DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC
about.doordash.com
about.doordash.com
The implication that Dashers earn 2x more per hour than "other workers" earning minimum wage is false, since "other workers" are paid for 100% of the time they work, including when they are waiting for work.
Though keep in mind they're throttle e-bikes, so there isn't a lot of actual pedaling going on. And as far as accumulated workplace injuries go, merely riding a bike is pretty easy compared to a lot of blue collar work. No, I think what'd get you here is the crashes.
Because anywhere that has any air pollution, you'll ingest more when you're breathing harder and have no air filter.
But I'd be surprised if many drivers grossed more than $50K/year. If they earn less, the tax benefit of deductibility is even smaller.
Not a CPA so I’m pretty sure I’m oversimplifying this and there are lower bounds I don’t know about which prevent most gig workers from operating like this.
My comment was motivated by OP's question asking whether it was possible to "offset these expenses against their tax" (emphasis added). No, it's not possible to offset an expense against tax. It's only possible to offset against income. I frequently see people on HN saying things like "it doesn't matter if it's a ripoff because it's a tax writeoff!!!" If they actually look at their tax returns, they are surprised that an expensed dollar saves them only 10-20 cents, so the price definitely does matter.
Tax credits, on the other hand, are a lot closer to what people are usually thinking of when they say tax expense. If you install residential solar in the US in 2023, for example, you get a 30% tax credit. That means if you spend $10,000, your federal tax bill goes down by $3,000. If it were merely 30% deductible, then you'd subtract $3,000 from your income, which at a Doordash driver's tax bracket would reduce taxes by only about $350.
(I'm not a CPA, either, as any CPA can surely tell.)
As it is there is public outcry about dangerous and aggressive riding behavior from food delivery workers. It is not strictly a bad idea to tilt the incentive structure so that while you can earn a little extra on tips for completing more deliveries, it's not such a huge part of your earnings that you need to cut corners, ride the wrong way on one-way streets, ride on sidewalks etc. to hyperoptimize your delivery rate.
This whole model feels screwed up to me.
Can you imagine if your dev job was like this? Picking up jobs to write a single function. And if youre too slow, or one too many tests fail you get sacked.
many (most?) delivery cyclists in NYC aren’t legally allowed to work
Mine is. We have stack ranking and it's a living nightmare.
I know I stay the hell out of the way of by-the-minute "communal" rental cars.
Capping the # of people online would cause tons of other issues, its very easy to exploit a system like that, plus it would slow everyone down
Either we want people to do things for us, want it super fast, and want to pay everyone for every second of their time. Can't have all of these without hiring a personal driver working just for you full time
In between deliveries, they are on their shift, and they should be paid for their time.
Yes, you either pay people for every second of their time, or pay enough money for their work hours. There's no way out of this.
A courier or a taxi driver does not chose to sit on their ass the entire day. You can get a hundred orders in a row, or you can have no orders for an hour or two, and you have no control over that. And it's not like they can just get up, get a cup of cofee and go to a second job in the meantime.
How do you know this information? Example: Are you involved from the legal or labor (union?) side? Or, are you a DoorDash "partner"?
Also Caller ID isn’t that new.
(This was in Tegucigalpa in the '90s, fwiw)
Within the <$50/diner category, yes. It seems this is where the new Applebees/Ruby Tuesdays are forming. Above that, there is an explosion of creativity in the fine and pseudufine dining categories.
I can count half a dozen on my block in Flatiron alone. The only Korean fine-dining place to have opened near me is Nōksu, and I'm a few blocks from Koreatown.
For example, a friend of mine is a data scientist who reports up into the CFO of a company that owns around 10 restaurants in New York, California, and Las Vegas. The flagship of the brand is a Michelin-starred celebrity chef.
His entire job is presenting to executives the profitability impact of experiments in changing the formulation of espresso martinis and leek soup. He says that the company is entirely, quantitatively, incrementally profit driven and "joyless, from the executive team down to the dishwashers". It honestly sounds to me like the most miserable, furthest possible thing from the romantic old new york storytelling of Anthony Bordain that could still be legally called restauranteuring.
This is massively prevalent for food science and prepackaged goods (through panels and such; usually not to the end customer). Seems like restaurants are catching up.
COVID killed a number of restaurants, but some, thrived. A couple of local sit-down restaurants switched to take-out only, fired all their waitstaff, and probably got a lot of financial assistance. They made out well.
A couple, never went back to in-house dining. They are still take-out only.
Doordash became huge around here (Ubereats, too). Pretty much every restaurant does them.
The prices have gone way up, for many of these places. A few places have doubled their prices, in just a few months.
Not sure of all the causes, or the long-term effects, but I am not seeing too many "Help Wanted" signs.
