Seems like it should be “DoorDash (YC S13) to Acquire Instacart (YC S12)”, if only to emphasize that this is by far the largest merger of YC companies.
> DoorDash to Acquire Instacart to Help Local Stores Win
> to Help Local Stores Win
Any local store will tell you DD is a necessary evil they put up with but strongly dislike overall. From the % of sales they take to the incredibly rude delivery drivers, DD is not well liked.
On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.
I worked at a local grocery store while unemployed, and I actually PREFERRED the Doordash/Instacart customers.
Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude. It was a very clear and direct communication. A simple scan, and boom, nothing further needed, I could just scan their items. Thr QR code scan handled payment and everything. They almost always helped with doing thier own bagging: Time is money, after all.
> Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude.
I want to be clear, the ability to speak English is not what I took issue with. That doesn't bother me and I'm fine with just showing the phone screen, no conversation. The issue I had was cutting the line and essentially demanding they be helped immediately. Wait in line like everyone else. This is a small food stall in a food hall with often just 1 person working the front. If they are actively helping another customer and have a line, I find it unacceptable to think you can cut to the front and immediately demand attention. What message does that send to the customers in line? "You're less important than delivery orders", and I can tell you that isn't the case due to the large chunk that DD takes.
My family member has even considered shutting down DD orders temporarily if/when the drivers act this way and publishing on social media about it. According to them, the loss in sales (and overall profit, which is minor on DD orders) wouldn't matter compared to the publicity/engagement (I don't know, that's not my world).
>What message does that send to the customers in line? "You're less important than delivery orders", and I can tell you that isn't the case due to the large chunk that DD takes.
I noticed a more extreme version of this while traveling in mainland China. Takeout shops, especially bubble tea shiops, that were genuinely pleasant a decade ago now seem entirely beholden to delivery algorithms and their productivity targets, with walk-in customers reduced to an afterthought. I once waited a half hour in the rain for a bubble tea while delivery orders repeatedly jumped ahead throwing their QR codes in people's faces; the moment I requested a refund, my order was suddenly next. I don't particularly blame the staff, but they weren't apologetic and I was really bothered that algorithmic metrics were prioritized at the expense of basic social courtesy. Watching those incentives gradually erode everyday social norms was genuinely depressing.
Ah, I see. That does suck. There was no line-cutting, that I saw, where I was. But at a grocery store you get kinda forced between belts and carts, so line-cutting would be quite a challenge.
Yeah mixed blessing at best. Increased volume, but not every 30-table restaurant is set up to do much more; kitchens are sized to expected in-person dining.
And all the stuff you mention.
The one restaurant owner I know who’s happy with DD set up an entirely separate kitchen in an industrial park. But to get to the DD revenue necessary to justify that investment, he had a couple of years of DD hell in his main restaurant.
That sounds like a scary investment to make on behalf of what's effectively a single customer. Without some kind of contractual commitment that locks in volume and price, they would really have you over a barrel.
I hate industrial/ghost kitchens so much. Accidentally ordered from one with friends and it was so off-putting.
Could see the kitchen areas through a window and they weren't necessarily dirty, but looked sketchy for some reason. Few people, robots delivering orders, one set of cooks making the food. Just dystopian.
We might as well just build ready to eat food factories that pipe the slop directly into your house. We got rid of the "inconvenience" of going out to eat and enjoying a restaurant. Why not get rid of the pesky delivery middle-man too?
Look up commissary kitchens. A ton of food is made that way, and I don’t see it as being all that different.
And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).
Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?
A restaurant with a physical presence with dine in service has a reputation to maintain, a ‘cloud kitchen’ food seller does not have the same reputation to worry about.
Every restaurant and ghost kitchen has a reputation to uphold. They all still have customers, and those customers still chat with other people and leave reviews just like it's still 2010.
It can be easier to rebrand a ghost kitchen than to rejigger a restaurant to do other things, though. For instance: The decor doesn't even exist, much less match a certain theme.
A ghost kitchen can also do many things at once that would not traditionally fit together in a single restaurant.
I think that might be part of what some find off-putting, but there's no conceptual reason why the same location can't make awesome New Haven wood-fired pizzas, Texas smoked beef ribs, and Philly cheesesteak sandwiches on the same day. It can work as long as the volume supports each of them well-enough that they can retain workers who are able to master these things well-enough to keep a good reputation going.
It's just a building with a kitchen, and that kitchen does not have a size limit. It can do many styles of cooking at once.
And when compared to having several different sit-down restaurants to operate, management can be more-centralized while also keeping them closer to the work. This can improve quality and reduce costs.
(That doesn't make me a fan of the idea. I'd rather go to a restaurant and sit down than have anything delivered, aside from things that travel well. Pizza, BBQ, and cold subs can travel extremely well, for instance, while french fries and burgers usually turn into sadness in minutes. But other people want whatever they want and that's fine too.)
For whatever reason, I find the reviews and rating of eateries on delivery apps locally to be extremely undiscerning. (Or fake?) Like restaurants that have bottom-tier 3.8-stars on Google Maps will be 4.8-star top-rated places on Uber Eats. Basically everything is mashed into the same rating scale as Uber drivers themselves, so what reputation difference even exists between different places?
(And at that, one my biggest complaints of Google Maps is that the reviewers are undiscerning and/or fake compared to what Urbanspoon had before it died.)
Sure, me too. When I do leave a review I make it honest and detailed, but I'm not everyone and some people seem to suck at reviewing things. (Or maybe they're getting paid: There's a Chinese buffet that I go to sometimes that offers a discount for a 5-star review on Google Maps. I should take a picture of the sign and put it on Google; the food is OK, but slime is slime.)
But do the reviews of a ghost kitchen differ in these ways compared to a sit-down restaurant? If not, then: They each have the same reputation to build and uphold -- whatever that reputation is worth.
The supermarket where I shop has a specific checkout station for delivery drivers. I have never seen one in a normal checkout line (not that it might be very obvious, especially if they were shopping not just picking up an order).
What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.
> What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.
It's a finder's fee, a very old and ordinary concept in business. The more sales you can bring to a company (or could divert to competitors), the more skin in the game you have. That's not to say I think these companies aren't in some ways anticompetitive to the detriment of merchants and DIY shoppers.
The stores often charge higher prices on app for the same items. If there's a sale on items, you won't likely get them on the app. You can say it's a shakedown but you can always refuse DoorDash business and just operate like every other place that doesn't use it. It's not end of the world.
Sure, you could operate without DD. You can also operate without advertising, but it makes it a lot harder to reach customers.
Elsewhere in this post a store owner talks about how DD is a necessary evil. How they have convinced a big chunk of customers to only use DD to order food, and you will lose out if you aren't on the platform.
It's a prisoners dilemma. The total market share remains the same, but if only one grocery store was on DD they'd be at an advantage over those who don't
These grocery stores are all going to continually lose market share to Amazon, Walmart, etc. as online ordering increases. The pricing of in person grocery stores is outrageous and the experience shopping at them is annoying. I hope to see many go out of business sooner than later so we can have better businesses take their place!
The supermarket I worked at had a split system. Our internal delivery people had their own checkout area, but it wasn't open 24/7. Doordash and the like had to go through the regular lines regardless.
That kind of thinking is why people call them vulture capitalists. It’s only true until it’s not. if your supplier is treating you like a hostage, you’re probably not very loyal.
I went to a restaurant for a nice meal with my family. We ordered and waited for our food forever, as a steady stream of delivery bags went out the door. It was an hour before our first appetizer came out. It took us a while to figure it out, but there's no doubt the restaurant was incentivized to prioritize delivery orders over customers sitting in front of them.
That's because fundamentally DD drivers are assholes for the most part. In British Columbia, they are paid a minimum wage plus the tips they make from each order. That is well more than what an average Walmart employee makes, which is just pretty much minimum wage. However, the DD drivers will expect a 30-40% tip on a $15 order or they will not even deliver it. Not to mention the theft, fake delivery issues (they take a photo of the delivery and then take the food away) and what not. On top of this, DoorDash will blatantly lie constantly "Your food is on time" (after a 2 hour delay) and keeps updating the ETA repeatedly to make it look like it's on time.
Fuck DoorDash and their drivers. The whole model is flawed and don't even get me started on the absurd tipping entitlement off late. WTF is even 30% of your food bill so normalized as a tip? The same model in Singapore is really so much streamlined in comparison - You order from Grab and it's so much nicer than this garbage, everyone gets paid fairly and restaurants will tell grab drivers to fuck off if they cut the line.
That's crazy bc in California with super high minimum wage and DD paying a portion of the order and not a minimum wage, the drivers make less than everyone else usually
> On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.
That's exactly what it's like in NYC. They just walk up with their huge backpacks straight to the front skipping everyone, turn around bumping people, show their phone, then stand RIGHT in the front as-if no one else exists. It's awful.
I'd love to contribute to a no-delivery store. Pickup or dine-in only.
Edit: Might have to re-think Pickup because that would just become a loophole for delivery. Maybe orders have to be placed in-store for to go.
They are being dispatched to the restaurant to pick up an order which was already placed, and which their system is telling them is ready (whether this is correct or not). They also make less than minimum wage in most markets, and their wage is tied to their efficiency.
I don't understand why you think they should wait in line in restaurants where people order at the counter, to pick up their order which was placed online. And if you want to see this, you should be supporting legislation makes them proper employees who get a proper wage based on their time working.
Dispatched? Don’t drivers pick their jobs? They choose to go to the restaurant with the line.
Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
I don’t get why we’re talking legislation; it’s basic courtesy.
If I said “hey, here’s $5 if you go cut the line at that restaurant,” does that make it right?
You are given an order, which you can decline. If you decline more than a handful, you get deprioritized; in practice this means that you tap accept on every order as it comes up. At best you can sometimes shift the balance a bit by where you wait between orders, but during busy times (which is also when restaurants have long lines), your next order is coming up the moment you finish the last one.
It's also worth noting that most restaurants set the instructions for the pickup, which is usually along the lines of “go to the front of the line and provide the staff with the order number”.
If you said "Hey, I work for an algorithm that will fire me if I don't get this done in a minute but the system didn't have the correct info, and if I don't get this done I won't be able to pay my rent" which is more accurate, then it wouldn't be right for other customers, but it would at least give a bit more insight into why doordashers are rude and look rushed and ragged all the time.
> Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
The dine-in customers have not paid for or ordered their food, to do so they must wait in line.
The delivery driver is being handed a bag of food that is ready to go and paid for.
Many restaurants are already set up to accommodate online to-go orders. Chik-Fil-A has a separate drive-thru line for online orders, Chipotle lets people come up and get to-go orders that have been paid, same with Potbelly, it’s very common. It’s mildly annoying when you’re the one waiting in line but I don’t expect a delivery driver to wait in line to be handed a bag.
It would be silly for a cached GET request to have to wait in line behind a bunch of POST requests blocked in serialized database transactions. A cache hit is basically free so it’s not starving any other requests.
Drivers ostensibly pick their jobs, but if they reject too many jobs they are put on a time-out and can't take any jobs.
Regarding line cutting - it doesn't quite make sense that someone just picking up a bag that is already prepared should wait in the same line as people who are putting in orders for food. For an extreme example, a BBQ place near me in Brooklyn commonly has lines that are 45 minutes long, with people waiting to order. Should a person who called in an order wait in that line, or just go to the front and ask for their food?
Someone must use these services because they are everywhere in the UK and I find them so annoying for many reasons, not just the ones you mention above.
Lots of people cycling all in black on ebikes on pavements making it dangerous for people to walk around safely and causing chaos for drivers and other cyclists. Also generally supporting big business over small stores. Everyone moans about having individuals charged with these minor traffic offences but in my view just targeting companies like JustEat directly and having massive fines based on employee behaviour would be far more effective.
My initial take to this news was “what about anti trust?!” But I was surprised to learn that DD is essentially non existent in grocery delivery and instacart’s non grocery deliveries are powered by Uber Eats. For two massive brands they really don’t offer the same product.(edit: not effectively, at least) If anything maybe this helps Instacart/DD compete in grocery with the real giants in Walmart and Amazon. I wouldn’t be mad to see DOJ block this but I was just surprised to learn about the landscape of grocery delivery.
I think your first instinct about antitrust is correct.
Out of the group of people who have food delivered, that food mostly comes from restaurants or grocery stores. Instacart/DD will be a behemoth of food delivery.
Whenever this comes up, I really don't care if there is antitrust or not. Delivery is a luxury service.
Whenever I bring this up, someone always goes "so disabled people should starve"? What did they do before delivery apps? Many restaurants still offer delivery that they do themselves (seriously, look it up).
But more importantly, meals on wheels and other services are still a very large, established network.
Anyways, I guess I could be convinced that this is bad for restaurants. But so many restaurants, especially in cities, are offering delivery services where 10 and 20 years ago there were none. And the infrastructure is not set up to handle that.
As a result, city streets are frequently blocked by delivery drivers. I genuinely would love if my city passed a resolution that prevented restaurants within the city center from offering DoorDash/Ubereats unless they had a dedicated parking lot.
And a million other reasons. In old times with a working community, delivery was a luxury, in “modern” days, it is often a necessity for lack of alternatives.
When was the last time you offered the old people down the road if they need help?
On demand delivery where you pay a premium of 30-40% over the actual cost (sometimes even more) is definitely a luxury to me. I can probably afford to do this but I still do pick ups along with my other errands. Only is rare circumstances I get one off deliveries and it hurts me to see the cost each time I look at it!
Doing it regularly is probably wasting money especially in this economy.
Kids + full time - pick up the food on your way home?
Medical condition - arrange for a routine cost effective delivery (like those meal delivery services who tend to deliver on their routes for free even?)
work 2 jobs - pick up along the way somewhere
can't drive? - use that routine delivery or find a way to cook or use a weekly meal delivery service etc.
But buying one off every other day paying the premium seems definitely a luxury. YMMV.
There are more social services for people that need this than there were in the 70s and volunteering appears roughly flat since then.
Meanwhile, people have been getting old, having kids, two jobs, medical conditions and so on for a little while now. A tremendous amount of America isn't even in a food delivery area unless you count McDonald's.
Eating out is a luxury. Getting that food delivered even more so. This isn't about basic needs.
Nonetheless, I don't see the productivity in arguing over generational lifestyle here. I just wanted to highlight that making people work more than ever means less people volunteer. Whether that is a good thing or not is up to the reader.
If volunteering remains flat but the population (and thus, demand)bgrows for 50 years, then the conclusion is that less people are proportionally volunteering.
Having nicer products or the overall state of technology being greater now than before doesn't mean people are automatically overall better off. Yes we can cure more cancers now. Yes we have less lynchings now, by the public or police. But people are, objectively, less financially secure. Cost of home ownership being 5x median income now vs 3.2x in the 90s, trending higher decade on decade, is a decent enough single number to point to. The long and short of it is that these benefits are being concentrated, as anything regarding wealth inevitably is, in the hands of a few.
> As a result, city streets are frequently blocked by delivery drivers.
How is it different than customers driving to the restaurant? Are you suggesting that there should be less restaurants, or people should use public transport to pick up food?
Customers don't necessarily drive to restaurants, they walk, bike, or take public transit. Most frequently they walk to whatever is nearby when they're hungry, in most functional cities.
I just had some American friends visit me in Taipei and now that they're back in the States they're telling me that if they want food they have to drive 20 minutes, so I understand the situation is different for most Americans, but the suggestion then seems to be the obvious ones: the USA should modernize its urban infrastructure.
Entertainment is also a luxury service. I don't think that justifies the behemoth mergers/acquisitions we've seen this decade. It's about competition, not necessarily how important the service is to the people.
Occasionally for fun I'll check the price of DoorDash / Uber Eats for fast food and compare it with the normal menu prices. The difference is insane. I don't think I'd pay that even if I were a billionaire. It's absolutely a luxury and I can't believe normal people pay for it.
For context Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart each have about a quarter of the online grocery delivery market with smaller outfits like Kroger and Albertsons eating up the remaining quarter. If you believe this data, that is.
https://talkbusiness.net/2025/04/online-grocery-sales-rise-2...
I've had failed or missing deliveries from an Albertson's owned grocery chain and when speaking to the manager of the department, they just subcontract the delivery to DD and UberEats, much like McDonald's does. It's not their own employees doing deliveries.
A few Albertsons stores do their own deliveries, but it's increasingly rare. I used to love my Abertsons deliveries. Always had the same guy (who was super friendly), and it came in a refrigerated truc, so cold products stayed cold.
I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.
Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.
Amazon/Whole Foods in our area seems consistently unable to pack bananas in a way that doesn't result in bruising. I'm beginning to think they train them to put heavy cans on top of bananas for some reason.
When shopping from kroger you can pay extra to get 2-3hr delivery from insta cart. If not your order gets routed through a more efficient planned route that hits multiple houses
It's believable to me. I exclusively use Walmart and Amazon for groceries now. The nearest grocery store is 10+ minute drive away and with gas prices, my time, etc. I'd rather just buy online and wait for someone to deliver to my door. It's much quicker than going around the store looking for items too.
It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
I've worked these 1099 grocery delivery gigs and you get paid around minimum wage to lug these very heavy orders of water and juice up stairs, all while adding miles to your own vehicle and bearing the full risk of injury because you're an independent contractor. I hope you tip them well at least.
I wish no one would tip them. Then they'd quit working for minimum wage, then the costs would go up, then I could see the actual cost of the service and make a decision to use it or not.
a tip for an unusual order/circumstance would be fine. Say if you ordered a 50lb bag of cat food, and live on the Nth floor, and the elevators are not working.
I see no reason to think that was the case. They'll work for whatever rate companies pay them. There are many workers in minimum wage jobs who don't get tips at all. I agree that tipping is a bad practice and that it pushes labor costs onto customers. It will take regulation for companies to stop and tipping culture to change. I'm doing my part to try and keep the problem from getting worse by refusing to tip for almost anything except deliveries and being actually waited on. No matter how much companies beg for tips for basic retail purchases and counter service I don't feel at all bad about turning them down.
I guess you're talking a much higher minimum wage then Kansas. Minimum wage here is $7.25/hr, which isn't enough to live on practically, so it's not hard to find a job for significantly more than minimum wage.
This seems to be you choosing to live in an idealized form of your future vs the actual reality of today. My question is, if you're choosing idealized anyway, why stop at a mundane ideal where anyone has to work for minimum wage at all? Unless you've baked the lower class labor category into your ideal future?
You not tipping doesn't improve anyone's material conditions. You choosing to give money to the exploitative companies does affect material conditions, negatively! To me it sounds like you're trying to doordash your cake, eat it, have it, not pay for it, and get paid for eating it, all at once!
I don't actually even have DoorDash available, but I can put my money where my mouth is when it comes to restaurants; PLEASE pay your workers a good wage, and then I won't eat there if I can't afford it. I don't know what your wages are, or your operating costs; don't make me guess how much I need to pay your employees for you!
I don't tip. I don't believe in the practice of tipping and especially with digital platforms I don't trust where the money goes.
If I am tipping, it will be directly and usually in cash and there's only one person who gets that and it's the person who cuts my hair.
Get a different job if you don't like it. Minimum wage jobs are dime a dozen and have joke requirements to get onboarded. It's not like competing for faang or whatever.
I gotta be real with you man, if you acted like that to your actual delivery driver and they happened to harm you or fuck you your food, I'd understand their POV.
Why does your personal activism stop after the point that harms fellow humans but not before the step of rewarding an exploitative corporation that subsidizes its labor cost with tips and your tax dollars through welfare to its laborers?
You're welcome to leave the job. If you're working a job that has tips - get a different job. I don't work a job that has tips and never have. I have worked from minimum wage to 1m+/yr.
There are an endless amount of jobs out there that don't have tips involved at all, require similar levels of experience/skill/craft/work-ethic, and pay similarly.
You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.
Have you been careful about making sure that the prices you're charged when shopping online are the same as what's on the price tag on the shelves? Online shopping makes it extremely easy for companies to overcharge you based on what they think you're willing/able to pay and provides them with valuable data they can use to decide when/how much to raise their prices.
You can also run into problems where employees will select for lower quality produce, and about to expire foods that in-store shoppers will commonly pass over. It's nice that it means less food gets thrown away, but can also mean you can end up wasting your money buying food you can't or don't want to eat.
> You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.
In theory, batching deliveries should delivery economies of scale on vehicle and labour costs.
Judging from other comments, the costs of gas and vehicle maintenance get pushed onto the drivers so probably aren't added to the cost of orders in fees.
> The local grocers massively overcharge in comparison to Amazon and Walmart
Those local shops might not have much choice. Walmart has been caught forcing companies to charge every other store higher wholesale prices than what they charge Walmart for the same goods. It's actually illegal, but the FTC doesn't bother enforcing it. Amazon has also been accused of forcing companies to raise their prices elsewhere and if companies refuse amazon removes the “Add to cart” and “Buy Now” buttons from their products pages. Last I heard they were being sued for that, so maybe the situation with amazon will improve.
It's really not the case. I'm talking like 2x the price of products. They basically started charging ridiculous prices because they wanted to gouge on whales. Unsurprisingly, these places are empty when I go into them now compared to ten years ago. They also have no one working at them.
DoorDash has a ton of grocery delivery, it's the only one i use for that now because instacart has a payments bug. Very weird that the only two big competitors in this space in North America can just merge like this
You're describing what economists call multihoming. The antitrust question gp asks - which I think is relevant - is whether the combined entity would have excessive market power in the relevant labor market.
DoorDash, at least for a while for me, was significantly cheaper than Instacart for grocery delivery, probably because they were trying to fight their way into the grocery delivery market. Now that they're just going to buy Instacart, this can only mean higher prices to me since they need to pay for their acquisition and they no longer need to compete on price. Great!
Might just speak to the competitive advantage of vertical integration. I.E “we make so much off the selling the product we don’t care if the sale originates on or off platform?” It is surprising though that they wouldn’t force users onto their service. They certainly have the power to
They tried that with WalmartPay. After about a decade, they gave up[1].
Consumers have a lot of agency. A lot of people get paid access to one of the other platforms by virtue of tie-ins with their mobile carrier, or bank, or whatever. There's low incentive to pay again to use Walmart's delivery service, which will not also bring delicious Thai food for lunch.
They're very multi-modal. Walmart will send deliveries out via Instacart, their own in-house drivers (1 year+ employees internally), Spark Delivery, and even Roadie ("a UPS Company"), though Roadie jobs are for oversize things that need a pickup truck or a van like TVs from what I've seen as a Roadie driver.
I think a lot of businesses have adopted this. I've seen Papa John's orders on Roadie, but I'm sure they also use Uber Eats or DoorDash and their own in-house drivers.
