I’ve never delivered for Uber Eats specifically, but I don’t know how they managed less than $2 an hour without doing obviously impractical things like trying to deliver at off hours, or in a poor area for it. I average about $27/hour. This is however, with GrubHub that has a wait list for drivers and they deliberately don’t overcrowd regions. Area really has a lot to do with it. I can imagine that if Uber doesn’t cap the amount of drivers in an area, a full on city is probably the worst example of a place to try it. I know that DoorDash is the same way in Atlanta, and the few times I have tried there, it wasn’t worth the trip. One thing you learn very fast through observations is that the “hot zones” mentioned in the article don’t matter. All they mean is that someone ordered from a place there before the map refreshed.
I guess my point here, is that the pay isn’t necessarily shit. You have to put in some leg work and learn the best areas around you as well as the times to work.
I do have a lot to say about doing this line of work with over 1k deliveries done across 3 apps, but it is kind of out of the scope of this comment unless someone asks.
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
This was in Toronto, and to call the ebike courier job market here “oversaturated” would be an understatement.
I will definitely be interested to hear about your experience.
Please, do tell
I edited my comment to include a lot.
See my edit.
Had a colleague that did it as a side gig and no matter how many times I told him to do it, he always refused to do the calculation to figure out how much he was making after expenses.
Living in denial is the only reason we aren’t already eating the rich.
I will never use uber so long as I shall live.
I was going to do it as a side hustle, but then I found out that I would have to change the type of car insurance I have, and my rate would go up. If I didn’t and had an accident while delivering, my insurance company would 100% deny all claims - assuming they found out I guess. I wasn’t willing to risk it , and the higher premium cost made it unprofitable.
Honestly, I’m surprised insurance companies don’t actively pursue this. Like doing a side gig such as this would very easily increase the possibility of claims because you’re on the road, so financially speaking it would make sense for them to try to partner through those delivery apps or Research into whether someone is doing it professionally on the side.
Then again I guess it is more financially Justified for them to just milk your insurance money up until the point that you get into an accident and then deny your claim there for being a gig worker
externalizing costs. vehicle maintenance, insurance, wages… it’s all a ruse to get anyone else to pay their overheads without realizing it.
That’s the foundation of the entire economic model imposed on the plebs.
If you are not exteacting, you are not winning.
bike time
Must be nice to live somewhere you can bike without high probability of death.
Let me be 100% clear. People who commute on bikes in my area are dead. Or they gave up because of a near death experience. I have lived here 18 years, I have seen one regular bike commuter. He caused major traffic backups, which was his safest option, at least they knew he was there. He lasted three weeks. I hope he’s not dead. You can not commute on a bike everywhere.
Even in places with good infrastructure and generally non-murderous drivers it still gets very sketchy.
The majority of drivers just havent ridden a bike since they were 3, and just don’t understand that you’re part of the traffic, as though you can magically just slip around between all the cars.
American drivers believe that they can kill people with cars and they do get away it a lot. Wouldn’t want to ruin their lives
A lot of couriers in my area are also using ebikes now. At least in winter, it seems like even more than regular bikes.
I think the trick is you’ll never make it just driving for one service, you have to do Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, maybe even Instacart as well if you want to do it for a living.
Just like the people who drive for both Uber and Lyft.
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.
Did you even read the article? This is not about or in the USA.
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?
What do you mean? Canada is American territory.
/j
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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…
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
So how many lemmy users are going to stop using food delivery to avoid being complicit? Especially asking if you refused to vote for Kamala Harris because of Gaza - or you can rant about how it’s “not the same thing” lol.
I live in California where we attempted to pass a law that would force these companies to hire their drivers as employees. Every gig worker i know bought the corpo propaganda and voted against it. That was when I realized exactly how much of an education and media literacy problem we have in this country.
The education and media literacy problem has been brewing for decades. Our culture is so entertainment addicted, lots of people can’t even take a shit without watching something on their phones. I had high hopes in a progressive victory and a slow turnaround, but Trump winning after everything that’s happened tells me we’ve gone over the event horizon into Idiocracy and collapse. Not looking forward to it.
My buddy who was a driver at the time would try to convince the Uber drivers in the lot at the airport and they all believed the propaganda from TV and radio that was clearly paid for by Lyft and Uber. The majority of the American public are just not intelligent.
