My initial take to this news was “what about anti trust?!” But I was surprised to learn that DD is essentially non existent in grocery delivery and instacart’s non grocery deliveries are powered by Uber Eats. For two massive brands they really don’t offer the same product.(edit: not effectively, at least) If anything maybe this helps Instacart/DD compete in grocery with the real giants in Walmart and Amazon. I wouldn’t be mad to see DOJ block this but I was just surprised to learn about the landscape of grocery delivery.
For context Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart each have about a quarter of the online grocery delivery market with smaller outfits like Kroger and Albertsons eating up the remaining quarter. If you believe this data, that is.
https://talkbusiness.net/2025/04/online-grocery-sales-rise-2...
I've had failed or missing deliveries from an Albertson's owned grocery chain and when speaking to the manager of the department, they just subcontract the delivery to DD and UberEats, much like McDonald's does. It's not their own employees doing deliveries.
A few Albertsons stores do their own deliveries, but it's increasingly rare. I used to love my Abertsons deliveries. Always had the same guy (who was super friendly), and it came in a refrigerated truc, so cold products stayed cold.
I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.
Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.
Amazon/Whole Foods in our area seems consistently unable to pack bananas in a way that doesn't result in bruising. I'm beginning to think they train them to put heavy cans on top of bananas for some reason.
When shopping from kroger you can pay extra to get 2-3hr delivery from insta cart. If not your order gets routed through a more efficient planned route that hits multiple houses
It's believable to me. I exclusively use Walmart and Amazon for groceries now. The nearest grocery store is 10+ minute drive away and with gas prices, my time, etc. I'd rather just buy online and wait for someone to deliver to my door. It's much quicker than going around the store looking for items too.
It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.
Have you been careful about making sure that the prices you're charged when shopping online are the same as what's on the price tag on the shelves? Online shopping makes it extremely easy for companies to overcharge you based on what they think you're willing/able to pay and provides them with valuable data they can use to decide when/how much to raise their prices.
You can also run into problems where employees will select for lower quality produce, and about to expire foods that in-store shoppers will commonly pass over. It's nice that it means less food gets thrown away, but can also mean you can end up wasting your money buying food you can't or don't want to eat.
I've worked these 1099 grocery delivery gigs and you get paid around minimum wage to lug these very heavy orders of water and juice up stairs, all while adding miles to your own vehicle and bearing the full risk of injury because you're an independent contractor. I hope you tip them well at least.
I wish no one would tip them. Then they'd quit working for minimum wage, then the costs would go up, then I could see the actual cost of the service and make a decision to use it or not.
a tip for an unusual order/circumstance would be fine. Say if you ordered a 50lb bag of cat food, and live on the Nth floor, and the elevators are not working.
I see no reason to think that was the case. They'll work for whatever rate companies pay them. There are many workers in minimum wage jobs who don't get tips at all. I agree that tipping is a bad practice and that it pushes labor costs onto customers. It will take regulation for companies to stop and tipping culture to change. I'm doing my part to try and keep the problem from getting worse by refusing to tip for almost anything except deliveries and being actually waited on. No matter how much companies beg for tips for basic retail purchases and counter service I don't feel at all bad about turning them down.
DoorDash, at least for a while for me, was significantly cheaper than Instacart for grocery delivery, probably because they were trying to fight their way into the grocery delivery market. Now that they're just going to buy Instacart, this can only mean higher prices to me since they need to pay for their acquisition and they no longer need to compete on price. Great!
DoorDash has a ton of grocery delivery, it's the only one i use for that now because instacart has a payments bug. Very weird that the only two big competitors in this space in North America can just merge like this
You're describing what economists call multihoming. The antitrust question gp asks - which I think is relevant - is whether the combined entity would have excessive market power in the relevant labor market.
Might just speak to the competitive advantage of vertical integration. I.E “we make so much off the selling the product we don’t care if the sale originates on or off platform?” It is surprising though that they wouldn’t force users onto their service. They certainly have the power to
They tried that with WalmartPay. After about a decade, they gave up[1].
Consumers have a lot of agency. A lot of people get paid access to one of the other platforms by virtue of tie-ins with their mobile carrier, or bank, or whatever. There's low incentive to pay again to use Walmart's delivery service, which will not also bring delicious Thai food for lunch.
They're very multi-modal. Walmart will send deliveries out via Instacart, their own in-house drivers (1 year+ employees internally), Spark Delivery, and even Roadie ("a UPS Company"), though Roadie jobs are for oversize things that need a pickup truck or a van like TVs from what I've seen as a Roadie driver.
I think a lot of businesses have adopted this. I've seen Papa John's orders on Roadie, but I'm sure they also use Uber Eats or DoorDash and their own in-house drivers.
Seems like it should be “DoorDash (YC S13) to Acquire Instacart (YC S12)”, if only to emphasize that this is by far the largest merger of YC companies.
> DoorDash to Acquire Instacart to Help Local Stores Win
> to Help Local Stores Win
Any local store will tell you DD is a necessary evil they put up with but strongly dislike overall. From the % of sales they take to the incredibly rude delivery drivers, DD is not well liked.
On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.
I worked at a local grocery store while unemployed, and I actually PREFERRED the Doordash/Instacart customers.
Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude. It was a very clear and direct communication. A simple scan, and boom, nothing further needed, I could just scan their items. Thr QR code scan handled payment and everything. They almost always helped with doing thier own bagging: Time is money, after all.
> Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude.
I want to be clear, the ability to speak English is not what I took issue with. That doesn't bother me and I'm fine with just showing the phone screen, no conversation. The issue I had was cutting the line and essentially demanding they be helped immediately. Wait in line like everyone else. This is a small food stall in a food hall with often just 1 person working the front. If they are actively helping another customer and have a line, I find it unacceptable to think you can cut to the front and immediately demand attention. What message does that send to the customers in line? "You're less important than delivery orders", and I can tell you that isn't the case due to the large chunk that DD takes.
My family member has even considered shutting down DD orders temporarily if/when the drivers act this way and publishing on social media about it. According to them, the loss in sales (and overall profit, which is minor on DD orders) wouldn't matter compared to the publicity/engagement (I don't know, that's not my world).
Ah, I see. That does suck. There was no line-cutting, that I saw, where I was. But at a grocery store you get kinda forced between belts and carts, so line-cutting would be quite a challenge.
The supermarket where I shop has a specific checkout station for delivery drivers. I have never seen one in a normal checkout line (not that it might be very obvious, especially if they were shopping not just picking up an order).
What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.
> What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.
It's a finder's fee, a very old and ordinary concept in business. The more sales you can bring to a company (or could divert to competitors), the more skin in the game you have. That's not to say I think these companies aren't in some ways anticompetitive to the detriment of merchants and DIY shoppers.
The stores often charge higher prices on app for the same items. If there's a sale on items, you won't likely get them on the app. You can say it's a shakedown but you can always refuse DoorDash business and just operate like every other place that doesn't use it. It's not end of the world.
Sure, you could operate without DD. You can also operate without advertising, but it makes it a lot harder to reach customers.
Elsewhere in this post a store owner talks about how DD is a necessary evil. How they have convinced a big chunk of customers to only use DD to order food, and you will lose out if you aren't on the platform.
It's a prisoners dilemma. The total market share remains the same, but if only one grocery store was on DD they'd be at an advantage over those who don't
The supermarket I worked at had a split system. Our internal delivery people had their own checkout area, but it wasn't open 24/7. Doordash and the like had to go through the regular lines regardless.
That kind of thinking is why people call them vulture capitalists. It’s only true until it’s not. if your supplier is treating you like a hostage, you’re probably not very loyal.
Yeah mixed blessing at best. Increased volume, but not every 30-table restaurant is set up to do much more; kitchens are sized to expected in-person dining.
And all the stuff you mention.
The one restaurant owner I know who’s happy with DD set up an entirely separate kitchen in an industrial park. But to get to the DD revenue necessary to justify that investment, he had a couple of years of DD hell in his main restaurant.
That sounds like a scary investment to make on behalf of what's effectively a single customer. Without some kind of contractual commitment that locks in volume and price, they would really have you over a barrel.
I hate industrial/ghost kitchens so much. Accidentally ordered from one with friends and it was so off-putting.
Could see the kitchen areas through a window and they weren't necessarily dirty, but looked sketchy for some reason. Few people, robots delivering orders, one set of cooks making the food. Just dystopian.
We might as well just build ready to eat food factories that pipe the slop directly into your house. We got rid of the "inconvenience" of going out to eat and enjoying a restaurant. Why not get rid of the pesky delivery middle-man too?
Look up commissary kitchens. A ton of food is made that way, and I don’t see it as being all that different.
And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).
Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?
A restaurant with a physical presence with dine in service has a reputation to maintain, a ‘cloud kitchen’ food seller does not have the same reputation to worry about.
Every restaurant and ghost kitchen has a reputation to uphold. They all still have customers, and those customers still chat with other people and leave reviews just like it's still 2010.
It can be easier to rebrand a ghost kitchen than to rejigger a restaurant to do other things, though. For instance: The decor doesn't even exist, much less match a certain theme.
A ghost kitchen can also do many things at once that would not traditionally fit together in a single restaurant.
I think that might be part of what some find off-putting, but there's no conceptual reason why the same location can't make awesome New Haven wood-fired pizzas, Texas smoked beef ribs, and Philly cheesesteak sandwiches on the same day. It can work as long as the volume supports each of them well-enough that they can retain workers who are able to master these things well-enough to keep a good reputation going.
It's just a building with a kitchen, and that kitchen does not have a size limit. It can do many styles of cooking at once.
And when compared to having several different sit-down restaurants to operate, management can be more-centralized while also keeping them closer to the work. This can improve quality and reduce costs.
(That doesn't make me a fan of the idea. I'd rather go to a restaurant and sit down than have anything delivered, aside from things that travel well. Pizza, BBQ, and cold subs can travel extremely well, for instance, while french fries and burgers usually turn into sadness in minutes. But other people want whatever they want and that's fine too.)
I went to a restaurant for a nice meal with my family. We ordered and waited for our food forever, as a steady stream of delivery bags went out the door. It was an hour before our first appetizer came out. It took us a while to figure it out, but there's no doubt the restaurant was incentivized to prioritize delivery orders over customers sitting in front of them.
> On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.
That's exactly what it's like in NYC. They just walk up with their huge backpacks straight to the front skipping everyone, turn around bumping people, show their phone, then stand RIGHT in the front as-if no one else exists. It's awful.
I'd love to contribute to a no-delivery store. Pickup or dine-in only.
Edit: Might have to re-think Pickup because that would just become a loophole for delivery. Maybe orders have to be placed in-store for to go.
They are being dispatched to the restaurant to pick up an order which was already placed, and which their system is telling them is ready (whether this is correct or not). They also make less than minimum wage in most markets, and their wage is tied to their efficiency.
I don't understand why you think they should wait in line in restaurants where people order at the counter, to pick up their order which was placed online. And if you want to see this, you should be supporting legislation makes them proper employees who get a proper wage based on their time working.
Dispatched? Don’t drivers pick their jobs? They choose to go to the restaurant with the line.
Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
I don’t get why we’re talking legislation; it’s basic courtesy.
If I said “hey, here’s $5 if you go cut the line at that restaurant,” does that make it right?
You are given an order, which you can decline. If you decline more than a handful, you get deprioritized; in practice this means that you tap accept on every order as it comes up. At best you can sometimes shift the balance a bit by where you wait between orders, but during busy times (which is also when restaurants have long lines), your next order is coming up the moment you finish the last one.
It's also worth noting that most restaurants set the instructions for the pickup, which is usually along the lines of “go to the front of the line and provide the staff with the order number”.
> Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
The dine-in customers have not paid for or ordered their food, to do so they must wait in line.
The delivery driver is being handed a bag of food that is ready to go and paid for.
Many restaurants are already set up to accommodate online to-go orders. Chik-Fil-A has a separate drive-thru line for online orders, Chipotle lets people come up and get to-go orders that have been paid, same with Potbelly, it’s very common. It’s mildly annoying when you’re the one waiting in line but I don’t expect a delivery driver to wait in line to be handed a bag.
Drivers ostensibly pick their jobs, but if they reject too many jobs they are put on a time-out and can't take any jobs.
Regarding line cutting - it doesn't quite make sense that someone just picking up a bag that is already prepared should wait in the same line as people who are putting in orders for food. For an extreme example, a BBQ place near me in Brooklyn commonly has lines that are 45 minutes long, with people waiting to order. Should a person who called in an order wait in that line, or just go to the front and ask for their food?
Someone must use these services because they are everywhere in the UK and I find them so annoying for many reasons, not just the ones you mention above.
Lots of people cycling all in black on ebikes on pavements making it dangerous for people to walk around safely and causing chaos for drivers and other cyclists. Also generally supporting big business over small stores. Everyone moans about having individuals charged with these minor traffic offences but in my view just targeting companies like JustEat directly and having massive fines based on employee behaviour would be far more effective.
My new years resolution for 2026 was to quit using 3rd party delivery companies. It was annoying at first but I've kept it and life is better without them.
I've reignited my love for cooking. I'm getting more exercise since I make a point of walking to the grocery store 3-4 times a week. Also means I'm cooking fresh foods. Partner and I have both lost weight without doing anything else.
Speaking purely for myself, and there are other factors, but enormous money savings and I've lost a bunch of weight. I took the force majeur approach of moving outside of delivery app range.
Mind giving more detail into how it went? Did first-party delivery options tend to exist and work well, or did you just adjust your expectations re: convenience?
We decided to completely rethink our eating. Started meal planning around basic staples like pasta and rice. Going to the store 3-4 times a week for fresh meat and produce. I cook lunch in big batches twice a week and hot pack individual portions in glass containers. Partner and I have both lost weight and gained energy while spending far less on food.
I've been delivery-app-free for several years, with the lone exception being when I'm sick and contagious. Restaurant food with delivery basically costs double where I live, and grocery delivery has always been hit-or-miss on the quality of things like produce.
Freak what you feel but delivery apps are just not worth it for me personally outside of those necessary contexts and I don't mind the inconvenience of picking up my own food.
Am I on the wrong side of perspective? I imagine of these companies are at big risk in a turn down with low margin - competitive space. The model is a tough one to work
Merging reduces platform inefficiencies and drivers can work both situation.
I am actually amazed both companies are alive and making a profit.
DD plays big games with pay, sometimes hides tips, drives down base pay, and stacks orders with good pay and bad pay offers to try and pay drivers as little money as possible.
In a bad economy, there's less people ordering on DD (although higher income earners who aren't as effective by economic effects don't change habits), however, it drives MORE desperate drivers to the platform that accept the low pay orders since they no longer have an income. This drives down all wages for drivers, and costs, which in turn pads DD's margins.
We actually see this seasonally in the summer when more students and teachers join the platform over the break. There's a glut of drivers, you can't cherry pick higher paying orders and most stuff that's left to fight for is low paying, no tip orders. When school starts back up things return to normal.
This is why DD is trying to sign up as many drivers as possible. If you remove the scarcity of drivers, then every low paying gig will eventually get picked up, driving average pay down and you can ratchet down your base pay hoping customer tips make up the slack.
So when AI-induced layoffs happen, it's good for DD because there are more potential drivers available? Or at least that nets out the downside of a bunch of well-heeled potential customers losing their jobs?
You're probably absolutely right about this, and some people in the company, or who invest in it, have likely made this exact (cold hard) calculation.
I obviously going to be a balance but gig work has an incredibly low barrier to entry in that all you need is a car, insurance and a phone. The company sets the bar as to how many people are allowed into a "zone" to work via waitlists. They control the labor pool and thus control the payouts. The more people signed up among limited orders, the more people willing to lower their pay standards just to take any order and get paid.
None of the money saved by reducing inefficiencies will lower prices for consumers or increase pay for drivers. The goal is always to charge customers the most while giving them the least, while paying employees as little as they can get away with. In theory merging also kills off competition that might steal customers and workers by offering better prices/wages, although in practice companies share the same goal of screwing over both consumers and workers and are perfectly willing to resort to collusion in order to do that most efficiently.
> DoorDash said the median payment to be returned to workers amounts to around $48.
> City officials said about 700 workers are owed more than $10,000 each; more than 27,000 workers are owed more than $1,000; and more than 4,000 workers are owed more than $5,000.
DoorDash also spent (from what I can tell) (1+1.4+1.8) million dollars to campaign against Mamdani.
DoorDash also charges a $2 "regulatory response fee" on every order in NYC. It has a little "info" icon that basically says "look at what these overzealous regulations like absolute minimum of workers rights costs you!"
To be more specific, they added this fee in response to a NYC regulation mandating a minimum $22.13 for delivery workers. [0]
There is debate about whether or not Doordash needed to do this, if they are just being vindictive etc. But what we do know is that regulation came at a cost to NYC consumers. And it wasn't just Door Dash. Uber Eats added a $2 fee and Instacart added a $5.99 fee. New Yorkers can determine for themselves if they want to pay higher prices to ensure higher wages.
Culper Research released a report about a year ago indicating a large component of DoorDash labor is very likely undocumented workers (which is not meant to be derogatory towards these workers, but signal that DoorDash needs labor willing to take gig payments on offer to make the model work).
I don't think the platform economics are working post ZIRP ("zero interest rate policy") as wages rise and margins compress, would need more data to understand what forward curves look like.
I love the Mamdani DoorDash story because it demonstrates that government can work. When it doesn't, it's because it's made not to work or the people in charge have absolutely no interest in doing anything than feathering their own nests.
Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.
One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.
Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.
But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).
It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.
Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.
> No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations
This is how income tax was sold to the American public. When it originally started it really only did effect the top earners, but as the years rolled on and inflation happened it impacted more and more people. The reality is these tools that target only the 'wealthy', if they're successful are used to target everyone.
As the decades went by, people wanted the government to do more and more things and it needed more and more money to do it. Look how many more things the federal government does today versus when income tax was first introduced.
"Inflation brought everyone into the taxable income brackets" has very little to do with it. A significant portion of the population still doesn't make enough income to pay federal tax.
Taxes are unpopular. The government has no reason to "target everyone" because that's an easy way to get voted out.
Why do you think more IRS agents would suddenly start "targeting" people who take the standard deduction (87% of all tax returns [1]) and if they did, why do you think that would matter? This is a nonsense slippery slope.
No, the problem was that wealth become concentrated in capital, and we don't tax wealth. Wealth can be leveraged as power without a taxable event. This is the problem. Capital is capturing the largest piece of the pie as ever, and isn't taxed effectively.
This is also why California is voting on a wealth tax.
- He explained, "I don't pay hardly any payroll taxes. Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes." Driving the point home, he emphasized the disparity: "Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes."
