8 ms·

Delivery Drivers Got Higher Wages. Now They're Getting Fewer Orders

31 points by lxm 2y ago

hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
https://archive.ph/vxtZa https://archive.ph/vxtZa
more_corn 2y ago
Oh wow, so it turns out this whole business model was built on slave wages and if you pay delivery drivers an honest wage the model doesn’t work.
- alphabettsy 2y ago
  Maybe poverty wages, but a slave wage?
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  The model works if you decrease the platform's cut. IMO, it would be neat to see a government provided "gig brokerage" of sorts that handles the dispatch of things like this (even including long haul delivery, maybe even a mechanical turk equivalent). When the service is ultimately provided by a contractor, what's the point of having middlemen compete?
  - jwsteigerwalt 2y ago
    A government solution will surely work.
    - thrill 2y ago
      And it's free money!
  - chrisan 2y ago
    You'd also need customer service to handle all the problems
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    The market is still pretty wide-open for a service that offers rapid, random delivery services and that takes a very small cut. Any of us are free to start such a thing right now, if they wish to spend the time putting it together and running it. (But even as a socialist, I think that this is approximately the last thing that the government should be in the middle of.)
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
      > The market is still pretty wide-open for a service that offers rapid, random delivery services and that takes a very small cut. Remember to factor in investors' motivation to extract capital above all else. Short term profit taking is an invisible fist.
    - eurleif 2y ago
      The "random" part was made illegal in California in 2020: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB2149 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... And in Florida in 2024: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/676 https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/676 (Probably also illegal in some other states, but those are the two I'm aware of off the top of my head.) I remember Postmates used to be able to deliver from any restaurant or store in your local area. Those were the days.
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        There's still 48 other states. How big of a thing must it be?
gjsman-1000 2y ago
If Seattle wants to force a certain wage, I see no reason why their city can’t have their own municipal food delivery system.
TulliusCicero 2y ago
The fundamental problem is just that the model of random delivery drivers grabbing (usually modest) amounts of food from random restaurants doesn't scale very well. It's inherently expensive because it's so time-consuming for the driver. Pizza is a bit of a different model because pizza delivery is sufficiently popular for pizza places to orient around supporting delivery well in the local area and have the drivers vertically integrated in-house.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  The on-demand deliver-anything business model just isn't sustainable. You can only have it when it's propped up by some combination of temporary subsidy (i.e., VC funding), price obfuscation (e.g., markups, fees, and tips), and shifting the costs and risks to drivers. DoorDash et al. aren't innovators in anything other than creative contracting and marketing. There's no magic practical efficiency that makes their business work.
  - snapplebobapple 2y ago
    I dont agree. Their innovation was stitching a whole swath of the cheapest and least reliable labor (part timers with a pulse who have an hour or two to kill) into a fairly reliable system. Leguslated higher wages destroys that innovation and highlights just how price sensitive the delivery demand is. It can never be a career at volume.
    - Larrikin 2y ago
      Door Dash was unable to make a profit during a time period where restaurants weren't allowed to have indoor dining and most people were locked in their homes for a year. This was before drivers and law makers began realizing that with car wear and tear they were getting less than minimum wage.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >drivers and law makers began realizing that with car wear and tear they were getting less than minimum wage. Source? At least according to this study[1] 92% of uber/lyft drivers in seattle made above minimum wage. True, this isn't exactly the same as for delivery workers, but given how fungible the two jobs are I think it's fair to treat them as approximately the same. Much more interesting is how much your earnings vary depending on your assumptions. The study calculated $17.40/hr by using pessimistic assumptions, and $23.25/hr using optimistic assumptions. [1] https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/161915a8-b0b8-4dc4-b5ff-d3e7b9012089 https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/161915a8-b0b8-4dc4-b5ff-d...
OptionOfT 2y ago
So on one hand we want to ensure everybody gets paid a decent wage. But then that gets countered by not wanting to pay too much for a luxury service, such as delivery, when I can just jump in the car and pick it up. One question: What did this people do before all of these apps came into play?
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  We didn't get delivery for as much stuff. In the US, I felt like delivery restaurants were mostly just pizza before (and in areas places you might have another type of cuisine known for doing delivery, like Chinese takeout places). Was born in 85 and I don't really remember getting delivered food from places other than pizza. Well, office catering would be a different story, but for regular folks yeah.
  - copperx 2y ago
    Pizza and Chinese food.
  - dgoldstein0 2y ago
