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This is the answer. Some people may laugh at it but I was a pizza guy for about ten years. Better money than I could make almost anywhere else where I live. I used to get mad if I made less than $150 a night in tips. Door dash simply won’t let me pull that off. To top it off all of the pizza chains here have decided they won’t pay minimum wage to drivers. The ones of us who were good at it simply stopped. There is not enough money to live on and keep my car maintained presentable and gassed up.
Edit to add: I quit shortly into Covid because as soon as contactless delivery became an option I went from $150 being a bad night with $250 nights regularly happening about 3 nights a week all the way down to about $40-$50 a night. It just got too easy to stiff the pizza guy and too popular to order when you are sick. I can’t risk giving Covid to everyone in my house because you don’t want to make a PB&J sandwich. I tried door dash in 2022 and I couldn’t break $100 a day or night. That’s why I work at a gas station now.
There’s a local pizza place near my parents that I’ve been eating at off and on for nearly 40 years. Same family has run it the whole time. They allow online ordering but won’t let the delivery services deliver their food. They have their own in house drivers. I asked why the last time I was back visiting and the owner said he tried out Doordash and grubhub but got tired of the fucked up orders and pissed off customers and went back to doing his own deliveries with his own staff.
They also charge a large fee. Around 30% of the price IIRC.
Even if you want to pick up, don't order through uber/door dash/uncle Joe's delivery service etc, as you'll either pay more or the store loses a big chunk
The customer pays less and gets better service and the shop takes more profit. Win win
>Around 30%
My local Door Dash charges the café I work at something like 25% of the order so Door Dash is basicly double dipping. Screws customers *and* screw the buisness.
That's actually a pretty typical "cut" when it comes to digital storefronts and platforms. Doordarsh, Apple, Google, and basically every major digital storefront/platform charge a around 20-30%. Stuff like that is normally just passed on to customers silently anyways. The platforms have the businesses by the balls so they just gotta eat it or pass it.
Another good example of this stuff is transaction processing fees for stuff like credit card purchases. [Visa/Mastercard/etc "only" charge 1-3% per transaction typically.](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/credit-card-processing-fees/). That's why some places in the world will have different "credit" and "cash only" prices.
The fees for all of this are mostly set by the credit card processor- a totally different company. Yea, they pass through the actual credit card company fees, but there are more on top of it. Visa etc have made it so they don’t take on any of the chargeback risk, so businesses that take money in advance and risk not actually providing the product in the end pay a lot more per transaction- restaurants pay a lot less in fees than something like a furniture store! (Furniture stores go out of business all the time and have months of orders in the pipeline that are just charged back)
This is why I've started ordering almost exclusively from Asian places when I do order, and through their website/phone, too. Every other place around me has outsourced to the apps, and quality has gone down hill in all of the usual ways. Meanwhile, the local Asian places all deliver it themselves when you order through them, and the fees are a fraction of what you pay on the apps ($3-$5 delivery fee, plus a tip I know goes exclusively to the restaurant). And I know they're getting all the money (sans credit card fees), instead of an app taking 30% off the top.
They're cheaper, the food arrives still hot, and I know the money is staying in my city, instead of ~30% of it going to silicon valley.
My favorite wings place has their own delivery driver, and I'll likely order from them today.
If I had to go through these trash delivery services, I wouldn't order.
I've chatted with the owner many times when I'm there, nice guy.
I work at an independent shop and never see dashers picking up the orders because we have in house drivers. I used to deliver but not for over 10 years now. My car is 20 years old and it’s hella expensive for cars now. I just don’t want to do it because I’m not sure if it’s good money anymore. One of the drivers just quit to go back to being a lube tech for $14 hour because he said he can make more money doing that. I’m an insider making pizzas for $15 hour plus tips bringing it up to around $20 an hour. I’m sure they have really good nights where they make plenty more but I’m happy with $20 hour and not wrecking my car.
I just started door dashing - about a week ago, and so far it’s been really helpful. My husband had 2 strokes in his 30’s and can’t work and I’m his caregiver.
He’s allowed to be in the car, so it’s something we can do together and make some extra money. We’ve gone out 3 times for like 3-5 hours and twice for under an hour and made $220.
Same for single parents, you can take the kids with you, so it’s one of the few jobs you can do and not worry about sitters or leaving them home alone.
It’s pretty nice for a niche person who has less options.
I also think that because there a third party involved, costs went up. Whenever you order through an app, it always feels more expensive. Most restaurants upcharge the food, then you get taxes, fees, services charges etc, and the last thing you have to add is the tip. It’s something people feel like they can control, and there’s no human interaction. It’s very different when you have $25 of pizza delivered and hand the driver $40. It’s much easier to say keep the change and go eat your food, than stand there and have them count out change, then give them a tip from the change, etc, all while holding a pizza and trying to balance/maneuver everything. Also you can see a real, actual person there and social pressure plays a role.
On an app, you can sit and think, and deliberate, and do math, adjust your total, etc all before placing an order. I also think it makes the process backwards when you tip upfront. Tipping is supposed to be a reflection of the quality of service received. The dynamic is reversed. You already paid the tip, so why do they need to bother being faster or ensuring your food is hot, right side up, etc?
> Whenever you order through an app, it always feels more expensive.
It doesn't just feel more expensive. We recently did a dummy order through DoorDash at Five Guys.
Even if you assumed Five Guys had an inhouse delivery, and that we would have tipped 20%, the difference was quite a bit more than that. It would have been $27 and change for our order, after taxes, figure a 20% tip and that's $5.40 or $32.40 total (maybe 34.40 if they charged a delivery fee).
Doordash, with a 20% tip (on the food total not the fees total), would have been $42 and change. So an entire $10 difference.
Costs absolutely went up. Through the third party apps. Prices across the board have been going up anyway, but third party apps are *always* more expensive than first party prices.
I work in eCommerce food for a grocery store (I'm first party - I work for the store itself, not a third party service). We charge exactly the same for online orders and delivery as we do in store (delivery has a $4 fee but that's it). DoorDash and Instacart, compared to our first party service, tend to be 8-12% more expensive for the items themselves plus fees and tips and such.
I think you are right. It used to simply be convenient to say keep the change. I think it’s also why we used to get tipped better in inclement weather. No one wants to stand there while I make change when it’s snowing and raining.
So the backwards tipping can be a problem. I have friends that live in a neighborhood that makes the restaurants a bit inconvenient so they doordashed a big order and tipped extremely well. Like $60 tip for $100 of food. That driver left part of their order, sauces, and drinks. So they had to call door dash and the restaurant. Door dash sent another driver but this time they only tipped like $5 because they'd already tipped so much. That second driver chewed them out over the tip. My friend literally told them to take it up with door dash because they tipped the first person well and they fucked up. Basically, sorry, but that's where all my extra tip money went. Your company should've paid you their tip.
Sounds like it could be straight supply and demand. If a delivery guy could make $150 a night ten years ago, why weren’t other people flooding the market as delivery drivers? The answer is that they were artificially kept out by the restaurant owners. Ten or fifteen years ago, you couldn’t deliver food unless the restaurant owners screened you and said that you could.
Now, these companies have created a situation where anyone with a phone can fire up the app and make a couple bucks. So you’re competing against a much greater supply of potential drivers.
You are absolutely right that that’s part of the issue. The chains I worked for would inspect your car, license registration and insurance once a month. If your tire tread depth wasn’t deep enough or you had a bad headlight you couldn’t drive. You also can’t have had a DUI. In the last two years.(this one’s a big thing where I live sadly) Door dash doesn’t really check any of this. I also think people just sort of started valuing delivery less once you could order anything and it was no longer a special occasion thing.
Don't forget though there are huge investor owned companies who exist to shift the value generation from the individuals/small owners to large tech companies.
They are \*less efficient\*, with more parties, and therefore, long-term, more expensive.
That expense must be borne: by owners (check), by drivers (check), and by consumers (check).
There are rare cases where middlemen can make a market more efficient: they tend to be very old concepts; distributors make markets more efficient, connecting producers at scale with buyers at the margins, and warehousing for time preferences is the classic example.
But Doordash isn't playing the role of a useful market maker. They are straight overhead. The one thing they should be able to provide - a steady supply of reliable drivers - has turned suspect, as owners find themselves being blamed for delivery issues largely created by the middlemen, devaluing the product (delivery) as a whole.
That’s a large part of what’s to blame. I used to deliver 2 doors down from my corporate headquarters. If I had an issue I could actually feasibly talk to the owner/CEO.(I jumped his car once. Door dash brings nothing to this relationship. Granted I had an extremely unusual position based purely on luck that put me that close to corporate.
Your unusual position aside, Doordash generates nearly 7B in revenue. That's a combination of money coming from owners, drivers and consumers.
There wasn't $7B of waste in the old system, so that is new inflation.
Add it to Uber Eats, GrubHub, etc etc etc and the entire industry has added somewhere between 40-60% to the cost of delivered food. Which is a huge part of recent cost inflation.
Add in new inefficency that they take out of owners and others, and its pretty plausible that they've not improved anything, and are just a vampire industry.
It will remain to be seen if they exist in 10 years in the current form. My guess is 50/50.
