I started boycotting food delivery services because the quality & service was just god awful. I found that if I drive, I actually don't spend that much time, and I get wayyyy better service.
McDonalds has a 2 for $2 deal on sausage mcmuffins & hashbrowns - been around forever. Let's say you and the wife want a McMuffin & a hashbrown each - you're in for $4 dollars and a bit of change for tax.
Here is the same meal via DoorDash:
McMuffins: $2.87ea Hash browns: $1.91ea
Subtotal: $9.56 (just below the 10 dollar minimum to wave the fee if you have DD+)
Delivery fee: $1.99 Service fee: $3.00 Tax: $0.91 Dasher Tip: $5 (good luck getting your order on time if you tip less than this)
Grand Total: $20.46 for $4 of food.
You can "optimize" by ordering an additional hash brown to get over the $10 hump so you can wave the delivery fee and reduce the service fee - which will instead cost you a total of $17.91 for $5 worth of food. Either way it's a shit deal. Not included here are the costs associated with 1 in every 4-5 orders being incorrect, or delivered to the wrong house and the hassle that adds to your life.
Obviously I went with low cost items to illustrate a point but often any food prices you see on DD are a good 50% markup vs going in person regardless of the restaurant before you even get into fees and tips.
In fact, my son started working at a pizza place before he had his driver's license. It was cheaper to pay Uber $350 a month than his current car note + car insurance.
Just to give you a hint about "affordability", we paid $335K in 2016 to have our house built - 3100 square feet - in the "good school system" in the burbs of a major metropolitan area.
Also car insurance for a teenage male ain't cheap...
https://www.valuepenguin.com/18-year-old-car-insurance
Not to mention that the old car needs maintenance and repairs.
https://www.valuepenguin.com/18-year-old-car-insurance.
It's slightly cheaper bundled with a parent's insurance.
All of my high school friends have the same experience as I do, a car with near zero value, and no collision coverage, just liability, and paid similarly dirt cheap rates. My friend had coverage on his old dodge van for $120 a year.
My car insurance on my nearly new car is actually double the price, despite me now being significantly older than 18, because I pay for coverage so I could repair it if it gets in an accident.
Consider switching insurances?
This is absolutely terrible advice in almost all circumstances. I am curious, what you consider a reasonable amount? People in California with the state minimum end up with $5,000 worth of property damage liability. Hope you have the remaining $75,000 sitting around when you accidentally run into a nice car.
I have no car, but between grocery delivery and an e-bike, why would I want to continue paying an exorbitant tax to get shitty, cold food two hours after I order it?
Basically - you having a car or not has zero (zilch, nada, nothing) to do with the insane markup these companies charge.
And if the difference in you having a car or not really was doordash... jeez man. Go re-evaluate your life.
I bet you live in a higher cost of living area and not in the cheaper burbs to be able to take an e-bike everywhere.
I have no problem calling a restaurant and ordering delivery. Or ordering groceries for delivery.
Neither of those delivery services is charging me a 50%+ markup to get food from them. And the quality of the food is generally much higher.
Doordash and Uber are charging me a 50%+ markup.
Basically - I have no problem with you preferring delivery instead of a car (hell - I made a similar choice and take public transit and bike when delivery doesn't work)
I'm saying that's unrelated to the fact that you're getting swindled by these companies.
If you're coming out ahead by using doordash, imagine how much money you could save if you literally just called the same fucking restaurant and ordered delivery directly.
---- As for your bet...
I live in SW Atlanta. For comparison - cost of living in Atlanta is almost exactly the national average (101.8%), and the south side of the city is MUCH cheaper (I paid less than you for our house, slightly smaller at ~2200 sqft, but we got nearly a full acre of land)
Most restaurants don't have there own delivery service.
If these companies aren't making money, how are they "swindling" anyone?
Unless you mean you're actually out near cummings or something and just claim it's Atlanta still. In which case... maybe - I don't really head up near Lake Lanier all that often.