    Yup sounds about right. Pizza delivery or pick it up yourself in the suburb I grew up in. These days I live in a somewhat dense city and yet I still prefer to order nearby and go walk to pick it up, at least when I'm just ordering for myself. It's probably an extra $5-10 and usually at least 20 minutes more to have someone else pick it up. As for the economics... If you force higher wages, then higher prices are likely and demand then goes down. Not surprising. The alternative might be for business to respond by working on higher efficiency, to get the average price of a delivery down by sharing the labor - that would require figuring out how to give the delivery workers multiple orders from the same or nearby restaurants to deliver in the same direction. Might be possible to build but when the restaurants aren't cooperating (it's wasteful for the delivery guy to wait for your food to be ready) and there's not enough orders from one area to another it's tough. Add that a lot of food delivery is relatively time sensitive as not all food keeps well / stays warm long enough. I suspect pizza delivery is the main type of business that has solved it this way. For everyone else, it's clearly a tricky problem and the net result either way is to need less labor for food delivery, higher prices, or a mix of both. Which is fine as long as we have other jobs those delivery drivers are willing to switch to instead. Imo that's a big part of the problem - mandating certain jobs will pay better without necessarily having a plan for creating other jobs for the folks who end up underworked/jobless as a result. Now if gig companies downsized their workforces like regular employers some of the extra jobs should result from the extra discretionary income spent by the remaining workers... But probably a tiny fraction of what's needed to avoid more unemployment. Complicating this may be that gig workers are subject to underemployment if not enough if them quit, and I suspect the unemployment safety net works poorly for them.
habosa 2y ago
Did the WSJ really just report on the basic concept of supply and demand?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  The steelman argument for minimum wage is that it acts as collective bargaining for groups that are otherwise too big and too sparse to cooperate with each other. But yeah there's obviously a some point at which the returns are diminishing, e.g. if it was $100/hour nothing would get done. Legally at least.
  - 4WIW 2y ago
    The flip side of minimum wage is often overlooked: people on the bottom end of the spectrum, who struggle to compete with other minimum-wagers, are cut out of the workforce. At $15 or $20/hour, the job requirements are higher than at $10/hour, and these folks stand no chance. Likewise, the low-end employers are priced out of the market. It's the same survival of fittest, except the weakest constituance is hurt most. They are very sparse so their voice is never heard.
    - paulmd 2y ago
      > It's the same survival of fittest, except the weakest constituance is hurt most. They are very sparse so their voice is never heard. their voice is heard to a disproportionate extent because there are entire companies like Walmart and really entire industries like food service that built a business model around being able to pay sub-living wages (usually with the difference made up by tax dollars or tips).
    - Balgair 2y ago
      In a few states you are allowed to pay people with 'severe' disabilities under minimum wage. The idea is to incentivize companies to hire these people for otherwise unprofitable work and mostly to get the disabled out of the house and earning some money that they otherwise would not. For example, most of the prescription glasses made in the US are made by blind people under such a scheme. Honestly, it sounds terribly exploitative. But, from what I understand, these schemes are mostly successful in that the disabled are happy with it along with the employers.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pbj1968 2y ago
I don’t mind a $5 fee, but it’s the markup above regular menu prices that generally kills it. I also had multiple issues with incomplete DoorDash deliveries. I doubt the drivers were stealing food, but the restaurants obviously thought they could get away with theft and not be penalized. It was ALWAYS the most expensive entree missing. Had to get into credit card disputes with DoorDash more than once before they were banned from our household. Oddly never once had the issue with Uber Eats. That being said, the in restaurant experience sure as hell isn’t what it used to be, either. Rarely bother with a sit down place anymore. Grocery delivery seems to be a winner, though. Costs about $20 more and I don’t have to spend two hours dealing with it? Count me in.
- yunwal 2y ago
  Grocery delivery is the worst for me. The store gives you the worst produce possible, and if something’s not in store, the substitution is often nonsensical.
  - gruez 2y ago
    Agreed. Just go in-store for the stuff you want to pick out, and do pickup for all the items that don't require selection. Usually pickup is free or very cheap. Sure, it's not as convenient as delivery, but it's also much cheaper and you get to pick out the stuff you want.
  - Retric 2y ago
    There’s a range of quality and options. My sister does in story pickup and then picks up produce on her own. It’s free and still saves her a half hour per week which adds up.
  - mvdtnz 2y ago
    My brother had AAA batteries substituted for AA batteries. Like, come on.
- gnicholas 2y ago
  > I doubt the drivers were stealing food, but the restaurants obviously thought they could get away with theft and not be penalized. I wouldn't doubt the drivers were stealing food. We've had occasions where the "wrong driver" picked up the food, but then "got a flat tire" and couldn't bring it back. This was a multi-hundred dollar order. I don't buy that crap for one minute. Some driver stole the food, and the restaurant may also have been at fault for not checking to make sure the proper driver got the order.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
