What I struggle with is why anyone would deliver for Door Dash if the pay is so bad.
The article closes with a statement that they want $15/hour plus expenses for drivers. The obvious problem is that I can’t see customers paying that much for delivery - ie. at those wages Door Dash can’t exist.
The fact that people choose to do the work makes me think there are people who find it worthwhile, and I can explain a few scenarios that make a lot more sense than the ones in the article:
I live in SF, which is only about 7mi by 7mi square, so if you do door dash here it’s very unlikely for a delivery to require more than 2-3 mi of travel. Further I see a lot of deliveries made on bikes, skateboards, scooters, etc. so the cost is much lower than the suburban deliveries made by car.
I see a lot of young delivery people, who I imagine may be high school or college students who just want a few bucks spending money without any kind of time commitment, and maybe this works nicely for them.
Regulating the wages to try and turn door dash into a “family feeding” job seems like it would do nothing but kill the business (and all the gig businesses), depriving people who want that kind of ultimate flexibility of the freedom and also depriving customers of a really convenient service.
But I do think regulation could be very beneficial in creating transparency around payment to both the customer and the gig worker. I can see no reason the companies should be allowed to obscure what they pay their workers, where tips for, how many miles the worker traveled on a job etc. That kind of information is fair and reasonable to provide, and would help avoid gig companies exploiting people who unfortunately may not understand how to properly value their expenses.
The final thing I would argue is that it’s reasonable to prohibit blind auctions, as door dash does.
Instead of randomly pairing a person to a job, giving them only seconds to respond, and penalizing them (by not offering more) if they fail to respond, it would be much more fair to have a real-time auction map showing all deliveries that need to be picked up in a certain area, where they need to go, how much the pay is, and then letting them “sit on the map” and slowly tick up in price until a worker picks one. That’s a half-baked brainstorm so maybe that’s not the right implementation, but my point is simply:
1. I think regulating gig wages is a blunt instrument that would mostly end the gig companies and possibly entrench one or two mega corps as survivors that are still exploitive toward workers - whereas providing information transparency could potentially preserve the good things about gig jobs while eliminating the majority of bad outcomes for workers.
2. The real problem seems to be that there are so many people in need of “family feeding” jobs who are working for Door Dash etc. instead. When we talk about a “historically low unemployment rate,” things like this make it ring hollow to me. Clearly there are a lot of people unable to get better work, who as a result are really hurting economically, and we need to do a better job measuring and understanding that problem so we can respond more effectively to it.
As a service, the gig economy deliveries are very low quality and low accountability. I just walked into a Mission taqueria and had to wait on not one but two Doordashers. The first one left with the second's order, came back, and said, "never mind, I'm cancelling."
Recently Safeway has also made a move to use Doordash. My parents have used Safeway's delivery for years and the change is terrible there for a different reason: an order from a grocery store is likely to be 10-20x bigger and more expensive than an equivalent restaurant order. The scale turns it into a fundamentally different job - how much you're lifting, the best type of vehicle, the value of the cargo, the emphasis of the throughput/latency equation. Each time since, when they get an order, it's by someone in a hatchback who is unused to the work. Safeway drivers previously did not accept tips, and so one of the big draws of Doordash is missing. Since the stores have handed off the customers to Doordash, updates on delivery status have become more difficult to get.
Identity is a pretty critical element to this, it turns out. If the restaurant knew their regular deliveryperson and could coordinate that info, they wouldn't send out wrong orders. If Safeway could specify drivers from a pool of truck drivers with freezer units and connect the customer to them directly, as they had before the change, there would be less of an unknown in ordering from them.
On the other hand, it's a case of "it can probably only go up from here" since competing on quality is likely to become the case if the economy stays fully employed and regulation starts creeping in.
"The obvious problem is that I can’t see customers paying that much for delivery - ie. at those wages Door Dash can’t exist."
I am 100% ok with DoorDash and that entire market not existing. We somehow managed without it just 3-4 years ago and it's not like Americans need another ridiculously unhealthy eating option provided with even greater convenience.
Pizza, Chinese food etc. delivery has existed forever, and the model for drivers was always the same - get paid nothing and rely on customers tipping you. Now there are billion dollar brands and fancy apps, but on the whole nothing has changed.
Food delivery apps have made 80% of restaurants realize that their customers would pay $8-$10 more per order for delivery. Before that customers didn't have the option and most restaurants just figured it wasn't for them. It's a huge new market.
> The real problem seems to be that there are so many people in need of “family feeding” jobs who are working for Door Dash etc. instead.
All jobs are basically a means for feeding your family, even if that family is just you. Few people work primarily for the fun of it.
The people taking the gig jobs to feed their families are often desperate, with few other options. They aren't taking the gig jobs by mistake. And cynically, this is the objective that our current socio economic system has been optimized for.
