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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

#211

Post by crmd »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #168
crmd wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here in the city, it's not just the Applebees/Ruby Tuesdays who are growing; there's another emerging level of corporate food service.

For example, a friend of mine is a data scientist who reports up into the CFO of a company that owns around 10 restaurants in New York, California, and Las Vegas. The flagship of the brand is a Michelin-starred celebrity chef.

His entire job is presenting to executives the profitability impact of experiments in changing the formulation of espresso martinis and leek soup. He says that the company is entirely, quantitatively, incrementally profit driven and "joyless, from the executive team down to the dishwashers". It honestly sounds to me like the most miserable, furthest possible thing from the romantic old new york storytelling of Anthony Bordain that could still be legally called restauranteuring.

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

#212

Post by bigtunacan »

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.

That's a generalization with no supporting data. As an actual sample size of 1; I lived in a smaller city of only about 250k people and there was a huge selection of restaurants that offered delivery, not just pizza.

Honestly DoorDash when it did come reduced restaurant profits, lowered quality of food delivered, and increased consumer costs. Zero advantage for anyone other than DoorDash unless you consider being able to search for the food in a single app and paying extra for it to be cold on arrival an advantage.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

crmd wrote: post #211
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Here in the city, it's not just the Applebees/Ruby Tuesdays who are growing; there's another emerging level of corporate food service. For example, a friend of mine is a data scientist who reports up into the CFO of a company that owns around 10 restaurants in New York, California, and Las Vegas. The flagship of the brand is a Michelin-starred celebrity chef. His entire job is presenting to executives the profitabili…

[deleted]

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

#214

Post by lozenge »

handy2000 wrote: post #150
dragontamer wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way it works is if someone else's time is an order of magnitude less valuable than yours. Ish. There's clearly a logistics problem here. 1-meal being delivered promptly on time scales poorly. But 15 meals delivered to 15 different people within 45 minutes is in fact, a net gain. Alas, Doordash and Uber have gone about it in all the wrong ways. Its the drivers who double-book this process (ie: picking up mo…

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.

Busses work, though. If you removed busses, there is no amount of Ubers you could add to the roads to "fix" the system. It's clearly impractical for each office worker to pay for even half an hour of someone's time every day to deliver a meal just to them. While most counter services can serve 20 meals with the same half hour of wages.

Uber Eats is doing it here in London with "ghost kitchens". 15 fast casual brands cooking (mostly reheating really) from 3 kitchens in 1 building. A much better chance for delivery drivers to be able to pick up multiple orders. It still isn't enough optimising though, as the destinations are still scattered.

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

#215

Post by multicast »

standardUser wrote: post #208
multicast wrote: post #206

That's awful. That happens when bureaucrats, who often don't understand the most simple basics of economics, mandate socialist rules to private companies. The companies affected by these policies will now just fire people to keep staff cost on the same level as before, period. Thus less people trying to fulfill the role of the same amount of delivery guys as before. And such more stress to fulfill more orders in the…

In Germany and the Nordic states wages are largely controlled by the powerful trade unions, the likes of which do not exist in the US and likely could not exist under current labor laws. Without powerful trade unions to set the floor, we have minimum wages. The alternative - allowing poverty wages - ensures the success of business models that can only survive by employing workers who rely on state aid (or are otherwi…

> In effect, removing the wage floor just makes government bigger and almost everyone poorer.

Nope, this is absolutely false, it is exactly the other way around.

I am not quite sure what you are trying to accomplish with your whole comment. It neither makes sense nor is it strictly related to what I just posted. Did you want to debate an argument of mine, just post your personal views about labor in general or simply troll? I am always open for a discussion.

Besides are labor unions (you are referring to the British english version) heavily involved in labor and wage discussions in the USA. The US is literally a labor union hell, so I don't get your point on that matter either.

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

#216

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

ryaneager wrote: post #31
dangrossman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Briefly, in 2019, until it made the news and the policy was changed so that drivers kept 100% of tips. There's more nuance than "DD was keeping tips", but plenty already written about that if you care to find the 2019 articles.