Why does “innovation” have to go hand in hand with fucked up labor practices?
Not exploiting your workforce as much as you can is an almost guaranteed road to failure.
Imagine taking investor money and saying "I'll pay more to my workers so they can have decent lives". They'd oust you in a second. Same if you're in a publicly traded company.
The only possible way this doesn't happen is if you're running an already profitable private company, you're willing to grow at slower rates (which carries its own risks), your market allows it and you're not a sociopath.
That's a very rare combination.
While still losing a billion dollars a year, or more, for years.
Honestly DoorDash when it did come reduced restaurant profits, lowered quality of food delivered, and increased consumer costs. Zero advantage for anyone other than DoorDash unless you consider being able to search for the food in a single app and paying extra for it to be cold on arrival an advantage.
If you want more concrete data, you need to look at how McDonald’s did deliveries in Manhattan but not rest of the US until they partnered with food delivery apps. Most other fast food chains did not have their own delivery network either.
And I also point to restaurants that are newly added to delivery platforms, because you can easily verify if they previously could deliver or not.
Since when the capitalism seeks for advantage of Regular Joe?
Nothing makes me feel so old as observing the phenomenon of people (mostly younger) habitually ordering food through these platforms, paying $5 to $10 in platform and delivery fees per meal. All this against the economic reality that wages have not kept up with the rising cost of, well, everything and it just looks a lot like rent-seeking on the part of these platforms. I do appreciate how the platforms have brought near-universal delivery to the suburbs, but I've lived in the suburbs my whole life and I simply do not use these services due to the cost. Same goes for ride-sharing. My only usage of these platforms is when I'm traveling.
Mandated minimum earnings will benefit the drivers, but that won't help drivers that have to quit the platforms because people stop using them.
I've used these services a time or two just to see what the fuss is about and I don't get it myself.
It's similar to fast food itself. convenient and cheap. these days the latter is falling off the wayside (again, just like modern fast food). It was invaluable during a pandemic to help encourage social distancing, but even if it was still cheap it was bound to fall off a bit (probably not to pre-pandemic levels, but no longer record customers).
>I wonder if perhaps they are so deep into a bubble of wealth and privilege that to them, spending $50 for a (cold by the time it arrives) burger seemed reasonable.
As others have mentioned, it's more a matter that VC's aren't necessarily looking to be the next big tech company. Many are looking for a profitable IPO and then move on to the next company. Lots of problems with enabling that model to begin with, but that's a whole other bucket of worms.
But it’s neither of those things, assuming you believe (as I do) that receiving food that should be hot but is cold isn’t convenient.
That is the real problem, not that the concept of food delivery is unprofitable by itself.
And even the most expensive, ubereats is only, at most, a 20% surcharge compared to the in-restaurant price plus tip, for a $50 order.
In other words, delivery apps went through the “burn vc money” phase already, and are now focusing on profitability, and successfully so.
I have not eaten fast food in like 10 years, and never had it delivered.
Not really up market imo.
Because what you've listed would suggest you believe it means the former, which isn't accurate (it's the latter). Maybe I misunderstand, though.
The only reason these companies can't turn a profit is because all those microservices, ads and "engagement" don't come for free.
In the end, it's pretty simple. How many deliveries does a single person make in an hour, including idle time? Is someone paying enough for that? And does the kitchen have enough spare capacity for that?
This article is about NYC, where food delivery was ubiquitous long before DoorDash. In fact, Seamless in 2010 was a better experience than Doordash is in 2023, when you consider the absurd markup on Doordash.
Doordash struggled to enter the NYC market for a while because it was trying to compete with an established product, yet using a higher price point. It was only with massive amounts of VC funding that they were able to get a foothold.
In limited markets, for specific types of food, and for pretty crappy wages for the delivery people. (And, yes, for mostly pretty low tech approaches.)
is because their business model is unviable and unsustainable
Seamless et al are really just siphoning money out of restaurants’ pockets because you cannot, these days, be the only restaurant who still makes people call over the phone.
Uber just got included into the SP 500. One of the pre-requisites for that is being profitable on a GAAP basis.
And that one time "revenue" boost was that a company they own they are asserting is now valued more than last year. And they are calling that "revenue".
Next quarter, their margin might entirely be wiped out by a slight downturn in business. If they could increase their margin and make profit consistently, then I'll change my mind.
It's not. Most of those "innovators" are still posting losses in the hundreds of millions
> Uber just got included into the SP 500. One of the pre-requisites for that is being profitable on a GAAP basis.
Because you can somehow lose a billion dollars a year for 10 years, become a publicly traded company with a steatement "we don't even know if we'll ever turn a profit", still continue operating at a huge loss for several years, write off 6 billion in losses, and finally become profitable enough to be included in S&P.
