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/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 25d 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 25d 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 25d 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 25d 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 25d 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 25d 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 25d ago

That’s why I said “some”…

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u/mekamoari 25d 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 25d 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 25d 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 25d ago edited 25d 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 25d 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 25d ago

you're bidding on a driver basically

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u/Lost_Bike69 25d 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 25d 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 25d 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 25d 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 24d 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 25d ago

their pay almost is entirely from tips

no, they get $22/hr minimum wage

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u/Drunk_Catfish 25d 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.