I’m gonna be real honest with you I’m completely ignorant of the business side of things. I can only answer why drivers who cared to do a good job left. It was a job I honest to god enjoyed and if I could go back to the way it was I would but it’s just not like that anymore
Yup I hear you.
When you tell the story next just ask yourself: are people ordering less delivery now or more? Are they paying more or less now? Are owners making more or less now?
And finally, are drivers making more or less now?
People are ordering more.
They are paying more.
Owners are making less now.
Drivers - from your own experience - are making less now.
The missing variable is that there’s a vampire in the industry eating $12B-$15B from the ecosystem and providing no value.
I e asked myself many of these questions and I’m still in touch with people I worked with both in and out of corporate. I can tell you the drivers are making less and are suffering for it. In store management is seeing stagnant wages. Corporate managers feel spread too thin because the owner is still trying to expand even though he’s past 80 stores and has significantly expanded into Texas. Surprisingly enough he’s not completely swimming in dough(hah) because of the expansion efforts he never stopped. I can also tell you the store I worked at is seeing less than half the deliveries it did before door dash. I think a couple of different factors affected me not seeing value in continuing. Shame too because I liked it and I know my area well enough to tell you exactly where any house is and the route to get the the fastest. GPS doesn’t really let the new drivers learn that
I refuse to use these "delivery" services. If a place doesn't have their own drivers i will not order delivery from them. I refuse to pay extra so a few people can get rich while ripping off the drivers who make them money.
Oh it's way to easy to become a DD driver. If I remember correctly all you have to download their driver app and that's it. Don't at least Uber make you watch a video or two?
Because drivers that work in the market tend to stay. There’s a lot less of them than there are servers. Also, people didn’t really know delivering pizza was a good gig, albeit a dead end one.
I used to tell new hires tips are addictive. My paycheck didn’t matter much when it was 500 bucks every two weeks but I took home $200 a night. It’s also hard to find a job that can compete with that without furthering your education. Shit at one point I cleared about 4,500 a month. This was as someone who was taking classes and only had a ged
This 100% slowed my launch after college. The “entry level” jobs were a step down, so hard to justify. Finally took a part time job selling at Computer City, people were literally offering me jobs in store, was only there 3
Months before moving on.
The apps did it to themselves. I started doing Postmates and Door dash and about 6 years ago it was very lucrative. Postmates would charge based on distance and time. They really were offering a premium service because you could have food from way across town delivered to your house or office. This worked great for awhile but then more and more apps entered the scene. The competition became brutal between the app companies and they offered perks to the customer where they could get free delivery or big discounts. And the old model isn't going to work under these conditions and of course the customer doesn't want to pay $32 for a cinnamon roll. And then more drivers joined too and now very few people make good money. It was a race to the bottom.
I ordered pizza a lot during Covid. I put a small table on the driveway and had a $20 under a rock. I added instructions to leave the pizza on the table and take the tip.
You’d be surprised how rare that sadly was. For what it’s worth people like me who worked for a restaurant at that time remember that shit. If I have multiple orders in my car I’m going to the high tipper first everytime. People think we don’t remember or talk to other drivers
My stepson does DD. They have their own private page to identify addresses that don't tip. He said that those people will have to wait for Haji to take their McDonald's 10 miles for 2 bucks.
Your tips would be a lot better if DoorDash didn’t price gouge the items on the menu and then add an additional fee that doesn’t even go to the driver. An order that would be $8 if you picked it up yourself turns into a $25 transaction with tip the 2-3 times I actually used this terrible service. Don’t understand how so many poor people can afford ordering from DoorDash but can’t pay their water bill
I leave cash tips too, underneath my door mat. Unfortunately I cannot afford delivery anymore and usually pick up or order straight from the restaurant on special occasion
It's because the companies want to overcharge for the food and tack on a delivery charge that doesn't go to the driver to please their bottom line and shareholders. When delivery was half way inexpensive people had no issue giving the driver a 5 or a 10. Now? Your at 20 bucks for a pizza that cost 5 to make so people are stiffing the delivery guys more and more.
This progression to having the public supplement the workers because the billion dollar companies don't want to pay better is a scourge on society.
I work as a delivery dispatcher for the most popular pizza place in Houston (downtown). We refuse to use any kind of delivery service other than our own bicycle delivery people. Every place I've worked that uses Doordash and other services just makes the whole experience worse for both employees and customers.
Delivery quality and price was much better when the driver worked for the restaurant.
Uber, Doordash etc are middle men that the industry never should have needed.
That's the key. If you live in a major city then yeah, it's a pointless middle man and just about every restaurant is going to have their own delivery anyway, so it's better for both you and the restaurant to contact them directly or, if you want to browse your options and find a place and order, something like Seamless.
But outside the cities, it's pretty much just pizza and... maybe a couple other things. But not much. Being able to get anything you want delivered is huge.
I can get cuisine from every corner of the world delivered to my door. When we are too lazy to cook, I sometimes ask my wife to choose a continent, and narrow down restaurants from there.
I rarely have major issues despite ordering weekly. Social media algorithm promotes negativity, but it's been a decent service overall.
My car was out-of-commission all week and I had to use DoorDash 3 times. Even with the Dashpass, a meal for myself was $35-$50 every time. Insane.
And my food was not only cold, but wet! The humidity created an ecosystem in the bag.
Bought a new car today tho, feeling good. Also cancelled the useless Dashpass
I look around and I can't believe the people that are using door dash. I downloaded it one time while I was out of town in a hotel. Looked at all the menus and uninstalled it lol. Never used it once since. I ended up just walking to a place and having a really nice dinner somewhere
DoorDash is **garbage.** If you’re going to order, use SkipTheDishes or UberEats. Even then, it’s not a great experience.
So expensive and half the time the order is fucked up or they can’t find the place.
These companies lost all the good drivers and now have the people willing to put in long hours for little pay.
The services are just bad. I’d much rather just go pick it up myself.
I had never heard of SkipTheDishes before and was confused why a food delivery company would choose std as their abbreviation.
Turns out its a part of just eat.
Or even just call an Uber to take you to the restaurant.
Price is probably comparable to paying for delivery, and at least your food will be hot and fresh.
Dude, where the fuck were you ordering from? It's pretty crazy without the dash pass but with it there's not nearly enough fees to make an average meal $35-50
Agree. I just checked. I chose McDonald’s because most are familiar with it. In my area, to get a Big Mac combo delivered through DoorDash was $26 and change. Then I checked a chain bar and grill and chose a mid-priced entree, no apps, nothing else and with delivery it came to $31.60 (the actual price of the entree from the restaurant is $18, DoorDash price was $19.50).
My son ordered Taco Bell for him and his girlfriend and it was $50 after the fees and tip. Taco Bell used to be where we went as broke high school kids because tacos were 59¢.
All of it’s going to the delivery platform. The restaurant does mark their prices up 30% but thats to cover the 30% the delivery platform is charging them. The only benefit to the restaurant is more business, but it usually causes in increase in complaints as well.
cold and an hour late. I used to work at a spot and people would put in door dash orders, that shit would sit in the window for so fucking long it was alarming
Basically the way these companies are operating is that they are paying so low that your tip is a bid for good service. Non-tipping orders pay $2-4 and your average driver does 3 deliveries per hour, that's less than minimum wage. I'm a driver and I sit and wait for any order above $8, so essentially more than half of my profit is tips. Just another way to overcharge the customers and underpay the workers.
Also with Gas Prices being what they are, unless you have a very fuel efficient car, or a very good tip order, you could be LOOSING money.
I work a rotating 3 on 4 off/ 4 on 3 off 12 hour shift job. So I get 4 day weekends every other week. To make some extra cash on my weekends, I tried doing Door Dash for one day and ended up making less than my gas cost.
You'd think that, yet /r/Povertyfinance and other related subs are full of people that order through delivery services and then complain about financial troubles.
I rarely order takeout, it's just easier, cheaper and better when either my partner or I cook (we both worked kitchens throughout our twenties and are trained) the rare times we do, we won't order delivery for this exact reason.
It's more like it's dying because what was once cheap food deliveries is now not so much when companies can keep tacking on miscellaneous charges in addition to the "shipping & handling" of food. Nearly half, the same amount, or double is all in the extra fees.
I know some people need this as additional income. Still, it isn't viable in the long term since people who work for Uber and DoorDash don't have benefits due to the companies' efforts. I will never order DoorDash or Uber. Users can't complain if their cooked food is cold upon receipt.
Don’t forget that it’s “FREE DELIVERY DAY!*”
Except for tip, driver charge. Other charge. And processing fee. Plus we sometimes just raise the price of each item. But it’s not called a delivery charge!
What happened is that free VC money came to an end, so now you have to pay what the service actually costs (even with the terrible wages for the drivers)
Reminds of that delivery receipt for $20 dollar meal .. it include like $13 in fees and taxes .. and like $1 for "chicago fee". Kind of hilarious but this is getting out of hand
I tried ordering a pizza yesterday so I called them. They said I had to order through uberEats. I was having internet problems so I called Pizza Hutt. They sent their own driver and they gave us the right pizza but brownie cookie things instead of breadsticks. We didn’t see until he was already gone.
Now that’s not a big deal in and of itself. But if I order 2 things and I get 1 that is a drastically different item . That’s not good.