New York City driver Jagat Pun, who mainly delivers for Uber Eats, said the app’s shift system has slashed his working hours by more than half. His weekly earnings are down about 60% ..."I'm struggling to survive" The unsaid implication: He used to make so much money from Uber Eats that he could afford the full set of NYC living costs. Seriously? He made six figures as an Uber Eats driver?
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Perhaps Jaget lives in a three-bedroom 6th story walkup with five other delivery drivers.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > Perhaps Jaget lives in a three-bedroom 6th story walkup with five other delivery drivers. That would seems like a pretty relevant detail to Jaget's story. However, I'm with you that some chasm-filling speculation is needed to make the columns balance here.
  - quantified 2y ago
    New York City contains a lot more than just the Upper West Side. Most New Yorkers do not make 6 figures. Median household income is like $75k.
senectus1 2y ago
but really, is one leading to the other, or is it just that inflation has caused fewer descretionary spedning?
spacecadet 2y ago
We didnt order out often, but at some point in the last year we also decided to scale that back to almost 0, mainly because of the quality of food.
gnicholas 2y ago
I wonder if the problem is that they're trying to coordinate/optimize drivers and routes after the orders have been placed. What if they tried to coordinate before the order was placed? There have been many days where I would have been happy to eat food from one of 10 different places, and we picked a restaurant more or less at random. If a platform could coordinate my choice with the choice of 4 very close by neighbors, then they could send one driver to pick up maybe $300-500 of orders ($60-100 food per household) and give us some sort of discount. I would actually allow notifications from an app that sometimes messaged me to say "several of your neighbors have ordered from X Restaurant, which you've liked in the past. Do you want to order also, for a 10% discount?". Of course, if they bullshitted and tried to fake-it-till-you-make-it with the order momentum (telling 50 neighbors that several already ordered), that would be annoying and potentially fraudulent. But I would be happy to see a competitor arise and shift the coordination from delivery to ordering. It could make the business model work much better, and would also cut down on travel time, food sogginess, etc.
- gruez 2y ago
  >There have been many days where I would have been happy to eat food from one of 10 different places, and we picked one more or less at random. That seems like a nightmare. I sure don't want to go through the trouble of making 10 different orders just to save 10%. If I wanted to jump through that many hoops I'd pick it up myself.
  - gnicholas 2y ago
    As another commenter said, I wouldn’t make different orders. I’d just pick a restaurant based on what other neighbors have picked, and be content with whatever it is.
  - doctor_eval 2y ago
    > That seems like a nightmare. I sure don't want to go through the trouble of making 10 different orders just to save 10%. If I wanted to jump through that many hoops I'd pick it up myself. I believe GP is saying they don’t care which of the 10 restaurants they place their single order, and if they knew which one would deliver most efficiently, they would choose it.
datavirtue 2y ago
Sounds like they are still campaigning with investor dollars. I doubt they had a viable business before the wage increase. They should make like a good capitalist and just go out of business.
MissTake 2y ago
> DoorDash said the new laws collectively led to a reduction of some 1% of its overall orders in the first quarter Not according to their own financials: orders were up 1M the first quarter for Door Dash compared to Q1 the previous year (+45M ‘23, +46M ‘24). Door Dash don’t even mention the new laws in their most recent financials: > In Q1 2024, Total Orders increased 21% Y/Y to 620 million and Marketplace GOV increased 21% Y/Y to $19.2 billion. We remain pleased with our execution against volume goals in all major areas of our business”
Larrikin 2y ago
Between my various credit cards and bank accounts GrubHub and Door dash premium services are free I slowed ordering when it became obvious the drivers were going to multiple restaurants, driving in the opposite direction to do other deliveries, and then my food from a relatively nearby restaurant was ice cold by the time I got it. I stopped completely once they IPOed and it became a 30 minute back and forth for partial credit for missing food when they used to just issue you a full refund in 30 seconds.
- techsupporter 2y ago
  > ...a 30 minute back and forth for partial credit for missing food when they used to just issue you a full refund in 30 seconds. Back when I regularly had to go to an office, my coworkers and I tried out a bunch of the delivery services. The one we settled on was Bite Squad because they apparently paid their drivers as actual employees[0], so an hourly wage and benefits, and had actual performance standards. If an item was left off, Bite Squad would dispatch a driver to go get it and bring it to us. All of the contractor-based services would just refund for food and be done with it. The problem is, that isn't what we wanted. If we'd wanted money instead of food, we wouldn't have ordered. The service expects us to do the management of additional attempts instead of it being part of their service. Ever since Bite Squad left Seattle, and especially now that I don't have to go to an office more than once or twice a month, I've not bothered with the food delivery apps. 0 - This was pre-pandemic, before Bite Squad "overhauled" their business model.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Gathering6678 2y ago
Isn't it Economics 101 that a higher price, when supply is constant, will lead to a decrease in demand?