Otherwise... plenty of delivery in brookhaven/perimeter/roswell. Honestly, you probably have more options for local delivery than we have across all of these services.
---
> If these companies aren't making money, how are they "swindling" anyone?
Well - outside of the obvious damage discussed in the article, a simple answer might be that it's entirely unsustainable, and you're making long term plans based on services that won't exist in a year or two if interest rates keep climbing (even the CEO of grubhub calls food delivery a "crummy" business and wants to pivot to handling the advertising while kicking the delivery service back to the individual restaurants).
In the mean time you're not doing anything to address the real problems with transportation in that area, and you continue to live in an area that's extremely hostile to your long terms goals of being a "digital nomad".
Further... even though these companies aren't making money, it's cheaper to order your food for pickup and pay someone on taskrabbit $18/hour to go get it for you rather than add $3-$5 to every item, a $5-$10 delivery fee, and tip on that new inflated price. So yes - I'd say you're getting swindled still.
I'm one of those "undesirables". When I use to go pick up my son, they immediately knew who my son was just by looking at me. Trust me, I'll be invited to a BLM rally way before I would ever be invited to a Klan rally.
> Unless you mean you're actually out near cummings or something and just claim it's Atlanta still. In which case... maybe - I don't really head up near Lake Lanier all that often.
Cumming is very much part of the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA MSA
https://dch.georgia.gov/sites/dch.georgia.gov/files/Atlanta%...
> In the mean time you're not doing anything to address the real problems with transportation in that area, and you continue to live in an area that's extremely hostile to your long terms goals of being a "digital nomad".
I'll be "living" across the US and taking advantage of Uber/Uber Eats by the end of the year.
> Further... even though these companies aren't making money, it's cheaper to order your food for pickup and pay someone on taskrabbit $18/hour to go get it for you rather than add $3-$5 to every item, a $5-$10 delivery fee, and tip on that new inflated price. So yes - I'd say you're getting swindled still.
There is a markup. But UberEats is much more integrated into the food delivery system than a random task rabbit worker and it is still cheaper.
It’s a fake industry held up by VC money.
But I don’t see Dominos dropping delivery.
The later VCs make money if the thing IPOs before the universe proves it can never be profitable (as with Uber).
personally I would to like to see their share prices go to zero
I looked at my most recent receipt for something more realistic: A $12 (in store) pizza was listed on doordash at $14.25 and I paid $17.30 in app with the Chase CSP discount. I guess not everyone has the card, but IMO it’s financially irresponsible not to.
Note that this restaurant is a 20 minute drive each way. Even if I worked minimum wage ($15/hr in CA) it would have cost me a lot more ($10 time + $5 gas!) to pick it up myself.
Can we stop doing this? Our free time has zero monetary value. Every minute of our lives is not billable, and it's disingenuous to frame it that way.
Sure, avoiding 40 minutes of driving time might be worth $10 to you (it is to me, too), but... just say that, maybe?
And I agree with you in general that the grandparent's example was maybe not the common case. Sure, sometimes people get late-night munchies and make a small delivery order to Taco Bell, but I would hope that most orders are at least for a single, full, lunch- or dinner-sized meal, and will often be for multiple people. Delivery is still certainly more expensive than going into the store, but not having to deal with driving somewhere to pick it up also has value to many.
You could spend 30 minutes to pick something up, or that same 30 minutes has a value of half your hourly rate (minus taxes). Why would you be opposed to anyone doing the calculus on how to best utilize their time?
The framing of something “costing me my time” has never made sense to me especially when someone tries to actually quantify it.
Most events can be moved around, so even if there's a big delay on changing your work hours you can still exchange extra free time with extra money.
And people generally can choose how many hours they want to be paid for.
It's easy to quantify, it's just something that happens in bigger shifts. One hour by itself probably doesn't make you change your work hours. But as more and more hours pile up, eventually you might chose to reduce your work week by half a day. Or if you find yourself doing unimportant and uninteresting things very often, and with a shortage of cash, you might increase your work week by half a day.