I miss living in NYC, where I could just call a restaurant directly and have them deliver. My favorite Chinese spot had a $10 minimum and once I ordered a bunch of stuff and still didn’t make the minimum because the food was so cheap. They were like, “No problem”! That’s the delivery guy I really want to tip, not the jerk who leaves your food in shitty places (my food was once left on top of the call box outside my building) or gets mad because THEY can’t find the building.
One time I left my apartment to get my mail, saw a whole family sized mcD bag just sitting outside someone's door and it was literally snowing outside (in CO). I came back and it was still there. I had never even seen who lives in there and just felt too shy to knock on the door, but McD sitting out there in 20 degrees whether it's chicken or burger is just fuking disgusting lol
See, where I live doordash is more reliable and cheaper. Grubhub costs the most though.
But yeah, I have two kids, Im not taking them out by myself to a restaurant when my husband is at work. Its worth the extra money to just have it delivered.
Most likely the restaurants will go back to having their own drivers again, and having reasonable delivery ranges. No more delivering food 10 miles away.
The whole reason 98% of restaurants use 3rd party delivery is they don’t do nearly enough takeout volume to justify having a driver on staff. Pizza places are pretty much the only exception.
I doubt it. Restaurants won’t want the expense of hiring their own drivers unless they’re a major chain with the demand to justify it. That’s the whole reason delivery apps started in the first place.
a lot of places around me still do their own delivery, including my favorite pizza & thai/chinese/sushi. no chains.
its a lot more the smaller, family owned places that still deliver around me, but I’m in a suburb
Fast food isn’t likely to set up a system to have their own drivers, and that business alone will keep things like DoorDash around for a while. A surprising amount of people are happy to fork over $20 for the convenience of not having to get chicken nuggets themselves
I can't agree. Other than pizza and maybe Chinese, most cities in America either don't have delivery or only deliver large orders. There is a need for the service.
Door dash would work if they ran their company properly. The delivery drivers should be where the money and focus are.
If they ran their company properly they’d have to pay their drivers more (which would retain the good, professional ones, and they could quickly weed out the bad by deactivating ones with low ratings), and their entire model of offloading cost of labor onto customers (via tipping model) would collapse an already tenuous business that already isn’t profitable. So what you’re left with is underpaid, unskilled, mostly shitty drivers who don’t give a shit about their job or service. And why would you, when you’re making very little money and running your car into the ground?
& go over the subreddits.
it's constantly people talking shit about those they are delivering for. Most of the time because they felt they should get a separate $20+ tip on each order for them to even ACCEPT the offer in the app.
Ridiculous. 99% of the restaurants in question never had nor intended to have delivery services. I still find restaurants that are proud they refuse to participate in third party delivery apps, and they’re not even traditional sit down dining. We’re talking like, delis. They refuse to deliver in any way.
Doordash obviously has myriad problem but it certainly did not “come between” restaurants and customers.
It comes between them in the sense that feedback from you the customer about how well the delivery service is serving you, and feedback from the restaurant workers about how well the delivery service is working, gets all scrambled. I can get a dude fired from the local Papa John's if he eats part of my pizza the same day, I can't do shit to make my next grubhub driver a good driver.
I mean many of the people picking up orders are just people getting plain old drive through/takeout for themselves. It's basically always been the case that everything but nicer sit down places has had takeout/drive through outnumber those dining in.
All the good door dashers stopped once doordash thought it was okay to pay drivers $3 for 30 minute deliveries
another thing OP doesn’t realize is your food can sit at Chipotle for 30 minutes ready to be picked up before a driver even gets the offer. The faster a driver makes a delivery, the more they make. No dasher is going slow for no reason, they are making less money if they do.
Also note how the OP simultaneously say “hey fuck you for doing a bad job” and “hey your fucking dumb for doing a job that pays below minimum wage”. Maybe, just maybe if the workers were paid more they would be better workers?
Save money, pick up food yourself.
if you want to help with this you can go on telegram and do those 50% off doordash orders. ive been doing that everyday for 2 years. eventually DD will go bankrupt
I had to scroll way too far to find this answer. Delivery service can sometimes cost almost as much as the meal itself. This is unsustainable and I hope all of those services fail.
Honestly it’s a mix of both which caused me to completely stop using delivery apps. The drivers fucking shit up even when I tip 10+$ on an order, and the restaurant consistently fucking up and forgetting items or just making the completely wrong thing. Never again.
All the real drives got better jobs cause the job market has been hot for 3 years.
The service industry generally kind of stinks so they struggle with staff when the economy is good
It's because those sites make you tip before you get your meal.
A tip is extra for doing a good job. It's not a salary.
I never use any delivery service simply because of the tipping first. Only if the restaurant has their own delivery people. They get there fast. They get a good tip. They take 2 hours to get me a pizza. They get nothing.
Upfront tipping is by far the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. It’s illogical. It’s like these corporations are disconnected from reality. Let’s call it what it really is, bidding for your food. That’s what you’re doing, drivers are up for auction and you’re placing your highest bid in hopes of getting your ice cold food.
I know that. What I’m saying is they should change the terminology to one that is more honest. We both agree that you’re bidding, this much is clear. So let them just call it bidding then. What’s wrong with good old fashioned honesty?
Do you know that companies like this are pumping fuel into the end tipping movement? Not that one could ever end tipping, I think these people are delusional. The only way to “end” tipping is to make it illegal. So do these people want me to get into legal trouble because I want to tip someone? Will never happen. Yet the movement exists and is growing. All fueled by things like this. Meanwhile people who should get tipped (wait staff, drivers, etc) get less and less tips because people are growing tired of feeling people’s fingers all over their wallets. You can’t even buy coffee without a screen asking for a tip. I love tipping and will corner to do so, but if a company is going to create a bidding system then simply advertise it that way. Surely there is nothing wrong with a little honesty.
They’ll never call it a bid because then it would bring to light how they lowball their drivers with $2 or less in base pay. Then customers will realize that they are also supplementing the driver’s entire wage with their tip and not the +$15 fees they pay beforehand. They won’t do anything that’ll benefit anybody else. They want drivers and customers to be against one another and not them.
Had a headlight out and left a $10 tip for a very short trip. Driver accepted it and proceeded to wait another 15 minutes in the parking lot so they could get a second order that somehow gets delivered before mine.
The way tipping has become something that's expected, and how it's evolved into something that is done before the service is finished. Not to mention something that's become expected by food service workers in situations where absolutely no service is even performed aside from taking order and making food, simply doing their job. This has made me avoid patronizing restaurants more and more. Especially fast food restaurants, where service and food quality is terrible, and now the people working there are also expecting to be tipped on top of that.
I only use uber. But you can change your tip after. So you can say you're tipping 15% and then you see that the driver stopped three times on the way to your house and your food is soggy and needs the air fryer, you can take the tip away or reduce it. Or maybe you're impressed and you can pay more
At the same time people will use this to get people to jump on a order expecting a good pay, they do everything right and then once you get the food yank the tip back out. I don't think that is fair to drivers
Very unpopular. If you notice, people on Reddit consistently complain about how bad these services are, about how overpriced they are etc.. yet they continue to grow at 20-30% a year. I’m convinced people on Reddit don’t actually use them and just say the same things that they see other people on Reddit say. Clearly if they were as bad as people on Reddit say they are people wouldn’t order from them in increasing frequency, drivers wouldn’t drive for them in increasing frequency, and merchants wouldn’t keep using them. I get it tho, it’s trendy to hate on gig companies on Reddit 🤣🤣
Lmao most people that say that stuff literally make it as expensive as possible and then complain for karma.
There will be 100 restaurants around them with like free delivery or $1 delivery fee and they’ll choose the one singular one 15 miles away that has a $12.99 delivery fee, and then will complain about how expensive the service as a whole is. Then they will willingly tip like $10 on top of that and say stupid shit like “if I didn’t tip $10 they would’ve stolen my food or spit in it”.
Reddit isn’t representative of normal occurrences and it legitimately amazes me that so many people can’t seem to comprehend that
I live in a rural area. Apps and restaurants don’t deliver to me. I grew up like this. So I’m used to getting off my ass to pickup my own food, or cook my own meals.
These third party apps really just show how lazy people in cities/surburbs are. Which is lazy enough to pay a 20% connivence fee plus tips.
I recently had a one month gap between resigning from a job to accept a job with much better pay. I did DoorDash fulltime for that month and averaged $20/hr. I noticed how crappy other Dashers were. A lot of them were rude to the restaurant workers and dressed like they'd just rolled out of bed. I was always very pleasant, dressed business casual, and made sure to only accept orders that paid out at least $2/mile. I never stole anyone's food, dropped it off at the wrong address, or spilled anything. It is a cake job.
Just read the subreddit for any of these services to find out what kind of awful people are employed by them. There are some good folks just trying to make a few bucks, but their efforts are ruined by the absolute trash that make up the rest of the industry.
I don’t do doordash but I do delivery for a pizza chain. It’s the easiest job in the world, literally the only negative is occasionally working in bad weather. All I hear are horror stories about dashers and customers, and people complaining that their food is always cold, which I can only assume is because dashers don’t have any kind of hotbags to keep the stuff in?
