which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.
It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?
Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?
I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.
No - it's quite different and that's the point.
The issues beyond 'apparent value creation are':
1) asymmetries in power between different actors that induces some to make ill advised actions - passing off hidden costs and especially risks
2) externalisations - aka damaging the environment, labour regs (which exist due to 1)
3) misrepresntations in value to end customer - dark patterns, hidden fees, risks not apparent in the transaction.
Entire industries would not work if we had to properly account for a lot of things.
"I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ri" <- it's not just the 'price' that is high and you're 'willing to pay' - that's fine.
That's definitely not 'rip off' because you're not coerced in any way for that - that's just 'high prices. Aka the $10 bottle of water at an event - that is a 'rip off'.
It's all the other things in the system that make it problematic.
Last mile delivery by poor people almost should not exist as a business because it depends on externalizing too many things.
If they provided healthcare, vacation, job security, didn't force people to run around, all that stuff that removes the 'power and information asymmetry' - and then - it still works as a business, fine but it generally wont.
Some businesses are structurally unsound, and people invest in them to take advantage of broken systems (social, regulatory) at the margins.
Now 'Robot Delivery' - that's an entirely different prospect.
That's an attempt at real value creation. If we got our act together, everything could be delivered by little robots - today - already in 2026. It would reuire a lot of coordination.
fast-rise sugar infested bun, non-organic antibiotic infested horrendous animal welfare beef, etc. - the BOM is well under $5, i'd think $3 at best. So, you pay $25 for sub-$5 bill of low quality materials (not good to your health with thus additional expenses down the road). Who is the sucker?
Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .
this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.
And that is what OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to do. Currently they have to compete with each other due to anti-monopoly laws. Once they scare everybody into allowing collaboration between them ("or our AI will kill you all"), ie. removing anti-cartel provisions, they would be able to squeeze both sides - the suppliers of hardware and energy as well as the customers.
I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
I'd rather the price of goods be fixed, and they tell me what the delivery fee is.
Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.
Edit: Spelling. “right” to “sick”.
Well, if you value an hour of your sleep or entertainment less than $15 dollars (if, for instance, you like to cook), then sure, spend it on cooking instead. Many of people would rather not, and their revealed preferences show it pretty clearly.
If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.
Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.
I can pay a bit extra for food and $10 in tips and fees to have it delivered to me instead of spending half an hour driving to go get it myself. I know what I’m paying for and value the service they provide.
You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.
First they exploit their own gig workers, to make an unsustainably cheap product and corner users. Then they exploit users, to monopolize distribution and corner restaurants. Then they exploit restaurants, threatening to cut off distribution entirely if they don't get an increasingly large share of profits.
I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.
And that in turn gives doordash, uber eats and whatnot access to a lot of data - who orders what and lives where or which restaurant is doing good and which is struggling - that can be sold to third parties. Governments (ICE and other agencies have been caught to just buy data from aggregators), advertisers, credit reporting agencies, political parties, you name it.
Sure. As a customer the value that doordash et al provide is hard to understate. A single point of contact, a single set of credentials, a unified UI compared to what used to be a ton of never-updated garbage wordpress installs, reliable tracking... but as a whole, we all lose.
You should run that experiment. Get two identical meals, one via delivery the other at the restaurant. Pay close attention to menu prices.
Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.
Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.
What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.
See the difference there?
In a sense, I agree with this assessment, and I think it should be corrected. We should allow people to have the older, less expensive plans with their lifetime caps and preexisting condition exclusion. We'd need to work out the details on whether or not we would allow someone choosing those plans from coming back to the ACA plans in the future, though. Maybe for the right price it could work out. Definitely adds complexity, however.
But your comparison is wrong, because you can...elect to not use the service. You could pay less for less coverage (so like, buying food without paying for a delivery fee because you don't need the convenience). Also, the individual mandate was killed (sucking funding out of the whole program), so you could opt out of the service entirely.
Nobody is forcing you to have insurance (at a federal level).
See the difference there?
Nope. It's a marketplace. Your above argument is perfectly applicable to it as well.
Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."
I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.
How did you arrive to this conclusion?
Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.
Didn't read - too expensive.
One word: variety.
My local sushi place isn't going to have enough delivery orders to justify having delivery drivers on staff.
Heck, I remember years ago (Was it the late 90s?) when McDonald's tried to do delivery.
