[HN Gopher] The failure of the Domino's 30-minute delivery guara...
___________________________________________________________________
The failure of the Domino's 30-minute delivery guarantee
Author : gaurang_tandon
Score : 152 points
Date : 2024-04-21 10:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thehustle.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehustle.co)
| nneonneo wrote:
| A guarantee memorably parodied in the setting of Snow Crash.
| euroderf wrote:
| The funnest opening scene of any cyberpunk book. Perfect for a
| film treatment.
| waihtis wrote:
| Directed by Neill Blomkamp
| GlacierFox wrote:
| Hopefully not. He made District 9 then every single
| following film he's made has been from mediocre to garbage.
| waihtis wrote:
| Chappie was awesome and Elysium was at least
| entertaining. Anyway, I was trying to think whose
| aesthetic a dystopian but wacky futuristic tech movie
| would suit best
| dylan604 wrote:
| I prefer the Bill Hicks reference of making it mandatory for
| everyone to smoke weed so the only people on the roads are
| Domino's delivery
| davidedicillo wrote:
| Snow Crash was the first thought that came to mind when I saw
| the title of this post
| foolfoolz wrote:
| i heard snow crash was a great book so i start reading it.
| immediatley it gets deep into pizza, the deliverator, the
| extreme attention to on time delivery, universities that
| specialize in franchising a pizza shop
|
| and then a little farther on you learn part of the book takes
| place in the virtual internet world. and i'm absolutely sure
| the pizza stuff is all part of this virtual world...
|
| one of my favorite books
| Liquix wrote:
| Hiro/the deliverator, YT, and most of the characters inhabit
| meatspace and "jack in" to the metaverse. Plenty is virtual
| but the dystopian pizza delivery is real
| cesarb wrote:
| I have recently re-read Snow Crash but, lacking the context
| (since I live in a difference country), I missed how closely
| the setting in the book parodied what is described in this
| article. For instance, the boss of the pizza chain being ex-
| military was an important plot point later in the book, but I
| didn't know that the real-life boss being parodied was also ex-
| military.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "The rise of microwaves and frozen dinners made Americans more
| accustomed to convenience and averse to going out in public. (One
| food industry exec described these consumer habits as
| "cocooning.") "
|
| Would love to see what this person would think after Covid. If
| microwaves wrecked this person's outlook on people, covid would
| have blown their mind
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I first heard about cocooning in a Faith Popcorn book a friend
| was reading.
|
| It was some of what was written, but also about how we don't
| sit on the front porch and visit with neighbors in the evening,
| and rarely see our front doors, much less our neighbors.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I don't think this one is actually true. I remember TV dinners
| replacing home cooked meals not eating out.
|
| Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when
| people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare
| treat rather than a daily occurrence.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time
| when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a
| rare treat rather than a daily occurrence.
|
| Fwiw some of us still cook at home and go out rarely. It's
| cheaper, tastier, healthier, and can be a pretty relaxing
| evening activity
| seoulmetro wrote:
| And the people who Uber Eats everything or go out for
| dinner are always the first to cry about cost of living or
| how prices in restaurants are so high. And then they cry
| that groceries are the same price.... ahah
| Contortion wrote:
| The one real downside is that learning to cook well at home
| spoils eating out - it sets your standards for what
| constitutes a good meal that much higher. If I'm spending
| EUR16 on a plate of pasta, it better be a lot better than I
| can make myself.
| twothamendment wrote:
| You are so right. There are very few things I look
| forward to when thinking about eating out - french fries
| is one. I don't deep fry and air fry or baked at home
| does not compare to the real thing.
|
| Steak is one where I've had better at a restaurant, but
| it was a $100/person type of place that work paid for.
| Mine at home is not quite there, but far above the
| average steak.
|
| When I eat out now I'm hoping to find some combination of
| spices I don't use or some new idea to take home.
| fma wrote:
| Steak is the one thing I can get consistently better than
| restaurants. It's all thanks to the book "Salt, Fat,
| Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking"
|
| It's a text book size cookbook. The author experiments
| different cooking methods and documents, taste tests.
|
| It boiled down to seasoning the steak over night so the
| salt extracts juices and tenderizes. Getting the
| temperature just perfect using a thermometer (I have a
| Ninja Foodi Grill that does it automatically).
|
| The quality and thickness of meat also matters. I get
| mine at Costco or Sam's Club.
|
| My pasta game is a lot better too. Main thing was to stir
| as the pasta cooks.
| Swizec wrote:
| The trick with steak, I've found, is to think "Steak is
| $50". Then you spend that money at the butcher instead of
| a restaurant. Put it on a skillet for a couple minutes
| each side and voila, you have a delicious steak way
| better than you'd find at any normie non-michelin-star
| restaurant.
|
| Cooking is 60% having good ingredients, 30% avoiding
| mistakes, and 10% technique.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Once I learned how to make a great steak at home, the
| appeal of going to a high-end steak house has completely
| lost its appeal.
|
| Sous vide makes steaks 100% idiot-proof. Takes zero skill
| to get a perfect steak every time. Kosher salt, pepper,
| granulated garlic, vacuum seal it, drop it into the
| circulator for ~2 hours, then use whatever the hottest
| method of cooking you have available to give a quick sear
| on each side. I use my gas grill pre-heated to about 800
| degrees.
|
| But to really kick it up another level, get yourself a
| smoker. Doesn't have to be a fancy $2000+ offset, a $600
| Traeger or even a $200 electric can give good results.
| Smoke at 225F until it gets to about 125F internal, then
| sear like above. If you like it extra smokey, you can
| smoke at a lower temperature.
|
| Now, the only expensive meals I will go out for are
| seafood. I haven't quite mastered seafood. Fish can be
| very delicate and fall apart, and it's hard to get the
| right color on shrimp without overcooking it and drying
| it out.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Eating at home made me realize how hard restaurants lean
| on salt and fat to make food taste good.
|
| I don't like eating out anymore because it's all either
| expensive greasy over seasoned food, or extremely
| expensive tiny portion food that maybe tastes about the
| same as home cooked.
| ta1243 wrote:
| It was common when you had a stay-at-home parent who did
| fresh shopping in the day then cooked a meal later for when
| their spouse (husband) came in just before 6pm (6.30 if
| he'd stopped off for a pint on the way home)
|
| Not so common when people get in from picking the kids up
| from daycare at 7.30pm and have to be up and out by 7am the
| next morning.
|
| Longer commutes, less time at home, and all that extra
| income has gone into housing and childcare costs. Yeay.
| _heimdall wrote:
| We've made our lives and society so busy and complicated.
| I've always been confused by how much we collectively
| value convenience products/services while simultaneously
| making everything more complex.
|
| I do hope that everyone is living the life they want and
| I'm just out of touch though. The idea of being away from
| home and my kids for 12+ hours every day and eating out
| before going to bed and doing it all over sounds
| miserable to me, but to each their own!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >We've made our lives and society so busy and complicated
|
| "We" have done nothing. _Our managers, bosses, and
| executives_ have made _everyone else 's lives_ miserable,
| for their benefit.
| _heimdall wrote:
| We're one of those families as well. We eat out once or
| twice a month, usually its a social thing when we're going
| to visit friends or family.
|
| It definitely takes some effort up front. It took us a few
| years to really build up a good list of go-to recipes we
| like and get to the point where we could wing it in the
| kitchen without chasing down recipes for everything.
|
| Part of our motivation was going further down the rabbit
| hole learning how industrial agriculture and the food
| industry actually work. Dig far enough and you'll want to
| plant a garden, raise chickens, and cook at home as much as
| you can.
| kergonath wrote:
| > It definitely takes some effort up front. It took us a
| few years to really build up a good list of go-to recipes
| we like and get to the point where we could wing it in
| the kitchen without chasing down recipes for everything.
|
| It can take a bit of time to get to the point where you
| can experiment and still be confident that the result
| will be edible, but that time investment is definitely
| worth it. It's nice to be able to improvise whatever
| recipe depending on what's actually available. It's like
| a puzzle game, a kind of reverse Tetris when opening the
| fridge.
|
| (It's also nice to have a bunch of no-brain required easy
| and quick recipe for when you don't want a challenge)
| JohnFen wrote:
| I have been doing this more and more, for the reasons you
| cite. Also, restaurants are increasingly doing things (like
| requiring the use of apps or websites) that make the
| experience far more unpleasant than it used to be.
|
| So my habits have changed to eating out much more rarely,
| but at much nicer restaurants.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > tastier
|
| I often see this mentioned during discussions of home
| cooking as if it were objective truth, but it confuses me
| because I enjoy a pie from the local pizza parlor as much
| as I enjoy my boeuf bourguignon. It's a different
| experience for sure. There's pleasure to be had in taking
| the time for the mise en place and coming up with tweaks
| over time to micro-optimize the flavor, but is it really
| tastier?
| _heimdall wrote:
| One factor that makes the comparison more apt may be
| accounting for the price difference. I can cook at home
| for a fraction of the price, or spend just as much but
| use _much_ better ingredients.
|
| When I do eat out there is always something nice about
| not having to cook or clean up. That skews it a bit for
| me, maybe it wasn't actually as tasty as cooking at home
| but the whole experience is nicer (on occasion).
