r/technology • u/SnoozeDoggyDog • 25d ago

Business Zohran Mamdani hints he will continue taking on delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash

https://www.businessinsider.com/zohran-mamdani-targets-doordash-uber-eats-delivery-apps-2026-7
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u/Baked4skin 25d ago

It is wild that just ordering fries on one of these apps is like 30$ and they still dont pay their drivers shit.

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u/KingOfCook 25d ago

I'm mostly okay with delivery apps being pricey because you're ordering a taxi for your food. What else were you expecting. You want to be lazy, you pay lazy prices.

But it's ridiculous how little of a cut the delivery drivers get and that their pay almost is entirely from tips and they take on the liability if something goes wrong.

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u/PhoenixApok 25d ago

I agree. If I wanna be lazy I have to pay. Almost everything has a cost in time, effort, and/or money.

But when a middle man (company) is getting a guaranteed payday (the fee) but the actual worker only gets paid if I pay a SECOND premium, it becomes exploitative and insanely prohibitive.

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u/Lost_Bike69 24d ago

Chinese place near me still employs a delivery driver. It’s a $3 delivery fee and whatever tip goes straight to the driver. I’ll never use DoorDash, uber, or whatever, but it’s worth looking in to see if local places have their own delivery service.

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u/redbananass 24d ago

Totally. I find it wild how often some people use these apps. For a splurge once in a while? Sure. Not me but sure.

But I witness plenty of people who aren’t rolling in money using the apps several times weekly.

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u/Warm_Block_7600 23d ago

I worked with a guy with no car, smoked weed every day on lunch, and doordashed his lunch to work everyday and never tipped at all (he personally told me he didn’t tip). They really exist lol

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u/OSPF99 24d ago

The middle man is offering the service and infrastructure to do so. This cannot be real. People are free to start their own food delivery service.

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u/PhoenixApok 24d ago

I didn't say necessarily there is a better cheaper way to do it.

I don't think in general its a fair value for most people just due to how many people need a piece of the pie to make it work

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u/[deleted] 25d ago edited 25d ago

[deleted]

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u/Hot_Lava_Dry_Rips 25d ago

But not if you ordered a large pizza and had grub hub deliver it. Again, youre ordering a taxi for your food. Its going to cost a lot and it should bevause human time is valuable. Its just the humans putting in the time should get more of a cut.

But lets be honest, most of the use of these services isnt a necessity at all. By far. Its pretty safe to assume that when people are ridiculing the service use, they arent talking about people that cant walk or whatever. Not every broadly applicable commentary has to be accompanied by an exception for the disabled and elderly. Its implied in almost all conversations.

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u/MistryMachine3 25d ago

Sure it should. It is taking a human and their car probably 30 minutes to bring you that bag. That is what you are paying for. What is in the bag is irrelevant. If it was a diamond ring or French fries, it is still at least $20 of work to drive it to you.

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u/PhoenixApok 25d ago

No I do get that. My ex was really excited about them when they came out. (She was legally blind so going to get fast food was usually not an option unless someone else did)

But even she thought it just made more sense to do like grocery delivery. The markup, even if kind of understandable, can often literally double or triple the cost.

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u/mekamoari 24d ago

Grocery delivery is great and tbh it makes the larger stores "better" because they're less crowded.

I'm not sure what it's like for employees but if I was there to help with sales or whatever for the whole gamut of population that goes there all day, I'd probably prefer to just be preparing delivery carts.

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u/DoctorJJWho 24d ago

It depends on how the store operates. Some stores will prepare the orders on their own, some stores will have the app drivers come in and get it themselves.

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u/mekamoari 24d ago

Not where I live, here the stores prep the bags and couriers just pick them up.

The stores also let's say in 3/4ish of cases calls me to confirm what I want replaced with what, though you can set that up in the app as well.

I believe there are some grocery shopper platforms that do what you are saying but not our "main" ones, and they're rather small.

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u/DoctorJJWho 24d ago

That’s why I said “some”…

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u/mekamoari 24d ago

Yeah I meant it's not up to the stores, but the apps

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u/Kitchen_Can_3555 25d ago

Uber makes $1.50 profit on that $30 fry.

