Silicon Valley Turned Your Burrito into a Capitalist Nightmare

I currently work in a restaurant with doordash. While I rarely have to take to-go orders and doordash orders, I see my Coworkers who hate taking doordash orders.

First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. On a busy night our Togo person makes ~50 in tips, so they just don't pay as much attention to the door dash orders.

Second, no matter how long we quote the order, the driver always shows up immediately and gets in the way of the servers and bussers and other customers (its a fairly small restaurant with no waiting area) so usually we are rushing to try and finish the order to get them to leave.

I don't know a single person in the restaurant except the owner who likes the doordash system, but as long as people keep ordering it'll stay

Let’s see: someone other than the restaurant usually inputs the menu, the menu can change, and prices change whenever costs go up.

Not every business owner necessarily wants to maintain a Doordash page because they have work to do, the same work they’ve been doing for 30 years, and every other Silicon Valley company wants to “partner” with them. Yelp wants them to advertise and maybe put those asinine digital wait lists out. Doordash wants them to maintain their online menu, them and 47 other delivery startups, most of whom also want to send you and iPad loaded with their own delivery receipt system. Google wants you to maintain your Maps listing and a million “SEO” whorehouses will spam call you to death to try and maintain it on your behalf. FiveStars would like to stick a little loyalty kiosk right on your counter, and all of this while juggling suppliers. Then there’s the random new credit card processors that pop up every now and then, staffing companies, job boards, et cetera and all of this is just the tip of the ice berg.

When I used to work in a café, I saw that someone listed our menu on Doordash. Every now and then a deliveryman would walk up to the counter and shove a phone in my face, and after making it clear to them that this is bad etiquette, I proceeded to point out: 1. The prices are all wrong, 2. Some of those things we don’t even have anymore, 3. Also they selected two types of bread because for some inexplicable reason, there was a separate bread and roll category, 4. Occasionally we would be out of a particular item, because oftentimes suppliers run out of things as well, or we decided to replace it with a different item. They would then try to call their customer, the customer would reject the call, and I would improvise with what was left. In a regular situation, I could talk to my customers directly, and deliver a good customer experience, but I couldn’t do that when there’s a middleman, a middleman who often didn’t speak English very well and was more often than not, shoving their phone right under my nose while I’m in the middle of making sandwiches for customers that were sitting in the store.

There is your primer on Doordash and also Postmates if they’re still kicking. I recommend you order from places that have setup a real pipeline for deliveries and have changed their business to accommodate it rather than assuming they did just because Doordash exists.

You missed the point. No one at the restaurant is getting a tip. The same person who would package up the food if you picked up in person (and who you would customarily tip) is the same person packaging up DoorDash orders, but with no incentive. The person getting tipped is the delivery service employee.

From a customer perspective I couldn’t disagree more. Calling on the phone to order something is often infuriating —- dealing with thick accents and loud background noise it could be awful to communicate.

With DoorDash and similar apps, you can place the order online and be precise about what you want, and get updates on where your order is.

It’s not perfect to be sure, but the “nightmare” is ridiculously exaggerated in the article. P

I believe there are reasons to be unhappy about those services, but you don't have to use them, whether you're a restaurant or consumer.

And senseless leftist opinions are devaluing the article. Example:

> They made sleek apps and clever algorithms, and paid people who couldn’t find a job a fraction of their labor value to pick up food and drop it off at your house.

These exploited people didn't make any fraction of their labor value prior to betting exploited. Why do they work when they're free to avoid that exploitation?

If the article had details on how customers get screwed, that would have helped. But overall repeat customers don't care about how items are organized, they look at the total price and whether the transaction makes sense for them.

I don't give a crap if the burger I ordered is X% cheaper at the restaurant that makes it. If it can be delivered in time and the total price is lower than the value I attribute to this service, it's a good deal for me.