This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
For drivers, the results are unpredictable and too often unfair. Data obtained by the Star shows Uber Eats’ platform can offer two food couriers different wages for the exact same trip.
Labour advocates charge that the app collects data on driver behaviour and can use it to decide who it can pay at a lower rate, allowing the company to pocket the difference and boost its revenue. This concept is widely referred to as algorithmic wage discrimination.
Wild
Par for the course based on Uber's history. I stopped using them in lieu of a local/community app...which is honestly absolute garbage, but it is essentially completely pass-through and free for my local area restaurants to use.
I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people's needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.
If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.
This would be a really good fit for federation I think.
Wage discrimination sounds like a fancy way of saying wage theft.
Yep, it's just when they only do wage theft on the most disadvantaged employees that are the least likely to sue them or quit as a result.
It shouldn't be a massive surprise. The whole platform exists as a way to circumvent minimum wage laws for drivers while taking a massive slice of restaurant profits.
No hygiene inspections either, half the places listed aren't even restaurants or takeaways, it's just in somebody's house...
I just can't use uber eats. It just feels weird. Like, I am fully capable of getting food myself, I know uber eats, doordash etc, pays shit, delivery folks have to wait at the restaurant if its not ready and then fix it if its not. Get my drink from the fountain if I ordered one. And then, drive all the way to my place. I then receive a cold, tossed meal. It's just depressing all around. I don't get it.
I'll pay for delivery of pizza or even something like jimmy johns who have delivery drivers, but having a third party involved just feels wrong.
It's also freaking expensive. When I used it occasionally at my last job we'd get reimbursed up to $20. I usually just got the $12 combo and by the time all the fees were added, I still ended up paying $2-3 out of pocket.
This is how I felt too. Eventually I just stopped using our corporate Grubhub “perk” because I was still paying for it when the entire idea was supposed to be a meal “on the company” once a week for weekly All-Hands meetings.
Another massive pet peeve that made me stop using these fucking delivery services is many times the restaurants would give you less food than if you went there. Take a place like Red Robin and their basket of fries was basically 25% a basket of fries at a marked up cost because they have to pay fees to these companies and lose money.
Plus they often got orders wrong. Not sure if that was on purpose or what, but I rarely got everything I asked for or the mods correct.
The worst are the places that say they have delivery, take you through the whole checkout process on their own site, and then sends you a link to track your order on door dash or something.
LOOKING AT YOU LITTLE CESARS
Asian food has been doing to-go for centuries, though. It packs well and keeps well for 30 minutes. In fact there is a to-go only Thai place near me which uses an industrial kitchen and literally a hole in the side of the building to take payments and hand over food. Other restaurants we know in our area stopped seating people during COVID and would just hand out to-go orders at the door. But I can only think of Asian restaurants that did this.
There’s nothing wrong necessarily with having a separate delivery service. Restaurants aren’t good at making menu apps or driving cars. It may be a little awkward fit for restaurants who rent retail space and offer dine-in tables, but the world is transitioning and I fully expect more Doordash-first restaurants operating out of less expensive kitchen space and just skipping the whole dine-in waiter thing.
I hate to hear that Doordash pays so poorly but we always tip 20% or more which, even if it is the only payment the driver receives, usually seems fair for 30 minutes of work. We are a family of four and our order is always over $50. So that’s $10 / 30 minutes or $20 / hour minimum (if everyone used it the way we do). That seems like an okay wage for a job with so much flexibility. Probably the real thing that kills it is gas and wear on the car being invisible costs. Just like with regular Uber drivers.
EDIT: hey /u/womble have you heard of this other American concept called “fuck you, Jack.”
I hear the smallest violin Everytime I hear about UberEATS executive complain about the company not being profitable.
I know GrubHub is bad too but I typically only pay a small fee of 3$ for their service and a tip of 20% to the driver.
Yet UberEATS usually includes a $10-15 UberEATS fee which the employee sees none of. Yet "oh no UberEATS is not profitable, oh no my 3rd yacht isn't big enough"
I only use eats if there's a solid promo, and then I pick up the food myself. They don't get the fee, I don't have to tip, and I get the deal. A lot of time the price per item is cheaper on pickup too. Their fees are absolutely ridiculous, and they are just a middleman. They for sure are losing money on me.
I will never use uber so long as I shall live.
Uber eats is such a scam. When these new VC companies come on the block offering things that are to good to be true I am constantly saying "we shouldn't support this unsustainable vc funded business, once they have market share they will have killed the competition and then they will raise their prices"
So many places used to deliver at reasonable prices but after years of uber delivering at way cheaper rates they stopped. Now uber delivers at $10 more.
Yeah I liked the idea of Uber at first because taxis have been shitty for a long time and Uber was shaking up that industry.