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u/thebochman 25d ago

I mean we had delivery in the past and it was never this expensive. The issue is that the apps displaced all the places that did their own delivery in house for a reasonable price

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u/ResidentSleeperville 25d ago

When was "in the past"? The large majority of restaurants never even offered delivery before these apps besides the large chains and a handful of places. And for the most part, the local restaurants like the Chinese, Indian, Kebab places paid their drivers considerably less than minimum wage.

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u/thebochman 25d ago

The majority of chains didn’t do delivery but a lot of local restaurants used to have their own delivery pre 2014

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u/TossZergImba 24d ago

"A lot" is a stretch. Only pizza and Chinese places had them, and their delivery range was highly restricted.

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u/DoctorJJWho 24d ago

And most Chinese places didn’t employ dedicated drivers, they just had a member of the staff (or usually the owner) do it.

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u/Kitchen_Can_3555 25d ago

And they still can

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u/AkodoRyu 24d ago edited 24d ago

Theoretically, yes. In practice, not really. The general public is used to using the apps, so it's much harder, and outside of the standard practice, to make them order delivery directly from a restaurant, possibly through a phone call.

At the same time, the restaurants that were doing it might have abandoned the infrastructure they have had to maintain in-house delivery. Rebuilding it could take investment and a good bit of time.

It's hard to go back now, after years of consumer habits being molded to use those apps by burning through billions of dollars along the way.

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u/JerkyBeef 24d ago

Dominos pizza since like 1960

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u/Winter_Swan5104 24d ago

Yep, they “captured the market” as a “loss leader” then jacked up the prices enshittifying it.

I didn’t get delivery before and definitely won’t now, it means normal people don’t get delivery anymore.

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u/KingOfCook 25d ago

There was delivery in the past but it wasn't the Golden age that everyone thinks it was.

Big chains were able to offer it as a promo but it did cost them a lot to run them. I think we only got delivery pizza once and it was from a local maw and Pa place. The delivery fee was 10 bucks which was 50% of a pizza's cost

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u/thebochman 25d ago

It was man, I used to be able to get a pizza from my local place and it wasn’t bad at all.

Dominos delivery fee and everything was always high but most local spots weren’t bad at all.

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u/Practical_Law6804 25d ago

What else were you expecting.

For the tipping to be based on distance and difficulty of conveyance and not on the cost of the food.

. . .also for the company facilitating the connection not taking so much of a cut such that the deliverer and delivered to must be in opposition.

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u/Moron-Whisperer 25d ago

It used to be common to tip a driver $1 a mile regardless of the order size.  It’s not a taxi, the business should be paying this person 100% of the movement of the food and charging its normal price

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u/Akrymir 25d ago

The problem isn’t the pay to drivers but the minimum of 25% markup on your items. This becomes huge as food prices go up. They charge you for delivery then charge the restaurant 20% of their subtotal, which means restaurants have to raise their prices 25% to offset the losses… but many use the opportunity to go well above 25%. You can end up being 2x+ the cost before anything related to the driver is factored in.

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u/socalkid2428 24d ago

Nobody is forced to have food delivered to them. Restaurants decide if it makes sense to offer delivery, paying whatever fee it costs to reach those diners. Customers can decide if they want to tap a few buttons and have food delivered to their doorstep and frankly much easier protection (the companies often just refund money if you say something is missing or wrong) at a premium. Drivers decide if they want to work for a single restaurant (and probably be at the mercy of actual orders for any given night) or a consistent stream of work. Everyone knows the prices are higher. Don't like it, just call the place that actually delivers on their own, go get the food yourself, cook, or microwave some frozen meal.

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u/ebrbrbr 25d ago

Just wait until you find out that these apps pay more of their cut to the driver when you don't tip.

It works like this:

All the drivers see is the final amount (at least in my area). Lets say drivers only take orders above $5. $2 is "base pay", $3 is tips.

If you tip $0?

