alt Hacker NewsYeah, that seems utterly made up.
I live in an urbanish area, and if i don't set Priority Delivery then there's probably a 2 in 3 chance I'm stuck in a queue with "waiting on other delivery to complete".
About the only way to get my food while it's still warm enough to eat (because few of these drivers use heat bags) is to set priority delivery. And when I do, I can track it straight from store to my place. No 'waiting on other delivery' messages, not even blips of disconnectedness while the driver fulfills orders from other apps. Just straight to me.
This fee, I find, works better than tipping. Which is sad because in my imagination, I suspect the platform is keeping the fee rather than the driver. Incentives are completely messed up for gig deliveries.
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Both can be true - in periods of high contention the priority delivery works as you'd expect, but in periods of low contention (where orders are not bundled anyway) the priority delivery option is still there, still costs the same, but doesn't do anything.
If you care about your food being warm enough to eat, why not just pick it up yourself?
I got a glimpse of this "delivery economy" myself last week, so
Self pick-up was:
>2x faster (20min vs ~40min estimate, probably more in the end), could be better if I actually knew the area and picked a better parking spot
>1/3 cheaper (total dropped from 30$ to 20$. I'm not from the US, and make roughly 6$/hr, so the sum is more significant than it seems)
>food was probably generally more fresh, but I don't eat sushi much, so can't tell the difference
>also, food was probably less banged up, because I'm not on the clock and don't drive like a madman
some counterpoints:
> we were already driving home from somewhere, the place was the opposite way though
> we live in a dense city, but not too dense, so owning a car and driving it around is possible even on a not so large income, but everything is pretty close
Generally, my family never stopped doing things "the old way", we barely use any delivery services, taxi, and everything the gig economy is involved in. Likely saves us good amount of money in subtle ways. Also, specifically not giving money to those platfoms is a minor benifit in my book.
I get there are people who are disabled, busy (parents with small children, ...), and so on, but it seems to me that for most people the barrier is psychological, and is about task/mode switching more than actual time and effort.