Any any other, sane world, Uber would be gone after two years of losing a billion dollars a year. Not crawl into S&P after 10 years of unsustainable losses.
With the unlimited free investor money. Same goes for the rest of "amazing starup innovators" of recent years (e.g. YCombinator's startups). The flow of money has now stopped/slowed, and we now see mass layoffs and a wave of bankrupcies.
Losing a billion dollars a year for 10 years is not a sustainable business. But somehow it has become the norm in IT.
Uber lost money for 22 straight quarters, then made money for the last two. Bit optimistic to think it's smooth sailing from here, in my opinion. I enjoy Uber, the product, but they are middle manning a couple of low margin industries. Hard to imagine it being a multi-hundred-billion dollar company.
The bigger thing is that if you're thinking of Lean manufacturing principles or Theory of Constraints, where the goal is to get the noise out of the system, you would never maximize a business the way that Uber Eats and Doordash are. It'd instead be something like the following pipe dream:
- We sell "pizza delivery as a service" to businesses who want it -- at first we're trying to partner with Target and Walmart, etc. Our value proposition to them is "hey Amazon is eating you alive, how about we help you offer ultra-rapid delivery and the people you're working with basically become fellow trusted Target employees?" (Of course, we'd be happy to double-dip -- ideally we'd convince Amazon that we're a cheaper way to reach their customers than their own delivery drivers. But that's a really hard sell.)
- The company rents delivery people from us per day, we provide the delivery network. If you need to "burst" we can provide extra folks to augment at a premium. Ideally someday we'll get some lucrative Amazon contract where the Amazon warehouse, but to start with we're doing laundry delivery and other odd jobs. The company maintains their brand; we're just a courier service. You don't go to the FedEx website to order something, you select FedEx at the end with "how would you like this to come to you."
- On the side, we do sell a service of "we will give you a new pickup/delivery portal web site that works with our delivery service" to smaller businesses so that they can get started with us.
- We are a courier service but we only operate in cities where we can sufficiently average out the volumes needed. Amazon, UPS, FedEx can be the kings of the countryside, that's fine.
- The company, assuming food, sends their delivery-person right when the food is cooked, they are our employee and package it to our standards and bring it straight out to our delivery hub. In general they will not be going to the final address. We use this as a process buffer to maximize our throughput for the people actually driving to the home addresses, we can make sure that certain people get to know neighborhood X better, etc.
- The shipping price should come in two tiers, give people a generous shipping discount for advance orders where we can have more opportunity to batch and optimize.
- Because the company pays us (and the user pays them for "shipping"), under no circumstance does the user tip; that workflow is just too indirect to sustain tipping.
- Which means we have to do a 180 on how we treat the delivery folks; ideally they'd be full-time employees and we'd proactively unionize them.
That last bit sounds like suicide but really there's a ton of noise in terms of all of this "well the question of who are our delivery people is fraught, they can drop off the map at any time" and it's like, no, I want to be able to say at the central hub, "here's the route you're about to follow, review it while you wait 2 more minutes for Tina to arrive with order 6AF12B, that's your third one, we've got the motor running for you and you know these streets better than anybody," and under no circumstance is that person saying "eh, I have a party I want to go check out, I'm just going to go with these 2 orders and leave Tina in the lurch." And, we can sell it to city-goers as "this is the ethical way to deliver, the union makes sure that we maintain the cars and that we pay as well as we can."
And the rest of it is making the profit back up in volume.
It takes 10 minutes for a chef to make my meal, and 25 minutes for someone to come to the restaurant, pick it up, and drive it to my house.
The only way it works is if someone else's time is an order of magnitude less valuable than yours.
Targeting mainly the wealthy isn't necessarily a bad business strategy.
It should also be noted that it's also useful for bulk order to people and those unable to physically move themselves to a place (disability, lack of car, etc). It's not a "use everyday" mechanism, but it has uses.
I mean, you've basically just described the entire service industry and virtually any job in North American where tips are expected.
There is an entire class of people ready to serve you.
He was lucky to get 2 deliveries per hour...
Ish.
There's clearly a logistics problem here. 1-meal being delivered promptly on time scales poorly. But 15 meals delivered to 15 different people within 45 minutes is in fact, a net gain.
Alas, Doordash and Uber have gone about it in all the wrong ways. Its the drivers who double-book this process (ie: picking up more orders than they can handle), leading to inconsistent quality, cold food, late deliveries and more.
Its a legitimate model though. A more "proper" company that's doing this officially is Foodsby, where one Restaraunt makes a single delivery to 15-ish people in one trip at a designated time and location (usually within 5 minutes walking distance of an office complex. IE: One particular office building has a Foodsby drop-off point).