My car dealership does this with shuttle rides. They've got a couple shuttles with drivers, but they'll book Uber rides for people if there's overflow.
Antitrust is completely dead with the current President brazenly taking bribes through his son in law and his sons fake crypto company and scamming his own supporters twice with rug pull memecoins. With that level of disdain for consumers who will ever enforce antitrust?
Am I on the wrong side of perspective? I imagine of these companies are at big risk in a turn down with low margin - competitive space. The model is a tough one to work
Merging reduces platform inefficiencies and drivers can work both situation.
I am actually amazed both companies are alive and making a profit.
DD plays big games with pay, sometimes hides tips, drives down base pay, and stacks orders with good pay and bad pay offers to try and pay drivers as little money as possible.
In a bad economy, there's less people ordering on DD (although higher income earners who aren't as effective by economic effects don't change habits), however, it drives MORE desperate drivers to the platform that accept the low pay orders since they no longer have an income. This drives down all wages for drivers, and costs, which in turn pads DD's margins.
We actually see this seasonally in the summer when more students and teachers join the platform over the break. There's a glut of drivers, you can't cherry pick higher paying orders and most stuff that's left to fight for is low paying, no tip orders. When school starts back up things return to normal.
This is why DD is trying to sign up as many drivers as possible. If you remove the scarcity of drivers, then every low paying gig will eventually get picked up, driving average pay down and you can ratchet down your base pay hoping customer tips make up the slack.
So when AI-induced layoffs happen, it's good for DD because there are more potential drivers available? Or at least that nets out the downside of a bunch of well-heeled potential customers losing their jobs?
You're probably absolutely right about this, and some people in the company, or who invest in it, have likely made this exact (cold hard) calculation.
I obviously going to be a balance but gig work has an incredibly low barrier to entry in that all you need is a car, insurance and a phone. The company sets the bar as to how many people are allowed into a "zone" to work via waitlists. They control the labor pool and thus control the payouts. The more people signed up among limited orders, the more people willing to lower their pay standards just to take any order and get paid.
None of the money saved by reducing inefficiencies will lower prices for consumers or increase pay for drivers. The goal is always to charge customers the most while giving them the least, while paying employees as little as they can get away with. In theory merging also kills off competition that might steal customers and workers by offering better prices/wages, although in practice companies share the same goal of screwing over both consumers and workers and are perfectly willing to resort to collusion in order to do that most efficiently.
why do you think this is a low margin business? The big expense is software labor and local administrative compliance.
Outside of that, this is ultimately two services where a middleman takes a decent cut while their delivery label is compensated entirely by the customer. Once the model is established and locked-in, this should theoreically be a very easy business to maintain.
I was at Snowflake supporting Instacart as main technical account architect and saw them polish things into place to get to a decent-sounding S-1 and then to go public. It sure was an interesting experience seeing battles between some people just not giving any care to costs and others trying to make money from these little itty bitty consumer transactions. Epic political battles, I tell you.
> DoorDash said the median payment to be returned to workers amounts to around $48.
> City officials said about 700 workers are owed more than $10,000 each; more than 27,000 workers are owed more than $1,000; and more than 4,000 workers are owed more than $5,000.
DoorDash also spent (from what I can tell) (1+1.4+1.8) million dollars to campaign against Mamdani.
DoorDash also charges a $2 "regulatory response fee" on every order in NYC. It has a little "info" icon that basically says "look at what these overzealous regulations like absolute minimum of workers rights costs you!"
To be more specific, they added this fee in response to a NYC regulation mandating a minimum $22.13 for delivery workers. [0]
There is debate about whether or not Doordash needed to do this, if they are just being vindictive etc. But what we do know is that regulation came at a cost to NYC consumers. And it wasn't just Door Dash. Uber Eats added a $2 fee and Instacart added a $5.99 fee. New Yorkers can determine for themselves if they want to pay higher prices to ensure higher wages.
I in california have all kinds of "service fees" too. Despite them successfully campaigning to make sure delivery drivers here do not count as employees.
Don't fall for the spin. This is just an added cost they always wanted to add. If Mamdami wasn't in NYC, they would just call it a "service Fee" or "delivery fee" (which is different from the Driver's Tip) like they do here. Or make up a anew fee altogether.
Culper Research released a report about a year ago indicating a large component of DoorDash labor is very likely undocumented workers (which is not meant to be derogatory towards these workers, but signal that DoorDash needs labor willing to take gig payments on offer to make the model work).
I don't think the platform economics are working post ZIRP ("zero interest rate policy") as wages rise and margins compress, would need more data to understand what forward curves look like.
I love the Mamdani DoorDash story because it demonstrates that government can work. When it doesn't, it's because it's made not to work or the people in charge have absolutely no interest in doing anything than feathering their own nests.
Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.
One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.
Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.
But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).
It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.
Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.
> No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations
This is how income tax was sold to the American public. When it originally started it really only did effect the top earners, but as the years rolled on and inflation happened it impacted more and more people. The reality is these tools that target only the 'wealthy', if they're successful are used to target everyone.
As the decades went by, people wanted the government to do more and more things and it needed more and more money to do it. Look how many more things the federal government does today versus when income tax was first introduced.
"Inflation brought everyone into the taxable income brackets" has very little to do with it. A significant portion of the population still doesn't make enough income to pay federal tax.
Taxes are unpopular. The government has no reason to "target everyone" because that's an easy way to get voted out.
Joe Schmoe has a job and makes income. so an income tax can and will affect him if you stretch it out. We can still fix that by adjusting income brackets. But that's yet another battle to be had.
an AMT is never going to affect Joe with a middle class life, 1 job, a family of a wife and 2 kids, and maybe some retirements savings. There's nothing more to take and it's purely a tool of coporate greed that he has to pay $200 for an accountant to fill out a form of taxes owed that the IRS already has. These kinds of measures will never affect Joe.
Why do you think more IRS agents would suddenly start "targeting" people who take the standard deduction (87% of all tax returns [1]) and if they did, why do you think that would matter? This is a nonsense slippery slope.
No, the problem was that wealth become concentrated in capital, and we don't tax wealth. Wealth can be leveraged as power without a taxable event. This is the problem. Capital is capturing the largest piece of the pie as ever, and isn't taxed effectively.
This is also why California is voting on a wealth tax.
- He explained, "I don't pay hardly any payroll taxes. Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes." Driving the point home, he emphasized the disparity: "Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes."
- Buffett's effective tax rate was 17.4% at the time, largely due to his income coming from capital gains, which are taxed much lower than ordinary wages. Bosanek, like many middle-class Americans, was paying nearly 36% when payroll and income taxes were combined.
- According to a CBS News report, Buffett quickly clarified that he didn't blame Romney for following the law. "I don't blame Gov. Romney for paying the tax rate he paid," Buffett said. "I blame the U.S. Congress."
- The disparity didn't bother Buffett – it drove him to advocate for sweeping changes to the tax code. In an op-ed for The New York Times, he argued for what would become known as the "Buffett Rule," a proposal to implement a minimum 30% tax on incomes exceeding $1 million. President Obama backed the idea, but opposition in Congress kept it from moving forward.
Republicans and conservatives simply don’t believe in taxes, and will take any action to make it as hard as possible to collect them out of ideology. As you mentioned, Mamdani proves government can work [1], and I look forward to more reps like him as election cycles occur and the US electorate turns over.
The pendulum will swing back, and be the opportunity to prevent this from ever happening again.
(i like taxes, with them i buy civilization, although i prefer they pay for social services and improving quality of life of humans with said resources, not endless wars in the middle east and tax cuts for the wealthiest driven by old men, their ideology, and their egos [n=1, ymmv, my two cents])
I saw this show up in my newsreader and first thing that crossed my mind was the textbook example of eBay / PayPal acquiring everything, leaving us with probably the worst situation possible for auctions and payments.
Could we have more discussion of our current legal/business environment, specifically, the economic opportunities it affords/constrains?
If this merger is approved via consumer welfare standard, should it be contingent upon some constraints? For example, should DoorDash be restricted from participating in the market it coordinates? If it’s a near monopoly in some regions, how will price be controlled without market pressure?
Historically, antitrust action also considers economic opportunity: Bell/AT&T licensed Unix source code for a nominal fee, largely because the 1956 consent decree restricted Bell/AT&T from selling products outside telecommunications.
The good news is the US has seen similar economic consolidation in the past, and passed laws to rebalance the economy accordingly.
The bad news is the US has developed a deeply entrenched culture of non-enforcement of laws rich people do not like. Unfortunately, until the culture changes, market pressure is the only avenue for relief.
From a marketshare perspective, it meets test of a monopoly in many localities. There is a "network effect" moat: the app is a storefront, payment gateway, and delivery network. The merger eliminates platform contention, giving customers perhaps greater choice of retailer but foreclosing the next largest platform alternative.
Their platform scopes and coordinates a market. They even recognize this in their announcement: "DoorDash and Instacart believe that communities benefit when Main Street competes"
The "consumer welfare standard" and related contestability doctrine is often used to challenge anti-trust action. However, requiring consumer harm neglects the loss of economic opportunity for providers (eg stores and gig workers).
If contestabilty, not marketshare, is the appropriate test of economic power, then laws may be needed to increase contestability, such as "data portability" rules for store owners so they don't have to key-in product description, availability, and pricing multiple times.
In your example of a new delivery platform entrant who bootstraps using its direct competitor, what legal framework protects that startup? This seems another contestability consideration.
You can also do adversarial interop. Whenever a restaurant signs up, go to them on doordash and have your intern key in all their data.
Heck, they don't even have to sign up. Just copy their listing from Doordash and when someone orders, place an order on Doordash if you can't fulfil it yourself. You'll probably need several phones to scale this, or you could make a doordash account per customer.
Once you have some drivers yourself, go around restaurants in your area and copy down their menus. Have drivers go and make takeaway orders.
Doordash undoubtedly used all these tactics. This is just how business works. Obviously doordash didn't order off doordash but they surely integrated restaurant ordering from places that already had their own delivery.
If you have VC funding, subsidize part of what doordash is charging so your prices are lower. IIRC Google did this once to the point where a pizza restaurant repeatedly ordered their own pizzas and made a profit, making front-page HN - don't go that crazy.
I feel bad for anyone who joined post 2021... They raised at like $39b that year, then another qtr billion later that year at an undisclosed valuation. This is effectively a "down round" here and everyone who got shares at a $40b+ valuation is getting screwed. I interviewed with them many years ago and ultimately decided against it - their dilution was insane, looked to keep going, and the valuations were absurd at the time already given how few people were actually using it... I think they had maybe a $4b value at the time though. Honestly I think COVID was a huge boon to the company and finally gave them some much needed revenue/membership growth.
Take a salary boost and RSU in cash denominations that show evidence of re-evaluation on funding raises, (vs options at preferred price). Otherwise, yeah, it seems like dilution just hurts.
their comp structure is like all other companies, yearly grants with some band of pay with performance mixed in. some stacking, idk the specifics but recruiters will explain it.
Hey - dumb question that is probably a derail: Is there a practical reason in the US to use Instacart over one of the Amazon services? It seems like they are fighting an uphill battle - Amazon has its own grocery warehouses (Prime food), and owns Whole foods. I haven't cross-shopped recently, but am having a hard time imagining them competing on price with either of those services. I suppose the obvious reason is you aren't limited to those two stores, so if you want specialty items, nice baked goods etc you would use Instacart?
They do compete on price. Amazon charges for Prime, charges extra for delivery, and Whole Foods is generally among the most expensive grocery stores. Instacart offers a ton of cheap alternatives.
> Do you find it, total price charged to card, to be competitive?
Yes. Instacart has low cost retailers like Walmart and Aldi in many areas, and their prices are generally better than Amazon groceries. Now Walmart does also have their own service, so technically you can do that, but then you're limited to just them.
The DoorDash subreddit is an interesting read. Lately, users are reporting being sent to retail stores to work for 30 minute stints. One anecdote: a person described taking a $25 gig that amounted to going to a Target and stocking one specific brand of shampoo. The stockers there had already filled the shelf, so he took a bottle down and then took a picture of himself putting it back.
That's part of a weird new segment of things they're doing for physical-world tasks, and a separate one of AI training. I assume the shampoo brand was doing some kind of inventory stock audit, perhaps?
I've heard of that being "a thing" where the brand wants to make sure their product is actually out on the shelves properly, so that Dasher probably got easy money verifying the store did their own job properly.
Oh, hmm, I was in the grocery store the other day and some guy was walking around with his phone out taking pictures of the aisles, I wonder if this is why. It was... somewhat annoying to walk around.
Man, what a sad end for Instacart. The leadership team that took over in 2021 absolutely squandered the amazing machine the founders had built, filling the top spots with cronies and sycophants, none of whom had very much interest in the actual core offering of Delivering Groceries. They brought Facebook-lite management and drove out the actual product and business acumen.
By the time the CEO bailed to OpenAI, the damage was done - billions of dollars of opportunity, totally wasted. She left an organization gripped with paralysis, apparently too broken to fix and remain independent.
I was actually pretty hyped for her at first, and she seemed to be doing a good job. It was only with time that I saw that she actually couldn't seem to hire good leaders, at all, and that she seemed to disdain the parts of the business that actually made money.
On the other hand - she did a great job at marketing herself. I wouldn't even call her trajectory "failing upwards", she made her moves intentionally and did it well. Fuck the rest of us though, I guess.
One thing I don't understand is how the rise of food delivery has gone up so much and is terrible for everyone.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% markup)
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.
Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.
Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)
Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)
Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)
That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.
They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.
If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.
Thanks for the breakdown. I guess the bigger question is why? Don't they want profit? Or are they optimizing for something else like expenses and enterprise value (size of spend)
They're taking hundreds of millions in profit and doing share buybacks for the investors, they've got plenty of money, their business is to be a middleman and squeeze everyone external to them: businesses, customers, and laborers
Yeah I’ve been doing DoorDash deliveries in SF for close to two years now it’s pretty clear to me that these companies having an adversarial relationship with their drivers is very much so not working. They have an incentive to pay the drivers as little as possible, but the drivers congregate around the most busy spots and so… they talk. Little cabals of people working together form to figure out how to game the system as much as possible, then the platforms adjust strategies to close those holes. Additionally the platforms use every dark pattern and psychological trick in the book to get you to work for less. People quit in response. Theirs no stable group of people doing this work. It shows up in the quality of what the platforms can provide.
If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.
For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.
Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.
The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.
> Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
only the latter is true. the former is true only for a subset of restaurants.
While your old pizza place probably serves the same amount of pizzas as before, for other restaurants, not specialized in delivery, the number of meals they sell has exploded.
so restaurant make less money per meal, put they make more meals.
also while customers pay more, you could see it as the price of convenience and choice.
Seems like the difference is millions of lines of code and thousands of servers now, vs none of either back then (unless you count some erlang ATT switching code for the phone call you make to the pizza shop).
Making a phone call, then paying with cash, is just crazy efficient. What exactly have we even gained?
I think the original business model included giving restaurants a fax machine and just faxing over the order. There is a lot of efficiencies with using an app and not having your guys tied up taking phone orders. Loop in credit card processing as well. Should have stopped there.
Are we really asking this question in the year of our Late Stage Capitalism lord 2026? Are we confused about the American Oligarchy working with private equity to dash all the labor gains of the mid-20th century?
It's going to billionaire's Yacht & Bunker funds. The gig economy is about inserting tech into the middle of a functioning system to extract wealth for 4-5 dudes' benefit.
Who is rich? The platforms aren't making a lot of money, they've been losing money for a very long time. The valuations were pumped by VC money and maybe the founders are paper rich.
Stop hand waving about capitalism. Give me a real answer.
The companies are losing money so the C-suite are doing what most small business owners are doing and not drawing a paycheck so they can make payroll, right?
...right?
Donald Trump is worth billions of dollars despite dozens of his projects "losing money"/going bankrupt. I will stop "waving about capitalism" when it stops doing the same fucking thing while incredulous passersby go "surely it must be something else causing the problem".
During Covid, I used DoorDash to get a pizza delivered. The prices were so inflated. They wanted $70 for a large pizza from Round Table. When, much to my admitted stupidity, I went ahead and ordered, the pizza arrived cold. Then, I felt I needed to tip the driver. The whole thing felt like a ripoff. Incredibly expensive and low value. I have not used them or any food delivery service since.
In some areas it's not a horrible deal. I'm in downtown Montreal, several hundred delivery options within 5km, so there's pretty much always a decent deal on something I'm hungry for. Of course, I'm close enough to walk to plenty of these places anyway, but it's quite nice when I'm sick or extremely busy.
Am I crazy or was pizza delivery free (or very cheap) when i was a child in comparison? I'd pay $5 to deliver most things but the percentage model makes no sense
I use both for grocery delivery. The grocery platform of Instacart is better, so, I hope we can get the best of both worlds with having the better DoorDash promos with the better platform.
Great, both are generally terrible. Nothing like ordering a pizza and having it sit in someone's car for an hour with a driver who has no attachment to the restaurant, who could not care less about what you think. At least delivery drivers employed by the restaurant had some slight incentive to get food to you while it was still edible.
Third party delivery services essentially break the chain of responsibility... food late and cold? tough luck, but please tip in advance. If you don't tip your driver will be very mad at you, maybe they'll text you about it, and we pay them so poorly that it's actually your fault for keeping them impoverished. Talk to our customer service bots and maybe we'll give you a $5 coupon for your next Doordash order.
I do deliveries via gig apps for extra cash and to get away from the computer and it's basically a complete toss up.
Some people are professional about it (I bring my own drink carriers, food bags, etc and have a minor Andretti gene so orders are as quick as the law allows), but most of the others I see doing it may as well not be. Slow, lazy, check nothing, and look like they just fell out of a methadone clinic (read: not the person you want showing up at your door in the dark at 8pm).
It's frustrating if you try to do it properly but get judged by customers like you're some out of work junkie (when, ironically, most people I deliver to live in a lower-income situation than I do).
From the driver's side, you get inundated with low-paying orders, often rapid-fire as you're driving to either pick up or deliver another order (like so bad that if you're not paying attention, you could get into an accident). Like literal Pavlov's dog, bell jingling over the top of the navigation instructions and a big pop up on screen. Essentially [1].
The entire thing is a psychological rat trap (by design as best as I can tell as these apps aren't terribly complicated to build/design; just scale), so it's not a total surprise when your driver fails to provide good service. They actually make it quite difficult to provide good service (e.g., I routinely get "already picked up" orders on my late night runs w/ no compensation for sitting/waiting on restaurant staff).
I think a lot of people should try doing deliveries via these apps a few times just to experience it. The psychological pressure alone likely makes a lot of people crack. It's all quite fucked up.
On the other countering opinion, I am a generally happy customer of both parties for years now (I pay for dashpass). I think I’m probably one of their heavier users as I use both services multiple times per week.
Food generally arrives warm and if not, a quick heat up in the air fryer generally solves most things. Soup based noodles are generally packed separately that you need to prepare it at home anyway.
My main gripe is there is the general occasional missed small item (like sauces, a drink), which I do complain about in DD. I imagine DD does provide this feedback to restaurants because it has been trending better over time.
Yep, unfortunately with the minimum wage mandate in CA pushing wages for pizza delivery drivers up to $20/hr led to over a thousand Pizza Hut drivers being laid off.
Unfortunately the existence of the (less-good) delivery options through DD and IC likely facilitated that decision.
but then you have states coming back around to place minimum wage on gig workers too, so the whole "we're laying them off so you can pay gig workers less" ends up completely pointless
so now you have delivery services paid at a similar wage anyway, but a whole third party organization that needs to extract its rent from the system
Since the reaction here seems to be universally negative, I’m curious what people see as the benefit of having several gig worker delivery platforms.
As a thought experiment, we currently have a duopoly for ride share. Would we be better off if Uber were broken up into two platforms?
Obviously having one platform would be bad, since there would be no price competition, but what’s the optimal number? Surely, too many platforms would be bad, as the concentration of delivery workers would be terrible on each app, making the whole system inefficient (setting aside whether one things the system should exist at all).
From the driver perspective, it permits some redunduncy in case of issues with the company. The support you get as a driver for dd or ic is more or less the same as you get with any internet company: non-existant for anything that isn't routine or touches on allegations of fraud or misconduct.
DD's new metric no longer even lets you dispute reports that an order wasn't delivered, with the obvious issues that come from that: having accounts with other apps in good standing is necessary to maintain your income if and when something stupid happens.
Doordash was meant to help local restaurants win, now a large percentage of the "restaurants" on DD are ghost kitchens run by DD. The same will happen to grocery stores. It's the enshittification model happening in plain sight.
I just want to say that the colour contrast on this post is atrocious.
#999999 on a white background is a 2.84:1 contrast ratio, when the minimum requirement for body text is 4.5:1. So this page technically violates the ADA and other accessibility laws.
Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
First off, okay that's great but no one is telling you to go use them. You can continue living your life exactly as you were without needing to judge others who live their lives differently from yours.
Second, clearly there are plenty of people who do use them judging from this $17b acquisition that just happened.
I don't really understand how the personal economics for this work out for the majority of the population.
You'll always get some people who argue that time is money and that the saved time that people have from ordering from these services is an opportunity cost. But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.
So then, all that is really left is convenience. And personally, I don't really find it that convenient at all. Often times the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is meaningfully longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
In other words - these services really just profit off of laziness. And the sad part is I think we're just promoting a lazy society overall with lots of the newer services being offered.
Here's how it works out rationally:
I just got home from work, the kids are a mess, the house needs cleaning, and my spouse is having a work crisis. The kids favorite treat is chipotle. Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
"Hey kids chipotle treats are on the way - but you have to go get your room tidied and leave mom alone" actually does work.
6 million smart, rational engineers, mathematicians, actuaries, professors in the country, each doing this analysis, four times a year, yields 240 million dollars in surcharges without an ounce of laziness.
Is it only $10 extra to have dinner for 4 delivered? IME the cost was much more than that, when you factor in the difference in menu price, the delivery fee, the tip, and the govt surcharges.
Fair! But $10 establishes a lower bound on a rational audience's TAM at a quarter billion a year. If it's higher, the TAM goes up without requiring loss of rationality / non-laziness of the customer base.
For a mere $800, I can net the fees to "approximately $0"? What a steal!
I'd be interested to see the math on this. They cover the amount I'd be expected to tip? They cover all the govt-mandated delivery driver fees? I could see how they might end up covering the official "delivery charge" but not the tip and other expected/mandatory fees that go along with actual delivery.
Oh come on, Chase Sapphire Reserve doesn't just give you Doordash credits. I probably save $5k/yr on travel alone with that card. A subsidized Doordash every month is just an added bonus.
