[HN Gopher] Taking my e-bike as an undercover food delivery rider
___________________________________________________________________
Taking my e-bike as an undercover food delivery rider
Author : GoRudy
Score : 29 points
Date : 2023-11-20 20:10 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (electrek.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (electrek.co)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| If tips don't put you above minimum wage, does Doordash need to
| top you up? Or is that part of the appeal of being a contractor -
| that you can get paid below minimum wage legally?
| thecyborganizer wrote:
| Paying a fee per job done, rather than a wage per hour of
| labor, is literally the entire point of the gig economy.
| Uber/DoorDash/etc. claim this is a perk, since you can set your
| own hours.
|
| However, food delivery gig workers in New York City and a few
| other places have recently successfully won the right to earn a
| fixed minimum wage: https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/09/28/minimum-
| hourly-pay-court-...
| sleepybrett wrote:
| the second one.
|
| There was a big fight in washington/seattle
| https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-cit...
|
| Lot's of misinfo/disinfo being disseminated from
| doordash/instacart etc about how unfair it is and how it will
| kill it's business. If your business can't survive your workers
| being paid minimum wage, maybe you shouldn't be in business.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| the entire US economy it seems is contingent on not doing
| anything properly, including paying reasonable wages
| brnt wrote:
| If you like this, Jeroen van Bergeijk has been writing about his
| doing such jobs undercover for a decade. I don't know that he was
| translated, but a documentary I think was.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Interesting video, but the amount of money he made from food
| delivery is horrifyingly low. Maybe under minimum age. Least of
| all if you stay until near the end when he says that almost all
| of that was from tips.
|
| People will hand-wave this away as "this isn't meant to be a full
| time job, just beer money on the side" but for a lot of adults it
| is in fact their primary source of income.
| jszymborski wrote:
| The article points out that it is indeed about $2 lower than
| the min wage for the state he was in (FL)
| Animats wrote:
| Not only that, he's counting revenue as income. He has
| operating costs. Less than a car, but real.
| alephxyz wrote:
| a lot of people with student visas in Canada choose to do it
| since they're limited to 20hr/week of work. You make a bit more
| money doing ~30 hours of Uber eats with 20 hours spent actually
| delivering food than working 20 hours at minimum wage.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Surely if you're working for 30 hours then the comparison
| ought to be with 30 hours at minimum wage, no?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Not if it's illegal for you to work 30 hours at minimum
| wage.
| ska wrote:
| I think their point was that they have an artificial limit
| for the actual hours booked (20h), but a lot of delivery
| time is not-working (e.g. waiting on an order) but that
| doesn't count against the 20h.
|
| So if they are willing, they can spend 30h
| waiting+delivering with a lower hourly rate, but higher
| total $ than just working 20h at min wage.
| edward wrote:
| I'd like a way to tell the delivery app that I'd prefer delivery
| by bike as opposed to car. Maybe I'm willing to pay a premium for
| bike delivery.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| The argument around tipping grates for me.
|
| The author is saying that the companies don't pay him enough so I
| should tip to compensate.
|
| This will actually make things worse, as I will then be
| artificially propping up a broken market.
|
| A better solution would be for _nobody_ to tip. At this point,
| all the drivers would quit because the pay is too low, so the
| companies would be forced to raise it to a level where they can
| attract drivers.
| jackvalentine wrote:
| Yeah - I don't use food delivery apps because of the
| wage/tipping issue. My wife HATES that I go and collect food
| myself but I just feel too anxious navigating the exploitation
| in the sector.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Why on earth would this bother her??? It also saves tons of
| money. I downloaded a delivery app, saw how much more it
| would cost, and have never used one again.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| every time my food delivery driver is on a moped, I get my food
| 3x faster than by car, and often half of the estimated delivery
| time. haven't seen an e-bike driver yet.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > So please tip your delivery rider. I always did before, but now
| I tip even better.
|
| Better yet, tip partly/fully in cash so the app doesn't know the
| true value of their earnings (especially with inevitable lawsuits
| and settlements that may deduct tips when doing minimum wage
| calculations).
|
| Personally, I don't like tipping in advance of receiving a
| service.
|
| I'm in Canada, so it's a good way to get rid of my $1 and $2
| coins (and some minority of quarters).
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Your experience may vary but for me this sounds like a great
| way to never have anything actually get delivered. I have to
| tip $10+ for every order just to get my order picked up and
| brought to my house. If I don't declare that's the tip amount
| in the doordaash app, no driver picks it up. Once I had a $5
| smoothie order and tried to only tip $5 so I wasn't paying $15
| for a smoothie and the order ended up sitting at the restaurant
| and got cancelled.
|
| My brother was a DoorDash driver and a lot of his friends were
| and they all said that they regularly skipped orders with $0
| tips because it meant they made nothing on them. DoorDash, at
| one point, even tried to implement something to address this by
| changing the way the income for the order was displayed but
| it's still quite prevalent.
|
| So, yeah, tipping cash is a great idea except these companies
| have built their whole model in a way that makes that look like
| you're going to tip $0. So unless someone doesn't care and
| picks it up, in my area at least, it sounds like you're just
| not going to get stuff delivered.
| mikestew wrote:
| _My brother was a DoorDash driver and a lot of his friends
| were and they all said that they regularly skipped orders
| with $0 tips because it meant they made nothing on them._
|
| This sounds like the whole idea is just broken. No one is
| making any money, including DoorDash (I at least _assume_
| they 're not profitable), and the only money to be made in
| any of this is the idea of a "tip" which effectively holds
| your order hostage unless you pay up some unspecified amount.
| All so you can have a lukewarm burger delivered to your door.
| Oh, and if you get ghosted, you could have already eaten your
| _hot_ food by the time you get it sorted, had you just gone
| and picked it up yourself.
|
| I dunno, does this sound like something a rational person
| would participate in? ("...he asked rhetorically.")
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-20 23:01 UTC)