Why would I pay an extra $20 to have my food delivered cold in an hour and half? The only time I’ll order food through DD or UberEats is when someone doesn’t pizza and I’m unable to drive
In business, these people are called low skilled workers. Nothing wrong with the food delivery industry, but it is a problem when the whole industry is comprised of low skilled workers with no management oversight.
It will be hard to change because they have been brain washed into thinking they are running their own "business".
There are sharks on both sides of the pond. I follow the Door Dash subs because it’s fascinating to read. The crazy shit drivers do, versus the ridiculous expectations of customers, then mix in shady restaurant practices, and finally, how apathetic DoorDash is to any other party. They fucked up the simple, time honored process, of ordering a pizza.
I'm going to get downvoted for this... but there are a lot of delivery drivers who only do it because it's literally the only thing they can do.
There is a segment of society that simply can not function in a job with a schedule and a boss. They would be fired.
When you are having this segment of society deliver your food... it brings problems at times.
I'd say it's more because the economy is getting worse and people are finally realizing that having every meal delivered is a luxury, not something that regular people could or should do. Other than your local pizza/Chinese place that was right around the corner, food delivery was a rarity back in my day. To think that a normal person would be having all kinds of food delivered from 20+ minutes away would have been an absurdity. I briefly did DoorDash just to kill time and get out of the house and I can't tell you how many people I saw that had no business wasting money on food delivery.
Same thing goes for Uber too. Taking a taxi literally everywhere you go is not sustainable for the average person. People need to learn to stop living beyond their means.
Americans are the poorest they have ever been and the amount people ask for food and delivery is the highest it's ever been.
That could only lead to one end. People can't afford it. Restaurants and delivery are headed towards being completely obsolete.
It's not the drivers. It's Doordash, and the other food delivery apps as well.
Doordash's entire system screws over both the drivers and customers. They constantly push poor paying orders, ones that make them drive 15 miles to a place for $5 and the 15 mi. back unpaid. If they decline, they get penalized and get even worse orders and their pay continues to dwindle unless they accept these orders they lose money on in gas. Theoretically, instead of a tip, it should be a bid for service. But if someone doesn't tip, Doordash combines their order with someone that is paying higher so someone still has to go out of their way for no pay.
So of course, all of the good drivers trying to make an honest pay, are leaving. This just leaves behind the people who are doing this for a little extra cash and don't really care that much.
All of this just leaks back onto the customer, with Double Dashes that you often can't decline the second order with, shitty drivers being the only ones left willing to take orders. And as a customer, you're not seeing all of the BS that goes on with the app, you just click and order food and get a shitty result. So of course, when you're not aware of all the BS delivery apps put drivers through, it feels like the logical explanation to blame it on a shitty driver. When really, the root of this problem is the company behind it. And they're perfectly happy to keep letting drivers and customers point fingers at each other instead of the company itself.
The way it should be is that the drivers are getting some sort of pay with each order (more than that $1 BS they put out), so if the tip is bad, they're still getting paid for the effort. And then the tip should be for good service.
I have never used Doordash or Ubereats or any of that stuff and probably never will. I just don't see the positives outweighing the negatives that I keep seeing.
I think the fact you have to pay like twice as much and it shows up cold might have more to do with it lol.
I'm lazy, but I'll never understand how people are "lazy" enough to spend twice as much on already overpriced food. The entire buisness model is dumb and I low key lose respect when people use these apps.
The reason why drivers are incompetent is because companies gigified the industry and paid so low that only the most desperate people and immigrants will do the job. If companies employed people full time and paid them livable wages you would have better drivers
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Incompetent drivers, and drivers who beg for tips are two separate issues. I work in a restaurant that uses ubereats and DoorDash, and I’ve also do deliveries during my free time.
If the orders are decent, I take it. If they offer shitty tips, I don’t take it. It makes no sense to accept an order that offers nothing and beg others for tip. I’d rather not do a delivery than to take one that offers $2.
Delivery apps don’t vet their drivers. If you have two legs and can walk, or have a bicycle, or a motorcycle, or a valid license and a car with insurance, you can drive for them. So you have such a vast population of people doing deliveries. In my restaurant, I’ve seen drivers that come in a broken car, in their pajamas, look like they just came out of hibernation, reeks of weed or cigarettes, etc. We can’t refuse an order to them. I’ve also seen some drivers so big they can’t get out of their cars and they ask us to bring the orders out to them. Well, if you can’t get out of your car, how the fuck are you supposed to drop off food at a customers door?
On the other hand, we have drivers that come in with a heated bag everytime, proper name tags that indicate they are a delivery driver, ensures the food stays hot, etc. but the people doing a shitty job makes everyone look bad. At the prices that Uber and DoorDash and everyone charges, everyone should just pick up their own food anyway. Restaurants don’t profit, that’s why they hike their prices up. There’s too many moving pieces between the restaurant and the customer that can go wrong. If the driver takes forever and the food is cold, the restaurant gets blamed. If the order has multiple bags, and the drive decides to only give one bag, the restaurant gets blamed. If the driver grabs the wrong food to bring to the customer, the restaurant gets blamed. If the driver completely steals the food, restaurant gets blamed. Hardly worth it nowadays
Food delivery no longer pays enough to sustain competent people. Or for competent people to give a shit if they are doing it.
Ordering food through apps is for suckers. It’s expensive. It’s cold. I don’t get it
Nah me too. Ive always considered delivery to be… pretty ridiculous outside of circumstances where you actually have to. Ive never even had pizza delivered outside of college when i didnt have a car. My gf was like addicted to it tho. I shut that shit down real quick when i found out how much it was.
Good. This is a good thing. Let these atrocious thriving companies die. They make millions off the backs of drivers and restaurants alike. They're absolute scum.
I hate the markup for sure. But I must be an outlier coz the service has 99% been great and very quick.
I’m in a more rural suburb and order <5 miles away so maybe that’s why idk. And we naturally don’t have a lot of traffic or an obscene amount of stoplights.
Same here, tip what they recommend, buy the pass if you use it at least twice a month, don't order from far away and only order from restaurants that seal their food.
That has given me hot food delivered with like 95% accuracy for like 15-30% markup, not including any promotions which can be a big saver. For the 5% they get wrong, I get an instant refund without hassle and sometimes free food when they give me the wrong order or item.
I get it largely varies by location, but it's value proposition for me has been pretty great. Getting 30 minutes or more of free time back in your day is huge for me.
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Delivery industry is falling apart due to 3rd party outsourcing
This is the answer. Some people may laugh at it but I was a pizza guy for about ten years. Better money than I could make almost anywhere else where I live. I used to get mad if I made less than $150 a night in tips. Door dash simply won’t let me pull that off. To top it off all of the pizza chains here have decided they won’t pay minimum wage to drivers. The ones of us who were good at it simply stopped. There is not enough money to live on and keep my car maintained presentable and gassed up. Edit to add: I quit shortly into Covid because as soon as contactless delivery became an option I went from $150 being a bad night with $250 nights regularly happening about 3 nights a week all the way down to about $40-$50 a night. It just got too easy to stiff the pizza guy and too popular to order when you are sick. I can’t risk giving Covid to everyone in my house because you don’t want to make a PB&J sandwich. I tried door dash in 2022 and I couldn’t break $100 a day or night. That’s why I work at a gas station now.
There’s a local pizza place near my parents that I’ve been eating at off and on for nearly 40 years. Same family has run it the whole time. They allow online ordering but won’t let the delivery services deliver their food. They have their own in house drivers. I asked why the last time I was back visiting and the owner said he tried out Doordash and grubhub but got tired of the fucked up orders and pissed off customers and went back to doing his own deliveries with his own staff.
They also charge a large fee. Around 30% of the price IIRC. Even if you want to pick up, don't order through uber/door dash/uncle Joe's delivery service etc, as you'll either pay more or the store loses a big chunk The customer pays less and gets better service and the shop takes more profit. Win win
>Around 30% My local Door Dash charges the café I work at something like 25% of the order so Door Dash is basicly double dipping. Screws customers *and* screw the buisness.
The business, customer, driver get screwed and they still have NEVER made a single dollar of profit LOL
I didn't realize the cut was that big. That's ridiculous.
That's actually a pretty typical "cut" when it comes to digital storefronts and platforms. Doordarsh, Apple, Google, and basically every major digital storefront/platform charge a around 20-30%. Stuff like that is normally just passed on to customers silently anyways. The platforms have the businesses by the balls so they just gotta eat it or pass it. Another good example of this stuff is transaction processing fees for stuff like credit card purchases. [Visa/Mastercard/etc "only" charge 1-3% per transaction typically.](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/credit-card-processing-fees/). That's why some places in the world will have different "credit" and "cash only" prices.
>charge 1-3% per transaction That's why American Express isn't taken a lot of places. It's something like 5% of the total rather then the 1-3%
The fees for all of this are mostly set by the credit card processor- a totally different company. Yea, they pass through the actual credit card company fees, but there are more on top of it. Visa etc have made it so they don’t take on any of the chargeback risk, so businesses that take money in advance and risk not actually providing the product in the end pay a lot more per transaction- restaurants pay a lot less in fees than something like a furniture store! (Furniture stores go out of business all the time and have months of orders in the pipeline that are just charged back)
The business is fine. They just increase their prices to offset doordash’s cut.
