today at 10:04 PM
Ever since it was found that they took part of driver's tips for themselves, I didn't trust the company https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/27/doordash-new...
today at 8:34 PM
services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25. then delivery worker made $5 on that order. + the delivery worker expects a tip.
which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
today at 9:05 PM
> literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more
Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.
It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?
Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?
I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.
today at 9:26 PM
Skip the line passes are an obvious sucker play; they oversell tickets to the park so that people can go on like 1 ride every 4 hours, then charge again to actually be able to use the ticket you already bought (and simply don't deliver service to the others). Do you think they are unaware of the capacity at which reasonable latencies can be maintained?
today at 9:35 PM
In case you, or anyone else, actually care or are interested, there's a great deep dive video on the history of "FASTPASS" by the youtube channel Defunctland.
today at 9:49 PM
It's just a standard reintermediation play, inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides.
Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .
this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.
today at 8:59 PM
I donât think paying someone to perform a service for you makes you a sucker.
Iâve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply âpaying more for the itemâ (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
today at 9:10 PM
Itâs not like they hide anything about what theyâre offering. They advertise service X for price Y and thatâs what they deliver. Seems fine. If you donât think Y is worth it for X then donât use it.
Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.
today at 10:19 PM
Well, they hide the fact that the food prices are marked up for one thing. Even if you pick up yourself, menu prices in DoorDash are at least 20% above the restaurantâs posted prices. That undisclosed upcharge comes on top of the delivery fees and service charges they do disclose â but only after you have made your order.
today at 9:53 PM
Oh come on, all of the service personnel survive on the tips alone just fine, like the cashiers, and the nurses, and the receptionists do. Right?
today at 8:51 PM
I thought they were built on "time is money". If you make the equivalent of $70 an hour, do you care about spending $15 for someone to bring you lunch and save you 15-30 minutes of your workday?
today at 10:09 PM
Itâs not just âtime is moneyâ, but also the convenience as well. Sometimes youâre sick and need a hot meal, or youâre busy helping someone, etc.
Edit: Spelling. ârightâ to âsickâ.
today at 9:28 PM
It was kind of fun doing this math back when I was a freelancer. An hour saved would literally produce more money than the order cost. But really, it would have been better to save the money by making food ahead of time.
today at 9:40 PM
I've always struggled with this thinking. Yes, you have finite hours in a day and if you spend an hour going to get food then you can't necessarily also be doing freelance work. But if you planned on working 8 hours to earn X dollars, you can still work 8 hours after spending an hour going to get food and still make X dollars. Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep. I guess it makes sense if you're trying to work every waking moment; and I can appreciate that some choose to and some have to.
today at 9:55 PM
> Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep.
Well, if you value an hour of your sleep or entertainment less than $15 dollars (if, for instance, you like to cook), then sure, spend it on cooking instead. Many of people would rather not, and their revealed preferences show it pretty clearly.
today at 9:33 PM
Ya I dont get this argument. Takes me all of 2 mins to grab my lunch in the morning. It's also not a greasy burger that shortens my lifespan and physically disable's me.
today at 9:47 PM
The whole point of food delivery is for the occasions you canât (e.g. sudden illness, or time management mishaps) or donât want to (laziness/tiredness) cook or drive to grab a takeout. You pay a premium for the convenience, someone else takes care of it. Nothing wrong with that, no âsuckersâ in the general scheme.
today at 9:20 PM
The gig workers are still suckers because gig work sucks. But yes the service is most sensible for higher paid consumers.
today at 9:53 PM
...only because the company is committing wage theft to subsidize costs. I don't think it feels reasonable to say "Your employer has to meet certain wages, but they didn't so you're a sucker".
If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.
Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.
today at 9:30 PM
Tony Xu spent three times as much time as the driver did, did he?
today at 9:44 PM
Except they increase the charges of the food also, so you are getting taken advantage of there as well.
today at 9:01 PM
This just translates to "anyone paying a margin on anything anywhere is a sucker."
You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.
today at 9:49 PM
today at 9:04 PM
My time is more expensive than the $15 extra I pay for the food...who's the sucker.
I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.
today at 9:05 PM
Eh, the difference is that DoorDash is a logistics company performing a service that restaurants do not like running (delivery). Itâs not a middleman providing no value
today at 9:40 PM
The problem is they use exploitative labor practices (as we're seeing here) and price-dumping funded by infinite amounts of venture capital. It sets customer expectations to unsustainably low pricing and it forces restaurants to either heavily subsidise their own delivery drivers to keep customer prices low or, because barely anyone can sustain that, to shut down their own delivery service and use <gig company> instead.