Everyone pays $2 each, the driver is happy, the restaraunt is happy (their personal staff deliver and therefore ensure quality food / hot food at the appropriate, predesignated time), and a ~5 minute walk for a bunch of office workers is a good idea anyway cause we're all sitting on our asses all day.
---------
It double-benefits because professional chefs like doing ~15 or 20 of the same order all at once, its more efficient for them... especially if they can plan such an order ahead of time (Foodsby isn't offered every day for a Restaraunt, they pick-and-choose the days that they'll offer the service).
So the chefs can cut-down on scheduling if they're burning out, or they can plan ahead and offer more days if they know some days are lulls / they have extra freetime.
Doordash / Grubhub / Uber is almost malicious for everyone involved. There's some ideas of convenience to some people, but its not good enough for the overall environment. In contrast, Foodsby (and hopefully more companies that adopt that model) has proven itself sustainable, at least in my area.
In the same way you could propose to replace Uber with... buses? 15 people get on the same bus at a specific time and get dropped off within 5 miles, thus optimizing the process.
I've seen the Uber drivers come in. They always grab like 4 or 5 orders, and possibly drive to a 2nd or 3rd restaraunt before they start delivering.
Its not like those UberEats drivers have a big penalty if they arrive late or if the food is cold.
-----------
What I'm saying is, consolidated food delivery services is *already* what we have with DoorDash/UberEats/whatever, they just lie to you about the details.
The reason why Foodsby works (albeit on a smaller scale) is because they're honest about it. There's nothing wrong with consolidating orders to minimize driving time, the problem occurs because those other services _PRETEND_ they're a 1-to-1 order service with dedicated drivers. IE: Its the lies where things have gone wrong, not necessarily the practice.
If all the drivers are double-booking / consolidating orders anyway, then work it into the model. Embrace it, rather than pretend otherwise.
It's a good business idea, it's just a different usage pattern. I order food when I am hungry. I don't preplan, don't like food from the majority of popular local places (pizza, Mexican, Chinese).
For some definition of increments and "all", yes they can.
Restaraunt#1 delivers at 10:15am.
Restaraunt#2 delivers at 10:30am.
Etc. etc. etc. Covering the entirety of lunch hours. This is how it works in practice, today.
If you're in a location with lots of Foodsby usage, then you might have 3 or 4 different Foodsby locations to check within a reasonable distance, which dramatically increases the restaurants and timeslots available. Like 1x Foodsby is already fine, but if you're in an area with 5x walking-distance Foodsby dropoff points like I am, things start to get really convenient, and the selection becomes dramatically wider.
It also means for the drivers, that one "trip" can hit 3, 4, 5 offices in one drive. I'm sure that on Foodsby days, these drivers are delivering multiple dozens of meals. In fact, the *MANAGER* of one local Restaurant was the driver for one of my recent orders (we recognize each other's faces because I visited his restaraunt a lot, so it surprised me to see the manager making delivery runs). So its more fulfilling work than typical grunt labor, since they're making so many deliveries on relatively low effort. If he's got ~30 orders, that's $60 ($2 per meal) in less than 30 minutes of driving/delivering, which is certainly more money flowing than most UberEats / DoorDash setups.
--------
Now yes, you may be arguing that "its not what you want". But... when that Spanish Restaraunt says "We're offering $2 delivery (no tip) 3 days from now at X-oclock"... I think you'll be thinking of using Foodsby that day.
Or maybe you check the website to see today's Restaraunts and whether or not your favorite is on the list.
-----------
In any case, _THIS_ is innovation. Actually playing with models and finding things that are better for everyone (chefs, restaraunt owners, drivers, users) as a whole. I'm sure other models can work too, for some sliding scale of individualism, bulk deliveries and whatnot.
But as far as the personalized 1-to-1 service? Its dead, its so dead I'm convinced it never even existed. UberEats _never_ promised a driver on the standby ready to personally serve you, and months/years of using the service has made it obvious to everyone.
There's only so many times that I get a meal 1.5 hours too late that causes me to give up on UberEats (and similar) services.
Yup, that's a good point. The current model doesn't seem to be sustinable.
Which is somewhat different than internet-based calling of food, but still a convenient walk that gets me lunch.
She arrange it such that users from a given neighborhood could order via the website app by 4:30 from a specific set of 2-3 restaurants per day. The orders from a given neighborhood are bulk ordered for 3-4 drivers to pick up from the 2-3 restaurants and delivered to the same neighborhood between 6-7pm.
The list of 2-3 restaurants for a given neighborhood are shared a week in advance and in cooperation with the restaurants so they can handle the surge. Since the restaurants no it will likely be reheated the packaging is optimized.
