Extrapolating from DoorDash scale to ‘your favorite local restaurant’ scale is inappropriate. Fraud at an exponentially higher scale deserves a similarly exponential increase in mistrust. Yes, bad actors individually exist, but when megacorporations scale up bad actors to national and international levels, it’s appropriate for mistrust to scale up accordingly. I have not been able to determine which of the restaurants I frequent are bad actors in this regard, but I have absolutely been able to determine that DoorDash is an unrepentant bad actor, as many consecutive “we fucked you over and paid pennies on the dollar to do so” settlements have confirmed. So changing my behavior to avoid a corrupt megacorp does not automatically correlate with contradiction and hypocrisy in my local behaviors.
> Fraud at an exponentially higher scale deserves a similarly exponential increase in mistrust.
It was never determined to be fraud. Keep in mind that what they were accused of was never actually tested in courts.
Also keep in mind that this practice is explicitly enshrined in the laws of many states for restaurant workers. If the worker got a tip, the restaurant owner was allowed to pay below minimum wage for that hour to that worker (as long as wage + tip met the federal minimum wage).
Which is why I was asking. If you're in one of those (many) states, chances are high that most restaurants are doing what people find so despicable of Doordash. So yes, it is "at scale".
Ok, so let's imagine that it's common that mom and pop stores cheat employees by adjusting timesheets. Let's say we also find that Walmart was doing this as official policy accross all their stores.
Are we supposed to just say "welp, that's ok Walmart, keep doing it, because we can't stop every other mom and pop store in the nation from potentially doing this."
> Are we supposed to just say "welp, that's ok Walmart, keep doing it, because we can't stop every other mom and pop store in the nation from potentially doing this."
No, you're supposed to say "Let's stop everyone from doing this" and stop making it legal for mom and pop stores from doing it.
And this has strayed from my original comment. I'm not asking about legality. The person I responded to found it so terrible he refused to use them. I'm merely suggesting they keep the same moral high ground when they go to eat at a restaurant.
You don't seem to understand what DoorDash did wasn't legal. They violated NY's minimum rate law which has provisions specific to gig economy delivery services.
This. The three conversational branches in reply to the question posed are “yes”, “no”, and “TIL”; none of those three branches ends up in a conversation that excuses DoorDash, nor in one that promotes increased tolerance of DoorDash. If anyone feels otherwise, then present the case for why we should tolerate Doordash’s behavior, rather than asking one-sentence leading questions and then arguing about the indirection layer of the leading question.
In this instance, for constructed example, one might present a straightforward claim that we should not direct moral outrage towards DoorDash for those behaviors they voluntarily paid money an apology for. I’m certain that’s not the correct phrasing of the argument intended, but since that claim hasn’t been made yet to us, of course my constructed example is wrong! That’s why it’s so essential to present one’s views as sentences, rather than through leading questions.
Above, no claim is presented for why discussing local restaurant behaviors has any bearing on how we interpret, moralize, and respond to the behavior of the faceless megacorp DoorDash. Without that connection having been drawn, this is a functionally irrelevant tangent into businesses not comparable to DoorDash in either scale or function.
> The three conversational branches in reply to the question posed are “yes”, “no”, and “TIL”; none of those three branches ends up in a conversation that excuses DoorDash, nor in one that promotes increased tolerance of DoorDash.
Nothing related to any of my comments was meant to excuse DoorDash. What gave people that idea? It was meant for people to question their views on tipping to begin with.
My issue is with rhetorical methods such as that, yes, but let’s not cross the line into mocking the people using those methods. Rhetoric is often taught in morally-neutral terms in the schools underpinning tech — especially at Stanford, the big one next door to YC/HN in Palo Alto! — and the seeming insult of that comparison (I’ve never seen Columbo) will make people less likely to reconsider their rhetorical choices. Whether they want to be heard more successfully or (as I hope) they realize that rhetorical methods are morally-charged in real-world communities or they’re asocial like me and this offers a method-hack for social interaction efficiency, it’s the method that matters here, not the person behind it.
(One benefit of being nameblind at HN’s community size is that it’s easy for me to treat everyone the same, because I lack any recognition for whether I’ve spoken with someone previously or not. I acknowledge it’s not that easy for other people, but certainly it has the upside of forcing this ‘method, not person’ approach I describe into every interaction I have here :)
You may be treating everyone equally in your mind, but prose like the above reads as pretentious to most people, so I don't think your approach is particularly persuasive.
Additionally, when I make comments like the above, I don't think the person I'm responding to is actually persuadable. It's not some sort of good faith socratic debate.
No. I’ve heard similar stories from baristas at small coffee shops. Any tips through the tap to pay systems get split between the processor, business owner and then the staff. This should be illegal. People should be ashamed
Should people not be ashamed for not tipping the chef in the back...?
Tipping is problematic no matter how you look at it. Rather than getting outraged, how about focusing on discontinuing this pointless practice? I've yet to find a single pro-tipping person who is consistent in their views on tipping. They'll happily support one tipping practice in one scenario, and be against the exact same practice in a different sphere.
BTW, what Doordash was accused of was not tip sharing, but using it to pay less than minimum wage. Which is standard practice for restaurants in the majority of states. That's why I was asking.
I’m against tipping in any scenario. I don’t think tipping for good service should be the norm. You don’t deserve a tip because you brought my food out correctly and timely, you don’t deserve a tip for delivering my appliances without damaging my walls, you don’t deserve a tip for ringing the register with a smile, all of that is what you’re supposed to do.
If the entire economic model hinges on the majority of people tipping variable amounts then the model seems broken. Charge proportionately more and don’t rely tips, everyone will have a better experience.
Agree that paying below minimum wage is bullshit. The small print does though state that if tips don't make up the difference between their wage and minimum wage, the restaurant owner is on the hook to make up that difference.
Regardless, every tip is a savings to the business owner.
> The small print does though state that if tips don't make up the difference between their wage and minimum wage, the restaurant owner is on the hook to make up that difference.
DoorDash was following this exact same fine print.
services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25. then delivery worker made $5 on that order. + the delivery worker expects a tip.
which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
I don’t think paying someone to perform a service for you makes you a sucker.
I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
It’s not like they hide anything about what they’re offering. They advertise service X for price Y and that’s what they deliver. Seems fine. If you don’t think Y is worth it for X then don’t use it.
Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.