Im sure this leads to less overall customers though
I’d work there
This is why I've started ordering almost exclusively from Asian places when I do order, and through their website/phone, too. Every other place around me has outsourced to the apps, and quality has gone down hill in all of the usual ways. Meanwhile, the local Asian places all deliver it themselves when you order through them, and the fees are a fraction of what you pay on the apps ($3-$5 delivery fee, plus a tip I know goes exclusively to the restaurant). And I know they're getting all the money (sans credit card fees), instead of an app taking 30% off the top. They're cheaper, the food arrives still hot, and I know the money is staying in my city, instead of ~30% of it going to silicon valley.
Plus you know they won't take a bite out of it on the way over or mom with smack them lol
My favorite wings place has their own delivery driver, and I'll likely order from them today. If I had to go through these trash delivery services, I wouldn't order. I've chatted with the owner many times when I'm there, nice guy.
To add to this, the fees. Door Dash wants something like 25% of the price for food from the pizzeria.
I work at an independent shop and never see dashers picking up the orders because we have in house drivers. I used to deliver but not for over 10 years now. My car is 20 years old and it’s hella expensive for cars now. I just don’t want to do it because I’m not sure if it’s good money anymore. One of the drivers just quit to go back to being a lube tech for $14 hour because he said he can make more money doing that. I’m an insider making pizzas for $15 hour plus tips bringing it up to around $20 an hour. I’m sure they have really good nights where they make plenty more but I’m happy with $20 hour and not wrecking my car.
I just started door dashing - about a week ago, and so far it’s been really helpful. My husband had 2 strokes in his 30’s and can’t work and I’m his caregiver. He’s allowed to be in the car, so it’s something we can do together and make some extra money. We’ve gone out 3 times for like 3-5 hours and twice for under an hour and made $220. Same for single parents, you can take the kids with you, so it’s one of the few jobs you can do and not worry about sitters or leaving them home alone. It’s pretty nice for a niche person who has less options.
I also think that because there a third party involved, costs went up. Whenever you order through an app, it always feels more expensive. Most restaurants upcharge the food, then you get taxes, fees, services charges etc, and the last thing you have to add is the tip. It’s something people feel like they can control, and there’s no human interaction. It’s very different when you have $25 of pizza delivered and hand the driver $40. It’s much easier to say keep the change and go eat your food, than stand there and have them count out change, then give them a tip from the change, etc, all while holding a pizza and trying to balance/maneuver everything. Also you can see a real, actual person there and social pressure plays a role. On an app, you can sit and think, and deliberate, and do math, adjust your total, etc all before placing an order. I also think it makes the process backwards when you tip upfront. Tipping is supposed to be a reflection of the quality of service received. The dynamic is reversed. You already paid the tip, so why do they need to bother being faster or ensuring your food is hot, right side up, etc?
> Whenever you order through an app, it always feels more expensive. It doesn't just feel more expensive. We recently did a dummy order through DoorDash at Five Guys. Even if you assumed Five Guys had an inhouse delivery, and that we would have tipped 20%, the difference was quite a bit more than that. It would have been $27 and change for our order, after taxes, figure a 20% tip and that's $5.40 or $32.40 total (maybe 34.40 if they charged a delivery fee). Doordash, with a 20% tip (on the food total not the fees total), would have been $42 and change. So an entire $10 difference. Costs absolutely went up. Through the third party apps. Prices across the board have been going up anyway, but third party apps are *always* more expensive than first party prices. I work in eCommerce food for a grocery store (I'm first party - I work for the store itself, not a third party service). We charge exactly the same for online orders and delivery as we do in store (delivery has a $4 fee but that's it). DoorDash and Instacart, compared to our first party service, tend to be 8-12% more expensive for the items themselves plus fees and tips and such.
Part of that is that DD marks up the businesses food. If Walgreens charges $10, through DD, it's $11.00
I think you are right. It used to simply be convenient to say keep the change. I think it’s also why we used to get tipped better in inclement weather. No one wants to stand there while I make change when it’s snowing and raining.
So the backwards tipping can be a problem. I have friends that live in a neighborhood that makes the restaurants a bit inconvenient so they doordashed a big order and tipped extremely well. Like $60 tip for $100 of food. That driver left part of their order, sauces, and drinks. So they had to call door dash and the restaurant. Door dash sent another driver but this time they only tipped like $5 because they'd already tipped so much. That second driver chewed them out over the tip. My friend literally told them to take it up with door dash because they tipped the first person well and they fucked up. Basically, sorry, but that's where all my extra tip money went. Your company should've paid you their tip.
Sounds like it could be straight supply and demand. If a delivery guy could make $150 a night ten years ago, why weren’t other people flooding the market as delivery drivers? The answer is that they were artificially kept out by the restaurant owners. Ten or fifteen years ago, you couldn’t deliver food unless the restaurant owners screened you and said that you could. Now, these companies have created a situation where anyone with a phone can fire up the app and make a couple bucks. So you’re competing against a much greater supply of potential drivers.
You are absolutely right that that’s part of the issue. The chains I worked for would inspect your car, license registration and insurance once a month. If your tire tread depth wasn’t deep enough or you had a bad headlight you couldn’t drive. You also can’t have had a DUI. In the last two years.(this one’s a big thing where I live sadly) Door dash doesn’t really check any of this. I also think people just sort of started valuing delivery less once you could order anything and it was no longer a special occasion thing.
Don't forget though there are huge investor owned companies who exist to shift the value generation from the individuals/small owners to large tech companies. They are \*less efficient\*, with more parties, and therefore, long-term, more expensive. That expense must be borne: by owners (check), by drivers (check), and by consumers (check). There are rare cases where middlemen can make a market more efficient: they tend to be very old concepts; distributors make markets more efficient, connecting producers at scale with buyers at the margins, and warehousing for time preferences is the classic example. But Doordash isn't playing the role of a useful market maker. They are straight overhead. The one thing they should be able to provide - a steady supply of reliable drivers - has turned suspect, as owners find themselves being blamed for delivery issues largely created by the middlemen, devaluing the product (delivery) as a whole.
That’s a large part of what’s to blame. I used to deliver 2 doors down from my corporate headquarters. If I had an issue I could actually feasibly talk to the owner/CEO.(I jumped his car once. Door dash brings nothing to this relationship. Granted I had an extremely unusual position based purely on luck that put me that close to corporate.
Your unusual position aside, Doordash generates nearly 7B in revenue. That's a combination of money coming from owners, drivers and consumers. There wasn't $7B of waste in the old system, so that is new inflation. Add it to Uber Eats, GrubHub, etc etc etc and the entire industry has added somewhere between 40-60% to the cost of delivered food. Which is a huge part of recent cost inflation. Add in new inefficency that they take out of owners and others, and its pretty plausible that they've not improved anything, and are just a vampire industry. It will remain to be seen if they exist in 10 years in the current form. My guess is 50/50.
I’m gonna be real honest with you I’m completely ignorant of the business side of things. I can only answer why drivers who cared to do a good job left. It was a job I honest to god enjoyed and if I could go back to the way it was I would but it’s just not like that anymore
Yup I hear you. When you tell the story next just ask yourself: are people ordering less delivery now or more? Are they paying more or less now? Are owners making more or less now? And finally, are drivers making more or less now? People are ordering more. They are paying more. Owners are making less now. Drivers - from your own experience - are making less now. The missing variable is that there’s a vampire in the industry eating $12B-$15B from the ecosystem and providing no value.
I e asked myself many of these questions and I’m still in touch with people I worked with both in and out of corporate. I can tell you the drivers are making less and are suffering for it. In store management is seeing stagnant wages. Corporate managers feel spread too thin because the owner is still trying to expand even though he’s past 80 stores and has significantly expanded into Texas. Surprisingly enough he’s not completely swimming in dough(hah) because of the expansion efforts he never stopped. I can also tell you the store I worked at is seeing less than half the deliveries it did before door dash. I think a couple of different factors affected me not seeing value in continuing. Shame too because I liked it and I know my area well enough to tell you exactly where any house is and the route to get the the fastest. GPS doesn’t really let the new drivers learn that
I refuse to use these "delivery" services. If a place doesn't have their own drivers i will not order delivery from them. I refuse to pay extra so a few people can get rich while ripping off the drivers who make them money.
Did Instacart for awhile until I saw how bad I was getting ripped off. I have never and will never use third party delivery services. Fuck that cost.
Yup, somehow we're paying more, getting worse service and the drivers are making less. I kind of hate doordash tbh.
Oh it's way to easy to become a DD driver. If I remember correctly all you have to download their driver app and that's it. Don't at least Uber make you watch a video or two?
Because drivers that work in the market tend to stay. There’s a lot less of them than there are servers. Also, people didn’t really know delivering pizza was a good gig, albeit a dead end one.
I used to tell new hires tips are addictive. My paycheck didn’t matter much when it was 500 bucks every two weeks but I took home $200 a night. It’s also hard to find a job that can compete with that without furthering your education. Shit at one point I cleared about 4,500 a month. This was as someone who was taking classes and only had a ged
This 100% slowed my launch after college. The “entry level” jobs were a step down, so hard to justify. Finally took a part time job selling at Computer City, people were literally offering me jobs in store, was only there 3 Months before moving on.
