services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25. then delivery worker made $5 on that order. + the delivery worker expects a tip.
which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
malfist 7 minutes ago [-]
> literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more
Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.
It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?
Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?
I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.
ehe78qhe 21 minutes ago [-]
I thought they were built on "time is money". If you make the equivalent of $70 an hour, do you care about spending $15 for someone to bring you lunch and save you 15-30 minutes of your workday?
sokoloff 12 minutes ago [-]
I don’t think paying someone to perform a service for you makes you a sucker.
I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
wat10000 2 minutes ago [-]
It’s not like they hide anything about what they’re offering. They advertise service X for price Y and that’s what they deliver. Seems fine. If you don’t think Y is worth it for X then don’t use it.
Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.
handfuloflight 11 minutes ago [-]
This just translates to "anyone paying a margin on anything anywhere is a sucker."
You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.
askafriend 8 minutes ago [-]
My time is more expensive than the $15 extra I pay for the food...who's the sucker.
I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.
tstrimple 5 minutes ago [-]
Doordash and grubhub are insane for single food purchases. But the fees are barely noticed when feeding my family of 5. We use it every other week or so just because of how chaotic school activity schedules can be. When we order sushi/chinese for the kids the bill before any delivery services is around $200 for enough food for dinner and another meal with leftovers. The service charge is like $7 and I make sure the driver gets at least $10 regardless of the distance. Cheaper than if we ate in the restaurant and were expected to give a 15-20% tip.
Aboutplants 7 minutes ago [-]
Eh, the difference is that DoorDash is a logistics company performing a service that restaurants do not like running (delivery). It’s not a middleman providing no value
Aunche 35 minutes ago [-]
Even though the press likes to give Mamdani all the credit for these types of things, this started with a law passed under DeBlasio, and most of the investigation was done under Adams.
xrd 26 minutes ago [-]
Mamdani deserves credit for taking this all the way.
Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."
I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.
giancarlostoro 21 minutes ago [-]
> taking this all the way.
How did you arrive to this conclusion?
tclancy 20 minutes ago [-]
>most of the investigation was done under Adams.
Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.
time4tea 43 minutes ago [-]
What does "this is not a pay wall" mean - if I have to give personal information over, that is a price.
Didn't read - too expensive.
pluc 26 minutes ago [-]
Your identity isn't considered of value to you, you can't monetize it. We can, but since it has no value to you, give it to us for free.
Disabling javascript let me read the whole article without any account nonsense.
andrewflnr 7 minutes ago [-]
Firefox reader mode also did it.
hapax_legomena 18 minutes ago [-]
I just reload the page and hit 'esc' a bunch of times right after it loads but before the paywall pops up. Works on 3/4 of these soft paywalled sites.
rsingel 32 minutes ago [-]
Journalism is labor
jgalt212 15 minutes ago [-]
Information wants to be free. But other than AI slop (where the tokens have become too cheap to meter), information costs money to produce. Pay with you info or your money. It's amazing how many people just cannot come to grips with that concept.
thehamkercat 18 minutes ago [-]
Works with any random email, kinda fine tbh
marricks 38 minutes ago [-]
I mean, test@example.com worked so info doesn't have to be that personal...
cgio 38 minutes ago [-]
I am so trained now, that I didn’t even read what they were asking for. Just closed the tab and came here to see if there was anything of value. Too expensive to even read their wall.
qurren 27 minutes ago [-]
Yep this is what I did as well. I also just close tabs if it ever pops up a "sign up for our newsletter" thing.
mkagenius 13 minutes ago [-]
> Founders: Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore (Stanford students at the time)
Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.
ok_dad 8 minutes ago [-]
Too bad having their names associated with this immoral politicking won’t cause them problems. An employee stealing a few hundred bucks would get a felony and probably never work a good job again. Founders stealing hundreds of millions from workers get to say whoopsie.
lern_too_spel 2 minutes ago [-]
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760317/how-to-rule-... is eye opening. When many of us were in college, there was still some idealism about using technology to make the world a better place. Maybe that still exists at some universities, but Sand Hill Road wiped that out of Stanford.
Seems like they spent more on campaigning than they did on the extra pay and fines here though. Who's making these financial calculations?
bootlooped 37 minutes ago [-]
They just agreed to a $131 million settlement. The article says this is a hundred times what they spent to prevent Mamdani from getting elected.
bee_rider 30 minutes ago [-]
Presumably somebody who thinks the Mamdani’s policies will be popular and spread to other jurisdictions. After all, why campaign against an idea that you think will fail? It’d exist as a prominent warning flag for the next group that considers it.
sharkjacobs 38 minutes ago [-]
If they were honest about it and said something like "we believe our actions were fair and legal and disagree with this decision" it would at least be ideologically consistent.
> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
This is villain shit.
InsideOutSanta 1 minutes ago [-]
"Simply put, we screwed up. We should have given Cuomo two million so we can keep underpaying Dashers."
toomuchtodo 52 minutes ago [-]
More evidence Big Tech valuations are driven primarily by worker exploitation. Keep 'em coming.
ausbah 42 minutes ago [-]
the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VC’d their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasn’t been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it
shadowgovt 31 minutes ago [-]
And they mostly keep getting away with it because digital makes things preposterously more convenient.
I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.
Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.
krispyfi 6 minutes ago [-]
It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?
usaar333 8 minutes ago [-]
Since when did doordash count as big tech?
toomuchtodo 6 minutes ago [-]
They're not FAANG or MANGA, but they're certainly at the top of https://www.ycombinator.com/companies with 8600 employees and an $82B market cap (as of this comment, ticker DASH). Is "Big Tech" reserved only for the "FAANG MANGA"? If so, my apologies.
throwaway27448 41 minutes ago [-]
Of course! that's always what "disruption" referred to.