> avoiding 40 minutes of driving time might be worth $10 to you
My point was that avoiding 40 minutes is worth the price increase for almost everyone, not just me! You’d have to go out of your way to find exceptions such as the GP’s McDonald’s deal.
And yeah doordash pretty much forces you to order at least $12 off food which often works out to 2 meals. I’m sure a lot of orders are larger too.
You're right... it's priceless. Some of us really do place a high value on our finite quantity of time that we have on this planet.
I remember being absolutely flummoxed by how much time people were willing to just throw away to camp overnight for some hot commodity Black Friday sale at Best Buy back in the day.
That aside, you’re mostly right about people losing money: Doordash nets -10% of revenue. Most restaurants also pay a commission to Doordash which effectively gets passed on to me as a discounted delivery fee, but I dunno if you’d count that as “losing money”.
I think it would be pretty easy for them to turn a 10% profit though. All they have to do is increase prices by ~15% and cut their R&D budget in half (currently 10% of revenue). I’ll enjoy the cheap deliveries while it lasts.
- Give hilariously bad estimates for delivery time. Dan Luu tracked this. https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1469755162004582400?s=20&t...
- Cause huge pileups for restaurant workers, who in pre-delivery app times were shielded by the presence of "a line", which puts a natural limit on order throughput (people drop out of line or don't enter when it's too long)
- Generally aren't good at giving prompt notifications, which sucks for both the driver and the order maker
I'm starting to believe two sided marketplaces tend to be worse for everyone except for the intermediary
If you ever wanted a feature-length explanation of queueing theory and how ignoring it makes everything worse, well... here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yjZpBq1XBE . The context is Disney parks and Fastpass, but the lessons are applicable to basically any business. Everything is a queue.
Huh, I wonder how universal this is. I agree with this take for Lyft and Uber (for rides), but for Uber Eats, at least, it's been incredibly rare for it to take longer than the estimate, and in the majority of cases the food arrives 5-10 minutes faster than the estimate suggests.
They lie and try to blame restaurants for slowness too. I've found that most of them have a specific timer for the all the stages before "driver waiting at the restaurant". If they can't allocate a driver or he doesn't arrive there by that time, the status will switch to "driver waiting at the restaurant" even if that's not yet the case, putting the blame on the restaurant.
I had suspicions about most of them doing it but what I can say for sure is that I caught Uber Eats doing this by calling the restaurant directly and confirming that there was absolutely nobody there and the food has been ready for 40 minutes.
I got a “free” door dash related thing and I tried it (no markup, made the poor guy deliver an avocado from the convenience store, did tip) and it was marked as “picked up” after it had been dropped off.
The food delivery companies on the other hand ruin the restaurant’s reputation by lying about them being slow, not to mention that they have zero excuse for doing so considering they actually have all the true information behind the scenes since the drivers are geolocated in real-time.
I've seen a lot of drama from DD drivers at restaurants, one thing that sticks in my mine was during a midnight run to White Castle. The place was packed and the workers kept asking about this huge bag of food for DD. The bag was easily 2 foot tall and completely packed full of food. The entire time I'm waiting on my food, people keep asking "any word on this door dash?"
Then some lady comes in screaming, "f- y'all, I've been waiting 20 f- minutes for a f- order and y'all slow mfers won't do shit!" The manager tells her the order is here and has been ready for 15 minutes. She goes up to the counter, takes the food, then throws the drink at the manager, screaming "f- you", throws the bag of food back at them yelling, "f- door dash" and "f- this $4 tip!"
So, not only did the person not get their food (and probably didn't find out for a long time afterwards), the restaurant had to cover the costs of all of it, and the delivery driver was out like her time and gas.
If they did, they need to sign a less abusive deal with DD.
