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DoorDash sprints towards replacing its drivers with robots [1]

['Séamus Bellamy']

Date: 2026-08-11  

Reading this story made me so damn tired: as part of their effort to replace human employees with delivery robots, DoorDash has come up with a cunning plan: they're gonna use the human employees they want to replace to load delivery robots

Some workers in areas where DoorDash is using its Dot delivery robot are receiving offers through the DoorDash app to load them up. It's the few feet between a restaurant's pickup counter and the curb outside where delivery workers intervene.

Is it a perfect circle or utter stupidity? You could argue either and come out a winner.

For all the tech baked into their Dot bots, DoorDash can't get around the tricky bit of loading the little bastards up with food. Their solution is to use hardworking gig employees to pick up food orders, find DoorDash's Dot robot out on the street, and jam it full of food orders so it can bring the food to waiting customers, according to a member of a DoorDash Driver Facebook group. In her post, the driver claimed that servicing the job-stealing little shit took around five minutes, soup to nuts, and paid five bucks. A company representative told Business Insider that they're only using this method of delivering food to front doors in "…busy periods, while creating more earning opportunities for Dashers outside of traditional deliveries."

Let me translate that for you, as I speak fluent bullshit: more earning opportunities don't mean more money. It just means more bullshit, low-paying tasks over more time-intensive, restaurant-to-front-door assignments. And it's only going to get worse. Earlier this month, the Federal Aviation Administration rubber-stamped DoorDash's plans to use aerial drones to plop food on doorsteps.

Previously:

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