Ekaros 49 minutes ago [-]
It is not like they aren't exploiting businesses either... Looking at Amazon(retail) and almost all SaaS services...
toomuchtodo 45 minutes ago [-]
You eat an elephant one bite at a time. This bite was good, lots more bites to go.
I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before.
> “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
"Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."
SoftTalker 44 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
ahoy 39 minutes ago [-]
The fact that you think NYC doordash delivery workers are driving is a good indication that you're out of your depth on this topic.
jmull 37 minutes ago [-]
> nobody is forced to work for DoorDash
It doesn’t matter who you work for, they still can’t underpay you or pay you late.
schnevets 26 minutes ago [-]
"Private chauffeur for your burrito" is proving to be too costly. Time for New Yorkers to rise up and side with the BurritoBus™
Place your order 6 hours in advance and our hyperadvanced algorithm will place your burrito on a hyperefficient route alongside other orders within your neighborhood. Estimated arrival times remain hyperaccurate (15 minute window) and your neighborhood FoodBusser is paid an hourly wage with hyperbenefits.
39 minutes ago [-]
bob778 42 minutes ago [-]
They have to do exactly this in Australia and a burger is still $20-22 all up.
throwaway27448 38 minutes ago [-]
The treatlerites strike again. All hail the burger reich!
tredre3 37 minutes ago [-]
> your burger and fries would probably cost $40 delivered, making the whole business model infeasible
Pizza places, chinese food places, many diners, they've all been making deliveries work for decades without inflating the prices to absurd levels. It's almost as if it can be done when you don't have to pay the middle man who has a billion dollar of venture debts.
It's so wild to see you, someone who seems to be older than gen z, so unaware that the food delivery model existed before delivery apps, and was highly successful without charging delivery charge + service fee + tip + 30% of the food price.
Forgeties79 41 minutes ago [-]
> your burger and fries would probably cost $40 delivered, making the whole business model infeasible.
Tough luck? Businesses aren’t entitled to exist. If it’s a bad model it’s a bad model. We can’t just throw our hands up and ignore bad business practices for that reason. It’s not our job to protect DoorDash’s unsustainable business model that only works if they behave particularly unethically. That is squarely their issue
SoftTalker 7 minutes ago [-]
You conveniently trimmed what I wrote to argue against a point I didn't make.
toomuchtodo 43 minutes ago [-]
I'm unwilling to argue with "It is a free choice to be exploited." I understand some will argue for this, and will hold the mental model, I am simply unwilling to entertain it from a time and effort perspective.
If the business cannot exist without exploitation, the business should not exist. I also understand this is an argument at the political process level at its core. Not much progress to be made in the argument over the US being an economic exploitation engine. Some are for, some are against. We choose, through policy, whether someone must make the choice to be exploited because we give them no other choice. We can make better choices, I argue. "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members."
SoftTalker 39 minutes ago [-]
I recognize that there is a power imbalance in play, but I would rather see activism towards educating would-be DoorDashers that the numbers don't work in their favor, rather than regulating DoorDash out of existence.
And in some cases, if you just need some money to pay a bill and you have a few hours available, maybe doing a few DoorDash deliveries closes that gap for you, even if it's not a good long term job. But, that can also work as a trap if you're not very deliberate about it.
38 minutes ago [-]
dust42 58 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
Terr_ 53 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand. What does Snowden stuff have to do with DoorDash's employment practices or an NY mayor? What is "interShiitake" supposed to reference?
only $1.4M? DD was not confident in their efforts to stop Mamdani. This is like a couple weeks of work from high priced political consultants in NYC.
probably_wrong 28 minutes ago [-]
The article disagrees:
> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race
exabrial 26 minutes ago [-]
I'm not so sure this is a victory lol
Rendered at 21:12:11 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.
It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?
Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?
I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.
I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).
Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.
You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.
I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.
Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."
I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.
How did you arrive to this conclusion?
Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.
Didn't read - too expensive.
Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.
(⌐_⌐)ノ Empathy
(•ᴗ•)つ Apathy
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SCKj7gwbYrc
> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
This is villain shit.
I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.
Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.
I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752
> “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
"Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."
It doesn’t matter who you work for, they still can’t underpay you or pay you late.
Place your order 6 hours in advance and our hyperadvanced algorithm will place your burrito on a hyperefficient route alongside other orders within your neighborhood. Estimated arrival times remain hyperaccurate (15 minute window) and your neighborhood FoodBusser is paid an hourly wage with hyperbenefits.
Pizza places, chinese food places, many diners, they've all been making deliveries work for decades without inflating the prices to absurd levels. It's almost as if it can be done when you don't have to pay the middle man who has a billion dollar of venture debts.
It's so wild to see you, someone who seems to be older than gen z, so unaware that the food delivery model existed before delivery apps, and was highly successful without charging delivery charge + service fee + tip + 30% of the food price.
Tough luck? Businesses aren’t entitled to exist. If it’s a bad model it’s a bad model. We can’t just throw our hands up and ignore bad business practices for that reason. It’s not our job to protect DoorDash’s unsustainable business model that only works if they behave particularly unethically. That is squarely their issue
If the business cannot exist without exploitation, the business should not exist. I also understand this is an argument at the political process level at its core. Not much progress to be made in the argument over the US being an economic exploitation engine. Some are for, some are against. We choose, through policy, whether someone must make the choice to be exploited because we give them no other choice. We can make better choices, I argue. "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members."
And in some cases, if you just need some money to pay a bill and you have a few hours available, maybe doing a few DoorDash deliveries closes that gap for you, even if it's not a good long term job. But, that can also work as a trap if you're not very deliberate about it.
> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race