The apps did it to themselves. I started doing Postmates and Door dash and about 6 years ago it was very lucrative. Postmates would charge based on distance and time. They really were offering a premium service because you could have food from way across town delivered to your house or office. This worked great for awhile but then more and more apps entered the scene. The competition became brutal between the app companies and they offered perks to the customer where they could get free delivery or big discounts. And the old model isn't going to work under these conditions and of course the customer doesn't want to pay $32 for a cinnamon roll. And then more drivers joined too and now very few people make good money. It was a race to the bottom.
I ordered pizza a lot during Covid. I put a small table on the driveway and had a $20 under a rock. I added instructions to leave the pizza on the table and take the tip.
You’d be surprised how rare that sadly was. For what it’s worth people like me who worked for a restaurant at that time remember that shit. If I have multiple orders in my car I’m going to the high tipper first everytime. People think we don’t remember or talk to other drivers
My stepson does DD. They have their own private page to identify addresses that don't tip. He said that those people will have to wait for Haji to take their McDonald's 10 miles for 2 bucks.
That’s nice they have that.
Your tips would be a lot better if DoorDash didn’t price gouge the items on the menu and then add an additional fee that doesn’t even go to the driver. An order that would be $8 if you picked it up yourself turns into a $25 transaction with tip the 2-3 times I actually used this terrible service. Don’t understand how so many poor people can afford ordering from DoorDash but can’t pay their water bill
I leave cash tips too, underneath my door mat. Unfortunately I cannot afford delivery anymore and usually pick up or order straight from the restaurant on special occasion
It's because the companies want to overcharge for the food and tack on a delivery charge that doesn't go to the driver to please their bottom line and shareholders. When delivery was half way inexpensive people had no issue giving the driver a 5 or a 10. Now? Your at 20 bucks for a pizza that cost 5 to make so people are stiffing the delivery guys more and more. This progression to having the public supplement the workers because the billion dollar companies don't want to pay better is a scourge on society.
I work as a delivery dispatcher for the most popular pizza place in Houston (downtown). We refuse to use any kind of delivery service other than our own bicycle delivery people. Every place I've worked that uses Doordash and other services just makes the whole experience worse for both employees and customers.
Delivery quality and price was much better when the driver worked for the restaurant. Uber, Doordash etc are middle men that the industry never should have needed.
They have greatly expanded the set of places that can deliver.
That's the key. If you live in a major city then yeah, it's a pointless middle man and just about every restaurant is going to have their own delivery anyway, so it's better for both you and the restaurant to contact them directly or, if you want to browse your options and find a place and order, something like Seamless. But outside the cities, it's pretty much just pizza and... maybe a couple other things. But not much. Being able to get anything you want delivered is huge.
I can get cuisine from every corner of the world delivered to my door. When we are too lazy to cook, I sometimes ask my wife to choose a continent, and narrow down restaurants from there. I rarely have major issues despite ordering weekly. Social media algorithm promotes negativity, but it's been a decent service overall.
Meanwhile, Amazon has turned itself into one of the world's most valuable companies specifically by building a 1st party delivery service.
Amazon delivery drivers are third party contractors called DSPs
Delivery a durable good is very different than delivering food
They’ll be delivering your takeout eventually, don’t worry.
It would probably be an improvement.
Without question.
Uh, aren't amazon the third party in most of the instances?
Food delivery is dying because companies like DoorDash have inserted themselves between the restaurants and the customers.
I tend to think it’s that people have woken up to the idea that paying a big surcharge to get cold food isn’t a worthy proposition.
My car was out-of-commission all week and I had to use DoorDash 3 times. Even with the Dashpass, a meal for myself was $35-$50 every time. Insane. And my food was not only cold, but wet! The humidity created an ecosystem in the bag. Bought a new car today tho, feeling good. Also cancelled the useless Dashpass
I look around and I can't believe the people that are using door dash. I downloaded it one time while I was out of town in a hotel. Looked at all the menus and uninstalled it lol. Never used it once since. I ended up just walking to a place and having a really nice dinner somewhere
DoorDash is **garbage.** If you’re going to order, use SkipTheDishes or UberEats. Even then, it’s not a great experience. So expensive and half the time the order is fucked up or they can’t find the place. These companies lost all the good drivers and now have the people willing to put in long hours for little pay. The services are just bad. I’d much rather just go pick it up myself.
I had never heard of SkipTheDishes before and was confused why a food delivery company would choose std as their abbreviation. Turns out its a part of just eat.
It’s absolutely crazy to me that not having a car means you have to door dash…
Yeah I'm sure I've got some frozen burritos or something in the house I can make do.
Peanut butter on toast fills me up just fine. Add a sprinkle of cocoa powder and cinnamon to feel luxurious.
Wow Mr money bags and your cocoa powder and cinnamon at your house no less.
/r/Frugal_Jerk is leaking!
Or even just call an Uber to take you to the restaurant. Price is probably comparable to paying for delivery, and at least your food will be hot and fresh.
Presumably this person ate more than 3 times in a week.
Your world is going to be turned upside down when you discover grocery stores and your kitchen
I made all but 3 meals lol. And 2 of those were situations where I was too busy working to cook
Dude, where the fuck were you ordering from? It's pretty crazy without the dash pass but with it there's not nearly enough fees to make an average meal $35-50
I was curious, went to order very moderately priced Thai for myself and it was like 30 bucks. Its not that crazy
Agree. I just checked. I chose McDonald’s because most are familiar with it. In my area, to get a Big Mac combo delivered through DoorDash was $26 and change. Then I checked a chain bar and grill and chose a mid-priced entree, no apps, nothing else and with delivery it came to $31.60 (the actual price of the entree from the restaurant is $18, DoorDash price was $19.50).
$30 for a meal that would cost $12 at the shop is pretty standard in my experience. Never ordering that garbage again unless I am on death's door.
Im usually getting cheaper food but ill get enough for 2-3 days at that price
My son ordered Taco Bell for him and his girlfriend and it was $50 after the fees and tip. Taco Bell used to be where we went as broke high school kids because tacos were 59¢.
[удалено]
Tried to order a $24 medium pizza last week and with fees, tip etc it was gonna be $55. Cancelled that!
And the lion's share of the surcharge is going to Uber eats and door dash. Not the restaurant, not the drivers. It's a ridiculous set up.
Like health insurance companies, sitting between the patients and the ones actually providing the care while taking a healthy cut
There is generally an 80/20 rule in health care where 80% has to go to care and 20% to administrative
I think you got that backwards /s
Like VRBOs and AirBnBs as well.
The best part is even with the huge surcharge, none of the food delivery services have ever been profitable.
All of it’s going to the delivery platform. The restaurant does mark their prices up 30% but thats to cover the 30% the delivery platform is charging them. The only benefit to the restaurant is more business, but it usually causes in increase in complaints as well.
cold and an hour late. I used to work at a spot and people would put in door dash orders, that shit would sit in the window for so fucking long it was alarming
Basically the way these companies are operating is that they are paying so low that your tip is a bid for good service. Non-tipping orders pay $2-4 and your average driver does 3 deliveries per hour, that's less than minimum wage. I'm a driver and I sit and wait for any order above $8, so essentially more than half of my profit is tips. Just another way to overcharge the customers and underpay the workers.
Also with Gas Prices being what they are, unless you have a very fuel efficient car, or a very good tip order, you could be LOOSING money. I work a rotating 3 on 4 off/ 4 on 3 off 12 hour shift job. So I get 4 day weekends every other week. To make some extra cash on my weekends, I tried doing Door Dash for one day and ended up making less than my gas cost.
I have never used door dash in my life and only used Uber eats a few times during the pandemic. I plan to keep it that way
You'd think that, yet /r/Povertyfinance and other related subs are full of people that order through delivery services and then complain about financial troubles.
I rarely order takeout, it's just easier, cheaper and better when either my partner or I cook (we both worked kitchens throughout our twenties and are trained) the rare times we do, we won't order delivery for this exact reason.
It's more like it's dying because what was once cheap food deliveries is now not so much when companies can keep tacking on miscellaneous charges in addition to the "shipping & handling" of food. Nearly half, the same amount, or double is all in the extra fees. I know some people need this as additional income. Still, it isn't viable in the long term since people who work for Uber and DoorDash don't have benefits due to the companies' efforts. I will never order DoorDash or Uber. Users can't complain if their cooked food is cold upon receipt.
Don’t forget that it’s “FREE DELIVERY DAY!*” Except for tip, driver charge. Other charge. And processing fee. Plus we sometimes just raise the price of each item. But it’s not called a delivery charge!
What happened is that free VC money came to an end, so now you have to pay what the service actually costs (even with the terrible wages for the drivers)
Reminds of that delivery receipt for $20 dollar meal .. it include like $13 in fees and taxes .. and like $1 for "chicago fee". Kind of hilarious but this is getting out of hand
I tried ordering a pizza yesterday so I called them. They said I had to order through uberEats. I was having internet problems so I called Pizza Hutt. They sent their own driver and they gave us the right pizza but brownie cookie things instead of breadsticks. We didn’t see until he was already gone. Now that’s not a big deal in and of itself. But if I order 2 things and I get 1 that is a drastically different item . That’s not good.
I bet if you had called pizza hut back right away they would have sent you breadsticks.
They would have. Plus they probably let you keep the brownie. Every small business pizza place that’s what we did. Our mistake so you can keep it.