Because there is a rotation of the restaurant - it paradoxically avoids the tyranny of choice issues with picking a restaurant and actually feels fresher in a discover new restaurants type of way.
During ZIRP/Covid the menu prices were sometimes lower and there was no delivery fee. Post Covid they do have a membership option or a very modest delivery fee.
Having done Doordash/Ubereats in the past myself that is ABSOUTELY not the norm, god I wish it was that streamlined. Picking up a single order and delivering it straight to the customer is by far and away the most common scenario for the drivers.
They do have stacked orders which are the multiple pickups you're talking about, but I've never had more than 3 orders "stacked" together, and I would say it's more common to have stacked orders from multiple different restaurants rather than multiple orders from the same restaurant. And from the driver point of view stacks suck because almost always only one order in the stack will have a tip, the others will be no-tip orders they couldn't get someone else to deliver by themselves.
Doordash also recently changed how they pay out on these stacked orders to the drivers detriment. It used to be you'd get the base rate for each order in the stack, so 3 orders stacked together would be the base rate x 3 + whatever tips by each customer, but now they pay them out as one big order no matter how many orders are stacked together, so you get a single count of the base rate even if you're delivering two or more orders in a stack, which again are usually only a single order with a tip, so you're effectively delivering the other orders for free.
All I've seen are the big orders that get handed to someone who immediately runs out the door and into a car that they left running (with the keys in and everything), lol. They're obviously stressed and trying to make time.
I guess the big orders / stacks are more noticeable to me and obvious what's going on. If a more "normal" driver comes in, it looks like any other internet order (like my own, except I'm picking it up personally).
Uber Eats is doing it here in London with "ghost kitchens". 15 fast casual brands cooking (mostly reheating really) from 3 kitchens in 1 building. A much better chance for delivery drivers to be able to pick up multiple orders. It still isn't enough optimising though, as the destinations are still scattered.
When I order DoorDash my driver either only has my order or they have a secondary delivery that is insanely out of the way. This is a very inefficient use of driver time.
The pizza place is practically all delivery and it's easy to bunch up the orders heading in the same direction. Comparing that to UE/DD, a single restaurant might have 2-3 delivery orders at any given time, but what are the odds they are all headed in the same direction? I wonder if extreme density cities have less of a problem with this.
For reference, I live in a "2nd tier" city. Not NY/LA, but a city everyone has heard of.
On an unrelated note, I've always thought the big problem is their market is too narrow. These companies should deliver literally anything that can fit in a passenger car. One example I know of is that auto shops do not keep parts for every car in the shop all the time. They contract out to parts warehouses. Those warehouses have employees which deliver your new carburetor to the auto shop that's installing it. There's no reason your Uber driver can't pick up pasta and a carburetor.
Looking at the Uber app, under Delivery > Services it actually looks like they do purport to offer delivery for basically anything. Groceries, Alcohol, Pharmacy, Flowers etc. I have never once tried it or met anyone who has. Maybe I'll give it a shot tho.
Food delivery also seems to work with vertically integrated geo-segmented services like pizza and Chinese takeout. My best guess is that the profit margin and delivery packing are high enough to make it worthwhile.
And in that 25 minutes, the food has gotten cold and its chemistry has changed too. You could reheat it in the microwave, but now it'll just taste like reheated leftovers.
Why do people buy this crap?
Open two windows, apply the coupon in one. Watch as the order totals are not 50% apart. They instantly jack the service fees on the 50% coupon order.
The last time I ordered UberEats, all the fees plus tip nearly doubled the cost of my order.
So they're guaranteeing higher pay for all workers, and cutting a benefit for their best workers? I wonder what kind of impact this will have. Will this encourage some of these top workers to leave the platform, since they can no longer get access to good orders based on their track record?
this isn't uber. Do people actually pick who delivers their often fast food?
It was a marketing ploy to trick people into losing money delivering. Because Door Dash can't force people to tip, someone has to take the financially bad orders.
> Because Door Dash can't force people to tip, someone has to take the financially bad orders.
Well, they're trying, by not-so-subtlely telling customers that if they don't want their orders to get cold, they need to pre-emptively tip.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/nyregion/migrant-delivery...
The person doing the work often isn't the person registered with (e.g.) DoorDash. There's a whole economy of middlemen who resell straw buyers' credentials/accounts.
Running around Manhattan on cold November nights five years ago, I began to appreciate the $100 a month I was getting programming for this small startup at my desk at home or in their co-working space. If you don't have a bicycle or car, you pretty much need a metro-card, which goes to your expenses. Sometimes orders came in right away, sometimes I'd be sitting around for over 20 minutes waiting for one. The food pickup location was always within half a mile of my location. The quickest pickup offer to delivery for me was 23 minutes, longest was 52 minutes. With waits of up to half an hour before a next offer.