I don't know why Doordash in particular drives this really strange discourse where people really want to go after people who use it. You're on a technology forum, it shouldn't be surprising that some people here are using resources (money) to buy them convenience. It's practically in our DNA
Sounds like you've got a sweet thing going! If most people could save $5,000/yr on things they would have otherwise purchased, then they'd all have CSR, right?
I am not "going after people who use" DD. I just pushed back on the notion that it costs $10 to get dinner delivered for a family of 4.
>Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
Exactly this. They know humans will likely pick the path of least resistance. And we are generally bad at problems that have compounding long term outcomes. They are essentially preying on our societal circumstances. My story: Brain will resist using energy for creative solution from within if external solution exists for $.
My example is _not_ preying. That $10 does nothing to help our lives if invested in diversified etfs, for example. The _best_ use of that $10 is to alleviate the instantaneous stressors for 4-5 people all at once so we can relax and solve larger problems (my spouse works for pro-social non-profits, for example).
Yes, doordash can prey on laziness, and people will fall into laziness, but in my example the _availability_ of the service is providing a price-adjustment for urgency that matches my own rational prioritization of the evening's needs. It's the most rational, mutually-beneficial argument I can make, and it's real in my house from time to time.
This is a question that's going to sound stupid and maybe insensitive, but that aside - how do you think people managed to do this in your exact same scenario for the last 50+ years without having a service like this?
Our own parents went through this exact scenario that you mentioned plenty of times before any of this even existed without having the to pay the $10 fee.
Pizza delivery has been a thing for the last 50 years. And in my own childhood, my parents kept tv dinners and other instant sodium-bombs like easy mac or ramen on hand.
Doordash costs more than that, but chipotle is a good deal more nutritious than the 90's-era tv dinners I remember, so I can understand parents preferring to spend a bit more for that equally-easy solution.
You're getting stones thrown at you when you were trying to be polite.
From my memory we often piled into the car, got dinner, and went home and my parents had to stay up late to clean while we went to bed.
In my wife's memory, one parent couldn't work - all this stuff had to fall on them.
I'm saying the $10 is a nicety, not a necessity. We would be ok without it. I just think we're a little better with it. It's a market system - if I need it, it's there at a price I can justify. Markets are a good thing.
People also used to live in caves and wipe their ass with sticks.
What is this question? Is the idea of new products, technology, or services strange and problematic to you? Convenience is a major driver of invention.
Also when I was growing up my parents would order delivery plenty - but the only option was pizza because the driver worked for the pizza joint. And yes, it’s true, their parents didn’t order delivery, but they also lived in crushing poverty of the Great Depression and could barely afford to feed their kids during every meal.
> I don't really understand how the personal economics for this work out for the majority of the population.
8.5% of American households have no car[1]. That isn't a strict majority, but if you can be charitably informal: paying for grocery deliveries is orders of magnitude cheaper than loan+insurance+maintenance for a car.
If you want to become car-less then the like of Instacart make that a realistic prospective (but Instacart specifically makes no sense because stores usually do it for free if you can tolerate next-day).
The majority of the population isn't using Doordash. A small portion of the population uses Doordash a lot. Think of all the college students who lack a kitchen and can't drive anywhere because they are drunk.
if you look at instacart's business model...they make barely any money on delivery. Vast majority of their profit is from advertising that they sell to brands. They create an audience of buyers with really good data and then monetize through advertising...so for the consumer you get very low cost delivery at the expense of seeing promoted products in the app.
I'll give an example of when I used a grocery delivery service two weeks ago.
I was landing from a flight and traveling home late on a Sunday. I also needed to go grocery shopping that night. I did not have a car at the airport, so my choices were either rideshare home for $70, or take the train for $10. The train takes about 30-40 minutes longer, but saves me $60.
If I did the rideshare, I could probably do the grocery shopping myself and get home a little bit later than when the train would get me home. Or I could take the train, order the grocery delivery, and then get home, unpack, and go to sleep. I chose to take the train and do grocery delivery. When I got home from the train, the delivery driver was walking up to my door with bags in hand. It worked out perfectly.
I could have taken the train and also done the grocery shopping myself, but it would have been very late by then and I had to be up early for work the next day.
> But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.
> So then, all that is really left is convenience.
But nearly all technology and services you pay for arguably boil down to “convenience,” in the sense that people in the past either did the thing themselves or survived without it.
The baseline premise that it’s more expensive is wrong. It can be as it’s a very big marketplace. But your entire stance is based on this static absolute that the cost is premium and that’s a wrong assumption.
One man's laziness is another man's leisure time. I'd much rather have an extra hour to spend with my kids, read a book, exercise, or really do just about anything else, versus get in my car and fight traffic and parking to go retrieve a bag of food.
Prefacing this by saying it may sound insensitive but from my experience shopping and getting things to eat used to be things people would do with their children and was part of growing up and learning what adults do.
In my opinion this scenario may actually end up promoting unhealthy habits for your children which is what these companies want.
Sure, but how many times do they have to do this to learn?
If I take my kid grocery shopping 4-5 times a month versus three times a month and then ordering DoorDash the other two times is that really going to make a difference?
In fact, ordering DoorDash will also teach your kid how to value time. Especially if you spend it with them doing other things.
>Sometimes the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
This misses the point. One is you devoting your own time and attention to doing the task, the other is delegating it so you can use your time for other things. Some people are going to burn the extra time scrolling (not great), others are going to help their kids with homework or get a workout in.
I'm all for people getting time back even with the downside that not everybody will choose to use it well. If people are choosing brainrot over living well, there's a bigger issue than delivery services.
"Often times the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is meaningfully longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself."
I don't think there are many people using this because they think they get it faster.
I know what people use them, for convenience. I also know why the business use them, is probably cheaper for them to advertise on this companies instead of trying to lump the users to your own app or worse, to call you business.
I know why they do it, that doesn't mean I like how the world works.
DoorDash is like cigarettes, gambling, paid pornography: people are using it in the closet. I know families who order it for 1/3 of the meals or more. Thousands a month in food, so presumably 4 figures in net revenue for DoorDash from a single household.
To say “ i can’t believe people use it “ is obviously a lie. It’s a magic food delivery machine. It’s the closest thing to the Star Trek Replicator we have .
I don’t like it, and you could make a million arguments about why it’s either bad, unhealthy, bad economics etc. But it’s perfectly obvious why the business is huge.
> Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
Paying an extra $10-12 in tips and fees to have some courier a meal directly to your door is ridiculously cheap, a courier service would charge 4x as much for a similar courier trip.
Sure, but the pizzeria charges less than $4 for delivery and don't want a tip.
I completely understand the grocery deliveries, it's a trade off, time vs. money. Personally I think the delivery costs are to high, but I also live four minutes away from the supermarket on foot. For others it's one less thing to deal with and they can do the shopping in the evening when the kids are put to bed or have the groceries ready when they come home after a long day. For them the delivery fee is well worth the value the service provides.
It's the $10+ for getting McDonalds multiple times a week I struggle with. People are free to make that choice obviously, but I feel like the delivery services are praying on people who are already struggling, especially when they team up the Buy Now Pay Later companies.
The pizzaria has the cost built in to the base price; minute-by-minute tracking of food/labour/delivery cost has been table stakes for pizza restaurant software since the 90's.
They probably comment things like "I don't get why people use these services", because they don't get why people use these services. I honestly do not understand the point of your comment.
Use your imagination.
Families with newborns, care takers, the disabled or sick, someone who worked a long shift at work and is just tired. The list goes on. Even just being lazy and not feeling like going out to pick up food is fine. You’re really weighing the opportunity cost (time) vs money.
I’m not going judge how folks spend their money. It’s their money and they’re all valid reasons regardless.
I've been an instacart customer since it launched in NYC, and I've generally been quite happy, but the quality has been gradually on the decline.
- in the past few years, orders are frequently not received.
- in the past few years, fruit/produce is often covered in mold, rotten, or otherwise unacceptable.
- in the past few years, delivery time estimates are frequently missed.
- in the past few months, customer support got significantly worse and came to resemble the bad attitude and general grudging unhlelpfulness of AirBNB's support team.
I think the main issue has been a big shortage of supply of workers who are willing to do the job and who can do it well. Often times the person delivering the order (and the order itself) smells strongly of cigarette smoke, and increasingly I've had drivers refuse to bring the order to the door, etc.
Add to that the impact of the labor shortage on grocery stores that makes stocking less reliable and results in no availability of bags, greater chances of rotten produce, etc.
Instacart does stand behind it service and I have received full refunds for the non-delivered orders and the rotten produce, but such things must take a great toll on the profitability of the business.
Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.
The answer is not to find new pools of desperate people but to improve working conditions (pay, benefits) and on a macro level reducing cost of living so the people performing the work don't have to work so much they stop being able to.
The way you COULD do that is to reduce administrative cost. From their most recent filing, marketing costs them 1/4 of their revenue, R&D (software development) 1/5th, and operations and administration 1/8th each. Their cost of revenue aka what they pay to their "shoppers" aka lower-class labor and the businesses they integrate with is 1/4th of gross, barely a pittance compared to the slush funds for management and investor payouts.
Bottom line: they are making money hand over fist, with the vast vast majority not going to workers but the corporate employees and investors. Your issue with delivery drivers is an issue with the bottom-of-the-barrel treatment decided by management - they could solve this problem (EASILY), but they choose not to in order to pay for more corporate employees and to have more profit to shareholders. The numbers are clear as day.
> Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.
I think this fact is often missed by middle/upper-middle-class tech folks (like a majority of this forum). From up here, it's eas to view labor as being an equitable exchange between two parties, but as you said, that is simply not the case when the pay doesn't even come close to covering expenses.
The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job - but then the question is, who delivers the food? To which I have yet to hear a satisfying answer (besides incentivizing better wages for those workers)
> The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job
These are folks who've never had to work a low wage job where bathroom breaks are tightly controlled, except maybe for fun money. I started working at 14, and as a software dev today I've never had to work nearly as hard, or be as utterly exhausted as working these sorts of jobs, which if you are having to do them to pay rent, its difficult or impossible to do extracurriculars like education or networking to move forward.
Imagine your entire workday is on a strict, short term set of timers and if you don't complete a task for any reason an automated rating goes down, and if it happens more than 3 times you are let go. People don't understand the level of stress that carries.
I drove Uber Eats for one day a few years ago (as an experiment) and it was way harder than I had imagined. Seemingly no buildings have numbers on them, and it took tremendous effort to find which door to knock on in most apartment complexes, and the tips were lousy and the pay was horrible.
I agree, I think the job is very difficult and does not pay well and so it's hard to find people who want to do it. I'm also aware that I could pay an assistant $100 to shop for me, and the reason I choose Instacart is because the service is not all that expensive.
While it could be a case of capitalist greed, it could also be a case of strategic misalignment of incentives for workers (too little pay, insufficient incentive to keep the job, etc.)
Note that I said I have been a customer for a long time, not that I know how well the company is managed or whether it understands incentives for its workers enough to thrive. This news about acquisition suggests perhaps its model was not working.
It could also be a casualty of the immigration crackdown on labor availability, or a consequence of inflation on tips (when the groceries already seem overpriced bc of inflation, maybe tips are lower), etc.
The management of the company does literally everything it can to ensure it doesn’t even have to pay drivers minimum wage and spends hundreds of millions to block minimum wage pay regulations in any municipality bold enough to try to stop them. It gets washed as “just business” but they are ruthlessly extractive.
My nephew is currently doing UE/DD/Instacart to make ends meet and if their experience is reflective, most of their customers deserve shitty service. I helped them write some scripts to analyze data from Gridwise (delivery+mileage tracking app) and the tips average around 3-5% of the gross. Even in California with Prop 22, that's not going to add up to a livable wage.
Don't be surprised when the permanent underclass you depend on doesn't give a shit about your moldy strawberries.
Yeah that’s what everyone says, but no one wants to pay for it. That’s why California voted for Prop 22 instead of our courts forcing the rideshare companies to treat their drivers as employees.
They could literally double the pay of every single driver and still make a profit, but they won't because the drivers "choice" of who to work for carries no market power whatsoever. Here in Seattle we passed a min wage for drivers, and Doordash promptly increased their fees to customers by 30-50%, making it the most expensive place to get delivery in the country. They didn't need to do so, except as a warning to other municipalities not to. Then they tell everyone that its the fault of the minimum wage workers that the fees are high, and not their decisions
It's the lifecycle of many gig-economy apps. They start out good and slowly degrade as they plateau and try to find ways to cut expenses to continue growing.
They spend $3b of their $4b in revenue on corporate employees, $500m on restaurant "subsidies" and drivers, and the rest goes to stock buybacks ($8b last year). If they want to find ways to cut expenses, they need to look in their offices not on the street.
Labor shortages, in general, just don’t exist. There can be one time shocks like during Covid, but if there is a lack of workers for a specific job or industry, it means that the business is either unwilling to pay for the employees needed for the job, or that the business itself should not function as the cost of the labor needed is unsustainable.
Oh these aren't "employees", these are lower caste "gig workers". They could double their pay and still make a profit, according to their latest quarterly filing. Their largest expensive, 5x of what they pay their drivers, is corporate employees, whether executives or software developers or marketers or salespeople.
If you want a good servant for a cheap price, you will only find it in a non-industrialized country. In an industrialized nation, all labour is gobbled up by industrially organized employment, because your average labourer produces hundreds of times more value in such employment compared to non-industrial employment. And in this includes restaurants for your food.
There's a reason why supermarkets went from having different counters for asking for your stuff to having you pick out your stuff yourself.
I'd rather occasionally get a rotten item that has to be refunded than go to the supermarket, collect everything into a cart, and then wait 15 minutes to pay and check out, carry everything home, etc. The service provides a tremendous value, the issue is just the marginal cases where the quality control is poor.
A large part of increasing profit margins for the past 40 years is that companies have realized that https://xkcd.com/325/ is an insane underestimate of consumer stickiness.
You can ship people literal trash like ten percent of the time and they will keep coming back.
You can provide someone negative value for decades, and they keep paying you.
I just cannot understand how willing to burn time, effort, and money on stupid purchases the average person is. I know I have poverty brain and used to be really bad at just spending money, but the fact of the matter is that PepsiCo had to increase the price of Doritos to $7 a bag before they saw a decline in purchasing.
Like, there are entire industries devoted to helping people figure out they are subscribed to something they don't use anymore. I don't even look at my bank account anymore but how do you possibly let that happen?
I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.
> I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.
I can - its a collection of hundreds of PHD-level human behavior psychologists across many companies finding ways to "hack" behavior to increase revenue, vs 1 exhausted customer who just needs something basic and doesn't have the time, money or experience to be discerning in what they buy. Ad companies know more about customers and their behavior than the people are aware of themselves. They hoover up your data, run an alg to determine the patterns of your life and the lives of everyone like you, and target both online and in person various inflection points to drive you towards behavior they want.
You have both product, marketing, and sales all contributing to a mass manipulation, and for this they are rewarded with extra resources to start new companies to do more manipulation.
I was a constant instacart user, never liked door dash though. What changed is that now instead of using Instacart I have a regular person who comes by to help me out at home with all sorts of chores and for me now it makes much more sense to pay her to also do the grocery shopping. I get much better service too, she knows my preferences and also does the inventory beforehand and puts everything away for me.
I found her for free on Facebook posting in a community group. It is a high trust situation but I realize a lot of these extra fees are because we try to operate in a low trust environment, which is really not optimal. Being able to trust your community is much better for everyone.
The cost of this acquisition will likely just get passed down to consumers by increasing the already ridiculous delivery and service fees even further... The only reason why I ever use DD is because DashPass is included in the CSR. Otherwise you pay $10 of extra fees for a $12 burrito.
If the economics are only working because of regulatory capture and gig worker labor, let the business fail.
This was never going to be sustainable long term based on the economics, it was a securities and investor grift. Those with stock did well (“the stock is the product”), consumers did well while the subsidies lasted, workers made the least gig platforms could offer, and the ride is coming to an end as true labor costs and regulations catch up. Similar with Uber and Lyft, and Airbnb. It was all a financialization play that worked under ZIRP but no longer works.
“Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.”
The business model of having a meal order delivered to your door for money has worked for, what, 100 years?
It's just greedy investors destroying the value for the customer by tacking on all these bizarre fees. You see the same with TakeAway-Just Eat. I barely know anyone who still orders food ever since they massively jacked up prices after 2020. Before that you could order a pizza or falafel or whatever without minimum order prize, hidden increased product price, delivery fee, service fee, and idk what else.
> greedy investors destroying the value for the customer
Not just the customer. The businesses which actually make the food receive less profit in this scheme as well. Only the middlemen win. It's privatized health insurance all over again.
Agreed! Delivery works, and will continue to work. Tech platforms attempting to monopolize and suck up all of the aggregate profit from the industry will not.
Repeating my comment from the dupe: My new years resolution for 2026 was to quit using 3rd party delivery companies. It was annoying at first but I've kept it and life is better without them.
My previous experience was any time something went wrong, no one would take accountability for it and at best I might get a partial refund but never a replacement order.
Having to do a bit more planning for meals is worth eliminating that aggravation from my life. Not to mention the shocking amount of money I'm saving.
Well, we do not really have to quit using them; in my case, for instance, I have two separate accounts with two different phone numbers, and I keep getting 20% to 30% off coupons on one of them most of the time. Whenever I need to get groceries or just get food, I go ahead and leverage one of these coupons, and it works out very well; in the end, the total comes out to slightly less than what I would pay if I went and picked it up myself.
Considering that I can go pick up the food myself, I think there's a very healthy competitive market here. In fact, that is what I do, all the time (when I'm not also competing with them by cooking my own food, using ingredients I purchased myself).
Its definitely a luxury service but often luxuries like this really improve quality of life, especially of people who aren't able bodied like elderly or disabled folks. Its helpful to think of them as the customer base in addition to the "tech person with money to burn who doesn't want to hop in their car" we often default to.
You have to have surplus money to burn to pay outrageous fees for something you could otherwise do for yourself—I know the story you’re selling about disabled geriatrics, but these companies wouldn’t be worth what they are worth if those were the majority of users. This is normie laziness.
It's fantastic when I travel. I usually book a hotel or AirBnB with a kitchen and then use instacart. I don't like the constant eating out when traveling and this has significantly improved the quality of vacations.
Utterly alien to me to pay to have someone shop your groceries and deliver them. I enjoy walking the supermarket/costco and poking around and buying what I need. The thought of paying 30% more AND lose that as well is a nonstarter.
My context for use was me getting home, getting some dish ready that night, and realizing I forgot some key ingredient. I didn't want to take the time to drive back to the grocery, so I use Instacart to deliver 1-4 items for me instead.
I can't really imagine doing more than that. I did hear stories of coworkers using instacart in COVID lockdown era, but that was clearly exceptional circumstances.
the best grocery delivery experience was from UK supermarkets - tesco.
none of this instacart nonsense. because it's the actual grocery shop delivering your order - you're not up-charged, your groceries tend to be of good quality no breakage etc cz they want you to return.
with instacart it's pervase incentives all the way down - spoiled fruit - instacart can blame the grocer, breakages same. grocer doesn't even know who ordered.
I hate this shit. Just another shameless ploy to find choke points in markets and further immiserate all participants in a two-sided market but the rentiers.
But doordash says this merger means more choice for the consumer, how could antitrust play a role here? I mean, unless they're lying about removing choices from the market place will result in more choices in the market place, but doordash wouldn't do that would they?
IMO grocery delivery is a game changer. I don't use either service, but use a different one[s]. Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's etc, and I don't have to put on outdoor clothes, walk to my car, navigate traffic, navigate the aisles, wait in line, reverse... IMO big QOL of life increase.
And second-order effects like I can always have fresh fruit + veggies / not worrying about rot by getting it in smaller quantities delivered more often.
For those wondering about price: It's much cheaper than takeout or prepared food delivery, but more expensive than getting your own groceries. Offset a bit by less food waste.
> Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's
In my experience its significantly more expensive for groceries: up to 20% for items + service fee + subscription + tip.
I was canceling Instacart subscription and they offered me another year for discounted price ($17). I kept it but I won’t ever extend it for full price given how much more it costs.
I should clarify: I'm referring to Amazon (prime or whole foods), which I understand is significantly cheaper than Instacart. It might be worth cross-shopping in this case.
I suspect this as well. Enjoying it while it lasts... I suspect the facilities being vertically-designed for this helps, but not enough(Especially the prime groceries; I suspect Whole foods has some but not the same extend?)
But if they were gone, the worst is you're putting pants on and getting your own products. There are not essential, they're simply a labor and regulatory arbitrage for gig workers to schlep product to consumers at very low wages.
I get this, but there are a few scenarios where grocery delivery is genuinely amazing.
- My parents are determined to age in place in their home. They get tired more easily than they used to, and aren't capable of doing as much. Especially in the winter, grocery delivery is a huge help for them.
- People with disabilities may or may not be capable of going to the store. Even for the ones who are capable, it is a much larger time commitment.
- For parents of young kids, leaving the house isn't just putting on pants. It's checking diapers, getting the kids to wear shoes, and timing the trip so it doesn't interfere with naptime, feedings, etc. This is a temporary phase! It doesn't take long before the kids are big enough to enjoy a trip to the store.
Yes. I can’t drive for medical reasons and I live in a rural area with poor public transport. If my wife had to stop driving we would have to use grocery delivery or move
Antitrust does not have "important service" requirement. What has happened in gaming is another travesty but there is plenty of people who would say it's not "important service". Antitrust must be universal.
TYVM. But I rely on Instacart as I live alone and can't drive anymore since my eye surgery 10 years ago. If I didn't have instacart I don't know how I'd ever get any groceries.
Grocery delivery is an important service for a large chunk of the population. About 40 million people in the country (mostly low income) live in food deserts. Plenty more don't own cars. Doordash & co have burned VC money for a decade to monopolize the delivery pipeline so restaurants and grocery stores rarely hire their own drivers anymore. And now with this kind of consolidation they can raise their prices unchecked.
Do you have a source that these low income Americans are the ones who are ordering food? My understanding was this was largely people with additional disposable income who were doing it for convenience and not necessity as the product for the price was a good enough trade off. I find it hard to believe low income Americans are getting their groceries delivered when they can’t afford the base prices for the most part.
Walmart+ actually provides a 50% discount if you have a valid benefits card, so that's "only" $7 a month to get "free delivery" from Walmart on the regular. All sent out to their Spark Delivery low-paid gig drivers.
The way this was handled before these gig economy food delivery companies sprang up. People didn't automatically die of starvation because they were disabled and became adults prior to DoorDash. Medicaid and Meals on Wheels fill in some of the gaps depending upon age and state.