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| "wrecked this person's outlook on people"? "Cocooning" was not
| an insult or meant to imply there was anything wrong with
| people, it was just a description of a "trend".
|
| (And was probably in part about the large "boomer" generation
| aging and having kids and thus going out less)
| hx8 wrote:
| What a nice example of 1980s corporate greed maximizing profits
| over human life. Modern delivery food delivery services can be
| seen making the same delivery-by guarantees, so we haven't fully
| learned our lesson.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| The article elaborates about that at the end. This isn't "1980s
| corporate greed". It's just corporate greed, and it's just as
| relevant today as it was 40 years ago.
| selfie wrote:
| Yeah, you can pick a year of your choice, and find a story
| like this.
| acdha wrote:
| I agree in general but I think the 80s deserve special
| recognition because it marked a turning point in the
| relationship between wages and productivity[1][2] and the
| long decline of collective bargaining[3] at the same time
| it became even more acceptable to brag about wealth because
| that linked into the Cold War comparisons we made with the
| Eastern Bloc countries. A lot of older Americans also
| didn't track how much things stood in other countries -
| e.g. the standard of living in much of Europe relative to
| people doing the same jobs domestically - but I think a lot
| of younger people are looking at how many trend lines have
| a knuckle point in that decade and are feeling cheated.
|
| 1. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
|
| 2. But see also
| https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-
| wages...
|
| 3. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2024/03/12/majoritie...
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| > In Domino's annual report last year, Mr. Monaghan said that
| ''failing to honor the 30-minute delivery guarantee was one of
| the big disappointments of 1987.'' He added that the delivery
| performance ''is still totally unacceptable and therefore must
| be our biggest priority in 1988.''
|
| > ''Not fulfilling a promise is inexcusable,'' he stated in the
| report. ''It not only goes against everything we believe in,
| but it's also bad business.'' [1]
|
| Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the
| problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30
| minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered to
| across thousands of franchisees without introducing significant
| risk to staff.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/29/business/fight-on-
| quick-p...
| dmurray wrote:
| > Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the
| problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30
| minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered
| to across thousands of franchisees without introducing
| significant risk to staff
|
| Could it not? I'm sure I could organise a pizza restaurant
| with a 99.9% success rate delivering pizzas within 30 minutes
| (the nationwide top- performing restaurant in TFA had 99%)
| and no more crashes than, say, the national per- mile rate
| for short journeys.
|
| But to achieve this, I'd need the restaurant to be
| overprovisioned in delivery drivers and conservative in
| rejecting requests that were too far away or too busy. My
| restaurant would lose money. The #1 priority is never really
| punctuality or timeliness or customer service - those are
| just means to an end. It's always money in the end.
| batch12 wrote:
| Or come up with a way to finish the pizza in transit that
| delivers an acceptable product.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| Attach a pizza oven to a drone...
| Everdred2dx wrote:
| Masayoshi Son is listening intently.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Hypothetically - why wouldn't not having a set amount of time
| for delivery be corporate greed too? I mean, if a corporation
| saves money by screwing over the customer it's corporate greed.
| If it screws over the employees it's corporate greed.
|
| There doesn't seem to be a lot of people left over to screw.
| mlrtime wrote:
| "corporate greed" is gen z talk... The current economic
| climate has a lot of gen z's suffering, they see capitalism
| as the problem, thus everything is corporate greed.
|
| It is a low quality signal, along the lines as a fiduciary
| duty to screw customers for profit.
| afavour wrote:
| It seems like an extremely straightforward term to me,
| describing corporations prioritising their own profit over
| customer experience. I'm a millennial and I've heard the
| term in use a lot longer than Gen Z have been around.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Because if you ask the owners of most of these business,
| this was not the plan they had in mind.
|
| Unintended consequences, it is one reason why business
| students study these cases, to hopefully not repeat them.
|
| Try running a business with low margins and low skilled
| employees, you make choices or go out of business, some
| choices win, some don't.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is still a pretty stupid term that shows they have
| understanding of economics shallower than a puddle. Not
| reducing the profit margin to zero is also prioritizing
| profit over customer experience.
| MoneyAugust wrote:
| Btw, it works in india
| rakejake wrote:
| No, it doesn't? I don't think Domino's or any pizza vendor has
| offered 30 minutes or free guarantees in a long time.
| rathish_g wrote:
| Domino's Pizza in India offers a 30-minute delivery
| guarantee. https://www.dominos.co.in/hot-pizza-30-minutes-
| delivery-guar...
| pests wrote:
| The only 30 minute delivery I see is DoorDash telling me my
| food is going to be 30 minutes away for 45 minutes.
| prashantsengar wrote:
| They have different timed delivery policies in India - even a
| 20 minutes delivery guarantee.
|
| Read the section "Service Guarantee"
|
| https://pizzaonline.dominos.co.in/tnc
|
| Also see: https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-
| cm/domino-s-p...
| badgersnake wrote:
| Are you referring to the Dabbawala system for lunches? That's a
| really interesting example.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| No, that doesnt have anything to do with it. Dominos delivery
| drivers are not part of the Dabbawala system.
| nyjah wrote:
| The failure of the 8-minute delivery free pizza guarantee ...
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7JaKr-ERZw
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Also what would have destroyed 8 Minute Abs
| https://youtu.be/rnso4nfdM9w?feature=shared
| superultra wrote:
| Wow. This Canadian business man seems really smart. I bet he
| went to a great business college.
| Gunax wrote:
| My dad tells a story that happened in 198X while the 30-minute
| guarantee still existed. He was living in DC and traffic in his
| neighbourhood was absolutely abysmal at peak hours when gov
| employees were leaving work. Apparently it could take 20 minutes
| just to get drive a few blocks.
|
| So he ordered pizza with the delivery time carefully planned to
| coincide right when traffic was greatest.
|
| Yet somehow the drive was able to get it to his house in 28
| minutes. He tried to ask the driver how this was possible, but
| the driver was allready rushing back to his car.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| I drove delivery in the period shortly after 30-minutes-or-N
| guarantees went away and customer expectations hadn't really
| caught up to the change. From cutting through park access
| trails at 60 miles an hour to using an elementary school soccer
| field as a shortcut between neighborhoods, nothing and I mean
| nothing was off the table if it shaved minutes off your drive
| time.
| cm2012 wrote:
| What your dad did is not cool. Stressing out some delivery
| worker to try to scam a free pizza is gross.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| "They're offering a free pizza if it takes over 30 minutes, I
| wonder if they can manage that during rush hour?" Seems like
| a fairly normal response.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Some basic empathy shows that his intellectual curiosity is
| not worth putting stress on some dude. That worker clearly
| is under a lot of pressure to deliver pizzas quickly,
| that's why he was out the door immediately with no small
| talk. Think about that delivery guy's state of mind when he
| realizes he just received an order at rush hour at an
| address that's hard to reach, and if he misses it he will
| probably get penalized.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| There are people who see a system and wonder how it can
| be broken or misused, or whether there's corner cases
| where the guarantees the system offers don't hold up.
| These people sometimes take actions that inconvenience or
| harm others, but we value them nonetheless because we
| acknowledge that these systems must be fixed, and this
| cannot happen if nobody draws attention to it.
|
| If some hacker notices that a website has sequential id's
| and no session cookies and you can use this to dump their
| entire database, you think this doesn't cause any stress
| for the employees?
| cm2012 wrote:
| You think his dad really did it to draw attention to the
| plight of delivery workers, and not out of desire to be
| clever, "beat the system" and get a free pizza?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Inspiring people to order pizza that they wouldn't
| otherwise was the entire point of the campaign.
|
| While I agree it made things unreasonably shitty for
| drivers, the customer can't really be blamed and
| shouldn't have to sit at home thinking "am I being a
| prick by making this person do their job?"
| cm2012 wrote:
| I agree the campaign was foolish overall, and dominos
| agreed. But there is a big difference from happening to
| order at a difficult time to purposely choosing the most
| difficult time. Multiply it by a billion and all that.
| sva_ wrote:
| Yeah it is objectively not cool, but I have to say that I'd
| have tried it too.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Further evidence we should build a Futurama-style series of tubes
| in cities for delivering items. I'm not joking. Might need extra
| packaging to pin the pizza down to survive the forces however.
| Maybe stack the slices and wrap them or something.
| avidiax wrote:
| Steve?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Those existed, though ones large enough to ship a pizza were
| rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube
| ta1243 wrote:
| Tom Scott videos
|
| Inter-building tubes:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMTZvA8iFgI
|
| Food by tube in a cafe:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTHZLKFblKo
| Ekaros wrote:
| Just have to roll it up. Sadly PFAS are banned so can't put
| non-stick plastic layer in between to avoid sticking...
| throwaway61646 wrote:
| On the other hand it's not hard to imagine how a modern
| pneumatic tube mail system could be abused (trafficking,
| terrorism, ...).
