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.
> 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.
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?
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.
I don’t think paying someone to perform a service for you makes you a sucker.
I’ve 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 “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
It’s not like they hide anything about what they’re offering. They advertise service X for price Y and that’s what they deliver. Seems fine. If you don’t think Y is worth it for X then don’t use it.
Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.
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?
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.
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.
Eh, the difference is that DoorDash is a logistics company performing a service that restaurants do not like running (delivery). It’s not a middleman providing no value
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am so trained now, that I didn’t 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.
Too bad having their names associated with this immoral politicking won’t 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.
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.
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.
Presumably somebody who thinks the Mamdani’s policies will be popular and spread to other jurisdictions. After all, why campaign against an idea that you think will fail? It’d exist as a prominent warning flag for the next group that considers it.
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, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VC’d their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasn’t been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it
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?
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.
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.
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.
> “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
"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."
"Private chauffeur for your burrito" is proving to be too costly. Time for New Yorkers to rise up and side with the BurritoBus™
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.
> 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.
> your burger and fries would probably cost $40 delivered, making the whole business model infeasible.
Tough luck? Businesses aren’t entitled to exist. If it’s a bad model it’s a bad model. We can’t just throw our hands up and ignore bad business practices for that reason. It’s not our job to protect DoorDash’s unsustainable business model that only works if they behave particularly unethically. That is squarely their issue
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."
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.
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?
> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race
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.
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.
I’ve 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 “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.
You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.
I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.
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?
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.
How did you arrive to this conclusion?
Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SCKj7gwbYrc
Didn't read - too expensive.
Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.
(⌐_⌐)ノ Empathy
(•ᴗ•)つ Apathy
> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
This is villain shit.
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.
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.
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.
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
> “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
"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."
It doesn’t matter who you work for, they still can’t underpay you or pay you late.
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.
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.
Tough luck? Businesses aren’t entitled to exist. If it’s a bad model it’s a bad model. We can’t just throw our hands up and ignore bad business practices for that reason. It’s not our job to protect DoorDash’s unsustainable business model that only works if they behave particularly unethically. That is squarely their issue
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."
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.
> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race