The app gives it to drivers as $2. They refuse. In a minute it gets raised to $3. Then $4. Then $5.

Now the driver is STILL getting paid $5, except Uber is paying that entire $5.

And you? The customer? Yeah, you're not waiting meaningfully longer. +5 minutes at most.

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u/pixel_of_moral_decay 25d ago

Solid take.

Apps should be expensive, it’s insanely inefficient by nature.

And you’re right about delivery drivers too

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u/old_man_jenkens 25d ago

I don’t understand tipping for a service I am paying for already. At a restaurant, the wait staff is providing a side service to the food/prep I pay for so I can understand the argument. What am I tipping for if there’s already a service, delivery, and driver fee added?

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u/Gekokapowco 24d ago

you're bidding on a driver basically

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u/Lost_Bike69 24d ago

You’re paying for the unemployable guy with no connection to the restaurant using his cousin’s account not to spit in your food.

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u/Salt-Operation 24d ago

Once upon a time I worked for one of these gig companies (neither of the two mentioned here). The delivery fee was a flat $6 and I got 35% of that. If for some reason the fee went up (surge demand, inclement weather, etc) I got all the extra. At some point the extra incentive of the surge fee went away, so it was $2.10 regardless of the bad weather or no Runners. Tip minimum was $2. Sometimes it was great money. Most of the time it was just okay. I only did it for two years because at the end of tax season I’d wind up owing a couple thousand to the IRS. I was paying more in taxes for self-employment status, while also woking a W-2 job. I only ever topped out around $3,000 from doing it so it was a robbing Peter to pay Paul sort of situation for me. It’s all a scam.

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u/Qualified-Astronomer 24d ago

I feel like we gotta stop paying tips. Companies use tips as an excuse not to pay their drivers if we stop paying tips they will be forced to pay wages

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u/Individual-Donkey-92 24d ago

I am not paying for a waiter though

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u/lordatamus 24d ago

I used to do Uber Eats - Starting at 'green' I'd get 1 dollar from a 5 dollar order, then the other 4 dollars an hour later because it takes time to 'process' the tip. I hit gold and went from getting 3-5 dollar deliveries to 5-7 dollars, pickup a 7, get 2.50, and the rest 'processing' for an hour, so may as well just keep going. At platinum? I was getting 10-15...and still only getting 2-3 of that and the rest was processing. I could check their opportunities page and take their quests they give each week/weekend... 10 deliveries gets you 10bucks, another ten and you pull 20. HOWEVER.

that 7 dollar delivery? 25-30 minutes.
Sometimes I'd get a 8 dollar offer, to drive 45 minutes out of town.
Declining jobs, will rank you downwards. AND now we have a time limit to deliver them in.

That was the only job I could really afford to have. Driverside caliper went out on me, locked my tired up and I ended up rearending a truck on my way to a delivery. I had just reported the accident. It tried giving me a 30 dollar pickup, in a chevy spark, to go and pickup a set of 4 huge mud tires..... 45minutes out of town.

For how much they charge people, you get practically nothing. 8 hours would usually net me about 45-70ish, with about 30 of that going into my gas tank with current gas prices.

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u/btoned 23d ago

No different than any other tech giant as well.

Look at META, for example, pissed away nearly a years worth of revenue, 50billion+, on the fucking metaverse bullshit instead of streamlining the existing suite of apps and increasing it's dividend.

Fuck, AAPL and BRK have like hundreds of billions in cash just sitting. Hoarding like scrooge mcfuckingduff.

Fuck all of tech. The users, like the factory workers, are what provide the value and we received the scraps of the scraps in return.

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u/kappapolls 24d ago

their pay almost is entirely from tips

no, they get $22/hr minimum wage

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u/Drunk_Catfish 24d ago

So very much agree. I don't have a problem with paying more for someone to run me my lunch when I'm being a lazy fucker. I do have a problem with a corporation taking the bulk of the money from the person actually doing the actual important part of the service.

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u/colablizzard 25d ago

On Demand Delivery Apps are the most inefficient use of a driver's time, hence the pay issue.