31 points by lxm 2y ago

https://archive.ph/vxtZa https://archive.ph/vxtZa

Oh wow, so it turns out this whole business model was built on slave wages and if you pay delivery drivers an honest wage the model doesn’t work.

alphabettsy 2y ago
Maybe poverty wages, but a slave wage?
candiddevmike 2y ago
The model works if you decrease the platform's cut. IMO, it would be neat to see a government provided "gig brokerage" of sorts that handles the dispatch of things like this (even including long haul delivery, maybe even a mechanical turk equivalent). When the service is ultimately provided by a contractor, what's the point of having middlemen compete?
- jwsteigerwalt 2y ago
  A government solution will surely work.
  - thrill 2y ago
    And it's free money!
- chrisan 2y ago
  You'd also need customer service to handle all the problems
- ssl-3 2y ago
  The market is still pretty wide-open for a service that offers rapid, random delivery services and that takes a very small cut. Any of us are free to start such a thing right now, if they wish to spend the time putting it together and running it. (But even as a socialist, I think that this is approximately the last thing that the government should be in the middle of.)
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > The market is still pretty wide-open for a service that offers rapid, random delivery services and that takes a very small cut. Remember to factor in investors' motivation to extract capital above all else. Short term profit taking is an invisible fist.
  - eurleif 2y ago
    The "random" part was made illegal in California in 2020: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB2149 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... And in Florida in 2024: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/676 https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/676 (Probably also illegal in some other states, but those are the two I'm aware of off the top of my head.) I remember Postmates used to be able to deliver from any restaurant or store in your local area. Those were the days.
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      There's still 48 other states. How big of a thing must it be?

gjsman-1000 2y ago

If Seattle wants to force a certain wage, I see no reason why their city can’t have their own municipal food delivery system.