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Basically the same way a normal mail system can be abused?
| bagels wrote:
| https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I honestly believe a fully automated drone delivery system is
| easily possible with our current technology, the only issue
| would be funding and widespread adoption. And the delivery
| drivers annoyed at losing jobs
| srmarm wrote:
| And noise
| bell-cot wrote:
| > ...the only issue would be...
|
| And inclement weather, and overhead wires, and crashes, and
| liability, and NIMBYs, and all the creeps (from local cops to
| data aggregators to foreign intel orgs) who want access to
| the data, and ...
| afavour wrote:
| You'd probably be able to hire those delivery drivers back as
| part of the huge fleet of "drone engineers" you'd need to
| maintain the fleet as they crash, get attacked, batteries run
| flat...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Switzerland's working on it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_Sous_Terrain
| monero-xmr wrote:
| When the 30 minute guarantee ended I had a recipient of my pizza
| delivery pull a gun on me when I refused to give a free pizza! (I
| handed it over) An anecdote I tell at parties
| ta1243 wrote:
| Have you managed to get out of Somalia? Or was it a favella in
| Rio?
| jajko wrote:
| You act like most probable place for such an event, when
| discussing on HN, ain't simply some rural US. Some folks are
| crazy and vastly unbalanced, period. If they have access to
| guns, bad shit happens frequently.
|
| The amount of folks in US who legally own guns and never ever
| should be allowed to touch one is staggering.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| You're more likely to get killed using a gun in the US than
| Somalia
|
| (Somalia: 7.02 per 100K, US: 10.84 per 100K)
| gruez wrote:
| Source for those figures? Do they include suicides?
| 15155 wrote:
| Yes, that figure is more than 50% suicides - this is a
| common statistical ruse.
| ta1243 wrote:
| OK so US is 5.4 and Somalia is 7
|
| "America -- slightly safer than Somalia!"
| 15155 wrote:
| Are you regularly involved in inner-city gang violence?
| The United States is a big, diverse place.
| 15155 wrote:
| More than 50% of that 10.84 consists of suicides - a fairly
| typical, convenient omission for folks with an agenda. "Get
| killed" would imply that "you" weren't the actor doing the
| killing.
|
| Somalia suicide rate: 7.90 per 100K
|
| United States suicide rate: 14 per 100K
|
| How many of these US and Somalia deaths are associated with
| organized crime?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Considering the rate of "regret"[1] on failed suicide
| attempts, this isn't the slam dunk you think it is.
|
| [1] https://ennyman.medium.com/a-lesson-from-29-golden-
| gate-suic...
| 15155 wrote:
| The original comment was:
|
| > You're more likely to get killed using a gun in the US
| than Somalia
|
| How is suicide or the regret thereof relevant to "getting
| killed?"
| ugur2nd wrote:
| Similar is the case with apps like Uber Eats and Getir. I only
| know that in Getir they use different algorithms with artificial
| intelligence to find the shortest and fastest route. I'm sure
| other vehicles also use it, but I haven't heard such rumors about
| them.
| zilti wrote:
| > Getir they use different algorithms with artificial
| intelligence to find the shortest and fastest route
|
| Were they that desperate for funding that they had to come up
| with some AI stuff for an already solved problem?
| dewey wrote:
| Not entirely the same thing but navigation and path finding
| for delivery apps is not a solved problem everywhere.
|
| Especially in places where street data isn't complete or
| works differently (no street names) than in the western
| cities where Google Maps etc. are developed.
|
| Grab (https://engineering.grab.com) always has interesting
| blog posts about these topics like:
| https://engineering.grab.com/road-localisation-grabmaps
| cesarb wrote:
| > Were they that desperate for funding that they had to come
| up with some AI stuff for an already solved problem?
|
| Path finding is one of the classic AI research areas, back
| when it mostly meant making robots able to interact with
| their environment. Yes, it's an "already solved problem", in
| that we already have several good enough algorithms derived
| from all that AI research; but that doesn't change the fact
| that this is "AI stuff", and it doesn't prevent new AI
| approaches from being used (perhaps something based on neural
| networks as a path finding heuristic, since we have a lot of
| computing power to spare nowadays).
| distances wrote:
| You don't use "artificial intelligence" for routing. You've
| just fallen to marketing speak.
| Filligree wrote:
| Pathfinding algorithms are absolutely artificial
| intelligence. A* and so on were invented in just that sort of
| research.
|
| It may not be AGI, but that was never claimed.
| hypeatei wrote:
| If I write an if statement, is that AI?
| Filligree wrote:
| No, but if you wrote a thousand if statements two decades
| ago it might be.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| In the end, it's all jumps, adds, flips and shifts.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| IMO, what counts as "AI" is one of those "I know it when
| I see it" things, simply because trying to write a
| lawyer-proof definition isn't possible.
|
| I'd argue that "AI" doesn't have to be attempting to
| achieve AGI to be considered AI. For example, "Computer"
| players in games are AI. This applies whether you're
| talking something as advanced as a deep strategy game
| like the Civ series, or something as basic as the ghosts
| in Pac-Man, or even an automated Tic-Tac-Toe player.
|
| So...is a path finding algorithm "AI"? I dunno. I could
| go either way.
|
| But like...I seriously can't come up with a real
| definition of "AI" that wouldn't end up including things
| that definitely _aren 't_ AI. For example, is AI simply
| any code that seems like it has agency and makes
| decisions? If so, then is any sort program that triggers
| execution based on certain detections "AI"? Certainly
| not. Is it code that attempts to mimic human behavior,
| even at a basic level? If so, then is AutoHotKey AI?
| Nope, definitely not.
| bitwize wrote:
| OK, I'm imagining some system just painting a large green arrow
| onto the windshield, so the driver can just Crazy Taxi their
| way to the destination.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I was just thinking about Crazy Taxi the other day. It
| doesn't seem quite so "crazy" now, more a real satire on the
| gig economy.
| tazu wrote:
| I ordered a pizza from Domino's in 2019 and it took 3 hours to be
| delivered. All it took was that one awful experience and I'll
| never order from them again.
| onion2k wrote:
| I'm willing to bet you wouldn't be willing to accept your boss
| firing you after one mistake though.
| tazu wrote:
| Totally, but I think there was more than one mistake in that
| instance.
| ta1243 wrote:
| I would guess the single mistake was that it was
| accidentality scanned as having being picked up, but wasn't
| actually picked up, it just sat on a shelf for a few hours.
|
| After the rush calmed down people started saying "hang on,
| what's this pizza doing here", then they made a new one and
| delivered it.
|
| Of course the correct thing to do is issue an apology and
| refund with the replacement.
| mlrtime wrote:
| FWIW this happens even with pickup. I used to use their 7.99
| pizzas a lot when money was short.
|
| Their app tells you when the pizza is ready, about 30% of the
| time the pizza was not ready when their app said it was. This
| means the workers were gaming their timing system with fake
| pizzas.
|
| Often times I'd be sitting in their pickup area for 20 minutes
| after the pizza was supposed to be done.
| nurple wrote:
| That's really surprising to hear! I have bought 100s of the
| 7.99 larges (don't get me started on the shift to one
| topping, where a sauce switch is counted), and have never
| arrived to an incomplete pizza... Though, I don't leave until
| the tracker shows done as my store is under a mile away, so
| maybe there's some speculative execution happening?
| vrighter wrote:
| I think I had read once on another-site-which-shall-remain-
| nameless that that timer actually had nothing to do with
| them, and there actually wasn't a way for the employees to
| indicate whether it's done or delayed or anything. In other
| words, that timer was just bullshit.
| RavingGoat wrote:
| Yeah, the timer in the app is fake.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >This means the workers were gaming their timing system with
| fake pizzas.
|
| Or it meant the person cutting and boxing your order was
| falling behind.
|
| At least ~15 years ago, the way Domino's timer works is that
| when the cook puts the order in the oven, they hit a button.
| ~8 minutes later it says it's ready, which is how long it
| takes to get through the oven. That was the only input for
| carryout, delivery had another for when the driver left.
|
| If it was 30% of the time, I'd guess you requested something
| unusual like "no garlic spray" where the mistake happened or
| was noticed after the computer says your order is ready, then
| had to remake it. Or most of the times it was just a few
| minutes and somebody was boxing it.
| dave78 wrote:
| > At least ~15 years ago, the way Domino's timer works is
| that when the cook puts the order in the oven, they hit a
| button.
|
| The Domino's location near me very obviously hits that
| button as soon as they get the order when things are busy,
| regardless of if it's actually going in the oven then or
| not. I've had many, many times where I arrived at the
| location, with the app saying "your pizza is ready!", only
| to have them say "it's not in the oven yet, it'll be 10
| minutes" when I ask for my order.
|
| I'm certain the stores and even individual employees are
| rated on how fast they get the orders done so of course
| they're going to mess with that system to show the best
| metrics they can. I'm not even a little bit surprised, nor
| do I really blame them. Even though it's frustrating to
| find out my order isn't actually in the oven, I just say
| "no worries" and wait a few minutes.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >certain the stores and even individual employees are
| rated on how fast they get the orders done
|
| They weren't fifteen years ago. The only speed incentive
| was not pissing off the customer. That may have changed,
| I can't say.
|
| One thing I didn't consider earlier, if the store is busy
| enough the oven might be full and the cook hits the
| button to clear the entry they're done with so they
| aren't confused.
| locallost wrote:
| Chilling ending to the article:
|
| > Gig drivers don't face an edict for speed like past Domino's
| drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into
| the job, with drivers hurrying to make financial incentives,
| avoid bad ratings, and ensure the food is warm upon delivery.
|
| Annoying corporate policy replaced by society taking a wrong turn
| to being driven by ratings on the I internet - that we unlike the
| bad policy can't get rid of.
| qeternity wrote:
| I don't really understand why you think having financial
| incentives to avoid bad ratings and deliver food warm is bad?
