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Delivery is good option for people with limited mobility
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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agreed. Just because something is unsustainable if everyone were to have limited mobility doesn't mean it's unsustainable.
been disabled since 2017. pays half my salary. gave up driving last year. not good at those prices. wife grows vegetables in summer.
Is this about cars or society and industry? Because what if they're really efficient and have wheels and run on passive energy collected from the power of the sun and processed through rare minerals dug from the earth?
A lot of people are bad with money and are way too ready to pay too much for convenience. This service has uses, but if you aren’t tied by need to use it, it’s pretty wasteful expenditure.
I mean its a thing useful for disabled people and even currently in NYC if the time limit to delivery was more variable a personal vehicle would be far from necessary given public transportation.
I've never ordered food to my door. Not even pizza. The rare times I order takeout pizza I pick it up myself. Unless you're a senior citizen it just seems so wasteful and lazy and comically expensive to have food delivered to you. I mean I get that we're absolutely going to destroy this planet, but holy shit are we speedrunning it.
When you build infrastructure that requires you take cars everywhere you minimize people going to get things for themselves
I assume that most deliveries in NYC are by push bike couriers and vesper type scooters. Thats more typical than yank tanks for this sort of thing in most densely populated cities I've seen.
It's mostly scooters and e-bikes.
this is some quality ragebait right here
I find it funny that the tip is already there before you get your food. I mean, did the driver make the burrito? He might be late and you get cold food, he might be a dick.
I just set the tip to zero and put "Will tip cash" in the delivery instructions on the rare occasions I do something like DoorDash.
Unless I order from a.local Chinese place that will deliver. I tip them generously, basically giving the older Chinese guy who usually runs the deliveries an amount akin to what all the fees from DoorDash would have been because at least then it's the restaurant getting the money.
Mandatory tips in general is a silly concept for me. The driver should be earning a fair salary without it and the price of the food/delivery should account for the staff costs. And any tips should be a voluntary extra. I feel the same about adding taxes on top of the sticker price the way they do in the US. That was an unexpected culture shock for me when I went there a few years ago.
"should" is really pulling all of the weight here.
Well yeah. I'm Norwegian, so I have no business saying what you, or maybe it is they, must do with their system of business.
Especially given the high probability that the app doesn't even pass on that full amount to the driver.
None of us need to purchase this goofy ass delivery powered by virtual slave labor. Spend no money, cause no harm. Let those capitalists seethe we no longer need to endlessly consume to be happy.
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I remember seeing a video about a similar service in the Netherlands for delivered groceries.
They deliver by bike, are faster by bike.
...and still are a bit of a controversial issue.
I worked as an engineer at a food delivery company and I almost never used my own companies app, these companies charge both the customer and the restaurant and the restaurants raise the prices of their menu on the app to compensate for it, plus the delivery takes a long ass time and the food arrives cold. And the business is still mostly unprofitable and these companies stay afloat from investments while they suffer losses.
It's a natural consequence of decoupling value from productivity; and instead relying on data harvesting for predictive analytics as an alternative for anything truly valuable.
We're living in a world in which the wealthy keep coming up with ways to hand money back and forth, while creatinf new schemes to cut out the working class from any resulting 'value' creation.
AI will fuck over workers just like every other technological marvel that preceded it.
We looked at GrubHub and said no when the delivery fee and tip would've been more than our meal cost.
The delivery services are a boon and a bane for everyone. For the restaurant, you no longer need to pay wages or insurance for dedicated delivery workers, but now have service fees that cut into profits. The customer has to cover many of these costs in all these extras fees and service charges, but get did delivered to them. And the driver has to pay for gas and insurance out of the pitiful payments and tips they get. If you are in a rural area, forget about getting enough local orders to cover anything.
And the rich take a huge profit just to run an app.
Are any of them actually profitable or are they still in the "drive established competitors out of business with unsustainably low prices" phase?
They get 5% to 30% from each order paid by the restaurant, then the customer has to also pay 5% to 20% service fee, they only have to pay for the cost of their servers and app development, and like $2.50 to each driver per order.
Doordash, Uber, and Grubhub are not food delivery companies, they are technology companies offering a platform that connects drivers and customers, basically a glorified facebook marketplace with automatic algorithm matching.
At this point it is hard to tell because most of the large US tech companies have decayed into this being the only way they can pursue the growth in profits Venture Capital, Private Equity and the US finance system in general demand existentially.
I think there are plenty of ways to make a profit here and these US tech companies will likely kill as many as possible to defend an inefficient, dead end business strategy.
Though I do wonder about profitability. My cousin wanted to start a similarish app (though for connecting yard work providers with seekers) and asked me to join him. I ended up declining because a) there's already a bunch of players in the area, both online and locally, b) the legal liabilities involved in providing a service where people go to someone's house and either party could be a sociopath, pervert, or thief. I figured lawyers would end up getting most of the money.
Those also apply to rideshare and delivery services. They thought they could drive taxi services and local delivery services out of business, but didn't think that others could come along and do the same thing, plus for delivery services, at least, operational costs are already pretty low and adding the infrastructure at the scale required to serve all the areas they want to serve is in addition to all the normal costs. Local delivery services I knew about from before uber and doordash just used cell phones to call the one or two drivers directly and since it was all so informal, they could add less legal options like selling drugs to make even more money, as long as they made sure to build a relationship of trust with clients before opening that up. The online services need to avoid a relationship between driver and client or they risk getting cut out entirely.
And personally, when I need a ride, I'll still call a cab because I don't want the services to win because I know they just want to build a monopoly and charge even more than the taxis were.
Fuck Uber especially, those genocide supporting scumbags.
Will never use anything from them
The expectation comes from SoftBank investing billions into Uber to kickstart the ride share industry.
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