Deliveries usually paid a little over $4, but there were bonuses of $2 for some deliveries, and you'd be paid for long distances or long waits for food. You would also get tips (up to $7).
As I said, I was getting paid $100 a month to do some programming for a small startup, which seemed very little, but it was a lot easier than how much time and effort it took running around Manhattan to earn $100 from Postmates.
About six months after doing occasional Postmates deliveries I was making over $60 an hour programming for a multi-national.
What’s a realistic amount of “active time” per hour? I’m assuming waiting for a job is not active time right?
> These new regulations will force us to raise fees for orders in New York City. In order to better balance the impact of these new costs, we’re moving the option to tip in the DoorDash app to after checkout.
So hiding the tip until after closing the sale to pretend the total price is cheaper? Very classy.
What’s funny is that the tip should come after the service is complete if it’s actually a tip for good service (otherwise how did you know what service you got?). But they’re clearly just trying to hide the true price.
Would love to hear from someone with actual DD experience what percentage of time is “active,” and what you have to do to keep that time high?
Years of less than honest players have taught me to read press releases like a lawyer redlining a contract. Every last word is in there for a reason.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know whether the threshold for hiding the full tip amount is based on a percentage of the total order cost or if it is just a flat number? I.e., “anything over $6 gets truncated to $6+” vs. “anything over 20% of the order gets truncated to ${total_order_cost*0.2}+”.
Or could it be based off the 3 pre-selected options for the tip that are displayed at the checkout page, and if it is more than the largest option, then it just shows `${largest_predefined_tip_option}+ `?
My personal guess is that it is the last one, but that’s just pure speculation on my part here, hence the question.
Regulate behavior by regulating the intermediary
Think about anything this way and you can push the same changes through any form of government
The chances of a server spitting in my food for me leaving a bad tip after a meal in a restaurant are 0%. The chances of someone mucking with my food because I tipped $1 on a $40 order are absolutely >0%.
More realistically, you'd just never get your food.
Drivers have the option to reject low-paying deliveries, and they absolutely will. I've heard of restaurants having a "wall of shame" of food that's been ordered and prepared, but is consistently getting rejected by drivers.
Eventually it'll land on a driver that is truly desperate or is just starting for DoorDash and wants to get some good reviews. Unfortunately, they'll deliver cold food that's been sitting on the Wall of Shame for half an hour and the customer will blame the driver for it.
(there is a sales tax exemption for mandatory gratuities, but that only applies where the ultimate recipient is an employee whereas DoorDash deliverypeople are independent contractors - https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/tg_bulletins/st/gratui...)
> Tip baiting is when customers enter a certain tip amount when they order their food or groceries on a food delivery app like Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub or Instacart and then lower the amount or remove the tip entirely after they have gotten their delivery.
Maybe they changed policy at some point?
You can add an additional Tip post order/delivery.
I have been tipping only like 50cents for down the road, to maybe 1.50/2$ for within 10 mins drive.
Haven't had issues receiving anyorders.
Plus it's not like you get tipped wages here in BC, but they did recent mandate a $21 delivery wage (2$ cad more than standard wage)
For long distance I have tipped more but I am reducing my tipping overall.
Like I am paying a BC bag fee to get a paper bag for 25 cents, well unfortunately that means I am paying 25 cents less for other things including tip
Letting the customer tip after the order has been received lets the customer evaluate, and tip, the overall actual service. And prevents drivers from prioritizing those orders with better tips.
So if you schedule two hours and the app give you no hits, or you decline hits that time wouldn't count.
Now that said, I know nothing about the $20 min wage and can't say if that's accurate or not.
There were exceptions I also saw, someone at 50%, some other people said they were at ~90% although I didn't see screenshots.
I assume this varies heavily by if your in a city or not or how close to meal time it is which I've got no insight into.
And note this could be all entirely wrong - it's people who chose to post their screenshots online so huge risk for selection bias to it being higher paid workers.
> After a few minutes of waiting, you are offered and accept an order and drive 10 minutes to get to the restaurant. You wait 5 minutes at the restaurant, then drive another 15 minutes to deliver the order.
> In this example, you spent 30 minutes actively on the delivery, which includes the drive to the restaurant, the wait at the restaurant, and the drive to drop off the order.
https://help.doordash.com/dashers/s/article/Time-Earnings-Mo...
If you are a true believer in the impossibility of good service in the absence of heavily tip-based pay, you set up incentives like this and your belief system won't ever be challenged.
In practice, it is probably to eliminate customers feeling the need to tip, reducing the sting of the higher fees.