These companies springing up put the old ones out of business. For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now. There's no going back to the "old way" when it doesn't exist. And now this kind of consolidation means they get to jack up prices however they want.
> For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now.
Before DoorDash, other than pizza places (who still run their own drivers), what restaurants delivered? McDonald's tried delivery for a short period of time, but other than that, nobody delivered.
Luckily he came of age just as texting took off. I guess in theory he could of relied upon a translator to make phone calls for him, but his life was much improved by modern communication.
Even if new technology makes things easier for 99% of people who are lazy, but is essential for that last 1%, it's a net positive.
Consolidation in this industry is horrible for everyone. Less competition means higher prices and lower pay.
Cool they will now charge $50 per delivery and give the drivers -10$ ?
There is zero cost of building matching systems (maybe 200$ worth of Claude subscription). Drivers and restaurants will be better off if they build their own ones. These centralized platforms need to die ASAP.
Google maps has the website links of your restaurants. You can just click it and order there.
The restaurant then can broadcast the driver demand and delivery prize in their website. Drivers can be scanning all the restaurants in their area and decide if they want to take it or not. Restaurants over time will build lists of reliable drivers whom they will favor when matching.
Dude, I pickup my own food with my own car 99/100 times.
I'm not saying a system couldn't be designed/work. I'm saying time and time and time again, it's been shown that consumers want a monopoly platform for convenience.
Oh that is fair. So maybe cost can help drive the decision? If going direct gets me delivery with $10 but door dash needs $40 I am incentivized as a customer to go direct.
Instacart fired my wife for running for office. My wife asked for approval to run from her boss, the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, who approved it and the company was excited for her to run.
A couple days after my wife launched her campaign, Instacart did a 180 and told her they had to fire her for running. Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
My wife was also pregnant and she told them. They fired her the next day.
My son lost his job so did InstaCart for a while. He got really good at it and started making good money. Then they sent him to an apartment complex but didn't give him an apartment number.
He called support who contacted the customer and said they were on their way and could he wait five minutes. Of course he did but 30 minutes went by.
Contacted support again who said customer would be there in five minutes but, 15 minutes later, support said to just take the goods back to the store.
He took the goods back to the store but the store refused to accept them. Support said he could just donate them or keep them.
Despite showing the back and forth text messages, he was deactivated for not delivering to the customer.
We're supposed to sue companies when they treat us like this but few of us do because it's a difficult process. Companies know this and act with impunity.
I wonder if this would have affected the result, though. I haven't been through either process, but it seems like either would be a venue for making your case and getting a fair judgement. My understanding (which could be totally wrong, please correct me) is that companies mostly force arbitration because it is cheaper and less variable than trials, not necessarily because the results tend to be biased toward them. Is that true?
My understanding is that it's cheaper because it is mediated by largely by a single person in a conference room, rather than the heavier process of collecting a jury. And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Collecting a jury doesn't cost the participants of a lawsuit anything. And the vast majority of civil cases do not make it to trial.
>And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
The vast majority of civil cases do not go to a jury, so again, I don't think this is good reasoning. The difference is mostly in discovery, which in an arbitration is stacked against any plaintiff bringing their claims compared to what they'd be entitled to in state or federal courts. That's probably the biggest reason they are less variable, in my experience.
>It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Well according to you, you don't really have any idea of any of this, you are just reflecting your understandings which are based on what?
> Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
But that doesn't mean those biases are not present.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks. (I admitted to not knowing and was open to being corrected. I appreciate you actually correcting my understanding, rather than assuming I hadn't even considered it.)
The issue of whether or not "forced" arbitration agreements are binding is different, but in this context I don't see it being something an employee can get out of. Some states have laws, for example, that destroy arbitration agreements in employment contexts for sexual harassment claims. If you have anything to offer, I'm more than happy to consider it. Short of that, I don't really see what point you're actually making besides "Maybe? I don't know!"
Arbitration is not nearly as one-sided as people make it out to be. It's much more about making sure that the case can be completed quickly than it is about the company winning.
If you have an absolute lay-up of a case (something like "my company fired me because I got pregnant, and lied about by pretending to change their mind about something they'd already approved of"), then you're going to win the arbitration case. Well, more accurately, the company's going to throw a pile of cash at you before it even gets that far, because they screwed up and the first time legal hears about it, the first words out of their mouth will be "you did fucking what?".
It is nigh impossible to cleanly fire an employee from the time you learn they're pregnant, to like a year after they come back from maternity leave. Unless they broke into your office and took a shit on the desk, the default opinion of every judge is going to be "I read about this exact scenario while studying for the bar, literally textbook".
When COVID hit, I got sick and had to spend several days inside ordering delivery. And more than once, the store was missing half my order. So I then had to make new orders for the food I wasn't able to get the first time -- while they refunded me only for the items they didn't have, leaving me to eat the (multiple) delivery fees and driver tips.
One of them is a worker drone with very little power, the other is the company's founder and CEO who is openly telling people that he believes a decent chunk of his employees don't deserve basic human rights. Quite a difference there, don't you think?
Software, especially open-source has an over-representation of people that identify as LGBTQ. Brendan openly signaled that he thought a good subset of his employees did not deserve the same rights as others. I don't see how he could have been an effective CEO after doing that.
It would've been a huge liability for Mozilla. An employer is not allowed to discriminate on sexuality. Fire any LGBTQ employee, and there's now a decent chance that Mozilla will now have to prove in court that it didn't have anything to do with the CEO openly hating gay people and creating a hostile work environment.
What a strange hill to stand on at this time. The overwhelming public backlash, boycotts, and resulting damage to Mozilla's brand left Eich with no practical choice but to step down.
> The lawsuit says Instacart violated a California law that bars companies from preventing their employees from becoming candidates for public office, among other complaints.
What would be the consequences of ensuring that only those with enough personal wealth to be able to go without a job while campaigning can run for office?
She approached to ask for permission. If they had any reservations, that was the time to discuss them. She did what was expected of an employee. The fact that they blessed her and then went back on their word seems wrong.
Not a lawyer but my intuition says there might be some legal grounds here favouring the wife.
My take is someone even higher up found out later and did not like it. Now it’s entirely possible the individuals who gave their blessings were supportive of the party the wife was standing for, and the ones above them weren’t? Still whoever blessed the campaign did so in their capacity as a senior officer of the company. A total shit show nevertheless.
To the original commenter: sorry this happened to your wife. Hope she’s able to find another job that treats her right. Also congrats on the baby, hoping parenthood makes up for all of this and more. Sending the best of wishes your way.
AFAIK in every US state a company can fire you for any reason that’s not protected, and “we told you this was okay but changed our minds” is as good a reason as any in the law’s eyes.
In many US states a company can fire you even for protected reasons, and just fabricate a reason that isn't protected. Of course there are examples of people fighting this because it sometimes is a fight worth having, but the vast majority just have to accept being discriminated against and try to find another job.
Puerto Rico is technically not a state, but as part of the US, and counted in the statistics of the (federal) Department of Labor, I would also count it as a _not "at-will"_ state.
Correct. If she had something in writing, signed by a person with proper authority in the organization, she might be on stronger footing. But they could just find some other reason, or state "no reason" for her termination, and that's perfectly legal in an at-will employment.
If I ask my employer if I can start a YouTube channel and then after getting permission I start posting videos that make the company look bad, and showing how awesome competitor products were I wouldn't be surprised if I got fired. I wouldn't be fired for the account but what I did with it.
Buuut it’s probably better for society to not kneecap ordinary folks just for trying to run for office. Otherwise, you only get folks in office with deep pockets who can take the hit.
Personal liberty and freedom also require people to be free from economic coercion so that we can exercise those rights. Corporations have an asymmetric amount of power and we should stop anthropomorphizing them.
> "a just society should generally tolerate the intolerant, reserving self-preserving actions for only when intolerance poses a concrete threat to liberty and stability."
Freedom of speech and self-expression applies to just that: words
If intolerance or hate poses a physical threat, or in any way infringes on the liberty and personal autonomy of others, a line has been crossed and must be swiftly dealt with.
I’m guessing you may not be from a minority and/or you live in a safe area? It’s a common occurrence for bigots to lob “words” at those people, in a way that they rightfully do not feel safe. On occasion, it escalates. What this means is that those people, for their own safety, have to act differently than they normally would. For example, gay/lesbian couples often have to pretend to be straight and can’t have a normal night out and display affection without being in danger.
In addition to the possibility of peril, there is also the psychological harm these interactions cause, and the living in fear.
It is only those who are safe who believe words from the intolerant are harmless. The intolerant count on that lack of knowledge to get away with “just asking questions”.
I hope you and your loved ones never have to go through any such interactions, they are harrowing, but I also urge you to have deep discussions with the recipients of them to understand a bit better why we should protect them instead of dismissing their concerns.
Even if an employee has the authority to make a decision, executive leadership should still have the legal right to terminate someone if they disagree with that choice. Let's not make running a business illegal.
Political beliefs or views are not a "protected class" in US federal employment law. That said, most employers at least say that they support political participation, but once you start taking public actions it becomes a bit different.
If a person made a large contribution or gave other public support to an extremist candidate, an employer might not want any association with that.
If running for an office is going to take up a significant amount of one's time, such that it might impact availability for work during normal hours, an employer would care about that.
In this specfic case, if she was featuring "I work for Instacart" in any way in her campaign they might care about that.
If she was saying anything inflamatory or controversial, Instacart might not want to be associated with that.
So running for a nonpartisan office such as a local council or school board or similar would normally not be any issue. Anything where party politics feature prominently is going to be riskier.
It's a standard practice in suppressing democratic norms yes. The US has a long sordid history of the elites absolutely hating when commoners practice democratic beliefs.
Let's not forget that many of our "founding fathers" deeply hated democracy and when speaking of the "democracy problem" of the 1780s in America it was mostly referring to commoners in Massachusetts participating in civic duties.
This tradition has never went away and is still practiced today.
I mean, running for office is essentially a full time job right?
It seems totally reasonable to both have a law that protects a citizen’s right to run for office without losing their job, but it also seems reasonable to require some sort of coordination with an employer.
(Knowing nothing about this, it is seems like it should work roughly like an extended jury duty.)
> Lisa Vedernikova Khanna, a candidate in Virginia, says in a lawsuit that the mobile shopping giant cited concerns her bid could hurt the company with President Donald Trump.
They always had a slimy reputation. I interviewed there very early on and two of the engineers interviewing me told me they fire people 1 day from vesting constantly...
I am of course very sympathetic to your wife and think it is outrageous that someone should lose their job this way but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice. I hope she wins the lawsuit and gets paid out but I can’t hate Instacart for being pragmatic.
Can you criticize them instead for firing her for something that their Chief Corporate Affairs Officer explicitly gave her permission to do? If it was a matter of pragmatism, they could have declined her request for permission. (One might separately argue about whether this should be a matter of right vs a matter of permission, but regardless, she did seek permission and was granted it.)
How many examples do we need of the Trump administration doing some illegal move then getting slapped down by the courts? This would be a slam dunk for DoorDash. That they chose to capitulate instead is damning.
The courts eventually ruling against the administration doesn’t undo the harm caused. A Trump tirade against Instacart could be a death sentence for the business.
Based on the ground you're treading I'd be careful with your casual use of "death sentence" when talking about something that is nothing of the sort, but behaviours that are only a few steps from the real thing.
>> but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice
That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?
> Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
I think it's a fully justified reason. If I'm in a senior position and I say something that in someway hurts the company reputation/income, I would be fired. If the company liveness depend on me being fired, the I think the decision is justified.
Running doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. I don't say firing is morally correct, but most companies don't work on moral. It's sad that this is the state, but what can you do? Companies are entities that want money, nothing stands in the way.
It's strange that the internet, which reduces friction and allows strangers to talk directly to each other more easily than ever before, has given rise to these massive companies that do absolutely nothing but serve as middlemen. Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Lyft... in a normal transaction with these companies, nobody who actually works for them ever does a damned thing for me. They exist solely to transmit a few hundred bytes of information from me to the driver, along with some of my money while keeping a bunch of it for themselves. For doing what, exactly?
At the end of the day, I guess their real product is trust. I wouldn't give $50 to a random stranger and ask them to drive me to the airport, but I would give $50 to Uber so they can give $25 to the stranger. It sure seems like a lot to pay for trust, though.
I used to use DoorDash and Instacart almost daily. Then I got a retail job.
I see and interact with hundreds of people a day. DoorDashers are the worst of the worst, by a mile. I cannot wait for the day DoorDash ceases to exist.
I can spot a DoorDasher from a mile away. There are three types of DoorDashers.
The first is the kind who is most likely not here legally. They come barreling into the store with their speakerphones turned up to the max as they yell into the phone to their wife/girlfriend in some other language (Venezuelan/Cuban?) the entire time. Without any attempt to look on their own, they find every worker they see and shove the phone in their face demanding and begging to have us do their job for them and find the items. Then they get in line, phone still blasting, and ignore you when you smile and say hello or ask them to touch a button on the screen or say “thank you, have a nice rest of your day”. This kind makes up probably about 70% of DDers. Mind you, I interact with non-English speakers all day. They make eye contact, they smile, they make an attempt. DoorDashers make zero attempt whatsoever and are extremely brash and rude.
The second is the citizens who cannot get a job anywhere else. These are all very clearly drug addicts and former convicts straight out of the halfway house who shop and deliver under the influence of every mixture of drug you can imagine. Really, really rough people. These people, too, also beg you to complete their entire shopping trip for them, but at least they understand English and make eye contact with you. These are about 20% of DDers.
The last group are the “okay” ones. These are decent everyday people who talk to you like a human being, smile, and are friendly. They only ask for help after they’ve clearly made an effort to find the items on their own. Unfortunately, this group makes up only about 10% of adders.
We got along just fine a few years ago when DoorDash didn’t exist. DD contributes to the anti socialization of the world, and it’s not a good thing.
Think really hard - why would doordash laborers be like that? Each thing you state - rudeness, brashness, drug addicts, convicts, etc, are all signs of desperation. People don't want to rush through their life or work as if being whipped. Its a job of indiscriminate last resort because they are paid as little as humanly possible and forced by an algorithm to adhere to timetables. Doordash and Instacart both make hefty profits, and spend at least 2-3x on their corporate employees and executive management as they do those actually performing the work. Your complaints are a direct reflection of the system that they control - if you want more pleasant laborers, ask them to make their labor less demanding.
Personally a doordash and instacart are like utility platforms if we are planning to use them to replace conventional means of delivery and discovery.
So I honestly think they should be under heavy govt regulations or be co-owned by everyone in the supply chain. Or firm regulated to avoid overcharging for useless stuff, everyone loses out including these companies as in needing to compete with eachother they have to offer dozens of benefits offers etc to customers, and customers get shafted when they are the most desperate because making money from the desperate is the best money making formula in the valley atm.
Seems like it should be “DoorDash (YC S13) to Acquire Instacart (YC S12)”, if only to emphasize that this is by far the largest merger of YC companies.
> DoorDash to Acquire Instacart to Help Local Stores Win
> to Help Local Stores Win
Any local store will tell you DD is a necessary evil they put up with but strongly dislike overall. From the % of sales they take to the incredibly rude delivery drivers, DD is not well liked.
On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.
I worked at a local grocery store while unemployed, and I actually PREFERRED the Doordash/Instacart customers.
Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude. It was a very clear and direct communication. A simple scan, and boom, nothing further needed, I could just scan their items. Thr QR code scan handled payment and everything. They almost always helped with doing thier own bagging: Time is money, after all.
> Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude.
I want to be clear, the ability to speak English is not what I took issue with. That doesn't bother me and I'm fine with just showing the phone screen, no conversation. The issue I had was cutting the line and essentially demanding they be helped immediately. Wait in line like everyone else. This is a small food stall in a food hall with often just 1 person working the front. If they are actively helping another customer and have a line, I find it unacceptable to think you can cut to the front and immediately demand attention. What message does that send to the customers in line? "You're less important than delivery orders", and I can tell you that isn't the case due to the large chunk that DD takes.
My family member has even considered shutting down DD orders temporarily if/when the drivers act this way and publishing on social media about it. According to them, the loss in sales (and overall profit, which is minor on DD orders) wouldn't matter compared to the publicity/engagement (I don't know, that's not my world).
>What message does that send to the customers in line? "You're less important than delivery orders", and I can tell you that isn't the case due to the large chunk that DD takes.
I noticed a more extreme version of this while traveling in mainland China. Takeout shops, especially bubble tea shiops, that were genuinely pleasant a decade ago now seem entirely beholden to delivery algorithms and their productivity targets, with walk-in customers reduced to an afterthought. I once waited a half hour in the rain for a bubble tea while delivery orders repeatedly jumped ahead throwing their QR codes in people's faces; the moment I requested a refund, my order was suddenly next. I don't particularly blame the staff, but they weren't apologetic and I was really bothered that algorithmic metrics were prioritized at the expense of basic social courtesy. Watching those incentives gradually erode everyday social norms was genuinely depressing.
Ah, I see. That does suck. There was no line-cutting, that I saw, where I was. But at a grocery store you get kinda forced between belts and carts, so line-cutting would be quite a challenge.
Yeah mixed blessing at best. Increased volume, but not every 30-table restaurant is set up to do much more; kitchens are sized to expected in-person dining.
And all the stuff you mention.
The one restaurant owner I know who’s happy with DD set up an entirely separate kitchen in an industrial park. But to get to the DD revenue necessary to justify that investment, he had a couple of years of DD hell in his main restaurant.
That sounds like a scary investment to make on behalf of what's effectively a single customer. Without some kind of contractual commitment that locks in volume and price, they would really have you over a barrel.
I hate industrial/ghost kitchens so much. Accidentally ordered from one with friends and it was so off-putting.
Could see the kitchen areas through a window and they weren't necessarily dirty, but looked sketchy for some reason. Few people, robots delivering orders, one set of cooks making the food. Just dystopian.
We might as well just build ready to eat food factories that pipe the slop directly into your house. We got rid of the "inconvenience" of going out to eat and enjoying a restaurant. Why not get rid of the pesky delivery middle-man too?
Look up commissary kitchens. A ton of food is made that way, and I don’t see it as being all that different.
And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).
Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?
Many resstaurants are just heating up frozen portions delivered from Sysco or similar providers anyway.
A restaurant with a physical presence with dine in service has a reputation to maintain, a ‘cloud kitchen’ food seller does not have the same reputation to worry about.
Every restaurant and ghost kitchen has a reputation to uphold. They all still have customers, and those customers still chat with other people and leave reviews just like it's still 2010.
It can be easier to rebrand a ghost kitchen than to rejigger a restaurant to do other things, though. For instance: The decor doesn't even exist, much less match a certain theme.
A ghost kitchen can also do many things at once that would not traditionally fit together in a single restaurant.
I think that might be part of what some find off-putting, but there's no conceptual reason why the same location can't make awesome New Haven wood-fired pizzas, Texas smoked beef ribs, and Philly cheesesteak sandwiches on the same day. It can work as long as the volume supports each of them well-enough that they can retain workers who are able to master these things well-enough to keep a good reputation going.
It's just a building with a kitchen, and that kitchen does not have a size limit. It can do many styles of cooking at once.
And when compared to having several different sit-down restaurants to operate, management can be more-centralized while also keeping them closer to the work. This can improve quality and reduce costs.
(That doesn't make me a fan of the idea. I'd rather go to a restaurant and sit down than have anything delivered, aside from things that travel well. Pizza, BBQ, and cold subs can travel extremely well, for instance, while french fries and burgers usually turn into sadness in minutes. But other people want whatever they want and that's fine too.)
For whatever reason, I find the reviews and rating of eateries on delivery apps locally to be extremely undiscerning. (Or fake?) Like restaurants that have bottom-tier 3.8-stars on Google Maps will be 4.8-star top-rated places on Uber Eats. Basically everything is mashed into the same rating scale as Uber drivers themselves, so what reputation difference even exists between different places?
(And at that, one my biggest complaints of Google Maps is that the reviewers are undiscerning and/or fake compared to what Urbanspoon had before it died.)
Sure, me too. When I do leave a review I make it honest and detailed, but I'm not everyone and some people seem to suck at reviewing things. (Or maybe they're getting paid: There's a Chinese buffet that I go to sometimes that offers a discount for a 5-star review on Google Maps. I should take a picture of the sign and put it on Google; the food is OK, but slime is slime.)
But do the reviews of a ghost kitchen differ in these ways compared to a sit-down restaurant? If not, then: They each have the same reputation to build and uphold -- whatever that reputation is worth.
The supermarket where I shop has a specific checkout station for delivery drivers. I have never seen one in a normal checkout line (not that it might be very obvious, especially if they were shopping not just picking up an order).
What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.
> What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.
It's a finder's fee, a very old and ordinary concept in business. The more sales you can bring to a company (or could divert to competitors), the more skin in the game you have. That's not to say I think these companies aren't in some ways anticompetitive to the detriment of merchants and DIY shoppers.
> What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. T
In theory it's because that customer wouldn't be purchasing without DD. In practice it's a shakedown.
The stores often charge higher prices on app for the same items. If there's a sale on items, you won't likely get them on the app. You can say it's a shakedown but you can always refuse DoorDash business and just operate like every other place that doesn't use it. It's not end of the world.
Sure, you could operate without DD. You can also operate without advertising, but it makes it a lot harder to reach customers.
Elsewhere in this post a store owner talks about how DD is a necessary evil. How they have convinced a big chunk of customers to only use DD to order food, and you will lose out if you aren't on the platform.
It's a prisoners dilemma. The total market share remains the same, but if only one grocery store was on DD they'd be at an advantage over those who don't
These grocery stores are all going to continually lose market share to Amazon, Walmart, etc. as online ordering increases. The pricing of in person grocery stores is outrageous and the experience shopping at them is annoying. I hope to see many go out of business sooner than later so we can have better businesses take their place!
The supermarket I worked at had a split system. Our internal delivery people had their own checkout area, but it wasn't open 24/7. Doordash and the like had to go through the regular lines regardless.
because they can get away with it and some VCs say best companies dont have customers, they have hostages.
That kind of thinking is why people call them vulture capitalists. It’s only true until it’s not. if your supplier is treating you like a hostage, you’re probably not very loyal.
I went to a restaurant for a nice meal with my family. We ordered and waited for our food forever, as a steady stream of delivery bags went out the door. It was an hour before our first appetizer came out. It took us a while to figure it out, but there's no doubt the restaurant was incentivized to prioritize delivery orders over customers sitting in front of them.
