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For drivers, the results are unpredictable and too often unfair. Data obtained by the Star shows Uber Eats’ platform can offer two food couriers different wages for the exact same trip.
Labour advocates charge that the app collects data on driver behaviour and can use it to decide who it can pay at a lower rate, allowing the company to pocket the difference and boost its revenue. This concept is widely referred to as algorithmic wage discrimination.
Wild
Wage discrimination sounds like a fancy way of saying wage theft.
Yep, it’s just when they only do wage theft on the most disadvantaged employees that are the least likely to sue them or quit as a result.
It shouldn’t be a massive surprise. The whole platform exists as a way to circumvent minimum wage laws for drivers while taking a massive slice of restaurant profits.
No hygiene inspections either, half the places listed aren’t even restaurants or takeaways, it’s just in somebody’s house…
Par for the course based on Uber’s history. I stopped using them in lieu of a local/community app…which is honestly absolute garbage, but it is essentially completely pass-through and free for my local area restaurants to use.
I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people’s needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.
If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.
This would be a really good fit for federation I think.
As a software engineer I’m down to help out on this, free of charge.
I’m a developer too, and I appreciate the offer very much, but I’m not really in a situation where I could work on something like this. It’s just an idea though, anyone could run with it.
Time to change your name from Patel to Smith
I just can’t use uber eats. It just feels weird. Like, I am fully capable of getting food myself, I know uber eats, doordash etc, pays shit, delivery folks have to wait at the restaurant if its not ready and then fix it if its not. Get my drink from the fountain if I ordered one. And then, drive all the way to my place. I then receive a cold, tossed meal. It’s just depressing all around. I don’t get it.
I’ll pay for delivery of pizza or even something like jimmy johns who have delivery drivers, but having a third party involved just feels wrong.
It’s also freaking expensive. When I used it occasionally at my last job we’d get reimbursed up to $20. I usually just got the $12 combo and by the time all the fees were added, I still ended up paying $2-3 out of pocket.
This is how I felt too. Eventually I just stopped using our corporate Grubhub “perk” because I was still paying for it when the entire idea was supposed to be a meal “on the company” once a week for weekly All-Hands meetings.
Another massive pet peeve that made me stop using these fucking delivery services is many times the restaurants would give you less food than if you went there. Take a place like Red Robin and their basket of fries was basically 25% a basket of fries at a marked up cost because they have to pay fees to these companies and lose money.
Plus they often got orders wrong. Not sure if that was on purpose or what, but I rarely got everything I asked for or the mods correct.
Asian food has been doing to-go for centuries, though. It packs well and keeps well for 30 minutes. In fact there is a to-go only Thai place near me which uses an industrial kitchen and literally a hole in the side of the building to take payments and hand over food. Other restaurants we know in our area stopped seating people during COVID and would just hand out to-go orders at the door. But I can only think of Asian restaurants that did this.
There’s nothing wrong necessarily with having a separate delivery service. Restaurants aren’t good at making menu apps or driving cars. It may be a little awkward fit for restaurants who rent retail space and offer dine-in tables, but the world is transitioning and I fully expect more Doordash-first restaurants operating out of less expensive kitchen space and just skipping the whole dine-in waiter thing.
I hate to hear that Doordash pays so poorly but we always tip 20% or more which, even if it is the only payment the driver receives, usually seems fair for 30 minutes of work. We are a family of four and our order is always over $50. So that’s $10 / 30 minutes or $20 / hour minimum (if everyone used it the way we do). That seems like an okay wage for a job with so much flexibility. Probably the real thing that kills it is gas and wear on the car being invisible costs. Just like with regular Uber drivers.
Maybe it’s what I eat but I find the food is always worse after delivery. It’s usually gotten a bit cold and steamed a bit. Some stuff like pizza and Asian food handles it well, but falafel and anything fried is best served immediately
The worst are the places that say they have delivery, take you through the whole checkout process on their own site, and then sends you a link to track your order on door dash or something.
LOOKING AT YOU LITTLE CESARS
During the pandemic I can see why these services blossomed, but I have only used them once or twice - and only in NYC where I didn’t have a car, and even if I did, getting around by car and parking is more challenging anyway. (Delivery drivers in NYC get around by scooter which they drive anywhere they want (street, sidewalk, wrong way on the street, they do not care. They’d probably get on the elevator if they could).