- Buffett's effective tax rate was 17.4% at the time, largely due to his income coming from capital gains, which are taxed much lower than ordinary wages. Bosanek, like many middle-class Americans, was paying nearly 36% when payroll and income taxes were combined.
- According to a CBS News report, Buffett quickly clarified that he didn't blame Romney for following the law. "I don't blame Gov. Romney for paying the tax rate he paid," Buffett said. "I blame the U.S. Congress."
- The disparity didn't bother Buffett – it drove him to advocate for sweeping changes to the tax code. In an op-ed for The New York Times, he argued for what would become known as the "Buffett Rule," a proposal to implement a minimum 30% tax on incomes exceeding $1 million. President Obama backed the idea, but opposition in Congress kept it from moving forward.
Republicans and conservatives simply don’t believe in taxes, and will take any action to make it as hard as possible to collect them out of ideology. As you mentioned, Mamdani proves government can work [1], and I look forward to more reps like him as election cycles occur and the US electorate turns over.
The pendulum will swing back, and be the opportunity to prevent this from ever happening again.
(i like taxes, with them i buy civilization, although i prefer they pay for social services and improving quality of life of humans with said resources, not endless wars in the middle east and tax cuts for the wealthiest driven by old men, their ideology, and their egos [n=1, ymmv, my two cents])
I feel bad for anyone who joined post 2021... They raised at like $39b that year, then another qtr billion later that year at an undisclosed valuation. This is effectively a "down round" here and everyone who got shares at a $40b+ valuation is getting screwed. I interviewed with them many years ago and ultimately decided against it - their dilution was insane, looked to keep going, and the valuations were absurd at the time already given how few people were actually using it... I think they had maybe a $4b value at the time though. Honestly I think COVID was a huge boon to the company and finally gave them some much needed revenue/membership growth.
Take a salary boost and RSU in cash denominations that show evidence of re-evaluation on funding raises, (vs options at preferred price). Otherwise, yeah, it seems like dilution just hurts.
their comp structure is like all other companies, yearly grants with some band of pay with performance mixed in. some stacking, idk the specifics but recruiters will explain it.
I saw this show up in my newsreader and first thing that crossed my mind was the textbook example of eBay / PayPal acquiring everything, leaving us with probably the worst situation possible for auctions and payments.
I was at Snowflake supporting Instacart as main technical account architect and saw them polish things into place to get to a decent-sounding S-1 and then to go public. It sure was an interesting experience seeing battles between some people just not giving any care to costs and others trying to make money from these little itty bitty consumer transactions. Epic political battles, I tell you.
Could we have more discussion of our current legal/business environment, specifically, the economic opportunities it affords/constrains?
If this merger is approved via consumer welfare standard, should it be contingent upon some constraints? For example, should DoorDash be restricted from participating in the market it coordinates? If it’s a near monopoly in some regions, how will price be controlled without market pressure?
Historically, antitrust action also considers economic opportunity: Bell/AT&T licensed Unix source code for a nominal fee, largely because the 1956 consent decree restricted Bell/AT&T from selling products outside telecommunications.
The good news is the US has seen similar economic consolidation in the past, and passed laws to rebalance the economy accordingly.
The bad news is the US has developed a deeply entrenched culture of non-enforcement of laws rich people do not like. Unfortunately, until the culture changes, market pressure is the only avenue for relief.
From a marketshare perspective, it meets test of a monopoly in many localities. There is a "network effect" moat: the app is a storefront, payment gateway, and delivery network. The merger eliminates platform contention, giving customers perhaps greater choice of retailer but foreclosing the next largest platform alternative.
Their platform scopes and coordinates a market. They even recognize this in their announcement: "DoorDash and Instacart believe that communities benefit when Main Street competes"
The "consumer welfare standard" and related contestability doctrine is often used to challenge anti-trust action. However, requiring consumer harm neglects the loss of economic opportunity for providers (eg stores and gig workers).
If contestabilty, not marketshare, is the appropriate test of economic power, then laws may be needed to increase contestability, such as "data portability" rules for store owners so they don't have to key-in product description, availability, and pricing multiple times.
In your example of a new delivery platform entrant who bootstraps using its direct competitor, what legal framework protects that startup? This seems another contestability consideration.
You can also do adversarial interop. Whenever a restaurant signs up, go to them on doordash and have your intern key in all their data.
Heck, they don't even have to sign up. Just copy their listing from Doordash and when someone orders, place an order on Doordash if you can't fulfil it yourself. You'll probably need several phones to scale this, or you could make a doordash account per customer.
Once you have some drivers yourself, go around restaurants in your area and copy down their menus. Have drivers go and make takeaway orders.
Doordash undoubtedly used all these tactics. This is just how business works. Obviously doordash didn't order off doordash but they surely integrated restaurant ordering from places that already had their own delivery.
If you have VC funding, subsidize part of what doordash is charging so your prices are lower. IIRC Google did this once to the point where a pizza restaurant repeatedly ordered their own pizzas and made a profit, making front-page HN - don't go that crazy.
Hey - dumb question that is probably a derail: Is there a practical reason in the US to use Instacart over one of the Amazon services? It seems like they are fighting an uphill battle - Amazon has its own grocery warehouses (Prime food), and owns Whole foods. I haven't cross-shopped recently, but am having a hard time imagining them competing on price with either of those services. I suppose the obvious reason is you aren't limited to those two stores, so if you want specialty items, nice baked goods etc you would use Instacart?
They do compete on price. Amazon charges for Prime, charges extra for delivery, and Whole Foods is generally among the most expensive grocery stores. Instacart offers a ton of cheap alternatives.
> Do you find it, total price charged to card, to be competitive?
Yes. Instacart has low cost retailers like Walmart and Aldi in many areas, and their prices are generally better than Amazon groceries. Now Walmart does also have their own service, so technically you can do that, but then you're limited to just them.
During Covid, I used DoorDash to get a pizza delivered. The prices were so inflated. They wanted $70 for a large pizza from Round Table. When, much to my admitted stupidity, I went ahead and ordered, the pizza arrived cold. Then, I felt I needed to tip the driver. The whole thing felt like a ripoff. Incredibly expensive and low value. I have not used them or any food delivery service since.
In some areas it's not a horrible deal. I'm in downtown Montreal, several hundred delivery options within 5km, so there's pretty much always a decent deal on something I'm hungry for. Of course, I'm close enough to walk to plenty of these places anyway, but it's quite nice when I'm sick or extremely busy.
Am I crazy or was pizza delivery free (or very cheap) when i was a child in comparison? I'd pay $5 to deliver most things but the percentage model makes no sense
Since the reaction here seems to be universally negative, I’m curious what people see as the benefit of having several gig worker delivery platforms.
As a thought experiment, we currently have a duopoly for ride share. Would we be better off if Uber were broken up into two platforms?
Obviously having one platform would be bad, since there would be no price competition, but what’s the optimal number? Surely, too many platforms would be bad, as the concentration of delivery workers would be terrible on each app, making the whole system inefficient (setting aside whether one things the system should exist at all).
From the driver perspective, it permits some redunduncy in case of issues with the company. The support you get as a driver for dd or ic is more or less the same as you get with any internet company: non-existant for anything that isn't routine or touches on allegations of fraud or misconduct.
DD's new metric no longer even lets you dispute reports that an order wasn't delivered, with the obvious issues that come from that: having accounts with other apps in good standing is necessary to maintain your income if and when something stupid happens.
Man, what a sad end for Instacart. The leadership team that took over in 2021 absolutely squandered the amazing machine the founders had built, filling the top spots with cronies and sycophants, none of whom had very much interest in the actual core offering of Delivering Groceries. They brought Facebook-lite management and drove out the actual product and business acumen.
By the time the CEO bailed to OpenAI, the damage was done - billions of dollars of opportunity, totally wasted. She left an organization gripped with paralysis, apparently too broken to fix and remain independent.
One thing I don't understand is how the rise of food delivery has gone up so much and is terrible for everyone.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% markup)
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
Yeah I’ve been doing DoorDash deliveries in SF for close to two years now it’s pretty clear to me that these companies having an adversarial relationship with their drivers is very much so not working. They have an incentive to pay the drivers as little as possible, but the drivers congregate around the most busy spots and so… they talk. Little cabals of people working together form to figure out how to game the system as much as possible, then the platforms adjust strategies to close those holes. Additionally the platforms use every dark pattern and psychological trick in the book to get you to work for less. People quit in response. Theirs no stable group of people doing this work. It shows up in the quality of what the platforms can provide.
If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.
For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.
Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.
The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.
For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.
Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.
Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)
Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)
Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)
That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.
They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.
If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.
Thanks for the breakdown. I guess the bigger question is why? Don't they want profit? Or are they optimizing for something else like expenses and enterprise value (size of spend)
> Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
only the latter is true. the former is true only for a subset of restaurants.
While your old pizza place probably serves the same amount of pizzas as before, for other restaurants, not specialized in delivery, the number of meals they sell has exploded.
so restaurant make less money per meal, put they make more meals.
also while customers pay more, you could see it as the price of convenience and choice.
Seems like the difference is millions of lines of code and thousands of servers now, vs none of either back then (unless you count some erlang ATT switching code for the phone call you make to the pizza shop).
Making a phone call, then paying with cash, is just crazy efficient. What exactly have we even gained?
I think the original business model included giving restaurants a fax machine and just faxing over the order. There is a lot of efficiencies with using an app and not having your guys tied up taking phone orders. Loop in credit card processing as well. Should have stopped there.
Are we really asking this question in the year of our Late Stage Capitalism lord 2026? Are we confused about the American Oligarchy working with private equity to dash all the labor gains of the mid-20th century?
It's going to billionaire's Yacht & Bunker funds. The gig economy is about inserting tech into the middle of a functioning system to extract wealth for 4-5 dudes' benefit.
Who is rich? The platforms aren't making a lot of money, they've been losing money for a very long time. The valuations were pumped by VC money and maybe the founders are paper rich.
Stop hand waving about capitalism. Give me a real answer.
The companies are losing money so the C-suite are doing what most small business owners are doing and not drawing a paycheck so they can make payroll, right?
...right?
Donald Trump is worth billions of dollars despite dozens of his projects "losing money"/going bankrupt. I will stop "waving about capitalism" when it stops doing the same fucking thing while incredulous passersby go "surely it must be something else causing the problem".
The DoorDash subreddit is an interesting read. Lately, users are reporting being sent to retail stores to work for 30 minute stints. One anecdote: a person described taking a $25 gig that amounted to going to a Target and stocking one specific brand of shampoo. The stockers there had already filled the shelf, so he took a bottle down and then took a picture of himself putting it back.
That's part of a weird new segment of things they're doing for physical-world tasks, and a separate one of AI training. I assume the shampoo brand was doing some kind of inventory stock audit, perhaps?
I've heard of that being "a thing" where the brand wants to make sure their product is actually out on the shelves properly, so that Dasher probably got easy money verifying the store did their own job properly.
Oh, hmm, I was in the grocery store the other day and some guy was walking around with his phone out taking pictures of the aisles, I wonder if this is why. It was... somewhat annoying to walk around.
Uber does both food and grocery delivery on top of rideshare.
I wonder if DD is going to make a play for Lyft next, which they’re already in close partnership. The market consolidating to these 2 players (Uber and DoorDash) seems natural(?), for lack of better terms. Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Uber Eats in my area is usually faster than DoorDash. I look forward to the ongoing competition. But, Instacart provides delivery services behind the scenes for Costco and Walmart; having less competition between DoorDash and Instacart will surely lead to higher prices charged to the big box stores. Hopefully Uber steps into the fray to keep them on their toes.
> I’ve literally never ordered from any of these 3 companies. ...
>Don’t get it.
I get that it takes full advantage of human tendency to be lazy. A friends stepson works a crappy job seemingly to pay for his door dash. The kid saves almost no money and is always asking his mother for money here and there while living at home with no expenses outside of his door dash and video game purchases. He couldn't afford to buy a bicycle.
do any of you have young kids and dual, heavy stress jobs? DoorDash and Instacart are godsends for families on the go who don't have time to do all this stuff anymore. My wife and I BARELY have time to go grocery shopping and will probably use this service once a month, doordash more than that when we don't have the energy to cook dinner and don't want to wrestle our kid into the car and constantly entertain them at a restaurant.
Do whatever it takes to handle things, but for this:
> My wife and I BARELY have time to go grocery shopping
If you can, take them grocery shopping with you. One parent stays at home doing stuff, the other goes grocery shopping with at least one kid.
In my experience kids at least 12-18 months old LOVE grocery shopping.
Get a big shopping cart, put them in that special seat facing you. Keep it concise, don't shop for more than 1 hour per round. Talk to them, explain what you're doing, give them harmless things to play with (a carrot, a celery bulb, a bag of rice, whatever). Have a little fun with the produce, they will love random things, for example that weird looking tomato.
My daughter used to love sitting in the cart while perusing the books they sold at Costco. But maybe we didn't buy enough, they don't seem to carry many anymore!
With 3 kids and both parents working we still never use these things. The few times I tried the food takes a long time and arrives kind of slimy.
The way I see it: customer service sucks real bad now. In San Francisco it sucks incredibly bad. Adding another layer of it is another place for things to get worse.
I completely understand how door dash is useful. But I've been so disappointed that I just don't consider it anymore
First, the only useful parenting advice is Every Kid Is Different. All other parenting advice needs to be evaluated with that lens.
Also, entertaining is not always putting on a show for them or giving them an ipad. Just chatting with three small children sitting around a table while they color can be difficult and you don't always have the energy.
While I agree with what you are saying I'm surprised at how confidently you can say it to someone else who lives, or grew up in, a different environment than you. How do you know theres no mental illness? How do you know if they're trying to shield their kid, via entertainment, from the brutal reality that they might lose their house? Maybe one works nights and one works days?
I took the advice as to remove the stress and pressure of assuming kids need synchronous attention to stay entertained. They sure will want it. resist.
I did it a few times years ago when they had huge promotions. And even still I found it to be too expensive on top of being a bad experience.
I do get it. If you just really dont want to spend time on getting/making your own food, dont care about the cost, and are willing to put up with the experience then it serves a purpose. There is also a difference between doing it regularly and rarely.
I'd wager most, although not all (reread this before replies of "but I ..."), of those people doing it regularly are lazy and making a bad financial decisions but thats on them.
I'm not sure what the third company you're referring to is (I've read through the article twice and only see DoorDash and Instacart (which I guess is incorporated as "Maplebear", but not a separate company from what it sounds like), but I've ordered from both of them, albeit not recently (my wife and I have been using FreshDirect lately). The value proposition of getting groceries delivered for us is that we don't drive (or have a car) and the grocery store is over 20 minutes away walking distance from us. The extra cost to have them delivered is far less than the cost and maintenance of having a car, and the convenience of being able to have it done even during times when I'm busy working from home is added bonus. My wife also has a condition where the treatment is essentially turning off her immune system every six months, so the safety of not exposing her to something by doing shopping in person is not something I'd ever want to give up.
I guess I could like, get a shopping cart and spent an extra 40 minutes hauling stuff back and forth every time we wanted groceries, but even that would be somewhat dependent on weather; a delivery driver is not going to have to walk 40 minutes in heavy rain and can bring frozen goods in an amount of time that doesn't result in them being soggy or completely melted messes by the time they reach us.
not an instacart user, but as a carless person an ebike has really saved me hundreds of dollars on DD fees just by doing pickup, and it really shortens the amount of time; even a very slow biking pace of 8mph is orders of magnitude faster than walking. and with bike panniers you can carry two grocery bags' worth of stuff. a decent ebike assists up to 20mph.
basically the only things i bother online delivering grocery wise are bulky dry goods (e.g. paper towels)
I just paid $20 for a $15 McDonald's order with the annual subscription. It all depends on the restaurant too. I also haven't gone grocery shopping since 2020.
I literally order from all of those companies as do 10s of millions of people if not more.
I haven't eaten MacD's in decades, but why does it matter as a percentage? How much you're willing to pay should be dependent on how much it costs you to acquire the items yourself. For example, if the store is a 10 minute round trip and you value your free time at at least $30/hr then paying $5 for delivery is rational, regardless of the item's initial cost. Better than rational even, when considering fuel and vehicle wear-and-tear.
(Of course if you have a kitchen, equipment, and time then buying bulk ingredients and making your own meals is sometimes more efficient, but thats an argument against buying prepared food in the first place, not against getting it delivered.)
If you're working hourly from home and it saves you 30 minutes, or sick and can't leave the house, or the baby is napping and you don't want to wake her up, etc etc, it's more than paid for itself.
That's not to say it is worth it as an axiomatic rule, but it's something some people will choose from among the options available to them, which may be many or few, as dictated by their circumstances.
>If you're working hourly from home and it saves you 30 minutes, or sick and can't leave the house, or the baby is napping and you don't want to wake her up, etc etc, it's more than paid for itself.
Compared to what? Pulling left overs out of the fridge? Or driving to get takeout? Driving to get takeout was never the financially savy decision in the first place. You are simply paying more for enjoyment. So let's not set that as the baseline.
In terms of time, if you spend 40 minutes on a batch making 8 meals you are spending 5 minutes/meal on preparation. You're going to take that much time with your doordash order so there is not even a time saving.
Doordash buys you enjoyment and impulsiveness. You can spend your money on that. But don't fool yourself into thinking its a time or especially a money saver.
nah you dont always have the luxury of meal prep (or planning/grocery store runs) when you have a newborn - besides this takes up so much time and energy
>If you're working hourly from home and it saves you 30 minutes, or sick and can't leave the house, or the baby is napping and you don't want to wake her up, etc etc, it's more than paid for itself.
Compared to what? Pulling left overs out of the fridge? Or driving to get takeout? Driving to get takeout was never the financially savy decision in the first place so let's not set that as the baseline.
This is why all the “everything is too expensive” complaints fall on deaf ears. The fact that these companies are used by so many is an easy indicator that all the “K-shaped” doomerism is just that.
It's true. The fast food restaurants had all been locked into competition without these services for years. Then they found out people will pay 2x, and not only that, will be a large percentage of their base. So at risk of doordash prices going to 3x, the restaurants raised prices 2x anyway figuring either people will drive in or door dash will split the difference. Which is what happened.
I don't order artificial food on apps or go anywhere near the golden arches, but it amazes me that the majority of the app orders are for these chains that sell utter garbage.
It is a bit like a phone, you could open a book to read classic literature or you could doom scroll AI trash all day. For some reason the latter option is invariably chosen over the former.
The money is also ridiculous, I am not sure of golden arches prices with delivery and tip on top, I just don't live like that. However, I always cook from scratch with no animal products, just stodgy vegetables, and I am sure that my weekly food bill is going to be less than one delivered cold and late burger meal of no nutritional value.