Well, they hide the fact that the food prices are marked up for one thing. Even if you pick up yourself, menu prices in DoorDash are at least 20% above the restaurant’s posted prices. That undisclosed upcharge comes on top of the delivery fees and service charges they do disclose — but only after you have made your order.
Aren't the prices marked up by the restaurant, not by DoorDash? I thought it was common practice for restaurants to list higher menu prices on DoorDash (and other delivery platforms) to help offset the platform's cut they take from the restaurant. (Which sounds entirely reasonable to me.)
I'm not sure why DoorDash should be responsible for disclosing that; DoorDash may not even know what the regular in-person menu prices are in the first place.
The solution to this is to stop allowing delivery services to take a cut of the restaurant's revenue. Instead they should be required to raise their delivery/service fees charged to the customer. Of course, this will likely result in fewer customers, so they don't want to do that, but it's the only honest thing to do.
I get that the delivery services do provide value to the restaurants in many cases, but ultimately the customer pays for it either way, so that cost should be made explicit to the customer.
I don’t see a problem with that. They show a price for a product. They have no responsibility to inform you that a lower price for the same product is available elsewhere.
This is what distributors do. I don't feel cheated when an Amazon sellers offers something that I can buy for 40% less direct from China, or when a store sells me a loaf of bread for $4 that they paid $2.75 for.
If it's worth it to me at the price offered, I'll buy it. If it's not, I won't.
amazon is a bad example for this because they aren't just saying here is x for y$. they force the sellers into paying at least y everywhere, even if amazon has nothing to do with the sale. they are using their semi-monopoly to raise your price on x everywhere. sort of the opposite of the "the market will solve it" approach.
Most states allow tips to be deducted from wages down to sub-minimum wages for for most tipped workers. Which sucks to be clear, just saying it's not unique to ride-share drivers.
I think this is different, though. The phenomenon you are talking about is customarily applied to hourly workers, where they are paid a set hourly wage for the time they're on the job, and then tips can deduct from that hourly wage. Hourly workers see both sides of this and can do the math, and know what their take-home will be based on their hourly wage and the tips they accept.
For a DoorDash delivery driver, the problem is transparency. Consider a $7 delivery with a customer tip of $5, and the difference between being told:
"This delivery offers you $7", or
"This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $5 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $2, so the total you receive is still $7."
In both cases the customer behavior and end result for the driver is the same, but in the first case DoorDash doesn't even mention the tip, and quietly pockets it. Another example, with a driver tip of $10 instead:
"This delivery offers you $7, and the customer added a tip of $3", or
"This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $10 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $0, so the total you receive is $10."
The 2nd statement in both cases is the honest one, but of course that would make drivers feel cheated, so DD says the 1st thing, and completely hides that they offset "wages" with tips.
Regardless, I personally think this practice (for regular hourly employees or delivery drivers) is garbage; in my state, the tipped minimum wage is set to the same value as the non-tipped minimum wage, so employers don't get to pull that crap.
That’s bad and should be considered theft. But what DD did is even worse. They didn’t just reduce pay, they hid what they were doing and didn’t even show a tip to the driver unless the tip was more than the guaranteed pay. And they did this to the tune of over sixteen million dollars.
> And they did this to the tune of over sixteen million dollars
So like $1 per driver?
Also it's not like the tips they earn correlate with service drivers can provide. At most you can be a bit faster, but generally bound to traffic? (I haven't used them tbh).
You are excusing literal theft to the tune of $16mm. And the excuse is that the company is so large and vast and dominant that the scale to the company is a drop in the bucket.
Does the theft of $16mm become worse if DoorDash was half the size?
If I steal $16mm I’d go to jail but it’s no big deal because a corporation did it? The apologia for this is baffling to me.
I genuinely don't understand how corporate propaganda in the US got people to get to the point where defending corporations is like a Pavlovian reflex for some people.
We’re on a forum run by the VCs who funded DoorDash. A lot of people here dream that they too can one day get funded and go on to steal millions with no consequences.
> literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more
Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.
It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?
Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?
I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.
Skip the line passes are an obvious sucker play; they oversell tickets to the park so that people can go on like 1 ride every 4 hours, then charge again to actually be able to use the ticket you already bought (and simply don't deliver service to the others). Do you think they are unaware of the capacity at which reasonable latencies can be maintained?
In case you, or anyone else, actually care or are interested, there's a great deep dive video on the history of "FASTPASS" by the youtube channel Defunctland.
"It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. "
It's quite different and that's the point.
The issues beyond 'apparent value creation are':
1) asymmetries in power between different actors that induces some to make ill advised actions - passing off hidden costs and especially risks
2) externalisations - aka damaging the environment, labour regs (which exist due to 1)
3) misrepresntations in value to end customer - dark patterns, hidden fees, risks not apparent in the transaction.
Entire industries would not work if we had to properly account for a lot of things.
"I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ri" <- it's not just the 'price' that is high and you're 'willing to pay' - that's fine.
That's definitely not 'rip off' because you're not coerced in any way for that - that's just 'high prices.
The $10 bottle of water at an event <- that is a 'rip off'.
It's all the other things in the system that make it problematic.
Last mile delivery by poor people almost should not exist as a business because it depends on externalizing too many things.
If they provided healthcare, vacation, job security, didn't force people to run around, all that stuff that removes the 'power and information asymmetry' - and then - it still works as a business, fine but it generally wont.
Some businesses are structurally unsound, and people invest in them to take advantage of broken systems (social, regulatory) at the margins. Gambling, day trading. A lot of zero-sum stuff.
Now 'Robot Delivery' - that's an entirely different prospect.
That's an attempt at real value creation. If we got our act together, everything could be delivered by little robots - today - already in 2026. It would reuire a lot of coordination.
I wonder how quickly businesses would advocate for better land use and city planning if these externalities were more apparent and properly accounted for instead of providing “convenience” in a system that has been designed to be inconvenient.
I think there's a business there, for sure, but the markup is definitely a problem for some. I think below a certain order volume it might be hard to get enough delivery people at the ready. As they ask customers to absorb more of the cost the volume could drop. If they don't have enough delivery people then that adds to the delivery time which makes it less and less worth it, at least to me.
I really dislike the unreliable delivery times. 99% of the time I just use the apps, or more likely the restaurant's site, to place the order and pick it up myself.