But then I learned that Uber wasn't making money and immediately realized that they were just looking better than taxis for as long as they needed to to drive them out of business so they can be even worse, while providing even less than taxis companies do. At least taxi companies have a relationship with their drivers while Uber was just a platform for connecting anonymous riders with almost as anonymous drivers and handling the financial aspect of it (so that they control it all as middlemen with control of the wallet).
So now I just use taxi services when I need a ride (while cursing the state of mass transit in North America and GM plus corrupt politicians for their role in making this like this).
Similar story with hotels/airbnb, though they've made it even worse because they are affecting the housing market itself rather than just the luxury service of staying somewhere while away from home.
Many reports of landlords evicting their tenants so they could turn their homes into airbnbs... Disgusting
The awful part is, even without tipping the driver the food is drastically more expensive. The restaurant takes an extra cut, The delivery service takes an extra cut. This person's delivering your food practically for free and the meal is already sit down restaurant price.
Just one note, restaurant prices go up because uber eats charges a percentage based fee for each menu item. So, restaurants need to up the prices on the app just to make the same amount of money. Just some good ol' under-the-table fuckery courtesy of Silicon Valley bastards.
I've never delivered for Uber Eats specifically, but I don't know how they managed less than $2 an hour without doing obviously impractical things like trying to deliver at off hours, or in a poor area for it. I average about $27/hour. This is however, with GrubHub that has a wait list for drivers and they deliberately don't overcrowd regions. Area really has a lot to do with it. I can imagine that if Uber doesn't cap the amount of drivers in an area, a full on city is probably the worst example of a place to try it. I know that DoorDash is the same way in Atlanta, and the few times I have tried there, it wasn't worth the trip. One thing you learn very fast through observations is that the "hot zones" mentioned in the article don't matter. All they mean is that someone ordered from a place there before the map refreshed.
I guess my point here, is that the pay isn't necessarily shit. You have to put in some leg work and learn the best areas around you as well as the times to work.
I do have a lot to say about doing this line of work with over 1k deliveries done across 3 apps, but it is kind of out of the scope of this comment unless someone asks.
Editing to add because people asked:
To address some comments here; I already had an LLC, and insured my car through that which made it cheaper. No, the driver doesn't get basically nothing if you don't tip. It's around $1/mile driven with an order (sorry, but I'm not up to doing the approximate .625 km/mile conversions here). I hate to say it, but if you are doing this even as a side job, you need to find overly gentrified suburbs, or a town that has almost nothing as far as restaurants go. I happen to be in a sweet spot between the two. My "assigned area" is Woodstock, GA but that still covers all the way up to Jasper. Woodstock is the overly gentrified suburb, and Jasper has almost nothing.
Many have noted the operational costs. With the mileage deduction of ¢60 per mile for tax purposes, it adds up a lot. Remember that you make roughly $1/mile driven with an order. I net around $19/hour with expenses, including tax. For me, that very much makes it worth the time. There are roughly 7 hours a day for my area that are worth driving for. 11 AM-1 PM, and 5-9 PM. Expenses included, I can make around $500 on weekends. I do, however, own a compact car with very good mileage. That's an extra $2000/mo. So, yes, if you really do the leg work it is worth it. You can not, as shown in this article, show up with a bike in a major city and every hope to make money. Bare minimum, you'd need a car.
I've seen comments here saying that your tip is not a tip, but a bid. This is partially true. I do need to reiterate that I've not done much of this work in a full fledged city (Atlanta being the only one I've covered). Your tip is not a bid. What happens is that your order (if just plain unprofitable) gets bounced from driver to driver. Your "tip" never has to escalate. What happens is that the pay from whatever service escalates. Say, someone makes an order and the total the potential driver might make is $10. If one driver declines, it gets passed to the next "best driver" - so on an so forth. Each time the pay from the company initially providing the service increases. There is no increased cost to the customer. This is why there is no reason, as a driver, one should never accept a low offer. That's how the bids work. It isn't from customer tips. There tends to be, however, a charge that will get you priority as a customer. Usually, drivers will have more than one order. You can pay to not get the meme of "lol took 20 mins over time, cold, and thrown around."
This was in Toronto, and to call the ebike courier job market here "oversaturated" would be an understatement.
This must be that innovation which is making the world a better place that these tech parasites keep gushing about.
How much did the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, earn last year?
Buddy, I cant use that service in any good concience...
Had a colleague that did it as a side gig and no matter how many times I told him to do it, he always refused to do the calculation to figure out how much he was making after expenses.
Living in denial is the only reason we aren’t already eating the rich.
I feel like you gotta go out of your way to make so little money doing this. If they actually did it correctly there would be no article to write. Not saying they would get rich but there's no way they did this honestly.
