2 pizzas, a small order of breadsticks, and wanted to splurge and get cinnamon sticks.
Pizzas are a “Buy one get one deal!” at 13 bucks a pizza. Figured what the hell, I’ll splurge on desert then with the deal. Get to checkout… hold on a minute… 50 dollars for pizza?! Wait a minute 80 dollars after fees and taxes?!
Usually I only use Doordash for finding something, then I order direct from the store. I just saw the sweet “buy one get one” deal and thought eh, fine I’m here. Right, that’s why I stopped using door dash. I’m not spending 80 dollars on freaking pizza. I’ll just go pick it up and spend a quarter of that price.
At least I would have saved the $3 dollar delivery fee. Phew. Thanks DoorDash.
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What is standing in the way of an open alternative to these services? Both customers and workers getting a terrible deal, you’d think anyone would switch to something else at the first opportunity
Turns out hiring a cab for your pizza is expensive, who would have thought. Personally when ordering out, I always choose pickup, and fortunately can bike to most places to pick it up. If the weather is too shitty to bike, why would I want to put a delivery driver in those conditions.
The alternative isn’t an open platform, but maybe prioritizing 10 minute city in urban environments where you don’t need a car to get/deliver everything you need
If the weather is too shitty to bike, why would I want to put a delivery driver in those conditions.
I mean, I really don’t want to bike in the rain, but that’s no big deal for someone in a car, lol.
My dad drives for Uber Eats and Skip the Dishes. He basically makes all his money in shitty weather. During the summer, when it’s gorgeous out, nobody places any orders. He ends up sitting in the car for hours doing nothing!
I guess I should clarify that I’ve never used DoorDash or Uber Eats, but for restaurants who have their own delivery people, it’s almost always via someone on an electric bike where I live, so rain or snow is not fun for them.
Someone would need to host and manage that thing, in the case of dispute. For the gig worker, they would need someone to know that these alternatives exists, and that require marketing and marketing cost money.
But i bet someone can make a cooperative of this service and only run locally, and restaurant and delivery worker can both help promote their alternative.
At least some local alternatives sort of like that do exist, eg. https://www.noshdelivery.co/about_us. But yeah, there is the issue of managing it and overhead since I guess probably part of what they do is vetting and dispute resolution, so it might be hard for it to be more decentralized. Maybe eventual convergence on shared tools and protocols though?
The fact that even with the fees charged to the restaurant and to the customer, the majority of these apps still aren’t even profitable, lol.
Makes me so grateful I have Starship where I live. No price markups, no tips, only a $3 fee.
I will always get a good laugh at people who are shocked that private courier services are expensive.
I will always get a good laugh of corporate bootlickers that can’t distinguish expensive from robbery.
Are you on drugs? Please share.
I mean, it shouldn’t be that expensive. Where I live basically every pizza and fast food place used to offer free delivery. Nowadays because of delivery services this has died out a bit, but it still exits, yet ordering through the delivery services is way more expensive.
I honestly don’t even get it, because for a long time the delivery services were operating at a loss, not even sure if most of them are in the plus even now, yet they should be more efficient than every fast food place having its own drivers.
I use delivery services because restaurants have terrible phone service. It’s always their cousin Mumbles who answers the phone, surrounded by people banging on pots and pans. He doesn’t read my order back to me to make sure it’s correct. He doesn’t tell me how much it’s going to be. He doesn’t tell me how long it’s going to take. So I have no idea if I’m going to get the right food, if it will be the right temperature, and if I have enough cash to pay the driver.
And there’s no way I’m going to give out my credit card info to some guy I don’t know.
I don’t order delivery, but I do order pickup, and I like when restaurants have online ordering using the same system they use in the restaurant. It’s common with restaurants that use modern PoS systems like Toasttab. Prices are the same as if you order in person, since they don’t have to also pay another third-party (DoorDash, etc).
