“I have to order Doordash because I live in a food desert”
“Can you taxi to the grocery store and back for about the same as the delivery fee?”
“No”
not sure what point you’re making – it seems like you’re criticizing anyone who engages in this ? regardless of context, circumstance, ability, or reason???
Taking a taxi 20 minutes away can be like $50 each way and involve an hour-long wait. Taxi service has changed a lot in some areas.
I use doordash because I’m tired AF and it’s 9pm (stores are closed) and there is nothing in the fridge.
Paying an extra 10 bucks to get food delivered while I can relax for 30m an drink a beer is priceless.
That’s the definition of luxury and discretionary spending
People can’t follow a conversation for one fucking second I swear
telling american pleb he should check his consumption habit… might as well called his mum a whore lol
We call our moms whores here, not our mums.
I used it when I was working 100 hour weeks and wanted to spend every hour after 9 pm too stoned and drunk to move. It was an expensive luxury, but also the one maintaining me at the stress level where I wouldn’t want to kill myself. I’d order enough to split over multiple days so it wasn’t as obscene.
Been there… Working like that with right…
But yeah when you are in that situation, food out is the least of your concern when you can have a metal break down at any point.
Cooking for your self is can be seen a luxury too nowadays I guess… Look at that peasant with all that free time to cook!
I don’t care.
edit: seriously, the shame you people feel is pathetic. I don’t need you to confess or explain your takeout life to me ffs. I guess you just need people to tell you your decisions are OK. Man the fuck up
who’s out there driving a deuce and a half as their daily driver?
other countries deliver most things using motorbikes, it always sounded ridiculous to me to use a car to deliver food
Most food deliveries in NYC happen on two wheels.
To be fair, most drivers have multiple ongoing deliveries (and space for them). So it’s not quite one car per burrito
Nicer in the winter to use a car. And depending on the type of service, these might otherwise be used as personal cars
Your personal car doesn’t make 50 deliveries in a day though, so that equation won’t work out.
?? I’m talking about the delivery people owning those cars and using them as personal cars after work, so they’re not being bought just for deliveries
its also expensive, if you calculate the maintenance /insurance and gas into your vehicles. thats why there isnt more deliveries services for instore shopping outside of a few.
OOP has no idea what they’re talking about, in NYC too all food deliveries come by bike, and in the large majority of cases it’s an ebike
…if you think delivery is too expensive, maybe don’t get your food delivered, then? Just a thought.
Can’t I do both though?
Both what?
Can’t I not order delivery but also think its absurdly expensive?
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, I was just asking what two options you were talking about. It was just a normal question with no motive.
I’m sorry sir, we abhor nuance around here
Just fyi, like 99% of food delivery via gig workers in nyc is done via e-bike
Even if done in a car in areas where a e-bike isn’t really feasible, they usually take several orders at at time. I think 1 car picking up and delivering 3 orders is probably slightly more efficient than each person driving to the restaurant.
they usually take several orders at at time
I’d like to see some stats on this. When I see uber eats workers pick up at McDonald’s the orders seem to be singular.
But my anecdotal experience is not usable data.
Sometimes you will get lucky and get a couple of orders from the same restaurant, but it’s usually stop at 2 or 3 different restaurants in the same area, then deliver. Occasionally I would take a single order if the money was good, but usually if I wasn’t taking 3 orders or more at once I wasn’t making enough money for it to be worth it.
It may have changed now, I fortunately got out of doing it a couple of yeas ago. It’s stressful and hard on your vehicle, and the companies you work for are shit. I’m not defending the gig companies as they are now, but in theory having one person deliver to multiple people isn’t a bad idea.
slightly more efficient that each person driving to the restaurant
Of course. But the correct solution here doesn’t require any individuals driving.
Are you implying a solution to delivery? Or that no one should eat (in or out) at restaurants?
Walkable cities
It’s quite telling that they didn’t think of walking or cycling
How does that fix food delivery? Are you only supposed to order from the restaurant around the corner?
Probably my personal bias, I have 5 different places I could get food from within 15 minutes walking. Closer to 20 when taking a bike.
When I visited the US I was gobsmacked by literally everything being a 30min walk at least, even in more densely populated areas
I have 5 different places I could get food from within 15 minutes walking.
Right, not exactly a lot of variation. It only really becomes viable once you add the bike back in.
So while a walk-able city is a great idea in general, it does nothing for this particular issue.
In most places I’ve lived for the past 40 years, I could just walk to the store. I have now four to choose from, all within 10 minutes of walking, and the city center is about an hour away. Ther are also bicycles.
By having groceries, you can make food yourself, at home. You can do this many times, for each time you actually have to get groceries.
As for eating at a restaurant, collective transport ranges from obvious to absolutely necessary, depending on the population density. When my family go out to eat, it’s a lot more convenient to hop on a bus or tram to the city center. It takes half the time, if you consider parking, it’s cheaper, and you can have a drink or two as well. You also get to engage with each other, during transit.
In the less car-retarded world, food delivery is also easier to do with non-car methods.
In any case, and because I know the kind of responses people reply with… Please don’t. I just gave you some examples and a different perspective. Americans are culturally dumb as shit when it comes to considering the obviously better alternatives, in so many different aspects, and I don’t really care all that much.
Thanks for the thought out answer!
You’re welcome. I want to apologize for my snarky tone. More often than not, questions on forums are not asked in good faith. Yours seems to have been.
Cheers man all good. I know a question like that can be charged, but my dumb brain just forgot people live in cities! Of course given the choice, you shouldn’t drive at all.