To me the service charges and tips are higher than I want to pay and I’ll just pick up the stuff myself. It’ll probably be hotter anyway since there aren’t other deliveries that need to be made before mine. The one exception is pizza where they already have their own delivery people.
Also, they handle multiple orders. So, by the time you get your food it’s lukewarm at best, but likely cold and soggy.
Last time I checked out of curiosity, this Mexican place near me sells burritos for $12. After fees and tips, it would’ve been $28 on Uber Eats. It’s just not worth it to me to pay extra, when I can easily drive the 10 minutes myself.
Even pizza shops with their own drivers. I’d usually prefer to go get it myself so it’s as fresh as possible.
Yeah the cold and soggy is my main criticism. At that point I’d rather cook
I don’t share any moral delima with the concept of third party delivery. Conceptually what’s different than the branded delivery drivers? Both by the way rely more on tips than anything else for payout to the delivery person, but at least the base pay rate for the branded driver is typically a tiny bit higher. I am bothered by the ratio of what I pay extra for third party services as compared to what the delivery person receives. You can’t possibly just drive the price up further to fill the gap, the gap is massive and the prices are already a limiting factor for most to utilize these services. I also relate to the cold tossed meal. There is no effort in training these gig workers or supplying them with proper equipment to deliver the food. It often arrives in a terrible state and there is very little in the way of quality control. If I were a restaurant I would hesitate to let these people represent my food. Conceptually I actually rather like the idea of third party delivery. I don’t want to be a domino’s employee and deliver pizza, but give me some freedom to pick my hours and a fare wage that doesn’t rely on tip culture, and I’ll stop by and deliver a domino’s pizza every once and awhile for some extra cash. The real world execution though is currently a mess. These companies took advantage of how badly Americans want food delivery and how hard it is for most restaurants to implement it themselves.
Conceptually what’s different than the branded delivery drivers?
- fixed wage plus tips
- already at the restaurant, so food will typically arrive hotter
- associated with the restaurant, so the brand has an incentive for drivers to do a good job
- can batch multiple deliveries from the same store, so drivers have fewer stops (doordssh etc drivers will probably hit multiple restaurants from multiple apps to keep profits high)
- usually no markup in the menu price, delivery fee is transparent
So, a lot of conceptual and practical differences beyond the couple you mentioned. I don’t order from doordash etc, but I will sometimes order delivery from dominoes or something where they have their own delivery drivers. It’s not hard for me to drive a couple miles to pick up my own order, which saves me money, has a better chance of having hot food, and I’m not enabling people making poor choices to work below minimum wage.
That said, I prefer ride sharing apps over taxis.
I a, bothered by the ratio of what I pay extra for third party services as compared to what the delivery person receives. You can’t possibly drive the price up further
The solution already existed. It’s called restaurants delivering their own food. But Ubereats shoehorned their way into the equation to be an unnecessary middleman in order to profit. Exploiting a whole new group of people in the process.
I absolutely share the moral dilemma with the concept of third party delivery. They’re just as useless as health insurance companies, so if you see the problem with the latter, you can def see the problem with the former. (Not to say they’re on the same scale or have similar histories or have equal amounts of blood on their hands, just that they’re similar in structure in a system that work(s)/(ed) fine without them.)
But tons of restaurants didn’t offer delivery before. That’s what the other commenter was saying. For many places, especially smaller, locally owned restaurants, a 3rd party enabling delivery for them is a huge boon. But like the other commenter said, it needs to be implemented well and fairly, which it currently is not.
Also, comparing 3rd party food delivery to health insurance is definitely something…
In my experience, plenty of local shops delivered. And when Uber eats came about, they had to fire their own delivery people because so many would check Uber eats first. Not to mention the restaurants get less on the food, when small, locally owned restaurants are already surviving on razor thin margins.
So the idea for these services is basically “I don’t want to go to my local restaurant to pick up food, so I’m going to financially hurt them so a middleman can profit by forcing them to deliver to me (which plenty were doing already).”
My point is it’s such a uniquely stupid, uniquely American concept that hurts everyone involved, and makes a ton of money for one large company—who completely inserted themselves into it unnecessarily.
If the argument is whether or not there should be a moral dilemma when ordering from them, I say yes. We can’t absolve ourselves of our laziness on this one, I don’t think.
And the likening it to insurance companies was strictly for the purpose of a meaningless middleman who changed the structure of the system they exist in, in order to profit unnecessarily. I tried to make it clear the likeness stopped there, but maybe I wasn’t.