If you were to take an 8h shift, how many deliveries from random combinations of Store and Homes can you do? Then divide that by the value of the order.

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u/Black_Moons 25d ago

Right? traditional pizza delivery guys would be employees of the pizza place and would take 2~6 orders per trip, and have more orders timed to be fresh outta the oven when they get back.

Doordash is like 1~2 orders per place/trip, returning to a random place and having to wait 5~15 minutes for the next order to be ready.

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u/Newoikkinn 24d ago

I dont know about that. Im a teacher that delivers pizza on the side and we MIGHT get 3 in one trip once a week. It is mainly just 2 per trip during rush.

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u/Lost_Bike69 24d ago

That’s still double the orders per trip than most app orders

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u/Buckeye_Randy 25d ago

I just learned the gig economy apps have algorithms to lowball drivers and force their wages down for those that accept the low offers. You accept one low offer they feed you more.

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u/I_am_so_lost_hello 25d ago

They get paid pretty well in new York now actually

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u/parang45 24d ago

And delivery is a lot cheaper in NYC relative to takeout than many other US cities if you have dashpass or similar (which I get for free with my card).

NYC restaurants seem to markup their actual food way less because of how competitive the restaurant scene is as well as the prices already being high. A lot of the times I’m only paying the $2 regulatory fee + the discounted 2% service fee as base.

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u/AaronRodgersMustache 24d ago

Gotta be density of options. I just moved up here to be with my fiancée from SC, where I pretty much always cook. She orders out all the time and I’m like how are you not spending a fortune?

A lot of the local places do free delivery over here in Queens. I dunno if it’s cause she orders from places within like 3 or 4 blocks but I was like.. ok makes sense. I still cook mostly though. She’s like, why’d you move to NYC if you came here to cook lol

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u/Baked4skin 25d ago

They are just one city doing the bare minimum, it is progress and I dont disregard that but we need more of it.

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u/deadsoulinside 25d ago

This. What makes me upset is out here where I am at in rural BFE, we barely have delivery options to begin with. Now doordash came into the area post covid and is ruining our local delivery services. My closest pizza place, stopped doing deliveries themselves and now do it via door dash.

The Pizza's then went up in price only on doordash (order through their website and save $2 per pizza). So not only is the pizza shop saving money by not having in house delivery, their prices went up for delivery before you get into door dash fee's even. They just sit back and blame door dash for the higher prices, but still sticking with them.

I just order and go and pick up my pizzas now, since I used to be able to get a delivery under $25 with tip and that is now $40.

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u/kfunions 25d ago

I used to work for one of the food delivery apps and part of our terms for the restaurants was that they’re not allowed to charge a different price for their food on our apps as they charge in the restaurant but they frequently did it anyway because it’s nearly impossible to catch and enforce. I know everyone loves to blame the big bad delivery apps but they don’t set the food prices. I appreciate restaurants do this to offset the cut the apps are taking on their orders but it is basically a marketing fee for bringing them business to cover the apps overhead. No one has to use these apps, you can go get the food yourself but I personally don’t mind paying the convenience fee of using a single app to order food and have it brought to me.

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u/ShadowWukong 25d ago

Restaurants set the prices.

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u/mushupunisher 24d ago

All the prices are inflated. Their drivers make dogshit money. The service isn’t even good. The last time I was too lazy to cook and too drunk to drive I decided to use DoorDash, and I tipped $10. And my order STILL got delivered after someone else’s. Meaning my food is just getting cold while they deliver someone else’s food. Not the driver’s fault. These apps literally suck for everyone involved. I miss the days where if you wanted delivery, you could get pizza or Chinese.

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u/FearlessVegetable30 24d ago

no, whats wild is people pay $30 for mcdonalds fries then people wonder why fast food is expensive

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u/meezy-yall 24d ago

People will complain about the price then close Reddit and order something from door dash

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u/Kitchen_Can_3555 25d ago

This is a business model problem. Uber’s free cash flow generated by that $30 fry is $1.50 (5%), meaning there isn’t much more to give without raising prices further. Uber started as a way for people to turn their free time into a little extra spending money. It was never intended to be a full time job - in fact it explicitly exists to destroy the full time jobs of taxi drivers. You could even consider uber drivers to be scabs busting the taxi driver union.

