
I’ve been delivering for Postmates and DoorDash - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/your-pizza-s-cold-blame-your-food-app-not-your-courier-9d1d123ad2e8
======
fpgaminer
I'm surprised DoorDash et al. didn't do away with tips. It causes
consternation for the couriers, is easily forgotten by the customers, and
seems to have no benefit.

You can choose to set the tip when placing the order, or give a cash tip when
the driver arrives. The former is convenient, but meaningless; how do you set
a tip for a service not yet performed? The latter is inconvenient, especially
if you don't carry the necessary cash. It complicates the delivery
interaction, is more likely to be forgotten, and still won't be very accurate.
Are you going to take the food out of the bag and check it before you tip and
let the courier leave?

Uber did away with tips, and it's wonderful. Drivers know how much they're
going to make, riders know how much they're spending, there is no awkwardness
or pressure, and the rating system does a far better job at maintaining level
of service.

My only experience has been with DoorDash. They should do away with tips and
overhaul their post-experience rating system. Right now the only options are
to give one overall rating to the whole experience, which is useless, or to
report a problem, and even then you're only able to report one problem. If,
for example, both your delivery was messed up and the order was wrong, you
can't tell DoorDash about both. You have to choose one. And their customer
service takes 12 hours to respond, with completely arbitrary refunds. Compare
to Uber who has responded to all my inquiries within 3 minutes.

Still worse, when I report a problem with my order (wrong items) ... who gets
blamed? Does DoorDash investigate and see who was at fault, to correctly apply
blame, or do they automatically blame the restaurant? None of that is made
clear to the customer, and so it gives me pause whenever I report problems.

~~~
awakeasleep
Does anyone know how having a tipped postition affects the law? I'm curious if
these companies gain some sort of protection (from fulltime workers, from
minimum wage laws, etc) by having their employees be paid by tip.

~~~
MaxGhenis
The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13/hour, but the employer must top it
off to non-tipped MW if the worker's total earnings w/tips fall short (in
reality many don't ask for this for fear of employer retribution).
California's tipped minimum wage is the same as its non-tipped though.

------
Canada
The courier must arrive before the food is ready and wait for it. The food
must be packed so that the least damage occurs. (eg. crispy needs to breathe,
yet be kept warm) The courier must deliver it in under 10 minutes worst case,
but within 5 minutes on average.

Like the constraint of the speed of light on networks, no amount of money can
change this. Some food ages like VOIP traffic.

Pizza and Chinese delivery do well in the worst case. They reheat well. Look
at what airlines serve.

To survive these new delivery services need to make a profit delivering food
that is unprofitable for individual establishments to deliver themselves.

~~~
FlamingHotRam
> The food must be packed so that the least damage occurs. (eg. crispy needs
> to breathe, yet be kept warm)

I wonder how much room there is to specialize in doing this right.

The vast majority of the time I order delivery, food tends to come in super-
budget containers that degrade the experience. Pizzas arriving in cardboard
boxes, the taste altered by 10+ minutes of steaming and dripping oil... asian
food tends to arrive in the clam-shell styrofoam containers that mush up some
vegetables or turn crispy fried food soggy, with sauces in thin plastic cups
that invariably leak at least a little... When was the last time anyone
rethought delivery?

The experience could be so much better. What if soups used parfait-style
containers to keep the liquids separate from dry mix-ins (eg fried chicken)
until right before consumption? What if pizza boxes had oil-absorbant padding
and better venting? And what about standardizing those container sizes like we
standardized shipping containers, so food doesn't get jumbled in a plastic
bag? Seems like that would open the window to containers with heating/cooling
packs as well, which would help batch-deliver orders more efficiently.

How much of a market is there for companies that handle shipping _and_
packaging/handling of delivery orders? Owning the full delivery experience
instead of just some cars.

~~~
qq66
That's what the vertically integrated delivery companies like Munchery do.
Ultimately I think this model will win, since the food prep facility does not
need to need to pay rent in a restaurant neighborhood, and the food can be
designed for deliverability.

------
nugget
Sometimes I wonder if this whole food delivery boom is being supported by
millenials who simply haven't faced the need (or desire) to budget yet. How
sustainable is spending $25 per person per meal for those outside the top
quintile? I know it works in San Francisco and NYC, but how deep is the market
elsewhere? Or does that not matter? Maybe a significant number of them will
never have families and all that disposable income will go to postmates and
doordash instead. Maybe these businesses are built on price insensitive folks
in urban areas for regular usage and irregular usage from everyone else?

~~~
qq66
All of these businesses are predicated upon an ever-increasing erosion of the
middle class, increasing the number of customers and depressing wages for the
workers by increasing the supply of people competing for the jobs.