I highly doubt it’s a “huge boon” to any small restaurant/business. With fees attached and drivers who really don’t give 2 shits, anything bad gets reflected on the restaurant. When in reality it could be the over worked driver that made a mistake, droppped off 4 orders at once so most of it is cold, rough handling, etc… Every place I have worked maybe came out even on good days from 3rd party orders. But you need extra kitchen staff (hard to find) extra host staff (parce and final prep on orders, plus regular duties). Maney way better spent ensuring people actually attend your restaurant in person and have a good experience
If it wasn’t a boon, the restaurant can simply not sign up for any of these 3rd party services. I know some in my localality that won’t sign up for various reasons and also plenty that are happy to have it.
One issue I’ve heard is if a restaurant chooses not to use the service someone else can set up a page in their name without permission, and the platforms often won’t do anything to prevent it. Then confused delivery drivers start to show up, and customers complain to the restaurant about the markups/high pricing even when the restaurant is not actually involved at all.
On top of all that, many people just use delivery apps to find local restaurants, so you lose a lot of visibility if you aren’t listed, but for that one you can argue it’s in fact paying for the service you get (i.e. marketing).
The solution did not exist at all. There was a huge market gap. Lots of restaurants didn’t have the population density or resources to support a built in delivery service. I had two restaurants that delivered to my location prior to ride share delivery. It instantly jumped to dozens as soon as door dash came to town.
Now see, I kinda had the idea for a syndicated delivery service (not online orders, but the internet would have been used to create the order data that would assign drivers) decades ago. I did some part time work delivering food back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I always thought it was so inefficient. The place I was at, was very busy, he had a very large delivery area but even so. There would be times he was paying people to sit outside talking shit to eachother in their cars.
I thought it would make sense to have a larger pool of drivers that service multiple restaurants/take-aways. Adding the economies of scale to the problem to ensure that people were being utilised and lowering the cost to each place using the service. Of course also paying some money to the person running the business that brought it all together.
I don’t think I ever considered paying less than this guy did (which wasn’t a lot, but would likely translate to $5 or so an hour in the 90s/2000s).
One thing I find really interesting about uber eats/door dash (US)/Deliveroo (UK/EU). When you add up their fees, they take a delivery fee from the user, a service fee from the user, an even bigger service fee from the restaurant and pay the lowest possible fee that will keep drivers interested. Yet I always hear the services are losing money too. How is that even possible?
Take deliveroo in the UK. Looking now I can see (I don’t live in a city, so most places are some distance away). A place 4.5 miles away is charging £4.29 for delivery. Let’s make up an imaginary order:
Order total: £20 (including sales tax/VAT) User’s service fee: £2.39 (it seems to be 11% including the VAT with a maximum set of which I am not sure how much) User’s delivery fee: £4.29 (including VAT, since they need to charge VAT on a service) Restaurant service fee: £6 (30% on the VAT included total). I am really unsure how this works entirely in terms of tax though… Total for user: £26.68
Total deliveroo service revenue: Net: £10.57 VAT: £2.11 Total: £12.68
Reading between the lines from what I can see delivery riders are paid between £3 and £6 per delivery. Now, in the cities this is probably great. I do wonder how they do it in the towns and villages. When I look at the list of places available to me most are 3 miles or more away, with some up to 6 miles away. I do wonder how £6 compensates someone doing a 10+ mile round trip at times.
But OK the price they pay drivers doesn’t include any tax. So it comes from the Net total. This means per delivery in revenue they are always making £4.50 or more per delivery.
Yes, they need to pay support staff, but they are in low cost geographies. Yes, they need to keep development staff and the usual management overhead And yes, they need servers/cloud time to host this stuff.
Looking this up (not sure how good the source is) their revenue in 2023 was £2.7billion, which I believe. However they lost £38million. Where all the costs come from, I am not sure.
I wonder how these numbers compare to US based operators?
Yet I always hear the services are losing money too. How is that even possible?
Massive amounts of money spent on advertising to get that sweet sweet venture capital. Leeching as much money as they can out of the business into the pockets of investors and C suite parasites. Paying lawyers to fight lawsuits due to skirting laws.
Just capitalism things.
Last Week Tonight has an episode on food delivery apps. They talk about how these apps don’t seem to help anyone. The customer pays more than before, the restaurant loses money, the delivery drivers lose money, and the app loses money.