I have the time to do this though, so maybe it's more valuable to busier people, like parents.
fast-rise sugar infested bun, non-organic antibiotic infested horrendous animal welfare beef, etc. - the BOM is well under $5, i'd think $3 at best. So, you pay $25 for sub-$5 bill of low quality materials (not good to your health with thus additional expenses down the road). Who is the sucker?
It's just a standard reintermediation play, inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides.
Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .
this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.
I thought they were built on "time is money". If you make the equivalent of $70 an hour, do you care about spending $15 for someone to bring you lunch and save you 15-30 minutes of your workday?
It was kind of fun doing this math back when I was a freelancer. An hour saved would literally produce more money than the order cost. But really, it would have been better to save the money by making food ahead of time.
I've always struggled with this thinking. Yes, you have finite hours in a day and if you spend an hour going to get food then you can't necessarily also be doing freelance work. But if you planned on working 8 hours to earn X dollars, you can still work 8 hours after spending an hour going to get food and still make X dollars. Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep. I guess it makes sense if you're trying to work every waking moment; and I can appreciate that some choose to and some have to.
> Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep.
Well, if you value an hour of your sleep or entertainment less than $15 dollars (if, for instance, you like to cook), then sure, spend it on cooking instead. Many of people would rather not, and their revealed preferences show it pretty clearly.
Ya I dont get this argument. Takes me all of 2 mins to grab my lunch in the morning. It's also not a greasy burger that shortens my lifespan and physically disable's me.
The whole point of food delivery is for the occasions you can’t (e.g. sudden illness, or time management mishaps) or don’t want to (laziness/tiredness) cook or drive to grab a takeout. You pay a premium for the convenience, someone else takes care of it. Nothing wrong with that, no “suckers” in the general scheme.
From what I've seen its the fat lazy devs at work that order chipotle for lunch rather than walking downstairs to get it themselves. Mostly the younger ones too that are right out of school and should be saving their money.
This sort of framing is never really valid, because when we go out to pick up our lunch, we generally do not lose part of our wages (for salaried employees). We may stay in the office a little bit longer to make up for it, but then that's a completely independent decision about how much that time is worth to us, plus how much we are willing and able to pay for that time.
You might say "going home from the office 30 minutes earlier is absolutely worth $15" to me, but that has little to do with what your effective hourly wage is.
...only because the company is committing wage theft to subsidize costs. I don't think it feels reasonable to say "Your employer has to meet certain wages, but they didn't so you're a sucker".
If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.
Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.
> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25.
Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but when I use these services, the price comes out to something like 20%-30% more than the in-restaurant cost (yes, including the common practice of restaurants increasing menu prices on delivery sites to offset the delivery company's cut of their revenue).
Sure, it's often not cheap, but when I use these services it's because I do not want to go and do the pickup myself. I'm paying for that convenience, and I'm fine with it. If you're not, that's fine; no one is forcing you to use delivery services.
In any cases where they are actually violating labor laws or being deceptive with their pricing or practices, yes, they should absolutely be punished and stop doing that. But that doesn't change the fact that they provide a service -- delivering food to your door -- and businesses generally charge you when they provide a service. You can argue that the charge on offer is too high for you, but that's a personal decision for everyone to make.
And even if it does cost $15 to deliver a $10 burger in some scenarios, there are times when I am happy to do that to save myself 30-45 minutes of driving somewhere, finding parking, waiting, and driving home. My time has value to me, and sometimes I'd rather spend it sitting on my ass at home than driving around town. Lazy? Maybe. But it's my choice.
I was just ordering some food on Uber eats and noticed that my bill for 50 bucks of food came to $75 or something. So I decided it was wasteful and I'll drive and pick it up myself. I wasted half an hour of my life and driving at rush hour was also stressful. That wouldn't be worth it for 25 bucks but it turned out Uber somehow has a lower price than in person so that brought it down to 21 and then in the restaurant despite it being a counter place with no sitting they pressure you to tip way more than Uber app and I kind of autoclicked it, so my savings are down to like 10 bucks for 30 minutes of stressful driving and waiting in line.
I think the delivery charge is totally worth it, especially if you order multiple meals and make any amount of money at your job. You're just paying for convenience and I'm not convinced you're getting ripped off at all. Having some dude drive around town with your burger is expensive. If anything if the allegation is he is underpaid, it should be even more expensive.
Food delivery services offer convenience for a price. If I hire a courier service to bring some materials and tools to one of my electricians, it’ll cost me a minimum of $50.
I can pay a bit extra for food and $10 in tips and fees to have it delivered to me instead of spending half an hour driving to go get it myself. I know what I’m paying for and value the service they provide.
Eh, the difference is that DoorDash is a logistics company performing a service that restaurants do not like running (delivery). It’s not a middleman providing no value
The problem is they use exploitative labor practices (as we're seeing here) and price-dumping funded by infinite amounts of venture capital. It sets customer expectations to unsustainably low pricing and it forces restaurants to either heavily subsidise their own delivery drivers to keep customer prices low or, because barely anyone can sustain that, to shut down their own delivery service and use <gig company> instead.
And that in turn gives doordash, uber eats and whatnot access to a lot of data - who orders what and lives where or which restaurant is doing good and which is struggling - that can be sold to third parties. Governments (ICE and other agencies have been caught to just buy data from aggregators), advertisers, credit reporting agencies, political parties, you name it.
Sure. As a customer the value that doordash et al provide is hard to understate. A single point of contact, a single set of credentials, a unified UI compared to what used to be a ton of never-updated garbage wordpress installs, reliable tracking... but as a whole, we all lose.
Doordash and grubhub are insane for single food purchases. But the fees are barely noticed when feeding my family of 5. We use it every other week or so just because of how chaotic school activity schedules can be. When we order sushi/chinese for the kids the bill before any delivery services is around $200 for enough food for dinner and another meal with leftovers. The service charge is like $7 and I make sure the driver gets at least $10 regardless of the distance. Cheaper than if we ate in the restaurant and were expected to give a 15-20% tip.
Depends on the restaurant, but each food item is typically more expensive in app (10-30%). And that's before they add fees, service charges, tips, tax, etc.
The enshittification model, but with an extra step because they actually have to employ labor.
First they exploit their own gig workers, to make an unsustainably cheap product and corner users. Then they exploit users, to monopolize distribution and corner restaurants. Then they exploit restaurants, threatening to cut off distribution entirely if they don't get an increasingly large share of profits.
> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more
Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.
Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.
What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.