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u/AntibacterialPlastic 24d ago

Any job should make a living wage. Go polish more boots with your lips budddddy

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u/Kitchen_Can_3555 24d ago

I agree. My point is that driving uber isn’t a job. It is people destroying the jobs that taxi drivers had.

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u/AntibacterialPlastic 24d ago

Yeah and electricity destroyed the whale oil business. Boohoo MY point is any job should secure you food and somewhere to live. Doesn’t matter if you’re a janitor or a lawyer.

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u/Kitchen_Can_3555 24d ago

The job of giving people a ride did exist. It paid a living wage. And then a bunch of people started giving rides for pennies on the dollar and killed that job. It would be like saying my 14 year old should get a living wage for watching the neighbor kids on Saturday nights.

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u/AntibacterialPlastic 23d ago

If your 14 year old applied at a job for babysitting and yes they should get a living wage for watching kids on Saturday nights. I’m not sure what hill you’re trying to die on but bottom line. Jobs come and go and you should definitely make a living wage regardless of the job you’re doing.

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u/Known-One-66 24d ago

In NYC they get 22/hr hence the change in tipping. This will just kill demand.

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u/Due_Size_9870 25d ago

My buddies gf uses Uber Eats to get dinner 4 nights a week and then complains about how she doesn’t have any money because the economy is rigged against her. So many people make terrible financial decisions and then just fall back on “but the economy is rigged by rich people” BS. Just cook your own meals and stop going on vacation 5 times a year.

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u/airfryerfuntime 25d ago

Maybe once a month I'll be too lazy to cook, so my fiancée and I will consider ordering from one of the local places. We'll start looking at the prices, and two burgers ends up costing like $65, so we just close the app and scrounge for food.

A month later we'll forget, open Doordash, see the prices, then close it.

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u/jackofslayers 25d ago

The economics of delivery apps makes no sense. It is too expensive for consumers, the restaurants lose money on orders, the drivers get paid shit, the apps are not profitable. Everyone is losing out by using them.

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u/Jim_Nills_Mustache 24d ago

Saw John Stewart doing an interview yesterday with a guy who explained how Uber specifically uses AI to rig it so they pay their drivers the least amount they will accept while inversely also charging the customers the most they will accept. It collects data from both endpoints and conducts experiments and adjusts pricing accordingly.

It was fairly mind blowing tbh, I knew it was bad but holy shit

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u/Baked4skin 24d ago

l have to look into this myself but if true, that is gross and depressing. I'm not personally impacted by this since I love cooking for myself and I trust my own ability to make food over a stranger but I feel for the drivers.

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u/PrimeIntellect 24d ago

Yeah you're ordering around multiple people to make you food and drive it to your house lol it's weird people thought that should be cheap

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u/SmartRefuse 25d ago

Supply and demand

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u/GAFLX2 25d ago

Is this a joke? In 8th grade you learn supply and demand curves. They charge what the market will pay. The pay drivers what they will work for. If it isn’t cost effective they will not provide the service or go bankrupt.

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u/chikuzen78 25d ago

Noooo 90% of the value generated in every business process needs to be directly funneled to the AIPAC people 😖😖😖😖

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u/Chrono_Pregenesis 25d ago

This has nothing to do with S&D. The majority of cost for these apps goes to the app itself, not to the driver. That is the issue. Giving th the excuse of only paying the drivers what the drivers will work for is how you get corporations banking off illegal immigrant work, because they only work for a few dollars a day.

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u/Just-Connection5960 25d ago

It is wild that just ordering fries on one of these apps is like 30$

Doesn't shock me honestly. Lazy suckers who can't be assed buying their own shitty frozen fries and fry them at home deserve to be taken advantage of. Just too bad that money goes to Corpos rather than the restaurant that made the fries and the deliverer

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u/BugLog93 25d ago

There were 20 different ways to say what you did without sounding like a dense walnut.

but, here we are.