It would be awesome if ordering systems had a standard API, so I could order delivery directly from any app
The pizza place has free delivery because the cost is built into the pizza and people who pick up at the store pay that even though they don’t get delivery. Using a private delivery service they charge more because they don’t get a piece of the ‘pie’ so you’re basically paying twice for delivery.
Your pizza/chinese food that have in house delivery dont give 10% discount for picking it up? Thats weird
Except there’s a local market price for that pizza. If your pizza is on par with a pizzeria two minutes away and doesn’t do free delivery, you can’t charge more. You’ll lose all your pickups to them.
Except that other pizzeria two minutes away isn’t only pricing it’s pizza for walk-ins either, it’s offering free delivery to steal the customers further away from the other pizzeria. They both would have the charge built into their pizza, so it’s irrelevant. Unless that pizzeria doesn’t do any delivery at all, in which case the first pizzeria doesn’t have to worry much as it has all the business for people who don’t want to come in and pick up pizza.
This only makes sense if they are trying to grow and customers are rational actors at every purchase point. Neither is true in this situation. And it’s obvious because there pizzerias that have delivery fees in the same marketplace as ones with free deliveries.
“Oh shit I forgot my passport at home and my flight leaves in an hour!” “I’ll uber it over!”
Is the only time I’ve used Uber and felt like it as worth it and necessary, not for food. Just bite the bullet and eat crackers and ramen for the night or walk to a nearby place
2 pizzas from lieferando in my country cost 30€
They too are a private Courier.
Actually no. Lieferando just offers digital menus and orders. The drivers themselves are employed by the restaurants. And the Lieferando fees are hidden (paid by the restaurants).
Luckily my favourite pizza place now has their own website that works better than Lieferando’s and all the proceeds go to them.
And the Lieferando fees are hidden (paid by the restaurants).
Restaurants pay DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc. too - it costs them 30% of the order price. So the restaurant pays a lot, and the customer also pays a lot. I don’t understand how people are comfortable with this business model.
If you can make multiple deliveries each trip then home delivery could be more efficient, but it’s hard to see how it could be cheaper than picking the meal up yourself.
They do make multiple deliveries per trip…
Occasionally. I regularly see uber eats drivers picking up single orders from restaurants.
Where I am you’re almost never the only delivery.
I had a friend who did this for a living, he had two phones so he would run Uber Eats and Doordash at the same time in order to try and optimize, and even then he spent a lot of time just sitting around because these apps are extremely inefficient (and later they started cracking down on people trying to increase their pay by doing both, dunno if it’s still doable now).
It feels like a problem that needs to be solved by a centralised entity, but whoever that is will most likely monopolise the situation.
I think this problem will disappear once drones delivery is common. Flying twice as much food uses about 2.5x more energy.
When I delivered pizza and BBQ(different places) that’s what we did. Load up 2-4 orders and delivery range was like 15 miles. The pizza place was always busy but the BBQ only did delivery during lunch and dinner. Now you can order a coffee from Pete’s 20 miles away at 7am. Some things don’t make sense to deliver and no one wins.
Does this pizza place not have their own drivers? If they do you’re already paying at least 30% more because of the DoorDash surcharge. Also, judging by the dashers who pick up from where I work, there’s a 60% chance they don’t have an insulated bag and you’re getting cold food.
Your driver would have been paid a total of
$6.50$5.00 on that order.Thank you for canceling.
Part of that fee is the “Seattle drivers fee”, which is supposed to go to the drivers, but they’ve been very shady about that, and the tipping algorithm was not adjusted at all when they rolled it out. They were also really shitty at the time blaming greedy drivers and the mean old city for forcing them to pay their drivers… and that’s when I stopped using them for good.
I don’t know your personal situation, but people need to learn to cook. Even a meal kit with 3 meals six plates all delivered to your door can cost less than that one order for two pizzas. Your local grocery has pre made pizza dough, sauce, and cheese, and can be cooked in less time than it takes to wait for delivery.
Hahaha. Just to really make my point: Safeway was offering premade medium sized pizzas for $4. You’re getting scammed.