Even before the penalty for non enrollment was set to zero, you could have still paid the $700 tax penalty and then had whatever plan for health insurance you wanted. If the market decided that there was no demand for those non eligible plans, then it means that the market collectively decided that keeping the old plans + 700 dollar additional annual cost was not a good value proposition compared to what replaced them. The net effect of everything taken together was that you would have to pay additional taxes.
You know, tariffs and gas prices going up have the effect of raising taxes. When the things you buy and the gas you buy costs more, you have to pay more in real dollars in sales and gas tax on those items. The tariffs and the gas prices also have the effect of killing industries locally, which might be more impactful nationally than predatory insurance plans that basically only cover going to the doctor's office for checkups. If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.
Your previous plans were subsidized by the insurance company stealing money, basically. As soon as we said “you can’t steal” then surprise! Your plan is more expensive.
They stole through denying claims, denying coverage, and more. The reality is that if Obamacare didn’t exist, I would be uninsurable. Yes that might bring your price down. For a bit, until you also become uninsurable, then you’re also fucked.
Yes insurance can be very cheap if you only take on fit, healthy clientele who will never use your insurance. But yeah, for society that sucks so we stopped doing that.
> Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to
In a sense, I agree with this assessment, and I think it should be corrected. We should allow people to have the older, less expensive plans with their lifetime caps and preexisting condition exclusion. We'd need to work out the details on whether or not we would allow someone choosing those plans from coming back to the ACA plans in the future, though. Maybe for the right price it could work out. Definitely adds complexity, however.
If you think "high earners with company subsidized plans"(where I assume you fall based on the general demographics of this site, but correct me if I'm wrong) were the target audience of the ACA, you're right to be pissed. It was for the un/underinsured, and people with preexisting conditions.
But your comparison is wrong, because you can...elect to not use the service. You could pay less for less coverage (so like, buying food without paying for a delivery fee because you don't need the convenience). Also, the individual mandate was killed (sucking funding out of the whole program), so you could opt out of the service entirely.
Nobody is forcing you to have insurance (at a federal level).
Even though the press likes to give Mamdani all the credit for these types of things, this started with a law passed under DeBlasio, and most of the investigation was done under Adams.
Mamdani deserves credit for taking this all the way.
Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."
I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.
Yes, the road is long and these sorts of investigations take time. Eric Adams is an old-school, working-class New Yorker. They tend to be corrupt, but they do get stuff done. His administration resolved a $20M Chipotle lawsuit, then launched and resolved a $39M Starbucks lawsuit.
I think they just explained how corrupt the prior mayor was, this coupled with the disclosure by Mamdani about every prior mayor hiding air safety data after 9/11 paint a damning picture of the priorities of prior NYC mayors in recent memory.
Information wants to be free. But other than AI slop (where the tokens have become too cheap to meter), information costs money to produce. Pay with you info or your money. It's amazing how many people just cannot come to grips with that concept.
I am so trained now, that I didn’t even read what they were asking for. Just closed the tab and came here to see if there was anything of value. Too expensive to even read their wall.
Too bad having their names associated with this immoral politicking won’t cause them problems. An employee stealing a few hundred bucks would get a felony and probably never work a good job again. Founders stealing hundreds of millions from workers get to say whoopsie.
Not even a whoopsie. Look how many responders here defend this exploitative behavior that is only enabled through monopolization as "the market regulates this", or "nobody forces them to buy/work there". Pure libertarian brain rot, no better than the communists they always cry about.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760317/how-to-rule-... is eye opening. When many of us were in college, there was still some idealism about using technology to make the world a better place. Maybe that still exists at some universities, but Sand Hill Road wiped that out of Stanford.
DoorDash and gig companies generally are a play to destabilize employment and turn as many people as possible from employees entitled to benefits and legal protections into contractors that can be discarded at whim. How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers?
Pizza shops (and, say, Chinese takeout restaurants) are the classic kinds of businesses that employed dedicated delivery drivers (or, more likely, it's a family business, and a family member does double duty).
But delivery sushi? Delivery pasta? Delivery tapas? Delivery burritos? Delivery Korean fried chicken? Delivery acai bowls? Delivery kebab?
DoorDash etc. gives us a variety of options that we mostly didn't really have before.
I do agree with you on the bullshit of turning employment into disposable contractors. But maybe we should change our laws to make that not possible, instead of condemning the idea that it's actually neat to be able to get nearly any kind of food from nearly any restaurant delivered to your door. We didn't used to have that.
I'll concede the point on variety but I don't think the platforms or their terms are fair to restaurants, delivery drivers or perhaps even customers (though they're clearly choosing to engage). Our favorite Mexican food place in town will fill the orders but isn't happy with them and I imagine they're not alone.
Indeed, I don't like how the delivery companies double-dip by charging both the restaurant AND the customer for a delivery. A modest fee of like 5% to the restaurant would maybe be fine (Especially considering the restaurant is already likely paying 3% for credit card processing), but based on the price differences between DD and the restaurant's own menu, it likely 15-20%.
The problem of course is that a restaurant that refuses to work with deliveries then ends up getting significantly fewer orders than ones that do. It creates a bit of a racket. Restaurants feel forced to cooperate, or lose significant business.
As a customer, I get around a lot of the extra costs because my credit card gives me the Dash Pass for free as a little bonus, and Costco sells $100 DD gift cards for $80, so I'm effectively getting every deliver at 20% off.
Your original post seems to suggest that DoorDash doesn't actually provide value (that we didn't have before) to customers, but that's trivially false. I think that's the thing people are arguing against.
But yes, their business practices suck, and that's our fault as a society for yet again allowing capitalism to run amok.
To play devils advocate, pre-UberEats era, we maybe had deliveries from Pizza places and some Chinese shops. Being able to order from basically everywhere and any time is very convenient. Restaurants are generating more sales as well, so it’s mostly the consumer, by choice, spends more on their dinner.
Their appeal initially was that they would deliver for places that didn't have their own drivers. So you went from only getting pizza and Chinese delivery to anything being available.
Now, everyone is offloading their deliveries to DoorDash. Wendy's first-party delivery is just a wrapper for DoorDash. Pizza Hut used DoorDash if they don't have enough drivers available. Even PetSmart or Petco uses DoorDash for delivery now.
Not saying it's right or good, but you could order from Pizza Hut and still get a gig worker if their driver called out stick today.
If they were honest about it and said something like "we believe our actions were fair and legal and disagree with this decision" it would at least be ideologically consistent.
> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VC’d their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasn’t been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it
It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?
Are you European or American? To a lot of America, that is considered a good numbers. Its worse in many parts of this vastly large country. The country has chosen to invest heavily in road networks. It appears that you can have one or the other but not both without great expense and reform.
I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png
Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.
That surface area map is a seriously bad argument: We are talking about bus lines here. Local transit just requires local lines. This isn't about train lines crossing through the whole country.
And how come China does a much better job than the US while they have the same surface area? Why aren't you overlapping those two maps?
There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.
I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.
But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.
They're not FAANG or MANGA, but they're certainly at the top of https://www.ycombinator.com/companies with 8600 employees and an $82B market cap (as of this comment, ticker DASH). Is "Big Tech" reserved only for the "FAANG MANGA"? If so, my apologies.
> “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
"Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."
Valuation yes, but if we take a step back, there must be value there. The idea of Uber really provided benefits to many groups. Example: minorities who were discriminated against by regular taxis, declining service level due to Taxi monopolies, etc. (Similar issues that Doordash solved as well.)
How can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between?
Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved:
1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves?
2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation?
3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors?
I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.
"Private chauffeur for your burrito" is proving to be too costly. Time for New Yorkers to rise up and side with the BurritoBus™
Place your order 6 hours in advance and our hyperadvanced algorithm will place your burrito on a hyperefficient route alongside other orders within your neighborhood. Estimated arrival times remain hyperaccurate (15 minute window) and your neighborhood FoodBusser is paid an hourly wage with hyperbenefits.
> your burger and fries would probably cost $40 delivered, making the whole business model infeasible
Pizza places, chinese food places, many diners, they've all been making deliveries work for decades without inflating the prices to absurd levels. It's almost as if it can be done when you don't have to pay the middle man who has a billion dollar of venture debts.
It's so wild to see you, someone who seems to be older than gen z, so unaware that the food delivery model existed before delivery apps, and was highly successful without charging delivery charge + service fee + tip + 30% of the food price.
> your burger and fries would probably cost $40 delivered, making the whole business model infeasible.
Tough luck? Businesses aren’t entitled to exist. If it’s a bad model it’s a bad model. We can’t just throw our hands up and ignore bad business practices for that reason. It’s not our job to protect DoorDash’s unsustainable business model that only works if they behave particularly unethically. That is squarely their issue
I'm unwilling to argue with "It is a free choice to be exploited." I understand some will argue for this, and will hold the mental model, I am simply unwilling to entertain it from a time and effort perspective.
If the business cannot exist without exploitation, the business should not exist. I also understand this is an argument at the political process level at its core. Not much progress to be made in the argument over the US being an economic exploitation engine. Some are for, some are against. We choose, through policy, whether someone must make the choice to be exploited because we give them no other choice. We can make better choices, I argue. "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members."
I recognize that there is a power imbalance in play, but I would rather see activism towards educating would-be DoorDashers that the numbers don't work in their favor, rather than regulating DoorDash out of existence.
And in some cases, if you just need some money to pay a bill and you have a few hours available, maybe doing a few DoorDash deliveries closes that gap for you, even if it's not a good long term job. But, that can also work as a trap if you're not very deliberate about it.
I suspect the doordashers are aware they're poor. In fact, I suspect the average doordasher is probably more financially literate as a result. The alternative is homelessness or worse.
Anyway, doing nothing and blindly hoping for the best didn't work the last thousand times. Why would it work this time?
This is a reminder to the naive people who think things are getting worse financially because covid/immigrants/gas/AI/supplychain/[insert BS reason], and not just the 1% greed. Things got bad and living wages are not enough substantially after covid at the same time when billionaires are getting exponentially richer, and all above excuses up there are only to distract the public from this simple fact: your life is getting worse because someone way wealthier is stealing your money, and unfortunately legally too because who writes and approves these legislation and laws is part of the game.
Ok, I'll bite. How are the "wealthier ... stealing [our] money"? We don't have to use doordash or claude code or aws or amazon or anything else. We get to choose. When it comes to paying for government, however, I don't believe we're allowed to "opt out". Maybe Mamdani will give us stores so great we'll be forced to shop at them!
> We don't have to use doordash or claude code or aws or amazon or anything else.
I know you think you're dunking here, but unfortunately you're just proving that either:
- You genuinely don't understand how the real works for vast amounts of people, in which case it would behoove you to educate yourself (maybe start by looking into topics like food deserts or Walmart's business practices in small towns)
- You're consciously making a strawman argument, in which case please don't insult us with that BS
Mamdani is very much the exception that confirms the rule. And ever since he's been inaugurated, he's been turned into a boogeyman by the right, successively called a "communist", then an "islamist", and often both.
And even in his own party, the dominant """moderate""" branch does everything it can to hide his success and popularity, from fear that the electorate would wake up to how utterly corrupt and ineffective the DMC is.
You're insulting the intelligence of everyone on this website by even attempting this argument. The handful of upset elections by young socialists who want to decrease the political hegemony of billionaires does not amount to evidence that the political hegemony of billionaires isn't real.
You don’t get to choose, that is the illusion of choice that everyone (or rather most) believes. The stealing is indirect, and it has many forms like:
- tax structure: investment income get taxed less than payroll etc etc
- tax avoidance: offshore, trusts, using companies to write off the tax plus the benefit provided by the government on these write offs. Using assets to loan more with speculation, worse, the buy borrow die model where they borrow against the asset and the heirs inherit the gains never taxed, among many ways and loopholes.
- asset inflation: low interest rates increase the stock and property, good for who owns it, while the poor get to pay higher rent, the cantillon effect
- the housing and zoning topic, and how it’s one of the pillar of such indirect money stealing, a topic that needs a book to describe but the solution is simple, depreciating housing as assets.
- monopolies and few (or one) companies controlling the price, or hold down the wages, to keep poor people poorer and shifting the money more to who controls the scheme
- poor people end up usually paying even more with overdraft fees or higher interests, punishing the poor even further, and these interests goes to lenders and shareholders.
- that leads the wealthy to be able to lobby to shape the interests and taxes to their liking, the subsidies etc. when a crisis or hard time happens, all tax payers get to pay and shoulder that but in times of booms the profit stay and remain private.
And many more cases or situations, hell, not just monetary stuff, even remote work was attacked because it shifts a slight of power dynamics to employees rather than the employers.
