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DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

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Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#161

Post by Consultant32452 »

crmd wrote: post #156
Consultant32452 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has the local restaurant scene recovered from the lockdowns? I live in a smaller city and we have recovered some but it's nothing like it was. I heard it was particularly rough in NYC.

In my experience, the more "corporate" restaurant groups are growing but the less well capitalized small businesses are in a world of hurt trying to balance the books with the leftovers after the rise in physical rent and advertising/platform company costs.

Now that you have written it, this models my experience too. Thanks for sharing.

Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#162

Post by koolba »

candiddevmike wrote: post #140
crmd wrote: post #131

As an old person, I'd like to point out that my hometown of New York City had a dynamic, world class restaurant scene, including a cornucopia of home delivery, long before the tech platform companies found a way to siphon ~40% of consumer spend out of the local restaurant economy in exchange for some friction reduction. We were doing great. But you had a drawer full of paper menus and had to call the restaurant.

And if you called the restaurant enough, you typically got on a first name basis with them and had incredible customer service. Now you're just another customer #47523 that created order #37324.

> And if you called the restaurant enough, you typically got on a first name basis with them and had incredible customer service.

Also Caller ID isn’t that new.

Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#163

Post by handy2000 »

darth_avocado wrote: post #155
crmd wrote: post #131

As an old person, I'd like to point out that my hometown of New York City had a dynamic, world class restaurant scene, including a cornucopia of home delivery, long before the tech platform companies found a way to siphon ~40% of consumer spend out of the local restaurant economy in exchange for some friction reduction. We were doing great. But you had a drawer full of paper menus and had to call the restaurant.

This was not very doable pretty much everywhere outside NYC. The lower density of restaurants made it harder for delivery to be a thing except all the pizza places that offered it.

At the end of the day this is all driven by market dynamics that affect everyone. Uber Eats doesn't have a secret sauce that makes it cheaper for drivers to deliver food in cities with lower restaurant density. Someone has to pay for gas, someone has to pay for drivers' time. Even in large cities Uber Eats is now more expensive than ordering directly from restaurants in the past, why would it be different for cities with fewer restaurants?

Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#164

Post by handy2000 »

dragontamer wrote: post #159
handy2000 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are describing a completely different service though. Prep-meal delivery also works, but it's addressing a different usage pattern. In the same way you could propose to replace Uber with... buses? 15 people get on the same bus at a specific time and get dropped off within 5 miles, thus optimizing the process.

UberEats is a "bus" that pretends otherwise. I've seen the Uber drivers come in. They always grab like 4 or 5 orders, and possibly drive to a 2nd or 3rd restaraunt before they start delivering. Its not like those UberEats drivers have a big penalty if they arrive late or if the food is cold. ----------- What I'm saying is, consolidated food delivery services is *already* what we have with DoorDash/UberEats/whatever,…

You are partially correct describing that some delivery drivers already batch their orders. But that's still a different use case. Foodsby can't scale to 15 min increments for all restaurants in the city. While some people can preplan and are OK ordering food from a specific restaurant that Foodsby works with, most people don't want that. How many people want to order food from an expensive Spanish (i.e. Spanish, not Mexican) restaurant I order from sometimes? So my options are going to be: #1 not ordering from this restaurant because it's not a common food preference and is expensive or #2 wait for 15 people to join the order for this restaurant and get food hours or days later.

It's a good business idea, it's just a different usage pattern. I order food when I am hungry. I don't preplan, don't like food from the majority of popular local places (pizza, Mexican, Chinese).

Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#165

Post by troupo »

Nextgrid wrote: post #46
kiba wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't really viable business models to begin with. Only VC funding can keep these online platform up.

The basic concept of food delivery existed long before tech and VC and was viable. The only reason these companies can't turn a profit is because all those microservices, ads and "engagement" don't come for free.

> The only reason these companies can't turn a profit is because

is because their business model is unviable and unsustainable

Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#166

Post by rendang »

hotpotamus wrote: post #41
kiba wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't really viable business models to begin with. Only VC funding can keep these online platform up.

I've never really gotten this. We can speculate about the intelligence of VCs, but I assume most of them know a bit of basic math. I wonder if perhaps they are so deep into a bubble of wealth and privilege that to them, spending $50 for a (cold by the time it arrives) burger seemed reasonable. Perhaps they thought that once everyone could experience this for an amount of money they find trifling, it would catch on? I…

A lot of Americans can't "reasonably" spend $25+ on a single delivery meal but do anyway, probably quite often on 25% APR credit cards

Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#167

Post by handy2000 »

zepton wrote: post #147

DoorDash is being misleading when they imply that NYC required a minimum wage of $29.93/hr for delivery workers. DoorDash could comply with the bylaw by paying its contractors $17.96/hr for the full time they work (including time waiting for orders). But DoorDash instead chose to use the "Alternate Method" which has a 67% higher minimum wage, but only for the time the contractor is actively delivering food (not stand…

Does this also introduce a bad incentive for drivers to delivery food slowly? Or do delivery apps account for that somehow already?..

Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#168

Post by JumpCrisscross »

crmd wrote: post #156
Consultant32452 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has the local restaurant scene recovered from the lockdowns? I live in a smaller city and we have recovered some but it's nothing like it was. I heard it was particularly rough in NYC.

In my experience, the more "corporate" restaurant groups are growing but the less well capitalized small businesses are in a world of hurt trying to balance the books with the leftovers after the rise in physical rent and advertising/platform company costs.

> the more "corporate" restaurant groups are growing but the less well capitalized small businesses are in a world of hurt

Within the <$50/diner category, yes. It seems this is where the new Applebees/Ruby Tuesdays are forming. Above that, there is an explosion of creativity in the fine and pseudufine dining categories.

Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#169

Post by chimeracoder »

jltsiren wrote: post #84
Nextgrid wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic concept of food delivery existed long before tech and VC and was viable. The only reason these companies can't turn a profit is because all those microservices, ads and "engagement" don't come for free.

Food delivery existed before platforms, but only where it made sense. You could order something like a pizza, where the marginal cost and effort required to make another meal was low, and the sales volume was high enough to justify using paid employees for delivery. Service area was also chosen by the restaurant itself to ensure that they would not spend too much time on a single delivery. In the end, it's pretty sim…

> Food delivery existed before platforms, but only where it made sense.

This article is about NYC, where food delivery was ubiquitous long before DoorDash. In fact, Seamless in 2010 was a better experience than Doordash is in 2023, when you consider the absurd markup on Doordash.

Doordash struggled to enter the NYC market for a while because it was trying to compete with an established product, yet using a higher price point. It was only with massive amounts of VC funding that they were able to get a foothold.

Re: DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

#170

Post by dragontamer »

handy2000 wrote: post #164
dragontamer wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UberEats is a "bus" that pretends otherwise. I've seen the Uber drivers come in. They always grab like 4 or 5 orders, and possibly drive to a 2nd or 3rd restaraunt before they start delivering. Its not like those UberEats drivers have a big penalty if they arrive late or if the food is cold. ----------- What I'm saying is, consolidated food delivery services is *already* what we have with DoorDash/UberEats/whatever,…

You are partially correct describing that some delivery drivers already batch their orders. But that's still a different use case. Foodsby can't scale to 15 min increments for all restaurants in the city. While some people can preplan and are OK ordering food from a specific restaurant that Foodsby works with, most people don't want that. How many people want to order food from an expensive Spanish (i.e. Spanish, not…

> Foodsby can't scale to 15 min increments for all restaurants in the city.

For some definition of increments and "all", yes they can.

Restaraunt#1 delivers at 10:15am.

Restaraunt#2 delivers at 10:30am.

Etc. etc. etc. Covering the entirety of lunch hours. This is how it works in practice, today.

If you're in a location with lots of Foodsby usage, then you might have 3 or 4 different Foodsby locations to check within a reasonable distance, which dramatically increases the restaurants and timeslots available. Like 1x Foodsby is already fine, but if you're in an area with 5x walking-distance Foodsby dropoff points like I am, things start to get really convenient, and the selection becomes dramatically wider.

It also means for the drivers, that one "trip" can hit 3, 4, 5 offices in one drive. I'm sure that on Foodsby days, these drivers are delivering multiple dozens of meals. In fact, the *MANAGER* of one local Restaurant was the driver for one of my recent orders (we recognize each other's faces because I visited his restaraunt a lot, so it surprised me to see the manager making delivery runs). So its more fulfilling work than typical grunt labor, since they're making so many deliveries on relatively low effort. If he's got ~30 orders, that's $60 ($2 per meal) in less than 30 minutes of driving/delivering, which is certainly more money flowing than most UberEats / DoorDash setups.

--------

Now yes, you may be arguing that "its not what you want". But... when that Spanish Restaraunt says "We're offering $2 delivery (no tip) 3 days from now at X-oclock"... I think you'll be thinking of using Foodsby that day.

Or maybe you check the website to see today's Restaraunts and whether or not your favorite is on the list.

-----------

In any case, _THIS_ is innovation. Actually playing with models and finding things that are better for everyone (chefs, restaraunt owners, drivers, users) as a whole. I'm sure other models can work too, for some sliding scale of individualism, bulk deliveries and whatnot.

But as far as the personalized 1-to-1 service? Its dead, its so dead I'm convinced it never even existed. UberEats _never_ promised a driver on the standby ready to personally serve you, and months/years of using the service has made it obvious to everyone.

There's only so many times that I get a meal 1.5 hours too late that causes me to give up on UberEats (and similar) services.

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