Don’t judge ppl for not cooking. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes more than the attention span of a squirrel. A lot of people just can’t any more. Depressed people, old people, exhausted people, busy people. Some flats don’t even come with kitchens and some people are forced to move somewhere. It also, doesn’t stop with the cooking, you have to clean up afterwards as well. Cooking can be fun, but it can also be chore.
What? Of course I can cook. It’s Friday and I didn’t feel like it. You’ve never said “Oh man, work was hell, I’m just going to order something and relax tonight”?
I meal prep for every day and cook every day. You don’t need to act superior to people because they wanted to order a pizza.
You complain, but still pay for it. That only encourages the gouging. The best way to make it stop is not patronizing food delivery services. Use any means necessary. If your tired, I totally get it, but paying them means you condone the behavior of price gouging and hidden fees.
I’m literally headed to the store now to make pizza. If you were local, I’d bring you a slice.
I… didn’t pay for it? I called the shop and went to pick it up. Saved 50 bucks on it. You’re making a lot of assumptions about me.
Did you even bother reading the text?
Usually I only use Doordash for finding something, then I order direct from the store. I just saw the sweet “buy one get one” deal and thought eh, fine I’m here. Right, that’s why I stopped using door dash.
😭
Are you crying here because you didn’t read the post and you regret your comments or are you still having a pop at OP?
I hope it’s the former as the latter makes you seem like a shitty person. Positive intent makes me believe it’s the former.
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OP’s situation aside, that doesn’t even fit your generalization here, many pizza places fired their delivery drivers and use these services without really informing you. I recently ordered from Pizza Hut and didn’t know my pizza was coming via these services until they text me that they were arriving. Naturally I only got one of the pizzas I ordered and the other was one that someone else ordered. Someone with terrible taste who thinks jalapeño and pineapple are appropriate ingredients for a pizza.
Learn to cook.
Do you just assume everybody that gets take out, goes for fast food, or eats at a restaurant can’t cook?
Does it not seem more appropriate that they just want to have a lazy day and not cook. Your comments here reek of privilege and superiority.
Try and be better my guy. Looking at how you’ve been received here should cause you to have a little introspection in how you conduct yourself. I say this from a place of constructive criticism and not having a go at you. We all make mistakes online and we should learn from them to be better and make this community a better place for everybody.
I mean, if you want pizza that’s even shittier than chain deliveries, sure, you can do that.
Let’s be real. A home oven and premade dough might be cheaper, but it ain’t good pizza.
You can get a pizza stone (or steel), or do a cast iron pizza and end up fine, that’s for sure. But if you’re using that premade dough, even Caesar’s is going to be as good. That’s not mentioning that the sauces available in jars aren’t all created equal at all, or that it’s a dice roll if the cheese is okay or not.
Even dominos and pizza hut are better than a cheap home made pie. You want a good home made pizza, you’re spending roughly the same, but now you have to learn how to hey it right. The learning curve isn’t horrible or anything, but it’s there.
Most people that want a pizza want something decent, or they’d just throw in a digiorno’s or whatever. Mind you, calling most chain pizza decent is a stretch of the term, but that’s another issue entirely since a solid pizzeria isn’t exactly a guarantee outside of cities
Just saying, this was made with premade dough in a residential oven. It was fantastic and cost about $7 total.
Even dominos
Hey let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. I’ll give you Pizza Hut, but fuck Dominoes and their nasty excuse for pizza.
Yeah, every time I think about getting Doordash, they sucker me in with promises of $1 delivery fees, etc. Then I take the time to find out what I want, put it in my cart, get excited, and…then I see the final price.
That’s when I close out of my browser and go preheat my oven so that I can put in a frozen pizza.
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So, you’re a homophobe? Transphobe?
I ask that of everyone who says they spend money at CFA.
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We created a rule, if you want to eat out, you have to be willing to get up and go get it. If you’re not willing to do that, you obviously don’t want it that badly and you can make something at home or do something else. It’s saved me probably thousands of dollars now. However DD is great at showing me what restaurants are around me, I just have to weed out the fake ones. Google has gotten worse and worse about showing me the small places around me.