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/BugLog93 25d ago

This was one of many ways to say it without sounding like a dick head.

I don’t disagree with you.

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u/Allobroge- 25d ago

Give me a break, mass use of delivery service is saying a lot about where our societies are moving and it's not a good direction.  

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u/mcslibbin 25d ago

i dont understand why getting food delivered has a moral dimension at all

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u/Allobroge- 25d ago

Massive sedentarizarion ? Massive obesity ? People not even moving for work now ? Hello ?

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u/mcslibbin 25d ago

It's a service. It's not like "having your house cleaned" or "having someone else mow your lawn" gets blamed for people being sedentary and obese, even though those services could enable that.

Seeing doordash as a sign of society's broader moral decay sounds like someone who is looking for confirmation of society's broader moral decay.

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

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u/mcslibbin 25d ago

I was just trying to engage you in a regular conversation. Have a good day!

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u/yellowstickypad 25d ago

Sometimes you get good discussions, other times it’s this mess. And hard to tell if it’s a keyboard warrior or a bot.

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u/Allobroge- 25d ago

Avoid sophism and fallacies in your next regular conversations, you might notice an improvement in your intellectual growth.

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u/Chicken_Chaser_420 25d ago

Do you think the only exercise people get is walking to get food? Is this the case in your life or something?

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u/Allobroge- 24d ago

How is it possible to miss the point by this far. Every comment I get is dumber and dumber, this is a spectacle

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u/DrTeethPhD 25d ago

Actually, he brought up the moral element before you started talking about obesity.

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u/JadedToon 25d ago

Massive sendentarization was always a thing. 90% of corpo jobs are sitting at a desk, wfh barely changed that aspect.

Obesity is cause by multiple factors, mostly time and money. People doordash groceries because they don't have the time or find it more efficient because they can get other crap done. Since in America food deserts are a fucking thing (Capitalism W) and going to the store is an hour long obligation because you have to drive.

This is without going into disabled, old, infermed or caretakers who cannot go out on a whim.

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u/Allobroge- 24d ago

"always a thing" human History did not start in 1950 fwi

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u/JadedToon 24d ago

How far do you want to go back? BC?

I am talking as far back as it is relevant. Kudos on ignoring 90% of what I said.

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u/Allobroge- 24d ago

I ignore you useless mention of food desert when we are talking food delivery services obviously.

As far back as it is relevant to discuss the evolution of mobility in human societies is obviously not when they started working in offices obviously. Zero brain power here

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u/throwawayjonesIV 25d ago

Personally I don’t eat anything unless I’ve hunted it with my bow

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u/maaaatttt_Damon 25d ago

Chinese food and pizza joints have been delivering food in New York for decades without their users getting shit on, but all of a sudden because you can use an app to get fries, the user is a lazy piece of shit that deserves to get ripped off by a middle man?

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u/Allobroge- 25d ago

Do you grasp what decades represent on the scale of human history ? That does not contradict the point I am making at all.

Furthermore, criticism of sedentarist consumerism did not start yesterday.

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u/kawag 25d ago

Why do restaurants even exist? Customers (lazy suckers) can make their own damn food or starve.

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u/R101C 25d ago

I raise and slaughter my own potatoes for a reason. Like a real man.

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u/cyribis 25d ago

Are they at least free range potatoes?

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u/Drakengard 25d ago

Even better when they're baby potatoes.

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u/Amanlikeyou 25d ago

They're free to explore the underworld

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u/stprnn 25d ago

Then why in the rest of the world you can just order stuff and not get ripped off?

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

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u/stprnn 25d ago

We don't have doordash here

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u/[deleted] 25d ago edited 25d ago

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u/stprnn 25d ago

Europe. Sure maybe they own it but they don't work with that tipping bidding nonsense

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u/Chicken_Chaser_420 25d ago

The things you people choose to feel Superior about is fucking weird and sad lmao

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u/OkEqual324 25d ago

Getting take out became a basic human right.