliveroos/s/1axFkcCP8J https://www.reddit.com/r/deliveroos/s/1axFkcCP8J
hulitu 3y ago
> Deliveroo and Uber Eats Riders Strike on Valentine's Day Strike ? But they are not employees. /s

35 points by admp 3y ago

Deliveroo, and really any gig-economy services, have a real problem — their largest markets are also the ones with significant cost-of-living issues affecting both riders and customers. Customers are spending less, especially in London, and riders need are being priced out of the market (reducing the supply of riders across a number of competing apps.) There was a trending tiktok by economist Kyla Scanlon on the topic of "subsidizing affluence" and how these services were able to be offered so cheap because of incredibly low interest rates and investment. Rates have risen dramatically, affecting both the appetite of debt for start-ups and the spending power of consumers. Shareholders recognised this, and it showed through Deliveroo's historically bad IPO. Ultimately, I suspect Deliveroo will continue to underpay (relative to the cost-of-living) because of the poverty trap — poor people don't have many options, and being underpaid as a Deliveroo rider may be the only option for survival in London and other similarly major cities.

mytailorisrich 3y ago
The issue with companies like Deliveroo is more basic than that: It's plainly profitability of the business model, irrespective of interest rates (which are blamed for anything and everything lately) At the moment the whole business model, and any plausible path to profitability, relies on squeezing riders as much as possible because (1) they are the main cost, (2) they have very low productivity (number of deliveries per hour), and (3) customers do not want to pay that much for delivery. Fees paid by customers have increased, and restaurants also often charge a different, higher price when ordering through Deliveroo and maybe this is getting to the limit of what the market will bear... So there is not much wiggle room.
- jpl56 3y ago
  If I'm having dinner in a quiet restaurant, I wouldn't accept to wait for the cooks to serve Deliveroo/Uber orders instead of taking care of mine. In France, some restaurants give a 10% discount if you order take away. But I hope they don't do it for deliveries through these companies. This lowers the global quality level. You can't have the same quality with one cook and 10 tables than one cook, 10 tables and 50 deliveries per hour.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    That's for the restaurant to decide, it's not a Deliveroo issue. Some do not accept Deliveroo orders when they are too busy.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    > You can't have the same quality with one cook and 10 tables than one cook, 10 tables and 50 deliveries per hour. I mean, the solution is fairly obvious - hire more cooks if you are serving more food. Resturants will either handle this properly or quickly go out of business.
    - CogitoCogito 3y ago
      I’d expect them to just limit the number of take out orders so that they could handle it. Food establishments already do this.
    - Animats 3y ago
      For a while, the solution seemed to be "ghost kitchens" - central commissary operations that pretend to be restaurants in their ads. The first Doordash Kitchen is in Redwood City, CA, near the intersection of Woodside Road and El Camino Real. It seems to be much less busy than it used to be. That industry has collapsed.[1] [1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/05/business/ghost-kitchens-were-supposed-to-be-the-future-of-fast-food-theyre-flaming-out/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/05/business/ghost-kitchens-were-...
    - pjerem 3y ago
      More cooks = bigger kitchen which is impossible in tiny restaurants of city centers. I also doubt it’s a good decision to invest in bigger real estate and more employees while the delivery companies are always on the edge of going bankrupt or being regulated. Also, a restaurant is not an easy to scale business : most of their value is a mix between the location and the cooking team. You can’t easily change one (or both) without changing your restaurant uniqueness.
      - bawolff 3y ago

bawolff 3y ago

I kind of doubt this will be effective. You can't get blood from a stone. There isn't a whole lot of money to be had in the delivery business. Consumers already feel costs are too high. Its not like these companies are insanely profitable and taking it all for themselves.

askonomm 3y ago
Yup, this. Most food delivery start-ups (Bolt food, Wolt, in northern Europe) operate at a loss actually, afaik. Few have already gone bankrupt.
- troupo 3y ago
  Why is this a bad thing? Non-profitable companies are supposed to go under. And yet we have companies like DoorDash losing a billion dollars a year every year, we nod and tell each other "look at this great successful innovative business".
  - askonomm 3y ago
    Never said it is a bad thing. It being a good or bad thing wasn't even the discussion.