Also shocking as a cooking person is how few McDonald's orders are sit down with people. We have ended up with people eating with their fingers in their solitary confinement cars with the worst junk food possible, whereas we once had dinner parties with a proper table, home cooked food of nutritional value, valued company, crockery, cutlery, etiquette and prayers to an imaginary god.
Even stranger is that there is no free healthcare in the USA. Eat this garbage and you have a healthcare bill coming for the obesity, saturated fats blocking arteries, cancer and the rest of the chronic diseases that go with artificial food.
This situation is a product of American corporate ways of doing things and hard to unpick, but with these delivery apps now worth billions, there is now another barrier between healthy eating since this silly gig economy now needs to be kept in existence since jobs and corporate profits depend on it.
Food/grocery delivery should be a municipal service like garbage/recycling with no tipping and service provided by full time government employees with good benefits and use of city vehicles. Many, many new jobs, and a public service that everybody would love.
But DoorDash has a patent on giving you a deal if you combine your order with another restaurant, and giving you a higher price unless it determines that pisses you off and then backing off a little. Those contributions to humanity must be protected.
Many cities already fund taxis. The city of Sunnyvale provides a taxi service under the name of Beam for $3.50 per ride. It does not seem like a big stretch to extend this to food and grocery delivery.
If you don’t want to be taxed for some service, you can always choose to vote to get rid of that service or move to a place without that service. I welcome more experimentation in municipal services.
In America sometimes construction of mass transit requires so much money that it is less cost effective in terms of riders served on a per-unit-cost basis than subsidized taxi. A lot of that tax money goes to intermediate consultants who come up with extravagant station designs that seem to value grandeur more than utility. Another large chunk of that tax money goes to union workers when equivalent non-union workers are much cheaper to hire, and when fewer non-union workers are needed to do the same job than union workers. The sheer size of mass transit projects means they become even bigger. I don’t like this but it is what it is.
personal chauffeur to work and back home for $7 everyday? Not a bad deal. Google says insurance is $180/month(higher end) or $6/day. Add gas, registration, maintenance and this is a good bargain.
If the government is going to get involved here, I would regulate companies like DoorDash or Uber to require them to provide company vehicles to drivers.
When DoorDash drivers subtract vehicle wear and tear, fuel, depreciation, and maintenance from their earnings, their net hourly pay frequently drops below the standard minimum wage.
DoorDash benefits from desperate people who slowly transform their vehicle into cash by laboring thousands of hours. They could have just sold the car; either way they end up with cash but no car.
People need to pay rent, so they look at their capital, owning a car, and then trade away that capital for less than it's worth, and a few years later they are worse off, but at least they made rent for those months.
We need the government to deliver food to our doorsteps? Shouldn't the stores provide this service? If there were demand and a sustainable business model, wouldn't they? Costco delivers, to commercial customers. I imagine they are not necessarily losing money doing that, but perhaps.
I think the argument here is if you allow delivery to become a local monopoly like other utilities then just make it a utility. However as-is, there's little barrier to entry on adding delivery to any business and it should probably stay that way.
Is it necessary? No. Unfortunately I don't think would be great as a utility because quality of service matters and unlike the actual utilities, there's a lot of arbitrariness to quality of the service.
Availability of vehicles for delivery purposes is an interesting proposition. Charge doordash a tax or fee to maintain a fleet of vehicles that would open flexibility in the job market. (Consider this for ride-sharing as well... basically just reinvented the taxi medallion system but maybe with less restriction).
I think the best idea would be a free and open source Doordash clone. The local government would contract a local company to handle logistics, so it would still be a private company (like garbage collection), but ideally lots of them spread out through the country. Each local government would decide if it's fully paid for by taxes, subsidized by taxes, etc (like garbage collection). City vehicles repaired/maintained by mechanics like school busses, etc.
Or we could just not pass absurd tax hikes to pay for grocery delivery, and then everyone has more money in their pockets and can freely choose to give it to their mothers for delivery. Forcing everyone into it via tax collection is literally absurd.
I basically want to socialize the costs of just about everything if people find it to be a useful public service. I'd like a single-payer streaming service like ITV, too. It gets very annoying to be gouged on all sides by corporations that don't care if the service is good or not, only how much money they can extract from people regardless of their station in life.
So TV licenses are not gouging, but a Netflix subscription is?
You live in a fantasy land if you think streaming services are not competitive and providing better value for money than public broadcasting companies.
If there were economies of scale that enabled it to be more broadly available, and that was competitive in terms of utility gain per dollar invested, why not. IMO the government should be utility maximizing for its citizens, whatever that looks like.
We're socializing the costs of everything else. I'd much rather my tax dollars go to pizza delivery (and single-payer healthcare) than lining the pockets of tech monopolists and the military-industrial complex.
Municipal services like garbage pickup are generally funded by a mix of per-household fees and property taxes. Property taxes loosely correlate with the size of the household (and yard and construction materials and everything else that scales with price) while the per-household fees can scale depending on how big of a collection can you request.
It's a good system for aligning the costs with the people who use the service.
If you thought all tax money went into a big general bucket and the government decided what services to offer out of that, municipal garbage pickup does not work that way.
There couldn't be a free delivery service because the usage would be all over the place. Someone DoorDashing burritos for breakfast lunch and dinner 7 days a week would use it 20X more than someone doing their once-weekly grocery order. Subsidizing it would incentivize a lot of waste, traffic, vehicle usage, and other things that we actually don't want to incentivize people to use more of.
The only way this could work is with a substantial per-delivery fee, which gets us right back to what we already have with DoorDash.
lol, this is the state of leftist discourse online? Now even completely unnecessary services like DoorDash should be socialized so we can all pay for it? This has to be satire.
It surprises me that you are getting such a strong reaction about a service that used to be extremely common and not even cost extra. Used to be - in my part of the world anyway - a greengrocer would come by and drop off your order and take a new one, the milkman would pick up bottles and drop off your milk, the ice man would come. It is hard to go out and do all these things with kids and with day jobs, and it does not take much marginal cost to take care of one more house in the neighborhood. Imagine rejecting receiving a birthday card in the mail as an irresponsible extravagance.
Grocery deliveries for the elderly and disabled are an excellent public service. But it's a hard sell to make everyone pay for stoners to get a $30 burrito delivered at 2am.
Are you kidding me? I don't use these services because I can save a lot of money by driving, taking public transit, or (gasp) walking to buy groceries or food myself. 100% do not want to be taxed to pay for some lazy individuals food delivery.
Is this satire? It sounds exactly like what someone would say if they were trying to parody a big government liberal. The idea of turning an expensive, optional convenience into a government-run service and touting job creatoin is a bit too on the nose.
It's not an optional convenience for some people. And no, not satire. We should be using local governments to drive competition as frequently as possible in my opinion. I believe in municipal broadband and cellular service as well.
I do agree that there is a small minority of people who greatly benefit from delivery services due to disability, hardship, or otherwise, but the thought of tax dollars paying to deliver Tom's crunchwrap supreme because he's a little high and really wants taco bell grinds my gears in a particular way.
I'd have no problem with a subsidized service for those that NEED it, but for those that just WANT it? Nope. But then you get into the sticky messy world of how to determine need.
I'm talking about local governments and not state or federal level, which is out of the scope of this conversation. I agree FWIW, but anyone with any degree of capacity for critical thinking would agree.
In my area, garbage collection is not done by the city, you pay a quarterly subscription to a private company if you want pickup. If not, you take it to the dump yourself. Some of my family live somewhere there are 3 of these pickup companies operating (which also pick up on different days).
Just saying, city run trash is far from universal.
I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.
(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).
For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.
I was a constant instacart user, never liked door dash though. What changed is that now instead of using Instacart I have a regular person who comes by to help me out at home with all sorts of chores and for me now it makes much more sense to pay her to also do the grocery shopping. I get much better service too, she knows my preferences and also does the inventory beforehand and puts everything away for me.
I found her for free on Facebook posting in a community group. It is a high trust situation but I realize a lot of these extra fees are because we try to operate in a low trust environment, which is really not optimal. Being able to trust your community is much better for everyone.
I've been an instacart customer since it launched in NYC, and I've generally been quite happy, but the quality has been gradually on the decline.
- in the past few years, orders are frequently not received.
- in the past few years, fruit/produce is often covered in mold, rotten, or otherwise unacceptable.
- in the past few years, delivery time estimates are frequently missed.
- in the past few months, customer support got significantly worse and came to resemble the bad attitude and general grudging unhlelpfulness of AirBNB's support team.
I think the main issue has been a big shortage of supply of workers who are willing to do the job and who can do it well. Often times the person delivering the order (and the order itself) smells strongly of cigarette smoke, and increasingly I've had drivers refuse to bring the order to the door, etc.
Add to that the impact of the labor shortage on grocery stores that makes stocking less reliable and results in no availability of bags, greater chances of rotten produce, etc.
Instacart does stand behind it service and I have received full refunds for the non-delivered orders and the rotten produce, but such things must take a great toll on the profitability of the business.
Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.
The answer is not to find new pools of desperate people but to improve working conditions (pay, benefits) and on a macro level reducing cost of living so the people performing the work don't have to work so much they stop being able to.
The way you COULD do that is to reduce administrative cost. From their most recent filing, marketing costs them 1/4 of their revenue, R&D (software development) 1/5th, and operations and administration 1/8th each. Their cost of revenue aka what they pay to their "shoppers" aka lower-class labor and the businesses they integrate with is 1/4th of gross, barely a pittance compared to the slush funds for management and investor payouts.
Bottom line: they are making money hand over fist, with the vast vast majority not going to workers but the corporate employees and investors. Your issue with delivery drivers is an issue with the bottom-of-the-barrel treatment decided by management - they could solve this problem (EASILY), but they choose not to in order to pay for more corporate employees and to have more profit to shareholders. The numbers are clear as day.
> Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.
I think this fact is often missed by middle/upper-middle-class tech folks (like a majority of this forum). From up here, it's eas to view labor as being an equitable exchange between two parties, but as you said, that is simply not the case when the pay doesn't even come close to covering expenses.
The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job - but then the question is, who delivers the food? To which I have yet to hear a satisfying answer (besides incentivizing better wages for those workers)
> The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job
These are folks who've never had to work a low wage job where bathroom breaks are tightly controlled, except maybe for fun money. I started working at 14, and as a software dev today I've never had to work nearly as hard, or be as utterly exhausted as working these sorts of jobs, which if you are having to do them to pay rent, its difficult or impossible to do extracurriculars like education or networking to move forward.
Imagine your entire workday is on a strict, short term set of timers and if you don't complete a task for any reason an automated rating goes down, and if it happens more than 3 times you are let go. People don't understand the level of stress that carries.
My nephew is currently doing UE/DD/Instacart to make ends meet and if their experience is reflective, most of their customers deserve shitty service. I helped them write some scripts to analyze data from Gridwise (delivery+mileage tracking app) and the tips average around 3-5% of the gross. Even in California with Prop 22, that's not going to add up to a livable wage.
Don't be surprised when the permanent underclass you depend on doesn't give a shit about your moldy strawberries.
Yeah that’s what everyone says, but no one wants to pay for it. That’s why California voted for Prop 22 instead of our courts forcing the rideshare companies to treat their drivers as employees.
Labor shortages, in general, just don’t exist. There can be one time shocks like during Covid, but if there is a lack of workers for a specific job or industry, it means that the business is either unwilling to pay for the employees needed for the job, or that the business itself should not function as the cost of the labor needed is unsustainable.
It's the lifecycle of many gig-economy apps. They start out good and slowly degrade as they plateau and try to find ways to cut expenses to continue growing.
If you want a good servant for a cheap price, you will only find it in a non-industrialized country. In an industrialized nation, all labour is gobbled up by industrially organized employment, because your average labourer produces hundreds of times more value in such employment compared to non-industrial employment. And in this includes restaurants for your food.
There's a reason why supermarkets went from having different counters for asking for your stuff to having you pick out your stuff yourself.
A large part of increasing profit margins for the past 40 years is that companies have realized that https://xkcd.com/325/ is an insane underestimate of consumer stickiness.
You can ship people literal trash like ten percent of the time and they will keep coming back.
You can provide someone negative value for decades, and they keep paying you.
I just cannot understand how willing to burn time, effort, and money on stupid purchases the average person is. I know I have poverty brain and used to be really bad at just spending money, but the fact of the matter is that PepsiCo had to increase the price of Doritos to $7 a bag before they saw a decline in purchasing.
Like, there are entire industries devoted to helping people figure out they are subscribed to something they don't use anymore. I don't even look at my bank account anymore but how do you possibly let that happen?
I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.
1) There is a chance the deal is blocked by antitrust regulators, and does not close.
2) Regulatory reviews typically take 6 months to a year. There is an opportunity cost to holding shares over this time, your capital is tied up in shares, when you could instead use the money to buy US 10-year Treasuries that yield around 5%.
Assuming the deal closes at $65 in 12 months, the present value of these shares is $65 / (1 + 5%) = $61.90
I think the discount is the risk of the deal not closing; there will be regulatory approvals, financing, all sorts of offramps ahead.
Also, the market has consistently undervalued Instacart since they went public to begin with, so why stop now? (signed, a not-at-all-bitter former employee)
Repeating my comment from the dupe: My new years resolution for 2026 was to quit using 3rd party delivery companies. It was annoying at first but I've kept it and life is better without them.
My previous experience was any time something went wrong, no one would take accountability for it and at best I might get a partial refund but never a replacement order.
Having to do a bit more planning for meals is worth eliminating that aggravation from my life. Not to mention the shocking amount of money I'm saving.
Well, we do not really have to quit using them; in my case, for instance, I have two separate accounts with two different phone numbers, and I keep getting 20% to 30% off coupons on one of them most of the time. Whenever I need to get groceries or just get food, I go ahead and leverage one of these coupons, and it works out very well; in the end, the total comes out to slightly less than what I would pay if I went and picked it up myself.
Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
First off, okay that's great but no one is telling you to go use them. You can continue living your life exactly as you were without needing to judge others who live their lives differently from yours.
Second, clearly there are plenty of people who do use them judging from this $17b acquisition that just happened.
I don't really understand how the personal economics for this work out for the majority of the population.
You'll always get some people who argue that time is money and that the saved time that people have from ordering from these services is an opportunity cost. But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.
So then, all that is really left is convenience. And personally, I don't really find it that convenient at all. Often times the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is meaningfully longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
In other words - these services really just profit off of laziness. And the sad part is I think we're just promoting a lazy society overall with lots of the newer services being offered.
Here's how it works out rationally:
I just got home from work, the kids are a mess, the house needs cleaning, and my spouse is having a work crisis. The kids favorite treat is chipotle. Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
"Hey kids chipotle treats are on the way - but you have to go get your room tidied and leave mom alone" actually does work.
6 million smart, rational engineers, mathematicians, actuaries, professors in the country, each doing this analysis, four times a year, yields 240 million dollars in surcharges without an ounce of laziness.
Is it only $10 extra to have dinner for 4 delivered? IME the cost was much more than that, when you factor in the difference in menu price, the delivery fee, the tip, and the govt surcharges.
Fair! But $10 establishes a lower bound on a rational audience's TAM at a quarter billion a year. If it's higher, the TAM goes up without requiring loss of rationality / non-laziness of the customer base.
For a mere $800, I can net the fees to "approximately $0"? What a steal!
I'd be interested to see the math on this. They cover the amount I'd be expected to tip? They cover all the govt-mandated delivery driver fees? I could see how they might end up covering the official "delivery charge" but not the tip and other expected/mandatory fees that go along with actual delivery.
Oh come on, Chase Sapphire Reserve doesn't just give you Doordash credits. I probably save $5k/yr on travel alone with that card. A subsidized Doordash every month is just an added bonus.
I don't know why Doordash in particular drives this really strange discourse where people really want to go after people who use it. You're on a technology forum, it shouldn't be surprising that some people here are using resources (money) to buy them convenience. It's practically in our DNA
Sounds like you've got a sweet thing going! If most people could save $5,000/yr on things they would have otherwise purchased, then they'd all have CSR, right?
I am not "going after people who use" DD. I just pushed back on the notion that it costs $10 to get dinner delivered for a family of 4.
>Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
Exactly this. They know humans will likely pick the path of least resistance. And we are generally bad at problems that have compounding long term outcomes. They are essentially preying on our societal circumstances. My story: Brain will resist using energy for creative solution from within if external solution exists for $.
My example is _not_ preying. That $10 does nothing to help our lives if invested in diversified etfs, for example. The _best_ use of that $10 is to alleviate the instantaneous stressors for 4-5 people all at once so we can relax and solve larger problems (my spouse works for pro-social non-profits, for example).
Yes, doordash can prey on laziness, and people will fall into laziness, but in my example the _availability_ of the service is providing a price-adjustment for urgency that matches my own rational prioritization of the evening's needs. It's the most rational, mutually-beneficial argument I can make, and it's real in my house from time to time.
This is a question that's going to sound stupid and maybe insensitive, but that aside - how do you think people managed to do this in your exact same scenario for the last 50+ years without having a service like this?
Our own parents went through this exact scenario that you mentioned plenty of times before any of this even existed without having the to pay the $10 fee.
Pizza delivery has been a thing for the last 50 years. And in my own childhood, my parents kept tv dinners and other instant sodium-bombs like easy mac or ramen on hand.
Doordash costs more than that, but chipotle is a good deal more nutritious than the 90's-era tv dinners I remember, so I can understand parents preferring to spend a bit more for that equally-easy solution.
You're getting stones thrown at you when you were trying to be polite.
From my memory we often piled into the car, got dinner, and went home and my parents had to stay up late to clean while we went to bed.
In my wife's memory, one parent couldn't work - all this stuff had to fall on them.
I'm saying the $10 is a nicety, not a necessity. We would be ok without it. I just think we're a little better with it. It's a market system - if I need it, it's there at a price I can justify. Markets are a good thing.
People also used to live in caves and wipe their ass with sticks.
What is this question? Is the idea of new products, technology, or services strange and problematic to you? Convenience is a major driver of invention.
Also when I was growing up my parents would order delivery plenty - but the only option was pizza because the driver worked for the pizza joint. And yes, it’s true, their parents didn’t order delivery, but they also lived in crushing poverty of the Great Depression and could barely afford to feed their kids during every meal.
> I don't really understand how the personal economics for this work out for the majority of the population.
8.5% of American households have no car[1]. That isn't a strict majority, but if you can be charitably informal: paying for grocery deliveries is orders of magnitude cheaper than loan+insurance+maintenance for a car.