And that in turn gives doordash, uber eats and whatnot access to a lot of data - who orders what and lives where or which restaurant is doing good and which is struggling - that can be sold to third parties. Governments (ICE and other agencies have been caught to just buy data from aggregators), advertisers, credit reporting agencies, political parties, you name it.
Sure. As a customer the value that doordash et al provide is hard to understate. A single point of contact, a single set of credentials, a unified UI compared to what used to be a ton of never-updated garbage wordpress installs, reliable tracking... but as a whole, we all lose.
today at 9:07 PM
Doordash and grubhub are insane for single food purchases. But the fees are barely noticed when feeding my family of 5. We use it every other week or so just because of how chaotic school activity schedules can be. When we order sushi/chinese for the kids the bill before any delivery services is around $200 for enough food for dinner and another meal with leftovers. The service charge is like $7 and I make sure the driver gets at least $10 regardless of the distance. Cheaper than if we ate in the restaurant and were expected to give a 15-20% tip.
today at 10:24 PM
> Cheaper than if we ate in the restaurant and were expected to give a 15-20% tip.
You should run that experiment. Get two identical meals, one via delivery the other at the restaurant. Pay close attention to menu prices.
today at 10:20 PM
[delayed]
today at 9:14 PM
> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more
Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.
Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.
What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.
See the difference there?
today at 10:00 PM
If you think "high earners with company subsidized plans"(where I assume you fall based on the general demographics of this site, but correct me if I'm wrong) were the target audience of the ACA, you're right to be pissed. It was for the un/underinsured, and people with preexisting conditions.
But your comparison is wrong, because you can...elect to not use the service. You could pay less for less coverage (so like, buying food without paying for a delivery fee because you don't need the convenience). Also, the individual mandate was killed (sucking funding out of the whole program), so you could opt out of the service entirely.
Nobody is forcing you to have insurance (at a federal level).
See the difference there?
today at 9:30 PM
Sounds like you agree that suckers pay more.
today at 9:58 PM
> Mandated and forced on everyone.
Nope. It's a marketplace. Your above argument is perfectly applicable to it as well.
today at 8:36 PM
Even though the press likes to give Mamdani all the credit for these types of things, this started with a law passed under DeBlasio, and most of the investigation was done under Adams.
today at 8:46 PM
Mamdani deserves credit for taking this all the way.
Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."
I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.
today at 8:51 PM
> taking this all the way.
How did you arrive to this conclusion?
today at 9:21 PM
I think they just explained how corrupt the prior mayor was, this coupled with the disclosure by Mamdani about every prior mayor hiding air safety data after 9/11 paint a damning picture of the priorities of prior NYC mayors in recent memory.
today at 10:10 PM
really we should be giving credit to hammurabi for developing the idea of laws in the first place. where would deblasio be without him??
today at 8:52 PM
>most of the investigation was done under Adams.
Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.
today at 8:44 PM
Josh Johnson has a great bit about Mamdani:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SCKj7gwbYrc
today at 8:29 PM
What does "this is not a pay wall" mean - if I have to give personal information over, that is a price.
Didn't read - too expensive.
today at 8:46 PM
Your identity isn't considered of value to you, you can't monetize it. We can, but since it has no value to you, give it to us for free.
today at 8:42 PM
Disabling javascript let me read the whole article without any account nonsense.
today at 9:04 PM
Firefox reader mode also did it.
today at 8:54 PM
I just reload the page and hit 'esc' a bunch of times right after it loads but before the paywall pops up. Works on 3/4 of these soft paywalled sites.
today at 8:40 PM
Journalism is labor
today at 8:56 PM
Information wants to be free. But other than AI slop (where the tokens have become too cheap to meter), information costs money to produce. Pay with you info or your money. It's amazing how many people just cannot come to grips with that concept.
today at 8:33 PM
I am so trained now, that I didnât even read what they were asking for. Just closed the tab and came here to see if there was anything of value. Too expensive to even read their wall.
today at 8:45 PM
Yep this is what I did as well. I also just close tabs if it ever pops up a "sign up for our newsletter" thing.
today at 8:54 PM
Works with any random email, kinda fine tbh
today at 8:33 PM
I mean, test@example.com worked so info doesn't have to be that personal...
today at 8:59 PM
> Founders: Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore (Stanford students at the time)
Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.
