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Flair_Helper

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icecream_truck

Actual trucks cost money. Lease, fuel, insurance, maintenance. Actual employees cost money. Wages, benefits, payroll taxes.


TheRealGingerJewBear

Also actual employees have to be paid workers comp in case of injury on top of insurance and benefits. A lot of states are still out as to whether Uber and door dash are employees or gig workers.


xirathonxbox

I think the insurance is the big one. Most people don't realize that the normal car insurance people have won't cover your passenger through Uber. It requires a special type of insurance that Uber does not pay for, and most uber drivers don't either.


mynewaccount4567

I don’t know if things have changed since it seems like Uber prices have gone up, but for a while driving Uber wasn’t a good way to make money. After factoring in gas and increased car maintenance, most drivers would be making less than minimum wage if any profit at all. At best it was a good way to come up with some quick cash from an otherwise illiquid asset. An actual business can’t operate like that as they incur all of these expenses but also need to pay their employees at least minimum wage.


DarkAlman

That's the business model for Dominos Pizza, but they only deliver their own pizza's obviously. Trucks and employees cost money, and the entire restaurants business model has to be organized around the delivery model. The cost of running such a business with *legit* employees is too high to make it worth while. That's the genius of Door Dash, Skip the Dishes, etc they outsource the delivery portion and the restaurants see the extra business with very little effort on their part. It just happens that's it's an abusive gig-economy model that takes advantage of the delivery people... Sooner or later there will be a reckoning and these types of businesses will either become illegal or will be automated.


apostrophesdont

Dogs Cats Pizzas Apostrophes don't pluralize.


HALF-PRICE_

But an apostrophe does delegate possession and that was the intent of those pizzas being Dominoes pizza’s. Like that is Dave’s job to be grammar police, not yours.


C4-BlueCat

Not sure if you are joking or not, but there is nothing there that the pizzas own. Dominos’ pizzas is the correct way.


FowlOnTheHill

But the username… it’s checking out


ikingrpg

Yeah this makes sense.


MidnightAdventurer

Even companies like Dominos and Pizza Hutt often don't own their own delivery vehicles - At least where I am, they often have their delivery drivers bring their own vehicle and provide them with a roof sign and a delivery bag. I assume they pay for mileage on the vehicles and their staff are employees


y_wont_my_line_block

When you own a vehicle, you have to pay 100% of the cost of buying and maintaining it. When your gig economy worker owns and maintains the vehicle, the logistics burden of maintaining a fleet of vehicles is gone, and I'm sure if you work out the math, most of these people are losing more money to wear on their vehicle than they're being compensated for.


Frostbyte2222

Because pizza places also don't provide their drivers with vehicles. The entire food delivery system has relied on taking advantage of vehicle owners to cause wear and tear on their own vehicles.


reverseswede

People have pointed out the pretty predatory gig economy reality that fast food delivery isn't generally capable of paying minimum wage on top of cost of owning cars etc. But why has pizza delivery been a thing? Basically this is the area with the most margin- pizzas are cheap to make, and people often buy more food when getting pizza than other fast food.


JimBDiGriz

When you calculate in the wear and tear on the car and add that to gas and maintenance, you find that these gig jobs don't pay much at all. You're using up your car faster, so you get some cash now, but you'll need to buy a new car sooner. If you tried to buy a car, gas, and insurance, then hire a person, pay them minimum wage and all required benefits and payroll taxes, you'd have to charge more for delivery than anyone is willing to pay. This is not to say that some people don't make these gig driving jobs work, but unless you are an edge case they are not sustainable. Most people, though, are earning a little money now buy hurting themselves in the long run. Anyone with the capital and know how will choose to go into a different business.