I have to gently disagree with part of what you said. In my life experience there are a lot of jobs that are taken by people who are not looking for what I called “family feeding” work (which I agree includes families of one), but rather for “spending money.”
Many high schoolers take jobs that fall into this category: they have parental support and don’t _need_ money, but they want to have some cash for their own entertainment.
These days I know a lot of married couples where one of the two earns a comfortable income such that the other doesn’t _need_ to work. The other person in that case often takes on volunteer work, but also often takes on “gigs” that come with very low pay but perhaps “gas money” or something like that.
I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with that kind of “token payment” work, because it doesn’t hurt anyone.
My closing point was, to me Doordash and other gig jobs seem to basically be suitable only as “spending money” or perhaps even “token payment” jobs, and yet some people (perhaps many?) are taking them as “family feeding,” work.
So (1) it really concerns me that this is happening, because it is strong evidence that we don’t have enough “family feeding” work available and there are a lot of people really hurting as a result. To me this is the main problem we should be talking about.
And (2) I don’t really understand the outrage at gig jobs for not being “family feeding” jobs. If the work is lousy, don’t do it! That’s not something the government needs to punish - there are plenty of these sub jobs out there that aren’t hurting anyone.
Except then we’re back to (1) - lots of people are so desperate they’re taking a gig and depending on it... which is scary. So how can we create more good quality work for people so they just give door dash the finger and move on, rather than feeling trapped in that as the best work they can get.
> Many high schoolers take jobs that fall into this category: they have parental support and don’t _need_ money, but they want to have some cash for their own entertainment.
I agree those jobs exist. I had them too. The question is whether we should be setting the rules for the economy and jobs to match that use case or the "family feeding" use case.
> So how can we create more good quality work for people so they just give door dash the finger and move on, rather than feeling trapped in that as the best work they can get.
A federal jobs guarantee, universal healthcare, better and more equal public education; those things will increase the leverage that workers have to give gig employers the finger.
Many of those would let even higher paid tech workers give their employers the finger.
I think it’s hard for HN peeps, who I would guess are mostly comfortably off, to empathise with those involuntarily stuck in the gig economy. It’s not likely to be a rational calculation but rather “I desperately need cash today, what can I do?”, that is an entirely short term decision. And if you’re stuck there, then companies can continually exploit you unless the government steps in to protect them. See also: payday loans.
The article closes with a statement that they want $15/hour plus expenses for drivers. The obvious problem is that I can’t see customers paying that much for delivery - ie. at those wages Door Dash can’t exist.
The fact that people choose to do the work makes me think there are people who find it worthwhile, and I can explain a few scenarios that make a lot more sense than the ones in the article:
I live in SF, which is only about 7mi by 7mi square, so if you do door dash here it’s very unlikely for a delivery to require more than 2-3 mi of travel. Further I see a lot of deliveries made on bikes, skateboards, scooters, etc. so the cost is much lower than the suburban deliveries made by car.
I see a lot of young delivery people, who I imagine may be high school or college students who just want a few bucks spending money without any kind of time commitment, and maybe this works nicely for them.
Regulating the wages to try and turn door dash into a “family feeding” job seems like it would do nothing but kill the business (and all the gig businesses), depriving people who want that kind of ultimate flexibility of the freedom and also depriving customers of a really convenient service.
But I do think regulation could be very beneficial in creating transparency around payment to both the customer and the gig worker. I can see no reason the companies should be allowed to obscure what they pay their workers, where tips for, how many miles the worker traveled on a job etc. That kind of information is fair and reasonable to provide, and would help avoid gig companies exploiting people who unfortunately may not understand how to properly value their expenses.
The final thing I would argue is that it’s reasonable to prohibit blind auctions, as door dash does.
Instead of randomly pairing a person to a job, giving them only seconds to respond, and penalizing them (by not offering more) if they fail to respond, it would be much more fair to have a real-time auction map showing all deliveries that need to be picked up in a certain area, where they need to go, how much the pay is, and then letting them “sit on the map” and slowly tick up in price until a worker picks one. That’s a half-baked brainstorm so maybe that’s not the right implementation, but my point is simply:
1. I think regulating gig wages is a blunt instrument that would mostly end the gig companies and possibly entrench one or two mega corps as survivors that are still exploitive toward workers - whereas providing information transparency could potentially preserve the good things about gig jobs while eliminating the majority of bad outcomes for workers.
2. The real problem seems to be that there are so many people in need of “family feeding” jobs who are working for Door Dash etc. instead. When we talk about a “historically low unemployment rate,” things like this make it ring hollow to me. Clearly there are a lot of people unable to get better work, who as a result are really hurting economically, and we need to do a better job measuring and understanding that problem so we can respond more effectively to it.