In SF we call those restaurants “Doordashed”
That's because fundamentally DD drivers are assholes for the most part. In British Columbia, they are paid a minimum wage plus the tips they make from each order. That is well more than what an average Walmart employee makes, which is just pretty much minimum wage. However, the DD drivers will expect a 30-40% tip on a $15 order or they will not even deliver it. Not to mention the theft, fake delivery issues (they take a photo of the delivery and then take the food away) and what not. On top of this, DoorDash will blatantly lie constantly "Your food is on time" (after a 2 hour delay) and keeps updating the ETA repeatedly to make it look like it's on time.
Fuck DoorDash and their drivers. The whole model is flawed and don't even get me started on the absurd tipping entitlement off late. WTF is even 30% of your food bill so normalized as a tip? The same model in Singapore is really so much streamlined in comparison - You order from Grab and it's so much nicer than this garbage, everyone gets paid fairly and restaurants will tell grab drivers to fuck off if they cut the line.
That's crazy bc in California with super high minimum wage and DD paying a portion of the order and not a minimum wage, the drivers make less than everyone else usually
Going by other comments in this thread it seems like if you kicked out the driver they'd probably get fired from Doordash.
> On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.
That's exactly what it's like in NYC. They just walk up with their huge backpacks straight to the front skipping everyone, turn around bumping people, show their phone, then stand RIGHT in the front as-if no one else exists. It's awful.
I'd love to contribute to a no-delivery store. Pickup or dine-in only.
Edit: Might have to re-think Pickup because that would just become a loophole for delivery. Maybe orders have to be placed in-store for to go.
They are being dispatched to the restaurant to pick up an order which was already placed, and which their system is telling them is ready (whether this is correct or not). They also make less than minimum wage in most markets, and their wage is tied to their efficiency.
I don't understand why you think they should wait in line in restaurants where people order at the counter, to pick up their order which was placed online. And if you want to see this, you should be supporting legislation makes them proper employees who get a proper wage based on their time working.
Dispatched? Don’t drivers pick their jobs? They choose to go to the restaurant with the line.
Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
I don’t get why we’re talking legislation; it’s basic courtesy.
If I said “hey, here’s $5 if you go cut the line at that restaurant,” does that make it right?
You are given an order, which you can decline. If you decline more than a handful, you get deprioritized; in practice this means that you tap accept on every order as it comes up. At best you can sometimes shift the balance a bit by where you wait between orders, but during busy times (which is also when restaurants have long lines), your next order is coming up the moment you finish the last one.
It's also worth noting that most restaurants set the instructions for the pickup, which is usually along the lines of “go to the front of the line and provide the staff with the order number”.
If you said "Hey, I work for an algorithm that will fire me if I don't get this done in a minute but the system didn't have the correct info, and if I don't get this done I won't be able to pay my rent" which is more accurate, then it wouldn't be right for other customers, but it would at least give a bit more insight into why doordashers are rude and look rushed and ragged all the time.
> Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
The dine-in customers have not paid for or ordered their food, to do so they must wait in line.
The delivery driver is being handed a bag of food that is ready to go and paid for.
Many restaurants are already set up to accommodate online to-go orders. Chik-Fil-A has a separate drive-thru line for online orders, Chipotle lets people come up and get to-go orders that have been paid, same with Potbelly, it’s very common. It’s mildly annoying when you’re the one waiting in line but I don’t expect a delivery driver to wait in line to be handed a bag.
They haven’t paid yet, no. But they adhere to the customs of waiting in line.
It would be silly for a cached GET request to have to wait in line behind a bunch of POST requests blocked in serialized database transactions. A cache hit is basically free so it’s not starving any other requests.
Drivers ostensibly pick their jobs, but if they reject too many jobs they are put on a time-out and can't take any jobs.
Regarding line cutting - it doesn't quite make sense that someone just picking up a bag that is already prepared should wait in the same line as people who are putting in orders for food. For an extreme example, a BBQ place near me in Brooklyn commonly has lines that are 45 minutes long, with people waiting to order. Should a person who called in an order wait in that line, or just go to the front and ask for their food?
Someone must use these services because they are everywhere in the UK and I find them so annoying for many reasons, not just the ones you mention above.
Lots of people cycling all in black on ebikes on pavements making it dangerous for people to walk around safely and causing chaos for drivers and other cyclists. Also generally supporting big business over small stores. Everyone moans about having individuals charged with these minor traffic offences but in my view just targeting companies like JustEat directly and having massive fines based on employee behaviour would be far more effective.
My initial take to this news was “what about anti trust?!” But I was surprised to learn that DD is essentially non existent in grocery delivery and instacart’s non grocery deliveries are powered by Uber Eats. For two massive brands they really don’t offer the same product.(edit: not effectively, at least) If anything maybe this helps Instacart/DD compete in grocery with the real giants in Walmart and Amazon. I wouldn’t be mad to see DOJ block this but I was just surprised to learn about the landscape of grocery delivery.
I think your first instinct about antitrust is correct.
Out of the group of people who have food delivered, that food mostly comes from restaurants or grocery stores. Instacart/DD will be a behemoth of food delivery.
Whenever this comes up, I really don't care if there is antitrust or not. Delivery is a luxury service.
Whenever I bring this up, someone always goes "so disabled people should starve"? What did they do before delivery apps? Many restaurants still offer delivery that they do themselves (seriously, look it up). But more importantly, meals on wheels and other services are still a very large, established network.
Anyways, I guess I could be convinced that this is bad for restaurants. But so many restaurants, especially in cities, are offering delivery services where 10 and 20 years ago there were none. And the infrastructure is not set up to handle that.
As a result, city streets are frequently blocked by delivery drivers. I genuinely would love if my city passed a resolution that prevented restaurants within the city center from offering DoorDash/Ubereats unless they had a dedicated parking lot.
Delivery is a luxury service until:
- you have school kids and a full time
- a medical condition
- work 2 jobs because economy is fucked.
- can’t drive of old age.
And a million other reasons. In old times with a working community, delivery was a luxury, in “modern” days, it is often a necessity for lack of alternatives.
When was the last time you offered the old people down the road if they need help?
On demand delivery where you pay a premium of 30-40% over the actual cost (sometimes even more) is definitely a luxury to me. I can probably afford to do this but I still do pick ups along with my other errands. Only is rare circumstances I get one off deliveries and it hurts me to see the cost each time I look at it!
Doing it regularly is probably wasting money especially in this economy.
Kids + full time - pick up the food on your way home? Medical condition - arrange for a routine cost effective delivery (like those meal delivery services who tend to deliver on their routes for free even?) work 2 jobs - pick up along the way somewhere can't drive? - use that routine delivery or find a way to cook or use a weekly meal delivery service etc.
But buying one off every other day paying the premium seems definitely a luxury. YMMV.
There are more social services for people that need this than there were in the 70s and volunteering appears roughly flat since then.
Meanwhile, people have been getting old, having kids, two jobs, medical conditions and so on for a little while now. A tremendous amount of America isn't even in a food delivery area unless you count McDonald's.
Eating out is a luxury. Getting that food delivered even more so. This isn't about basic needs.
>volunteering appears roughly flat since then.
>people have been getting old, having kids, two jobs, medical conditions and so on for a little while now.
well you explained the phenomenon pretty concisely.
Indeed, in the good ol days people were worse off. But I suppose you forgot to quote that part.
You forgot to mention it so I could quote it.
Nonetheless, I don't see the productivity in arguing over generational lifestyle here. I just wanted to highlight that making people work more than ever means less people volunteer. Whether that is a good thing or not is up to the reader.
> There are more social services for people that need this than there were in the 70s
Less people aren't volunteering. Flat means stationary. On working hours, it's not significantly different either.
If volunteering remains flat but the population (and thus, demand)bgrows for 50 years, then the conclusion is that less people are proportionally volunteering.
As a percentage..
https://bloomerang.com/blog/volunteer-statistics
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/good-young-old-forty-years-am...
Having nicer products or the overall state of technology being greater now than before doesn't mean people are automatically overall better off. Yes we can cure more cancers now. Yes we have less lynchings now, by the public or police. But people are, objectively, less financially secure. Cost of home ownership being 5x median income now vs 3.2x in the 90s, trending higher decade on decade, is a decent enough single number to point to. The long and short of it is that these benefits are being concentrated, as anything regarding wealth inevitably is, in the hands of a few.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/reports/fil...
All these conditions were common (some of them nearly universal) before Instacart ever existed.
At least with Uber, you could point to the regulated taxi system that was being displaced. That logic doesn't work at all for Instacart.
Having kids, a medical condition that doesn't kill you, or getting to old age is increasingly a luxury.
And luxuries have a cost. I won't pay it until I'll have to choose to.
Are we talking about the $3 delivery charge from the Chinese joint around the corner,
or the effective $13-$33 charge per order from the major delivery apps, after up charge to be using it plus delivery?
Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same stuff, here.
> As a result, city streets are frequently blocked by delivery drivers.
How is it different than customers driving to the restaurant? Are you suggesting that there should be less restaurants, or people should use public transport to pick up food?
Customers don't necessarily drive to restaurants, they walk, bike, or take public transit. Most frequently they walk to whatever is nearby when they're hungry, in most functional cities.
I just had some American friends visit me in Taipei and now that they're back in the States they're telling me that if they want food they have to drive 20 minutes, so I understand the situation is different for most Americans, but the suggestion then seems to be the obvious ones: the USA should modernize its urban infrastructure.
Delivery is a luxury for diners but not restaurants, who now have one fewer vendor.
Entertainment is also a luxury service. I don't think that justifies the behemoth mergers/acquisitions we've seen this decade. It's about competition, not necessarily how important the service is to the people.
Occasionally for fun I'll check the price of DoorDash / Uber Eats for fast food and compare it with the normal menu prices. The difference is insane. I don't think I'd pay that even if I were a billionaire. It's absolutely a luxury and I can't believe normal people pay for it.
For context Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart each have about a quarter of the online grocery delivery market with smaller outfits like Kroger and Albertsons eating up the remaining quarter. If you believe this data, that is. https://talkbusiness.net/2025/04/online-grocery-sales-rise-2...
I've had failed or missing deliveries from an Albertson's owned grocery chain and when speaking to the manager of the department, they just subcontract the delivery to DD and UberEats, much like McDonald's does. It's not their own employees doing deliveries.
A few Albertsons stores do their own deliveries, but it's increasingly rare. I used to love my Abertsons deliveries. Always had the same guy (who was super friendly), and it came in a refrigerated truc, so cold products stayed cold.
I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.
Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.
Amazon/Whole Foods in our area seems consistently unable to pack bananas in a way that doesn't result in bruising. I'm beginning to think they train them to put heavy cans on top of bananas for some reason.
It protects the cans from denting...
When shopping from kroger you can pay extra to get 2-3hr delivery from insta cart. If not your order gets routed through a more efficient planned route that hits multiple houses
It's believable to me. I exclusively use Walmart and Amazon for groceries now. The nearest grocery store is 10+ minute drive away and with gas prices, my time, etc. I'd rather just buy online and wait for someone to deliver to my door. It's much quicker than going around the store looking for items too.
It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
I've worked these 1099 grocery delivery gigs and you get paid around minimum wage to lug these very heavy orders of water and juice up stairs, all while adding miles to your own vehicle and bearing the full risk of injury because you're an independent contractor. I hope you tip them well at least.
I wish no one would tip them. Then they'd quit working for minimum wage, then the costs would go up, then I could see the actual cost of the service and make a decision to use it or not.
a tip for an unusual order/circumstance would be fine. Say if you ordered a 50lb bag of cat food, and live on the Nth floor, and the elevators are not working.
> Then they'd quit working for minimum wage
I see no reason to think that was the case. They'll work for whatever rate companies pay them. There are many workers in minimum wage jobs who don't get tips at all. I agree that tipping is a bad practice and that it pushes labor costs onto customers. It will take regulation for companies to stop and tipping culture to change. I'm doing my part to try and keep the problem from getting worse by refusing to tip for almost anything except deliveries and being actually waited on. No matter how much companies beg for tips for basic retail purchases and counter service I don't feel at all bad about turning them down.
I guess you're talking a much higher minimum wage then Kansas. Minimum wage here is $7.25/hr, which isn't enough to live on practically, so it's not hard to find a job for significantly more than minimum wage.
This seems to be you choosing to live in an idealized form of your future vs the actual reality of today. My question is, if you're choosing idealized anyway, why stop at a mundane ideal where anyone has to work for minimum wage at all? Unless you've baked the lower class labor category into your ideal future?
You not tipping doesn't improve anyone's material conditions. You choosing to give money to the exploitative companies does affect material conditions, negatively! To me it sounds like you're trying to doordash your cake, eat it, have it, not pay for it, and get paid for eating it, all at once!
A good chunk of lower class labor isn't tipped.
I don't actually even have DoorDash available, but I can put my money where my mouth is when it comes to restaurants; PLEASE pay your workers a good wage, and then I won't eat there if I can't afford it. I don't know what your wages are, or your operating costs; don't make me guess how much I need to pay your employees for you!
I don't tip. I don't believe in the practice of tipping and especially with digital platforms I don't trust where the money goes.
If I am tipping, it will be directly and usually in cash and there's only one person who gets that and it's the person who cuts my hair.
Get a different job if you don't like it. Minimum wage jobs are dime a dozen and have joke requirements to get onboarded. It's not like competing for faang or whatever.
I gotta be real with you man, if you acted like that to your actual delivery driver and they happened to harm you or fuck you your food, I'd understand their POV.
Why does your personal activism stop after the point that harms fellow humans but not before the step of rewarding an exploitative corporation that subsidizes its labor cost with tips and your tax dollars through welfare to its laborers?
You're welcome to leave the job. If you're working a job that has tips - get a different job. I don't work a job that has tips and never have. I have worked from minimum wage to 1m+/yr.
There are an endless amount of jobs out there that don't have tips involved at all, require similar levels of experience/skill/craft/work-ethic, and pay similarly.
I only tip servers in sit-own restaurants. I don't tip drivers, fast food or coffee shop workers. Sue me.
You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.
Have you been careful about making sure that the prices you're charged when shopping online are the same as what's on the price tag on the shelves? Online shopping makes it extremely easy for companies to overcharge you based on what they think you're willing/able to pay and provides them with valuable data they can use to decide when/how much to raise their prices.
You can also run into problems where employees will select for lower quality produce, and about to expire foods that in-store shoppers will commonly pass over. It's nice that it means less food gets thrown away, but can also mean you can end up wasting your money buying food you can't or don't want to eat.
> You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.
In theory, batching deliveries should delivery economies of scale on vehicle and labour costs.
Judging from other comments, the costs of gas and vehicle maintenance get pushed onto the drivers so probably aren't added to the cost of orders in fees.
So far it saves me money. Nearest Walmart is 10+ miles away.
I haven't really had too many issues with ordering online. It works for me.
I haven't noticed a price difference shopping in store vs online. The local grocers massively overcharge in comparison to Amazon and Walmart.
> The local grocers massively overcharge in comparison to Amazon and Walmart
Those local shops might not have much choice. Walmart has been caught forcing companies to charge every other store higher wholesale prices than what they charge Walmart for the same goods. It's actually illegal, but the FTC doesn't bother enforcing it. Amazon has also been accused of forcing companies to raise their prices elsewhere and if companies refuse amazon removes the “Add to cart” and “Buy Now” buttons from their products pages. Last I heard they were being sued for that, so maybe the situation with amazon will improve.
It's really not the case. I'm talking like 2x the price of products. They basically started charging ridiculous prices because they wanted to gouge on whales. Unsurprisingly, these places are empty when I go into them now compared to ten years ago. They also have no one working at them.
DoorDash has a ton of grocery delivery, it's the only one i use for that now because instacart has a payments bug. Very weird that the only two big competitors in this space in North America can just merge like this
What's the bug? It's gotta be a serious edge case
Interesting perspective.
They do serve the same market for gig workers that don’t want to be ride share drivers, though, right? I wonder what their market share is for that.
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of drivers are doing both deliveries and ride shares depending on what's available/most profitable at the time.
You're describing what economists call multihoming. The antitrust question gp asks - which I think is relevant - is whether the combined entity would have excessive market power in the relevant labor market.
DoorDash, at least for a while for me, was significantly cheaper than Instacart for grocery delivery, probably because they were trying to fight their way into the grocery delivery market. Now that they're just going to buy Instacart, this can only mean higher prices to me since they need to pay for their acquisition and they no longer need to compete on price. Great!
And the folks currently in the FTC mysteriously will receive cushy board positions when the administration turns over. Literally everyone wins!
> compete in grocery with the real giants in Walmart
In my area Walmart is on Instacart and I've often wondered how that squares with their own delivery service.
Might just speak to the competitive advantage of vertical integration. I.E “we make so much off the selling the product we don’t care if the sale originates on or off platform?” It is surprising though that they wouldn’t force users onto their service. They certainly have the power to
> They certainly have the power to
They tried that with WalmartPay. After about a decade, they gave up[1].
Consumers have a lot of agency. A lot of people get paid access to one of the other platforms by virtue of tie-ins with their mobile carrier, or bank, or whatever. There's low incentive to pay again to use Walmart's delivery service, which will not also bring delicious Thai food for lunch.
1 - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/21/walmart-to-finally-start-a...
Walmart asks me to sign up for their Prime equivalent every time I go on their website. I'm never going to do that.
They're very multi-modal. Walmart will send deliveries out via Instacart, their own in-house drivers (1 year+ employees internally), Spark Delivery, and even Roadie ("a UPS Company"), though Roadie jobs are for oversize things that need a pickup truck or a van like TVs from what I've seen as a Roadie driver.
I think a lot of businesses have adopted this. I've seen Papa John's orders on Roadie, but I'm sure they also use Uber Eats or DoorDash and their own in-house drivers.
My car dealership does this with shuttle rides. They've got a couple shuttles with drivers, but they'll book Uber rides for people if there's overflow.
Antitrust is completely dead with the current President brazenly taking bribes through his son in law and his sons fake crypto company and scamming his own supporters twice with rug pull memecoins. With that level of disdain for consumers who will ever enforce antitrust?
Am I on the wrong side of perspective? I imagine of these companies are at big risk in a turn down with low margin - competitive space. The model is a tough one to work
Merging reduces platform inefficiencies and drivers can work both situation.
I am actually amazed both companies are alive and making a profit.
From a driver persepctive:
DD plays big games with pay, sometimes hides tips, drives down base pay, and stacks orders with good pay and bad pay offers to try and pay drivers as little money as possible.
In a bad economy, there's less people ordering on DD (although higher income earners who aren't as effective by economic effects don't change habits), however, it drives MORE desperate drivers to the platform that accept the low pay orders since they no longer have an income. This drives down all wages for drivers, and costs, which in turn pads DD's margins.
We actually see this seasonally in the summer when more students and teachers join the platform over the break. There's a glut of drivers, you can't cherry pick higher paying orders and most stuff that's left to fight for is low paying, no tip orders. When school starts back up things return to normal.
This is why DD is trying to sign up as many drivers as possible. If you remove the scarcity of drivers, then every low paying gig will eventually get picked up, driving average pay down and you can ratchet down your base pay hoping customer tips make up the slack.
So when AI-induced layoffs happen, it's good for DD because there are more potential drivers available? Or at least that nets out the downside of a bunch of well-heeled potential customers losing their jobs?
You're probably absolutely right about this, and some people in the company, or who invest in it, have likely made this exact (cold hard) calculation.
I obviously going to be a balance but gig work has an incredibly low barrier to entry in that all you need is a car, insurance and a phone. The company sets the bar as to how many people are allowed into a "zone" to work via waitlists. They control the labor pool and thus control the payouts. The more people signed up among limited orders, the more people willing to lower their pay standards just to take any order and get paid.
> Merging reduces platform inefficiencies
None of the money saved by reducing inefficiencies will lower prices for consumers or increase pay for drivers. The goal is always to charge customers the most while giving them the least, while paying employees as little as they can get away with. In theory merging also kills off competition that might steal customers and workers by offering better prices/wages, although in practice companies share the same goal of screwing over both consumers and workers and are perfectly willing to resort to collusion in order to do that most efficiently.
> Merging reduces platform inefficiencies
This was literally why Rockefeller was a big proponent of the monopoly. Unfortunately exploitation is the tradeoff that is enables
It's an argument he advanced in favour of monopolies. Then reason he was in favour of being a monopoly was, of course, that it gave him more money.
Profit? Who cares about profit today in tech? It's tomorrow's profit that matters. Whenever that is.
why do you think this is a low margin business? The big expense is software labor and local administrative compliance.
Outside of that, this is ultimately two services where a middleman takes a decent cut while their delivery label is compensated entirely by the customer. Once the model is established and locked-in, this should theoreically be a very easy business to maintain.
I was at Snowflake supporting Instacart as main technical account architect and saw them polish things into place to get to a decent-sounding S-1 and then to go public. It sure was an interesting experience seeing battles between some people just not giving any care to costs and others trying to make money from these little itty bitty consumer transactions. Epic political battles, I tell you.
always been curious about this, were these guys using snowflake unistore/hybrid tables as a backend data store ? or was it purely just analytics
Since some other people are posting links about DoorDash, here’s one: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani...
From the NYT version of this story:
> DoorDash said the median payment to be returned to workers amounts to around $48. > City officials said about 700 workers are owed more than $10,000 each; more than 27,000 workers are owed more than $1,000; and more than 4,000 workers are owed more than $5,000.
DoorDash also spent (from what I can tell) (1+1.4+1.8) million dollars to campaign against Mamdani.
DoorDash also charges a $2 "regulatory response fee" on every order in NYC. It has a little "info" icon that basically says "look at what these overzealous regulations like absolute minimum of workers rights costs you!"
To be more specific, they added this fee in response to a NYC regulation mandating a minimum $22.13 for delivery workers. [0]
There is debate about whether or not Doordash needed to do this, if they are just being vindictive etc. But what we do know is that regulation came at a cost to NYC consumers. And it wasn't just Door Dash. Uber Eats added a $2 fee and Instacart added a $5.99 fee. New Yorkers can determine for themselves if they want to pay higher prices to ensure higher wages.
[0] https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/changes-to-fees-nyc
I in california have all kinds of "service fees" too. Despite them successfully campaigning to make sure delivery drivers here do not count as employees.
Don't fall for the spin. This is just an added cost they always wanted to add. If Mamdami wasn't in NYC, they would just call it a "service Fee" or "delivery fee" (which is different from the Driver's Tip) like they do here. Or make up a anew fee altogether.
NYC recovered $131M in unpaid wages from DoorDash.
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani...
Culper Research released a report about a year ago indicating a large component of DoorDash labor is very likely undocumented workers (which is not meant to be derogatory towards these workers, but signal that DoorDash needs labor willing to take gig payments on offer to make the model work).
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b...
I don't think the platform economics are working post ZIRP ("zero interest rate policy") as wages rise and margins compress, would need more data to understand what forward curves look like.