It should be way more efficient considering they could do a pickup from a restaurant near their last delivery. Play the traveling salesman game decently and you’ll easily beat individuals driving themselves many times over. The driver might also do a pickup job from a restaurant they like and decide to get their own food at the same time.
Just walk and buy the stuff. In a way, I miss how before apps, places just had two or three delivery guys
Related video; “Why Convenience is Killing Us” Levi Hildebrand - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpe8te3PdkA
Agreed, I miss delivery being associated with a restaurant. There was better accountability.
But I also live in a walkable area, so it’s easy for me to say ‘just walk’.
If you walk the roads near me you won’t live long.
Where the fuck do you live that’s so dangerous?!!
Shitty suburban Ohio. No shoulder on the road, no bike lanes, no sidewalk. Two lane roads with relatively high speed limits and lots of heavy truck traffic.
Lots of crosses from dead pedestrians and cyclists. The last time I walked home two miles from the tire shop I had three people stop to offer me a ride. Everyone knows you shouldn’t be on these roads without a vehicle.
Oh, I’ve experienced that near Windham, OH. Makes total sense.
Where the fuck do you live that’s so dangerous?!!
This cuts both ways actually. you can have 10 guys going through a drive thru or one 1 making 10 stops. The one guy making ten stops results in less traffic and fewer emissions.
Does that happen in a meaningful amount? Drivers getting multiple orders for the same place with close by destinations? I think it’s vastly more common that you just have 10 drivers at different locations on behalf of 10 customers.
At best it’s 2-3…
That comment is a cope
I do a lot of DD, and I’d bet that 75%+ of my restaurant orders are a single order going to a single house. I prefer grocery delivery, and it’s probably closer to 50% for those, as we often get a couple of orders at once.
Occasionally we get a single drop off with 2 stops (pick up food from a restaurant and something from a drug or grocery store, and drop them both off together).
I’ve never gotten more than 3 orders at once, and those are pretty rare.
A “Driver tip” isn’t a “fee”. It’s a tip.
But on top of everything else, I’d like to point out that nobody is making big bucks on this. Last time I checked, food delivery services mean the consumer is paying more, the restaurant is making less, and the delivery service itself would be lucky to break even. The drivers are making money, but it’s not a lot of money.
What does it all mean, though? Let’s look at it another way. What if, instead of hiring somebody to do that, you go out and eat at a restaurant? Basically, you’re doing all of this work of driving for free. It’s a hidden cost of the meal. It’s about $22 of work in this example. Just lost time. No physical benefit to driving a car.
You’d be much better off taking public transit or cycling.
The thing about all these delivery service is, i feel like they’re all using venture capitalist money to make the business seems lucrative, grow their userbase and business as much as possible, and then sell it off. Doesn’t even need to make big profit the time they run the businesses, just have to sustain enough to reach the point where they sell off. All venture capitalist funded business works that way.
Isn’t that obvious? If you don’t start with that assumption, then you’re not paying attention.
The reason I brought that up is that, if nobody else is making money, then the fees are not inflated and reflect the actual cost of the driving.
Is the purpose of DoorDash to get food that normally doesn’t have a delivery option? I always call and pick my food up. It’s a reason to get out of the house and exercise.
NYC tipped worker minimum wage is like 13 an hour. Not that The food delivery services are paying minimum wage …
In one of the most expensive cities in the world, an on-demand courier is not going to be cheap. Even if they’re on a bike.
What we’re actually suffering from is that the cost of business and minimum wage has increased but the middle and upper wages have not. That, and the delivery services are a bit out of control. They’re taking $10 out of every transaction to connect a web page to a mobile app.
It’s not just delivery services, basically everything has been co-opted by tech bros that take a huge cut for transactions that are between two parties that have nothing to do with them, just for providing a “shiny” platform. Hotel bookings, AirBnB, marketplaces, Uber, and so on and so forth. All platforms that could be managed by 3 Devs in a basement, or public and managed by the government, but somehow they require 10k employees and vacuum up billions?
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504862
You might be interested in this book
I worked as an engineer at a food delivery company and I almost never used my own companies app, these companies charge both the customer and the restaurant and the restaurants raise the prices of their menu on the app to compensate for it, plus the delivery takes a long ass time and the food arrives cold. And the business is still mostly unprofitable and these companies stay afloat from investments while they suffer losses.
I remember seeing a video about a similar service in the Netherlands for delivered groceries.
They deliver by bike, are faster by bike.
…and still are a bit of a controversial issue.
None of us need to purchase this goofy ass delivery powered by virtual slave labor. Spend no money, cause no harm. Let those capitalists seethe we no longer need to endlessly consume to be happy.
More people need to learn about and think about externalized costs.
“This plastic cup is free! … if I ignore the fact that it’s going into a landfill or worse”
“This delivery is free! … if I ignore the fact that the delivery guy is getting fucked by capital”
More governments need to tax externalized costs.
You’re last point doesn’t hold if you tip generously, which i bet most people in this forum do. I’ve heard that delivery people in the right neighborhood can make bank. In which case they’re still “getting fucked by capital” but no more than any of the rest of us
The thing is that these types of services eat away at money anyway. It’s better to go get the food yourself just to save yourself the money. If you must eat out rather than cook. Although, I understand that this may be more difficult for those who live in major cities such as NYC or LA, as examples. Food delivery has always been a thing for a lot of major U.S. cities. In my opinion, food delivery apps such as Uber Eats and Door Dash are not worth it or smart for many, if not most people.