The problem with that law is many that qualify to deliver now, wouldn’t if they were considered employees, and a lot of homeless/near homeless deliver instead of begging.
That argument is just a regurgitation of the propaganda that these people bought into. You can’t possibly know what would have happened because the law was voted down. I think that if those companies severely restricted the number of drivers they allowed, quality of service would decline and they would end up losing market share. In the end, there probably are somewhat fewer drivers, but those drivers are guaranteed to be making at least minimum wage plus mileage and access to health insurance.
No, that’s my personal experience and prediction knowing how shit corporations are. Yeah, in an idealized world we’d all be w2 workers, but there also wouldn’t be homeless and there’s be easy to enter programs to make money if you are.
But until those programs are in place you’re risking the jobs of tens of thousands of people without other options. For no reason.
That law still pisses me off. I heard that it got a court check because of a clause in the amendment required a 7/8ths majorty vote in both the Senate and Assembly, but I don’t recall if the judge ruled to keep it or abolish it.
California can be such a great state, but sometimes we vote for the dumbest shit because companies lobbied for ads that make no sense but to the dumbest voter. The most recent set of props come to mind.
I know the courts upheld it in 2023. I haven’t heard of anything changing since then.
Like every time we vote to keep dialysis shitty?
I never understand why we keep voting for it each election, but more:
https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/11/california-propositions-election-results/
- Voted no on rent control because of successful propaganda by landlords
- Voted no raising the minimum wage because of successful propaganda by companies
- Voted no on affordable housing because “muh taxes”
- Voted no on banning prison labor, because “Hey if they went to jail, they should burn in a forest fire, paying them is icky!!”
I don’t buy through food delivery apps, I only order delivery if the store itself provides the service.
And I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, not because of Gaza, but because she sucks in a lot of areas. I also didn’t vote for Trump because he also sucks in a lot of ways. My state is heavily partisan, so me voting for one or the other feels like more of a wasted vote than voting third party, because everyone knows which party will win my state before the primaries even start, so I might as well juice the third party numbers a bit.
Last time I tried ordering food I spent an hour trying to find a restaurant that still had delivery drivers on staff.
Fucking capitalism is killing everything.
Are you for fucking real? Capitalism is killing your ability to lay on your ass and order food brought to you? Have you no sense of irony, history or context?
I just stick to two or three, and drive to the rest. I don’t order delivery enough to need more than that.
Not sure how many but when I suggest boycotting these parasites a while back, I was down voted and told to get fucked lol
Fuck kamala and loser DNC komissars who shill owner class agenda against pedons
That’s the spirit! Let’s review in 4 years.
Life will be shitter just the same way it gets shitter with each new presidential term. The trend is set, you have to be naive to think that regime white kamala would reverse the trend.
Two party system is to maintain power of the owner class.
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Doesn’t really seem to help when it still shows their username…
This is why I’m never in favour of unrestricted, uncensored speech in public forums…lol
This is… a weird gotcha. “You claim to be aginast murder, but sometimes you like to order Taco Bell! Checkmate, progressives!”
I personally voted for Harris despite being in California, but I can’t afford doordash for going out. It’s often:
- Meal Price (often but not always extra charges because fuck you, they can
- Service fees
- Driver fees
- Tip to get someone to deliver in my rural area
Meanwhile I can often walk to there and put in my order in the same amount of time. It’s often even cheaper to take the bus someplace, then take the bus back. Doordash makes more sense in an urban area, but I don’t live in one. And when I am in one, I’m often with a friend who knows how to drive.
I never used them. Smug_face.png.
I don’t use them either.
Together we will rule over this wretched land.
Until a sudden but inevitable betrayal.
It will be me.
So how many lemmy users are going to stop using food delivery to avoid being complicit?
I generally avoid food delivery apps because of the extra cost either way…but if you have a problem with the wages, just tip more. Tip cash if you have it – there’s no way for the app to get its hands on that money!
I either pick up the food myself or eat there and highly tip the server, because that’s how the system works right now - but long term it would be better if they got more wages and didn’t need to rely on generosity.
Definitely. I wish we’d ban tipping in North America.
And also put the taxes into the sticker/menu prices. No more of this price jumping at the register.