Plenty won’t tip if the Dasher won’t see until after.
> Beyond productivity, there also exist several other margins for adjustment to higher delivery worker pay. For instance, apps could choose to reduce consumers’ costs through changes to the user interface that discourage or eliminate tipping (or, equivalently, consumers could choose to tip less in light of workers’ higher pay, independent of any changes engineered by apps). The Department finds that if tipping were eliminated at all apps, costs to consumers would increase by $1.06 per delivery (3%) with workers still receiving sizable pay increases.
Basically, the previously "mandatory" tip is now baked into the price upfront. I think this exactly what you want.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dca/downloads/pdf/workers/Deliver...
it was truly optional before, no? you just had to decide if you were taking an option or implicitly being a jerk before ordering. now you decide after.
perhaps companies need to stop implying such things altogether. such as could be done by not even mentioning a tip until food is in hand. as that is what a tip is.
that the delivery person be paid more upfront and outside of tips is part of the problem that needs solved. a big part, but not the only one.
in fact the case study advocates for more than dd did.
so this doesn’t seem to be what the commenter wanted. progress but not completion. maybe not time to celebrate yet.
better but still not yet good.
Now dashers won't see tip variance in offers, it'll effectively be post-service from their perspective.
From the consumer perspective, yes, you can tip before you have the food in hand, but it's no different than if you had gone back after delivery and added a tip.
I don't really see what your remaining point of contention is here.
When you visit a restaurant, do you give a tip to the wait staff when you place your order or do you wait until after the service has been rendered?
However, the change with DoorDash is now it doesn't really matter when consumers decide to tip since it won't be known to the service provider (well, I suppose DoorDash themselves know, but the dasher does not). Previously the tip impacted the offers dashers saw, so opting to tip after service would impact the service being provided.
This. I had a recent order with a "SkipTheDishes". It was a semi-big order, and I left the default tip in place, which was over $20 for a 5-10 minute drive. The driver did a few other deliveries on the way, so when I got my meal it was only vaguely warm. Certainly not worth $20, and enabled by the company as they have a mechanism for a driver to take multiple orders at once.
Truly horrible service is now standard.
I'm done with companies not only charging more, but requiring that I assist them AGAIN with payroll.
Fucking pay an actual wage or fuck off.
The justification of the minimum pay over NYC minimum wage is a mixture of reasonable (DoorDash not paying employee taxes, worker costs) and ... creative (like rolling in cost of living adjustments to minimum wage just because you can).
More importantly:
> First, the model assumes that, from 2023 to 2025, apps will respond to the minimum pay rate by increasing deliveries per hour worked from the current 1.63 to 2.50. This assumption is based on the Department’s identification, using the record-level data obtained from apps, of large differences between apps in the number of deliveries per hour.
Their "model" is making HUGE assumptions about the apps being able to "innovate" in NY, based on data coming from their own black-box reported numbers. And nearly all of calculations about how the pricing, cost to businesses, customer price sensitivity, and take-home pay of the workers is entirely based on very flimsy projections.
I have no problem if NY wants to level the playing field between employees and contractors so that apps have to pay fair. But they are taking things one step further just because they have the mandate to do so. And there's no way that the people setting policy based on these arbitrary numbers are ever going to be held accountable for them.
The problem is that these companies need to somehow pay for all that "growth & engagement" and so have insane overheads, so being upfront about the costs will mean they'd get no business, so instead they obfuscate it as much as possible like in the above scenario or outright steal drivers' tips.
Whether it's financially responsible or not depends on the individual.
I also live in the suburbs where I’m not walking to the restaurant, I’m getting in my car.
I used to live in downtown SF, which is one of the densest urban areas in the US outside of NY, and I would only reluctantly order delivery because the average wait was closer to 75 minutes. I'd wait 1.5 hrs before checking on the order. Food reliably showed up cold.
A whole lot of people will lose income (no matter how mediocre) if this were to come to fruition though.
But I also lived in a LCOL city where my rent was $500 (room in an house with 5 roommates) and I lived super well.
And don't forget DoorDash doesn't pay for gas or other required maintenance from the extra use on your car.
“As always” is a lie. Moving the tip prompt to after checkout is far more consequential than they’re admitting.
Previously, the way it worked was that you could tip $0 and they would compensate by steadily increasing their offer for the job until a dasher accepted it. This essentially meant that pre-checkout “tips” were bonus money for DoorDash, not the workers. It sounds like that scam is finally going away. No wonder they refer to the regulatory changes as “bad policies”. This is coming in other major markets and they know it.
Relevant to "active time", they seemed to spend a lot of time during the day just waiting around...