today at 9:04 PM
Too bad having their names associated with this immoral politicking wonât cause them problems. An employee stealing a few hundred bucks would get a felony and probably never work a good job again. Founders stealing hundreds of millions from workers get to say whoopsie.
today at 9:28 PM
Not even a whoopsie. Look how many responders here defend this exploitative behavior that is only enabled through monopolization as "the market regulates this", or "nobody forces them to buy/work there". Pure libertarian brain rot, no better than the communists they always cry about.
today at 9:10 PM
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760317/how-to-rule-... is eye opening. When many of us were in college, there was still some idealism about using technology to make the world a better place. Maybe that still exists at some universities, but Sand Hill Road wiped that out of Stanford.
today at 9:01 PM
Is a drEAk meme appropriate here?
(â_â)ă Empathy
(â˘á´â˘)㤠Apathy
today at 10:05 PM
Money influencing politics again exposes flaws in our democracies. Shocking.
today at 9:36 PM
Uber wants DoorDash gone and DoorDash is just making it too easy.
today at 8:34 PM
If they were honest about it and said something like "we believe our actions were fair and legal and disagree with this decision" it would at least be ideologically consistent.
> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, âSimply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes werenât intentional, that doesnât make them okay.â (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
This is villain shit.
today at 9:10 PM
"Simply put, we screwed up. We should have given Cuomo two million so we can keep underpaying Dashers."
today at 10:07 PM
This is a reminder to the naive people who think things are getting worse financially because covid/immigrants/gas/AI/supplychain/[insert BS reason], and not just the 1% greed. Things got bad and living wages are not enough substantially after covid at the same time when billionaires are getting exponentially richer, and all above excuses up there are only to distract the public from this simple fact: your life is getting worse because someone way wealthier is stealing your money, and unfortunately legally too because who writes and approves these legislation and laws is part of the game.
today at 10:12 PM
Ok, I'll bite. How are the "wealthier ... stealing [our] money"? We don't have to use doordash or claude code or aws or amazon or anything else. We get to choose. When it comes to paying for government, however, I don't believe we're allowed to "opt out". Maybe Mamdani will give us stores so great we'll be forced to shop at them!
today at 10:25 PM
Wealthy choose the goverment amd most of its agenda. People dont get much choice and choosing from available options is framed as "support".
today at 10:26 PM
Doordash - ie "the wealthy" - spent to prevent Mamdani from getting elected. They failed. What on earth are you complaining about again?
today at 10:26 PM
[delayed]
today at 8:20 PM
More evidence Big Tech valuations are driven primarily by worker exploitation. Keep 'em coming.
today at 8:30 PM
the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VCâd their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasnât been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it
today at 8:41 PM
And they mostly keep getting away with it because digital makes things preposterously more convenient.
I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.
Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.
today at 9:06 PM
It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?
today at 9:22 PM
Are you European or American? To a lot of America, that is considered a good numbers. Its worse in many parts of this vastly large country. The country has chosen to invest heavily in road networks. It appears that you can have one or the other but not both without great expense and reform.
I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png
Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.
today at 9:34 PM
Wildly underfunded? I don't think so.
America underfunded? Yes.
There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.
I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.
But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.
today at 8:31 PM
Of course! that's always what "disruption" referred to.
today at 9:04 PM
Since when did doordash count as big tech?
today at 9:06 PM
They're not FAANG or MANGA, but they're certainly at the top of https://www.ycombinator.com/companies with 8600 employees and an $82B market cap (as of this comment, ticker DASH). Is "Big Tech" reserved only for the "FAANG MANGA"? If so, my apologies.
today at 10:15 PM
Yeah that's not big tech. $1 trillion market cap is big tech or 30k+ employees.
This is upper end of mid sized.
No yc alum counts as big tech
today at 8:23 PM
It is not like they aren't exploiting businesses either... Looking at Amazon(retail) and almost all SaaS services...
today at 8:27 PM
You eat an elephant one bite at a time. This bite was good, lots more bites to go.
I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752
> âI think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,â DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. âYou have to keep going all the way and seeing if thereâs more.â
"Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."
today at 9:15 PM
Valuation yes, but if we take a step back, there must be value there. The idea of Uber really provided benefits to many groups. Example: minorities who were discriminated against by regular taxis, declining service level due to Taxi monopolies, etc. (Similar issues that Doordash solved as well.)
How can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between?
Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved:
1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves?
2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation?
3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors?