The general idea seems to be that venture capitalists believe they can change the way the system works so that everyone eventually relies on an app to order food. Once ordering food without using an app becomes impossible, they can charge whatever they want and make a killing.
The thing is, they do already have lock-in in some ways at least. Otherwise I cannot imagine a restaurant wanting to give away 30% of each sale this way. Unless the other option is virtually no traffic.
The key between UberEATS and a much better service you describe is that the drivers need to stay on site, and the site needs to be geographically in the same place.
But yeah, I agree a better model would be tiny GrubHubs that service one, very small restaurant area. Basically the pizza delivery drivers also deliver for the 4-5 restaurants around the pizza place.
It’d be better service for the users, likely cheaper, and better for the restaurants who have 4-7 consistent drivers, and it’d be better for the drivers who actually get an hourly wage on top of their delivery fees.
Someone just has to build the infrastructure for this, have the capital to get started, sell the restaurants on it, and advertise the service.
The problem is that restaurants usually have similar load patterns. The orders for the Mexican place aren’t coming in while the pizza restaurant are slow, they’re all getting a decent surge at lunch time and a bigger surge at dinner timr
This must be that innovation which is making the world a better place that these tech parasites keep gushing about.
How much did the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, earn last year?
I hear the smallest violin Everytime I hear about UberEATS executive complain about the company not being profitable.
I know GrubHub is bad too but I typically only pay a small fee of 3$ for their service and a tip of 20% to the driver.
Yet UberEATS usually includes a $10-15 UberEATS fee which the employee sees none of. Yet “oh no UberEATS is not profitable, oh no my 3rd yacht isn’t big enough”
I only use eats if there’s a solid promo, and then I pick up the food myself. They don’t get the fee, I don’t have to tip, and I get the deal. A lot of time the price per item is cheaper on pickup too. Their fees are absolutely ridiculous, and they are just a middleman. They for sure are losing money on me.
Best to just call it in. Even for pick up, all these online providers take a huge cut, eating the profit margin from the people actually making the food you like.
I try to only use online orders for restaurants that have their own website cart. I do sometimes resort to the big ones when I’m busy / lazy, but I make a point to try to make sure the actual restaurant gets my money, because I want them to survive and keep making me tasty food.
Tipping culture caused this mess, meritocracy bullshit
I will never use uber so long as I shall live.
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This was in Toronto, and to call the ebike courier job market here “oversaturated” would be an understatement.
27 an hour after expenses?
Considering that the average pay for doordash workers are usually between 15 to 20 an hour, I’m guessing that 27 an hour is before taking out for expenses.
27 an hour becomes 22.8/h after taxes (assuming you are in a state with no state income tax) minus whatever paid for fuel expenses, and that’s before you take into consideration the wear and tear on the vehicle and unless you are flying under the radar(bad idea they’ll refuse your claim or even drop you) the increase Insurance costs for using the vehicle commercially
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I will definitely be interested to hear about your experience.
Uber eats is such a scam. When these new VC companies come on the block offering things that are to good to be true I am constantly saying “we shouldn’t support this unsustainable vc funded business, once they have market share they will have killed the competition and then they will raise their prices”
So many places used to deliver at reasonable prices but after years of uber delivering at way cheaper rates they stopped. Now uber delivers at $10 more.
Yeah I liked the idea of Uber at first because taxis have been shitty for a long time and Uber was shaking up that industry.
But then I learned that Uber wasn’t making money and immediately realized that they were just looking better than taxis for as long as they needed to to drive them out of business so they can be even worse, while providing even less than taxis companies do. At least taxi companies have a relationship with their drivers while Uber was just a platform for connecting anonymous riders with almost as anonymous drivers and handling the financial aspect of it (so that they control it all as middlemen with control of the wallet).
So now I just use taxi services when I need a ride (while cursing the state of mass transit in North America and GM plus corrupt politicians for their role in making this like this).
Similar story with hotels/airbnb, though they’ve made it even worse because they are affecting the housing market itself rather than just the luxury service of staying somewhere while away from home.
Many reports of landlords evicting their tenants so they could turn their homes into airbnbs… Disgusting
Which means it’s financially viable to compete with them again using their own drivers. Uber just trained an entire sector on delivery driving which is a larger pool of labour places can now draw from. And they can start by talking in person to the drivers who conveniently come directly to their business every day.
No because after uber cornered the market uber raised the bar for what kind of fuckery is acceptable. Takeaway shops would do normal prices plus a $10 delivery fee. Now they can double their prices and have contractless uber drivers manage all their deliveries.