If you want to become car-less then the like of Instacart make that a realistic prospective (but Instacart specifically makes no sense because stores usually do it for free if you can tolerate next-day).
The majority of the population isn't using Doordash. A small portion of the population uses Doordash a lot. Think of all the college students who lack a kitchen and can't drive anywhere because they are drunk.
I'll give an example of when I used a grocery delivery service two weeks ago.
I was landing from a flight and traveling home late on a Sunday. I also needed to go grocery shopping that night. I did not have a car at the airport, so my choices were either rideshare home for $70, or take the train for $10. The train takes about 30-40 minutes longer, but saves me $60.
If I did the rideshare, I could probably do the grocery shopping myself and get home a little bit later than when the train would get me home. Or I could take the train, order the grocery delivery, and then get home, unpack, and go to sleep. I chose to take the train and do grocery delivery. When I got home from the train, the delivery driver was walking up to my door with bags in hand. It worked out perfectly.
I could have taken the train and also done the grocery shopping myself, but it would have been very late by then and I had to be up early for work the next day.
if you look at instacart's business model...they make barely any money on delivery. Vast majority of their profit is from advertising that they sell to brands. They create an audience of buyers with really good data and then monetize through advertising...so for the consumer you get very low cost delivery at the expense of seeing promoted products in the app.
The baseline premise that it’s more expensive is wrong. It can be as it’s a very big marketplace. But your entire stance is based on this static absolute that the cost is premium and that’s a wrong assumption.
> But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.
> So then, all that is really left is convenience.
But nearly all technology and services you pay for arguably boil down to “convenience,” in the sense that people in the past either did the thing themselves or survived without it.
>Sometimes the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
This misses the point. One is you devoting your own time and attention to doing the task, the other is delegating it so you can use your time for other things. Some people are going to burn the extra time scrolling (not great), others are going to help their kids with homework or get a workout in.
I'm all for people getting time back even with the downside that not everybody will choose to use it well. If people are choosing brainrot over living well, there's a bigger issue than delivery services.
"Often times the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is meaningfully longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself."
I don't think there are many people using this because they think they get it faster.
One man's laziness is another man's leisure time. I'd much rather have an extra hour to spend with my kids, read a book, exercise, or really do just about anything else, versus get in my car and fight traffic and parking to go retrieve a bag of food.
Prefacing this by saying it may sound insensitive but from my experience shopping and getting things to eat used to be things people would do with their children and was part of growing up and learning what adults do.
In my opinion this scenario may actually end up promoting unhealthy habits for your children which is what these companies want.
Sure, but how many times do they have to do this to learn?
If I take my kid grocery shopping 4-5 times a month versus three times a month and then ordering DoorDash the other two times is that really going to make a difference?
In fact, ordering DoorDash will also teach your kid how to value time. Especially if you spend it with them doing other things.
I know what people use them, for convenience. I also know why the business use them, is probably cheaper for them to advertise on this companies instead of trying to lump the users to your own app or worse, to call you business.
I know why they do it, that doesn't mean I like how the world works.
DoorDash is like cigarettes, gambling, paid pornography: people are using it in the closet. I know families who order it for 1/3 of the meals or more. Thousands a month in food, so presumably 4 figures in net revenue for DoorDash from a single household.
To say “ i can’t believe people use it “ is obviously a lie. It’s a magic food delivery machine. It’s the closest thing to the Star Trek Replicator we have .
I don’t like it, and you could make a million arguments about why it’s either bad, unhealthy, bad economics etc. But it’s perfectly obvious why the business is huge.
> Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
Paying an extra $10-12 in tips and fees to have some courier a meal directly to your door is ridiculously cheap, a courier service would charge 4x as much for a similar courier trip.
Sure, but the pizzeria charges less than $4 for delivery and don't want a tip.
I completely understand the grocery deliveries, it's a trade off, time vs. money. Personally I think the delivery costs are to high, but I also live four minutes away from the supermarket on foot. For others it's one less thing to deal with and they can do the shopping in the evening when the kids are put to bed or have the groceries ready when they come home after a long day. For them the delivery fee is well worth the value the service provides.
It's the $10+ for getting McDonalds multiple times a week I struggle with. People are free to make that choice obviously, but I feel like the delivery services are praying on people who are already struggling, especially when they team up the Buy Now Pay Later companies.
The pizzaria has the cost built in to the base price; minute-by-minute tracking of food/labour/delivery cost has been table stakes for pizza restaurant software since the 90's.
They probably comment things like "I don't get why people use these services", because they don't get why people use these services. I honestly do not understand the point of your comment.
Use your imagination.
Families with newborns, care takers, the disabled or sick, someone who worked a long shift at work and is just tired. The list goes on. Even just being lazy and not feeling like going out to pick up food is fine. You’re really weighing the opportunity cost (time) vs money.
I’m not going judge how folks spend their money. It’s their money and they’re all valid reasons regardless.
The cost of this acquisition will likely just get passed down to consumers by increasing the already ridiculous delivery and service fees even further... The only reason why I ever use DD is because DashPass is included in the CSR. Otherwise you pay $10 of extra fees for a $12 burrito.
If the economics are only working because of regulatory capture and gig worker labor, let the business fail.
This was never going to be sustainable long term based on the economics, it was a securities and investor grift. Those with stock did well (“the stock is the product”), consumers did well while the subsidies lasted, workers made the least gig platforms could offer, and the ride is coming to an end as true labor costs and regulations catch up. Similar with Uber and Lyft, and Airbnb. It was all a financialization play that worked under ZIRP but no longer works.
“Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.”
The business model of having a meal order delivered to your door for money has worked for, what, 100 years?
It's just greedy investors destroying the value for the customer by tacking on all these bizarre fees. You see the same with TakeAway-Just Eat. I barely know anyone who still orders food ever since they massively jacked up prices after 2020. Before that you could order a pizza or falafel or whatever without minimum order prize, hidden increased product price, delivery fee, service fee, and idk what else.
> greedy investors destroying the value for the customer
Not just the customer. The businesses which actually make the food receive less profit in this scheme as well. Only the middlemen win. It's privatized health insurance all over again.
Agreed! Delivery works, and will continue to work. Tech platforms attempting to monopolize and suck up all of the aggregate profit from the industry will not.
Doordash was meant to help local restaurants win, now a large percentage of the "restaurants" on DD are ghost kitchens run by DD. The same will happen to grocery stores. It's the enshittification model happening in plain sight.
I just want to say that the colour contrast on this post is atrocious.
#999999 on a white background is a 2.84:1 contrast ratio, when the minimum requirement for body text is 4.5:1. So this page technically violates the ADA and other accessibility laws.
This is like the argument that Amazon has a monopoly, but it's actually even weaker. Doordash is just picking stuff up from local vendors that buyers could visit themselves, whereas Amazon is shipping people things from all over the world.
Amazon has been pretty successful in arguing that Walmart, Nordstrom, and everything in between are their competitors, and I expect that DD and IC will have no trouble doing the same (especially under this administration).
I wouldn't be the one to ask about the details, but I think it would be foolish to surmise that two companies taking up 3/4ths of a sector shouldn't go through some anti-trust scrutiny.
While they are an effective duopoly, it would be good to also consider them as monopolistic competition versus a true market split out -- there is very little traditional moat, and almost only network effect due to restaurants accepting their services and menu.
But economies of scope, such as they exist, can be good for consumer welfare (unpopular as that is to discuss in current public forums).
Two chunks of overhead (IT, web app, mobile app, finance, HR, etc.) instead of one can be bad for consumers too.
But yeah, flexing pricing increases to gobble up consumer welfare is what the FTC is supposed to rally against, and, while services expand their markets aren't that different.
EDIT: Wow, people really hate this comment! I'm not being normative here. Economies of scope are the thing that any acquiring companies with any reasonable market share will argue for their case, its textbook economics and what the FTC is trained for.
You’re getting downvoted because nobody gives a rats ass about efficiency for massive corporations that continue to abuse their power and make our lives unnecessarily expensive while their leaders (generally) tear down democracy.
The Doordash acquisition of Instacart increases competition. You are missing something fundamental if you think "2 services becoming one means less competition."
Doordash attempted to buy Instacart in 2021 for $40-50B dollars. Since then Instacart has lost market share and value, and Doordash is now acquiring them for $17B.
The real competitors to Doordash and Instacart for grocery delivery are not each other. The competitors are Walmart, Amazon, and local grocery chains (Meijer, Kroger, etc). And guess what? These competitors are winning. Amazon, Walmart, and Kroger alone comprise a majority of grocery delivery (~64% in 2025, per an emarketer FAQ on digital groceries).
Has nothing to do with monopolies, having the market slowly condense into one mega company does not create competition and results in higher prices for the consumer.
You don't have to have an absolute monopoly. Microsoft was punished for anti-competitive actions in the 90s when it bundled its Internet Explorer browser into Windows.
Even though other browsers existed, like Netscape Navigator etc, Microsoft was still found guilty of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and guilty of anti-competitive action, both in the US and elsewhere.
Microsoft was forced to create a version of Windows without IE bundled, and other corrective actions.
To this day while I welcome anti-trust legislation, I don't understand how a "free" thing can be anti-consumer. Both Microsoft and Netscape were not "charging" the customer for this product. While it could be argued the product may generated revenue, the purpose of anti-trust in general is to stop something that negatively affects consumers.
Now the food industry would be my best example that needs more anti-trust. All of my organic brands have been bought out by Conagra Brands. There's no competition.
I would also agree that this specific acquisition is not going to be helpful for consumers.
> I don't understand how a "free" thing can be anti-consumer
If it is only free in order to inconvenience competitors in a way that will eventually reduce choice, either giving you undue control of a market or being done with a view to charge later when people have no choice as the competition is broken, or both - that is when free becomes an anti-consumer matter.
It is an issue that you sometimes need to think long term to notice. If you wait for it to be an immediate problem, it is often too late to easily do anything about it.
Your food example is exactly what people feared would happen with IE, and what actually did happen for a long time despite the anti-trust case: client side developments stalled because IE was such a large part of the market and it did not implement anything new because there was no reason for them to. There was not sufficient competition to make it inconvenient for the incumbent to stagnate, so the whole area stagnated somewhat until Chrome came along and stirred things up a bit. MS was in control due to an effective monopoly, the consumer suffered.
I think the history actually proves the opposite. There was never a version of Windows that I purchased that required me to download Internet Explorer. In fact on the latest copy of Windows - Edge is still pre-installed. Yet Chrome holds a larger share TODAY. There was absolutely no reason for Microsoft to lose that case.
The second most popular browser now is Safari. Should the justice department come after Apple for including it in the Mac?
> I don't understand how a "free" thing can be anti-consumer.
Not 100% apples-to-apples, but I imagine you've heard cases of "big players" in various industries lowering their prices to the point of selling at a loss, which drives out the small players (Amazon, Wal-Mart come to mind). In the end, only the big player is left, and they are now free to raise prices.
I think it's reasonable to see that initial low-prices (could even be free) period of behavior as anti-competitive, since it may ultimately stifle competition in the long term.
I do agree with that. Home Depot has a history of cutting out small lumber yards across the US for charging less for wood. Then when the local lumber yard is out of business, oh suddenly the wood shortage back east is a great reason to raise prices.
But what you're saying is that if a piece of software is popular, free and has no competition, it should be illegal!? And the browser isn't even a great example of that since there are tons of other options! Wireshark is specialty packet sniffing software that has literally no reasonable competition in it's space. It's also free. Should it be banned here?
You should go ahead and read the arguments they lay out.
Here is Khan's report on Amazon: https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf
You can disagree, but they at least make compelling arguments that forces one to think.
Isn't that more proof that the consumer won here? Even business consumers? By making IE free, there is no reason to pay Netscape. I'm sorry but this is not an example of a monopoly. Should Wireshark be banned in the United States because it's the best packet sniffer and it's competition is basically 0 right now?
Monopolies are not illegal, anti-competitive practices are illegal; there's a subtle difference.
You're right. Duopolies aren't great either and just because two companies are in fierce competition doesn't mean everything is good with the law. Both companies might be engaging in illegal anti-competitive behavior.
There is also a skyrocketing chance they are colluding via algorithm.
This needs to be discussed more in the age of AI. RealPage was just the eye-opener. Every industry that should be competing on prices has a cottage industry of "price recommenders" that is de-facto collusion in front of our eyes.
>A company with 60% market share gobbles up a company with 25% market share.
Can you be more precise about what percentage of what market? I think you are conflating restaurant delivery with grocery delivery. How would instacart have 25% market share and door dash have 60% and Uber eats have 26% and Grub hub have 8%? Doesn't add up because you are mixing markets.
Instacart doesnt event have 25% of grocery delivery. That was 5 years ago. Instacart's market share is declining - Im seeing 18%. Doordash offered around $50B in 2021 now offering $17B.
The grocery stores themselves are actually the major competitors on grocery delivery and they cant serve other small business like the independent services can.
There is nothing inherently bad about large companies merging and this will increase competition. Deilvery apps are losing to much larger companies (the grocery stores themselves) and offer unique advantages over these direct from grocery services (ie they can serve small businesses).
You sound like the person who said that my town actually had too much competition in grocery stores and they should consolidate to reduce prices for consumers.
Considering that I can go pick up the food myself, I think there's a very healthy competitive market here. In fact, that is what I do, all the time (when I'm not also competing with them by cooking my own food, using ingredients I purchased myself).
the best grocery delivery experience was from UK supermarkets - tesco.
none of this instacart nonsense. because it's the actual grocery shop delivering your order - you're not up-charged, your groceries tend to be of good quality no breakage etc cz they want you to return.
with instacart it's pervase incentives all the way down - spoiled fruit - instacart can blame the grocer, breakages same. grocer doesn't even know who ordered.
Delivery services charge ~30% and increasingly police the practice of charging different amounts for items in person vs. in app. So not only are you paying a delivery fee + tip but (until very recently) you were likely paying more for the food.
Now that menus are being 'audited' by the delivery companies, the use of UE or DD can lead to the _retail_ prices that people pay in person being raised (as it's the only way they restaurants can safely raise their delivery prices).
Bad for everyone except shareholders of delivery services, I guess.
Great, both are generally terrible. Nothing like ordering a pizza and having it sit in someone's car for an hour with a driver who has no attachment to the restaurant, who could not care less about what you think. At least delivery drivers employed by the restaurant had some slight incentive to get food to you while it was still edible.
Third party delivery services essentially break the chain of responsibility... food late and cold? tough luck, but please tip in advance. If you don't tip your driver will be very mad at you, maybe they'll text you about it, and we pay them so poorly that it's actually your fault for keeping them impoverished. Talk to our customer service bots and maybe we'll give you a $5 coupon for your next Doordash order.
I do deliveries via gig apps for extra cash and to get away from the computer and it's basically a complete toss up.
Some people are professional about it (I bring my own drink carriers, food bags, etc and have a minor Andretti gene so orders are as quick as the law allows), but most of the others I see doing it may as well not be. Slow, lazy, check nothing, and look like they just fell out of a methadone clinic (read: not the person you want showing up at your door in the dark at 8pm).
It's frustrating if you try to do it properly but get judged by customers like you're some out of work junkie (when, ironically, most people I deliver to live in a lower-income situation than I do).
From the driver's side, you get inundated with low-paying orders, often rapid-fire as you're driving to either pick up or deliver another order (like so bad that if you're not paying attention, you could get into an accident). Like literal Pavlov's dog, bell jingling over the top of the navigation instructions and a big pop up on screen. Essentially [1].
The entire thing is a psychological rat trap (by design as best as I can tell as these apps aren't terribly complicated to build/design; just scale), so it's not a total surprise when your driver fails to provide good service. They actually make it quite difficult to provide good service (e.g., I routinely get "already picked up" orders on my late night runs w/ no compensation for sitting/waiting on restaurant staff).
I think a lot of people should try doing deliveries via these apps a few times just to experience it. The psychological pressure alone likely makes a lot of people crack. It's all quite fucked up.
Yep, unfortunately with the minimum wage mandate in CA pushing wages for pizza delivery drivers up to $20/hr led to over a thousand Pizza Hut drivers being laid off.
Unfortunately the existence of the (less-good) delivery options through DD and IC likely facilitated that decision.
but then you have states coming back around to place minimum wage on gig workers too, so the whole "we're laying them off so you can pay gig workers less" ends up completely pointless
so now you have delivery services paid at a similar wage anyway, but a whole third party organization that needs to extract its rent from the system
On the other countering opinion, I am a generally happy customer of both parties for years now (I pay for dashpass). I think I’m probably one of their heavier users as I use both services multiple times per week.
Food generally arrives warm and if not, a quick heat up in the air fryer generally solves most things. Soup based noodles are generally packed separately that you need to prepare it at home anyway.
My main gripe is there is the general occasional missed small item (like sauces, a drink), which I do complain about in DD. I imagine DD does provide this feedback to restaurants because it has been trending better over time.
I hate this shit. Just another shameless ploy to find choke points in markets and further immiserate all participants in a two-sided market but the rentiers.
Cool they will now charge $50 per delivery and give the drivers -10$ ?
There is zero cost of building matching systems (maybe 200$ worth of Claude subscription). Drivers and restaurants will be better off if they build their own ones. These centralized platforms need to die ASAP.
Google maps has the website links of your restaurants. You can just click it and order there.
The restaurant then can broadcast the driver demand and delivery prize in their website. Drivers can be scanning all the restaurants in their area and decide if they want to take it or not. Restaurants over time will build lists of reliable drivers whom they will favor when matching.
Dude, I pickup my own food with my own car 99/100 times.
I'm not saying a system couldn't be designed/work. I'm saying time and time and time again, it's been shown that consumers want a monopoly platform for convenience.
But doordash says this merger means more choice for the consumer, how could antitrust play a role here? I mean, unless they're lying about removing choices from the market place will result in more choices in the market place, but doordash wouldn't do that would they?
IMO grocery delivery is a game changer. I don't use either service, but use a different one[s]. Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's etc, and I don't have to put on outdoor clothes, walk to my car, navigate traffic, navigate the aisles, wait in line, reverse... IMO big QOL of life increase.
And second-order effects like I can always have fresh fruit + veggies / not worrying about rot by getting it in smaller quantities delivered more often.
For those wondering about price: It's much cheaper than takeout or prepared food delivery, but more expensive than getting your own groceries. Offset a bit by less food waste.
> Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's
In my experience its significantly more expensive for groceries: up to 20% for items + service fee + subscription + tip.
I was canceling Instacart subscription and they offered me another year for discounted price ($17). I kept it but I won’t ever extend it for full price given how much more it costs.
I should clarify: I'm referring to Amazon (prime or whole foods), which I understand is significantly cheaper than Instacart. It might be worth cross-shopping in this case.
