Thread

1. dzonga · 1790195655 · focus · HN ↗

   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.

   1. Aboutplants · 1790197522 · focus · HN ↗

      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

      1. mschuster91 · 1790199607 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

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