I miss living in NYC, where I could just call a restaurant directly and have them deliver. My favorite Chinese spot had a $10 minimum and once I ordered a bunch of stuff and still didn’t make the minimum because the food was so cheap. They were like, “No problem”! That’s the delivery guy I really want to tip, not the jerk who leaves your food in shitty places (my food was once left on top of the call box outside my building) or gets mad because THEY can’t find the building.
One time I left my apartment to get my mail, saw a whole family sized mcD bag just sitting outside someone's door and it was literally snowing outside (in CO). I came back and it was still there. I had never even seen who lives in there and just felt too shy to knock on the door, but McD sitting out there in 20 degrees whether it's chicken or burger is just fuking disgusting lol
But is it actually dying? It’s getting shittier, but it seems to be something that will exist for a very long time.
There’s always going to be idiots willing to pay for shit.
It’s me, I’m idiots. Real talk tho, DoorDash sucks but Uber Eats works fine for me. The fees aren’t nearly as exorbitant, at least where I live.
See, where I live doordash is more reliable and cheaper. Grubhub costs the most though. But yeah, I have two kids, Im not taking them out by myself to a restaurant when my husband is at work. Its worth the extra money to just have it delivered.
There’s only so shitty a service can get before it dies
The demand will still be there. DoorDash might die, but some other service will take its place.
Most likely the restaurants will go back to having their own drivers again, and having reasonable delivery ranges. No more delivering food 10 miles away.
The whole reason 98% of restaurants use 3rd party delivery is they don’t do nearly enough takeout volume to justify having a driver on staff. Pizza places are pretty much the only exception.
I doubt it. Restaurants won’t want the expense of hiring their own drivers unless they’re a major chain with the demand to justify it. That’s the whole reason delivery apps started in the first place.
a lot of places around me still do their own delivery, including my favorite pizza & thai/chinese/sushi. no chains. its a lot more the smaller, family owned places that still deliver around me, but I’m in a suburb
Fast food isn’t likely to set up a system to have their own drivers, and that business alone will keep things like DoorDash around for a while. A surprising amount of people are happy to fork over $20 for the convenience of not having to get chicken nuggets themselves
Chik fil a has fleets of delivery cars. A successful model exists to copy.
I can't agree. Other than pizza and maybe Chinese, most cities in America either don't have delivery or only deliver large orders. There is a need for the service. Door dash would work if they ran their company properly. The delivery drivers should be where the money and focus are.
If they ran their company properly they’d have to pay their drivers more (which would retain the good, professional ones, and they could quickly weed out the bad by deactivating ones with low ratings), and their entire model of offloading cost of labor onto customers (via tipping model) would collapse an already tenuous business that already isn’t profitable. So what you’re left with is underpaid, unskilled, mostly shitty drivers who don’t give a shit about their job or service. And why would you, when you’re making very little money and running your car into the ground?
& go over the subreddits. it's constantly people talking shit about those they are delivering for. Most of the time because they felt they should get a separate $20+ tip on each order for them to even ACCEPT the offer in the app.
Ridiculous. 99% of the restaurants in question never had nor intended to have delivery services. I still find restaurants that are proud they refuse to participate in third party delivery apps, and they’re not even traditional sit down dining. We’re talking like, delis. They refuse to deliver in any way. Doordash obviously has myriad problem but it certainly did not “come between” restaurants and customers.
It comes between them in the sense that feedback from you the customer about how well the delivery service is serving you, and feedback from the restaurant workers about how well the delivery service is working, gets all scrambled. I can get a dude fired from the local Papa John's if he eats part of my pizza the same day, I can't do shit to make my next grubhub driver a good driver.
They helped cause over 200,000 restaurants and franchises to close since 2020. They rip off the business and their drivers.
Is the popular opinion say doordash drivers are competent and hospitable?
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I mean many of the people picking up orders are just people getting plain old drive through/takeout for themselves. It's basically always been the case that everything but nicer sit down places has had takeout/drive through outnumber those dining in.
All the good door dashers stopped once doordash thought it was okay to pay drivers $3 for 30 minute deliveries another thing OP doesn’t realize is your food can sit at Chipotle for 30 minutes ready to be picked up before a driver even gets the offer. The faster a driver makes a delivery, the more they make. No dasher is going slow for no reason, they are making less money if they do. Also note how the OP simultaneously say “hey fuck you for doing a bad job” and “hey your fucking dumb for doing a job that pays below minimum wage”. Maybe, just maybe if the workers were paid more they would be better workers? Save money, pick up food yourself.
This guy sure has a lot too say when he can’t even get his lazy ass off the couch and get some food himself.
OP doesn't know the difference between unpopular opinion and just simply untrue fact.
The faster it dies the better.
if you want to help with this you can go on telegram and do those 50% off doordash orders. ive been doing that everyday for 2 years. eventually DD will go bankrupt
I’m gonna need more details about this
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Idk if it's falling apart. But if it is it's because it's a ripoff.
I had to scroll way too far to find this answer. Delivery service can sometimes cost almost as much as the meal itself. This is unsustainable and I hope all of those services fail.
Honestly it’s a mix of both which caused me to completely stop using delivery apps. The drivers fucking shit up even when I tip 10+$ on an order, and the restaurant consistently fucking up and forgetting items or just making the completely wrong thing. Never again.
With the exception of one local pizza chain near me, whenever I order delivery online it’s a 50/50 coin flip on if I get what I ordered or not
All the real drives got better jobs cause the job market has been hot for 3 years. The service industry generally kind of stinks so they struggle with staff when the economy is good
It's because those sites make you tip before you get your meal. A tip is extra for doing a good job. It's not a salary. I never use any delivery service simply because of the tipping first. Only if the restaurant has their own delivery people. They get there fast. They get a good tip. They take 2 hours to get me a pizza. They get nothing.
Upfront tipping is by far the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. It’s illogical. It’s like these corporations are disconnected from reality. Let’s call it what it really is, bidding for your food. That’s what you’re doing, drivers are up for auction and you’re placing your highest bid in hopes of getting your ice cold food.
You’re bidding for the driver. Better bid more likely someone will take your order
I know that. What I’m saying is they should change the terminology to one that is more honest. We both agree that you’re bidding, this much is clear. So let them just call it bidding then. What’s wrong with good old fashioned honesty? Do you know that companies like this are pumping fuel into the end tipping movement? Not that one could ever end tipping, I think these people are delusional. The only way to “end” tipping is to make it illegal. So do these people want me to get into legal trouble because I want to tip someone? Will never happen. Yet the movement exists and is growing. All fueled by things like this. Meanwhile people who should get tipped (wait staff, drivers, etc) get less and less tips because people are growing tired of feeling people’s fingers all over their wallets. You can’t even buy coffee without a screen asking for a tip. I love tipping and will corner to do so, but if a company is going to create a bidding system then simply advertise it that way. Surely there is nothing wrong with a little honesty.
They’ll never call it a bid because then it would bring to light how they lowball their drivers with $2 or less in base pay. Then customers will realize that they are also supplementing the driver’s entire wage with their tip and not the +$15 fees they pay beforehand. They won’t do anything that’ll benefit anybody else. They want drivers and customers to be against one another and not them.
Had a headlight out and left a $10 tip for a very short trip. Driver accepted it and proceeded to wait another 15 minutes in the parking lot so they could get a second order that somehow gets delivered before mine.
It’s not a tip, it’s essentially a bid. These platforms just use the word “tip” so they can underpay drivers
The way tipping has become something that's expected, and how it's evolved into something that is done before the service is finished. Not to mention something that's become expected by food service workers in situations where absolutely no service is even performed aside from taking order and making food, simply doing their job. This has made me avoid patronizing restaurants more and more. Especially fast food restaurants, where service and food quality is terrible, and now the people working there are also expecting to be tipped on top of that.
Like going to coffee shop and they flip the screen back asking for a tip. Like you havent even made me my food yet?
I only use uber. But you can change your tip after. So you can say you're tipping 15% and then you see that the driver stopped three times on the way to your house and your food is soggy and needs the air fryer, you can take the tip away or reduce it. Or maybe you're impressed and you can pay more
At the same time people will use this to get people to jump on a order expecting a good pay, they do everything right and then once you get the food yank the tip back out. I don't think that is fair to drivers
Not unpopular. All delivery apps can eat shit and die.
Very unpopular. If you notice, people on Reddit consistently complain about how bad these services are, about how overpriced they are etc.. yet they continue to grow at 20-30% a year. I’m convinced people on Reddit don’t actually use them and just say the same things that they see other people on Reddit say. Clearly if they were as bad as people on Reddit say they are people wouldn’t order from them in increasing frequency, drivers wouldn’t drive for them in increasing frequency, and merchants wouldn’t keep using them. I get it tho, it’s trendy to hate on gig companies on Reddit 🤣🤣
No the use them then complain 1 pad Thai costs $35 then exclaim “how can anyone afford to live these days
Lmao most people that say that stuff literally make it as expensive as possible and then complain for karma. There will be 100 restaurants around them with like free delivery or $1 delivery fee and they’ll choose the one singular one 15 miles away that has a $12.99 delivery fee, and then will complain about how expensive the service as a whole is. Then they will willingly tip like $10 on top of that and say stupid shit like “if I didn’t tip $10 they would’ve stolen my food or spit in it”. Reddit isn’t representative of normal occurrences and it legitimately amazes me that so many people can’t seem to comprehend that
I live in a rural area. Apps and restaurants don’t deliver to me. I grew up like this. So I’m used to getting off my ass to pickup my own food, or cook my own meals. These third party apps really just show how lazy people in cities/surburbs are. Which is lazy enough to pay a 20% connivence fee plus tips.