I suspect this as well. Enjoying it while it lasts... I suspect the facilities being vertically-designed for this helps, but not enough(Especially the prime groceries; I suspect Whole foods has some but not the same extend?)
But if they were gone, the worst is you're putting pants on and getting your own products. There are not essential, they're simply a labor and regulatory arbitrage for gig workers to schlep product to consumers at very low wages.
I get this, but there are a few scenarios where grocery delivery is genuinely amazing.
- My parents are determined to age in place in their home. They get tired more easily than they used to, and aren't capable of doing as much. Especially in the winter, grocery delivery is a huge help for them.
- People with disabilities may or may not be capable of going to the store. Even for the ones who are capable, it is a much larger time commitment.
- For parents of young kids, leaving the house isn't just putting on pants. It's checking diapers, getting the kids to wear shoes, and timing the trip so it doesn't interfere with naptime, feedings, etc. This is a temporary phase! It doesn't take long before the kids are big enough to enjoy a trip to the store.
Yes. I can’t drive for medical reasons and I live in a rural area with poor public transport. If my wife had to stop driving we would have to use grocery delivery or move
Antitrust does not have "important service" requirement. What has happened in gaming is another travesty but there is plenty of people who would say it's not "important service". Antitrust must be universal.
TYVM. But I rely on Instacart as I live alone and can't drive anymore since my eye surgery 10 years ago. If I didn't have instacart I don't know how I'd ever get any groceries.
Grocery delivery is an important service for a large chunk of the population. About 40 million people in the country (mostly low income) live in food deserts. Plenty more don't own cars. Doordash & co have burned VC money for a decade to monopolize the delivery pipeline so restaurants and grocery stores rarely hire their own drivers anymore. And now with this kind of consolidation they can raise their prices unchecked.
Do you have a source that these low income Americans are the ones who are ordering food? My understanding was this was largely people with additional disposable income who were doing it for convenience and not necessity as the product for the price was a good enough trade off. I find it hard to believe low income Americans are getting their groceries delivered when they can’t afford the base prices for the most part.
Walmart+ actually provides a 50% discount if you have a valid benefits card, so that's "only" $7 a month to get "free delivery" from Walmart on the regular. All sent out to their Spark Delivery low-paid gig drivers.
The way this was handled before these gig economy food delivery companies sprang up. People didn't automatically die of starvation because they were disabled and became adults prior to DoorDash. Medicaid and Meals on Wheels fill in some of the gaps depending upon age and state.
These companies springing up put the old ones out of business. For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now. There's no going back to the "old way" when it doesn't exist. And now this kind of consolidation means they get to jack up prices however they want.
> For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now.
Before DoorDash, other than pizza places (who still run their own drivers), what restaurants delivered? McDonald's tried delivery for a short period of time, but other than that, nobody delivered.
Luckily he came of age just as texting took off. I guess in theory he could of relied upon a translator to make phone calls for him, but his life was much improved by modern communication.
Even if new technology makes things easier for 99% of people who are lazy, but is essential for that last 1%, it's a net positive.
Consolidation in this industry is horrible for everyone. Less competition means higher prices and lower pay.
It's strange that the internet, which reduces friction and allows strangers to talk directly to each other more easily than ever before, has given rise to these massive companies that do absolutely nothing but serve as middlemen. Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Lyft... in a normal transaction with these companies, nobody who actually works for them ever does a damned thing for me. They exist solely to transmit a few hundred bytes of information from me to the driver, along with some of my money while keeping a bunch of it for themselves. For doing what, exactly?
At the end of the day, I guess their real product is trust. I wouldn't give $50 to a random stranger and ask them to drive me to the airport, but I would give $50 to Uber so they can give $25 to the stranger. It sure seems like a lot to pay for trust, though.
Instacart fired my wife for running for office. My wife asked for approval to run from her boss, the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, who approved it and the company was excited for her to run.
A couple days after my wife launched her campaign, Instacart did a 180 and told her they had to fire her for running. Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
My wife was also pregnant and she told them. They fired her the next day.
My son lost his job so did InstaCart for a while. He got really good at it and started making good money. Then they sent him to an apartment complex but didn't give him an apartment number.
He called support who contacted the customer and said they were on their way and could he wait five minutes. Of course he did but 30 minutes went by.
Contacted support again who said customer would be there in five minutes but, 15 minutes later, support said to just take the goods back to the store.
He took the goods back to the store but the store refused to accept them. Support said he could just donate them or keep them.
Despite showing the back and forth text messages, he was deactivated for not delivering to the customer.
We're supposed to sue companies when they treat us like this but few of us do because it's a difficult process. Companies know this and act with impunity.
I wonder if this would have affected the result, though. I haven't been through either process, but it seems like either would be a venue for making your case and getting a fair judgement. My understanding (which could be totally wrong, please correct me) is that companies mostly force arbitration because it is cheaper and less variable than trials, not necessarily because the results tend to be biased toward them. Is that true?
My understanding is that it's cheaper because it is mediated by largely by a single person in a conference room, rather than the heavier process of collecting a jury. And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Collecting a jury doesn't cost the participants of a lawsuit anything. And the vast majority of civil cases do not make it to trial.
>And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
The vast majority of civil cases do not go to a jury, so again, I don't think this is good reasoning. The difference is mostly in discovery, which in an arbitration is stacked against any plaintiff bringing their claims compared to what they'd be entitled to in state or federal courts. That's probably the biggest reason they are less variable, in my experience.
>It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Well according to you, you don't really have any idea of any of this, you are just reflecting your understandings which are based on what?
> Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
But that doesn't mean those biases are not present.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks. (I admitted to not knowing and was open to being corrected. I appreciate you actually correcting my understanding, rather than assuming I hadn't even considered it.)
The issue of whether or not "forced" arbitration agreements are binding is different, but in this context I don't see it being something an employee can get out of. Some states have laws, for example, that destroy arbitration agreements in employment contexts for sexual harassment claims. If you have anything to offer, I'm more than happy to consider it. Short of that, I don't really see what point you're actually making besides "Maybe? I don't know!"
Arbitration is not nearly as one-sided as people make it out to be. It's much more about making sure that the case can be completed quickly than it is about the company winning.
If you have an absolute lay-up of a case (something like "my company fired me because I got pregnant, and lied about by pretending to change their mind about something they'd already approved of"), then you're going to win the arbitration case. Well, more accurately, the company's going to throw a pile of cash at you before it even gets that far, because they screwed up and the first time legal hears about it, the first words out of their mouth will be "you did fucking what?".
It is nigh impossible to cleanly fire an employee from the time you learn they're pregnant, to like a year after they come back from maternity leave. Unless they broke into your office and took a shit on the desk, the default opinion of every judge is going to be "I read about this exact scenario while studying for the bar, literally textbook".
When COVID hit, I got sick and had to spend several days inside ordering delivery. And more than once, the store was missing half my order. So I then had to make new orders for the food I wasn't able to get the first time -- while they refunded me only for the items they didn't have, leaving me to eat the (multiple) delivery fees and driver tips.
One of them is a worker drone with very little power, the other is the company's founder and CEO who is openly telling people that he believes a decent chunk of his employees don't deserve basic human rights. Quite a difference there, don't you think?
Software, especially open-source has an over-representation of people that identify as LGBTQ. Brendan openly signaled that he thought a good subset of his employees did not deserve the same rights as others. I don't see how he could have been an effective CEO after doing that.
It would've been a huge liability for Mozilla. An employer is not allowed to discriminate on sexuality. Fire any LGBTQ employee, and there's now a decent chance that Mozilla will now have to prove in court that it didn't have anything to do with the CEO openly hating gay people and creating a hostile work environment.
What a strange hill to stand on at this time. The overwhelming public backlash, boycotts, and resulting damage to Mozilla's brand left Eich with no practical choice but to step down.
> The lawsuit says Instacart violated a California law that bars companies from preventing their employees from becoming candidates for public office, among other complaints.
What would be the consequences of ensuring that only those with enough personal wealth to be able to go without a job while campaigning can run for office?
She approached to ask for permission. If they had any reservations, that was the time to discuss them. She did what was expected of an employee. The fact that they blessed her and then went back on their word seems wrong.
Not a lawyer but my intuition says there might be some legal grounds here favouring the wife.
My take is someone even higher up found out later and did not like it. Now it’s entirely possible the individuals who gave their blessings were supportive of the party the wife was standing for, and the ones above them weren’t? Still whoever blessed the campaign did so in their capacity as a senior officer of the company. A total shit show nevertheless.
To the original commenter: sorry this happened to your wife. Hope she’s able to find another job that treats her right. Also congrats on the baby, hoping parenthood makes up for all of this and more. Sending the best of wishes your way.
AFAIK in every US state a company can fire you for any reason that’s not protected, and “we told you this was okay but changed our minds” is as good a reason as any in the law’s eyes.
In many US states a company can fire you even for protected reasons, and just fabricate a reason that isn't protected. Of course there are examples of people fighting this because it sometimes is a fight worth having, but the vast majority just have to accept being discriminated against and try to find another job.
Puerto Rico is technically not a state, but as part of the US, and counted in the statistics of the (federal) Department of Labor, I would also count it as a _not "at-will"_ state.
Correct. If she had something in writing, signed by a person with proper authority in the organization, she might be on stronger footing. But they could just find some other reason, or state "no reason" for her termination, and that's perfectly legal in an at-will employment.
If I ask my employer if I can start a YouTube channel and then after getting permission I start posting videos that make the company look bad, and showing how awesome competitor products were I wouldn't be surprised if I got fired. I wouldn't be fired for the account but what I did with it.
Buuut it’s probably better for society to not kneecap ordinary folks just for trying to run for office. Otherwise, you only get folks in office with deep pockets who can take the hit.
Personal liberty and freedom also require people to be free from economic coercion so that we can exercise those rights. Corporations have an asymmetric amount of power and we should stop anthropomorphizing them.
> "a just society should generally tolerate the intolerant, reserving self-preserving actions for only when intolerance poses a concrete threat to liberty and stability."
Freedom of speech and self-expression applies to just that: words
If intolerance or hate poses a physical threat, or in any way infringes on the liberty and personal autonomy of others, a line has been crossed and must be swiftly dealt with.
I’m guessing you may not be from a minority and/or you live in a safe area? It’s a common occurrence for bigots to lob “words” at those people, in a way that they rightfully do not feel safe. On occasion, it escalates. What this means is that those people, for their own safety, have to act differently than they normally would. For example, gay/lesbian couples often have to pretend to be straight and can’t have a normal night out and display affection without being in danger.
In addition to the possibility of peril, there is also the psychological harm these interactions cause, and the living in fear.
It is only those who are safe who believe words from the intolerant are harmless. The intolerant count on that lack of knowledge to get away with “just asking questions”.
I hope you and your loved ones never have to go through any such interactions, they are harrowing, but I also urge you to have deep discussions with the recipients of them to understand a bit better why we should protect them instead of dismissing their concerns.
Even if an employee has the authority to make a decision, executive leadership should still have the legal right to terminate someone if they disagree with that choice. Let's not make running a business illegal.
Political beliefs or views are not a "protected class" in US federal employment law. That said, most employers at least say that they support political participation, but once you start taking public actions it becomes a bit different.
If a person made a large contribution or gave other public support to an extremist candidate, an employer might not want any association with that.
If running for an office is going to take up a significant amount of one's time, such that it might impact availability for work during normal hours, an employer would care about that.
In this specfic case, if she was featuring "I work for Instacart" in any way in her campaign they might care about that.
If she was saying anything inflamatory or controversial, Instacart might not want to be associated with that.
So running for a nonpartisan office such as a local council or school board or similar would normally not be any issue. Anything where party politics feature prominently is going to be riskier.
It's a standard practice in suppressing democratic norms yes. The US has a long sordid history of the elites absolutely hating when commoners practice democratic beliefs.
Let's not forget that many of our "founding fathers" deeply hated democracy and when speaking of the "democracy problem" of the 1780s in America it was mostly referring to commoners in Massachusetts participating in civic duties.
This tradition has never went away and is still practiced today.
I mean, running for office is essentially a full time job right?
It seems totally reasonable to both have a law that protects a citizen’s right to run for office without losing their job, but it also seems reasonable to require some sort of coordination with an employer.
(Knowing nothing about this, it is seems like it should work roughly like an extended jury duty.)
> Lisa Vedernikova Khanna, a candidate in Virginia, says in a lawsuit that the mobile shopping giant cited concerns her bid could hurt the company with President Donald Trump.
They always had a slimy reputation. I interviewed there very early on and two of the engineers interviewing me told me they fire people 1 day from vesting constantly...
I am of course very sympathetic to your wife and think it is outrageous that someone should lose their job this way but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice. I hope she wins the lawsuit and gets paid out but I can’t hate Instacart for being pragmatic.
Can you criticize them instead for firing her for something that their Chief Corporate Affairs Officer explicitly gave her permission to do? If it was a matter of pragmatism, they could have declined her request for permission. (One might separately argue about whether this should be a matter of right vs a matter of permission, but regardless, she did seek permission and was granted it.)
How many examples do we need of the Trump administration doing some illegal move then getting slapped down by the courts? This would be a slam dunk for DoorDash. That they chose to capitulate instead is damning.
The courts eventually ruling against the administration doesn’t undo the harm caused. A Trump tirade against Instacart could be a death sentence for the business.
Based on the ground you're treading I'd be careful with your casual use of "death sentence" when talking about something that is nothing of the sort, but behaviours that are only a few steps from the real thing.
>> but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice
That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?
> Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
I think it's a fully justified reason. If I'm in a senior position and I say something that in someway hurts the company reputation/income, I would be fired. If the company liveness depend on me being fired, the I think the decision is justified.
Running doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. I don't say firing is morally correct, but most companies don't work on moral. It's sad that this is the state, but what can you do? Companies are entities that want money, nothing stands in the way.
I really don’t understand people who use these? Is it really that hard to go drive to Taco Bell or the grocery store and buy your food there? Every time I have used one of these services I have had a terrible customer experience.
Or are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
And fwiw, I’m not against delivery. I use Amazon fresh frequently but I would argue that is much more efficient. Dedicated drivers and warehouses optimized for grocery is societally useful.
Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
I gift meals to people in other cities when they're in need (sick, childbirth, death in the family) and I'm not nearby to help.
I've had intense working situations where an extra hour of work was worth paying someone $30 to deliver my $100 of groceries.
We've frequently used DoorDash and other services for small business meetings where we wanted to provide lunch, or in some situations where we had to stay late (security incidents, etc) and wanted to provide the team with something better than pizza delivery.
However it's also scary to watch some people who will DoorDash whenever they feel like it without regard to the cost. I watched some eye-opening conversations among college students comparing how much they had spent on DoorDash in the past year, even though they were not in a financial demographic that should have been indulging in delivery.
I use Instacart every week. It's clearly valuable over shopping yourself for a lot of people and the shoppers are clearly making more than "half a dollar".
Maybe you don't have kids or that busy of a schedule?
I use DoorDash all the time. Here in urban San Diego, there are lots of restaurants with no nearby parking – so you either have to park blocks away in a residential neighborhood or have a companion who can grab the food while the driver circles the block. Or carry your tacos home on the bus.
> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
Ok, but then...
> I use Amazon fresh frequently
So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...
Having a terrible experience seems like a local issue, certainly some areas might have a worse pool of delivery personnel than others but where I live the people doing Instacart are primarily women and they do an excellent job. Many women can't do Uber because of the insane levels of harassment, but they are able to do "gig" work like Instacart or UberEats that doesn't involve interacting with random strangers.
Like most things in life, it's not a matter of difficulty, as if I am so incapable of going to a grocery store to buy groceries and the undue hardship it will cause me. It's simply a matter of how I like to budget my time. I judge that the 30 minutes it can take to do groceries is better spent doing other things with my life.
Exactly. I’ll also add two other cases. My 80 year old grandma no longer drives. We live a hour away and visit every weekend to take her grocery shopping, but it’s nice to order her snacks throughout the week.
When our kids were babies we were sleep deprived and their sleep schedule made it hard to randomly go out. Having delivery was so helpful during those years.
And these days I’ll order delivery if I’m feeling sick or just tired.
I used to use DoorDash and Instacart almost daily. Then I got a retail job.
I see and interact with hundreds of people a day. DoorDashers are the worst of the worst, by a mile. I cannot wait for the day DoorDash ceases to exist.
I can spot a DoorDasher from a mile away. There are three types of DoorDashers.
The first is the kind who is most likely not here legally. They come barreling into the store with their speakerphones turned up to the max as they yell into the phone to their wife/girlfriend in some other language (Venezuelan/Cuban?) the entire time. Without any attempt to look on their own, they find every worker they see and shove the phone in their face demanding and begging to have us do their job for them and find the items. Then they get in line, phone still blasting, and ignore you when you smile and say hello or ask them to touch a button on the screen or say “thank you, have a nice rest of your day”. This kind makes up probably about 70% of DDers. Mind you, I interact with non-English speakers all day. They make eye contact, they smile, they make an attempt. DoorDashers make zero attempt whatsoever and are extremely brash and rude.
The second is the citizens who cannot get a job anywhere else. These are all very clearly drug addicts and former convicts straight out of the halfway house who shop and deliver under the influence of every mixture of drug you can imagine. Really, really rough people. These people, too, also beg you to complete their entire shopping trip for them, but at least they understand English and make eye contact with you. These are about 20% of DDers.
The last group are the “okay” ones. These are decent everyday people who talk to you like a human being, smile, and are friendly. They only ask for help after they’ve clearly made an effort to find the items on their own. Unfortunately, this group makes up only about 10% of adders.
We got along just fine a few years ago when DoorDash didn’t exist. DD contributes to the anti socialization of the world, and it’s not a good thing.
Think really hard - why would doordash laborers be like that? Each thing you state - rudeness, brashness, drug addicts, convicts, etc, are all signs of desperation. People don't want to rush through their life or work as if being whipped. Its a job of indiscriminate last resort because they are paid as little as humanly possible and forced by an algorithm to adhere to timetables. Doordash and Instacart both make hefty profits, and spend at least 2-3x on their corporate employees and executive management as they do those actually performing the work. Your complaints are a direct reflection of the system that they control - if you want more pleasant laborers, ask them to make their labor less demanding.
Personally a doordash and instacart are like utility platforms if we are planning to use them to replace conventional means of delivery and discovery.
So I honestly think they should be under heavy govt regulations or be co-owned by everyone in the supply chain. Or firm regulated to avoid overcharging for useless stuff, everyone loses out including these companies as in needing to compete with eachother they have to offer dozens of benefits offers etc to customers, and customers get shafted when they are the most desperate because making money from the desperate is the best money making formula in the valley atm.
