Comment by bko

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.

Here's Instacart's latest quarterly report which tells you exactly where the money is going:

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.

> 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?

>>So where the hell is the money going??

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.