TulliusCicero 2y ago

The fundamental problem is just that the model of random delivery drivers grabbing (usually modest) amounts of food from random restaurants doesn't scale very well. It's inherently expensive because it's so time-consuming for the driver. Pizza is a bit of a different model because pizza delivery is sufficiently popular for pizza places to orient around supporting delivery well in the local area and have the drivers vertically integrated in-house.

the_snooze 2y ago
The on-demand deliver-anything business model just isn't sustainable. You can only have it when it's propped up by some combination of temporary subsidy (i.e., VC funding), price obfuscation (e.g., markups, fees, and tips), and shifting the costs and risks to drivers. DoorDash et al. aren't innovators in anything other than creative contracting and marketing. There's no magic practical efficiency that makes their business work.
- snapplebobapple 2y ago
  I dont agree. Their innovation was stitching a whole swath of the cheapest and least reliable labor (part timers with a pulse who have an hour or two to kill) into a fairly reliable system. Leguslated higher wages destroys that innovation and highlights just how price sensitive the delivery demand is. It can never be a career at volume.
  - Larrikin 2y ago
    Door Dash was unable to make a profit during a time period where restaurants weren't allowed to have indoor dining and most people were locked in their homes for a year. This was before drivers and law makers began realizing that with car wear and tear they were getting less than minimum wage.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >drivers and law makers began realizing that with car wear and tear they were getting less than minimum wage. Source? At least according to this study[1] 92% of uber/lyft drivers in seattle made above minimum wage. True, this isn't exactly the same as for delivery workers, but given how fungible the two jobs are I think it's fair to treat them as approximately the same. Much more interesting is how much your earnings vary depending on your assumptions. The study calculated $17.40/hr by using pessimistic assumptions, and $23.25/hr using optimistic assumptions. [1] https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/161915a8-b0b8-4dc4-b5ff-d3e7b9012089 https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/161915a8-b0b8-4dc4-b5ff-d...

OptionOfT 2y ago

So on one hand we want to ensure everybody gets paid a decent wage. But then that gets countered by not wanting to pay too much for a luxury service, such as delivery, when I can just jump in the car and pick it up. One question: What did this people do before all of these apps came into play?

TulliusCicero 2y ago
We didn't get delivery for as much stuff. In the US, I felt like delivery restaurants were mostly just pizza before (and in areas places you might have another type of cuisine known for doing delivery, like Chinese takeout places). Was born in 85 and I don't really remember getting delivered food from places other than pizza. Well, office catering would be a different story, but for regular folks yeah.
- copperx 2y ago
  Pizza and Chinese food.
- dgoldstein0 2y ago
  Yup sounds about right. Pizza delivery or pick it up yourself in the suburb I grew up in. These days I live in a somewhat dense city and yet I still prefer to order nearby and go walk to pick it up, at least when I'm just ordering for myself. It's probably an extra $5-10 and usually at least 20 minutes more to have someone else pick it up. As for the economics... If you force higher wages, then higher prices are likely and demand then goes down. Not surprising. The alternative might be for business to respond by working on higher efficiency, to get the average price of a delivery down by sharing the labor - that would require figuring out how to give the delivery workers multiple orders from the same or nearby restaurants to deliver in the same direction. Might be possible to build but when the restaurants aren't cooperating (it's wasteful for the delivery guy to wait for your food to be ready) and there's not enough orders from one area to another it's tough. Add that a lot of food delivery is relatively time sensitive as not all food keeps well / stays warm long enough. I suspect pizza delivery is the main type of business that has solved it this way. For everyone else, it's clearly a tricky problem and the net result either way is to need less labor for food delivery, higher prices, or a mix of both. Which is fine as long as we have other jobs those delivery drivers are willing to switch to instead. Imo that's a big part of the problem - mandating certain jobs will pay better without necessarily having a plan for creating other jobs for the folks who end up underworked/jobless as a result. Now if gig companies downsized their workforces like regular employers some of the extra jobs should result from the extra discretionary income spent by the remaining workers... But probably a tiny fraction of what's needed to avoid more unemployment. Complicating this may be that gig workers are subject to underemployment if not enough if them quit, and I suspect the unemployment safety net works poorly for them.