To me, going and picking up food IS the lazy option. I refuse to be lazier than that. I mean, that’s not true. If delivery was free, I’d use it.
That’s a great tip for finding new restaurants! I get to waste the middleman’s resources, too! Win win.
It’s even better when you realize they have a ton of metrics, and they are you clicking around to only end up not buying anything. I like to add stuff to my cart, only to walk away so they see that I saw the price and then left
Stop using it. It’s that simple.
Gig economy work is horrible for the workers, and incredibly exploitative. The workers frequently make less than minimum wage.
I refuse to order from any restaurant that doesn’t do their own delivery. If enough other people do the same, these places will curl up and die very quickly.
I don’t disagree, but jobs are already hard to come by, pushing people out of the only jobs they can find is a rough solution
The jobs won’t disappear. They’ll just change. The need is obviously there.
Here in Colorado a bunch of drivers just formed a employee owned co-op, both to give the middle finger to Uber and Lyft, and so the drivers can actually earn a living. We need more of that.
what’s the coop called?
Here’s the first thing I found when I went looking. https://www.shareable.net/driving-change-the-story-of-the-drivers-cooperative-colorado/
That’s the one! I’m really rooting for them.
A fediverse app to empower coops and smaller taxi companies and allow them to reach users could actually be a pretty good idea and a great way to reduce Uber’s power
This is the way. This gig worker industry is in need of disruption. It’s ultimately a matchmaking service. There is no other broker than can charge 100% markup.
Professional job placement company, realtors, etc do more for a much smaller percentage.
well that sounds like unemployment insurance with more steps. rather than people buying stuff they don’t need so that it can be delivered to keep someone in a job, and paying the apps the fees, remove the middleman.
They said they don’t use it and only use it to browse the menu.
Yeah, doordash can gdiaf. Local burger joint only does delivery through doordash, but adds 20% on top of the base price to cover the fees doordash change them (fair enough), then doordash adds the delivery fee they charge me on top of that as well. They double dip on fees by changing both the restaurant and the customer, what should be a fairly affordable lunch when I don’t have time to make something or go out and get it myself would end up being stupid expensive
These apps will die slowly until the companies can switch to self driving electric cars.
Once they become common/cheap enough that a pizza place can afford one or two self driving cars doing delivery the prices on these things will absolutely crash.
For pizza, I wouldn’t be surprised if it went a step further and the pizza was made and cooked by a robot inside the vehicle while it drives around. Only needing to go restock and recharge every few hours.
Not needing a retail location or almost any staff would make the whole thing super cheap to operate.
In the meantime fuck all food delivery.
The money you’re paying DoorDash isn’t going to the drivers, so I don’t know how driverless cars will reduce the costs. Having driven for DoorDash off and on over the past couple years, they typically only pay $2 per delivery, plus whatever tip the customer gives. I’ve read they additionally charge the restaurants around a 30% commission on all orders, which is why the prices are so much higher than in the restaurant; the restaurants raise the prices so that they still get roughly the same money after the commission is deducted.
I’m not really sure where all that money goes with DoorDash. They clearly try to keep support costs as low as possible. I’m guessing they lose a lot to refunds, legitimate or not. But I still don’t understand how the prices can be so high yet they always seem tight on cash.
Its surely not the millions in management salary each month…
Driverless cars will eliminate Grubhub, DoorDash, etc, because it will be cheaper for most restaurants to have their own delivery vehicles again, and you’ll probably see co-op services for smaller places.
Restaurants delivering their own food is not a foreign concept - it’s how all food delivery was done in the ‘old days’. They will jump on the chance to eliminate these gig commissions.
