
Silicon Valley Turned Your Burrito into a Capitalist Nightmare - turtlegrids
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/how-silicon-valley-turned-your-burrito-into-a-capitalist-nightmare
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seibelj
Ah yes, another 2000 word screed on how absolutely horrible and inhumane it is
to order food from an app. This is the same genre of writing about how the
latest iPhone is garbage or the touchpad on the MacBooks is proof of societal
collapse.

It’s wonderful that in 2019 these are the issues people care about. It shows
how pleasant our lives have become.

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ninth_ant
From a customer perspective I couldn’t disagree more. Calling on the phone to
order something is often infuriating —- dealing with thick accents and loud
background noise it could be awful to communicate.

With DoorDash and similar apps, you can place the order online and be precise
about what you want, and get updates on where your order is.

It’s not perfect to be sure, but the “nightmare” is ridiculously exaggerated
in the article. P

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dmode
I agree and disagree. Doordash have opened up deliveries from restaurants that
would have never hired their own drivers. On the other hand their delivery
mechanism sucks. Almost every other order is messed up. Yesterday, after a 2
hr delay, in which time there was to way to contact customer service, my
deliver was abruptly cancelled. Imagine a toddler at this time. Also, most of
the time the food arrives cold or there are items that are incorrect. It is
bizarre

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retromagik
I currently work in a restaurant with doordash. While I rarely have to take
to-go orders and doordash orders, I see my Coworkers who hate taking doordash
orders.

First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. On a busy night our Togo
person makes ~50 in tips, so they just don't pay as much attention to the door
dash orders.

Second, no matter how long we quote the order, the driver always shows up
immediately and gets in the way of the servers and bussers and other customers
(its a fairly small restaurant with no waiting area) so usually we are rushing
to try and finish the order to get them to leave.

I don't know a single person in the restaurant except the owner who likes the
doordash system, but as long as people keep ordering it'll stay

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turtlegrids
> First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders.

Yes, there are indeed tips for doordash orders. I tip my doordash drivers.
It's right there in the app, not hidden in some dark pattern or anything.
[https://fooddeliveryguru.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/02/Scre...](https://fooddeliveryguru.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/02/Screen-Shot-2018-01-29-at-9.39.56-PM.png)

~~~
bdcravens
You missed the point. No one at the restaurant is getting a tip. The same
person who would package up the food if you picked up in person (and who you
would customarily tip) is the same person packaging up DoorDash orders, but
with no incentive. The person getting tipped is the delivery service employee.

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screye
I am surprised that to-go orders are tipped in the first place.

Aren't waiters tipped because the law allows them to be paid below minimum
wage? AFAIK, behind the counter service people get paid commensurately, so
tipping them doesn't make sense.

~~~
retromagik
On the west coast waiters make minimum wage and there is still a tipping
culture. Because of this, being a server or a waiter can be a very high paying
job. To-go orders usually get tipped, but closer to 5-10% as opposed to the
standard 15-20 for a sit down restaurant.

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JoeAltmaier
Food delivery was broken - only a few restaurants did it. Now almost all of
them can do it. That is truly disruptive. Does it suck sometime? Yes, probably
even more than Sal's Pizza on a busy midterm week. But that you can do it at
all, that's new and different. There will be growing pains of course.

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AznHisoka
After a few bad experiences, I only call the restaurany directly to order now.
A lot of these apps show choices that the restaurants may not have and they
end up giving you an inferior substitute. If I have a good experience, I often
just stick with that restaurant/order forever since I know its reliable.

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scarmig
I don't know why this irked me so much, but it did:

> the roughly 50-square-mile area surrounding the San Francisco Peninsula

SF itself is around 50 square miles. I know the article probably means
something like "the area within 50 miles of San Francisco," but an editor
should have caught this.

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anbop
But you can pick 50 square miles of the Bay Area they have most of the
relevant tech headquarters

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damian2000
Can see the author's point, but I know people in their late teens who never
would have bothered ringing up restaurants to get things delivered. They only
do so now because its a single app with many choices ... similar to Uber in
this regard - they managed to augment an existing service with a cool
smartphone app & location tracking.

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kirghiz
> Look, there’s a machine in our pockets that allows us to take a thousand
> photos a day, access the world’s information, and do things we never could
> have dreamed of in the past

None of these things originated in Silicon Valley.

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Ericson2314
The problem is cars. Food delivery works perfectly well in NYC. Bike transit
times are wonderfully predictable.