What I’m guessing happens is that if you tip high, less scrupulous but tech savvy drivers will snag the delivery. These folks have multiple accounts and work for multiple services at once, so your order is way down on their list. It frequently comes with location spoofing, where the driver is supposedly waiting at the restaurant for nearly an hour, and once they’re actually on their way, they’ll teleport miles away (having unlocked their location).
When I tip less, I don’t see this behavior. It’s probably folks not gaming the system that will take whatever delivery pops up.
Tips are supposed to be for good service! I know they've been perverted into more than that by a combination of unscrupulous business owners and the US's broken tax code, but... c'mon. These services shouldn't even ask for a tip until the delivery is complete, let alone show the amount to the driver before they accept the job.
(I'm fine with them asking for the tip as a part of the initial checkout, though, since I imagine many people won't remember to revisit the app post-delivery within the tipping window, even if they did want to leave a tip, and that alone would unfairly take money out of drivers' pockets. But the tip should be adjustable for some amount of time after the delivery completes, and the driver shouldn't see it until that time expires. Amazon's grocery delivery has this right.)
If drivers can see the tip before accepting the job, then it's not a tip: it's a competitive bid that the customer makes for delivery drivers... though if your theory is correct, it's already gamed into uselessness.
But even better would get to know the local dasher and contract directly. Heh.
Uber Eats drivers aren't shown any of the tip beforehand, in fact they will never know whether or not yoy tipped until one hour after delivery has been completed.
Doordash on the other hand will hide any tips over $4 and have also gone back to stealing them.
I used to drive for both and had to stop when UE no one was tipping meaning jobs paid only $2.50-3.50 for the whole job, meaning with Cali gas prices even before the pandemic you were losing money on 90% of jobs.
Went to DD only for a while after that until I caught them lying and underpaying on mileage and keeping tips again.
So, to reiterate, UE doesn't show drivers your tip until one hour after drop off. DD hides all tips over $4 until after drop off,but will keep tips over $4 probably 80% of the time.
I had to start texting customers at drop off to let them know what the job had paid and what the tip was and to please let me know if there were any discrepancies.
It got to the point where more often than not DD was keeping part or all of the tip over $4. Ie customer tipped 10, I received 5. Wal-Mart is known to keep 100% of tips through DD, as well as Mountain Mike's Pizza and a few others.
The subreddits will show customers things from the driver's point of view.
When you add DoorDash or any other third party delivery service into the equation, you add two more parties to this - the service itself, and the driver, who is usually an independent contractor.
What this has led to in my experience is that when something goes wrong, instead of me working it out with the restaurant, I am left frustrated, hungry, and hung out to dry by three parties - the restaurant, the platform, and the contractor.
If you read enough of the DoorDash subreddit[1], you realize that a tip is not a gratuity for good service, it's a bid for an independent contractor to take up your delivery. However, you have no ability to choose which Dasher takes it, and they are under no obligation to represent you as your agent or look out for your interests. So if they show up and the food is cold, not their problem, they get the tip because they accepted the bid.
When DoorDash had a major outage some time back, I had placed an order for about $70, generous tip (because I realize it's really a bid) and fees included. My order was prepared and ready for pick up just as the whole platform went down. It was impossible to cancel my order, because DoorDash was down, so I made alternate arrangements for dinner and figure I'll reach out for a refund when things are back up.
About three hours later, I get a notification that my order is out for delivery. The optimist in me hoped that the restaurant saw that some food sat out in the "danger zone" for several hours and remade it, or that the Dasher realized that the containers weren't the slightest bit warm, or something like that, but nope. I got dropped off a lot of food that was beyond safe to eat, not even worth saving to have as leftovers for a later meal, and now I have to dispose of all of it.
When I finally got through to support later that night, I asked for a refund, and they said they could only give me a credit for the meal, not the tip. I said I want the whole order refunded to my original payment, they said well, here's a credit and it will convert over to that later. One week and several phone calls later, they stopped telling me it was "too late to get a refund" and I got my refund and uninstalled the app. I don't need that negative energy in my life.