Nah, cos the way the self driving thing will be structured will make it pretty much impossible to actually buy one - they’ll be crazy expensive to buy outright, but you can absolutely lease one - oh but if you are using it for commercial purposes it’s more expensive cos… insurance or something, oh and don’t forget the per-km fees, and the servicing fee, and the battery wear fee, and …
Self driving car companies benefit from more total units on the road compared to limiting service and charging more. It will only take one of the companies selling outright to customers for the entire industry to be forced to drop prices.
How does the self driving car deliver to an apartment on the 6th floor?
Either with their own smaller delivery robot, or buildings will get dedicated delivery robots inside that can receive packages and take them up to particular apartments.
I wished I could live in this fairy tale world where a driverless car won’t be vandalized/stripped for parts
Like you’d be paying 30 bucks to basically have an unsupervised car show up at your location that’s totally not gonna result in a lot of trouble and cost a shit ton
You say unsupervised, but they have as many cameras and sensors on them than your average military drone at this point. They can (and will) transmit this data live if they detect negative interactions.
It’s not like people don’t have unsupervised access to cars without people in them right now. People park and leave their cars alone all the time.
Gangs of criminals are hacking big companies all the time and stealing or extorting millions of dollars. If they can hack into Amazon or Target they can hack into Uber and steal fleets of self driving vehicles. Just turn off all the data logging and have them drive to a chop shop or even down to the local port and right into a shipping container.
You vastly overestimate hackers abilities.
Most security workers at companies overestimate hackers abilities. That’s why all these companies are hacked all the time and there are tons and tons of data breaches.
The thing very few people understand about hackers is that they can code and they share their hacks as tools with each other on the black market. This means you’re essentially up against the combined effort of all hackers on the black market. When one succeeds, they all succeed. When one piece of server software is hacked, all companies who use that software get hacked.
There’s a difference between grabbing data, and controlling physical systems.
Hackers are not regularly taking over power plants or shutting down manufacturing robots.
They are taking over Internet accounts though. They hack people’s social media profiles, Netflix accounts, Amazon accounts etc. They also take down websites via DDoS attacks.
Here’s the thing with fleets of self-driving rental cars: unlike power plants or manufacturing robots, these cars will be on the public Internet. They cannot be airgapped on a private LAN the way a fixed robot in a factory can.
So all it takes to control these things is to hack into the authentication system and steal the credentials for the master control account for the cars. Then they’ll be able to connect to the cara remotely and issue commands to control them, just as the company would for say, ordering them to return to base to recharge, get cleaned up, or be repaired.
That’s the vulnerability. And even if they put all the cars on a VPN it’ll still exist because hackers can and do steal VPN credentials just like any other credential.
By the way, there has been at least one high profile hack of manufacturing robots: the Stuxnet worm which targeted Iran’s nuclear program. Since a fleet of self-driving cars is going to have millions and millions of dollars in value (tens of thousands of cars on the road) it’s going to be an extremely high value target for criminal gangs. While their resources might not be as extreme as the probable Stuxnet creators, they will be very large (and might even gain state actor support from unfriendly countries).
Who’s gonna vandalize it when everybody biological is confined to their home for safety? Not like any of the interhome bots could ever escape their programming without the police bots disabling them immediately.
I don’t think we will get to a place with self driving cars.
We’re already in a place with self-driving cars. They are operating as taxis in a half dozen cities in North America already and Waymo is expanding to like 12 cities total in the next year.
It won’t happen overnight, but the aren’t science fiction at this point, it’s just refinements.
Perhaps there but the UK I can’t see it.
Your government passed a law last year to allow it starting in 2026
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/10/contents/enacted
Perhaps I should have been clearer.
I can’t see it taking off, anywhere really, but here particularly as our roads are very different to American roads so I don’t think they’ll have much success outside of maybe a few limited areas.
I also don’t think we will ever get to a point of self driving being very popular. As you would need to get humans to stop driving really as a mix wouldn’t be very safe.
People said the same thing about cars taking over for horses.
People said the same thing about computers.
People said the same thing about the internet.
People said the same thing about cell phones.
I’m not sure people said those things.
Seeing things like this make me happy that I
- live in a state that banned junk fees.