I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.
Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.
It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
Have you been careful about making sure that the prices you're charged when shopping online are the same as what's on the price tag on the shelves? Online shopping makes it extremely easy for companies to overcharge you based on what they think you're willing/able to pay and provides them with valuable data they can use to decide when/how much to raise their prices.
You can also run into problems where employees will select for lower quality produce, and about to expire foods that in-store shoppers will commonly pass over. It's nice that it means less food gets thrown away, but can also mean you can end up wasting your money buying food you can't or don't want to eat.
a tip for an unusual order/circumstance would be fine. Say if you ordered a 50lb bag of cat food, and live on the Nth floor, and the elevators are not working.
I see no reason to think that was the case. They'll work for whatever rate companies pay them. There are many workers in minimum wage jobs who don't get tips at all. I agree that tipping is a bad practice and that it pushes labor costs onto customers. It will take regulation for companies to stop and tipping culture to change. I'm doing my part to try and keep the problem from getting worse by refusing to tip for almost anything except deliveries and being actually waited on. No matter how much companies beg for tips for basic retail purchases and counter service I don't feel at all bad about turning them down.
They do serve the same market for gig workers that don’t want to be ride share drivers, though, right? I wonder what their market share is for that.
In my area Walmart is on Instacart and I've often wondered how that squares with their own delivery service.
They tried that with WalmartPay. After about a decade, they gave up[1].
Consumers have a lot of agency. A lot of people get paid access to one of the other platforms by virtue of tie-ins with their mobile carrier, or bank, or whatever. There's low incentive to pay again to use Walmart's delivery service, which will not also bring delicious Thai food for lunch.
1 - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/21/walmart-to-finally-start-a...
With this merger I have a feeling that things are only going to go worse.
> to Help Local Stores Win
Any local store will tell you DD is a necessary evil they put up with but strongly dislike overall. From the % of sales they take to the incredibly rude delivery drivers, DD is not well liked.
On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.
Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude. It was a very clear and direct communication. A simple scan, and boom, nothing further needed, I could just scan their items. Thr QR code scan handled payment and everything. They almost always helped with doing thier own bagging: Time is money, after all.
I want to be clear, the ability to speak English is not what I took issue with. That doesn't bother me and I'm fine with just showing the phone screen, no conversation. The issue I had was cutting the line and essentially demanding they be helped immediately. Wait in line like everyone else. This is a small food stall in a food hall with often just 1 person working the front. If they are actively helping another customer and have a line, I find it unacceptable to think you can cut to the front and immediately demand attention. What message does that send to the customers in line? "You're less important than delivery orders", and I can tell you that isn't the case due to the large chunk that DD takes.
My family member has even considered shutting down DD orders temporarily if/when the drivers act this way and publishing on social media about it. According to them, the loss in sales (and overall profit, which is minor on DD orders) wouldn't matter compared to the publicity/engagement (I don't know, that's not my world).
What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.
It's a finder's fee, a very old and ordinary concept in business. The more sales you can bring to a company (or could divert to competitors), the more skin in the game you have. That's not to say I think these companies aren't in some ways anticompetitive to the detriment of merchants and DIY shoppers.
In theory it's because that customer wouldn't be purchasing without DD. In practice it's a shakedown.
Elsewhere in this post a store owner talks about how DD is a necessary evil. How they have convinced a big chunk of customers to only use DD to order food, and you will lose out if you aren't on the platform.
And all the stuff you mention.
The one restaurant owner I know who’s happy with DD set up an entirely separate kitchen in an industrial park. But to get to the DD revenue necessary to justify that investment, he had a couple of years of DD hell in his main restaurant.
Could see the kitchen areas through a window and they weren't necessarily dirty, but looked sketchy for some reason. Few people, robots delivering orders, one set of cooks making the food. Just dystopian.
We might as well just build ready to eat food factories that pipe the slop directly into your house. We got rid of the "inconvenience" of going out to eat and enjoying a restaurant. Why not get rid of the pesky delivery middle-man too?
And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).
Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?
It can be easier to rebrand a ghost kitchen than to rejigger a restaurant to do other things, though. For instance: The decor doesn't even exist, much less match a certain theme.
A ghost kitchen can also do many things at once that would not traditionally fit together in a single restaurant.
I think that might be part of what some find off-putting, but there's no conceptual reason why the same location can't make awesome New Haven wood-fired pizzas, Texas smoked beef ribs, and Philly cheesesteak sandwiches on the same day. It can work as long as the volume supports each of them well-enough that they can retain workers who are able to master these things well-enough to keep a good reputation going.
It's just a building with a kitchen, and that kitchen does not have a size limit. It can do many styles of cooking at once.
And when compared to having several different sit-down restaurants to operate, management can be more-centralized while also keeping them closer to the work. This can improve quality and reduce costs.
(That doesn't make me a fan of the idea. I'd rather go to a restaurant and sit down than have anything delivered, aside from things that travel well. Pizza, BBQ, and cold subs can travel extremely well, for instance, while french fries and burgers usually turn into sadness in minutes. But other people want whatever they want and that's fine too.)
That's exactly what it's like in NYC. They just walk up with their huge backpacks straight to the front skipping everyone, turn around bumping people, show their phone, then stand RIGHT in the front as-if no one else exists. It's awful.
I'd love to contribute to a no-delivery store. Pickup or dine-in only.
Edit: Might have to re-think Pickup because that would just become a loophole for delivery. Maybe orders have to be placed in-store for to go.
I don't understand why you think they should wait in line in restaurants where people order at the counter, to pick up their order which was placed online. And if you want to see this, you should be supporting legislation makes them proper employees who get a proper wage based on their time working.
Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
I don’t get why we’re talking legislation; it’s basic courtesy.
If I said “hey, here’s $5 if you go cut the line at that restaurant,” does that make it right?
It's also worth noting that most restaurants set the instructions for the pickup, which is usually along the lines of “go to the front of the line and provide the staff with the order number”.
The dine-in customers have not paid for or ordered their food, to do so they must wait in line.
The delivery driver is being handed a bag of food that is ready to go and paid for.
Many restaurants are already set up to accommodate online to-go orders. Chik-Fil-A has a separate drive-thru line for online orders, Chipotle lets people come up and get to-go orders that have been paid, same with Potbelly, it’s very common. It’s mildly annoying when you’re the one waiting in line but I don’t expect a delivery driver to wait in line to be handed a bag.
Regarding line cutting - it doesn't quite make sense that someone just picking up a bag that is already prepared should wait in the same line as people who are putting in orders for food. For an extreme example, a BBQ place near me in Brooklyn commonly has lines that are 45 minutes long, with people waiting to order. Should a person who called in an order wait in that line, or just go to the front and ask for their food?
Lots of people cycling all in black on ebikes on pavements making it dangerous for people to walk around safely and causing chaos for drivers and other cyclists. Also generally supporting big business over small stores. Everyone moans about having individuals charged with these minor traffic offences but in my view just targeting companies like JustEat directly and having massive fines based on employee behaviour would be far more effective.
Freak what you feel but delivery apps are just not worth it for me personally outside of those necessary contexts and I don't mind the inconvenience of picking up my own food.
Merging reduces platform inefficiencies and drivers can work both situation.
I am actually amazed both companies are alive and making a profit.
DD plays big games with pay, sometimes hides tips, drives down base pay, and stacks orders with good pay and bad pay offers to try and pay drivers as little money as possible.
In a bad economy, there's less people ordering on DD (although higher income earners who aren't as effective by economic effects don't change habits), however, it drives MORE desperate drivers to the platform that accept the low pay orders since they no longer have an income. This drives down all wages for drivers, and costs, which in turn pads DD's margins.
We actually see this seasonally in the summer when more students and teachers join the platform over the break. There's a glut of drivers, you can't cherry pick higher paying orders and most stuff that's left to fight for is low paying, no tip orders. When school starts back up things return to normal.
This is why DD is trying to sign up as many drivers as possible. If you remove the scarcity of drivers, then every low paying gig will eventually get picked up, driving average pay down and you can ratchet down your base pay hoping customer tips make up the slack.
You're probably absolutely right about this, and some people in the company, or who invest in it, have likely made this exact (cold hard) calculation.
None of the money saved by reducing inefficiencies will lower prices for consumers or increase pay for drivers. The goal is always to charge customers the most while giving them the least, while paying employees as little as they can get away with. In theory merging also kills off competition that might steal customers and workers by offering better prices/wages, although in practice companies share the same goal of screwing over both consumers and workers and are perfectly willing to resort to collusion in order to do that most efficiently.
This was literally why Rockefeller was a big proponent of the monopoly. Unfortunately exploitation is the tradeoff that is enables
From the NYT version of this story:
> DoorDash said the median payment to be returned to workers amounts to around $48. > City officials said about 700 workers are owed more than $10,000 each; more than 27,000 workers are owed more than $1,000; and more than 4,000 workers are owed more than $5,000.
DoorDash also spent (from what I can tell) (1+1.4+1.8) million dollars to campaign against Mamdani.
There is debate about whether or not Doordash needed to do this, if they are just being vindictive etc. But what we do know is that regulation came at a cost to NYC consumers. And it wasn't just Door Dash. Uber Eats added a $2 fee and Instacart added a $5.99 fee. New Yorkers can determine for themselves if they want to pay higher prices to ensure higher wages.
[0] https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/changes-to-fees-nyc
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani...
Culper Research released a report about a year ago indicating a large component of DoorDash labor is very likely undocumented workers (which is not meant to be derogatory towards these workers, but signal that DoorDash needs labor willing to take gig payments on offer to make the model work).
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b...
I don't think the platform economics are working post ZIRP ("zero interest rate policy") as wages rise and margins compress, would need more data to understand what forward curves look like.
Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.
One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.
Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.
But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).
It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.
Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.
This is how income tax was sold to the American public. When it originally started it really only did effect the top earners, but as the years rolled on and inflation happened it impacted more and more people. The reality is these tools that target only the 'wealthy', if they're successful are used to target everyone.
"Inflation brought everyone into the taxable income brackets" has very little to do with it. A significant portion of the population still doesn't make enough income to pay federal tax.
Taxes are unpopular. The government has no reason to "target everyone" because that's an easy way to get voted out.
1 - https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-tax-stats-at-a-...
This is also why California is voting on a wealth tax.
Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270764 - October 2026
The 'Buy, Borrow and Die' Wealth Strategy Has Become a $5T Market - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50253630 - October 2026
Warren Buffett has been saying this for years, that his secretary was taxed at a higher effective rate then him.
Billionaire Warren Buffett Calls It 'Outrageous' His Secretary Pays 2x's His Tax Rate – 'If This Is A War, My Side Has The Nuclear Bomb' - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-warren-buffett-ca... - December 16th, 2024
- He explained, "I don't pay hardly any payroll taxes. Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes." Driving the point home, he emphasized the disparity: "Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes."
- Buffett's effective tax rate was 17.4% at the time, largely due to his income coming from capital gains, which are taxed much lower than ordinary wages. Bosanek, like many middle-class Americans, was paying nearly 36% when payroll and income taxes were combined.
- According to a CBS News report, Buffett quickly clarified that he didn't blame Romney for following the law. "I don't blame Gov. Romney for paying the tax rate he paid," Buffett said. "I blame the U.S. Congress."
- The disparity didn't bother Buffett – it drove him to advocate for sweeping changes to the tax code. In an op-ed for The New York Times, he argued for what would become known as the "Buffett Rule," a proposal to implement a minimum 30% tax on incomes exceeding $1 million. President Obama backed the idea, but opposition in Congress kept it from moving forward.
[1] https://www.mamdanibulletin.com/p/everything-zohran-mamdani-...
The pendulum will swing back, and be the opportunity to prevent this from ever happening again.
(i like taxes, with them i buy civilization, although i prefer they pay for social services and improving quality of life of humans with said resources, not endless wars in the middle east and tax cuts for the wealthiest driven by old men, their ideology, and their egos [n=1, ymmv, my two cents])
it's bad if you're an investor I guess.
If this merger is approved via consumer welfare standard, should it be contingent upon some constraints? For example, should DoorDash be restricted from participating in the market it coordinates? If it’s a near monopoly in some regions, how will price be controlled without market pressure?
Historically, antitrust action also considers economic opportunity: Bell/AT&T licensed Unix source code for a nominal fee, largely because the 1956 consent decree restricted Bell/AT&T from selling products outside telecommunications.
The bad news is the US has developed a deeply entrenched culture of non-enforcement of laws rich people do not like. Unfortunately, until the culture changes, market pressure is the only avenue for relief.
Their platform scopes and coordinates a market. They even recognize this in their announcement: "DoorDash and Instacart believe that communities benefit when Main Street competes"
If contestabilty, not marketshare, is the appropriate test of economic power, then laws may be needed to increase contestability, such as "data portability" rules for store owners so they don't have to key-in product description, availability, and pricing multiple times.
In your example of a new delivery platform entrant who bootstraps using its direct competitor, what legal framework protects that startup? This seems another contestability consideration.
Heck, they don't even have to sign up. Just copy their listing from Doordash and when someone orders, place an order on Doordash if you can't fulfil it yourself. You'll probably need several phones to scale this, or you could make a doordash account per customer.
Once you have some drivers yourself, go around restaurants in your area and copy down their menus. Have drivers go and make takeaway orders.
Doordash undoubtedly used all these tactics. This is just how business works. Obviously doordash didn't order off doordash but they surely integrated restaurant ordering from places that already had their own delivery.
If you have VC funding, subsidize part of what doordash is charging so your prices are lower. IIRC Google did this once to the point where a pizza restaurant repeatedly ordered their own pizzas and made a profit, making front-page HN - don't go that crazy.
Yes. Instacart has low cost retailers like Walmart and Aldi in many areas, and their prices are generally better than Amazon groceries. Now Walmart does also have their own service, so technically you can do that, but then you're limited to just them.
I compared a meal I bought takeout the other day (by calling the place and walking over to pick it up) vs the same meal on Doordash.
* Direct: 56.28
* Doordash: 101.16
Nearly double. It can be hard to find out what the actual direct price is for some restaurants, but I'd encourage you to make the same experiment.
From Dominos you can get 10 pizzas delivered for not much more than that.
As a thought experiment, we currently have a duopoly for ride share. Would we be better off if Uber were broken up into two platforms?
Obviously having one platform would be bad, since there would be no price competition, but what’s the optimal number? Surely, too many platforms would be bad, as the concentration of delivery workers would be terrible on each app, making the whole system inefficient (setting aside whether one things the system should exist at all).
DD's new metric no longer even lets you dispute reports that an order wasn't delivered, with the obvious issues that come from that: having accounts with other apps in good standing is necessary to maintain your income if and when something stupid happens.
By the time the CEO bailed to OpenAI, the damage was done - billions of dollars of opportunity, totally wasted. She left an organization gripped with paralysis, apparently too broken to fix and remain independent.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% markup)
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
I wrote more about it here
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-food-de...
If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.
For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.
Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.
The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...
For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.
Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.
Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)
Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)
Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)
That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.
They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.
If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.
only the latter is true. the former is true only for a subset of restaurants.
While your old pizza place probably serves the same amount of pizzas as before, for other restaurants, not specialized in delivery, the number of meals they sell has exploded.
so restaurant make less money per meal, put they make more meals.
also while customers pay more, you could see it as the price of convenience and choice.
Making a phone call, then paying with cash, is just crazy efficient. What exactly have we even gained?
Are we really asking this question in the year of our Late Stage Capitalism lord 2026? Are we confused about the American Oligarchy working with private equity to dash all the labor gains of the mid-20th century?
It's going to billionaire's Yacht & Bunker funds. The gig economy is about inserting tech into the middle of a functioning system to extract wealth for 4-5 dudes' benefit.
Stop hand waving about capitalism. Give me a real answer.
...right?
Donald Trump is worth billions of dollars despite dozens of his projects "losing money"/going bankrupt. I will stop "waving about capitalism" when it stops doing the same fucking thing while incredulous passersby go "surely it must be something else causing the problem".
I've heard of that being "a thing" where the brand wants to make sure their product is actually out on the shelves properly, so that Dasher probably got easy money verifying the store did their own job properly.
https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/introducing-doordash-t...
I assume it's just their own version of Gigwalk (https://www.gigwalk.com/).
I wonder if DD is going to make a play for Lyft next, which they’re already in close partnership. The market consolidating to these 2 players (Uber and DoorDash) seems natural(?), for lack of better terms. Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me.
I do wonder what percentage of their orders are McDonalds. I lived near one and the car traffic of vehicles with delivery placards was significant.
Which makes me wonder about pricing pressure that is often reported re: McDonalds, and yet people end up paying $30-40 for a $15 McDonalds order.
Don’t get it.
>Don’t get it.
I get that it takes full advantage of human tendency to be lazy. A friends stepson works a crappy job seemingly to pay for his door dash. The kid saves almost no money and is always asking his mother for money here and there while living at home with no expenses outside of his door dash and video game purchases. He couldn't afford to buy a bicycle.
> My wife and I BARELY have time to go grocery shopping
If you can, take them grocery shopping with you. One parent stays at home doing stuff, the other goes grocery shopping with at least one kid.
In my experience kids at least 12-18 months old LOVE grocery shopping.
Get a big shopping cart, put them in that special seat facing you. Keep it concise, don't shop for more than 1 hour per round. Talk to them, explain what you're doing, give them harmless things to play with (a carrot, a celery bulb, a bag of rice, whatever). Have a little fun with the produce, they will love random things, for example that weird looking tomato.
It becomes even easier as they grow a bit.
The way I see it: customer service sucks real bad now. In San Francisco it sucks incredibly bad. Adding another layer of it is another place for things to get worse.
I completely understand how door dash is useful. But I've been so disappointed that I just don't consider it anymore
Stop entertaining your kid.
Your kid doesn't need to be entertained. They don't need the tv, a tablet, or a scheduled production put on by their parents.
Let them be entertain themselves. They are great at it.
They will be better behaved, they will be happier and more independent. You will enjoy spending time with your kids again.
Take them out. Let them wait in line. Let them sit at the table a bit. Do slow restaurants that aren't kid friendly.
Let them bring a few small non-electronic toys or a little book, or paper and crayons.
Also, entertaining is not always putting on a show for them or giving them an ipad. Just chatting with three small children sitting around a table while they color can be difficult and you don't always have the energy.
its ok to say what you mean and have it land in different ways for different people.
I was going to say that this is an absurd leap, but going off your username I suspect that was the point.
> Take them out.
?
I took the advice as to remove the stress and pressure of assuming kids need synchronous attention to stay entertained. They sure will want it. resist.
Things that work for your kids don’t necessarily work for all kids.