We don’t have to use that service. Who’s with me?
I’ve never used the third party delivery apps because it was clear their business model was going to screw over the deivers from the beginning.
And be very expensive for the customer at the same time. Food is expensive enough already without adding more fees and overhead.
Well, I’m definitely not using any delivery service - we live ~25 mins drive from the nearest town, so it’s just not an option.
I’ve lived most of my life in the countryside and just think that getting someone else to go get my food is a weird concept anyway… I’d go as far as saying that I’m no-one special, so why ask someone else to get my food - just get it myself (lazy, etc.)
Plus, I like driving, so I’m happy to get out of the house for a while (and drive like a delivery driver to get the food home whilst it’s still hot)
I use it, I just tip way more than anyone else in my area tips. Mostly out of guilt, partially out of solidarity for the working person. I like to think my order at bumps that avg hourly rate up at bit.
I feel like it’s a double-edged sword.
For as long as there are people willing to tip more, the company can get away spending less and shifting it onto customers.
As a result, workers get highly unpredictable and generaly low income and customers feel guilty for leaving low tips. Everybody but the company loses.
This is why I only tip if the staff performed some actual service, not just calling my name for me to pick up my own order from the counter. Tipping in those situations (all situations actually) will allow the employer to pay shit wages longer and avoid a union to get them the benefits they deserve.
This just makes your house a target for robbery because the criminals who deliver on the side will think you have lots of money
As a former driver for both UE and GH, I disagree. The rich fucks who tip nothing could be a target. My best tips came from the blue collar and lower-middle-class houses. Solidarity. (Also why I won’t use the services myself; I can’t tip enough to justify wasting an hour of their time and missed opportunities.)
As a driver, I started losing money once pandemic pay became a thing. It seemed like nearly all the furloughed teachers and daycare workers got in on the gig. I was lucky if I got one run per hour, and my area had no guaranteed minimum pay, even on scheduled blocks.
I haven’t found a greener pasture yet, but at least I didn’t totally ruin my car with the excess miles. Silver linings, I guess.
The awful part is, even without tipping the driver the food is drastically more expensive. The restaurant takes an extra cut, The delivery service takes an extra cut. This person’s delivering your food practically for free and the meal is already sit down restaurant price.
My wife and I ran the numbers and, in our area, Uber Eats was pulling in about 1/4 to 1/3 the cost of the meal between charges to the restaurant and the customer. We were discussing opening a non-profit delivery service in our area. Turns out it’s pretty hard to do.
Oh yeah, they’re going to want to see some serious reason why you shouldn’t be paying tax.
It’s a lot easier to start an SCorp or an LLC in the US. Starting the corporation’s not horribly expensive either
Since you’re not selling the product, you probably just need to pay the tax on The money they pay you to do the pickup. You need to start it more like a postmates where they ask you to go pick up the order they placed at some shop. But then I suspect you would have timing issues if you have a limited staff. You couldn’t just place the order and then wait a unlimited amount of time for it to show up.
Then there’s that daunting problem of when the store screws up the order. Because they always screw up the order.
But you’re still going to have to deal with labor laws, You’re going to need bonding, a CPA, advertising, presumably a web presence and software maybe across platform cell phone app. These are all things that get easier as the company gets bigger but are rather daunting it small scale.
I guess it’s kind of a tough business to break into. Owning my own car, I could place an order, drive to McDonald’s pick up the food and come back for pennies. Obviously that 30 minutes is my time but it’s time I would spend not making money else wise. Because I’m already spending a couple hundred a month on a car, it’s not worth very much for me to pay someone to bring me food. But at a livable wage, plus someone else’s maintenance, that’s probably $7 to $10, assuming there’s a limited number of orders they can pick up at once in a small area.
Just one note, restaurant prices go up because uber eats charges a percentage based fee for each menu item. So, restaurants need to up the prices on the app just to make the same amount of money. Just some good ol’ under-the-table fuckery courtesy of Silicon Valley bastards.
In any case, when it cost me $20 more to get the meal through delivery, and f**** over a delivery person I’ve got a lot more incentive to drive 10 minutes to pick up food.
it’s okay you can say fuck.
Voice dictation censors, getting to the setting is a pain, I use dictation for work a lot so it’s better for you to be imaginative them me to screw up and get in trouble.
Yeah, it would suck if you’re ever referring to the fuck Tory manager
What a sad country, where people have to accept being paid so little.