I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.
today at 8:28 PM
[flagged]
today at 8:32 PM
The fact that you think NYC doordash delivery workers are driving is a good indication that you're out of your depth on this topic.
today at 8:34 PM
> nobody is forced to work for DoorDash
It doesnât matter who you work for, they still canât underpay you or pay you late.
today at 8:46 PM
"Private chauffeur for your burrito" is proving to be too costly. Time for New Yorkers to rise up and side with the BurritoBusâ˘
Place your order 6 hours in advance and our hyperadvanced algorithm will place your burrito on a hyperefficient route alongside other orders within your neighborhood. Estimated arrival times remain hyperaccurate (15 minute window) and your neighborhood FoodBusser is paid an hourly wage with hyperbenefits.
today at 8:32 PM
today at 8:29 PM
They have to do exactly this in Australia and a burger is still $20-22 all up.
today at 8:33 PM
The treatlerites strike again. All hail the burger reich!
today at 8:35 PM
> your burger and fries would probably cost $40 delivered, making the whole business model infeasible
Pizza places, chinese food places, many diners, they've all been making deliveries work for decades without inflating the prices to absurd levels. It's almost as if it can be done when you don't have to pay the middle man who has a billion dollar of venture debts.
It's so wild to see you, someone who seems to be older than gen z, so unaware that the food delivery model existed before delivery apps, and was highly successful without charging delivery charge + service fee + tip + 30% of the food price.
today at 8:30 PM
> your burger and fries would probably cost $40 delivered, making the whole business model infeasible.
Tough luck? Businesses arenât entitled to exist. If itâs a bad model itâs a bad model. We canât just throw our hands up and ignore bad business practices for that reason. Itâs not our job to protect DoorDashâs unsustainable business model that only works if they behave particularly unethically. That is squarely their issue
today at 9:05 PM
You conveniently trimmed what I wrote to argue against a point I didn't make.
today at 8:29 PM
I'm unwilling to argue with "It is a free choice to be exploited." I understand some will argue for this, and will hold the mental model, I am simply unwilling to entertain it from a time and effort perspective.
If the business cannot exist without exploitation, the business should not exist. I also understand this is an argument at the political process level at its core. Not much progress to be made in the argument over the US being an economic exploitation engine. Some are for, some are against. We choose, through policy, whether someone must make the choice to be exploited because we give them no other choice. We can make better choices, I argue. "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members."
today at 8:32 PM
I recognize that there is a power imbalance in play, but I would rather see activism towards educating would-be DoorDashers that the numbers don't work in their favor, rather than regulating DoorDash out of existence.
And in some cases, if you just need some money to pay a bill and you have a few hours available, maybe doing a few DoorDash deliveries closes that gap for you, even if it's not a good long term job. But, that can also work as a trap if you're not very deliberate about it.
today at 8:34 PM
today at 8:14 PM
[flagged]
today at 8:18 PM
I don't understand. What does Snowden stuff have to do with DoorDash's employment practices or an NY mayor? What is "interShiitake" supposed to reference?
today at 8:34 PM
only $1.4M? DD was not confident in their efforts to stop Mamdani. This is like a couple weeks of work from high priced political consultants in NYC.
today at 8:44 PM
The article disagrees:
> At the time, DoorDashâs campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large â it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race
today at 8:45 PM
I'm not so sure this is a victory lol
today at 8:33 PM
Seems like they spent more on campaigning than they did on the extra pay and fines here though. Who's making these financial calculations?
today at 8:35 PM
They just agreed to a $131 million settlement. The article says this is a hundred times what they spent to prevent Mamdani from getting elected.
today at 8:42 PM
Presumably somebody who thinks the Mamdaniâs policies will be popular and spread to other jurisdictions. After all, why campaign against an idea that you think will fail? Itâd exist as a prominent warning flag for the next group that considers it.
today at 9:57 PM
How did you come to that conclusion? The very first sentence explicitly explains that to be false.
today at 9:51 PM
DoorDash and gig companies generally are a play to destabilize employment and turn as many people as possible from employees entitled to benefits and legal protections into contractors that can be discarded at whim. How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers?
today at 10:28 PM
Their appeal initially was that they would deliver for places that didn't have their own drivers. So you went from only getting pizza and Chinese delivery to anything being available.
Now, everyone is offloading their deliveries to DoorDash. Wendy's first-party delivery is just a wrapper for DoorDash. Pizza Hut used DoorDash if they don't have enough drivers available. Even PetSmart or Petco uses DoorDash for delivery now.
Not saying it's right or good, but you could order from Pizza Hut and still get a gig worker if their driver called out stick today.