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Because, delivery drivers, unlike uber or whatever, are
| frequently screwed by things outside their control. No parks
| near the restaurant, so delay in the pickup? Bad driver!
| Restaurant behind on orders? Bad driver! Something missing
| from order? Bad driver!
|
| Incentives can cause perverse outcomes, but it's worse when
| you are not in control of the outcomes at all.
| xvector wrote:
| The vast majority of delays I've seen from these drivers is
| because they are (very obviously) double-apping, in which
| case I'm happy to have them be affected by terrible
| ratings.
|
| Unless you are _consistently_ bad, the occasional delay won
| 't meaningfully impact your ratings. There are enough
| samples to identify consistent issues and smooth out
| unfortunate happenstance. For instance, the difference
| between an Uber driver with 4.3 stars and 4.9 stars is
| consistently obvious. The rating system works.
| zztop44 wrote:
| The thing I find offensive is expecting these people to
| be providing 4.9 level customer service when they're
| getting nowhere near commensurate pay.
|
| Imagine if software devs got a star rating for every new
| commit, rated on how long it took compared to how many
| points on the ticket (which someone else decides). And if
| your rating drops too low you stop getting tickets (and
| stop getting paid). And your salary sucks to begin with.
| chii wrote:
| if there was an objective way to value the quality of a
| commit, rather than how long it took, then yes, this
| method of rating would work.
|
| The length of time is not proportionally related to the
| quality (it's not even inversely proportional - i think
| there's no relationship between time taken to do a commit
| and its quality).
| zztop44 wrote:
| Do you really think it's impossible for a manager to rate
| a commit or completed ticket (including taking into
| consideration how long it took vs how long they think it
| should have taken).
|
| I don't think many software developers would want to work
| under such a system. Yet we build them for other people.
| chii wrote:
| > Do you really think it's impossible for a manager to
| rate a commit
|
| if the manager is able to know how long something
| would've taken, it is because the task is simple and
| already well specified. Therefore, the work will be
| similar to delivery analogy from the OP. I do believe
| some places (such as oracle) do this sort of rating
| (heard from the grapevines).
|
| However, most work i find that require a developer isn't
| simple tasks, but complex cognitive thinking to come up
| with a solution. I dont believe a rating system works for
| such work. Peer judgement, as well as long term results
| (such as a stable, working system that expands as
| required in a timely manner) work much better. But by the
| time the long term comes, the developer's contributions
| would've been diluted if the team expands massively due
| to success, or have moved on!
| simiones wrote:
| You are misunderstanding. They are not suggesting this
| would be a good or objective system. The problem is that
| ratings for drivers/deliveries/restaurants are just as
| arbitrary as this. I have seen people give 1 star reviews
| to a restaurant saying that the food was extraordinary
| but the waiter told them that it is possible to tip by
| card without them asking.
| ta1243 wrote:
| I have no idea what "4.9 level" means. When I used to use
| uber (before it stopped working reliably in the UK about
| 5 years ago) they would ask me "how many stars" on a
| range of 1-5. There was no indication of what this meant
| or how to judge it. Presumably the idea is that the star
| ratings are relative and follow a normal distribution, so
| most are in the middle (say about 70% between 2 _/ could
| be better and 4_/really good, with about 15% being 5 _/
| excellent and 15% being 1_ terrible.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| The ratings actually mean: 5 stars = OK, 1-4 stars = bad.
|
| Yes, it's a bad system.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Which isn't explained on various systems.
|
| Feels to me that if you want that rating system applied
| consistently you need to only ask one question -- "Was
| the service acceptable Yes/No".
|
| If more than 50% of your replies are "this service was
| above average", then you have a meaningless system.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| It's a bad system, but pretty much every other online
| rating system is uncalibrated too (they just have
| different social expectations than the "always give 5
| stars" that most people use for taxis and deliveries).
|
| There are plenty of things that could be done, like using
| the algorithm that was developed for Netflix's prize
| contest, but nobody seems to be doing them.
| nurple wrote:
| A lot of the same topics in this thread sound similar to
| when Netflix changed their star system to a binary
| good/bad, and why.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13893672
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| No system built for a society that (sometimes) values
| kindness over honesty will ever give you honest answers.
| My wife still wants to leave big tips when the service is
| lousy "they're counting on it to be able to make rent".
| With _stars_ or similar ratings systems, even cheapskates
| can be kind. Have you ever seen a thread where someone
| starts talking about "brutal honesty", and how people
| react to that term?
|
| >If more than 50% of your replies are "this service was
| above average", then you have a meaningless system.
|
| Only true mathematically if ratings are for internal
| comparison only. It could be that the service at
| restaurant A is consistently above average, because the
| service at restaurant B is consistently below average.
| Only their aggregate ratings should show it split half
| and half.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Does anyone know if Uber rescales the star ratings? For
| example if you have someone like GP who consistently
| gives out 3s or 4s, do those get rescaled back up to 5s
| based on the user's average?
| lupusreal wrote:
| Most of the general population have no idea what a normal
| distribution is. You have to put yourself into a common
| mindset to figure out the meaning of things designed for
| the general population. It doesn't need to be explained
| because half the population is too dumb to understand a
| written explaination anyway.
|
| 5 means they did good, anything less means you have
| complaints that you think are serious enough to warrant
| effective "demotion" of the driver.
| ta1243 wrote:
| So stupid system with no instructions on how to
| calibrate.
|
| How do you say someone did a better than expected job if
| the "baseline" is 5?
|
| If they expect the normal to be 5, why give 1-4 as
| options. Why not "good" and "bad"
|
| Not to mention the cultural differences between
| countries. While America loves being over-the-top with
| fake "oh you are so awesome", other countries (say Japan
| and the UK) are far more reserved.
| acdha wrote:
| > If they expect the normal to be 5, why give 1-4 as
| options. Why not "good" and "bad"
|
| Some places do use a thumbs up/down rating but I think a
| lot of companies like the stress the 1-5 or 1-10 ratings
| put on workers. If you view your workers as easily
| replaceable, stress is a feature and the false precision
| lets you say that any particular outcome was data driven.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Japan has the opposite problem on restaurant review
| websites, where ~3.0 stars means OK and ~3.65 stars or
| above means absolutely bloody fantastic.
| kergonath wrote:
| I think a 3-states scale would be good. Something like
| "happy", "not happy", and "feared for your life". You'd
| want a way to identify outliers. But using a quantitative
| scale for this is not a good idea.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I'm a fan of 4 stars, as I think it forces you to make a
| real choice, while still being simple enough that it's
| hard to misinterpret:
|
| 4 stars => great
|
| 3 stars => quite good
|
| 2 stars => not so good
|
| 1 star => bad
|
| There's no score right in the middle so you can't sit on
| the fence (unless you ruin it by allowing half stars,
| Ebert style).
| kergonath wrote:
| > Most of the general population have no idea what a
| normal distribution is.
|
| They have an intuitive understanding of what an average
| is, though. And when provided a scale the vast majority
| of people assume that the average is in the middle. If
| some smart arse grading system is not intuitively
| understood by someone's customers (and seriously, people
| have something like 10 seconds to make that choice), it's
| not the users who are stupid.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Most people don't think a 3 of 5 rating is "good", rather
| it's half-way to utter failure. 5 star ratings as used by
| the general public are calibrated as 5 meeting all
| reasonable expectations and no special rating given for
| exceptional performance. Most people don't need
| instruction on how to rate on this scale, they just give
| everybody a 5 unless something happened to piss them off.
| simiones wrote:
| No, most people when asked to rate something think back
| to their school days, where "has done all the work we
| asked for" is either the max grade (A/10/20), or just
| under (say, A-/9/18). So, most people give 5 stars (or
| more rarely 4 stars) to drivers that have met their
| expectations.
| Ekaros wrote:
| That is very country specific. Here scale is 4 to 10. 4
| being failure and 10 being essentially perfection.
| Average work being 7 with 6 below and 8 pretty good and 9
| good. Scaling this to 1 to 5 would mean 1 is failure, 2
| is not entirely failed, 3 average, 4 good and 5
| perfection.
| mancerayder wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/nyregion/nyc-delivery-
| wor...
|
| 17 an hr plus tips isn't the end of the world?
|
| If I give less stars to a restaurant due to my food
| arriving cold, that's not reflected on the driver? At
| least on Seamless/Grubhub as far as I know.
| infecto wrote:
| The thing I find offensive is people defending a group of
| workers that do not have to work as a gig worker. I think
| most people would consider 4.9 service as nothing special
| and just the due course of delivering food, on time, not
| opening and eating my food, putting it somewhere
| accessible. We are not talking about a 3 start dining
| experience. If they are not making enough money to
| provide the minimum level of service for delivering food
| then they should do something else.
|
| That is the problem with gig work though. A lot of it is
| self-filtering, I will see people doing deliveries/uber
| rides in high-value vehicles or massive gas guzzlers like
| trucks. A rational actor would realize this is probably
| below minimum wage when you account for all the extra
| costs which leaves you with the rest of the pool of
| potential gig workers that are not doing the math.
| rpdillon wrote:
| > Imagine if software devs got a star rating for every
| new commit, rated on how long it took compared to how
| many points on the ticket (which someone else decides).
| And if your rating drops too low you stop getting tickets
| (and stop getting paid). And your salary sucks to begin
| with.
|
| This is the app store, more or less.
| erinaceousjones wrote:
| Why are they "double apping", though? Is it perhaps
| because they are trying to scrape a liveable wage from a
| flawed gig economy....
| c22 wrote:
| The insane thing is people trying to make a livable wage
| off of "gigs".
|
| We should stop pretending this is or ever can be
| reasonable full-time employment.
|
| Driving for apps is something you do on the weekend to
| supplement your day job, or during school hours as a stay
| at home spouse or whatever.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Yeaaaaaah, remember when the bulk of US manufacturing and
| industry was offshored a few decades ago and pundits were
| falling all over themselves to explain how we were
| transitioning to a "service economy"? Well this is what a
| service economy looks like.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| This is such a perfect way to put it.
| addicted wrote:
| A service economy with proper living wages is absolutely
| possible. I'm not a fan of such an economy because any
| country, especially one as large as the U.S., has no
| reason to be a single sector economy and plus as we saw
| during the pandemic and are seeing in the Ukraine war, a
| lack of domestic manufacturing capabilities is a
| significant strategic threat.
|
| However, the gig economy model is a choice. A choice that
| can be fixed by simply reclassifying these workers as
| employees. The gig economy is little more than a way to
| get around employee protections, and the sooner we face
| that obvious reality the better.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| No argument there. Startup culture's ongoing war on low
| wage workers is a fucking travesty.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| California voters showed up in droves to prevent that
| exact classification change from happening, because your
| average voter is few IQ points away from needing help
| tying their shoes, and will absolutely eat up whatever
| lies Uber et al. will pump out.
