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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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A lot of these are delivered by bike nowadays, no?
Edit: since people keep asking without reading below, I mean specifically in NYC.
there's no way to make delivery worth it for small items like this, be it by foot / bike / electric scooter / carrier pigeon
Well apparently there is considering it’s a popular service. I’m not sure what you mean by this.
I doubt we'll ever get data to support this but I suspect most drivers aren't drivers for very long. A few, who are otherwise entirely unemployable, may stick it out. It sounds like a much better deal than it is, I think most people realize that after a relatively short time.
My experience with doing deliveries was the only people who had been doing it for a while were a: broke as fuck and 2, exactly the opposite of the type of person you might want handling your food.
I did delivery for long term at one point (doordash). Once you reach their highest rating and learn which orders to take/deny, it is actually quite profitable. Still massively exploitative, of course, but at the time I was making $18 an hour (high for my area), and that's also factoring in breaks and commute. I had a very fuel efficient hybrid which added to the value proposition. I was broke as fuck at the time, but it wasn't the job's fault, more the fact that I only worked exactly the amount of hours I needed each month to pay for my basic necessities and rent, and spent the rest with my friends and fiancee.
How about factoring in vehicle wear, tear, insurance, and depreciation? You said "hybrid" so I'm thinking car, not bicycle. And cars are pretty damn pricy per (especially city) mile, hybrid or not. Also regular insurance policies often don't allow doing such gigs for obvious reasons.
I also don't know labor laws in the US, but here those companies got in major trouble because even ignoring the exploitative nature of the gig, they were misclassifying employment as "contract work" which allowed them to avoid paying employment taxes, days off, medical pay, insurance, etc. basically displacing all that burden on the State's social systems. That's the definition of unsustainable.
It isn't sustainable. My car takes significantly less damage per mile than a gas only car, and the gas is nearly negligible compared to the pay when you get consistent 40+ mpg. Even then, it's still not sustainable. I wouldn't recommend the job to anyone, but if someone was desperate or really set on it, then it should really only be a temporary stop-gap to something more sustainable.
Yeah I think from the people I've talked to, it's mostly people who do it part time as a way to make a bit of extra cash or like students who otherwise don't have time for a full time job but still need some form of income.
There's an episode on a Canadian show called Late Bloomer that tells the story of one of those bike food delivery drivers who is an international student and trying to basically survive. Good show, really fucking sad episode.
I drove down doordash for a while. Trust me, every driver knows how much they're getting screwed. You'll never be more class-conscious than having 30+ interactions with people as broke as you every day, and seeing every possible angle of fellow working class jobs. You do it for one of several reasons: you want some tiny modicum of control in your life through your schedule, you desperately need the money and it's easy as fuck to get a delivery job, or you started it for one of those reasons or something similar, got good enough to be ahead of the curve, and it's now more appealing than finding something else. The last one was where I was at.
I had done the job enough that I was making $18 an hour, well above the average in my area, and despite needing to pay for gas and taxes on a 1099a, it was still more appealing to keep control and flexibility over my life than to do something else. I could take days off whenever I wanted, see friends during the week, and coordinate my schedule with my fiancee easily. You're very aware that you're getting screwed, but you choose the devil you know, as they say.
Ding ding ding.
I don't hate myself enough to do Doordash (yet), but I'm too fucking autistic to keep any job other than rideshare.
If you don't have a fuel efficient car, I wouldn't even consider it. If you do, you need to devote a lot of time to it before it becomes at all worth it (100 orders in last 30 days, good ratings, and above 70% order acceptance rate). Once you're there, it's basically as profitable as any other service job, but with the caveat that it's entirely on you and your executive function to work enough (very boring) hours to pay the bills.
Edit: also, wear and tear on your car is gonna be worth more than the job in any job where you use your personal car for 100% of the work. I would consider any of these jobs a temporary measure.
I encountered a guy doing DoorDash in a fucking RAM truck the other day. Just couldn't believe what I was seeing.
And it should be mentioned that lots of short trips are hard on cars. EVs are probably much better for this, but I would guess that most delivery drivers (who are using their own personal vehicle) aren't rolling around in EVs.
Yep. For this reason, I left my car running when I'd stop, as idling on the hybrid battery was better than needing to cold start the car 50 times a day.
Is this even true? I thought most of these companies were still in the "chuck VC money into the furnace" phase.
I heard the same. But that was a few years ago. There was a popular DoorDash sub on Reddit that covered all of this stuff. So many drivers complaining about shit there.
Stop assuming stupidity because a lower monetary class.
Everyone realizes and knows this, you can't do anything about it when you're struggling to feed your family and you just need extra money.
There's a reason you assume everyone who's a delivery driver doesn't understand the cruelty of our monetary system.
I understand it might not be malicious but you should think on why that assumption is made.
These things for college campuses are great. They take up no more space than a person and can be a huge help when one is busy or sick.
With the tax being $8.04, the order is not that small.
Pizza delivery has been popular for several decades. Pizza is cheap but they made the numbers work. It's actually weird that it was just pizza until recently.
The cost is middlemen needing to get their cut. Half the cost here is them getting their cut. $15 to use an app one time is what is unsustainable here.
Pneumatic tubes!
An instant burrito in every home!
rofl
NYC actually used to have a citywide system like this. It was for mail but there's no reason somebody couldn't have snuck a burrito or a rolled-up pizza into one of those cannisters.
BRING IT BACK BRING IT BACK
Good news, everyone !
hsssss....thwooooop...KChUNK
I remember being a kid in the mid 90s, in a hospital that had such a system to send messages and pills around, the vast majority of their computers were not actually networked.
When you’re disabled and cannot leave your home, this kind of stuff becomes a lifeline.
exactly why airport pizza has such an amazing business model, because pizza can be delivered efficiently by aircraft to places up to a couple hundred miles away without relying on non-existant roads or rail
I will order 4 or 5 meals at once and then put them in my fridge to eat over the next week.
Varies. In Oslo Foodora started as bike deliveries; the cyclists unionised and got better pay and working conditions, and nooow it seems to be a lot of Romanians in beaters that don't look like they'd pass their next EU inspections, don't pay tolls or for parking, and apparently there seems to be something like trafficking going on.
Well I meant in NYC specifically but that’s interesting.
In a large metropolis, yes. Unfortunately most cities in the USA are spread out so much that you almost need a car to go to the bathroom.
In the EU maybe, where there's a lot of protected bike lanes and where most drivers are relatively competent (and don't carry guns).
In SF it's definitely done by electric moped
I mean in NYC specifically.
no. they are all delivered by car, even if they say it's by bike.
bikes are too slow for be good for delivery
yes, miles per hour instead of meters per second
Gridlocked traffic or having to deal with parking can change the math on this such that bikes make sense.