msravi 3y ago

This article is so frustrating on data presentation: > To make the minimum national wage we have to make at least four deliveries, which is not as easy as it seems. On what timeline? Per hour? Per day? > Delivery Job UK claimed its delivery riders were braving the "cold, rain and absurd distances" for deliveries paying "ridiculous values", ranging from £2.80 to £3.15. On what distance? "Absurd" is not a quantity. > ...striking Deliveroo riders wanted an increase to a minimum of £5. Per delivery? Per hour? Per kilometer? Per mile? > On a Friday night you could make £100 over 4-5 hours, now that's gone First data point that actually makes some sense. But what do they make now? Why leave an obvious question unanswered and hanging? > With a minimum fee of £2.80, most might only be making three orders an hour, and then they have to subtract their costs too. Some are making £7 an hour, which in London is barely liveable Ah, finally! Why do news organizations do this?

gamblor956 3y ago
On what timeline? Per hour? Per day? When discussing wages, wage conditions are commonly understood to mean "per hour" since wages are hourly. Per delivery? Per hour? Per kilometer? Per mile? This was actually discussed in the article. Per delivery.
- itake 3y ago
  "wage" in the UK usually means per week or per month. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/wage_1 https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
  - Celtis 3y ago
    When talking about the minimum wage, that’s usually per hour as seen on gov.uk https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates
  - saaaaaam 3y ago
    National minimum wage is very explicitly an hourly rate established in law. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/minimum-wage-rates-for-2024 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/minimum-wage-rate...

Magi604 3y ago

Valentine's day was probably a bad day to go on strike. So many couples went out for dinner, the effects from striking delivery workers was probably minimized a bit at least.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
You're making a lot of assumptions and/or generalisations there, because plenty of people would prefer a quiet night in.
- Magi604 3y ago
  I drive Uber (non-food delivery) weeknight evenings and it was super busy shuttling couples to and from restaurants, easily the busiest night of the year. That was what I was basing my comment on. Maybe there's enough couples out there where we can both be right?
buggeryorkshire 3y ago
Food delivery company I worked for, one of those mentioned, Valentine's Day was the second busiest of the year.
- Magi604 3y ago
  Interesting, I as a non-food delivery Uber driver was super busy all night shuttling couples to and from restaurants. Biggest night of the year thus far. Keep in mind maybe you were so busy because your fellow delivery drivers were striking and you just picked up their slack.
  - buggeryorkshire 3y ago
    I left the company last April, but was there 5 years. It is definitely one of the busiest days on the calendar, along with New Year's Day, in the UK anyway.
fakedang 3y ago

mulmen 3y ago

Gig work in general and food delivery specifically is the poster child for the tragedy of ZIRP. These companies somehow took what pizza shops and Chinese restaurants have been doing profitably for decades and with the power of unlimited free money… made it a losing proposition for restaurants, couriers, customers, governments, and even themselves. Food delivery isn’t a technology problem. It’s a trivial hiring and logistics problem. One that can literally be solved successfully by teenagers. There might have been a market for an ultra-lean driver-as-a-service with an SLA suitable for pizza delivery but I’m not even sure that’s viable. Pizza shops are vertically integrated, staffed by entry level workers, and still have razor thin margins. It’s not a career, it’s a way to build skills and get a better job. What an incredible blunder.

itake 3y ago
At least in my area, customers have more choices beyond mediocre pizza and chinese restaurants.
- mulmen 3y ago
  I have had all kinds of food delivered but the quality really suffers. Pho, BBQ, burgers, teriyaki, burritos, none of it really works for delivery. I have never had great delivery food. It’s always inferior to the restaurant, even from take-out places. Delivery pizza and Chinese places offer dishes specifically suited to survive the rigors of delivery. That’s why their food is mediocre in person. It’s optimized for delivery. Big food delivery is a fundamentally doomed business because the existing companies are treating this like a logistics problem to be solved by technology when really it’s a product problem. To make this business work you need to sell cheap, simple food that’s still satisfying. That means delivery-specific dishes.
  - jkepler 3y ago
    I still don't understand though why people do delivery pizza when decent-quality frozen pizza is often far cheaper than delivery, and it comes out of one's oven piping hot. Unless we're considering folks without ovens.

simonbarker87 3y ago

I really hope these services become unviable and disappear. They all but ruin the in restaurant experience by having half a dozen couriers sat around. They all seem like very nice people just trying to make a living so it’s not their fault but a restaurant isn’t a take-away.

forgotusername6 3y ago

A rider posted on Reddit yesterday how much they made by not striking on valentine's day. They made ~£70 from 10 deliveries. In their area at least that strike seemed to more than double the amount they got on average per delivery. https://www.reddit.com/r/deliveroos/s/1axFkcCP8J https://www.reddit.com/r/deliveroos/s/1axFkcCP8J

hulitu 3y ago

> Deliveroo and Uber Eats Riders Strike on Valentine's Day Strike ? But they are not employees. /s