My experience with delivery services (mostly, but not exclusively, Postmates) is that they are usually very good at giving refunds (your experience clearly sucked, though!), which is nice (but I’m guessing not for the drivers, who may or may not be at fault), but that restaurants with their own delivery services have been more willing to send out the missing food on an expedited basis, which is often a better resolution (if I didn’t want the food more than the money, I wouldn’t have ordered in the first place.)
I’ve also noticed that wrong or missing food items are more common with third-party delivery services.
This has changed over time, though. For the first year or so of Postmates' existence, refunds were easy and near-automatic. It was trivial to get in touch with a support person, and their response to pretty much any complaint was either a refund or a (usually generous) credit. But after Postmates grew beyond a certain point, they got more stingy with refunds, and credit they offered -- if any! -- would be much lower.
I remember the same thing happening with Uber when it was new. Rating a driver under 4 stars would win you an unsolicited email from support, asking what went wrong, with a credit or refund for the ride. That pretty much never happens anymore.
Agree with you on restaurants, though. Restaurants that do their own first-party delivery are almost always better at customer experience and fixing things when something goes wrong. And it makes sense, too: DoorDash and the driver don't care if you end up with a negative impression of a restaurant because the food arrived cold. The consequences for DD are much less than the consequences for the restaurant. And even if you do call the restaurant, there's usually not much they can do, because they're not able to get DD to redo the delivery for free, and have no leverage over DD to give refunds.
Of course this is different with my work travel portal run by Concur. I get to keep the points/miles and "non refundable" tickets are refundable when the airlines are trying to stay in the good graces of a company that books...a lot.. of money in travel.
All airlines and hotel groups I’ve used let you get points no matter where you book. Just need to use the website to claim the spend.
> Elite nights are not earned with online travel agency bookings. For example, if you book through Expedia, you will not earn elite night credit (or points) for your stay. You also might not receive elite benefits during your stay, but some hotels have been known to offer them anyway as long as you add your Hilton Honors membership number to the reservation.
Yes this is different if you use a portal like Concur used for business travel. You can even put your personal loyalty code in and it shows up automatically -- at least through Hilton and Delta.
1. When I am on business trips and getting reimbursed, I don't care. It's "other people's money"
2. The food delivery services have made it possible for us to have one car off an on since 2020 and not have to pay for two cars. In fact, we just sold our newer car back to the dealer and are sharing one car now saving us $900+ a month in car insurance, car payments, gas, maintenance, etc.
We don't plan to have a car for the next three years as we embark on our "digital nomad" existence.
If I can get away without ever having a car again, I will. It just doesn't make sense for me as someone who works remotely and has grown kids and really only needs to get out on the weekend to deal with paying for a car just to sit in the garage most of the time.
There's a huge gap between 'no car' and $900/mo in car expenses. Buy a used car, not too old, and do basic maintenance (oil/filter, brakes, etc) yourself where you can. It's trivial to own and operate a car for well under $200-$300/mo - millions of people do it.
The average price people paid for a car is $27K
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274928/used-vehicle-aver...
The average price of a new car is $47k.
https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-tops-4700...
The average cost of maintaining a car is between $7K - $10K
https://www.thebalance.com/average-car-maintenance-cost-4775...
Even the IRS says the average cost of a car is now $0.63 a mile.
Basic maintenance doesn't get you much of the way to $900/month anyway. An oil change is like $50-$100 depending on things, and most OEM service schedules have those once a year (unless you put on a lot of miles... but if you put on a lot of miles, it's unlikely that you can realistically forgo a car). Brakes cost more, but depending on how you drive, shouldn't be too frequent; and you really should be competent at brakes before maintaining them or you're likely to cause safety issues. An incompetent oil change my ruin your engine and as a result your pocketbook, but an incompetent brake servicing can result in no ability to stop which has much bigger life safety implications.