~~~
nugget
I suppose that benefits them on both sides of their marketplace: the # of less
price sensitive consumers in the upper class increases and the # of (educated,
reliable, service oriented) people available for cheap on demand labor in the
lower class increases as well. The hourglass distribution is a nice tailwind.
I wonder how many young people are temporarily part of the demand equation
when they are working 24/7 for a high wage and have no dependents and a low to
zero (or negative) savings rate. From watching my friends it seems that once
you have a child your attitude towards expenses and savings changes
dramatically.

------
jellicle
When I read stories like this, my only thought is how little San Francisco
resembles any other city in the world. If you are designing your [next big
thing] to be successful in SF, it won't be successful anywhere else. If you
are designing it to be successful in the real world, it won't be successful in
SF.

No, people outside SF are not going to pay $15 delivery on an $18 salad in
order to receive it an hour late. No amount of venture capital thrown away
will change this.

~~~
StavrosK
As a Greek, it's very odd to me why many other cultures don't seem to have the
food delivery element. Here, you can get virtually every type of food, from
fast food, to street food, to restaurant food, delivered, free of charge, in
around ten minutes, from 9 am to 2 am.

No other country I've traveled to really had this, you could, at most, get
pizza delivered until 10pm or so. Can anyone shed some light?

~~~
antidaily
Big cities and college towns in the US have delivery of everything. Same hours
you mentioned. Some delivery til 4am.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, I haven't seen that in SF, LA or NY, but it's possible I just didn't know
places delivered.

~~~
URSpider94
Sorry, but almost every restaurant in NY delivers ... When I lived there we
used to have a giant basket of menus on the kitchen counter, everything from
sushi to Argentinian arepas to Cajun.

------
caseyf7
This helps explain something I've noticed over time using these services. At
first, it seemed like most of the delivery people were local and now it seems
like they are coming from further and further outside the bay area. When the
drivers are driving monster trucks, they probably don't live in an urban area.

~~~
ryanSrich
Wait what? You get postmates delivered via monster truck? How is that even
legal?

~~~
SilasX
I'm pretty sure the parent didn't mean a literal monster truck, but some kind
of large, hoisted pickup truck that's more typical of rural areas.

------
wpietri
This is another one of those things that I blame on what is certainly a hot
boom and what many call a bubble. Look at HomeJoy for comparison:

[https://medium.com/backchannel/why-homejoy-failed-
bb0ab39d90...](https://medium.com/backchannel/why-homejoy-failed-bb0ab39d901a)

In a saner funding environment, people get small things working reasonably
well and then scale up. But with the oceans of cash sloshing around and the
land-grab mentality, it's too easy to get something half-assedly working and
then throw money at all your problems. Disappointed customers? Give refunds!
Give coupons! Do more marketing! Frustrated pseudo-employees? Subsidize them!
Do more recruiting! Poach from your competitors!

~~~
will_pseudonym
Home cleaning services and food delivery are quite dissimilar. There is much
more trust required of the former, and as a result, once you find someone who
you like, you'd rather just keep using them.

On this same spectrum, an Uber-for-babysitters would fail even more
spectacularly than HomeJoy.

~~~
wpietri
They are similar in that it's relatively easy to paper over negative gross
margins and poor execution by throwing money at them.

~~~
will_pseudonym
I see! We were discussing different attributes of those businesses. I was more
going on the first principle of business, "What problem are we solving for the
customer?"

I don't have any opinions on the specific financials of any company. I was
just saying the fundamentals of HomeJoy were completely wrong.

Thanks for the discussion!

------
JoeAltmaier
Illuminating! I'm wondering, who can live in San Francisco on $16 per hour?

~~~
lsc
Rent control in San Francisco is... dramatic. My brother lives in SF in a
really nice place that has a little bit of a bay view, even, and he made about
that much when he moved in.

My understanding is that The law prevents the landlord from keeping rent in
line with market, and makes it hard for the landlord to evict the current
tenant, and even limits how much the landlord can jack up the rent between
tenants.

Often in situations where one person has the master lease and then rents out
rooms, that one person will keep a lot of the difference... but not always.
Quite often, it would seem, they are just more picky about choosing roommates.

But the upshot is that there are a small number of very inexpensive units in
SF. As far as I can tell, you have to know someone (or know someone who knows
someone) and then you have to be lucky, and then that someone needs to like
you. But if all those things happen? potentially, you can have cheaper rent in
SF than you can in San Jose.