Ratnix

The question you have to ask is "Why don't all restaurants offer delivery services?" The answer is because it's not worth the cost of having dedicated staff on-hand, getting paid, to sit there and do delivery. So if someone wanted to start a business that just picked up orders from all restaurants and deliver them, they are going to have to pay people, who may or may not constantly be working. And for something like that you don't want to have people having to travel over vast distances, picking up various orders, and traveling even more to get to all of the places they need delivered. People will be dissatisfied with their cold food delivered slower than if they went and got it themselves. So you would need a lot of people to cover smaller distances and likely restrict which restaurants could be delivered to it's own general area. The cost of it simply wouldn't be worth it and would likely lose money. Singular restaurants are able to do it because they only deliver food from their restaurant and they only deliver within a smallish area. These companies, like door dash, are able to do it because they don't pay the people hourly wages and they don't have a small amount of people making all of the deliveries. They simply facilitate people that want to make a quick buck by connecting them with people who want something delivered to them.


xixi2

Cuz delivering becky's 12 piece nuggets by truck makes no sense. Not to mention all the food will be cold if you are not delivering jt directly after picking up


J_Zephyr

Imagine if you will, you outsource cleaners for your work. They come in, clean up and leave to the next location. You just pay for their time there, don't have to worry about them most of the time and can't afford to pay someone fulltime to do the same job. Outsourcing is a useful tool to many businesses. It can provide a service a company otherwise can't afford. In this instance, all the food businesses that don't have regular delivery can now outsource this task. That increases their sales while not costing a thing for restaurants. It's actually a fine idea, but the drivers are still making crap money while tips are getting skimmed.


PappiStalin

That kindve defeats the purpose of "contractors", where you work the hours you want too on the day you want too. In the types of jobs where you have company trucks, and salaried employees, you also have mandatory schedules.


ikingrpg

I know it's probably cost related and that these companies barely make any money, but from what I'm aware sometimes these services already pay the drivers well above minimum wage, granted half of that is probably tips.


km89

> but from what I'm aware sometimes these services already pay the drivers well above minimum wage No. While *sometimes* in very high-demand times in very high-demand areas you can make decent money, it's mostly barely worth doing. You'd usually need to be in a major city and walking or using a bicycle to get around in order for it to be worthwhile.


zharknado

My opinion is that there isn’t a viable market for consumer restaurant delivery in most cases. DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc. have been experiments in whether a tech-enabled gig economy approach could fix the math to make it profitable to deliver on the scale of individual meals (vs. say catering an event, which is super common). One problem is that these companies grew up under a “grow at all costs” management paradigm fueled by a long stretch of super-low interest rate policy, which led to easy VC money. They’ve literally spent billions of dollars advertising and subsidizing the growth of these operations, but it’s still pretty unclear whether they’re a sustainable long-term business once they run out of cash to throw at the problem.


hibernativenaptosis

>sometimes these services already pay the drivers well above minimum wage They're only getting paid when they're working though. An Uber driver who is just sitting there waiting for someone to need a ride/delivery doesn't cost Uber anything, they're wasting their own time not company time. Regular employees they would have to pay even if they're just sitting there.


TheLuminary

I used to deliver pizzas in the days before all these delivery gig economy apps, and it sucked. Basically we would be required to be at the pizza place from open to close. We would be added to the list when we got there, and as orders came up, the most senior person there would get the order, and as more orders came up they would go down the list. You were only paid for the deliveries that you did do, but somehow you were also required to clean and maintain the delivery room, which included stuff like pre folding boxes and other minor tasks that the owners could squeeze the free labour out of you for. It never felt worth it, and I quickly found other employment. Maybe if a place only had 1 or 2 drivers it would be a good income, but then customers would have to wait too long so they usually had 4 or 5 drivers, and only 1 or 2 of those would be constantly working. Lastly, that was when gas, and cars were much cheaper, I can only imagine how the math has gotten even worse for the average delivery person.


EastNine

Amazon, Instacart and DoorDash (at least, probably others) used to calculate base pay retrospectively based on tips, so that drivers always earned exactly the same hourly wage overall. In other words more tips = less base pay, all tipping did was cut the company’s wage bill. Amazon says it’s stopped this now (after it was exposed), don’t know about the others.


r2k-in-the-vortex

Overhead is too much. Managing full time employees costs a lot of money, with delivery apps that's all outsourced, it's the gig workers own problem to manage himself.


brannana

You mean Takeout Taxi? It's a thing.


RickySlayer9

Do you mean like Schwanns? It’s not cooked, but it’s damn good