Whenever this comes up, I really don't care if there is antitrust or not. Delivery is a luxury service.

Whenever I bring this up, someone always goes "so disabled people should starve"? What did they do before delivery apps? Many restaurants still offer delivery that they do themselves (seriously, look it up). But more importantly, meals on wheels and other services are still a very large, established network.

Anyways, I guess I could be convinced that this is bad for restaurants. But so many restaurants, especially in cities, are offering delivery services where 10 and 20 years ago there were none. And the infrastructure is not set up to handle that.

As a result, city streets are frequently blocked by delivery drivers. I genuinely would love if my city passed a resolution that prevented restaurants within the city center from offering DoorDash/Ubereats unless they had a dedicated parking lot.

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.

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.

What's the bug? It's gotta be a serious edge case

And the folks currently in the FTC mysteriously will receive cushy board positions when the administration turns over. Literally everyone wins!

I'd be willing to bet that a lot of drivers are doing both deliveries and ride shares depending on what's available/most profitable at the time.

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'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.

Its definitely a luxury service but often luxuries like this really improve quality of life, especially of people who aren't able bodied like elderly or disabled folks. Its helpful to think of them as the customer base in addition to the "tech person with money to burn who doesn't want to hop in their car" we often default to.

It's fantastic when I travel. I usually book a hotel or AirBnB with a kitchen and then use instacart. I don't like the constant eating out when traveling and this has significantly improved the quality of vacations.

So is Uber, AirBnb, McDonalds, and plenty of other billion dollar companies with externalities that negatively effect society.

Utterly alien to me to pay to have someone shop your groceries and deliver them. I enjoy walking the supermarket/costco and poking around and buying what I need. The thought of paying 30% more AND lose that as well is a nonstarter.

The really are whole different worlds out there!

> 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).

> 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.

> What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. T

In theory it's because that customer wouldn't be purchasing without DD. In practice it's a shakedown.

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.

because they can get away with it and some VCs say best companies dont have customers, they have hostages.

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?

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.

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.

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.

It's an argument he advanced in favour of monopolies. Then reason he was in favour of being a monopoly was, of course, that it gave him more money.

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.

[0] https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/changes-to-fees-nyc

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.

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"

Do you find it, total price charged to card, to be competitive? What if you already have a Prime membership?

I'm in Montreal as well. You might be underestimating how much you're spending on third party delivery.

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.

It was built into the price; typically with extensive “carry out” discounts for people who picked up their orders.

I was actually pretty hyped for her at first, and she seemed to be doing a good job. It was only with time that I saw that she actually couldn't seem to hire good leaders, at all, and that she seemed to disdain the parts of the business that actually made money.

On the other hand - she did a great job at marketing herself. I wouldn't even call her trajectory "failing upwards", she made her moves intentionally and did it well. Fuck the rest of us though, I guess.

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.

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)

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.

Making it so you don't have to see anyone and eat. (I don't do this personally - just reflecting society)

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.

> 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)

They should be paid a livable wage before tips.

They spend $3b of their $4b in revenue on corporate employees, $500m on restaurant "subsidies" and drivers, and the rest goes to stock buybacks ($8b last year). If they want to find ways to cut expenses, they need to look in their offices not on the street.

Oh these aren't "employees", these are lower caste "gig workers". They could double their pay and still make a profit, according to their latest quarterly filing. Their largest expensive, 5x of what they pay their drivers, is corporate employees, whether executives or software developers or marketers or salespeople.

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.

I think for that last part it's more the other way around.

No way.

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 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).

[1]: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2024.B08201

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.

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.

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.

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.

> DoorDash is like cigarettes, gambling, paid pornography

LMAO wat

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.

It was cheaper to get a pizza delivered before these delivery companies popped up.

So what these services do is bring you food in exchange for money. If you have money and need some food they will bring it to you.

Why would you comment this instead of, i dont know, educating yourself on why is that happening?

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I know a lot of people who survive (almost) exclusively off take out and delivery. Especially in cities like NYC.

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.

I'd be curious to see if it lowered food prices at all if these services and their upcharges weren't around anymore to influence pricing.

What if you’re disabled and need to order food ?

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.

Instacart stole money from me.

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.

Brendan Eich was fired from Mozilla for a $1k political donation.

Corporatist hellhole was your reaction to that too I imagine.

* Technically resigned, but there was significant pressure from Mozilla.

What would be illegal about firing an employee who you think is causing your company to get a bad image?

I'm curious to hear other people's perspectives on why they think they should be illegal?

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.

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.

I don't understand it from an American perspective. Is this a standard practice in large companies?

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.)

I don't understand why this is getting downvoted, I'm surprised as well

Literally article's description:

> 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.

In California the courts look very poorly on that, just in case that ever happens to you.

> 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.

>> 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?

I can hate for you then.

Even after being specifically told that running was ok?

> I would be fired

Ok, but _should_ you be fired? And - if so - why?