| casercaramel144 wrote:
| Good, this is exactly what we wanted. Service worker
| classification is straight up wealth transfer from
| delivery users to drivers since competition is so tight
| and everyone ie being squeezed. The needs of the many
| outweigh the entitlement of the few. It's unfair for
| delivery app users to have to subsidize employment for
| drivers when its clear there's many willing to accept the
| current terms.
| mlrtime wrote:
| No, this is what a very small section of a service
| industry looks like. There are millions of people who can
| have a livable wage in a service industry.
|
| The actual problem that I never see addressed is that
| should EVERY job be a "living wage" job.
|
| To me that answer is and always has been no. There will
| always be a need for temp workers.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > There are millions of people who can have a livable
| wage in a service industry.
|
| There are millions of illegal immigrants, living 5 to a
| bedroom proping up the resturant industry. The back of
| house doesn't do very well at all, its only the wait
| staff that makes a fair wage for the effort.
| Vvector wrote:
| The solution is not to provide assistance to underpaid
| illegals. Better to penalize the company for hiring and
| underpaying them.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Ok so having roughly doubled the cost of restaurant meals
| what's our next move?
| willcipriano wrote:
| Not eat out often. Only on special occasions.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| K so having bankrupted the restaurant industry, what's
| next?
| willcipriano wrote:
| Then we don't need so many immigrants.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Apparently we do if having a restaurant industry is
| desirable. We've already established raising wages to
| something that might attract less desperate applicants is
| a non-starter. Now if you were to say pivot the
| conversation to the H1-B system that fills more desirable
| jobs...
| willcipriano wrote:
| You aren't entitled to below cost dinners.
| Yeul wrote:
| Isn't America supposed to be the richest country in the
| world? You can afford to pay people a decent wage you
| just don't want to.
|
| You could double the price of a beer in NYC or Miami and
| people would still come.
| tomrod wrote:
| The meme of a living wage is a nice one. It hits most
| moral frameworks as fair. The concern I have with it is
| it isn't defined.
|
| What does living mean? When I belonged to a high demand
| religion that is known for "helping" its membership,
| financial assistance was dedicated to the preservation of
| life only. Not the preservation or growth of the quality
| of life. So if you had a medical life transition and a
| mortgage, they might pay for you to dump the mortgage and
| move to a tiny apartment while also receiving some food
| pantry items on a semi-regular frequency. Their goal was
| to keep you alive, not to give you a living. At the time,
| excess bills like cell phones, internet, cars, etc. were
| recommended to be removed and/or deducted from assistance
| given (in urban areas; rural areas cars were not really a
| focus, there was some autonomy in the people making the
| decisions). Only what was needed to remain alive.
|
| I bring this up not because I necessarily agree with the
| approach, but rather to ask what we mean by "living"
| wage. The typical idea is that it allows people to afford
| food, shelter, and basic necessities (cue tangent
| discussion regarding American healthcare). Under this
| definition, are people willing to bunk up six to a room
| and expand WIC/SNAP? Because that is what a "living" wage
| can be -- not a great existence but not dying while
| working full time.
|
| The usual excuse for this Spartan approach is that there
| aren't enough resources. For current program funding
| levels this is true. And in the US, we keep shooting
| ourselves in the foot for further resource growth --
| regulations and policies are continually cherry picked,
| unprotected, and embattled to the point that the cost
| burden to maintain even the status quo is overwhelming,
| whether in implementation (NIMBYism) or in infrastructure
| (environmental impact studies taking years and decades)
| or in ideals (protecting water and air via the EPA).
|
| Ideally we could organize, right? Unionize, make our
| collective voices heard. While a wonderful thing to
| enable, and there are many great outcomes when it
| happens, unions are subject to corruption as well -- I am
| not sure there is a legal framework that helps overcome
| that particularly pernicious principal/agent problem.
|
| So, in this brief review, we arrive to your same
| conclusion, that we structurally probably can't support
| every job having a high enough wage to satisfy each to
| their wants. We can hope and want and organize for it,
| but until we have some significant structural changes in
| society and policy it seems unattainable to me :(
| Vvector wrote:
| I think you are on the right path. I've seen the
| arguments that "minimum wage" should be able to afford a
| median priced 2BR apartment (30% of income). Then who
| rents the bottom third apartments? I'm all for a bottom
| tier safety net to keep people off the streets.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| We've decided servicing slumlords' profit margins is now
| a societal goal?
| tomrod wrote:
| Only when we forget that affordable housing is also in
| those lower brackets.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| So now, as a society, we've decided that slumlords are
| the key to affordable housing? I swear if the bar gets
| any lower someone's going to have to rent an excavator to
| dig the hole.
| thuuuomas wrote:
| Protecting water & air is, in fact, very materialistic.
| Nobody wants to live in the exclusion zone.
| tomrod wrote:
| Indeed. But the definition of what is protected and by
| what methods can be somewhat idealistic.
|
| As an almost absurdist starting point that highlights
| this spectrum - several eons ago byproducts from bacteria
| poisoned the atmosphere and threatened life on earth
| until plants and eventually animals evolved, enabling
| homeostasis to occur.
|
| And some people today live at the periphery of Chernobyl
| by choice, much like the animals in the exclusion zone
| that are thriving.
|
| So it's reasonable to point to an implemented standard
| and consider it an ideal, perhaps even worth defending!
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| When the majority of wealth isn't owned by a group
| roughly the size of the population of Fairlea WV we can
| start having meaningful conversations about what we can
| and can't afford.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| And yet the average American is richer than ever, and
| far, far richer than the rest of the world.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Not sure where you're basing that on. Household debt is
| up and wages have been stagnant for decades.
| soco wrote:
| The insane thing is people trying to make a livable wage,
| maybe? Those drivers don't have the possibility (for
| whatever reason) to do something else, so gig it is -
| otherwise they'd be collecting food stamps or robbing at
| gunpoint. And if there were no such drivers, we'd get no
| warm pizza at all, how about that?
| ta1243 wrote:
| I used to deliver pizza for an independent company as a
| student back in 2000 in the UK (North West). I didn't get
| paid a lot, but it was easy work sitting in a car
| listening to the radio all evening. Inflation adjusted I
| was paid PS4.57 an hour and 27p per mile. Used to get
| another PS3 an hour in tips from people who didn't want
| change (this was of course back when everyone paid cash
| and ordered over the phone), did that for about 30 hours
| a week, racking up about 400 miles.
|
| I was earning money to spend on new computer bits etc,
| not to pay rent for a family of 4. I valued the
| flexibility and the easy life.
|
| The problem comes when people think this type of work is
| suitable for a full time career, not just a way to "top
| up" an income - either by working one or two nights a
| week, or doing it as a student, or doing it after
| retiring to keep the social aspect.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The problem comes when people think this type of work
| is suitable for a full time career, not just a way to
| "top up" an income
|
| People don't _think_ this work is a full time career, but
| they often enough _don 't have another choice_. When you
| have barely (or none at all) language skills, or you're
| an immigrant whose certifications from their home country
| aren't recognized, or you're without legal immigration
| status, there aren't many ways left to make a living -
| it's either "tech gig work" (deliveries, taxis),
| construction/trades/restaurant helper or agriculture. The
| latter options are physically demanding, dangerous
| options or they don't exist around urban areas, and you
| often run into issues getting paid or dealing with
| dangerous/abusive employment - "gig work" options at
| least pay out reliably and carry less workplace abuse.
|
| Want to fix gig work issues? Offer a decent social safety
| net so that no one is forced to accept this kind of work
| just to survive, and the market will (have to) improve on
| its own.
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| It seems you and the GP agree, though, that gig work
| shouldn't be treated full-time employment, which was the
| topic at hand.
| soco wrote:
| However one say "just eat cake instead" while the other
| underlines the struggle.
| ta1243 wrote:
| In the UK companies are crying out for employees on solid
| reliable wages.
|
| You're right it's a good way to get around immigration
| law, where someone with a right to work subcontracts the
| job to someone without and keeps 10/20/50%. That tends to
| be more the case with things like ubereats rather than
| traditional pizza-place-employing-driver -- you can't
| work in dominos without showing right to work, and you
| can't swap out the employee as people would notice,
| because you are Alice the driver who's kids have just
| left home and plays in the local cricket team, not
| "Driver 24601"
|
| Given that we had no problem getting pizzas, currys etc
| in 2000 before ubereats I'm not sure I recognise the
| "without gig work we wouldn't get warm pizza" argument.
| tomrod wrote:
| > People don't think this work is a full time career, but
| they often enough don't have another choice.
|
| Then I reckon the solution isn't to add antagonism to the
| employment relationship they already have, but rather as
| a community rally around to provide resources to lower
| their search costs (Note: I assume when you say "don't
| have another choice" you really mean the finding and
| switching costs for new opportunities are too high)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Note: I assume when you say "don't have another choice"
| you really mean the finding and switching costs for new
| opportunities are too high
|
| No, I mean that the eligibility is not present.
|
| Getting employment requires hurdles many people cannot
| pass: you need a registered address to get postal letters
| (which excludes many homeless), you need valid
| immigration credentials, you need skill certifications
| (school or academic degrees, vocational training, ...)
| for many employments (which foreigners sometimes have a
| hard time showing (refugees) or getting recognized
| legally), you need to speak the language, you need to be
| able to read and write...
|
| For us tech people, a lot of these hurdles don't apply,
| but the lowest rungs of employment / society have a very
| difficult time which most of us don't have any
| experience.
| tomrod wrote:
| For awhile, I worked in an R&D/policy group that focused
| on these very issues in the healthcare domain.
|
| I think my point still stands. Community funded programs
| that helps individuals find their next step, when funded
| appropriately, are often enormously successful. In the
| healthcare context, say you want to decrease the number
| of repeat folks to the ER without decreasing their access
| -- basically ounce of prevention vs. pound of cure
| approach. A representative example is person who
| regularly comes to the ER for insulin issues. In addition
| to cost pressure, there issues might also source from not
| have a working fridge or consistent electricity. It is
| thus cheaper for the social safety net to provide
| electricity and a basic fridge than to have the person
| return regularly to the ER for insulin.
|
| Similar workflows and standard of care exist for almost
| every social ill -- if we have the civic sense to fund it
| -- to help people take the next step towards bettering
| their lives.
| soco wrote:
| You probably missed the "don't have the possibility" part
| of my message. Not everybody has the easy life, with
| their own car and the parents for safety net, but other
| commenter already described it much better.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yeah but what is wrong with saying "this job isn't for
| them then"? If you are skilled enough to drive a car all
| day as a job, Amazon will happily hire you to drive a van
| all day, they pay much better than a local pizza delivery
| gig(at least here in UK, no idea about where you live
| obviously).
|
| Or are we really debating whether there is some extremely
| small subset of people who can only get a job delivering
| pizzas(somehow) and they can't possibly get any other
| employment?