I love the Mamdani DoorDash story because it demonstrates that government can work. When it doesn't, it's because it's made not to work or the people in charge have absolutely no interest in doing anything than feathering their own nests.
Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.
One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.
Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.
But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).
It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.
Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.
> No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations
This is how income tax was sold to the American public. When it originally started it really only did effect the top earners, but as the years rolled on and inflation happened it impacted more and more people. The reality is these tools that target only the 'wealthy', if they're successful are used to target everyone.
As the decades went by, people wanted the government to do more and more things and it needed more and more money to do it. Look how many more things the federal government does today versus when income tax was first introduced.
"Inflation brought everyone into the taxable income brackets" has very little to do with it. A significant portion of the population still doesn't make enough income to pay federal tax.
Taxes are unpopular. The government has no reason to "target everyone" because that's an easy way to get voted out.
Joe Schmoe has a job and makes income. so an income tax can and will affect him if you stretch it out. We can still fix that by adjusting income brackets. But that's yet another battle to be had.
an AMT is never going to affect Joe with a middle class life, 1 job, a family of a wife and 2 kids, and maybe some retirements savings. There's nothing more to take and it's purely a tool of coporate greed that he has to pay $200 for an accountant to fill out a form of taxes owed that the IRS already has. These kinds of measures will never affect Joe.
Why do you think more IRS agents would suddenly start "targeting" people who take the standard deduction (87% of all tax returns [1]) and if they did, why do you think that would matter? This is a nonsense slippery slope.
1 - https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-tax-stats-at-a-...
No, the problem was that wealth become concentrated in capital, and we don't tax wealth. Wealth can be leveraged as power without a taxable event. This is the problem. Capital is capturing the largest piece of the pie as ever, and isn't taxed effectively.
This is also why California is voting on a wealth tax.
Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270764 - October 2026
The 'Buy, Borrow and Die' Wealth Strategy Has Become a $5T Market - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50253630 - October 2026
Warren Buffett has been saying this for years, that his secretary was taxed at a higher effective rate then him.
Billionaire Warren Buffett Calls It 'Outrageous' His Secretary Pays 2x's His Tax Rate – 'If This Is A War, My Side Has The Nuclear Bomb' - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-warren-buffett-ca... - December 16th, 2024
- He explained, "I don't pay hardly any payroll taxes. Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes." Driving the point home, he emphasized the disparity: "Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes."
- Buffett's effective tax rate was 17.4% at the time, largely due to his income coming from capital gains, which are taxed much lower than ordinary wages. Bosanek, like many middle-class Americans, was paying nearly 36% when payroll and income taxes were combined.
- According to a CBS News report, Buffett quickly clarified that he didn't blame Romney for following the law. "I don't blame Gov. Romney for paying the tax rate he paid," Buffett said. "I blame the U.S. Congress."
- The disparity didn't bother Buffett – it drove him to advocate for sweeping changes to the tax code. In an op-ed for The New York Times, he argued for what would become known as the "Buffett Rule," a proposal to implement a minimum 30% tax on incomes exceeding $1 million. President Obama backed the idea, but opposition in Congress kept it from moving forward.
Republicans and conservatives simply don’t believe in taxes, and will take any action to make it as hard as possible to collect them out of ideology. As you mentioned, Mamdani proves government can work [1], and I look forward to more reps like him as election cycles occur and the US electorate turns over.
[1] https://www.mamdanibulletin.com/p/everything-zohran-mamdani-...
The pendulum will swing back, and be the opportunity to prevent this from ever happening again.
(i like taxes, with them i buy civilization, although i prefer they pay for social services and improving quality of life of humans with said resources, not endless wars in the middle east and tax cuts for the wealthiest driven by old men, their ideology, and their egos [n=1, ymmv, my two cents])
DoorDash is pretty much scum, stealing $130m in wages from their own "contractors"
Man, can only imagine this is more bad news for delivery drivers.
I saw this show up in my newsreader and first thing that crossed my mind was the textbook example of eBay / PayPal acquiring everything, leaving us with probably the worst situation possible for auctions and payments.
Could we have more discussion of our current legal/business environment, specifically, the economic opportunities it affords/constrains?
If this merger is approved via consumer welfare standard, should it be contingent upon some constraints? For example, should DoorDash be restricted from participating in the market it coordinates? If it’s a near monopoly in some regions, how will price be controlled without market pressure?
Historically, antitrust action also considers economic opportunity: Bell/AT&T licensed Unix source code for a nominal fee, largely because the 1956 consent decree restricted Bell/AT&T from selling products outside telecommunications.
The good news is the US has seen similar economic consolidation in the past, and passed laws to rebalance the economy accordingly.
The bad news is the US has developed a deeply entrenched culture of non-enforcement of laws rich people do not like. Unfortunately, until the culture changes, market pressure is the only avenue for relief.
Is it even possible for doordash to be a monopoly? I understand that just about anyone can set up a website advertising food delivery for cheaper.
From a marketshare perspective, it meets test of a monopoly in many localities. There is a "network effect" moat: the app is a storefront, payment gateway, and delivery network. The merger eliminates platform contention, giving customers perhaps greater choice of retailer but foreclosing the next largest platform alternative.
Their platform scopes and coordinates a market. They even recognize this in their announcement: "DoorDash and Instacart believe that communities benefit when Main Street competes"
If you're making a doordash competitor you can use doordash for order fulfilment on the back end until you build out your network.
The "consumer welfare standard" and related contestability doctrine is often used to challenge anti-trust action. However, requiring consumer harm neglects the loss of economic opportunity for providers (eg stores and gig workers).
If contestabilty, not marketshare, is the appropriate test of economic power, then laws may be needed to increase contestability, such as "data portability" rules for store owners so they don't have to key-in product description, availability, and pricing multiple times.
In your example of a new delivery platform entrant who bootstraps using its direct competitor, what legal framework protects that startup? This seems another contestability consideration.
You can also do adversarial interop. Whenever a restaurant signs up, go to them on doordash and have your intern key in all their data.
Heck, they don't even have to sign up. Just copy their listing from Doordash and when someone orders, place an order on Doordash if you can't fulfil it yourself. You'll probably need several phones to scale this, or you could make a doordash account per customer.
Once you have some drivers yourself, go around restaurants in your area and copy down their menus. Have drivers go and make takeaway orders.
Doordash undoubtedly used all these tactics. This is just how business works. Obviously doordash didn't order off doordash but they surely integrated restaurant ordering from places that already had their own delivery.
If you have VC funding, subsidize part of what doordash is charging so your prices are lower. IIRC Google did this once to the point where a pizza restaurant repeatedly ordered their own pizzas and made a profit, making front-page HN - don't go that crazy.
I feel bad for anyone who joined post 2021... They raised at like $39b that year, then another qtr billion later that year at an undisclosed valuation. This is effectively a "down round" here and everyone who got shares at a $40b+ valuation is getting screwed. I interviewed with them many years ago and ultimately decided against it - their dilution was insane, looked to keep going, and the valuations were absurd at the time already given how few people were actually using it... I think they had maybe a $4b value at the time though. Honestly I think COVID was a huge boon to the company and finally gave them some much needed revenue/membership growth.
Take a salary boost and RSU in cash denominations that show evidence of re-evaluation on funding raises, (vs options at preferred price). Otherwise, yeah, it seems like dilution just hurts.
their comp structure is like all other companies, yearly grants with some band of pay with performance mixed in. some stacking, idk the specifics but recruiters will explain it.
it's bad if you're an investor I guess.
Hey - dumb question that is probably a derail: Is there a practical reason in the US to use Instacart over one of the Amazon services? It seems like they are fighting an uphill battle - Amazon has its own grocery warehouses (Prime food), and owns Whole foods. I haven't cross-shopped recently, but am having a hard time imagining them competing on price with either of those services. I suppose the obvious reason is you aren't limited to those two stores, so if you want specialty items, nice baked goods etc you would use Instacart?
Instacart is also integrated with several stores. Kroger and Costco both use Instacart for their pickup and delivery services in their own apps.
They do compete on price. Amazon charges for Prime, charges extra for delivery, and Whole Foods is generally among the most expensive grocery stores. Instacart offers a ton of cheap alternatives.
Do you find it, total price charged to card, to be competitive? What if you already have a Prime membership?
> Do you find it, total price charged to card, to be competitive?
Yes. Instacart has low cost retailers like Walmart and Aldi in many areas, and their prices are generally better than Amazon groceries. Now Walmart does also have their own service, so technically you can do that, but then you're limited to just them.
Instacart delivers for costco
Yeah instacart isn't limited to specific stores, you can even order from multiple stores and group them
The DoorDash subreddit is an interesting read. Lately, users are reporting being sent to retail stores to work for 30 minute stints. One anecdote: a person described taking a $25 gig that amounted to going to a Target and stocking one specific brand of shampoo. The stockers there had already filled the shelf, so he took a bottle down and then took a picture of himself putting it back.
That's part of a weird new segment of things they're doing for physical-world tasks, and a separate one of AI training. I assume the shampoo brand was doing some kind of inventory stock audit, perhaps?
I've heard of that being "a thing" where the brand wants to make sure their product is actually out on the shelves properly, so that Dasher probably got easy money verifying the store did their own job properly.
https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/introducing-doordash-t...
I assume it's just their own version of Gigwalk (https://www.gigwalk.com/).
Oh, hmm, I was in the grocery store the other day and some guy was walking around with his phone out taking pictures of the aisles, I wonder if this is why. It was... somewhat annoying to walk around.
Man, what a sad end for Instacart. The leadership team that took over in 2021 absolutely squandered the amazing machine the founders had built, filling the top spots with cronies and sycophants, none of whom had very much interest in the actual core offering of Delivering Groceries. They brought Facebook-lite management and drove out the actual product and business acumen.
By the time the CEO bailed to OpenAI, the damage was done - billions of dollars of opportunity, totally wasted. She left an organization gripped with paralysis, apparently too broken to fix and remain independent.
She was fairly incompetent at FB before that, I was surprised at the CEO gig when it was announced. “Failing upwards” I guess
I was actually pretty hyped for her at first, and she seemed to be doing a good job. It was only with time that I saw that she actually couldn't seem to hire good leaders, at all, and that she seemed to disdain the parts of the business that actually made money.
On the other hand - she did a great job at marketing herself. I wouldn't even call her trajectory "failing upwards", she made her moves intentionally and did it well. Fuck the rest of us though, I guess.
One thing I don't understand is how the rise of food delivery has gone up so much and is terrible for everyone.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% markup)
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
I wrote more about it here
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-food-de...
Here's Instacart's latest quarterly report which tells you exactly where the money is going:
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...
For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.
Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.
Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)
Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)
Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)
That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.
They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.
If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.
Thanks for the breakdown. I guess the bigger question is why? Don't they want profit? Or are they optimizing for something else like expenses and enterprise value (size of spend)
They're taking hundreds of millions in profit and doing share buybacks for the investors, they've got plenty of money, their business is to be a middleman and squeeze everyone external to them: businesses, customers, and laborers
Yeah I’ve been doing DoorDash deliveries in SF for close to two years now it’s pretty clear to me that these companies having an adversarial relationship with their drivers is very much so not working. They have an incentive to pay the drivers as little as possible, but the drivers congregate around the most busy spots and so… they talk. Little cabals of people working together form to figure out how to game the system as much as possible, then the platforms adjust strategies to close those holes. Additionally the platforms use every dark pattern and psychological trick in the book to get you to work for less. People quit in response. Theirs no stable group of people doing this work. It shows up in the quality of what the platforms can provide.
If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.
For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.
Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.
The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.
> Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
only the latter is true. the former is true only for a subset of restaurants.
While your old pizza place probably serves the same amount of pizzas as before, for other restaurants, not specialized in delivery, the number of meals they sell has exploded.
so restaurant make less money per meal, put they make more meals.
also while customers pay more, you could see it as the price of convenience and choice.
Seems like the difference is millions of lines of code and thousands of servers now, vs none of either back then (unless you count some erlang ATT switching code for the phone call you make to the pizza shop).
Making a phone call, then paying with cash, is just crazy efficient. What exactly have we even gained?
I think the original business model included giving restaurants a fax machine and just faxing over the order. There is a lot of efficiencies with using an app and not having your guys tied up taking phone orders. Loop in credit card processing as well. Should have stopped there.
Making it so you don't have to see anyone and eat. (I don't do this personally - just reflecting society)
>>So where the hell is the money going??
Are we really asking this question in the year of our Late Stage Capitalism lord 2026? Are we confused about the American Oligarchy working with private equity to dash all the labor gains of the mid-20th century?
It's going to billionaire's Yacht & Bunker funds. The gig economy is about inserting tech into the middle of a functioning system to extract wealth for 4-5 dudes' benefit.
Who is rich? The platforms aren't making a lot of money, they've been losing money for a very long time. The valuations were pumped by VC money and maybe the founders are paper rich.
Stop hand waving about capitalism. Give me a real answer.
in your substack gas 1.5$/gallon
Might be diff with others but I delivered maybe 5m out most. Mostly less than a mile (sense suburb). I drove maybe 20-30 miles in a 3 hour shift
The companies are losing money so the C-suite are doing what most small business owners are doing and not drawing a paycheck so they can make payroll, right?
...right?
Donald Trump is worth billions of dollars despite dozens of his projects "losing money"/going bankrupt. I will stop "waving about capitalism" when it stops doing the same fucking thing while incredulous passersby go "surely it must be something else causing the problem".
During Covid, I used DoorDash to get a pizza delivered. The prices were so inflated. They wanted $70 for a large pizza from Round Table. When, much to my admitted stupidity, I went ahead and ordered, the pizza arrived cold. Then, I felt I needed to tip the driver. The whole thing felt like a ripoff. Incredibly expensive and low value. I have not used them or any food delivery service since.
In some areas it's not a horrible deal. I'm in downtown Montreal, several hundred delivery options within 5km, so there's pretty much always a decent deal on something I'm hungry for. Of course, I'm close enough to walk to plenty of these places anyway, but it's quite nice when I'm sick or extremely busy.
I'm in Montreal as well. You might be underestimating how much you're spending on third party delivery.
I compared a meal I bought takeout the other day (by calling the place and walking over to pick it up) vs the same meal on Doordash.
* Direct: 56.28
* Doordash: 101.16
Nearly double. It can be hard to find out what the actual direct price is for some restaurants, but I'd encourage you to make the same experiment.
How in gods name is a large pizza $70?
From Dominos you can get 10 pizzas delivered for not much more than that.
Am I crazy or was pizza delivery free (or very cheap) when i was a child in comparison? I'd pay $5 to deliver most things but the percentage model makes no sense
It was built into the price; typically with extensive “carry out” discounts for people who picked up their orders.
Overprice food items, arriving cold, plus tips. Not in this economy
I use both for grocery delivery. The grocery platform of Instacart is better, so, I hope we can get the best of both worlds with having the better DoorDash promos with the better platform.
I'm mostly hoping this doesn't end up affecting Costco delivery, which works reasonably well and uses Instacart behind the scenes.
Everything in the US is a monopoly or oligopoly
Great, both are generally terrible. Nothing like ordering a pizza and having it sit in someone's car for an hour with a driver who has no attachment to the restaurant, who could not care less about what you think. At least delivery drivers employed by the restaurant had some slight incentive to get food to you while it was still edible.
Third party delivery services essentially break the chain of responsibility... food late and cold? tough luck, but please tip in advance. If you don't tip your driver will be very mad at you, maybe they'll text you about it, and we pay them so poorly that it's actually your fault for keeping them impoverished. Talk to our customer service bots and maybe we'll give you a $5 coupon for your next Doordash order.
I do deliveries via gig apps for extra cash and to get away from the computer and it's basically a complete toss up.
Some people are professional about it (I bring my own drink carriers, food bags, etc and have a minor Andretti gene so orders are as quick as the law allows), but most of the others I see doing it may as well not be. Slow, lazy, check nothing, and look like they just fell out of a methadone clinic (read: not the person you want showing up at your door in the dark at 8pm).
It's frustrating if you try to do it properly but get judged by customers like you're some out of work junkie (when, ironically, most people I deliver to live in a lower-income situation than I do).
From the driver's side, you get inundated with low-paying orders, often rapid-fire as you're driving to either pick up or deliver another order (like so bad that if you're not paying attention, you could get into an accident). Like literal Pavlov's dog, bell jingling over the top of the navigation instructions and a big pop up on screen. Essentially [1].
The entire thing is a psychological rat trap (by design as best as I can tell as these apps aren't terribly complicated to build/design; just scale), so it's not a total surprise when your driver fails to provide good service. They actually make it quite difficult to provide good service (e.g., I routinely get "already picked up" orders on my late night runs w/ no compensation for sitting/waiting on restaurant staff).
I think a lot of people should try doing deliveries via these apps a few times just to experience it. The psychological pressure alone likely makes a lot of people crack. It's all quite fucked up.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7my1G0TrwT8
On the other countering opinion, I am a generally happy customer of both parties for years now (I pay for dashpass). I think I’m probably one of their heavier users as I use both services multiple times per week.
Food generally arrives warm and if not, a quick heat up in the air fryer generally solves most things. Soup based noodles are generally packed separately that you need to prepare it at home anyway.
My main gripe is there is the general occasional missed small item (like sauces, a drink), which I do complain about in DD. I imagine DD does provide this feedback to restaurants because it has been trending better over time.
Yep, unfortunately with the minimum wage mandate in CA pushing wages for pizza delivery drivers up to $20/hr led to over a thousand Pizza Hut drivers being laid off.
Unfortunately the existence of the (less-good) delivery options through DD and IC likely facilitated that decision.
but then you have states coming back around to place minimum wage on gig workers too, so the whole "we're laying them off so you can pay gig workers less" ends up completely pointless
so now you have delivery services paid at a similar wage anyway, but a whole third party organization that needs to extract its rent from the system
Since the reaction here seems to be universally negative, I’m curious what people see as the benefit of having several gig worker delivery platforms.
As a thought experiment, we currently have a duopoly for ride share. Would we be better off if Uber were broken up into two platforms?
Obviously having one platform would be bad, since there would be no price competition, but what’s the optimal number? Surely, too many platforms would be bad, as the concentration of delivery workers would be terrible on each app, making the whole system inefficient (setting aside whether one things the system should exist at all).
From the driver perspective, it permits some redunduncy in case of issues with the company. The support you get as a driver for dd or ic is more or less the same as you get with any internet company: non-existant for anything that isn't routine or touches on allegations of fraud or misconduct.
DD's new metric no longer even lets you dispute reports that an order wasn't delivered, with the obvious issues that come from that: having accounts with other apps in good standing is necessary to maintain your income if and when something stupid happens.
If there was a delivery driver's union, I think the downsides of having too many platforms dramatically reduce.
I vividly remember the ZIRP era when there was a new food delivery (or e-scooter) startup almost every week.
Great, just one less competitor in the marketplace.
Doordash was meant to help local restaurants win, now a large percentage of the "restaurants" on DD are ghost kitchens run by DD. The same will happen to grocery stores. It's the enshittification model happening in plain sight.
Is this true? Every place I DoorDash from is a place I know and have been to
I just want to say that the colour contrast on this post is atrocious.
#999999 on a white background is a 2.84:1 contrast ratio, when the minimum requirement for body text is 4.5:1. So this page technically violates the ADA and other accessibility laws.
Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
First off, okay that's great but no one is telling you to go use them. You can continue living your life exactly as you were without needing to judge others who live their lives differently from yours.
Second, clearly there are plenty of people who do use them judging from this $17b acquisition that just happened.
I don't really understand how the personal economics for this work out for the majority of the population.
You'll always get some people who argue that time is money and that the saved time that people have from ordering from these services is an opportunity cost. But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.
So then, all that is really left is convenience. And personally, I don't really find it that convenient at all. Often times the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is meaningfully longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
In other words - these services really just profit off of laziness. And the sad part is I think we're just promoting a lazy society overall with lots of the newer services being offered.
No way.
Here's how it works out rationally: I just got home from work, the kids are a mess, the house needs cleaning, and my spouse is having a work crisis. The kids favorite treat is chipotle. Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
"Hey kids chipotle treats are on the way - but you have to go get your room tidied and leave mom alone" actually does work.
6 million smart, rational engineers, mathematicians, actuaries, professors in the country, each doing this analysis, four times a year, yields 240 million dollars in surcharges without an ounce of laziness.
Then add laziness on top.
Is it only $10 extra to have dinner for 4 delivered? IME the cost was much more than that, when you factor in the difference in menu price, the delivery fee, the tip, and the govt surcharges.
Fair! But $10 establishes a lower bound on a rational audience's TAM at a quarter billion a year. If it's higher, the TAM goes up without requiring loss of rationality / non-laziness of the customer base.
Chase Sapphire Reserve would net that out to approximately $0 on a monthly basis after credits and rebates.
For a mere $800, I can net the fees to "approximately $0"? What a steal!
I'd be interested to see the math on this. They cover the amount I'd be expected to tip? They cover all the govt-mandated delivery driver fees? I could see how they might end up covering the official "delivery charge" but not the tip and other expected/mandatory fees that go along with actual delivery.
Oh come on, Chase Sapphire Reserve doesn't just give you Doordash credits. I probably save $5k/yr on travel alone with that card. A subsidized Doordash every month is just an added bonus.
I don't know why Doordash in particular drives this really strange discourse where people really want to go after people who use it. You're on a technology forum, it shouldn't be surprising that some people here are using resources (money) to buy them convenience. It's practically in our DNA
Sounds like you've got a sweet thing going! If most people could save $5,000/yr on things they would have otherwise purchased, then they'd all have CSR, right?
I am not "going after people who use" DD. I just pushed back on the notion that it costs $10 to get dinner delivered for a family of 4.
>Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
Exactly this. They know humans will likely pick the path of least resistance. And we are generally bad at problems that have compounding long term outcomes. They are essentially preying on our societal circumstances. My story: Brain will resist using energy for creative solution from within if external solution exists for $.
My example is _not_ preying. That $10 does nothing to help our lives if invested in diversified etfs, for example. The _best_ use of that $10 is to alleviate the instantaneous stressors for 4-5 people all at once so we can relax and solve larger problems (my spouse works for pro-social non-profits, for example).
Yes, doordash can prey on laziness, and people will fall into laziness, but in my example the _availability_ of the service is providing a price-adjustment for urgency that matches my own rational prioritization of the evening's needs. It's the most rational, mutually-beneficial argument I can make, and it's real in my house from time to time.
This is a question that's going to sound stupid and maybe insensitive, but that aside - how do you think people managed to do this in your exact same scenario for the last 50+ years without having a service like this?
