201–210 of 246 posts
The absolute entitlement to believe that delivery workers should be coming up to your door at the 9th floor, while complaining about "ethics". You're using a delivery service like Uber Eats, Deliveroo or Doordash that are well known to underpay, overwork and unjustly punish workers that do not maximize their deliveries per hour, and you have the gall to complain that they're not taking pride in their jobs from your i…
Some people have disabilities thou.
US perspective (eg theft of bikes / crime is not AS serious a problem as Brazil, although it can be bad): I'm a bit torn here. On the one hand, I fully empathize with the delivery drivers (particularly if the rules / policy of the app is NOT doorstep delivery) and where theft is a real issue. However, as a (US) consumer, where the apps DO allow us to request doorstep delivery, I think there is no issue with consumers…
It's slightly annoying and I probably order less because of it, but it's not the end of the world.
If it's that much of an issue, then insurance/replacing the bikes needs pricing into the delivery. It's not like the delivery drivers are currently earning good money, as far as I know they usually struggle to make minimum wage in most countries.
One of my principles is that you shouldn't screw with the people who deliver your packages. And this goes double if they're delivering food. If the man calls and says come down to get your food, your options at that point are a) come down to get your food, or b) refuse delivery. Anything else is out of scope here, _including_ the notion that the delivery person was supposed to deliver upstairs and is refusing. While…
So how are people with mobility issues or medical quarantine situations supposed to get their food if there isn’t a way to reliably arrange for delivery people to bring it to (at least outside) their door? And yes, both of these circumstances have happened to me at times within the last few years, though fortunately not so far in a permanent way. Other people do have such limitations permanently.
Be mad at the companies for not accommodating you like they should legally be required, not the individual employees. The companies have worked very hard to push these "gig workers" to be as "efficient" (read overworked) as possible because that directly increases profit.
The company could add functionality to their app: "Click here for specialty service at an additional cost" but they don't want to do that because that's another nail in their claim that they are just facilitating contracting, so instead their system just pretends every order is the happy path trivial order, and punishes you if you take an order with a giant tip for extra or special instructions.
The company building the app is choosing to fuck you over so they can also continue to fuck over the people stuck working for them. That's who you should get angry at.
Let's revisit this excerpt from the article, which would mitigate many of these comments about how "workers should take pride in their work" and "do their job" and similar. They are doing their jobs. > "According to Rappi and iFood, which control over 90% of Brazil’s app delivery market, drivers do not need to make doorstep deliveries. On paper, representatives from both companies told Rest of World, their rules alre…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
15 minutes vs. 18 minutes - that's roughly a 17% pay cut for the driver, plus assumption of liability (for theft). I'll guess that ~100% of folks here on HN would feel themselves blatantly screwed over if they were on the receiving end of that deal.
Actually it's a 0% pay cut because you pay for apartment door delivery. It's a 17% theft if the delivery driver doesn't come up.
2. Have some compassion, delivery drivers are not rolling in cash
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I think it should just default to front-of-building but have a no-charge button to have delivery to the door which drivers can see in advance. Then if they don't want to bother they can skip it, and if people need a delivery to the door they can get that too without having to message and explain. Also gives people the option to add additional information on door codes/where to locate the door inside the ap…
I've always been severely disappointed that these "gig apps" aren't actually gig apps - you know, that support negotiation and other such things. Because having Uber tell me it will cost $10 but I get no service at all is not useful, especially if there was a driver who would have gone for it at $11 or $15 or whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are between a rock and a hard place: I think the game StarCitizen had a perfect visualization of their problem. When you try to trade resources, you make say 4% income on the trade. So if you trade say 2-million you can win about 200k or 400k, depending on server state. However the risk is your ship blows up, which could be because of a buggy crash or a server crash. The risk was "is the value I get from the wor…
> So they basically said "well if I get penalized ANYWAYS... might as well eat it, because it is equivalent to me" > I see zero ethical issues with what is happening. I think that's an equivalent economic outcome, but not an equivalent ethical outcome.
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And if you're a thief (not all thieves are just random people walking by) you will KNOW that someone who just jumped off a bike and locked it will not be back for a certain time, and tossing the bike into a truck, lock and all, could be a moment's time. So now you need to lock it to something, causing even more time lost.
That's what I did when I did bicycle deliveries. Yes it was a pain, but I considered it part of the job. But I was working for an individual pizza shop which did a good job making the job worthwhile overall and paid me well enough for my time and this sort of "extra effort".
Because that's the reality these delivery apps set up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're paid per delivery, then you don't want to faff about wasting time locking and unlocking a bike every single time
Yeah, these gig workers need to be paid enough to cover the time for faffing about with locks that are large enough to deter thieves for 10 minutes or so. I doubt they are, which drives these conflicts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how are people with mobility issues or medical quarantine situations supposed to get their food if there isn’t a way to reliably arrange for delivery people to bring it to (at least outside) their door? And yes, both of these circumstances have happened to me at times within the last few years, though fortunately not so far in a permanent way. Other people do have such limitations permanently.
The idea that it is poor worker's duty to give up income or safety in case one out of 100 customers have poor mobility is extremely entitled. Slowing down to help out someone like a good Samaritan explicitly harms the deliveryperson's performance in these apps. Be mad at the companies for not accommodating you like they should legally be required, not the individual employees. The companies have worked very hard to p…
I am just responding to and disagreeing with your argument that street delivery is generally enough, although I admit that Brazil might be a special case due to the level of theft risk that drivers in Brazil would have to deal with in order to deliver to the door.
Forcing disabled or quarantined people to pay extra is discriminatory, and forcing them to out their medical condition to a delivery service in order to avoid a surcharge is rather extreme. Delivery to the door was standard before the pandemic, and the deterioration of service is something we should reverse without undue harm to the workers rather than defend.
But I do sympathize with the delivery workers as well. They need stronger rights and I don’t want them to be overworked. But I would prefer that to be handled differently, like legislatively allowing them to sue the companies for 1 year’s full-time salary plus legal fees for every day they are given a (properly defined) abusively unreasonable set of expectations or abusively low pay per day. That way obligations to deliver to the door would not overwork or undercompensate them, and more workers would be hired to satisfy the part of the demand that currently leads to overwork. If they still don’t make enough income to find it a viable job, then as per supply and demand the apps will have to raise their compensation in order to attract enough workers when the number of deliveries or hours per day is legislatively capped.