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Commercial drivers license
| kibwen wrote:
| _> And if there were no such drivers, we 'd get no warm
| pizza at all, how about that?_
|
| First of all, the horror, second of all, there used to be
| a thing known as "going outside", and before that there
| used to be a thing known as "cooking".
| jstanley wrote:
| Yeah, and there used to be "subsistence farming" and
| "living in the forest" and "making everything out of
| sticks and stones because we don't know any better".
|
| How far back do you want to go to find the optimal
| configuration of society? Or does it just coincidentally
| match the configuration that you personally grew up with?
| messe wrote:
| The difference being that cooking is something people in
| developed nations still do, more often than eating
| out/getting delivery.
| harimau777 wrote:
| That's part of the problem isn't it? It used to be
| possible to raise a family on a single wage/salary so
| that the other partner could cook. Now many people end
| the workday with so few hours or so much stress that they
| can't cook.
| sneak wrote:
| The only people pretending that this is reasonable
| employment are the people willing to treat it as such -
| ie the delivery drivers. "We" aren't.
| c22 wrote:
| But in this very thread people are saying things like
|
| _" It should not be considered okay for there to be jobs
| that cannot earn a decent wage ... since we ... see
| people working these jobs full time."_
|
| _"...for most people, these "gigs" are actually jobs.
| Qualifying them as "gigs" and saying that people
| shouldn't depend on them just allows you to feel better
| about not paying the true cost for the goods/services you
| are consuming."_
|
| and _"...the gig economy model ... can be fixed by simply
| reclassifying these workers as employees. "_
|
| We can redefine the set of "we" all we want, but that
| doesn't change the fact that this is a not-uncommon
| viewpoint amongst more than just delivery drivers.
|
| Unfortunately the truth of the matter is that the service
| provided by these jobs is simply not worth enough to
| support a living wage and the pool of competing
| candidates willing to do the job is high. The only way to
| have "our" cake and eat it too requires perpetually
| subsidizing this line of work with either public funds or
| funds from increasingly disgruntled investors.
|
| I haven't ordered food from an app in _years_ since the
| sub-par experience of waiting over an hour for some cold
| and congealing phad thai is simply not worth the premium
| when I can order directly from the restaurant, pick it up
| myself and achieve a better overall experience.
| John23832 wrote:
| The reality is that gigs only work for children or the
| elderly. The quintessential teenage babysitter can only
| afford to do so because they have parents paying for
| everything else. The quintessential "retiree" worker can
| only afford to uber/doordash if they have saved enough up
| to offset the rest of their spending.
|
| The reality is that for most people, these "gigs" are
| actually jobs. Qualifying them as "gigs" and saying that
| people shouldn't depend on them just allows you to feel
| better about not paying the true cost for the
| goods/services you are consuming.
|
| If the only dashers/uberers were people who were truly
| only doing it for "gig work", the platforms would go
| under. Either that or enjoy your 50 dollar sandwich or
| 100 dollar uber.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| It should not be considered okay for there to be jobs
| that cannot earn a decent wage because they are
| categorized as "supplement jobs." Especially since we
| observably see people working these jobs full time.
|
| I order doordash on weeknights on occasion. Who is
| delivering to me if the drivers are just people
| supplementing on the weekend or during the school day
| while their kids are away?
|
| If you are working, then you should be treated with
| dignity.
| abduhl wrote:
| There's a lot of posts here besides yours talking about
| the "dignity" workers deserve. What does treating a
| delivery driver with dignity mean/require?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| It might actually be a good policy to de-fractionate
| jobs. A fast food store will take what could be ten full-
| time positions, and break those up into thirty part-time
| positions. It could be mandated that if the total hours
| of the business's part-time positions are some level
| above one or more full-time positions, that they must
| hire the full-timers. While some would no doubt still
| complain, this should be an improvement for most and
| business's can't make honest claims that they're
| suffering economic penalty.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> The insane thing is people trying to make a livable
| wage off of "gigs".
|
| > We should stop pretending this is or ever can be
| reasonable full-time employment._
|
| Hypothetically, imagine a society that required welfare
| claimants to accept any job they were offered. If any
| would not work, neither should he eat.
|
| Should such a society allow shitty/exploitative/dangerous
| jobs to exist, and force welfare claimants to work them?
|
| Or should there only be an obligation to take a job if it
| provides a certain minimum level of safety, dignity and
| salary?
| LocalH wrote:
| Stop giving the conservatives ideas! /s
| pcrh wrote:
| > If any would not work, neither should he eat.
|
| Ironically, that is one of the original "10 planks of
| communism" by Marx and Engels (i.e. "The liability of all
| to labour").
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't think a gig economy app's open signup process is
| considered an offer for unemployment purposes. (If it
| were how would anyone get unemployment payments?)
| anamax wrote:
| They're double-apping because they want more business
| than they can get from either app alone.
|
| It's unclear why that's a "flaw". If Uber has to pay idle
| drivers, it has to charge more for rides.
|
| Do you want there to be only one such company?
|
| Do you object when a grocery story carries more than one
| brand of bread? How about when a given brand of bread has
| more than one type of bread?
| mFixman wrote:
| > For instance, the difference between an Uber driver
| with 4.3 stars and 4.9 stars is consistently obvious.
|
| Yeah, 4.9 drivers explicitly ask for a good rating. It's
| the same for 4.3 and 4.9 star restaurants in Google Maps.
|
| Reviews make sense if you can read other people's
| comments, otherwise they are useless. I wouldn't mind if
| 5-star ratings in service apps were replaced with more
| detailed "I had a problem" forms.
| crackercrews wrote:
| > Yeah, 4.9 drivers explicitly ask for a good rating.
|
| Literally have never experienced this.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I've taken 100s of Ubers and have never had a single
| driver ask me to rate them highly.
|
| Agree with your point about the comments though
| John23832 wrote:
| > The vast majority of delays I've seen from these
| drivers is because they are (very obviously) double-
| apping, in which case I'm happy to have them be affected
| by terrible ratings.
|
| They are double-apping because you as the consumer are
| not actually willing to pay what it costs to have someone
| deliver your food to you as a job. So now you want to
| enact a punishment on the driver for not making you their
| sole focus for less than a survivable daily wage.
|
| I'm sure you also don't tip.
| infecto wrote:
| You don't know if the GP tips or not. I along with some
| segment of consumers would be happy to pay the true cost
| of the service. Unfortunately in the last 5 years we are
| being bombarded everywhere with tips for what should be
| normal service. It is wildly frustrating.
|
| On the flip side I would argue that if a single app is
| not paying well enough that a gig worker should try
| something else for work. Gig work like delivery is a
| commodity and not defensible. At some point gig workers
| should try something else if its not making them money.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > I'm sure you also don't tip.
|
| In-app tipping should be discouraged regardless of
| someone's overall opinion on tipping.
|
| The market and regulatory environment has already set a
| precedent that stealing tips is de facto legal, and there
| are many ways to do so in an undetectable way (without a
| full source code audit) even if it wasn't legal.
|
| If you want to tip, do it cash in hand.
| bena wrote:
| The business itself is unsustainable. There isn't any
| good way to provide delivery of most items to most people
| at a reasonable cost.
|
| Also, the consumer isn't being given the choice, they are
| provided the cost from the app. The delivery company
| isn't willing to charge what it costs to have dedicated
| delivery drivers. That's the real culprit here.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I tip (well), I'm willing to pay. Now what? The problem
| isn't the consumer either.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > because you as the consumer are not actually willing to
| pay what it costs to have someone deliver your food to
| you as a job.
|
| Isn't that the fault of the businesses? People are paying
| what the business is charging. Are you faulting customers
| for not paying more than the business asks for the
| service?
| John23832 wrote:
| > Isn't that the fault of the businesses? People are
| paying what the business is charging. Are you faulting
| customers for not paying more than the business asks for
| the service?
|
| No, I am painting the reality of the situation in an
| effort to point out that the OP's attempt to "abuse by
| ratings" is misplaced.
|
| Where we stand at this point is that the OP wants a
| service (food delivery), but is receiveing a market
| discount for that service (the current price of food
| delivery that does not reflect a living wage for the
| service provider), BUT the OP is upset by the mechanism
| through which the market provides them with the discount
| (double apping). So much so that they wish to abuse
| deliverers with bad ratings.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The OP mentioned reducing the rating due to late
| delivery. I don't think that can count as "abusing the
| delivery people". It's one of the things that as a
| customer I'd hope would be reflected in the ratings.
|
| But again, this sort of thing is a great example of how
| ratings don't actually help anybody. Gaming the rating
| just to be nice to the service providers makes the
| ratings worthless to the customers.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Having worked as a server in college, servers get blamed
| for everything, and it definitely made me avoid and lose
| most of my confidence in humans other than close friends
| and family. People can be just mean and horrible for no
| real reason. Most are nice and patient, however a
| significant minority are just awful and must lead
| miserable, empty lives.
| input_sh wrote:
| May I suggest reading the article you're commenting on?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I read the article. I don't think the article made a
| persuasive case that this policy was bad.
| qeternity wrote:
| I did read the article. Hence my confusion.
|
| What are you suggesting then? A company that is selling
| warm pizza with prompt delivery should not do anything to
| incentive employees to deliver on that value prop?
