Trying to find any hints of this elsewhere online as I’m inherently skeptical of posts such as this. This is what I have found, take it for what it is. Sorry for any formatting or spelling. It’s 1:15am and I’m scrolling HN rather than sleeping.

I don’t know why but I always just assumed priority delivery meant “faster”. It doesn’t.

> If you select the Priority Delivery option, a Priority Fee will be added on top of the delivery fee for your order to be dropped off first in case of a batched delivery.

So, I’m guessing, if you are in a batched delivery of priority orders you are paying for normal service. [0][1]

Looking at the DoorDash blog, they are constantly running experiments so none of this really shocks me.

> At the time of writing, we run about one thousand experiments per year, including 30 concurrently running switchback experiments, which make up to 200,000 QPS of bucket evaluations. [2]

Regarding the desperation score: algorithmic wage discrimination appears very well studied and verified. [3][4]

The delivery fees to pay for lobbying efforts is very well covered apparently.

> In an earnings call last month, DoorDash executives told investors that the number of commission caps more than doubled from August, when there were 32, to December, when there were 73. Still more have been added since then. Localities that imposed caps are small cities like Pacific Grove, California, and larger cities like Oakland; some are entire states, like Oregon and Washington. Prabir Adarkar, the company's chief financial officer, said the company made $36 million less in revenue during the last three months of 2020 because of the new limits.

> DoorDash executives have argued that they have no financial choice but to fight back by adding fees in jurisdictions where there are caps.

> In Oakland, according to the city's online lobbyist database, DoorDash now has a dedicated representative registered with the city for the first time. Other lobbyists for DoorDash are handling efforts for multiple cities. On March 15, Chad Horrell, a lobbyist for DoorDash, left nearly identical public comment voicemails for the city councils in Akron, Ohio, and Huntington Beach, California. [5]

> Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies who authored and advertised Proposition 22 spent a record $200 million on the ballot initiative to persuade Californians to vote it into law. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 general election, Uber and Lyft bombarded its riders and drivers with endless messaging through its apps and by saturating the television and digital ad space. [6]

The section on companies subsidizing pay looks to have been proven in court multiple times and led to millions in settlements.

> On Feb. 24, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release that between May 2017 and September 2019, an Office of the Attorney General (OAG) investigation found that the delivery platform “used customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of giving workers the full tips they rightfully earned.”

> Attorney General Karl A. Racine today announced a $2.54 million settlement with Instacart, an online delivery company, resolving a lawsuit alleging that the company misled DC consumers, used tips left for workers to boost the company’s bottom line, and failed to pay required sales taxes. [8]

[0] https://help.uber.com/ubereats/restaurants/article/how-the-d...

[1] https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/angry-uber-eats-customers...

[2] https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/the-4-principles-doordash...

[3] https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wag...

[4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithm...

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262088

[7] https://www.today.com/food/news/doordash-settlement-payout-r...

[8] https://oag.dc.gov/release/ag-racine-announces-instacart-mus...