habosa 2y ago

Did the WSJ really just report on the basic concept of supply and demand?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
The steelman argument for minimum wage is that it acts as collective bargaining for groups that are otherwise too big and too sparse to cooperate with each other. But yeah there's obviously a some point at which the returns are diminishing, e.g. if it was $100/hour nothing would get done. Legally at least.
- 4WIW 2y ago
  The flip side of minimum wage is often overlooked: people on the bottom end of the spectrum, who struggle to compete with other minimum-wagers, are cut out of the workforce. At $15 or $20/hour, the job requirements are higher than at $10/hour, and these folks stand no chance. Likewise, the low-end employers are priced out of the market. It's the same survival of fittest, except the weakest constituance is hurt most. They are very sparse so their voice is never heard.
  - paulmd 2y ago
    > It's the same survival of fittest, except the weakest constituance is hurt most. They are very sparse so their voice is never heard. their voice is heard to a disproportionate extent because there are entire companies like Walmart and really entire industries like food service that built a business model around being able to pay sub-living wages (usually with the difference made up by tax dollars or tips).
  - Balgair 2y ago
    In a few states you are allowed to pay people with 'severe' disabilities under minimum wage. The idea is to incentivize companies to hire these people for otherwise unprofitable work and mostly to get the disabled out of the house and earning some money that they otherwise would not. For example, most of the prescription glasses made in the US are made by blind people under such a scheme. Honestly, it sounds terribly exploitative. But, from what I understand, these schemes are mostly successful in that the disabled are happy with it along with the employers.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

pbj1968 2y ago

I don’t mind a $5 fee, but it’s the markup above regular menu prices that generally kills it. I also had multiple issues with incomplete DoorDash deliveries. I doubt the drivers were stealing food, but the restaurants obviously thought they could get away with theft and not be penalized. It was ALWAYS the most expensive entree missing. Had to get into credit card disputes with DoorDash more than once before they were banned from our household. Oddly never once had the issue with Uber Eats. That being said, the in restaurant experience sure as hell isn’t what it used to be, either. Rarely bother with a sit down place anymore. Grocery delivery seems to be a winner, though. Costs about $20 more and I don’t have to spend two hours dealing with it? Count me in.

yunwal 2y ago
Grocery delivery is the worst for me. The store gives you the worst produce possible, and if something’s not in store, the substitution is often nonsensical.
- gruez 2y ago
  Agreed. Just go in-store for the stuff you want to pick out, and do pickup for all the items that don't require selection. Usually pickup is free or very cheap. Sure, it's not as convenient as delivery, but it's also much cheaper and you get to pick out the stuff you want.
- Retric 2y ago
  There’s a range of quality and options. My sister does in story pickup and then picks up produce on her own. It’s free and still saves her a half hour per week which adds up.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  My brother had AAA batteries substituted for AA batteries. Like, come on.
gnicholas 2y ago
> I doubt the drivers were stealing food, but the restaurants obviously thought they could get away with theft and not be penalized. I wouldn't doubt the drivers were stealing food. We've had occasions where the "wrong driver" picked up the food, but then "got a flat tire" and couldn't bring it back. This was a multi-hundred dollar order. I don't buy that crap for one minute. Some driver stole the food, and the restaurant may also have been at fault for not checking to make sure the proper driver got the order.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

New York City driver Jagat Pun, who mainly delivers for Uber Eats, said the app’s shift system has slashed his working hours by more than half. His weekly earnings are down about 60% ..."I'm struggling to survive" The unsaid implication: He used to make so much money from Uber Eats that he could afford the full set of NYC living costs. Seriously? He made six figures as an Uber Eats driver?

ssl-3 2y ago
Perhaps Jaget lives in a three-bedroom 6th story walkup with five other delivery drivers.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > Perhaps Jaget lives in a three-bedroom 6th story walkup with five other delivery drivers. That would seems like a pretty relevant detail to Jaget's story. However, I'm with you that some chasm-filling speculation is needed to make the columns balance here.
- quantified 2y ago
  New York City contains a lot more than just the Upper West Side. Most New Yorkers do not make 6 figures. Median household income is like $75k.