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| In a vacuum, there's no problem.
|
| Unfortunately though, those same incentives also incentivise
| risk taking and dangerous driving.
| bagels wrote:
| They aren't bad in themselves, but the consequences of
| reckless driving are.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Because it can encourage dangerous behavior.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the
| I internet
|
| Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the
| popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.
|
| The customer ratings concept even infected places like your
| local doctor's office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been
| complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have
| discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or
| excessive drinking for decades. Doctors are also more likely to
| give in to patient demands for unnecessary antibiotics or
| controlled substances when they know it's going to result in a
| hit to their ratings if those ratings are related to their
| compensation.
|
| Every time I've visited a car dealer for service in the past
| few decades, the service manager is almost begging me to give
| them a "9 or 10" on the survey that will be sent to me
| afterward. He pleads that I work with him first to address
| anything that might reduce his rating.
|
| Even vehicle drivers have had "How is my driving?" numbers on
| the back of their cars for a very long time.
|
| Having customer satisfaction surveys tied to performance
| reviews isn't new if you've worked in anything customer-facing.
| It's just getting more attention now because "gig economy" has
| become a journalistic buzzword and people are more likely to be
| sympathetic to an hourly worker than, say, the doctor or
| service manager at their local dealership.
|
| Even long before all of this, tipping was the standard way of
| linking customer feedback to compensation. This applied to
| delivery drivers, too! The hand-wringing over customer feedback
| being an internet-era gig economy thing is misplaced. It has
| always been this way.
| LocalH wrote:
| My SO is a restaurant manager, and she has told me that the
| only reviews/ratings that have any positive effects are 5s
| out of 5. 4 out of 5? You might as well have put 0 or 1.
|
| It's extremely toxic.
| ghaff wrote:
| And Ebay, so 20+ years. It was either positive and A+++++
| or it's effectively negative.
| pc86 wrote:
| I remember once I bought a car and the salesman said if I
| had any reservations about giving him a 10/10 on every
| question in the survey no matter what it was that I should
| text or call his personal phone and he'd do whatever he
| could to fix it, also directly saying that it's better for
| them to have 95% of people not fill it out at all and get
| 10/10 from everyone else than to have 100% completion with
| a single 9/10.
|
| I don't know if it's true or not but he told me he lost out
| on a $10k volume bonus because someone who was extremely
| happy with everything gave him 9/10 on all questions and in
| the comments simply put "I wouldn't change anything about
| my experience, it was great! But perfection is reserved for
| God."
|
| I've heard this from everyone I've ever bought a car from,
| everyone I know who has ever been involved with that
| industry, etc.
|
| Why even have surveys if the point is just to collect 100%s
| and not actually find things to change without taking money
| out of people's pockets?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is classic Goodhart's Law stuff[1]. The key takeaway
| is that any company that implement these kinds of
| incentives doesn't actually give a shit about customer
| experience, they just like to play pretend.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| thfuran wrote:
| No, the key takeaway is that they probably shouldn't be
| relying on ratings to the extent that they are.
| cgriswald wrote:
| From the story it seems like they just like to deny
| bonuses on flimsy pretexts.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > Why even have surveys if the point is just to collect
| 100%s and not actually find things to change without
| taking money out of people's pockets?
|
| "So if I implement this system then either I get
| confirmation that everything I'm responsible for is
| perfect or I get an excuse to save money on labor?" -
| management approximately 8 seconds before implementing
| the surveys.
| 20after4 wrote:
| When I'm buying a product on a site like amazon with 5
| start rating scale, I find that all of the useful
| information is found in the 2, 3 and 4 star reviews.
|
| 1 star reviews are mostly people pissed off for some
| reason, people with unreasonable expectations, or
| competitors trying to hurt their competition. 5 stars
| reviews are either zero effort reviews from people with
| low expectations or they are outright fake reviews from
| people incentivized to inflate the rating.
|
| The 3 star reviews identify key and serious problems with
| the product that the customer otherwise would have liked.
| Usually the most information is found here. 4 star
| reviews identify weaknesses in the product that the
| customer still liked despite the drawbacks. 2 stars often
| are the same as 1 star but from less critical people.
|
| The only signal I pay attention to from 1 star and 5 star
| reviews is if there are too many of them it's a red flag.
| More than 10% 1 star usually indicates a serious problem
| with product defects. More than 80% 5 star indicates a
| product that's buying fake reviews.
| ImAnAmateur wrote:
| This mirrors my experience in retail. Anything less than
| the top score is counted as a negative, often counting the
| 1-9 score as a 0 with the 10 as a 1. The heat lands on a
| local manager when corporate comes to town. What ends up
| happening is that the customer-facing employees train the
| customers to put down 10s.
|
| It's ultimately a metric that's been gamified by everyone
| involved. I think the cynics keep it around because it
| gives customers a voice.
| LocalH wrote:
| Which is ironic, given that it modifies the customer's
| actual voice when interpreting the numbers in such a
| toxic way. I point to the cousin comment where a salesman
| lost a $10k bonus because a customer didn't give them a
| 10, despite the customer's comment being very explicit
| that they were extremely happy with the experience, but
| that they refused to rate _anything_ perfectly, as they
| reserved that for God. Despite that comment, the 9 was
| used as justification to deny the bonus, effectively also
| denying the customer 's voice.
| tyingq wrote:
| > Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the
| popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.
|
| Your electronic report card is now more persistent, and
| there's a much smaller number of companies dominating these
| gig industries, and they cross areas (food delivery + driving
| people, for example). It's not as easy to start over.
| pc86 wrote:
| Is this necessarily a bad thing?
|
| Do we want to make it easy for someone to "start over" when
| that means instead of driving bags of food around they're
| now driving around people?
| tyingq wrote:
| The scoring system doesn't necessarily reflect reality.
|
| Separately, there is a drive towards a sort of "social
| credit rating" that I do think is a bad thing.
|
| In the narrower space of having a criminal history, the
| US is very different in how that affects people that have
| done their time. Any company can do a dirt-cheap
| background check, this makes people close to
| unemployable. In other countries, like Australia,
| employers can request a "yes/no" answer to "is this
| person's history suitable for this specific job" from a
| government agency...but they can't just get history
| themselves.
|
| The combination of consolidation in the space into a few
| giants, and dirt cheap sharing of data across employers
| is, over time, applying the same sort of permanent mark
| problem to everyone else. I think it's a bad thing.
| nradov wrote:
| Some US states have now adopted "ban the box" legislation
| which prohibits asking job candidates about criminal
| history (at least for certain jobs). Of course, it's
| still tough to explain a 10-year employment gap on a CV.
|
| https://www.nelp.org/publication/ban-the-box-fair-chance-
| hir...
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's also toothless when the employer's insurance company
| can require a (post-hire) background check to cover the
| employee and failing it is grounds for canceling the
| hire.
|
| I don't see an obvious solution, because compelling
| commercial insurance to cover someone with repeat
| duis/reckless driving/addiction issues in a work truck
| doesn't feel quite fair, but there needs to be a path to
| gainful employment for ex-cons if we want our supposedly
| rehabilitative justice system to have even a chance of
| working, and there's not a lot of options that aren't
| customer facing, don't involve driving, and don't put you
| in some sort of security context or in charge of accounts
| or money.
|
| Basically, any job that pays worth a damn requires a bit
| of trust, and we simply don't trust ex cons. And they're
| probably statistically somewhat less trustworthy, but
| that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a path out. For our
| sake as much as theirs.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Ideally the insurance company only cares about crimes
| that are relevant to the job; theft or embezzlement for
| workers handling cash. DUIs for drivers. Etc. There are
| certain combinations of crime and job that are sensibly
| going to be risky, but how do you prevent companies from
| being overcautious? An insurance company that was more
| optimally cautious than overcautious won't gain much for
| it.
| pc86 wrote:
| Why do you need to "prevent companies from being
| overcautious?" It's their money they're spending, it's
| their customer relationships they're putting at risk,
| it's their liability they're increasing by having someone
| with multiple DUI convictions driving around the work
| truck.
|
| Criminal history is not a protected class (nor should it
| be), there's nothing wrong with a company saying it
| doesn't want to hire people with criminal histories in
| the recent past for certain jobs, or any job.
| tyingq wrote:
| Collectively, blackballing people with a criminal past
| has negative effects not just for those people.
| lupusreal wrote:
| We don't "need" to but we'd all be generally better off
| if ex-cons can find honest jobs to support themselves.
| pc86 wrote:
| > There are certain combinations of crime and job that
| are sensibly going to be risky, but _how do you prevent
| companies from being overcautious?_
|
| Your words imply we do need to do that.
| pc86 wrote:
| I'd be more than happy having a period of time where
| these things can't be taken into account (like
| bankruptcy). But if you have repeat DUIs / reckless
| driving incidents, you've proven that at least currently
| you can't be trusted to drive safely. Having a job where
| operating a vehicle as part of your job isn't a human
| right so I don't see anything wrong with saying "you're
| not allowed to have this job." Isn't it much more humane
| to do that in the application process than firing the
| candidate in their first week because the insurance will
| not cover them? Isn't it wrong to force the insurance to
| cover someone at a loss, or force the employer to pay
| more to cover this person who probably shouldn't be
| driving anyway?
