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Comment by notjonheyman | Hacker News Reader

You think restaurants are bad... you should see services like UberEats and DoorDash drivers.

I have had orders cancelled by the driver because they found something that tipped higher despite me tipping $7 for something down the street less than 1 mile from my house. I have also tipped $20 only for instructions to be ignored where I put my gate code, unit# and ask for it to just be dropped off at my door step but the driver is so lazy they leave the food on the ground outside the gate on the street.

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My personal favorite is that DoorDash started a $2.99 'Express' fee. The idea being like UberX vs Uber Pool: If you don't choose this option 6/10 times your driver will pick up other orders and deliver them prior to yours. Might I add that it is a brutally cold area here and zero of the drivers have any sort of keep-warm bag. So at the last minute it is a $3.99 fee that I'm assuming, mostly pays DoorDash's bills. Just so my food is not frozen and soggy. I stopped using the product, it sucks to pay 50% more for cold food or 60% more to maybe have it not be as cold.

Edit: Reddit says the driver gets ZERO.

The idea of tipping before the service is given is ridiculous. At sit-down restaurants you get to taste the food, see the care put into it, the presentation, service, etc. But at your local sandwich shop or with UberEats, you pay and tip before receiving the wrong order or bad quality food. Tips are supposed to be the incentive to provide a good service/product, not a custom which renders you the asshole when ignored.

Friend of mine started driving for Door Dash recently and when he told me they can see up front what the tip is going to be I was just flabbergasted. That's not how it's supposed to work, at all.

I had never heard that before, and now that I have I won't ever use them again.

I double checked with him just to make sure, and he confirmed with me that he can see the tip.

I've had delivery drivers give me my order only after explicitly telling me to tip more - which was frustrating because I actually increased my tip from $5 suggested by the app to $7 cause it was a snowy night. Some people won't be happy no matter what you do for them.

$7 seems pretty good to me, though it's pretty mileage dependent (I assume the suggested tip is probably taking that into account), but I wonder, how much would I have to offer you to complete a Doordash order?

The tip isn’t the price of delivering the order though, you’re conflating the price and the tip into the same thing, which they’re not.

For the record, I’ve been a delivery driver before. Getting tipped at all was amazing, so I literally can not imagine pounding on the door, handing the person their pizza and telling them that they should tip more because I want more money.

When you were a delivery driver, were you a W-2 employee? Doordash is not that - it's more like a live service market where you bid for delivery from a driver and Doordash attempts to match your order to a driver, all of whom are self employed (1099). They've got to pay all their vehicle expenses and in theory get something for their time, meanwhile Doordash is a middle-man and trying to squeeze both sides of the transaction. When it works, it is pretty impressive, but mostly it just seems like a Mug's game.

For the modern food ordering app, the tip is the price of delivering. It's really a misnomer. More accurately, it should be called a bid, since you're placing a bid on your order and hoping a delivery driver will pick it up.

Isn't it peak capitalism to find the market price for food delivery by bidding? Too low of a bid, the limited resource goes to someone else.

My biggest complaint are services that don't show the driver the tip until after they deliver. I want them to know!

Bidding is fine and will drop process and balance out long term, but seeing the tip before delivery creates the bad incentives described in other comments i.e. canceling an accepted order for another with a higher tip or not following instructions. I know I've been peeved after waiting 30 minutes only to find out my food isn't coming.

That makes sense. The problem sounds like that some vendors let the delivery be cancelled mid-way through the delivery process, rather than making people commit to making a delivery that they have accepted. I'd think if we were serious about bidding to discover the price, there would be a queue of open orders, and then someone would accept, and they would absolutely have to do the delivery or be banned or whatever. For the customer, your order would either sit in the queue forever, or be accepted and you'd be guaranteed to receive your order. (This is challenging in practice because there are two concurrent processes going on; preparing your food, and then delivering it. You want to get the delivery driver en route to the restaurant so they show up right when the food is first ready; waiting on either end is lost money. The food delivery provider is walking a fine line where they'll have to pay for food that's prepared and thrown away if no driver is willing to transport it. And, I'm sure restaurants will want in on this price discovery mechanism, making it too complicated and unreliable for any consumer to actually use.)

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