1. only some specific circumstances for regular kids
2. special needs kids
should warrant exceptions.
I do get it. If you just really dont want to spend time on getting/making your own food, dont care about the cost, and are willing to put up with the experience then it serves a purpose. There is also a difference between doing it regularly and rarely.
I'd wager most, although not all (reread this before replies of "but I ..."), of those people doing it regularly are lazy and making a bad financial decisions but thats on them.
I guess I could like, get a shopping cart and spent an extra 40 minutes hauling stuff back and forth every time we wanted groceries, but even that would be somewhat dependent on weather; a delivery driver is not going to have to walk 40 minutes in heavy rain and can bring frozen goods in an amount of time that doesn't result in them being soggy or completely melted messes by the time they reach us.
basically the only things i bother online delivering grocery wise are bulky dry goods (e.g. paper towels)
I literally order from all of those companies as do 10s of millions of people if not more.
Do you have regular groceries delivered?
You couldn't torture that out of me.
I haven't eaten MacD's in decades, but why does it matter as a percentage? How much you're willing to pay should be dependent on how much it costs you to acquire the items yourself. For example, if the store is a 10 minute round trip and you value your free time at at least $30/hr then paying $5 for delivery is rational, regardless of the item's initial cost. Better than rational even, when considering fuel and vehicle wear-and-tear.
(Of course if you have a kitchen, equipment, and time then buying bulk ingredients and making your own meals is sometimes more efficient, but thats an argument against buying prepared food in the first place, not against getting it delivered.)
That's not to say it is worth it as an axiomatic rule, but it's something some people will choose from among the options available to them, which may be many or few, as dictated by their circumstances.
Compared to what? Pulling left overs out of the fridge? Or driving to get takeout? Driving to get takeout was never the financially savy decision in the first place. You are simply paying more for enjoyment. So let's not set that as the baseline.
In terms of time, if you spend 40 minutes on a batch making 8 meals you are spending 5 minutes/meal on preparation. You're going to take that much time with your doordash order so there is not even a time saving.
Doordash buys you enjoyment and impulsiveness. You can spend your money on that. But don't fool yourself into thinking its a time or especially a money saver.
Compared to what? Pulling left overs out of the fridge? Or driving to get takeout? Driving to get takeout was never the financially savy decision in the first place so let's not set that as the baseline.
That's it. The comparison is indeed burger delivery vs drive-through/takeout. Cooking is irrelevant in the equation.
Do we not have the freedom to be impulsive?
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
you’re bragging about being above mcdonalds. on an internet forum.
chill
I don't order artificial food on apps or go anywhere near the golden arches, but it amazes me that the majority of the app orders are for these chains that sell utter garbage.
It is a bit like a phone, you could open a book to read classic literature or you could doom scroll AI trash all day. For some reason the latter option is invariably chosen over the former.
The money is also ridiculous, I am not sure of golden arches prices with delivery and tip on top, I just don't live like that. However, I always cook from scratch with no animal products, just stodgy vegetables, and I am sure that my weekly food bill is going to be less than one delivered cold and late burger meal of no nutritional value.
Also shocking as a cooking person is how few McDonald's orders are sit down with people. We have ended up with people eating with their fingers in their solitary confinement cars with the worst junk food possible, whereas we once had dinner parties with a proper table, home cooked food of nutritional value, valued company, crockery, cutlery, etiquette and prayers to an imaginary god.
Even stranger is that there is no free healthcare in the USA. Eat this garbage and you have a healthcare bill coming for the obesity, saturated fats blocking arteries, cancer and the rest of the chronic diseases that go with artificial food.
This situation is a product of American corporate ways of doing things and hard to unpick, but with these delivery apps now worth billions, there is now another barrier between healthy eating since this silly gig economy now needs to be kept in existence since jobs and corporate profits depend on it.
If you don’t want to be taxed for some service, you can always choose to vote to get rid of that service or move to a place without that service. I welcome more experimentation in municipal services.
When DoorDash drivers subtract vehicle wear and tear, fuel, depreciation, and maintenance from their earnings, their net hourly pay frequently drops below the standard minimum wage.
DoorDash benefits from desperate people who slowly transform their vehicle into cash by laboring thousands of hours. They could have just sold the car; either way they end up with cash but no car.
People need to pay rent, so they look at their capital, owning a car, and then trade away that capital for less than it's worth, and a few years later they are worse off, but at least they made rent for those months.
What you mean is you want to live in one pond and shit in other peoples because they economicaly immoral.
(And no, I don't want the city involved in food/grocery delivery).
Here is the neat thing.
They want stores to be government owned too.
Is it necessary? No. Unfortunately I don't think would be great as a utility because quality of service matters and unlike the actual utilities, there's a lot of arbitrariness to quality of the service.
Availability of vehicles for delivery purposes is an interesting proposition. Charge doordash a tax or fee to maintain a fleet of vehicles that would open flexibility in the job market. (Consider this for ride-sharing as well... basically just reinvented the taxi medallion system but maybe with less restriction).
What monopoly? I can barely remember all the companies in this space, GrubHub, UberEats, PostMates, etc.
I wouldn't mind if my mom had access to a free grocery delivery service. She's 80 and has very bad vision.
Fairer, simpler to implement, no avenues for corruption.
You live in a fantasy land if you think streaming services are not competitive and providing better value for money than public broadcasting companies.
It's a good system for aligning the costs with the people who use the service.
If you thought all tax money went into a big general bucket and the government decided what services to offer out of that, municipal garbage pickup does not work that way.
There couldn't be a free delivery service because the usage would be all over the place. Someone DoorDashing burritos for breakfast lunch and dinner 7 days a week would use it 20X more than someone doing their once-weekly grocery order. Subsidizing it would incentivize a lot of waste, traffic, vehicle usage, and other things that we actually don't want to incentivize people to use more of.
The only way this could work is with a substantial per-delivery fee, which gets us right back to what we already have with DoorDash.
And "should"... what?
That said, I'm not convinced of this idea either. But if you're not going to enforce antitrust laws, it seems preferable to a private monopoly.
I'd have no problem with a subsidized service for those that NEED it, but for those that just WANT it? Nope. But then you get into the sticky messy world of how to determine need.
Just saying, city run trash is far from universal.
I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.
(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).
For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.
I found her for free on Facebook posting in a community group. It is a high trust situation but I realize a lot of these extra fees are because we try to operate in a low trust environment, which is really not optimal. Being able to trust your community is much better for everyone.
- in the past few years, orders are frequently not received.
- in the past few years, fruit/produce is often covered in mold, rotten, or otherwise unacceptable.
- in the past few years, delivery time estimates are frequently missed.
- in the past few months, customer support got significantly worse and came to resemble the bad attitude and general grudging unhlelpfulness of AirBNB's support team.
I think the main issue has been a big shortage of supply of workers who are willing to do the job and who can do it well. Often times the person delivering the order (and the order itself) smells strongly of cigarette smoke, and increasingly I've had drivers refuse to bring the order to the door, etc.
Add to that the impact of the labor shortage on grocery stores that makes stocking less reliable and results in no availability of bags, greater chances of rotten produce, etc.
Instacart does stand behind it service and I have received full refunds for the non-delivered orders and the rotten produce, but such things must take a great toll on the profitability of the business.
The answer is not to find new pools of desperate people but to improve working conditions (pay, benefits) and on a macro level reducing cost of living so the people performing the work don't have to work so much they stop being able to.
The way you COULD do that is to reduce administrative cost. From their most recent filing, marketing costs them 1/4 of their revenue, R&D (software development) 1/5th, and operations and administration 1/8th each. Their cost of revenue aka what they pay to their "shoppers" aka lower-class labor and the businesses they integrate with is 1/4th of gross, barely a pittance compared to the slush funds for management and investor payouts.
Take a look yourself: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...
Bottom line: they are making money hand over fist, with the vast vast majority not going to workers but the corporate employees and investors. Your issue with delivery drivers is an issue with the bottom-of-the-barrel treatment decided by management - they could solve this problem (EASILY), but they choose not to in order to pay for more corporate employees and to have more profit to shareholders. The numbers are clear as day.
I think this fact is often missed by middle/upper-middle-class tech folks (like a majority of this forum). From up here, it's eas to view labor as being an equitable exchange between two parties, but as you said, that is simply not the case when the pay doesn't even come close to covering expenses.
The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job - but then the question is, who delivers the food? To which I have yet to hear a satisfying answer (besides incentivizing better wages for those workers)
These are folks who've never had to work a low wage job where bathroom breaks are tightly controlled, except maybe for fun money. I started working at 14, and as a software dev today I've never had to work nearly as hard, or be as utterly exhausted as working these sorts of jobs, which if you are having to do them to pay rent, its difficult or impossible to do extracurriculars like education or networking to move forward.
Imagine your entire workday is on a strict, short term set of timers and if you don't complete a task for any reason an automated rating goes down, and if it happens more than 3 times you are let go. People don't understand the level of stress that carries.
Don't be surprised when the permanent underclass you depend on doesn't give a shit about your moldy strawberries.
There's a reason why supermarkets went from having different counters for asking for your stuff to having you pick out your stuff yourself.
You can ship people literal trash like ten percent of the time and they will keep coming back.
You can provide someone negative value for decades, and they keep paying you.
I just cannot understand how willing to burn time, effort, and money on stupid purchases the average person is. I know I have poverty brain and used to be really bad at just spending money, but the fact of the matter is that PepsiCo had to increase the price of Doritos to $7 a bag before they saw a decline in purchasing.
Like, there are entire industries devoted to helping people figure out they are subscribed to something they don't use anymore. I don't even look at my bank account anymore but how do you possibly let that happen?
I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.
Instacart is profitable, yea? So they don't want to provide a better quality service or they would offer greater incentives to workers.
They seem like near-identical businesses to me.
Still very similar
2) Regulatory reviews typically take 6 months to a year. There is an opportunity cost to holding shares over this time, your capital is tied up in shares, when you could instead use the money to buy US 10-year Treasuries that yield around 5%.
Assuming the deal closes at $65 in 12 months, the present value of these shares is $65 / (1 + 5%) = $61.90
Also, the market has consistently undervalued Instacart since they went public to begin with, so why stop now? (signed, a not-at-all-bitter former employee)
My previous experience was any time something went wrong, no one would take accountability for it and at best I might get a partial refund but never a replacement order.
Having to do a bit more planning for meals is worth eliminating that aggravation from my life. Not to mention the shocking amount of money I'm saving.
First off, okay that's great but no one is telling you to go use them. You can continue living your life exactly as you were without needing to judge others who live their lives differently from yours.
Second, clearly there are plenty of people who do use them judging from this $17b acquisition that just happened.
You'll always get some people who argue that time is money and that the saved time that people have from ordering from these services is an opportunity cost. But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.
So then, all that is really left is convenience. And personally, I don't really find it that convenient at all. Often times the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is meaningfully longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
In other words - these services really just profit off of laziness. And the sad part is I think we're just promoting a lazy society overall with lots of the newer services being offered.
Here's how it works out rationally: I just got home from work, the kids are a mess, the house needs cleaning, and my spouse is having a work crisis. The kids favorite treat is chipotle. Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
"Hey kids chipotle treats are on the way - but you have to go get your room tidied and leave mom alone" actually does work.
6 million smart, rational engineers, mathematicians, actuaries, professors in the country, each doing this analysis, four times a year, yields 240 million dollars in surcharges without an ounce of laziness.
Then add laziness on top.
I'd be interested to see the math on this. They cover the amount I'd be expected to tip? They cover all the govt-mandated delivery driver fees? I could see how they might end up covering the official "delivery charge" but not the tip and other expected/mandatory fees that go along with actual delivery.
I don't know why Doordash in particular drives this really strange discourse where people really want to go after people who use it. You're on a technology forum, it shouldn't be surprising that some people here are using resources (money) to buy them convenience. It's practically in our DNA
I am not "going after people who use" DD. I just pushed back on the notion that it costs $10 to get dinner delivered for a family of 4.
Exactly this. They know humans will likely pick the path of least resistance. And we are generally bad at problems that have compounding long term outcomes. They are essentially preying on our societal circumstances. My story: Brain will resist using energy for creative solution from within if external solution exists for $.
Yes, doordash can prey on laziness, and people will fall into laziness, but in my example the _availability_ of the service is providing a price-adjustment for urgency that matches my own rational prioritization of the evening's needs. It's the most rational, mutually-beneficial argument I can make, and it's real in my house from time to time.
Our own parents went through this exact scenario that you mentioned plenty of times before any of this even existed without having the to pay the $10 fee.
Doordash costs more than that, but chipotle is a good deal more nutritious than the 90's-era tv dinners I remember, so I can understand parents preferring to spend a bit more for that equally-easy solution.
From my memory we often piled into the car, got dinner, and went home and my parents had to stay up late to clean while we went to bed.
In my wife's memory, one parent couldn't work - all this stuff had to fall on them.
I'm saying the $10 is a nicety, not a necessity. We would be ok without it. I just think we're a little better with it. It's a market system - if I need it, it's there at a price I can justify. Markets are a good thing.
What is this question? Is the idea of new products, technology, or services strange and problematic to you? Convenience is a major driver of invention.
Also when I was growing up my parents would order delivery plenty - but the only option was pizza because the driver worked for the pizza joint. And yes, it’s true, their parents didn’t order delivery, but they also lived in crushing poverty of the Great Depression and could barely afford to feed their kids during every meal.
8.5% of American households have no car[1]. That isn't a strict majority, but if you can be charitably informal: paying for grocery deliveries is orders of magnitude cheaper than loan+insurance+maintenance for a car.
If you want to become car-less then the like of Instacart make that a realistic prospective (but Instacart specifically makes no sense because stores usually do it for free if you can tolerate next-day).
[1]: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2024.B08201
I was landing from a flight and traveling home late on a Sunday. I also needed to go grocery shopping that night. I did not have a car at the airport, so my choices were either rideshare home for $70, or take the train for $10. The train takes about 30-40 minutes longer, but saves me $60.
If I did the rideshare, I could probably do the grocery shopping myself and get home a little bit later than when the train would get me home. Or I could take the train, order the grocery delivery, and then get home, unpack, and go to sleep. I chose to take the train and do grocery delivery. When I got home from the train, the delivery driver was walking up to my door with bags in hand. It worked out perfectly.
I could have taken the train and also done the grocery shopping myself, but it would have been very late by then and I had to be up early for work the next day.
> So then, all that is really left is convenience.
But nearly all technology and services you pay for arguably boil down to “convenience,” in the sense that people in the past either did the thing themselves or survived without it.
This misses the point. One is you devoting your own time and attention to doing the task, the other is delegating it so you can use your time for other things. Some people are going to burn the extra time scrolling (not great), others are going to help their kids with homework or get a workout in.
I'm all for people getting time back even with the downside that not everybody will choose to use it well. If people are choosing brainrot over living well, there's a bigger issue than delivery services.
I don't think there are many people using this because they think they get it faster.
In my opinion this scenario may actually end up promoting unhealthy habits for your children which is what these companies want.
If I take my kid grocery shopping 4-5 times a month versus three times a month and then ordering DoorDash the other two times is that really going to make a difference?
In fact, ordering DoorDash will also teach your kid how to value time. Especially if you spend it with them doing other things.
I struggle to see the teachings behind watching little brown men bringing meals to the door.
Virtue signaling.
I know why they do it, that doesn't mean I like how the world works.
To say “ i can’t believe people use it “ is obviously a lie. It’s a magic food delivery machine. It’s the closest thing to the Star Trek Replicator we have .
I don’t like it, and you could make a million arguments about why it’s either bad, unhealthy, bad economics etc. But it’s perfectly obvious why the business is huge.
LMAO wat
Paying an extra $10-12 in tips and fees to have some courier a meal directly to your door is ridiculously cheap, a courier service would charge 4x as much for a similar courier trip.
I completely understand the grocery deliveries, it's a trade off, time vs. money. Personally I think the delivery costs are to high, but I also live four minutes away from the supermarket on foot. For others it's one less thing to deal with and they can do the shopping in the evening when the kids are put to bed or have the groceries ready when they come home after a long day. For them the delivery fee is well worth the value the service provides.
It's the $10+ for getting McDonalds multiple times a week I struggle with. People are free to make that choice obviously, but I feel like the delivery services are praying on people who are already struggling, especially when they team up the Buy Now Pay Later companies.
I’m not going judge how folks spend their money. It’s their money and they’re all valid reasons regardless.
Strong case for B2B sales focus
I believe it has been passed down to you, either knowingly or not
This was never going to be sustainable long term based on the economics, it was a securities and investor grift. Those with stock did well (“the stock is the product”), consumers did well while the subsidies lasted, workers made the least gig platforms could offer, and the ride is coming to an end as true labor costs and regulations catch up. Similar with Uber and Lyft, and Airbnb. It was all a financialization play that worked under ZIRP but no longer works.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074978 said it best:
“Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.”
It's just greedy investors destroying the value for the customer by tacking on all these bizarre fees. You see the same with TakeAway-Just Eat. I barely know anyone who still orders food ever since they massively jacked up prices after 2020. Before that you could order a pizza or falafel or whatever without minimum order prize, hidden increased product price, delivery fee, service fee, and idk what else.
Not just the customer. The businesses which actually make the food receive less profit in this scheme as well. Only the middlemen win. It's privatized health insurance all over again.
Right?
#999999 on a white background is a 2.84:1 contrast ratio, when the minimum requirement for body text is 4.5:1. So this page technically violates the ADA and other accessibility laws.
Amazon has been pretty successful in arguing that Walmart, Nordstrom, and everything in between are their competitors, and I expect that DD and IC will have no trouble doing the same (especially under this administration).
(Nearly all of the remaining amount is Uber Eats.)
So if not a monopoly, then at least a duopoly.
As a rule, two-sided marketplaces are very difficult to disrupt.
- Other delivery service
- Other task service
- Go yourself
While they are an effective duopoly, it would be good to also consider them as monopolistic competition versus a true market split out -- there is very little traditional moat, and almost only network effect due to restaurants accepting their services and menu.
"Only" is a massive amount of lifting in that sentance.
Network effects are among the most durable/effect competitive qualities. And they have that network on both sides.
Two chunks of overhead (IT, web app, mobile app, finance, HR, etc.) instead of one can be bad for consumers too.
But yeah, flexing pricing increases to gobble up consumer welfare is what the FTC is supposed to rally against, and, while services expand their markets aren't that different.
EDIT: Wow, people really hate this comment! I'm not being normative here. Economies of scope are the thing that any acquiring companies with any reasonable market share will argue for their case, its textbook economics and what the FTC is trained for.
Doordash attempted to buy Instacart in 2021 for $40-50B dollars. Since then Instacart has lost market share and value, and Doordash is now acquiring them for $17B.