senectus1 2y ago

but really, is one leading to the other, or is it just that inflation has caused fewer descretionary spedning?

spacecadet 2y ago

We didnt order out often, but at some point in the last year we also decided to scale that back to almost 0, mainly because of the quality of food.

gnicholas 2y ago

I wonder if the problem is that they're trying to coordinate/optimize drivers and routes after the orders have been placed. What if they tried to coordinate before the order was placed? There have been many days where I would have been happy to eat food from one of 10 different places, and we picked a restaurant more or less at random. If a platform could coordinate my choice with the choice of 4 very close by neighbors, then they could send one driver to pick up maybe $300-500 of orders ($60-100 food per household) and give us some sort of discount. I would actually allow notifications from an app that sometimes messaged me to say "several of your neighbors have ordered from X Restaurant, which you've liked in the past. Do you want to order also, for a 10% discount?". Of course, if they bullshitted and tried to fake-it-till-you-make-it with the order momentum (telling 50 neighbors that several already ordered), that would be annoying and potentially fraudulent. But I would be happy to see a competitor arise and shift the coordination from delivery to ordering. It could make the business model work much better, and would also cut down on travel time, food sogginess, etc.

gruez 2y ago
>There have been many days where I would have been happy to eat food from one of 10 different places, and we picked one more or less at random. That seems like a nightmare. I sure don't want to go through the trouble of making 10 different orders just to save 10%. If I wanted to jump through that many hoops I'd pick it up myself.
- gnicholas 2y ago
  As another commenter said, I wouldn’t make different orders. I’d just pick a restaurant based on what other neighbors have picked, and be content with whatever it is.
- doctor_eval 2y ago
  > That seems like a nightmare. I sure don't want to go through the trouble of making 10 different orders just to save 10%. If I wanted to jump through that many hoops I'd pick it up myself. I believe GP is saying they don’t care which of the 10 restaurants they place their single order, and if they knew which one would deliver most efficiently, they would choose it.

datavirtue 2y ago

Sounds like they are still campaigning with investor dollars. I doubt they had a viable business before the wage increase. They should make like a good capitalist and just go out of business.

MissTake 2y ago

> DoorDash said the new laws collectively led to a reduction of some 1% of its overall orders in the first quarter Not according to their own financials: orders were up 1M the first quarter for Door Dash compared to Q1 the previous year (+45M ‘23, +46M ‘24). Door Dash don’t even mention the new laws in their most recent financials: > In Q1 2024, Total Orders increased 21% Y/Y to 620 million and Marketplace GOV increased 21% Y/Y to $19.2 billion. We remain pleased with our execution against volume goals in all major areas of our business”

Larrikin 2y ago

Between my various credit cards and bank accounts GrubHub and Door dash premium services are free I slowed ordering when it became obvious the drivers were going to multiple restaurants, driving in the opposite direction to do other deliveries, and then my food from a relatively nearby restaurant was ice cold by the time I got it. I stopped completely once they IPOed and it became a 30 minute back and forth for partial credit for missing food when they used to just issue you a full refund in 30 seconds.

techsupporter 2y ago
> ...a 30 minute back and forth for partial credit for missing food when they used to just issue you a full refund in 30 seconds. Back when I regularly had to go to an office, my coworkers and I tried out a bunch of the delivery services. The one we settled on was Bite Squad because they apparently paid their drivers as actual employees[0], so an hourly wage and benefits, and had actual performance standards. If an item was left off, Bite Squad would dispatch a driver to go get it and bring it to us. All of the contractor-based services would just refund for food and be done with it. The problem is, that isn't what we wanted. If we'd wanted money instead of food, we wouldn't have ordered. The service expects us to do the management of additional attempts instead of it being part of their service. Ever since Bite Squad left Seattle, and especially now that I don't have to go to an office more than once or twice a month, I've not bothered with the food delivery apps. 0 - This was pre-pandemic, before Bite Squad "overhauled" their business model.

deleted 2y ago

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Gathering6678 2y ago

Isn't it Economics 101 that a higher price, when supply is constant, will lead to a decrease in demand?