Our own parents went through this exact scenario that you mentioned plenty of times before any of this even existed without having the to pay the $10 fee.
Pizza delivery has been a thing for the last 50 years. And in my own childhood, my parents kept tv dinners and other instant sodium-bombs like easy mac or ramen on hand.
Doordash costs more than that, but chipotle is a good deal more nutritious than the 90's-era tv dinners I remember, so I can understand parents preferring to spend a bit more for that equally-easy solution.
You're getting stones thrown at you when you were trying to be polite.
From my memory we often piled into the car, got dinner, and went home and my parents had to stay up late to clean while we went to bed.
In my wife's memory, one parent couldn't work - all this stuff had to fall on them.
I'm saying the $10 is a nicety, not a necessity. We would be ok without it. I just think we're a little better with it. It's a market system - if I need it, it's there at a price I can justify. Markets are a good thing.
50 years ago most households did not have both parents working full time.
The usual answer to this question: "things were shitty in the past"
People also used to live in caves and wipe their ass with sticks.
What is this question? Is the idea of new products, technology, or services strange and problematic to you? Convenience is a major driver of invention.
Also when I was growing up my parents would order delivery plenty - but the only option was pizza because the driver worked for the pizza joint. And yes, it’s true, their parents didn’t order delivery, but they also lived in crushing poverty of the Great Depression and could barely afford to feed their kids during every meal.
> I don't really understand how the personal economics for this work out for the majority of the population.
8.5% of American households have no car[1]. That isn't a strict majority, but if you can be charitably informal: paying for grocery deliveries is orders of magnitude cheaper than loan+insurance+maintenance for a car.
If you want to become car-less then the like of Instacart make that a realistic prospective (but Instacart specifically makes no sense because stores usually do it for free if you can tolerate next-day).
[1]: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2024.B08201
A lot of stores are contracting to dd or ic or whatever to provide those free delivery services.
The majority of the population isn't using Doordash. A small portion of the population uses Doordash a lot. Think of all the college students who lack a kitchen and can't drive anywhere because they are drunk.
if you look at instacart's business model...they make barely any money on delivery. Vast majority of their profit is from advertising that they sell to brands. They create an audience of buyers with really good data and then monetize through advertising...so for the consumer you get very low cost delivery at the expense of seeing promoted products in the app.
I'll give an example of when I used a grocery delivery service two weeks ago.
I was landing from a flight and traveling home late on a Sunday. I also needed to go grocery shopping that night. I did not have a car at the airport, so my choices were either rideshare home for $70, or take the train for $10. The train takes about 30-40 minutes longer, but saves me $60.
If I did the rideshare, I could probably do the grocery shopping myself and get home a little bit later than when the train would get me home. Or I could take the train, order the grocery delivery, and then get home, unpack, and go to sleep. I chose to take the train and do grocery delivery. When I got home from the train, the delivery driver was walking up to my door with bags in hand. It worked out perfectly.
I could have taken the train and also done the grocery shopping myself, but it would have been very late by then and I had to be up early for work the next day.
> But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.
> So then, all that is really left is convenience.
But nearly all technology and services you pay for arguably boil down to “convenience,” in the sense that people in the past either did the thing themselves or survived without it.
The baseline premise that it’s more expensive is wrong. It can be as it’s a very big marketplace. But your entire stance is based on this static absolute that the cost is premium and that’s a wrong assumption.
One man's laziness is another man's leisure time. I'd much rather have an extra hour to spend with my kids, read a book, exercise, or really do just about anything else, versus get in my car and fight traffic and parking to go retrieve a bag of food.
Prefacing this by saying it may sound insensitive but from my experience shopping and getting things to eat used to be things people would do with their children and was part of growing up and learning what adults do.
In my opinion this scenario may actually end up promoting unhealthy habits for your children which is what these companies want.
Sure, but how many times do they have to do this to learn?
If I take my kid grocery shopping 4-5 times a month versus three times a month and then ordering DoorDash the other two times is that really going to make a difference?
In fact, ordering DoorDash will also teach your kid how to value time. Especially if you spend it with them doing other things.
They'd be better off learning to budget, shop, and prep food alongside you.
I struggle to see the teachings behind watching little brown men bringing meals to the door.
>Sometimes the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
This misses the point. One is you devoting your own time and attention to doing the task, the other is delegating it so you can use your time for other things. Some people are going to burn the extra time scrolling (not great), others are going to help their kids with homework or get a workout in.
I'm all for people getting time back even with the downside that not everybody will choose to use it well. If people are choosing brainrot over living well, there's a bigger issue than delivery services.
"Often times the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is meaningfully longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself."
I don't think there are many people using this because they think they get it faster.
> Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
Virtue signaling.
I know what people use them, for convenience. I also know why the business use them, is probably cheaper for them to advertise on this companies instead of trying to lump the users to your own app or worse, to call you business.
I know why they do it, that doesn't mean I like how the world works.
The acquisition is for consolidating power the deal is finished DoorDash will basically be the only sheriff in town.
Maybe the idea is that this market will shrivel once the rest of the populace "wise up" to what the various OPs already know.
DoorDash is like cigarettes, gambling, paid pornography: people are using it in the closet. I know families who order it for 1/3 of the meals or more. Thousands a month in food, so presumably 4 figures in net revenue for DoorDash from a single household.
To say “ i can’t believe people use it “ is obviously a lie. It’s a magic food delivery machine. It’s the closest thing to the Star Trek Replicator we have .
I don’t like it, and you could make a million arguments about why it’s either bad, unhealthy, bad economics etc. But it’s perfectly obvious why the business is huge.
> DoorDash is like cigarettes, gambling, paid pornography
LMAO wat
worse than cigs, better than gambling or porn
> Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
Paying an extra $10-12 in tips and fees to have some courier a meal directly to your door is ridiculously cheap, a courier service would charge 4x as much for a similar courier trip.
Sure, but the pizzeria charges less than $4 for delivery and don't want a tip.
I completely understand the grocery deliveries, it's a trade off, time vs. money. Personally I think the delivery costs are to high, but I also live four minutes away from the supermarket on foot. For others it's one less thing to deal with and they can do the shopping in the evening when the kids are put to bed or have the groceries ready when they come home after a long day. For them the delivery fee is well worth the value the service provides.
It's the $10+ for getting McDonalds multiple times a week I struggle with. People are free to make that choice obviously, but I feel like the delivery services are praying on people who are already struggling, especially when they team up the Buy Now Pay Later companies.
The pizzaria has the cost built in to the base price; minute-by-minute tracking of food/labour/delivery cost has been table stakes for pizza restaurant software since the 90's.
The pizzerias are all on doordash now
> Sure, but the pizzeria charges less than $4 for delivery and don't want a tip.
The rest of the delivery charge is ‘baked’ into the price of the food.
It was cheaper to get a pizza delivered before these delivery companies popped up.
They probably comment things like "I don't get why people use these services", because they don't get why people use these services. I honestly do not understand the point of your comment.
So what these services do is bring you food in exchange for money. If you have money and need some food they will bring it to you.
Why would you comment this instead of, i dont know, educating yourself on why is that happening?
I don't know, I cannot look into their head. Why don't you just write that you don't want people to comment that way, that would be more honest.
Use your imagination. Families with newborns, care takers, the disabled or sick, someone who worked a long shift at work and is just tired. The list goes on. Even just being lazy and not feeling like going out to pick up food is fine. You’re really weighing the opportunity cost (time) vs money.
I’m not going judge how folks spend their money. It’s their money and they’re all valid reasons regardless.
I've been an instacart customer since it launched in NYC, and I've generally been quite happy, but the quality has been gradually on the decline.
- in the past few years, orders are frequently not received.
- in the past few years, fruit/produce is often covered in mold, rotten, or otherwise unacceptable.
- in the past few years, delivery time estimates are frequently missed.
- in the past few months, customer support got significantly worse and came to resemble the bad attitude and general grudging unhlelpfulness of AirBNB's support team.
I think the main issue has been a big shortage of supply of workers who are willing to do the job and who can do it well. Often times the person delivering the order (and the order itself) smells strongly of cigarette smoke, and increasingly I've had drivers refuse to bring the order to the door, etc.
Add to that the impact of the labor shortage on grocery stores that makes stocking less reliable and results in no availability of bags, greater chances of rotten produce, etc.
Instacart does stand behind it service and I have received full refunds for the non-delivered orders and the rotten produce, but such things must take a great toll on the profitability of the business.
Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.
The answer is not to find new pools of desperate people but to improve working conditions (pay, benefits) and on a macro level reducing cost of living so the people performing the work don't have to work so much they stop being able to.
The way you COULD do that is to reduce administrative cost. From their most recent filing, marketing costs them 1/4 of their revenue, R&D (software development) 1/5th, and operations and administration 1/8th each. Their cost of revenue aka what they pay to their "shoppers" aka lower-class labor and the businesses they integrate with is 1/4th of gross, barely a pittance compared to the slush funds for management and investor payouts.
Take a look yourself: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...
Bottom line: they are making money hand over fist, with the vast vast majority not going to workers but the corporate employees and investors. Your issue with delivery drivers is an issue with the bottom-of-the-barrel treatment decided by management - they could solve this problem (EASILY), but they choose not to in order to pay for more corporate employees and to have more profit to shareholders. The numbers are clear as day.
> Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.
I think this fact is often missed by middle/upper-middle-class tech folks (like a majority of this forum). From up here, it's eas to view labor as being an equitable exchange between two parties, but as you said, that is simply not the case when the pay doesn't even come close to covering expenses.
The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job - but then the question is, who delivers the food? To which I have yet to hear a satisfying answer (besides incentivizing better wages for those workers)
> The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job
These are folks who've never had to work a low wage job where bathroom breaks are tightly controlled, except maybe for fun money. I started working at 14, and as a software dev today I've never had to work nearly as hard, or be as utterly exhausted as working these sorts of jobs, which if you are having to do them to pay rent, its difficult or impossible to do extracurriculars like education or networking to move forward.
Imagine your entire workday is on a strict, short term set of timers and if you don't complete a task for any reason an automated rating goes down, and if it happens more than 3 times you are let go. People don't understand the level of stress that carries.
I drove Uber Eats for one day a few years ago (as an experiment) and it was way harder than I had imagined. Seemingly no buildings have numbers on them, and it took tremendous effort to find which door to knock on in most apartment complexes, and the tips were lousy and the pay was horrible.
I agree, I think the job is very difficult and does not pay well and so it's hard to find people who want to do it. I'm also aware that I could pay an assistant $100 to shop for me, and the reason I choose Instacart is because the service is not all that expensive.
While it could be a case of capitalist greed, it could also be a case of strategic misalignment of incentives for workers (too little pay, insufficient incentive to keep the job, etc.)
Note that I said I have been a customer for a long time, not that I know how well the company is managed or whether it understands incentives for its workers enough to thrive. This news about acquisition suggests perhaps its model was not working.
It could also be a casualty of the immigration crackdown on labor availability, or a consequence of inflation on tips (when the groceries already seem overpriced bc of inflation, maybe tips are lower), etc.
The management of the company does literally everything it can to ensure it doesn’t even have to pay drivers minimum wage and spends hundreds of millions to block minimum wage pay regulations in any municipality bold enough to try to stop them. It gets washed as “just business” but they are ruthlessly extractive.
My nephew is currently doing UE/DD/Instacart to make ends meet and if their experience is reflective, most of their customers deserve shitty service. I helped them write some scripts to analyze data from Gridwise (delivery+mileage tracking app) and the tips average around 3-5% of the gross. Even in California with Prop 22, that's not going to add up to a livable wage.
Don't be surprised when the permanent underclass you depend on doesn't give a shit about your moldy strawberries.
They should be paid a livable wage before tips.
Yeah that’s what everyone says, but no one wants to pay for it. That’s why California voted for Prop 22 instead of our courts forcing the rideshare companies to treat their drivers as employees.
They could literally double the pay of every single driver and still make a profit, but they won't because the drivers "choice" of who to work for carries no market power whatsoever. Here in Seattle we passed a min wage for drivers, and Doordash promptly increased their fees to customers by 30-50%, making it the most expensive place to get delivery in the country. They didn't need to do so, except as a warning to other municipalities not to. Then they tell everyone that its the fault of the minimum wage workers that the fees are high, and not their decisions
The whole gig economy is just underpaid servants as a service. Don't be surprised that they do a less than exemplary job.
Sorry to break it to you, so are nearly all middle class jobs.
It's the lifecycle of many gig-economy apps. They start out good and slowly degrade as they plateau and try to find ways to cut expenses to continue growing.
They spend $3b of their $4b in revenue on corporate employees, $500m on restaurant "subsidies" and drivers, and the rest goes to stock buybacks ($8b last year). If they want to find ways to cut expenses, they need to look in their offices not on the street.
Labor shortages, in general, just don’t exist. There can be one time shocks like during Covid, but if there is a lack of workers for a specific job or industry, it means that the business is either unwilling to pay for the employees needed for the job, or that the business itself should not function as the cost of the labor needed is unsustainable.
Oh these aren't "employees", these are lower caste "gig workers". They could double their pay and still make a profit, according to their latest quarterly filing. Their largest expensive, 5x of what they pay their drivers, is corporate employees, whether executives or software developers or marketers or salespeople.
If you want a good servant for a cheap price, you will only find it in a non-industrialized country. In an industrialized nation, all labour is gobbled up by industrially organized employment, because your average labourer produces hundreds of times more value in such employment compared to non-industrial employment. And in this includes restaurants for your food.
There's a reason why supermarkets went from having different counters for asking for your stuff to having you pick out your stuff yourself.
You've continued to use a service for a "few years" while it provides you with rotten fruit?
I'd rather occasionally get a rotten item that has to be refunded than go to the supermarket, collect everything into a cart, and then wait 15 minutes to pay and check out, carry everything home, etc. The service provides a tremendous value, the issue is just the marginal cases where the quality control is poor.
A large part of increasing profit margins for the past 40 years is that companies have realized that https://xkcd.com/325/ is an insane underestimate of consumer stickiness.
You can ship people literal trash like ten percent of the time and they will keep coming back.
You can provide someone negative value for decades, and they keep paying you.
I just cannot understand how willing to burn time, effort, and money on stupid purchases the average person is. I know I have poverty brain and used to be really bad at just spending money, but the fact of the matter is that PepsiCo had to increase the price of Doritos to $7 a bag before they saw a decline in purchasing.
Like, there are entire industries devoted to helping people figure out they are subscribed to something they don't use anymore. I don't even look at my bank account anymore but how do you possibly let that happen?
I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.
> I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.
I can - its a collection of hundreds of PHD-level human behavior psychologists across many companies finding ways to "hack" behavior to increase revenue, vs 1 exhausted customer who just needs something basic and doesn't have the time, money or experience to be discerning in what they buy. Ad companies know more about customers and their behavior than the people are aware of themselves. They hoover up your data, run an alg to determine the patterns of your life and the lives of everyone like you, and target both online and in person various inflection points to drive you towards behavior they want.
You have both product, marketing, and sales all contributing to a mass manipulation, and for this they are rewarded with extra resources to start new companies to do more manipulation.
> I think the main issue has been a big shortage of supply of workers who are willing to do the job
Instacart is profitable, yea? So they don't want to provide a better quality service or they would offer greater incentives to workers.
I would think so, I have been thinking recently that I will stop using it based on the decline in quality. It's really frustrating.
I was a constant instacart user, never liked door dash though. What changed is that now instead of using Instacart I have a regular person who comes by to help me out at home with all sorts of chores and for me now it makes much more sense to pay her to also do the grocery shopping. I get much better service too, she knows my preferences and also does the inventory beforehand and puts everything away for me.
I found her for free on Facebook posting in a community group. It is a high trust situation but I realize a lot of these extra fees are because we try to operate in a low trust environment, which is really not optimal. Being able to trust your community is much better for everyone.
I was waiting for you to finish this with "she also gives me hugs and pays half of the mortgage".
I think for that last part it's more the other way around.
What's the moat for DoorDash?
Perfectly reasonable to continue ordering private taxis for your burrito. Where do I invest?
The cost of this acquisition will likely just get passed down to consumers by increasing the already ridiculous delivery and service fees even further... The only reason why I ever use DD is because DashPass is included in the CSR. Otherwise you pay $10 of extra fees for a $12 burrito.
> The only reason why I ever use DD is because DashPass is included in the CSR.
Strong case for B2B sales focus
If the economics are only working because of regulatory capture and gig worker labor, let the business fail.
This was never going to be sustainable long term based on the economics, it was a securities and investor grift. Those with stock did well (“the stock is the product”), consumers did well while the subsidies lasted, workers made the least gig platforms could offer, and the ride is coming to an end as true labor costs and regulations catch up. Similar with Uber and Lyft, and Airbnb. It was all a financialization play that worked under ZIRP but no longer works.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074978 said it best:
“Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.”
The business model of having a meal order delivered to your door for money has worked for, what, 100 years?
It's just greedy investors destroying the value for the customer by tacking on all these bizarre fees. You see the same with TakeAway-Just Eat. I barely know anyone who still orders food ever since they massively jacked up prices after 2020. Before that you could order a pizza or falafel or whatever without minimum order prize, hidden increased product price, delivery fee, service fee, and idk what else.
> greedy investors destroying the value for the customer
Not just the customer. The businesses which actually make the food receive less profit in this scheme as well. Only the middlemen win. It's privatized health insurance all over again.
Agreed! Delivery works, and will continue to work. Tech platforms attempting to monopolize and suck up all of the aggregate profit from the industry will not.
> The cost of this acquisition will likely just get passed down to consumers ... included in the CSR
I believe it has been passed down to you, either knowingly or not
A resounding victory for workers and customers, right?
Right?
Repeating my comment from the dupe: My new years resolution for 2026 was to quit using 3rd party delivery companies. It was annoying at first but I've kept it and life is better without them.
My previous experience was any time something went wrong, no one would take accountability for it and at best I might get a partial refund but never a replacement order.
Having to do a bit more planning for meals is worth eliminating that aggravation from my life. Not to mention the shocking amount of money I'm saving.
Well, we do not really have to quit using them; in my case, for instance, I have two separate accounts with two different phone numbers, and I keep getting 20% to 30% off coupons on one of them most of the time. Whenever I need to get groceries or just get food, I go ahead and leverage one of these coupons, and it works out very well; in the end, the total comes out to slightly less than what I would pay if I went and picked it up myself.
Wow, really didn't see this one coming.
Major competitors shouldn't be able to acquire each other in any society that cares about healthy markets.
Considering that I can go pick up the food myself, I think there's a very healthy competitive market here. In fact, that is what I do, all the time (when I'm not also competing with them by cooking my own food, using ingredients I purchased myself).
Doordash as an app or a business model always feel scammy and full of dark patterns.
With this merger I have a feeling that things are only going to go worse.
Good thing it’s a completely unnecessary service.
Its definitely a luxury service but often luxuries like this really improve quality of life, especially of people who aren't able bodied like elderly or disabled folks. Its helpful to think of them as the customer base in addition to the "tech person with money to burn who doesn't want to hop in their car" we often default to.
You have to have surplus money to burn to pay outrageous fees for something you could otherwise do for yourself—I know the story you’re selling about disabled geriatrics, but these companies wouldn’t be worth what they are worth if those were the majority of users. This is normie laziness.
I feel like this is way more true of Instacart. Ordering takeout is just not that necessary.
I live in the US - no car. No grocery store close by. Only real option is to use an Uber which is more expensive than using DoorDash.
Right.
It's fantastic when I travel. I usually book a hotel or AirBnB with a kitchen and then use instacart. I don't like the constant eating out when traveling and this has significantly improved the quality of vacations.
I'm sure it's fantastic, but "It improves the quality of my vacations" is still very much in line with "completely unnecessary"
Utterly alien to me to pay to have someone shop your groceries and deliver them. I enjoy walking the supermarket/costco and poking around and buying what I need. The thought of paying 30% more AND lose that as well is a nonstarter.
The really are whole different worlds out there!
My context for use was me getting home, getting some dish ready that night, and realizing I forgot some key ingredient. I didn't want to take the time to drive back to the grocery, so I use Instacart to deliver 1-4 items for me instead.
I can't really imagine doing more than that. I did hear stories of coworkers using instacart in COVID lockdown era, but that was clearly exceptional circumstances.
So is Uber, AirBnb, McDonalds, and plenty of other billion dollar companies with externalities that negatively effect society.
You can't assign blame to those businesses. If you must, then your blame should be directed at the consumers.
Unless of course these "negative externalities" are secret and unknown to the consumer... which I'd doubt.
The "your evil local government makes us(you) pay this fee" fee is great!
And instacart didn’t ?
food delivery stayed around, the e scooters not so much
the best grocery delivery experience was from UK supermarkets - tesco.
none of this instacart nonsense. because it's the actual grocery shop delivering your order - you're not up-charged, your groceries tend to be of good quality no breakage etc cz they want you to return.
with instacart it's pervase incentives all the way down - spoiled fruit - instacart can blame the grocer, breakages same. grocer doesn't even know who ordered.
I didn't realize DoorDash was so big.
Instacart has it's own unique offerings and propositions, hopefully those don't dissapear, they were invaluable during the pandemic.
These two slimy companies do belong to each other. Perfect match made in hell.
I hate this shit. Just another shameless ploy to find choke points in markets and further immiserate all participants in a two-sided market but the rentiers.
unless you have a disability. just no
I’d cry “antitrust” but who are we kidding at this point. The relevant parties have likely been paid off already.
"DoorDash and Instacart believe that communities benefit when Main Street competes"
That's rich! Communities benefit when small businesses compete against each other. Announced as part of a merger of two giant public companies.
But doordash says this merger means more choice for the consumer, how could antitrust play a role here? I mean, unless they're lying about removing choices from the market place will result in more choices in the market place, but doordash wouldn't do that would they?
I mean neither of these companies provide an important service. If they both disappeared tomorrow I think most people wouldn't care.
IMO grocery delivery is a game changer. I don't use either service, but use a different one[s]. Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's etc, and I don't have to put on outdoor clothes, walk to my car, navigate traffic, navigate the aisles, wait in line, reverse... IMO big QOL of life increase.
And second-order effects like I can always have fresh fruit + veggies / not worrying about rot by getting it in smaller quantities delivered more often.
For those wondering about price: It's much cheaper than takeout or prepared food delivery, but more expensive than getting your own groceries. Offset a bit by less food waste.
> Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's
In my experience its significantly more expensive for groceries: up to 20% for items + service fee + subscription + tip.
I was canceling Instacart subscription and they offered me another year for discounted price ($17). I kept it but I won’t ever extend it for full price given how much more it costs.
I should clarify: I'm referring to Amazon (prime or whole foods), which I understand is significantly cheaper than Instacart. It might be worth cross-shopping in this case.