> How are the "wealthier ... stealing [our] money"?
Wages not catching up with inflation? Everything getting more expensive? The BBB giving massive tax cuts to the rich, while cutting government programs (which are a form of redistribution)?
> We get to choose
Up to a point, and it's naive to think that people are getting poorer only because of bad personal choices. The younger generations not being able to afford homes isn't because they're all bad with their finances. Treating housing as a speculation vehicle instead of an essential commodity is a political choice, and it was made by a political class completely permeated by moneyed interests.
Look, you don't even need to know about the "how". The gini index is getting worse, billionaires are turning into trillionaires while public infrastructure and social services are crumbling. It's natural, and correct, to connect the dots.
> The younger generations aren't able to afford homes because they're all bad with their finances
Home ownership of Gen Z is aligned with millennials’ home ownership at their time. I agree about the K shape economy stuff, but it’s a bit more tricky than “everyone is poor”.
I don't understand. What does Snowden stuff have to do with DoorDash's employment practices or an NY mayor? What is "interShiitake" supposed to reference?
> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race
They knew that tons of other PACs and democracy-hating billionaires like Bill Ackman had their back. Cuomo spent $65 (!!!) per vote received, while Mamdani was at $15.
Just shows the power of being a politician that actually cares.
Presumably somebody who thinks the Mamdani’s policies will be popular and spread to other jurisdictions. After all, why campaign against an idea that you think will fail? It’d exist as a prominent warning flag for the next group that considers it.
I've used one of these delivery services directly only once since they've all existed. They have been pretty blatant scum since the rip.
It was never determined to be fraud. Keep in mind that what they were accused of was never actually tested in courts.
Also keep in mind that this practice is explicitly enshrined in the laws of many states for restaurant workers. If the worker got a tip, the restaurant owner was allowed to pay below minimum wage for that hour to that worker (as long as wage + tip met the federal minimum wage).
Which is why I was asking. If you're in one of those (many) states, chances are high that most restaurants are doing what people find so despicable of Doordash. So yes, it is "at scale".
Are we supposed to just say "welp, that's ok Walmart, keep doing it, because we can't stop every other mom and pop store in the nation from potentially doing this."
It's an absurd position to take.
No, you're supposed to say "Let's stop everyone from doing this" and stop making it legal for mom and pop stores from doing it.
And this has strayed from my original comment. I'm not asking about legality. The person I responded to found it so terrible he refused to use them. I'm merely suggesting they keep the same moral high ground when they go to eat at a restaurant.
In this instance, for constructed example, one might present a straightforward claim that we should not direct moral outrage towards DoorDash for those behaviors they voluntarily paid money an apology for. I’m certain that’s not the correct phrasing of the argument intended, but since that claim hasn’t been made yet to us, of course my constructed example is wrong! That’s why it’s so essential to present one’s views as sentences, rather than through leading questions.
Above, no claim is presented for why discussing local restaurant behaviors has any bearing on how we interpret, moralize, and respond to the behavior of the faceless megacorp DoorDash. Without that connection having been drawn, this is a functionally irrelevant tangent into businesses not comparable to DoorDash in either scale or function.
Nothing related to any of my comments was meant to excuse DoorDash. What gave people that idea? It was meant for people to question their views on tipping to begin with.
And these people are always so smug about it, like they're Columbo at the end of an episode doing the big reveal of your moral hypocrisy or whatever.
(One benefit of being nameblind at HN’s community size is that it’s easy for me to treat everyone the same, because I lack any recognition for whether I’ve spoken with someone previously or not. I acknowledge it’s not that easy for other people, but certainly it has the upside of forcing this ‘method, not person’ approach I describe into every interaction I have here :)
Additionally, when I make comments like the above, I don't think the person I'm responding to is actually persuadable. It's not some sort of good faith socratic debate.
Tipping is problematic no matter how you look at it. Rather than getting outraged, how about focusing on discontinuing this pointless practice? I've yet to find a single pro-tipping person who is consistent in their views on tipping. They'll happily support one tipping practice in one scenario, and be against the exact same practice in a different sphere.
BTW, what Doordash was accused of was not tip sharing, but using it to pay less than minimum wage. Which is standard practice for restaurants in the majority of states. That's why I was asking.
If the entire economic model hinges on the majority of people tipping variable amounts then the model seems broken. Charge proportionately more and don’t rely tips, everyone will have a better experience.
Regardless, every tip is a savings to the business owner.
DoorDash was following this exact same fine print.
which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
I'd rather the price of goods be fixed, and they tell me what the delivery fee is.
And have a small delivery fee.
And have a small “city wants DoorDash to pay its workers fairly, so it’ll charge you an arbitrary amount extra” fee
And a bag fee.
And sales tax.
And a tip
Oh and don’t forget the service fee.
I’m not kidding, this is from a recent receipt. There are 6 fees PLUS the cost of the actual food.
Other delivery platforms are similar
Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.
I'm not sure why DoorDash should be responsible for disclosing that; DoorDash may not even know what the regular in-person menu prices are in the first place.
The solution to this is to stop allowing delivery services to take a cut of the restaurant's revenue. Instead they should be required to raise their delivery/service fees charged to the customer. Of course, this will likely result in fewer customers, so they don't want to do that, but it's the only honest thing to do.
I get that the delivery services do provide value to the restaurants in many cases, but ultimately the customer pays for it either way, so that cost should be made explicit to the customer.
If it's worth it to me at the price offered, I'll buy it. If it's not, I won't.
For a DoorDash delivery driver, the problem is transparency. Consider a $7 delivery with a customer tip of $5, and the difference between being told:
"This delivery offers you $7", or
"This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $5 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $2, so the total you receive is still $7."
In both cases the customer behavior and end result for the driver is the same, but in the first case DoorDash doesn't even mention the tip, and quietly pockets it. Another example, with a driver tip of $10 instead:
"This delivery offers you $7, and the customer added a tip of $3", or
"This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $10 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $0, so the total you receive is $10."
The 2nd statement in both cases is the honest one, but of course that would make drivers feel cheated, so DD says the 1st thing, and completely hides that they offset "wages" with tips.
Regardless, I personally think this practice (for regular hourly employees or delivery drivers) is garbage; in my state, the tipped minimum wage is set to the same value as the non-tipped minimum wage, so employers don't get to pull that crap.
So like $1 per driver?