Now, everyone is offloading their deliveries to DoorDash. Wendy's first-party delivery is just a wrapper for DoorDash. Pizza Hut used DoorDash if they don't have enough drivers available. Even PetSmart or Petco uses DoorDash for delivery now.
Not saying it's right or good, but you could order from Pizza Hut and still get a gig worker if their driver called out stick today.
Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.
> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
This is villain shit.
I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.
Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.
I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png
Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.
And how come China does a much better job than the US while they have the same surface area? Why aren't you overlapping those two maps?
America underfunded? Yes.
There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.
I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.
But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.
This is upper end of mid sized.
No yc alum counts as big tech
I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752
> “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
"Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."
How can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between?
Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved:
1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves?
2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation?
3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors?
I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.
It doesn’t matter who you work for, they still can’t underpay you or pay you late.
Place your order 6 hours in advance and our hyperadvanced algorithm will place your burrito on a hyperefficient route alongside other orders within your neighborhood. Estimated arrival times remain hyperaccurate (15 minute window) and your neighborhood FoodBusser is paid an hourly wage with hyperbenefits.
Pizza places, chinese food places, many diners, they've all been making deliveries work for decades without inflating the prices to absurd levels. It's almost as if it can be done when you don't have to pay the middle man who has a billion dollar of venture debts.
It's so wild to see you, someone who seems to be older than gen z, so unaware that the food delivery model existed before delivery apps, and was highly successful without charging delivery charge + service fee + tip + 30% of the food price.
Tough luck? Businesses aren’t entitled to exist. If it’s a bad model it’s a bad model. We can’t just throw our hands up and ignore bad business practices for that reason. It’s not our job to protect DoorDash’s unsustainable business model that only works if they behave particularly unethically. That is squarely their issue
If the business cannot exist without exploitation, the business should not exist. I also understand this is an argument at the political process level at its core. Not much progress to be made in the argument over the US being an economic exploitation engine. Some are for, some are against. We choose, through policy, whether someone must make the choice to be exploited because we give them no other choice. We can make better choices, I argue. "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members."
And in some cases, if you just need some money to pay a bill and you have a few hours available, maybe doing a few DoorDash deliveries closes that gap for you, even if it's not a good long term job. But, that can also work as a trap if you're not very deliberate about it.
- tax structure: investment income get taxed less than payroll etc etc
- tax avoidance: offshore, trusts, using companies to write off the tax plus the benefit provided by the government on these write offs. Using assets to loan more with speculation, worse, the buy borrow die model where they borrow against the asset and the heirs inherit the gains never taxed, among many ways and loopholes.
- asset inflation: low interest rates increase the stock and property, good for who owns it, while the poor get to pay higher rent, the cantillon effect
- the housing and zoning topic, and how it’s one of the pillar of such indirect money stealing, a topic that needs a book to describe but the solution is simple, depreciating housing as assets.
- monopolies and few (or one) companies controlling the price, or hold down the wages, to keep poor people poorer and shifting the money more to who controls the scheme
- poor people end up usually paying even more with overdraft fees or higher interests, punishing the poor even further, and these interests goes to lenders and shareholders.
- that leads the wealthy to be able to lobby to shape the interests and taxes to their liking, the subsidies etc. when a crisis or hard time happens, all tax payers get to pay and shoulder that but in times of booms the profit stay and remain private.
And many more cases or situations, hell, not just monetary stuff, even remote work was attacked because it shifts a slight of power dynamics to employees rather than the employers.
And even in his own party, the dominant """moderate""" branch does everything it can to hide his success and popularity, from fear that the electorate would wake up to how utterly corrupt and ineffective the DMC is.
Wages not catching up with inflation? Everything getting more expensive? The BBB giving massive tax cuts to the rich, while cutting government programs (which are a form of redistribution)?
> We get to choose
Up to a point, and it's naive to think that people are getting poorer only because of bad personal choices. The younger generations not being able to afford homes isn't because they're all bad with their finances. Treating housing as a speculation vehicle instead of an essential commodity is a political choice, and it was made by a political class completely permeated by moneyed interests.
Look, you don't even need to know about the "how". The gini index is getting worse, billionaires are turning into trillionaires while public infrastructure and social services are crumbling. It's natural, and correct, to connect the dots.
Home ownership of Gen Z is aligned with millennials’ home ownership at their time. I agree about the K shape economy stuff, but it’s a bit more tricky than “everyone is poor”.
> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race
Just shows the power of being a politician that actually cares.