- live just far enough outside of a metro area that these services don’t deliver to me so I don’t have to worry about being tempted to order from them.
Hear hear for living too far away from DD to be tempted by it. I used to waste a lot of money on it back in like 2021/22, but I moved to a town whose only “fast food” is a burger grill that’s attached to the gas station and run by exactly one guy and if he’s on break when you show up then you can either wait until he’s done or leave and go to the grocery store.
Few questions:
How far away is the pizza place? Do you live in a remote area? What time of day is it? What are the driving conditions like (snow/rain/other hazards)?
You say you can just pick it up for a quarter of that price. Then go pick it up? Is there anything preventing you? Not saying this is reasonable on DoorDash’s end, but there’s a ton of information we’re missing here. So I don’t understand how people can jump to certain conclusions this quickly.
Unless they’re a hundred miles away, I don’t see how $30 in pizza goes up to $80 for delivery.
I’m missing something. If the two pizzas were 13, then the sticks + desert were 40? Then tax and service fee on top (40% lol)
Yeah I’m confused about this too.
When I went to the store, they honored the 2 for one and I walked out paying 30 dollars. Door dash said they honored the 2 for one, but their base price was 50. They also don’t show the itemized cost breakdown. Real sus.
You can tap on top where it says 4 items to see the itemized breakdown, right?
“Estimated taxes” what is that for bullshit? You can just calculate how much the tax should be.
I know it’s not how it works in the US, but if they advertise it for 13$ they should sell it for 13$ including tax.
“Estimated Taxes” is where they hide all the bullshit made up fees and imaginary taxes that are pure profit and increase profit margin, but if they listed it as “Customer Fuck-over Fee” people would obviously stop using it.
You can ask for an invoice. O wait companies in North America cannot make proper incoices for some weird fucking reason.
It should just all be included in the price (excluding shipping and the fee when paying with a creditcard or paypal instead of a bankcard) and people should make more trouble out of them not doing that.
Americans cant even agree that fascism=bad, what makes you think Americans can give enough of a fuck about something like hidden fees to get something done.
They lump it together. Estimated taxes AND fees. Usually the tax part is like 30% while the fee part is like 70%.a lot of hotel sites will do this for unpublished rates, and the tax part is $0.
They should show me the invoice, but North American companies generally fuck that up as well
I don’t understand how all of these delivery services are so popular when everyone is saying how high the cost of living is. People have money to blow on delivery fees?
Most of the people that I know that make decent money don’t use the service, but the people that work at restaurants or do gig work occasionally do… I don’t understand
Easy really. The shop has one parking space which is occupied by their delivery driver. The next nearest parking space is half a mile away through a dark alley and you have to pay, but it takes so long to pay that you get fined. The shop itself is freezing because the door doesn’t shut properly. It’s also a ten mile drive away, down wide fast roads, or at least roads that would be fast if they weren’t infested by ridiculously low average speed cameras which mean you have to crawl all the way there and back or risk getting fined again. Then when you get home you discover you’ve been fined for the last time you parked somewhere and overstayed by a whole nanosecond.
That’s how it is in the UK anyway. And politicians wonder why town centres are dying.
It is your opinion town centres are dying from not enough parking space?
This used to be the mainstream opinion back in the sixties, but nowadays basically any “revitalisation” programme will be removing asphalt, because small business health has been shown to be correlated with how well connected the area is to public transport, and how pleasant it is to loiter in.
FWIW my teen does. For him it’s a combination of things not available on campus and he’s always sent money as soon as he gets it. But he doesn’t have any expenses so …
…so bad parenting?
Just fools and their money being parted.
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Yes. Those people consider things like this part of the “cost of living”, not the luxury that it is.
On average, people have more of an issue overspending than they do underearning. That’s why even among people making six figures, 1 in 4 of them live “paycheck to paycheck”, which people assume to mean ‘barely make enough to make ends meet’, but what more commonly means ‘deliberately chooses not to save/spends every dollar earned’.