| tyingq wrote:
| The argument isn't about whether to disqualify someone
| for a job that involves driving if they have a DUI, at
| least to me.
|
| I mentioned the Australian system...when the employer
| sends the candidate name/info and the complete job
| description, and a government agency replies yes/no. I
| assume they have some criteria for how long ago the
| offense was, etc. And that candidates generally know if
| they apply for a job that's not a good match, they will
| get a "no".
|
| In the US system, even for a job where driving is not
| involved, the employer gets the full record and gets to
| decide what to do with that information with whatever
| arbitrary opinions they have.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Doctors telling patients they're fat doesn't help them get
| skinnier. The literature is pretty clear that in every double
| blind study, the category of medical advice or helping make
| nutrition and exercise plans leads to 0lbs average weight
| loss over 5 years.
| everforward wrote:
| No, but some people do need to be informed of how dangerous
| it is, and doctors can either prescribe weight loss
| medications or give a referral to a doctor specializing in
| medical and surgical weight loss.
|
| Regardless, it's something I would expect doctors to nag
| patients about, the same way my dentist nags me to floss.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Why, if there's proven to be no benefit?
| lupusreal wrote:
| _" Proven to have no benefit"_ in this case only means
| that most people won't lose weight after being told to. A
| minority will though, so doctors refusing to tell fat
| people to lose weight is a disservice to the few who
| stand a chance of making it. The rest should either be
| signed up for surgery, drugs, or written off as lost
| causes.
| everforward wrote:
| The person I responded to said that there's no benefit to
| advice to diet and exercise. Presuming that's true (I
| doubt that there's 0 effect, and e.g. [1] would
| disagree), there are still benefits. As I mentioned,
| advice on dieting and exercising is far from the only
| tool doctors can reach for here.
|
| There are medical options that doctors can prescribe (or
| refer to another doctor for a prescription).
| WeGovy/semaglutide, Adipex, HCG, good old adderall, etc.
| I haven't followed the space in about a decade so I don't
| know what's in and what's banned, but I'm aware there are
| a range of options there. I believe there are some
| outpatient programs as well, semantically similar to
| outpatient rehabs.
|
| There are also surgical options that doctors can refer
| patients to a surgeon for. Laparoscopic bands, gastric
| bypasses, I think there's a third that I can't recall.
|
| The incredibly sad issue is that doctors are sometimes
| forced to fall back on advice to diet and exercise
| because many of these treatments are contra-indicated
| with common comorbidities of obesity. Anesthesia can be
| very risky for patients with a BMI of 45 or 50, so they
| may need to lose weight the old fashioned way until
| they're at a weight where they can be safely
| anesthetized. Stimulants (adipex and adderall) are very
| effective at curbing hunger, but are contra-indicated by
| high blood pressure which is incredibly common.
|
| I also believe there's a large segment of primary care
| physicians who aren't up to date on weight loss
| procedures, because they change fairly frequently
| relative to something like treating strep throat.
|
| [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6169796
| /#:~:tex... (
| kyleee wrote:
| It's the right thing to do at the individual level. The
| doctor should be honest with each patient and every
| individual should be given the chance to act on that
| honest information, even if studies show that many people
| have difficulty overcoming weight issues on their own.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, these ratings problems aren't new, but they are more
| pervasive and less useful than ever before. For my part, I
| just refuse to give ratings or pay attention to them.
|
| The effective binary nature of ratings (if you don't give the
| best one, you may as well give worst one) was the last straw
| for me. Ratings are a game that harms both customers and the
| people providing good and services.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Agreed. And because ratings are so broken, there are
| multiple ways to game them. In addition to rarely leaving
| ratings, I rarely trust the damn things either.
|
| In my opinion, ratings need to decay over time. For service
| workers like Uber drivers any rating >1 year old (or maybe
| less) should decay to 0 significance. For online retail
| like Amazon, _maybe_ 2 years but not much longer than that.
| This not only allows people to "clean up their act" after
| bad ratings, but makes botting a recurring cost instead of
| a one-time investment.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Notably steam ratings on games are divided into "all
| time" and "recent" categories.
| nox101 wrote:
| I had I think, a related issue. I moved, need a new dentist,
| called one, told them I wanted to take a sleeping pill
| because it helps me with my anxiety from previous painful
| dentist visits. They said they'd have their office manager
| call me back. He vehemently steered me to another dentist. It
| was ridiculous how much corp-speak he used to try to convince
| me it was in my best interest. They had a 5/5 rating. I
| assume it's because they reject anyone the think might lower
| it.
| tengbretson wrote:
| Asking someone to temporarily take on the responsibility of
| your medical wellbeing while admittedly being on
| psychotropics is a bit of an ask, isn't it?
| nox101 wrote:
| Is it? My last dentist did it
| nradov wrote:
| You're probably reading too much into that interaction.
| Look for a local sedation dentistry practice. They
| specialize in managing patients with anxiety. Regular
| dentists may not be set up to handle patients with major
| anxiety.
|
| https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22275-seda
| t...
| nox101 wrote:
| my last dentist did it and was not a "sedation Dentistry"
| practice. She was head of the California Dental
| Association tho
| cess11 wrote:
| It's much broader than that.
|
| Having people with little to no understanding of work
| evaluate and exercise power over it has been foundational for
| capitalism since its beginning.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| What _hasn 't_ that been foundational towards? I think that
| goes back all the way to god-emperors of the first cities.
| cess11 wrote:
| Could you give some examples?
| happytiger wrote:
| This is just a social credit system designed to control
| behavior, but attached to your workplace instead of your
| person.
|
| The proof is simple. If you move this system from a single
| workplace to multiple workplaces with an ID for the worker, you
| get social credit.
|
| This is a system that many governments and corporatists are in
| love with, as it generally "punishes troublemakers" without
| having anyone who's a lawsuit target get overly involved. In my
| opinion, social credit systems are repression and
| totalitarianism masquerading as systems of personal
| responsibility.
| Insanity wrote:
| Will take this as an opportunity to complain about how sub-par
| dominos ordering is in Canada compared to Belgium. In Belgium,
| they have a modern website with a real-time tracker for when the
| food will arrive. In Canada, they have a progress bar that just
| says "out for delivery" without any indication of how long it
| will take.
|
| Their website and ordering experience in Canada is so frustrating
| that I mostly stopped getting Dominos, except for exceedingly
| rare occasions
| krisgenre wrote:
| They have real-time tracking in India too + an app (though its
| likely a wrapper over their website)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| When I order Domino's in Canada I get a map and ETA. I always
| order on desktop. Maybe it's a mobile or regional thing?
| gardenhedge wrote:
| I still remember the ad before the Simpsons from when I was a kid
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Domino's driving was lucrative in the 1980s. I lived near Wash DC
| and a number of delivery drivers were spotted with diplomatic
| tags.
|
| During that time there was also controversy about dip tags being
| ~100% exempt from ticket penalties. (IDK about today.)
|
| Confidence was high that those pizzas _always_ arrived on time.
| zelias wrote:
| Where is the Deliverator when you need him?
| pryelluw wrote:
| An offer so good (dangerous, yes) that took a shitty pizza place
| to a current 16B-ish valuation is a failure?
|
| This is actually a good example of a mediocre product growing due
| to an incredible offer. Something that most business don't event
| bother to consider. Your offer is definitely more important than
| even features in most cases.
| nradov wrote:
| In fairness to Domino's, they did also increase the quality of
| the pizza. It is at least no longer terrible.
|
| https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-dominos-pizza-reinvented-itself
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I actually like it a lot
| chihuahua wrote:
| I read about that back then, thought "oh I should give
| Domino's another try", and it was still terrible. If it was
| even worse before, I can't imagine how that is possible.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I was a delivery driver for Dominos during that time. My manager
| (bless her heart, truly) was always saying "DO NOT SPEED OR BE
| DANGEROUS"; we had literally zero incentives to be on time, or at
| least we weren't punished if we weren't.
|
| The markup on delivered pizza at THAT time was in the 800% range,
| so a free pie now and again wasn't going to hurt that much. A
| lawsuit over a crash probably would, though.
|
| I suspect I was lucky there.
| pc86 wrote:
| This strikes me as one of those things where scale works
| against incentives. If you own one store, you're making good
| money. There's little reason to push your managers to try to
| drive that margin to 810% by eliminating the occasional free
| pizza.
|
| But when you own a dozen stores (like one of the stories in the
| article) all you see are numbers, you don't care, you push as
| hard as you can to "drive efficiencies" and you end up with
| managers who are getting yelled at because they're at 97%
| sub-30m delivery instead of the 98.5% goal or whatever. And
| then you have a manager pulling a pizza out of a car wreck and
| giving it to another driver.
| kshacker wrote:
| I think it is also the decoupling from real people doing real
| job. The farther you go from ground level work, the easier it
| is to theorize what they could do - whether it is asking
| drone operators to bomb some place, or set a policy without
| setting foot in the store on a daily basis, or do a leveraged
| buyout based primarily on a spreadsheet driven model, the
| farther you go away from people whose lives are being
| impacted, the easier it is for you to make decisions that do
| not think about them.
| snissn wrote:
| this is worth a read too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Noid
| mzs wrote:
| reminded me of the minuteman blast door:
| https://www.nps.gov/teachers/classrooms/military-morale-art....
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Food delivery driver the most dangerous job.
| commonenemy wrote:
| This campagin is still alive in China today. But the
| circumstances are different tho, distances are closer (denser
| community), and drviers use mopeds insteads of cars (can navigate
| through cities faster than cars).
|
| And if an order exceeded 30 mins, the customer will receive a
| 9-inch pizze coupon.
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