I see the justification in adding the tax on afterwards because putting it on stickers and menus imposes more work on the business whenever the sales tax changes. If you’ve ever done a store inventory you’ll get it. Also if you live in a place with sales tax, which in America means almost everywhere, you get used to mentally approximating it, or at least knowing it’s going to be added on - and a sales tax amount is mandated, it isn’t something people agonize over deciding like a tip.
but if you have a problem with the wages, just tip more.
enabler | noun
en·abler i-ˈnā-b(ə-)lər
: one that enables another to achieve an end especially : one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior (such as substance abuse) by providing excuses or by making it possible to avoid the consequences of such behavior
Someone using the service is already an en·abler (i-ˈnā-b(ə-)lər).
Tipping well enables the drivers to pay their bills, at least.
I didn’t vote for Harris because she’s one of them. I also don’t use food delivery. Enjoying your feeling of superiority from pointing out the hypocrisy of random group intersections?
Reading comprehension dude - I specifically addressed the Harris question to people who are in both categories.
We don’t have to use that service. Who’s with me?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
Bootlicker spotted
I feel like you gotta go out of your way to make so little money doing this. If they actually did it correctly there would be no article to write. Not saying they would get rich but there’s no way they did this honestly.
Spoken like someone who’s never done delivery work in their life.
I delivered pizza from high school through college. And now I own 2 business that we use third party delivery at. I can assure you literally no one makes this little on these apps even the people who are illegals and doing profit sharing with people with legal accounts make more.
I think the problem is: what they call a “Tip” is more like a “Bid”/“Offer”. People see “Tip” and thus believe its optional, I mean it technically is optional, but the base pay is like $2.50 so its customarily required. I think for even the shortest delivery of a place 10 minutes away with a 2 mile distance is supposed to tip at least $5. and if the delivery is done in 30 minutes, that’s an effective wage of $15/hour, that is, if they get orders back-to-back.
Customers don’t understand how this works and puts $0 as the “Tip”, buts its really a “Bid”, effectively making anyone who is willing to accept the order, to work below minimum wage. And also new drivers doesn’t understand how this works and acceepts orders without a good enough “Bid”, effectively working below minimum wage.
I mean, why even call it a “Tip” if its customarily required, just change the base pay to $7.50. So for an order that takes 30 minutes, its an effective wage of $15/house, assuming they get orders back-to-back. Much less confusion amongst both customers and drivers.
I think for even the shortest delivery of a place 10 minutes away with a 2 mile distance is supposed to tip at least $5. and if the delivery is done in 30 minutes, that’s an effective wage of $15/hour, that is, if they get orders back-to-back.
Since these shitty companies don’t provide vehicles or gas money most of that $15 is going to vehicle costs.
When I delivered for a pizza place in the late 90s in a midwest college town with my own car I got 15-20 per hour between base pay, gas and car use subsidy, and tips. That business was 90% deliveries, so the delivery was baked into the cost.
why even call it a “Tip” if its customarily required,
Noce psyop there tbh… Why duck over your worker when you can shift that blame on your idiot customers?
It is your fault Joe delivery guy doesn’t get paid!!!
Lol, “everyone except me is a government agent”.
Its not blaming customers, its not the customers fault, its the company making things confusing to scam both the customers and drivers.
I’m saying, if the company wants to effectively make customers pay the wages of the drivers, then it should be transparent, like how it is in Europe.
Raise the base pay to match at least the minimum wage. If the company isn’t happy with their greed (they charge restaurants somewhere from 5% to 30% btw), then they can charge the customer more delivery fees to make it up (like they do in Europe).
But the point is, if companies want to be greedy, at least be transparent about it.
Sir, we are aligned. If I was not clear, the corpo is shifting responsibility of wages to the end user and then makes them tip out of guilt.
If companies gonna be this greedy, deny the parasite profit full stop. Delivery is a luxury, nobody has yet to die from lacking delivery slop.
Americans be crazy. I never tipped in my life and ain’t about to start.
“Let me help subsidise a company paying below minimum wage” totally normal not batshit insane idea.
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 $10 delivery fee. Now they can double their prices and have contractless uber drivers manage all their deliveries.
Well this is a more or less solved problem in BC:
https://www.moneysense.ca/earn/careers/gig-worker-rights-in-canada/
I hear the smallest violin Everytime I hear about UberEATS executive complain about the company not being profitable.
I know GrubHub is bad too but I typically only pay a small fee of 3$ 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.
Tipping culture caused this mess, meritocracy bullshit