How can that be profitable on the long run?
Feels like it will end up more expensive in a few years
I suspect this as well. Enjoying it while it lasts... I suspect the facilities being vertically-designed for this helps, but not enough(Especially the prime groceries; I suspect Whole foods has some but not the same extend?)
But if they were gone, the worst is you're putting pants on and getting your own products. There are not essential, they're simply a labor and regulatory arbitrage for gig workers to schlep product to consumers at very low wages.
I get this, but there are a few scenarios where grocery delivery is genuinely amazing.
- My parents are determined to age in place in their home. They get tired more easily than they used to, and aren't capable of doing as much. Especially in the winter, grocery delivery is a huge help for them.
- People with disabilities may or may not be capable of going to the store. Even for the ones who are capable, it is a much larger time commitment.
- For parents of young kids, leaving the house isn't just putting on pants. It's checking diapers, getting the kids to wear shoes, and timing the trip so it doesn't interfere with naptime, feedings, etc. This is a temporary phase! It doesn't take long before the kids are big enough to enjoy a trip to the store.
I agree, these are all valid use cases, but you don’t need a tech platform to offer and perform delivery.
Not everyone can just "put their pants on." For some, its more of an ordeal at a physical level.
Yes. I can’t drive for medical reasons and I live in a rural area with poor public transport. If my wife had to stop driving we would have to use grocery delivery or move
Does DD or IC deliver reliably in rural areas in general?
if they were gone, the worst is you're putting pants on and getting your own products
Says someone with no problems putting on his pants and making a grocery run.
Just try to remember your own words when you get older. You'll get your turn. Everyone does.
Only the lucky get old.
Anyway what a strange attitude to have on a tech forum. Why do we need HN, let's discuss this over a game of bowling!
what a strange attitude to have on a tech forum.
How so? Do tech people never get hurt? They never slip on ice? Blow out a knee playing a sport? Trip over a power cable?
What a strange attitude to think that everyone on a tech forum is identical, and also in identically healthy shape.
"Game of bowling?" Are you a bot, or something?
I’m trying to agree with you, the strange attitude is being anti instacart
Valid!
Antitrust does not have "important service" requirement. What has happened in gaming is another travesty but there is plenty of people who would say it's not "important service". Antitrust must be universal.
I know a lot of people who survive (almost) exclusively off take out and delivery. Especially in cities like NYC.
Right but where's the moat?
And takeout and delivery existed before this.
Takeout and prepared food delivery is much more expensive than grocery delivery.
TYVM. But I rely on Instacart as I live alone and can't drive anymore since my eye surgery 10 years ago. If I didn't have instacart I don't know how I'd ever get any groceries.
Grocery delivery is an important service for a large chunk of the population. About 40 million people in the country (mostly low income) live in food deserts. Plenty more don't own cars. Doordash & co have burned VC money for a decade to monopolize the delivery pipeline so restaurants and grocery stores rarely hire their own drivers anymore. And now with this kind of consolidation they can raise their prices unchecked.
Do you have a source that these low income Americans are the ones who are ordering food? My understanding was this was largely people with additional disposable income who were doing it for convenience and not necessity as the product for the price was a good enough trade off. I find it hard to believe low income Americans are getting their groceries delivered when they can’t afford the base prices for the most part.
Walmart+ actually provides a 50% discount if you have a valid benefits card, so that's "only" $7 a month to get "free delivery" from Walmart on the regular. All sent out to their Spark Delivery low-paid gig drivers.
https://www.walmart.com/plus/assist https://www.sparkdriverapp.com/en_us.html
The food desert thing has been debunked. And the notion that millions of low income people are using DD to get broccoli delivered is laughable.
I'd be curious to see if it lowered food prices at all if these services and their upcharges weren't around anymore to influence pricing.
What if you’re disabled and need to order food ?
The way this was handled before these gig economy food delivery companies sprang up. People didn't automatically die of starvation because they were disabled and became adults prior to DoorDash. Medicaid and Meals on Wheels fill in some of the gaps depending upon age and state.
These companies springing up put the old ones out of business. For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now. There's no going back to the "old way" when it doesn't exist. And now this kind of consolidation means they get to jack up prices however they want.
Those restaurants simply didn't deliver at all in those days.
Pizzarias and other traditional delivery food businesses still hire their own drivers in many cases.
> For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now.
Before DoorDash, other than pizza places (who still run their own drivers), what restaurants delivered? McDonald's tried delivery for a short period of time, but other than that, nobody delivered.
How many of their customers fit this description?
I had a co worker who was deaf.
Luckily he came of age just as texting took off. I guess in theory he could of relied upon a translator to make phone calls for him, but his life was much improved by modern communication.
Even if new technology makes things easier for 99% of people who are lazy, but is essential for that last 1%, it's a net positive.
Consolidation in this industry is horrible for everyone. Less competition means higher prices and lower pay.
oh no :(
"More Choice for Consumers"
A truly laughable fig leaf for the non-existent anti-trust regulators.
Capital wants a monopoly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291135 - October 2026
Cool they will now charge $50 per delivery and give the drivers -10$ ?
There is zero cost of building matching systems (maybe 200$ worth of Claude subscription). Drivers and restaurants will be better off if they build their own ones. These centralized platforms need to die ASAP.
That sounds great, now convince consumers they don't want Monopoly one-stop platforms where they can order/purchase anything they can think of.
Google maps has the website links of your restaurants. You can just click it and order there.
The restaurant then can broadcast the driver demand and delivery prize in their website. Drivers can be scanning all the restaurants in their area and decide if they want to take it or not. Restaurants over time will build lists of reliable drivers whom they will favor when matching.
Dude, I pickup my own food with my own car 99/100 times.
I'm not saying a system couldn't be designed/work. I'm saying time and time and time again, it's been shown that consumers want a monopoly platform for convenience.
Oh that is fair. So maybe cost can help drive the decision? If going direct gets me delivery with $10 but door dash needs $40 I am incentivized as a customer to go direct.
Instacart fired my wife for running for office. My wife asked for approval to run from her boss, the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, who approved it and the company was excited for her to run.
A couple days after my wife launched her campaign, Instacart did a 180 and told her they had to fire her for running. Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
My wife was also pregnant and she told them. They fired her the next day.
Congratulations on the merger.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/15/instacart...
My son lost his job so did InstaCart for a while. He got really good at it and started making good money. Then they sent him to an apartment complex but didn't give him an apartment number.
He called support who contacted the customer and said they were on their way and could he wait five minutes. Of course he did but 30 minutes went by.
Contacted support again who said customer would be there in five minutes but, 15 minutes later, support said to just take the goods back to the store.
He took the goods back to the store but the store refused to accept them. Support said he could just donate them or keep them.
Despite showing the back and forth text messages, he was deactivated for not delivering to the customer.
We're supposed to sue companies when they treat us like this but few of us do because it's a difficult process. Companies know this and act with impunity.
Did you mean "mandatory arbitration"? Suing is such a 20th century action.
I wonder if this would have affected the result, though. I haven't been through either process, but it seems like either would be a venue for making your case and getting a fair judgement. My understanding (which could be totally wrong, please correct me) is that companies mostly force arbitration because it is cheaper and less variable than trials, not necessarily because the results tend to be biased toward them. Is that true?
Have you wondered why its cheaper and less variable than trials?
My understanding is that it's cheaper because it is mediated by largely by a single person in a conference room, rather than the heavier process of collecting a jury. And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Collecting a jury doesn't cost the participants of a lawsuit anything. And the vast majority of civil cases do not make it to trial.
>And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
The vast majority of civil cases do not go to a jury, so again, I don't think this is good reasoning. The difference is mostly in discovery, which in an arbitration is stacked against any plaintiff bringing their claims compared to what they'd be entitled to in state or federal courts. That's probably the biggest reason they are less variable, in my experience.
>It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Well according to you, you don't really have any idea of any of this, you are just reflecting your understandings which are based on what?
> Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
But that doesn't mean those biases are not present.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks. (I admitted to not knowing and was open to being corrected. I appreciate you actually correcting my understanding, rather than assuming I hadn't even considered it.)
Have you proven why? To make my point again: we just feel like it won't work so we don't even try
The issue of whether or not "forced" arbitration agreements are binding is different, but in this context I don't see it being something an employee can get out of. Some states have laws, for example, that destroy arbitration agreements in employment contexts for sexual harassment claims. If you have anything to offer, I'm more than happy to consider it. Short of that, I don't really see what point you're actually making besides "Maybe? I don't know!"
Arbitration is not nearly as one-sided as people make it out to be. It's much more about making sure that the case can be completed quickly than it is about the company winning.
The company, of course, knows all the tricks to win consistently.
That's just as true in real court.
If you have an absolute lay-up of a case (something like "my company fired me because I got pregnant, and lied about by pretending to change their mind about something they'd already approved of"), then you're going to win the arbitration case. Well, more accurately, the company's going to throw a pile of cash at you before it even gets that far, because they screwed up and the first time legal hears about it, the first words out of their mouth will be "you did fucking what?".
It is nigh impossible to cleanly fire an employee from the time you learn they're pregnant, to like a year after they come back from maternity leave. Unless they broke into your office and took a shit on the desk, the default opinion of every judge is going to be "I read about this exact scenario while studying for the bar, literally textbook".
See that's part of the difficult process. Mandatory arbitration clauses aren't even always valid.but we just assume they are.
they want you to sue your phone
Instacart stole money from me.
When COVID hit, I got sick and had to spend several days inside ordering delivery. And more than once, the store was missing half my order. So I then had to make new orders for the food I wasn't able to get the first time -- while they refunded me only for the items they didn't have, leaving me to eat the (multiple) delivery fees and driver tips.
Fascinatingly, this is not prima facie illegal in many US states! Wow. We live in a corporatist hell hole don’t we?
Brendan Eich was fired from Mozilla for a $1k political donation.
Corporatist hellhole was your reaction to that too I imagine.
* Technically resigned, but there was significant pressure from Mozilla.
One of them is a worker drone with very little power, the other is the company's founder and CEO who is openly telling people that he believes a decent chunk of his employees don't deserve basic human rights. Quite a difference there, don't you think?
Software, especially open-source has an over-representation of people that identify as LGBTQ. Brendan openly signaled that he thought a good subset of his employees did not deserve the same rights as others. I don't see how he could have been an effective CEO after doing that.
It would've been a huge liability for Mozilla. An employer is not allowed to discriminate on sexuality. Fire any LGBTQ employee, and there's now a decent chance that Mozilla will now have to prove in court that it didn't have anything to do with the CEO openly hating gay people and creating a hostile work environment.
What a strange hill to stand on at this time. The overwhelming public backlash, boycotts, and resulting damage to Mozilla's brand left Eich with no practical choice but to step down.
“Overwhelming.” Eich made a modest donation to a ballot initiative, which got majority support by California btw.
But in any case, your point is “it was damaging the company, therefore it makes sense to see them gone.” And there’s your parallel.
—
In reality, whether corporate agnosticism is right depends almost exclusively on your feelings of the underlying cause.
What would be illegal about firing an employee who you think is causing your company to get a bad image?
> The lawsuit says Instacart violated a California law that bars companies from preventing their employees from becoming candidates for public office, among other complaints.
What would be the consequences of ensuring that only those with enough personal wealth to be able to go without a job while campaigning can run for office?
The thing about legality is that you kinda get to chose. In your case the companies' interests weight more than the people's interest.
For example in the US it's totally legal to spy on your employees with key loggers &co, in most of Europe it isn't
She approached to ask for permission. If they had any reservations, that was the time to discuss them. She did what was expected of an employee. The fact that they blessed her and then went back on their word seems wrong.
Not a lawyer but my intuition says there might be some legal grounds here favouring the wife.
My take is someone even higher up found out later and did not like it. Now it’s entirely possible the individuals who gave their blessings were supportive of the party the wife was standing for, and the ones above them weren’t? Still whoever blessed the campaign did so in their capacity as a senior officer of the company. A total shit show nevertheless.
To the original commenter: sorry this happened to your wife. Hope she’s able to find another job that treats her right. Also congrats on the baby, hoping parenthood makes up for all of this and more. Sending the best of wishes your way.
AFAIK in every US state a company can fire you for any reason that’s not protected, and “we told you this was okay but changed our minds” is as good a reason as any in the law’s eyes.
In many US states a company can fire you even for protected reasons, and just fabricate a reason that isn't protected. Of course there are examples of people fighting this because it sometimes is a fight worth having, but the vast majority just have to accept being discriminated against and try to find another job.
I think Montana is the only state not "at-will"
Puerto Rico is technically not a state, but as part of the US, and counted in the statistics of the (federal) Department of Labor, I would also count it as a _not "at-will"_ state.
Correct. If she had something in writing, signed by a person with proper authority in the organization, she might be on stronger footing. But they could just find some other reason, or state "no reason" for her termination, and that's perfectly legal in an at-will employment.
If I ask my employer if I can start a YouTube channel and then after getting permission I start posting videos that make the company look bad, and showing how awesome competitor products were I wouldn't be surprised if I got fired. I wouldn't be fired for the account but what I did with it.
We don’t know if the person did any such thing (bad mouth the company or its products).
However, in the scenario they did, then the company would have grounds to fire them.
Well in normal countries…firing them for something they did outside work. In American vernacular, something something free speech.
You have the right to free speech. Your employer, like anyone else, has a right to not be associated with what you say.
I'm curious to hear other people's perspectives on why they think they should be illegal?
For example: Suppose you hire someone to help you move furniture.
You can decide you dont like the color of their shoes and tell them to kick rocks.
You dont owe anyone a job, and labor for pay is a contractual agreement, nothing more.
Color of shoes is one thing, that’s fair game.
Buuut it’s probably better for society to not kneecap ordinary folks just for trying to run for office. Otherwise, you only get folks in office with deep pockets who can take the hit.
Sure, it's a dick move. But it's important to distinguish "shouldn't" from "legally can't".
Should you be racist? No. Should you call someone fat and ugly? No.
But personal liberty and freedom require we allow people to make choices and have opinions we don't personally agree with.
Personal liberty and freedom also require people to be free from economic coercion so that we can exercise those rights. Corporations have an asymmetric amount of power and we should stop anthropomorphizing them.
I recommend Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/images/2/2e/Paradox_of_...
I think we're on the same page:
Freedom of speech and self-expression applies to just that: wordsIf intolerance or hate poses a physical threat, or in any way infringes on the liberty and personal autonomy of others, a line has been crossed and must be swiftly dealt with.
I’m guessing you may not be from a minority and/or you live in a safe area? It’s a common occurrence for bigots to lob “words” at those people, in a way that they rightfully do not feel safe. On occasion, it escalates. What this means is that those people, for their own safety, have to act differently than they normally would. For example, gay/lesbian couples often have to pretend to be straight and can’t have a normal night out and display affection without being in danger.
In addition to the possibility of peril, there is also the psychological harm these interactions cause, and the living in fear.
It is only those who are safe who believe words from the intolerant are harmless. The intolerant count on that lack of knowledge to get away with “just asking questions”.
I hope you and your loved ones never have to go through any such interactions, they are harrowing, but I also urge you to have deep discussions with the recipients of them to understand a bit better why we should protect them instead of dismissing their concerns.
I spent years in prison and homeless, lol
Being denied housing or employment was not just a regular occurrence but the norm for me for a large portion of my life
It limits the ability for someone to run for office. Making it only so people who CAN afford to not work to run. Seems unfair.
Even if an employee has the authority to make a decision, executive leadership should still have the legal right to terminate someone if they disagree with that choice. Let's not make running a business illegal.
I see this totally wild she even had to ask permission for running for office, or at least from an European perspective.
I don't understand it from an American perspective. Is this a standard practice in large companies?
Political beliefs or views are not a "protected class" in US federal employment law. That said, most employers at least say that they support political participation, but once you start taking public actions it becomes a bit different.
If a person made a large contribution or gave other public support to an extremist candidate, an employer might not want any association with that.
If running for an office is going to take up a significant amount of one's time, such that it might impact availability for work during normal hours, an employer would care about that.
In this specfic case, if she was featuring "I work for Instacart" in any way in her campaign they might care about that.
If she was saying anything inflamatory or controversial, Instacart might not want to be associated with that.
So running for a nonpartisan office such as a local council or school board or similar would normally not be any issue. Anything where party politics feature prominently is going to be riskier.
I believe only California lists "political affiliation" as a protected class.
So most states you can be fired for voting wrong.
Apparently.
It's a standard practice in suppressing democratic norms yes. The US has a long sordid history of the elites absolutely hating when commoners practice democratic beliefs.
Let's not forget that many of our "founding fathers" deeply hated democracy and when speaking of the "democracy problem" of the 1780s in America it was mostly referring to commoners in Massachusetts participating in civic duties.
This tradition has never went away and is still practiced today.
I mean, running for office is essentially a full time job right?
It seems totally reasonable to both have a law that protects a citizen’s right to run for office without losing their job, but it also seems reasonable to require some sort of coordination with an employer.
(Knowing nothing about this, it is seems like it should work roughly like an extended jury duty.)
I don't understand why this is getting downvoted, I'm surprised as well
How's the lawsuit going?
Wow. Cant you sue for wrongful termination ? I am assuming this was considered and not followed through. What are the legal details here ?
Literally article's description:
> Lisa Vedernikova Khanna, a candidate in Virginia, says in a lawsuit that the mobile shopping giant cited concerns her bid could hurt the company with President Donald Trump.
It should be illegal to do what instacart did to your wife.
They always had a slimy reputation. I interviewed there very early on and two of the engineers interviewing me told me they fire people 1 day from vesting constantly...
In California the courts look very poorly on that, just in case that ever happens to you.
Sounds like your wife has a good case for a lawsuit
And still people will continue to use their services. :(
I am of course very sympathetic to your wife and think it is outrageous that someone should lose their job this way but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice. I hope she wins the lawsuit and gets paid out but I can’t hate Instacart for being pragmatic.
> I can’t hate Instacart for being pragmatic
Can you criticize them instead for firing her for something that their Chief Corporate Affairs Officer explicitly gave her permission to do? If it was a matter of pragmatism, they could have declined her request for permission. (One might separately argue about whether this should be a matter of right vs a matter of permission, but regardless, she did seek permission and was granted it.)
How many examples do we need of the Trump administration doing some illegal move then getting slapped down by the courts? This would be a slam dunk for DoorDash. That they chose to capitulate instead is damning.
The courts eventually ruling against the administration doesn’t undo the harm caused. A Trump tirade against Instacart could be a death sentence for the business.
Based on the ground you're treading I'd be careful with your casual use of "death sentence" when talking about something that is nothing of the sort, but behaviours that are only a few steps from the real thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out
>> but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice
That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?
I can hate for you then.
Same.
> Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
I think it's a fully justified reason. If I'm in a senior position and I say something that in someway hurts the company reputation/income, I would be fired. If the company liveness depend on me being fired, the I think the decision is justified.
Even after being specifically told that running was ok?
Running doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. I don't say firing is morally correct, but most companies don't work on moral. It's sad that this is the state, but what can you do? Companies are entities that want money, nothing stands in the way.
> I would be fired
Ok, but _should_ you be fired? And - if so - why?
It's strange that the internet, which reduces friction and allows strangers to talk directly to each other more easily than ever before, has given rise to these massive companies that do absolutely nothing but serve as middlemen. Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Lyft... in a normal transaction with these companies, nobody who actually works for them ever does a damned thing for me. They exist solely to transmit a few hundred bytes of information from me to the driver, along with some of my money while keeping a bunch of it for themselves. For doing what, exactly?
At the end of the day, I guess their real product is trust. I wouldn't give $50 to a random stranger and ask them to drive me to the airport, but I would give $50 to Uber so they can give $25 to the stranger. It sure seems like a lot to pay for trust, though.
Anti-trust legislation is all well and good, but worthless when politicians are corrupt.
How much do you think the tip was?
I used to use DoorDash and Instacart almost daily. Then I got a retail job.
I see and interact with hundreds of people a day. DoorDashers are the worst of the worst, by a mile. I cannot wait for the day DoorDash ceases to exist.
I can spot a DoorDasher from a mile away. There are three types of DoorDashers.
The first is the kind who is most likely not here legally. They come barreling into the store with their speakerphones turned up to the max as they yell into the phone to their wife/girlfriend in some other language (Venezuelan/Cuban?) the entire time. Without any attempt to look on their own, they find every worker they see and shove the phone in their face demanding and begging to have us do their job for them and find the items. Then they get in line, phone still blasting, and ignore you when you smile and say hello or ask them to touch a button on the screen or say “thank you, have a nice rest of your day”. This kind makes up probably about 70% of DDers. Mind you, I interact with non-English speakers all day. They make eye contact, they smile, they make an attempt. DoorDashers make zero attempt whatsoever and are extremely brash and rude.
The second is the citizens who cannot get a job anywhere else. These are all very clearly drug addicts and former convicts straight out of the halfway house who shop and deliver under the influence of every mixture of drug you can imagine. Really, really rough people. These people, too, also beg you to complete their entire shopping trip for them, but at least they understand English and make eye contact with you. These are about 20% of DDers.
The last group are the “okay” ones. These are decent everyday people who talk to you like a human being, smile, and are friendly. They only ask for help after they’ve clearly made an effort to find the items on their own. Unfortunately, this group makes up only about 10% of adders.
We got along just fine a few years ago when DoorDash didn’t exist. DD contributes to the anti socialization of the world, and it’s not a good thing.
Think really hard - why would doordash laborers be like that? Each thing you state - rudeness, brashness, drug addicts, convicts, etc, are all signs of desperation. People don't want to rush through their life or work as if being whipped. Its a job of indiscriminate last resort because they are paid as little as humanly possible and forced by an algorithm to adhere to timetables. Doordash and Instacart both make hefty profits, and spend at least 2-3x on their corporate employees and executive management as they do those actually performing the work. Your complaints are a direct reflection of the system that they control - if you want more pleasant laborers, ask them to make their labor less demanding.
> they yell into the phone to their wife/girlfriend in some other language (Venezuelan/Cuban?)
Spanish.
Girl in Atlanta got chopped into pieces on a DoorDash delivery. I predict the same outcome once private equity gets its hand on this mess in 5 years.
Personally a doordash and instacart are like utility platforms if we are planning to use them to replace conventional means of delivery and discovery.
So I honestly think they should be under heavy govt regulations or be co-owned by everyone in the supply chain. Or firm regulated to avoid overcharging for useless stuff, everyone loses out including these companies as in needing to compete with eachother they have to offer dozens of benefits offers etc to customers, and customers get shafted when they are the most desperate because making money from the desperate is the best money making formula in the valley atm.