It’s not more nuanced they were skimming tips and got caught.

This 100%.

They were stealing tips. Full stop.

If a driver would be paid $5 for a delivery, and the customer tipped $5, the driver should receive $10.

But what was effectively happening instead was that the pay would be reduced by the tip amount to as low as $2. So now that delivery would actually pay $2 plus the $5 for a total of $7.

On longer range deliveries that might pay $10, the customer could tip $8 and the driver would still only make $10.

Now, from what I understand, DD no longer does this practice and legitimately gives the entire tipped amount to the driver with no reduction in pay from DD, but DD lowered the base delivery pay to compensate.

At the time, IIRC, DD tried to wordsmith what they were doing to not make it sound like they were stealing tips, and instead was simply subsidizing poor tippers with a higher base pay and acting like the keeping of the tip was just the removal of the poor-tip subsidy. I say to-may-toe, you say to-mah-toe, it's bullshit. They were stealing tips.

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

#217

Post by 1000100_1000101 »

chavesn wrote: post #113
kazinator wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can't pay a tip forward to guarantee good service; it's supposed to be a reward after good service.

It seems like that's the point of the story -- they were willing to tip well, and received bad service. If it came after, then drivers would have a reason to make sure food was delivered fast and efficiently.

Yeah, the way it's setup, with the delivery company on board with stacking deliveries, and no guarantee of good service despite a good tip, there's no incentive to tip at all.

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

#218

Post by lancesells »

interactivecode wrote: post #198
CydeWeys wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The delivery vehicles being used in NYC are almost entirely e-bikes, so the expense is not as big as you might be thinking. It's certainly nothing close to the cost to gig workers for running an Uber car.

So does it include health and sick pay for when you get injured or older and you’re less mobile? Cycling all the time could be way more taxing than driving.

The act of cycling shouldn't be any sort of problem. The accidents though are another story. The e-bikes are as silent as regular bikes but much faster.

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

#219

Post by Zircom »

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,…

>I've seen the Uber drivers come in. They always grab like 4 or 5 orders [from the same restaurant], and possibly drive to a 2nd or 3rd restaurant before they start delivering.

Having done Doordash/Ubereats in the past myself that is ABSOUTELY not the norm, god I wish it was that streamlined. Picking up a single order and delivering it straight to the customer is by far and away the most common scenario for the drivers.

They do have stacked orders which are the multiple pickups you're talking about, but I've never had more than 3 orders "stacked" together, and I would say it's more common to have stacked orders from multiple different restaurants rather than multiple orders from the same restaurant. And from the driver point of view stacks suck because almost always only one order in the stack will have a tip, the others will be no-tip orders they couldn't get someone else to deliver by themselves.

Doordash also recently changed how they pay out on these stacked orders to the drivers detriment. It used to be you'd get the base rate for each order in the stack, so 3 orders stacked together would be the base rate x 3 + whatever tips by each customer, but now they pay them out as one big order no matter how many orders are stacked together, so you get a single count of the base rate even if you're delivering two or more orders in a stack, which again are usually only a single order with a tip, so you're effectively delivering the other orders for free.

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

#220

Post by standardUser »

bluSCALE4 wrote: post #51

I personally feel like outsourced delivery for hot food orders at peak hours is a flawed idea. I've used Grubhub and it seems like they try to group deliveries. In my situation, I had a driver pick up my food only to drive it around down and deliver it to me 40 minutes later. If I order from a place and they don't have a driver on staff, I won't order delivery.

In NYC delivery is too good. I'd say 20-40 minutes about 90% of the time. I'll even order fried food and know it will still be crispy!

I used to live in downtown SF, which is one of the densest urban areas in the US outside of NY, and I would only reluctantly order delivery because the average wait was closer to 75 minutes. I'd wait 1.5 hrs before checking on the order. Food reliably showed up cold.

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