If I'm using I service for the express purpose of delivery, and paying a premium for it, I don't need a culture of expected tipping on top. I miss the days of Uber baking supply/demand pricing and that was the end of it.
Anecdotally, I never have even considered it – although it's true that I'm somebody who prefers choosing my own groceries.
I feel like the value prop (i.e. value less [opportunity] costs) is de minimis to most in NYC, with abundant grocers and restaurants at every price point.
I use it when I'm too sick to leave home and I'm not stocked up on food. Or board game nights when we don't want someone to have to leave to pick up food. All the delivery apps have such bad customer experience though, we usually now just agree on food beforehand and have one person pick it up on their way.
Absolutely blows my mind the kind of money people will spend to avoid 10 minutes of driving.
Even now that I am making substantially more money, pretty much Doordash's prime demographic, I find it such a terrible deal that I simply cannot bring myself to use it.
If you subscribe, you'll pay about $3-$6 in fees (factoring in the subscription cost). Without a subscription, more like $5-$9. Some restaurants will charge even higher delivery fees, like a flat $5 or $10 on top of the app fees, but they are the minority.
And then there is the tip, which everyone does differently, but I think/hope most people tip at least $3. I consider $4-$6 to be a good range, though I can't explain why. Some apps encourage bigger tipping with their presets, including percentage tipping (like 10%, 15%, 20%), which could easily be $15 or more if it's from an expensive place.
Overall, I'd estimate that most deliveries for 1-2 people cost from $6-$15 in fees + tips. I pay about $8 per delivery based on my ordering and tipping habits.
Few servers in the US share your sentiment. Servers are the aristocracy of the retail industry. They don't want their gravy train to run out.
An decent server at a decent restaurant can easily clear 60k / year. An excellent server at an excellent restaurant can clear 6 figures.
What other industry is this possible with so little training or experience?
The language was very deceptive, as giving a tip did not always increase the amount of money received by a dasher.
Otherwise, DD used the tip to pay them.
Meaning - if you somehow work one job and it takes an entire hour - and you got a $10 tip - you would only make $29, not $29 + $10x1 = $39.
If you worked 1 hour and did 5 jobs - each with $10 tips - you would get paid $50 - not $29 + $10x5 = $79.
OP was making a joke that no, it's not "as always" because there wqs a pretty large scandal just a few years ago centered around DoorDash not paying 100% of tips.
Not trying to make a stance one way or another, just wanted to make sure I understand what you meant by this correctly.
Is what you are describing essentially the same way it works in the restaurant industry for waiters/servers?
TLDR: waiters/servers in the US typically have a base pay that’s below the minimum wage, but they get to keep all the tips. However, if a waiter/server at the end of their pay period makes less with their base pay+tips than what the minimum wage for the area would be, the employer is legally on the hook for making up the difference to the employee.
I believe that's the federal rule, but several states with higher than federal minimum wages have a uniform minimum wage for tipped and non-tipped workers. If I'm reading the chart correctly[1], those states/territories include Alaska, California, Guam, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
I bet they all came onto HN and bitched about taxes and Unions after.
They were stealing tips. Full stop.
If a driver would be paid $5 for a delivery, and the customer tipped $5, the driver should receive $10.
But what was effectively happening instead was that the pay would be reduced by the tip amount to as low as $2. So now that delivery would actually pay $2 plus the $5 for a total of $7.
On longer range deliveries that might pay $10, the customer could tip $8 and the driver would still only make $10.
Now, from what I understand, DD no longer does this practice and legitimately gives the entire tipped amount to the driver with no reduction in pay from DD, but DD lowered the base delivery pay to compensate.
At the time, IIRC, DD tried to wordsmith what they were doing to not make it sound like they were stealing tips, and instead was simply subsidizing poor tippers with a higher base pay and acting like the keeping of the tip was just the removal of the poor-tip subsidy. I say to-may-toe, you say to-mah-toe, it's bullshit. They were stealing tips.
No minimum wage is what creates competition between companies, all industries affected by minimum wages already have and will have shitty wages for ages to come. Switzerland as an example is a country where cleaners (CHF 4K a month on average) without any serious education earn a bit less than a well educated professional mechanic and 2x more than a local branch bank employee in Germany, simply because of no minimum wage restrictions (also after monthly living expenses in Switzerland which are relatively high in certain aspects).
Nope, this is absolutely false, it is exactly the other way around.
I am not quite sure what you are trying to accomplish with your whole comment. It neither makes sense nor is it strictly related to what I just posted. Did you want to debate an argument of mine, just post your personal views about labor in general or simply troll? I am always open for a discussion.
Besides are labor unions (you are referring to the British english version) heavily involved in labor and wage discussions in the USA. The US is literally a labor union hell, so I don't get your point on that matter either.