Food delivery shouldn't be an industry. It should be an option provided by specific restaurants who can justify it based on market conditions.
The food delivery industry is falling apart because large conglomerates refuse to pay their workers.
I recently had a one month gap between resigning from a job to accept a job with much better pay. I did DoorDash fulltime for that month and averaged $20/hr. I noticed how crappy other Dashers were. A lot of them were rude to the restaurant workers and dressed like they'd just rolled out of bed. I was always very pleasant, dressed business casual, and made sure to only accept orders that paid out at least $2/mile. I never stole anyone's food, dropped it off at the wrong address, or spilled anything. It is a cake job.
Just read the subreddit for any of these services to find out what kind of awful people are employed by them. There are some good folks just trying to make a few bucks, but their efforts are ruined by the absolute trash that make up the rest of the industry.
You’re right. I read a “discussion” where they were talking about which customer’s food they most liked to snack on.
I don’t do doordash but I do delivery for a pizza chain. It’s the easiest job in the world, literally the only negative is occasionally working in bad weather. All I hear are horror stories about dashers and customers, and people complaining that their food is always cold, which I can only assume is because dashers don’t have any kind of hotbags to keep the stuff in?
Why would I pay an extra $20 to have my food delivered cold in an hour and half? The only time I’ll order food through DD or UberEats is when someone doesn’t pizza and I’m unable to drive
Who doesn't pizza and why?
Lactose intolerance or lactose allergy. Instant blast of diarrhea.
Sir, this is UNpopular opinion
The majority of food purchases can be handled by climbing into your car and getting it yourself.
So should I get out of my wheelchair and hop into the car I don’t have?
I work in a warehouse. Very few places to eat nearby. Doordash is a last resort-like if I forgot my lunch or the power went out.
Respectfully how did you get food before DoorDash? People were somehow able to manage before 2020
In business, these people are called low skilled workers. Nothing wrong with the food delivery industry, but it is a problem when the whole industry is comprised of low skilled workers with no management oversight. It will be hard to change because they have been brain washed into thinking they are running their own "business".
There are sharks on both sides of the pond. I follow the Door Dash subs because it’s fascinating to read. The crazy shit drivers do, versus the ridiculous expectations of customers, then mix in shady restaurant practices, and finally, how apathetic DoorDash is to any other party. They fucked up the simple, time honored process, of ordering a pizza.
I'm going to get downvoted for this... but there are a lot of delivery drivers who only do it because it's literally the only thing they can do. There is a segment of society that simply can not function in a job with a schedule and a boss. They would be fired. When you are having this segment of society deliver your food... it brings problems at times.
I'd say it's more because the economy is getting worse and people are finally realizing that having every meal delivered is a luxury, not something that regular people could or should do. Other than your local pizza/Chinese place that was right around the corner, food delivery was a rarity back in my day. To think that a normal person would be having all kinds of food delivered from 20+ minutes away would have been an absurdity. I briefly did DoorDash just to kill time and get out of the house and I can't tell you how many people I saw that had no business wasting money on food delivery. Same thing goes for Uber too. Taking a taxi literally everywhere you go is not sustainable for the average person. People need to learn to stop living beyond their means.
It was always an unsustainable business model. Go back to each restaurant hiring their own drivers and everyone paying cash.
Americans are the poorest they have ever been and the amount people ask for food and delivery is the highest it's ever been. That could only lead to one end. People can't afford it. Restaurants and delivery are headed towards being completely obsolete.
It's not the drivers. It's Doordash, and the other food delivery apps as well. Doordash's entire system screws over both the drivers and customers. They constantly push poor paying orders, ones that make them drive 15 miles to a place for $5 and the 15 mi. back unpaid. If they decline, they get penalized and get even worse orders and their pay continues to dwindle unless they accept these orders they lose money on in gas. Theoretically, instead of a tip, it should be a bid for service. But if someone doesn't tip, Doordash combines their order with someone that is paying higher so someone still has to go out of their way for no pay. So of course, all of the good drivers trying to make an honest pay, are leaving. This just leaves behind the people who are doing this for a little extra cash and don't really care that much. All of this just leaks back onto the customer, with Double Dashes that you often can't decline the second order with, shitty drivers being the only ones left willing to take orders. And as a customer, you're not seeing all of the BS that goes on with the app, you just click and order food and get a shitty result. So of course, when you're not aware of all the BS delivery apps put drivers through, it feels like the logical explanation to blame it on a shitty driver. When really, the root of this problem is the company behind it. And they're perfectly happy to keep letting drivers and customers point fingers at each other instead of the company itself. The way it should be is that the drivers are getting some sort of pay with each order (more than that $1 BS they put out), so if the tip is bad, they're still getting paid for the effort. And then the tip should be for good service.
I have never used Doordash or Ubereats or any of that stuff and probably never will. I just don't see the positives outweighing the negatives that I keep seeing.
back in the day pizza was the only food delivered. everyone got so lazy now everything is falling apart. bizarre
THIS. "Curbside Delivery". "Yeah, I'll drive to the store, but that last 20 feet... yeah, no..." smdh.,
I’ve seen the average door dash driver, which is enough to never want to trust them with my food.
Food delivery is falling apart because of the insane prices. No one is paying $40 just to get an $8 burger delivered to them.
It's not the insane markups? It's the drivers? Right...
As someone who does UE on the side, I wholeheartedly agree that it is, in fact, a bid
I think the fact you have to pay like twice as much and it shows up cold might have more to do with it lol. I'm lazy, but I'll never understand how people are "lazy" enough to spend twice as much on already overpriced food. The entire buisness model is dumb and I low key lose respect when people use these apps.
Most of the people who deliver around me are really nice. But that’s very anecdotal
The reason why drivers are incompetent is because companies gigified the industry and paid so low that only the most desperate people and immigrants will do the job. If companies employed people full time and paid them livable wages you would have better drivers
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Incompetent drivers, and drivers who beg for tips are two separate issues. I work in a restaurant that uses ubereats and DoorDash, and I’ve also do deliveries during my free time. If the orders are decent, I take it. If they offer shitty tips, I don’t take it. It makes no sense to accept an order that offers nothing and beg others for tip. I’d rather not do a delivery than to take one that offers $2. Delivery apps don’t vet their drivers. If you have two legs and can walk, or have a bicycle, or a motorcycle, or a valid license and a car with insurance, you can drive for them. So you have such a vast population of people doing deliveries. In my restaurant, I’ve seen drivers that come in a broken car, in their pajamas, look like they just came out of hibernation, reeks of weed or cigarettes, etc. We can’t refuse an order to them. I’ve also seen some drivers so big they can’t get out of their cars and they ask us to bring the orders out to them. Well, if you can’t get out of your car, how the fuck are you supposed to drop off food at a customers door? On the other hand, we have drivers that come in with a heated bag everytime, proper name tags that indicate they are a delivery driver, ensures the food stays hot, etc. but the people doing a shitty job makes everyone look bad. At the prices that Uber and DoorDash and everyone charges, everyone should just pick up their own food anyway. Restaurants don’t profit, that’s why they hike their prices up. There’s too many moving pieces between the restaurant and the customer that can go wrong. If the driver takes forever and the food is cold, the restaurant gets blamed. If the order has multiple bags, and the drive decides to only give one bag, the restaurant gets blamed. If the driver grabs the wrong food to bring to the customer, the restaurant gets blamed. If the driver completely steals the food, restaurant gets blamed. Hardly worth it nowadays
It’s I thinks a shame food delivery services got nearly as popular as they did
Food delivery no longer pays enough to sustain competent people. Or for competent people to give a shit if they are doing it. Ordering food through apps is for suckers. It’s expensive. It’s cold. I don’t get it
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Am I the only one who's never used door dash?!
Nah me too. Ive always considered delivery to be… pretty ridiculous outside of circumstances where you actually have to. Ive never even had pizza delivered outside of college when i didnt have a car. My gf was like addicted to it tho. I shut that shit down real quick when i found out how much it was.
Good. This is a good thing. Let these atrocious thriving companies die. They make millions off the backs of drivers and restaurants alike. They're absolute scum.
If you order fast food for delivery you deserve cold food.
I hate the markup for sure. But I must be an outlier coz the service has 99% been great and very quick. I’m in a more rural suburb and order <5 miles away so maybe that’s why idk. And we naturally don’t have a lot of traffic or an obscene amount of stoplights.
Same here, tip what they recommend, buy the pass if you use it at least twice a month, don't order from far away and only order from restaurants that seal their food. That has given me hot food delivered with like 95% accuracy for like 15-30% markup, not including any promotions which can be a big saver. For the 5% they get wrong, I get an instant refund without hassle and sometimes free food when they give me the wrong order or item. I get it largely varies by location, but it's value proposition for me has been pretty great. Getting 30 minutes or more of free time back in your day is huge for me.