Also it's not like the tips they earn correlate with service drivers can provide. At most you can be a bit faster, but generally bound to traffic? (I haven't used them tbh).
Does the theft of $16mm become worse if DoorDash was half the size?
If I steal $16mm I’d go to jail but it’s no big deal because a corporation did it? The apologia for this is baffling to me.
Not sure why you seem to think that the company only matters here, and the workers are irrelevant.
(And no, it's not $1 per driver, way to argue in bad faith.)
Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.
It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?
Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?
I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.
It's quite different and that's the point.
The issues beyond 'apparent value creation are':
1) asymmetries in power between different actors that induces some to make ill advised actions - passing off hidden costs and especially risks
2) externalisations - aka damaging the environment, labour regs (which exist due to 1)
3) misrepresntations in value to end customer - dark patterns, hidden fees, risks not apparent in the transaction.
Entire industries would not work if we had to properly account for a lot of things.
"I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ri" <- it's not just the 'price' that is high and you're 'willing to pay' - that's fine.
That's definitely not 'rip off' because you're not coerced in any way for that - that's just 'high prices.
The $10 bottle of water at an event <- that is a 'rip off'.
It's all the other things in the system that make it problematic.
Last mile delivery by poor people almost should not exist as a business because it depends on externalizing too many things.
If they provided healthcare, vacation, job security, didn't force people to run around, all that stuff that removes the 'power and information asymmetry' - and then - it still works as a business, fine but it generally wont.
Some businesses are structurally unsound, and people invest in them to take advantage of broken systems (social, regulatory) at the margins. Gambling, day trading. A lot of zero-sum stuff.
Now 'Robot Delivery' - that's an entirely different prospect.
That's an attempt at real value creation. If we got our act together, everything could be delivered by little robots - today - already in 2026. It would reuire a lot of coordination.
I really dislike the unreliable delivery times. 99% of the time I just use the apps, or more likely the restaurant's site, to place the order and pick it up myself.
I have the time to do this though, so maybe it's more valuable to busier people, like parents.
fast-rise sugar infested bun, non-organic antibiotic infested horrendous animal welfare beef, etc. - the BOM is well under $5, i'd think $3 at best. So, you pay $25 for sub-$5 bill of low quality materials (not good to your health with thus additional expenses down the road). Who is the sucker?
Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .
this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.
Edit: Spelling. “right” to “sick”.
Well, if you value an hour of your sleep or entertainment less than $15 dollars (if, for instance, you like to cook), then sure, spend it on cooking instead. Many of people would rather not, and their revealed preferences show it pretty clearly.
You might say "going home from the office 30 minutes earlier is absolutely worth $15" to me, but that has little to do with what your effective hourly wage is.
If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.
Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.
Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but when I use these services, the price comes out to something like 20%-30% more than the in-restaurant cost (yes, including the common practice of restaurants increasing menu prices on delivery sites to offset the delivery company's cut of their revenue).
Sure, it's often not cheap, but when I use these services it's because I do not want to go and do the pickup myself. I'm paying for that convenience, and I'm fine with it. If you're not, that's fine; no one is forcing you to use delivery services.
In any cases where they are actually violating labor laws or being deceptive with their pricing or practices, yes, they should absolutely be punished and stop doing that. But that doesn't change the fact that they provide a service -- delivering food to your door -- and businesses generally charge you when they provide a service. You can argue that the charge on offer is too high for you, but that's a personal decision for everyone to make.
And even if it does cost $15 to deliver a $10 burger in some scenarios, there are times when I am happy to do that to save myself 30-45 minutes of driving somewhere, finding parking, waiting, and driving home. My time has value to me, and sometimes I'd rather spend it sitting on my ass at home than driving around town. Lazy? Maybe. But it's my choice.
You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.
I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.
I think the delivery charge is totally worth it, especially if you order multiple meals and make any amount of money at your job. You're just paying for convenience and I'm not convinced you're getting ripped off at all. Having some dude drive around town with your burger is expensive. If anything if the allegation is he is underpaid, it should be even more expensive.
I can pay a bit extra for food and $10 in tips and fees to have it delivered to me instead of spending half an hour driving to go get it myself. I know what I’m paying for and value the service they provide.
And that in turn gives doordash, uber eats and whatnot access to a lot of data - who orders what and lives where or which restaurant is doing good and which is struggling - that can be sold to third parties. Governments (ICE and other agencies have been caught to just buy data from aggregators), advertisers, credit reporting agencies, political parties, you name it.
Sure. As a customer the value that doordash et al provide is hard to understate. A single point of contact, a single set of credentials, a unified UI compared to what used to be a ton of never-updated garbage wordpress installs, reliable tracking... but as a whole, we all lose.
You should run that experiment. Get two identical meals, one via delivery the other at the restaurant. Pay close attention to menu prices.
First they exploit their own gig workers, to make an unsustainably cheap product and corner users. Then they exploit users, to monopolize distribution and corner restaurants. Then they exploit restaurants, threatening to cut off distribution entirely if they don't get an increasingly large share of profits.
Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.
Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.
What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.
See the difference there?
You know, tariffs and gas prices going up have the effect of raising taxes. When the things you buy and the gas you buy costs more, you have to pay more in real dollars in sales and gas tax on those items. The tariffs and the gas prices also have the effect of killing industries locally, which might be more impactful nationally than predatory insurance plans that basically only cover going to the doctor's office for checkups. If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.
They stole through denying claims, denying coverage, and more. The reality is that if Obamacare didn’t exist, I would be uninsurable. Yes that might bring your price down. For a bit, until you also become uninsurable, then you’re also fucked.
Yes insurance can be very cheap if you only take on fit, healthy clientele who will never use your insurance. But yeah, for society that sucks so we stopped doing that.
In a sense, I agree with this assessment, and I think it should be corrected. We should allow people to have the older, less expensive plans with their lifetime caps and preexisting condition exclusion. We'd need to work out the details on whether or not we would allow someone choosing those plans from coming back to the ACA plans in the future, though. Maybe for the right price it could work out. Definitely adds complexity, however.
But your comparison is wrong, because you can...elect to not use the service. You could pay less for less coverage (so like, buying food without paying for a delivery fee because you don't need the convenience). Also, the individual mandate was killed (sucking funding out of the whole program), so you could opt out of the service entirely.
Nobody is forcing you to have insurance (at a federal level).
See the difference there?
Nope. It's a marketplace. Your above argument is perfectly applicable to it as well.
Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."
I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.
How did you arrive to this conclusion?
Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SCKj7gwbYrc
Didn't read - too expensive.
1790224159 | DoorDash's $131.5M Settlement with the City of New York | https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/dcwp | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49826260 | 1 comment
Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.
(⌐_⌐)ノ Empathy
(•ᴗ•)つ Apathy
But delivery sushi? Delivery pasta? Delivery tapas? Delivery burritos? Delivery Korean fried chicken? Delivery acai bowls? Delivery kebab?
DoorDash etc. gives us a variety of options that we mostly didn't really have before.
I do agree with you on the bullshit of turning employment into disposable contractors. But maybe we should change our laws to make that not possible, instead of condemning the idea that it's actually neat to be able to get nearly any kind of food from nearly any restaurant delivered to your door. We didn't used to have that.
One word: variety.
My local sushi place isn't going to have enough delivery orders to justify having delivery drivers on staff.
Heck, I remember years ago (Was it the late 90s?) when McDonald's tried to do delivery.
The problem of course is that a restaurant that refuses to work with deliveries then ends up getting significantly fewer orders than ones that do. It creates a bit of a racket. Restaurants feel forced to cooperate, or lose significant business.
As a customer, I get around a lot of the extra costs because my credit card gives me the Dash Pass for free as a little bonus, and Costco sells $100 DD gift cards for $80, so I'm effectively getting every deliver at 20% off.
But yes, their business practices suck, and that's our fault as a society for yet again allowing capitalism to run amok.
Now, everyone is offloading their deliveries to DoorDash. Wendy's first-party delivery is just a wrapper for DoorDash. Pizza Hut used DoorDash if they don't have enough drivers available. Even PetSmart or Petco uses DoorDash for delivery now.
Not saying it's right or good, but you could order from Pizza Hut and still get a gig worker if their driver called out stick today.
> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
This is villain shit.
But it's too impractical. It'll probably be on throughout the year.
I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.
Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.
I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png
Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.
And how come China does a much better job than the US while they have the same surface area? Why aren't you overlapping those two maps?
America underfunded? Yes.
There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.
I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.
But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.
This is upper end of mid sized.
No yc alum counts as big tech
I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752
> “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
"Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."
How can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between?
Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved:
1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves?
2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation?
3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors?
I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.
It doesn’t matter who you work for, they still can’t underpay you or pay you late.
Place your order 6 hours in advance and our hyperadvanced algorithm will place your burrito on a hyperefficient route alongside other orders within your neighborhood. Estimated arrival times remain hyperaccurate (15 minute window) and your neighborhood FoodBusser is paid an hourly wage with hyperbenefits.
Pizza places, chinese food places, many diners, they've all been making deliveries work for decades without inflating the prices to absurd levels. It's almost as if it can be done when you don't have to pay the middle man who has a billion dollar of venture debts.
It's so wild to see you, someone who seems to be older than gen z, so unaware that the food delivery model existed before delivery apps, and was highly successful without charging delivery charge + service fee + tip + 30% of the food price.
Tough luck? Businesses aren’t entitled to exist. If it’s a bad model it’s a bad model. We can’t just throw our hands up and ignore bad business practices for that reason. It’s not our job to protect DoorDash’s unsustainable business model that only works if they behave particularly unethically. That is squarely their issue
If the business cannot exist without exploitation, the business should not exist. I also understand this is an argument at the political process level at its core. Not much progress to be made in the argument over the US being an economic exploitation engine. Some are for, some are against. We choose, through policy, whether someone must make the choice to be exploited because we give them no other choice. We can make better choices, I argue. "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members."
And in some cases, if you just need some money to pay a bill and you have a few hours available, maybe doing a few DoorDash deliveries closes that gap for you, even if it's not a good long term job. But, that can also work as a trap if you're not very deliberate about it.
Anyway, doing nothing and blindly hoping for the best didn't work the last thousand times. Why would it work this time?
I know you think you're dunking here, but unfortunately you're just proving that either: - You genuinely don't understand how the real works for vast amounts of people, in which case it would behoove you to educate yourself (maybe start by looking into topics like food deserts or Walmart's business practices in small towns) - You're consciously making a strawman argument, in which case please don't insult us with that BS
And even in his own party, the dominant """moderate""" branch does everything it can to hide his success and popularity, from fear that the electorate would wake up to how utterly corrupt and ineffective the DMC is.
- tax structure: investment income get taxed less than payroll etc etc
- tax avoidance: offshore, trusts, using companies to write off the tax plus the benefit provided by the government on these write offs. Using assets to loan more with speculation, worse, the buy borrow die model where they borrow against the asset and the heirs inherit the gains never taxed, among many ways and loopholes.
- asset inflation: low interest rates increase the stock and property, good for who owns it, while the poor get to pay higher rent, the cantillon effect
- the housing and zoning topic, and how it’s one of the pillar of such indirect money stealing, a topic that needs a book to describe but the solution is simple, depreciating housing as assets.
- monopolies and few (or one) companies controlling the price, or hold down the wages, to keep poor people poorer and shifting the money more to who controls the scheme
- poor people end up usually paying even more with overdraft fees or higher interests, punishing the poor even further, and these interests goes to lenders and shareholders.
- that leads the wealthy to be able to lobby to shape the interests and taxes to their liking, the subsidies etc. when a crisis or hard time happens, all tax payers get to pay and shoulder that but in times of booms the profit stay and remain private.
And many more cases or situations, hell, not just monetary stuff, even remote work was attacked because it shifts a slight of power dynamics to employees rather than the employers.
Wages not catching up with inflation? Everything getting more expensive? The BBB giving massive tax cuts to the rich, while cutting government programs (which are a form of redistribution)?
> We get to choose
Up to a point, and it's naive to think that people are getting poorer only because of bad personal choices. The younger generations not being able to afford homes isn't because they're all bad with their finances. Treating housing as a speculation vehicle instead of an essential commodity is a political choice, and it was made by a political class completely permeated by moneyed interests.
Look, you don't even need to know about the "how". The gini index is getting worse, billionaires are turning into trillionaires while public infrastructure and social services are crumbling. It's natural, and correct, to connect the dots.
Home ownership of Gen Z is aligned with millennials’ home ownership at their time. I agree about the K shape economy stuff, but it’s a bit more tricky than “everyone is poor”.
> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race
Just shows the power of being a politician that actually cares.