91–100 of 151 posts
DoorDash is wonderful if you want to pay 30% more for the same item, and then add tax and tip on top of that. Restaurants pass on the platform fee to you. It's idiotic. Just phone it in directly and go pick it up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because it’s a circular economy - at no point does that wealth reach workers, it just ends up in the hands of other plutocrats.
How exactly does the money that a company like DoorDash loses end up with other plutocrats? Isn't most of that money being paid to people working for those companies?
I'm surprised more restaurants aren't suing DoorDash for damage to their reputation. Inserting themselves unrequested into the ordering process, then delivering cold food, the wrong food, etc. the customers just blame the restaurant ultimately.
It's been worse -- they've been caught setting up ghost kitchens in the name of real restaurants that didn't offer delivery or take-out service, and siphoning off order flow. One Michelin-star restaurateur found out about this when she got complaints about a delivery order placed to Seamless, which was pretending to offer delivery from her place, but was actually a ghost kitchen she'd never heard of ... https://www.e…
This blows me away every time I’m in New York. They all do it. An everyone seems to be fine with it. (In that nobody is suing.)
> You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and…
But the whole point is that in this case the money is not accumulated. Lots of different companies are each spending a lot of money in the hopes that they will be the last standing, at which point they will get to accumulate the money. It's possible that if one company does end up with a monopoly, they will treat their employees better. Because then they will finally be able to charge higher prices to the customers w…
If they can get away with paying employees so little, why would they voluntarily pay more as a monopoly? (Presumably they wouldn't have a monopoly in the labour market, in which case I would expect pay to remain the same, rather than worsen.)
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Uber made a profit for the first time ever this year after torching billions to accrue market share for fifteen years. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-pro... Having to do it via huge price hikes and screwing drivers makes me dubious about their ability to do so more than a few times.
> Having to do it via huge price hikes and screwing drivers makes me dubious about their ability to do so more than a few times. So here's my dumb question: What's with all the people that talk or even brag about how much money they make doing ridesharing, food delivery, etc? Are they just lying? Are they misinformed, bad at math, etc? Do 10% of the drivers actually make money, while the rest break even or lose money…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. People are not forced to use DoorDash, UberEats, etc. We never do and are surviving just fine.
> Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. No, you've got that backward. Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital. Advertising is a pretty clear example but it's not the limit. I mean, how man…
Source?
The best argument against this is how elastic demand was when ZIRP ended. Customers responded to an underpriced product. When the price was raised to a profit-clearing level, it no longer cleared most of the market.
> You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and…
Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. People are not forced to use DoorDash, UberEats, etc. We never do and are surviving just fine.
Is this DoorDash's plan once they've driven their competitors out of the market? The market will shrink and it will take quite some time to recoup their expenses. Maybe that's okay in their books. Own the whole pie even if you shrink it.
> You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and…
Won't blowing money like this redistribute it quickly, taking care of the "inequality"? It looks like this is a good way to take wealth from people who have accumulated it (the investors) and disperse it widely. I can't make your argument make any sense.
C suite gets giant cuts, office workers get medium-large cuts based on career, gig workers just have a new type of low-wage part-time labor to fill their hours with.
Money technically changes hands, but calling the existence of a company with status-quo wages “wealth redistribution” is really taking the term too literally.
> You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and…
Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. People are not forced to use DoorDash, UberEats, etc. We never do and are surviving just fine.
The problem here is that there's a $45B company (doordash) in the middle of the person cooking the food and the person delivering the food instead of a high school kid in a funny hat.
Exchanging the overhead of a dining room for the overhead of unskilled labor taking food to a place is an easy win for a restaurant. Doordash and the like are taking jobs that you could train a child to do in an hour (take an order, deliver it to a place) and spending billions on the technology to do instead while still requiring unskilled labor to do the job.
This is the kind of software that needs to be a small scale distributed open source affair instead of a $45B company with several competitors at the same scale.
They started selling their product as if it were basically free by burning investor cache and now they're riding the limited rails of brand recognition and habit while trying to charge for the ridiculous amount they're doing for such a simple task.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. No, you've got that backward. Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital. Advertising is a pretty clear example but it's not the limit. I mean, how man…
> Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital Source? The best argument against this is how elastic demand was when ZIRP ended. Customers responded to an underpriced product. When the price was raised to a profit-clearing level, it no longer cleared most of the market.