I’ve been arguing for decades that EU needs to tax US imports, because USA is using social dumping to compete unfairly.
The US minimum wage is not a living wage, and employers can even go below that if they can claim tips are part of the wage.USA has created a system where employers are not paying the actual cost of labor. By tilting the power balance to vastly favor employers, and fail to regulate against abuse.
Chattel slavery ended but we are ruled by people who think of themselves as modern slavers though.
Have you heard the claim “Slavery wasn’t that bad.”?
That has actually been pushed by the extreme right for a couple of years now!
Like WTF? Are they arguing we should have slavery again?Well at least slaves were provided housing!
Did you even read the article? This is not about or in the USA.
What do you mean? Canada is American territory.
/j
Good job! You can open websites! We’re so proud.
It shows paywall.
Oh, in that case how did you manage to come to such strong conclusions if you didn’t read the article?
Because I know it happens in USA.
So you didn’t bother to read the article but felt the need to make a top level comment about it?
I was just commenting on a thread about public transportation (there’s none where live) and someone commented that they’re moving to micro transportation by just buying a $3 Uber every time they need to go somewhere. Even if uber is only taking $1 of that, $2 isn’t paying someone to drive you somewhere. Uber drivers should make at least $30/hr.
Where can you take a $3 Uber? If I took an Uber to my next door neighbor’s house it would be more than $3.
I haven’t done the math but if you don’t drive that much, did it beat their yearly costs (maintenance/insurance/gas)? Honestly that scheme is wild but makes total sense for a customer because not having to deal with car maintenance and insurance seems like a good tradeoff. I wonder when the dominos are all gonna tumble for these driving companies
I don’t know where the person who commented that lives, but you can’t get an Uber five blocks for under $10 around here. If I was that close and walkable I’d just walk. I do know uber is losing drivers locally though because they don’t pay enough, certainly not enough for people to maintain their cars. It’s predatory employment at this point, and it is becoming normalized.
I took one recently and found out Lyft was taking the ride at a loss. (They must average out the rides). I needed to drop my vehicle somewhere for maintenance, called a Lyft and it was something like 5.42 before I added a tip. I asked the driver when it had gotten so much cheaper and he said he had been doing well and checked and was getting paid $9 before tip for the ride. Told him I was giving him $10 for going out of his way as a tip, and the app actually wouldn’t allow me to tip that much, I couldn’t get above 9.58 or something. Anyways, slower areas they must be taking a loss to try to get more market in the area.
Also, Lyft has always been better for me when needed, Uber won’t allow me to schedule a ride, so you have to wait till you want to leave, and in a slow area that just means… There might not be anyone. If I schedule it with Lyft for a set time I’ve never had an issue with that.
“Minimum wage and the idea that hard work should lead to economic security, can be — and are being — destroyed by these A.I. systems.”
Lol. AI has so very little to do with this. That’s only mentioned because it’s the latest bogeyman.
Not A.I, just a terrible system that incentivises (and even demands for public companies) abusive behaviour.
Yep, blaming it on A.I. is just an easy way for corporates to shift the blame to something they can’t control. A.I. is just a tool, the people using it and HOW they use it are responsible for the outcome.
Yeah, AI is making the same practices worse, but tryijg to destroy the concept of the minimum wage goes back to at least the early 80s if not before.
Food delivery only made sense as an operating cost of the business, so third party delivery would have only made sense as something that the businesses subsidized. It also only makes sense if it is structured around the busy times of day as well.
I worked in a few businesses in the late 90s that offered delivery. In every case the delivery drivers were basically kitchen staff who went on deliveries OR the business itself was primarily delivery based in the first place and they still had the drivers do some other work around the place during downtime between meals. Both approaches spread the cost of the employees over more than the literal time delivering, because otherwise the cost per hour would be ridiculous. They also delivered food that held up to delivery times, so the food waiting 10-15 minutes before being delivered wasn’t an issue.
There was a reason that pizza places and Chinese restaurants frequently had delivery even in smaller towns while things like McDonald’s did not. The food held up to delivery and was frequently of a volume that made the restaurant subsidizing the cost of delivery feasible.
Many of the food couriers I worked alongside were young international students struggling to earn an income while they make their way through school. Others were refugees or undocumented workers, navigating precarious lives.
I honestly wonder if pretty much all of the surge in illegal immigration over the last 5 or 6 years comes down to Uber Eats.
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