> At 2-3% the profits on that bill drop down to nowhere near enough to cover gas, mileage, health insurance, unemployment tax, and everything else tacked on for the true cost of delivery.
I don't understand how most of those things are "true costs" at all.
This type of work is ideal for college students, who are typically still on their parents health insurance, or as supplementary work for someone who already has a full time job and wants to work a few extra hours.
Unemployment doesn't even make sense in this context because you work whatever hours you want and they don't really do layoffs. Even if the company went out of business, there are several others offering the same type of work immediately to anyone.
Gas costs money, but how much is highly dependent on vehicle type and people doing this type of work have the obvious incentive to use higher efficiency vehicles where the gas for this kind of trip would cost less than $1, and for the same reason to choose more reliable vehicles with below average maintenance costs.
The way you get really gnarly cost estimates is by using the same depreciation models that corporations do when they buy new vehicles for the sole purpose of making deliveries -- because you then lose $10,000 or more in value over the first few years of ownership regardless of mileage or anything else you do. But for someone using a personal vehicle they would need regardless, that huge reduction in value due to age is already a sunk cost.
And it is a bad deal for anyone who is trying to make a long-term career out of it, but the people expecting to do that should look elsewhere for employment. Not every job is a career, and why should it have to be?
It is better for jobs with high flexibility and low compensation to exist for the people who want them. The people who need less flexibility and more compensation should choose different jobs.