The real competitors to Doordash and Instacart for grocery delivery are not each other. The competitors are Walmart, Amazon, and local grocery chains (Meijer, Kroger, etc). And guess what? These competitors are winning. Amazon, Walmart, and Kroger alone comprise a majority of grocery delivery (~64% in 2025, per an emarketer FAQ on digital groceries).
"When there are fewer competitors it means there's increased competition" is quite the take.
> The real competitors to Doordash and Instacart for grocery delivery are not each other.
Together they will have ~80% of the market.
I think it's quite obvious that mergers can increase competition. Especially when you read the rest of my comment. Can you steelman what I'm saying?
>Together they will have ~80% of the market.
Are you mixing restaurant delivery (~60% for doordash) with grocery delivery (~20% for instacart)? Those are different market shares.
Even though other browsers existed, like Netscape Navigator etc, Microsoft was still found guilty of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and guilty of anti-competitive action, both in the US and elsewhere.
Microsoft was forced to create a version of Windows without IE bundled, and other corrective actions.
Now the food industry would be my best example that needs more anti-trust. All of my organic brands have been bought out by Conagra Brands. There's no competition.
I would also agree that this specific acquisition is not going to be helpful for consumers.
If it is only free in order to inconvenience competitors in a way that will eventually reduce choice, either giving you undue control of a market or being done with a view to charge later when people have no choice as the competition is broken, or both - that is when free becomes an anti-consumer matter.
It is an issue that you sometimes need to think long term to notice. If you wait for it to be an immediate problem, it is often too late to easily do anything about it.
Your food example is exactly what people feared would happen with IE, and what actually did happen for a long time despite the anti-trust case: client side developments stalled because IE was such a large part of the market and it did not implement anything new because there was no reason for them to. There was not sufficient competition to make it inconvenient for the incumbent to stagnate, so the whole area stagnated somewhat until Chrome came along and stirred things up a bit. MS was in control due to an effective monopoly, the consumer suffered.
The second most popular browser now is Safari. Should the justice department come after Apple for including it in the Mac?
Not 100% apples-to-apples, but I imagine you've heard cases of "big players" in various industries lowering their prices to the point of selling at a loss, which drives out the small players (Amazon, Wal-Mart come to mind). In the end, only the big player is left, and they are now free to raise prices.
I think it's reasonable to see that initial low-prices (could even be free) period of behavior as anti-competitive, since it may ultimately stifle competition in the long term.
But what you're saying is that if a piece of software is popular, free and has no competition, it should be illegal!? And the browser isn't even a great example of that since there are tons of other options! Wireshark is specialty packet sniffing software that has literally no reasonable competition in it's space. It's also free. Should it be banned here?
You're right. Duopolies aren't great either and just because two companies are in fierce competition doesn't mean everything is good with the law. Both companies might be engaging in illegal anti-competitive behavior.
This needs to be discussed more in the age of AI. RealPage was just the eye-opener. Every industry that should be competing on prices has a cottage industry of "price recommenders" that is de-facto collusion in front of our eyes.
No one is saying the merger is illegal, just that it probably shouldn't be allowed.
If something is legal, the government should allow it.
I am saying that it shouldn't be allowed, because it is not in harmony with the laws, and is therefore illegal.
Can you be more precise about what percentage of what market? I think you are conflating restaurant delivery with grocery delivery. How would instacart have 25% market share and door dash have 60% and Uber eats have 26% and Grub hub have 8%? Doesn't add up because you are mixing markets.
Instacart doesnt event have 25% of grocery delivery. That was 5 years ago. Instacart's market share is declining - Im seeing 18%. Doordash offered around $50B in 2021 now offering $17B.
The grocery stores themselves are actually the major competitors on grocery delivery and they cant serve other small business like the independent services can.
none of this instacart nonsense. because it's the actual grocery shop delivering your order - you're not up-charged, your groceries tend to be of good quality no breakage etc cz they want you to return.
with instacart it's pervase incentives all the way down - spoiled fruit - instacart can blame the grocer, breakages same. grocer doesn't even know who ordered.
Now that menus are being 'audited' by the delivery companies, the use of UE or DD can lead to the _retail_ prices that people pay in person being raised (as it's the only way they restaurants can safely raise their delivery prices).
Bad for everyone except shareholders of delivery services, I guess.
If they were actually “bad” for consumers as reflected in their revealed preferences, the restaurants shouldn’t lose any business.
Personally, I don’t get the economic appeal for most restaurants and foods, but obviously a lot of consumers disagree.
Instacart has it's own unique offerings and propositions, hopefully those don't dissapear, they were invaluable during the pandemic.
Third party delivery services essentially break the chain of responsibility... food late and cold? tough luck, but please tip in advance. If you don't tip your driver will be very mad at you, maybe they'll text you about it, and we pay them so poorly that it's actually your fault for keeping them impoverished. Talk to our customer service bots and maybe we'll give you a $5 coupon for your next Doordash order.
Some people are professional about it (I bring my own drink carriers, food bags, etc and have a minor Andretti gene so orders are as quick as the law allows), but most of the others I see doing it may as well not be. Slow, lazy, check nothing, and look like they just fell out of a methadone clinic (read: not the person you want showing up at your door in the dark at 8pm).
It's frustrating if you try to do it properly but get judged by customers like you're some out of work junkie (when, ironically, most people I deliver to live in a lower-income situation than I do).
From the driver's side, you get inundated with low-paying orders, often rapid-fire as you're driving to either pick up or deliver another order (like so bad that if you're not paying attention, you could get into an accident). Like literal Pavlov's dog, bell jingling over the top of the navigation instructions and a big pop up on screen. Essentially [1].
The entire thing is a psychological rat trap (by design as best as I can tell as these apps aren't terribly complicated to build/design; just scale), so it's not a total surprise when your driver fails to provide good service. They actually make it quite difficult to provide good service (e.g., I routinely get "already picked up" orders on my late night runs w/ no compensation for sitting/waiting on restaurant staff).
I think a lot of people should try doing deliveries via these apps a few times just to experience it. The psychological pressure alone likely makes a lot of people crack. It's all quite fucked up.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7my1G0TrwT8
Unfortunately the existence of the (less-good) delivery options through DD and IC likely facilitated that decision.
so now you have delivery services paid at a similar wage anyway, but a whole third party organization that needs to extract its rent from the system
Food generally arrives warm and if not, a quick heat up in the air fryer generally solves most things. Soup based noodles are generally packed separately that you need to prepare it at home anyway.
My main gripe is there is the general occasional missed small item (like sauces, a drink), which I do complain about in DD. I imagine DD does provide this feedback to restaurants because it has been trending better over time.
There is zero cost of building matching systems (maybe 200$ worth of Claude subscription). Drivers and restaurants will be better off if they build their own ones. These centralized platforms need to die ASAP.
The restaurant then can broadcast the driver demand and delivery prize in their website. Drivers can be scanning all the restaurants in their area and decide if they want to take it or not. Restaurants over time will build lists of reliable drivers whom they will favor when matching.
I'm not saying a system couldn't be designed/work. I'm saying time and time and time again, it's been shown that consumers want a monopoly platform for convenience.
That's rich! Communities benefit when small businesses compete against each other. Announced as part of a merger of two giant public companies.
And second-order effects like I can always have fresh fruit + veggies / not worrying about rot by getting it in smaller quantities delivered more often.
For those wondering about price: It's much cheaper than takeout or prepared food delivery, but more expensive than getting your own groceries. Offset a bit by less food waste.
In my experience its significantly more expensive for groceries: up to 20% for items + service fee + subscription + tip.
I was canceling Instacart subscription and they offered me another year for discounted price ($17). I kept it but I won’t ever extend it for full price given how much more it costs.
Feels like it will end up more expensive in a few years
- My parents are determined to age in place in their home. They get tired more easily than they used to, and aren't capable of doing as much. Especially in the winter, grocery delivery is a huge help for them.
- People with disabilities may or may not be capable of going to the store. Even for the ones who are capable, it is a much larger time commitment.
- For parents of young kids, leaving the house isn't just putting on pants. It's checking diapers, getting the kids to wear shoes, and timing the trip so it doesn't interfere with naptime, feedings, etc. This is a temporary phase! It doesn't take long before the kids are big enough to enjoy a trip to the store.
Says someone with no problems putting on his pants and making a grocery run.
Just try to remember your own words when you get older. You'll get your turn. Everyone does.
Anyway what a strange attitude to have on a tech forum. Why do we need HN, let's discuss this over a game of bowling!
How so? Do tech people never get hurt? They never slip on ice? Blow out a knee playing a sport? Trip over a power cable?
What a strange attitude to think that everyone on a tech forum is identical, and also in identically healthy shape.
"Game of bowling?" Are you a bot, or something?
https://www.walmart.com/plus/assist https://www.sparkdriverapp.com/en_us.html
Pizzarias and other traditional delivery food businesses still hire their own drivers in many cases.
Before DoorDash, other than pizza places (who still run their own drivers), what restaurants delivered? McDonald's tried delivery for a short period of time, but other than that, nobody delivered.
Luckily he came of age just as texting took off. I guess in theory he could of relied upon a translator to make phone calls for him, but his life was much improved by modern communication.
Even if new technology makes things easier for 99% of people who are lazy, but is essential for that last 1%, it's a net positive.
Consolidation in this industry is horrible for everyone. Less competition means higher prices and lower pay.
At the end of the day, I guess their real product is trust. I wouldn't give $50 to a random stranger and ask them to drive me to the airport, but I would give $50 to Uber so they can give $25 to the stranger. It sure seems like a lot to pay for trust, though.
A truly laughable fig leaf for the non-existent anti-trust regulators.
A couple days after my wife launched her campaign, Instacart did a 180 and told her they had to fire her for running. Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
My wife was also pregnant and she told them. They fired her the next day.
Congratulations on the merger.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/15/instacart...
He called support who contacted the customer and said they were on their way and could he wait five minutes. Of course he did but 30 minutes went by.
Contacted support again who said customer would be there in five minutes but, 15 minutes later, support said to just take the goods back to the store.
He took the goods back to the store but the store refused to accept them. Support said he could just donate them or keep them.
Despite showing the back and forth text messages, he was deactivated for not delivering to the customer.
It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
>And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
The vast majority of civil cases do not go to a jury, so again, I don't think this is good reasoning. The difference is mostly in discovery, which in an arbitration is stacked against any plaintiff bringing their claims compared to what they'd be entitled to in state or federal courts. That's probably the biggest reason they are less variable, in my experience.
>It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Well according to you, you don't really have any idea of any of this, you are just reflecting your understandings which are based on what?
> Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
But that doesn't mean those biases are not present.
If you have an absolute lay-up of a case (something like "my company fired me because I got pregnant, and lied about by pretending to change their mind about something they'd already approved of"), then you're going to win the arbitration case. Well, more accurately, the company's going to throw a pile of cash at you before it even gets that far, because they screwed up and the first time legal hears about it, the first words out of their mouth will be "you did fucking what?".
It is nigh impossible to cleanly fire an employee from the time you learn they're pregnant, to like a year after they come back from maternity leave. Unless they broke into your office and took a shit on the desk, the default opinion of every judge is going to be "I read about this exact scenario while studying for the bar, literally textbook".
When COVID hit, I got sick and had to spend several days inside ordering delivery. And more than once, the store was missing half my order. So I then had to make new orders for the food I wasn't able to get the first time -- while they refunded me only for the items they didn't have, leaving me to eat the (multiple) delivery fees and driver tips.
Corporatist hellhole was your reaction to that too I imagine.
* Technically resigned, but there was significant pressure from Mozilla.
But in any case, your point is “it was damaging the company, therefore it makes sense to see them gone.” And there’s your parallel.
—
In reality, whether corporate agnosticism is right depends almost exclusively on your feelings of the underlying cause.
For example in the US it's totally legal to spy on your employees with key loggers &co, in most of Europe it isn't
Not a lawyer but my intuition says there might be some legal grounds here favouring the wife.
My take is someone even higher up found out later and did not like it. Now it’s entirely possible the individuals who gave their blessings were supportive of the party the wife was standing for, and the ones above them weren’t? Still whoever blessed the campaign did so in their capacity as a senior officer of the company. A total shit show nevertheless.
To the original commenter: sorry this happened to your wife. Hope she’s able to find another job that treats her right. Also congrats on the baby, hoping parenthood makes up for all of this and more. Sending the best of wishes your way.
For example: Suppose you hire someone to help you move furniture.
You can decide you dont like the color of their shoes and tell them to kick rocks.
You dont owe anyone a job, and labor for pay is a contractual agreement, nothing more.
Buuut it’s probably better for society to not kneecap ordinary folks just for trying to run for office. Otherwise, you only get folks in office with deep pockets who can take the hit.
Should you be racist? No. Should you call someone fat and ugly? No.
But personal liberty and freedom require we allow people to make choices and have opinions we don't personally agree with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/images/2/2e/Paradox_of_...
If intolerance or hate poses a physical threat, or in any way infringes on the liberty and personal autonomy of others, a line has been crossed and must be swiftly dealt with.
In addition to the possibility of peril, there is also the psychological harm these interactions cause, and the living in fear.
It is only those who are safe who believe words from the intolerant are harmless. The intolerant count on that lack of knowledge to get away with “just asking questions”.
I hope you and your loved ones never have to go through any such interactions, they are harrowing, but I also urge you to have deep discussions with the recipients of them to understand a bit better why we should protect them instead of dismissing their concerns.
Being denied housing or employment was not just a regular occurrence but the norm for me for a large portion of my life
If a person made a large contribution or gave other public support to an extremist candidate, an employer might not want any association with that.
If running for an office is going to take up a significant amount of one's time, such that it might impact availability for work during normal hours, an employer would care about that.
In this specfic case, if she was featuring "I work for Instacart" in any way in her campaign they might care about that.
If she was saying anything inflamatory or controversial, Instacart might not want to be associated with that.
So running for a nonpartisan office such as a local council or school board or similar would normally not be any issue. Anything where party politics feature prominently is going to be riskier.
So most states you can be fired for voting wrong.
Let's not forget that many of our "founding fathers" deeply hated democracy and when speaking of the "democracy problem" of the 1780s in America it was mostly referring to commoners in Massachusetts participating in civic duties.
This tradition has never went away and is still practiced today.
It seems totally reasonable to both have a law that protects a citizen’s right to run for office without losing their job, but it also seems reasonable to require some sort of coordination with an employer.
(Knowing nothing about this, it is seems like it should work roughly like an extended jury duty.)
> Lisa Vedernikova Khanna, a candidate in Virginia, says in a lawsuit that the mobile shopping giant cited concerns her bid could hurt the company with President Donald Trump.
Can you criticize them instead for firing her for something that their Chief Corporate Affairs Officer explicitly gave her permission to do? If it was a matter of pragmatism, they could have declined her request for permission. (One might separately argue about whether this should be a matter of right vs a matter of permission, but regardless, she did seek permission and was granted it.)
That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?
I think it's a fully justified reason. If I'm in a senior position and I say something that in someway hurts the company reputation/income, I would be fired. If the company liveness depend on me being fired, the I think the decision is justified.
Ok, but _should_ you be fired? And - if so - why?
Or are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
And fwiw, I’m not against delivery. I use Amazon fresh frequently but I would argue that is much more efficient. Dedicated drivers and warehouses optimized for grocery is societally useful.
Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
I gift meals to people in other cities when they're in need (sick, childbirth, death in the family) and I'm not nearby to help.
I've had intense working situations where an extra hour of work was worth paying someone $30 to deliver my $100 of groceries.
We've frequently used DoorDash and other services for small business meetings where we wanted to provide lunch, or in some situations where we had to stay late (security incidents, etc) and wanted to provide the team with something better than pizza delivery.
However it's also scary to watch some people who will DoorDash whenever they feel like it without regard to the cost. I watched some eye-opening conversations among college students comparing how much they had spent on DoorDash in the past year, even though they were not in a financial demographic that should have been indulging in delivery.
Maybe you don't have kids or that busy of a schedule?
> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
Ok, but then...
> I use Amazon fresh frequently
So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...
We also think it's important not to have our kids grow up thinking that everything is just delivered to them at their beck and call.
Like most things in life, it's not a matter of difficulty, as if I am so incapable of going to a grocery store to buy groceries and the undue hardship it will cause me. It's simply a matter of how I like to budget my time. I judge that the 30 minutes it can take to do groceries is better spent doing other things with my life.
When our kids were babies we were sleep deprived and their sleep schedule made it hard to randomly go out. Having delivery was so helpful during those years.
And these days I’ll order delivery if I’m feeling sick or just tired.
Now they have the freedom to get what they want, when they want.
There's also times when you have people over and don't want to leave to pick something up.
And times when you are too tired or sick and don't want to leave the house
I see and interact with hundreds of people a day. DoorDashers are the worst of the worst, by a mile. I cannot wait for the day DoorDash ceases to exist.
I can spot a DoorDasher from a mile away. There are three types of DoorDashers.
The first is the kind who is most likely not here legally. They come barreling into the store with their speakerphones turned up to the max as they yell into the phone to their wife/girlfriend in some other language (Venezuelan/Cuban?) the entire time. Without any attempt to look on their own, they find every worker they see and shove the phone in their face demanding and begging to have us do their job for them and find the items. Then they get in line, phone still blasting, and ignore you when you smile and say hello or ask them to touch a button on the screen or say “thank you, have a nice rest of your day”. This kind makes up probably about 70% of DDers. Mind you, I interact with non-English speakers all day. They make eye contact, they smile, they make an attempt. DoorDashers make zero attempt whatsoever and are extremely brash and rude.
The second is the citizens who cannot get a job anywhere else. These are all very clearly drug addicts and former convicts straight out of the halfway house who shop and deliver under the influence of every mixture of drug you can imagine. Really, really rough people. These people, too, also beg you to complete their entire shopping trip for them, but at least they understand English and make eye contact with you. These are about 20% of DDers.
The last group are the “okay” ones. These are decent everyday people who talk to you like a human being, smile, and are friendly. They only ask for help after they’ve clearly made an effort to find the items on their own. Unfortunately, this group makes up only about 10% of adders.
We got along just fine a few years ago when DoorDash didn’t exist. DD contributes to the anti socialization of the world, and it’s not a good thing.
Spanish.
So I honestly think they should be under heavy govt regulations or be co-owned by everyone in the supply chain. Or firm regulated to avoid overcharging for useless stuff, everyone loses out including these companies as in needing to compete with eachother they have to offer dozens of benefits offers etc to customers, and customers get shafted when they are the most desperate because making money from the desperate is the best money making formula in the valley atm.