Food Delivery Apps: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

As a european hearing People say "make sure you tip" is so weird. no, make sure workers are paid a living Wage. The employer needs to pay his employees not the customer.

Maybe we should focus on the fact that US tipping culture has incentivised places to pay a lower wage for the food service workers.

I drove for door dash for awhile. Most reviews and people were great, however here are some negative reviews that I got: 2* My cold stone ice cream was melted when I ordered from 25 minutes away from my home 1* The store didn't have the drink that I wanted 1* Food not delivered (the store they ordered from was closed and I had to call and cancel their order) 1* I called to inform the person the machine was down and asked what they wanted instead, I gave that to them and then they gave me a bad rating because it wasn't what they originally wanted When you factor in wear and tear on a vehicle, the inconsistencies in tipping, waiting around a restaurant because the order isn't ready, app mistakes causing a picked up order to be requested over and over it made it no longer worth it. When factoring in those items, I was making less than $8/hr

Safety is huge. It taught me poor driving habits to make the unreasonable delivery times to not get negative ratings and it could have cost me my life in a huge crash

"Choose your hours" As a PhD student, that's such a huge trap. It's a morbid joke in grad school that "You have the freedom to work any 80 hours you want each week."

I'm so sick of hearing someone referring to a person's 2-5th jobs as "side hustles". If you need multiple "side hustles" to live they are JOBS.

Aside from freshman year in college, I've stubbornly never once gotten food delivered. If it's close enough for delivery, it's close enough for me to go there myself.

This is why I stopped using delivery apps 3 years ago and instead started calling the restaurants for pick-up orders. Not only do the restaurants I like makes a better margins and can stay in business, but also it takes me less time to drive to the restaurant, grab my food and come back home than it takes with the delivery app. So I encourage my restaurant, pay less, have hot food, eat earlier and all it cost me was a 15-20 minutes drive.

In the netherlands, deliveroo workers sued deliveroo for requiring them to become independent contractors, which takes them away from a lot of worker's rights we have here. The judge decided that deliveroo is not allowed to do this, and then they just quit doing business in the entire country lmao

Big Food Apps: "We are barely making a profit!" Also Big Food Apps: "Here is $184 million so that we don't have to give our employees health insurance."

I delivered for Uber Eats for a couple months when I found myself between jobs. In those two months, I put a couple thousand miles on my car, hundreds of gallons of gas into the tank, and made just enough to cover the gas and an occasional meal. The only good thing was the "set your own hours" aspect of it, as that provided me enough time to go get another real job. I now work fewer hours, make much more, and only have to drive my car to and from work. Should things go wrong, and I find myself out of work again, I think I'll consider a life of crime rather than go back to delivering.

Got my first delivery job at Domino's in 2003. When Katrina hit in 2004 and gas prices soared, Domino's starting charging $0.99 or $1.99 as a delivery fee. It was a "temporary" fee while they adjusted to the price increase of gas. Temporary....

Instead of telling people who order food "You need to tip more", we should tell companies "You need to pay your workers more".

“Can’t spell Millennial without three massive L’s” Yeah. I felt that.

Still can’t get over the order I placed last week. The delivery guy didn’t show up and vanished off the map. After two hours I contact support and ask them what’s going on. They call the delivery guy and tell me that “They can’t seem to reach him, it’s odd that he vanished en route, this has never happened before.” I say that I really hope he’s ok and they should definitely check on him in a bit, to which they reply asking how I’d like my refund. I tell them, then reiterate that I hope they can get in touch with the driver and I hope nothing happened to him. They tell me that the restaurant still delivers, so I can reorder, and this behavior is not up to their usual high standards. I tell them, yup, I’ll order again, but also, they have a driver missing. And they ask me to positively rate the interaction and to have a nice day.

The door dash dude talking about an Orphanage was hilarious. Gotta love when the jokes write themselves. It feels like the "app for everything" era has made very few things better and just made an alternative to an already, usually better, system. You can thank a lot of food prices being jacked up around urban areas on these apps. Not just inflation.

I work at Circle K. Tons of Uber and Lyft drivers come in for gas. So many of them have zero idea that they should be saving their gas reciepts for when they file taxes, because many of them seem pretty unaware that they even need to file taxes, much less that they can deduct expenses related to their car. These apps should be required to educate their drivers on these things. I know its just one in a huge list of disgusting abuses by these companies, but it just really upsets me.

Despite the $40 cost for delivering a $12 meal before tip, somehow the apps manage to not turn a profit. Instead of paying lobbyists, perhaps they should keep that money.

The right thing with the "enshittification cycle" is to abandon ship immediately when the rates go up and the service goes down.

One problem not addressed in this video is the restaurant owners themselves. When they sign up for these delivery services, they get a huge boost in the amount of customers they have. Very few restaurants hire more cooks. It gets to the point where the people eating in the restaurant wait longer because they are being bumped back for the delivery orders. No such thing as free money.