https://seattle.eater.com/2024/2/21/24079162/tony-delivers-seattle-delivery-app-fees-downtown
Tony Illes was working as an Uber Eats delivery person when an ordinance passed last year by the Seattle City Council came into effect in mid-January. The new rule required app companies to pay workers like Illes a minimum wage based on the miles they travel and the minutes they spend on the job. The apps say that this amounts to around $26 an hour, and both Uber Eats and DoorDash responded by adding $5 fees to every order (even when the customer is outside Seattle city limits) while calling for the law to be repealed. According to a recent DoorDash blog post, the ordinance has resulted in an “unprecedented drop in order volume,” a drop that Illes felt personally. He told Geekwire that “demand is dead” and told local TV station KIRO 7, “I didn’t get an order for like six hours and I was done.”
So Illes had an idea: Who needs these apps, anyway? He printed up signs with QR codes directing people to a bare-bones website with his phone number, promising that he would deliver food by bike in Uptown, South Lake Union, Belltown, and a chunk of the downtown core for $5 a pop from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily. All you had to do was order the food and send him the screenshot. He called himself “Tony Delivers.”
This is splendid. 100% fuck DoorDash and UberEats.
Ordered some sushi and cold stone the other day.
Same parking lot.
The dasher picks up my ice cream, does another dash then goes and waits 20 minutes for my sushi for some reason then does another dash.
I was delivered a bag of melted ice cream and the container it was in.
Door dash offered me a refund that was less than the tip and said “they solved my problem” and then I cancelled my dash pass and they can go fuck themselves.
No offence but why the fuck would you get ice cream delivered?
Ordering delivery from two separate places is your problem
This has to be a toned down advertisement for a particular subscription baased seattle company that changes delivery fees to service fees and everyone knows who that is. I hope I’m not on a hit list tommrgurk
There should be more local cooperative delivery services. Small scale, profit sharing.
I agree, the delivery services are definitely price gouging to a degree. It sucks that we’re charged for delivery, service fees AND the item prices are inflated by around 20% too. Thing is, I think there’s a bunch of reasons that TonyDelivers will eventually become as bad as the current market leaders. As his company grows, takes on employees, builds infrastructure, overheads increase, management grows - they’ll fall into the same “traps”/profit seeking the other delivery companies have fallen into.
Plus he’s got to find a load more guys called Tony.
They don’t have to. Plenty of small businesses stay good and small.
The problem is the ones that spread like cancer.
In a capitalist economy it’s normally a “growth or death” situation, for many reasons.
I think the platform that allows efficient distribution of the requests is not that easy to come with. Would need some nice devs to open source one and put it on the fediverse maybe.
Allocating a job to a driver is the easy part. It’s all the other stuff people expect from a delivery app that’s the hard part. Like having an accurate DB of stores and facilitating orders/payments. If you don’t do that then people can troll with fake orders and stiff drivers. Plus moderation of drivers who steal food or are convicted burglars/rapists (existing apps already suck at that).
But a federated approach would be immensely more complicated to do well and is a privacy nightmare. You’d need to share buyer’s address and drivers’ current locations to many different instances to facilitate a buyer on one instance and potential drivers on several different instances. All that data needs to be available (and accurate to the minute) to the instance that assigns the job. Similar privacy/logistic issues pop up when you consider payments.
I think there’s also a fair amount of optimization work on the pricing depending not only on supply/demand, and geography but also other environmental conditions, and a notable amount of data to collect in quasi real time to reach a good level of service. Uber-like services are ethically very questionable, but there’s a lot of fine tech behind, their tech blogs are often very rich.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_routing_problem
I think it already on github. I remember reading article on habr by Post of Russia that mentioned they use opensource planner for optimal routing.
Sadly I can’t find that article any more.
Already found something:
- https://github.com/reinterpretcat/vrp
- https://github.com/ShadowOS/Vechicle-Routing-Problem-VRP-with-Pickup-and-Delivery
- https://github.com/topics/pickup-and-delivery
Also there is some stuff in organicmaps repo
According to a recent DoorDash blog post, the ordinance has resulted in an “unprecedented drop in order volume,”
No, you disingenuous stink sacks. Your $5 “you made an order in or around Seattle” fee did that. Orders would’ve continued unchanged if you hadn’t raised fees.
But that would have cut into their enormous share of the profits. What kind of monster are you?
Yeah if investors can’t make cartoonish returns for doing literally nothing what’s even the point of gouging customers??
Ahhh, true value add to society. Trust fund babies sitting on the beach being funneled money for work they had no part of. It’s almost like it doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you want a subset of rich people and a whole bunch of middle class workers to labor for them.
More accurately that 5 bucks goes into those grubby Uber execs hands anyway.
Damn, $5 sounds too cheap. I can’t imagine ride to store, pick up at store during busy times and ride to the delivery to be less than 20m. That’s barely minimum wage. Prob better off at $8 or $10. Still undercut rideshare rates. Then drop only if there’s competition.
Then also he has to get around. Either he pays for transport, or he has to keep his bike/scooter/whatever in shape.
Yeah, he’s biking, assuming he’s doing maintenance himself you get a LOT of miles out of a bike for very little upkeep. If he were driving it would be a losing proposition from the start.
Hi, I’m someone who works on bicycles for a living!
Basic maintenance such as
-checking tires for wear and cracks, keeping the bike dry and rinsing with clean water if it gets road salt on it,
-keeping the chain and sprockets lubed and cleaning them of debris if it gets caked on,
-cleaning the bearing races of debris and keeping them lubed (maybe go to a shop for this one if you aren’t sure about it)
-and just generally not doing stupid things with it
and you will have a bike that lasts a lifetime.
Maybe less if it’s a cheap brand like Schwinn or mongoose. But those steps drastically improve the life of any bicycle.
Worth noting: my main bicycle is a GT hybrid from 2014. It’s not much of a step above baseline (at the time, GT fell off in quality) but spending a little time doing some online “research” into the parts on the bike will go a long way. You’d be surprised what both cheap AND expensive brands put on their frames. Cheap brands using mid-tier gear (instead of cheapest) , and top brands using the cheapest tourney derailleur you can find in a clearance bin…
I kind of got off topic a bit but yeah.
BASIC PREVENTATIVE BICYCLE MAINTENANCE WILL KEEP CYCLING CHEAP AF
For a decade i didn’t own a car and biked everywhere. It really is dirt cheap compared to other methods of transportation.
And yeah more off topic but checking your chain for wear and replacing it becomes the most important/frequent replacement item. A worn chain wears out the rest of the drivetrain more quickly-- it is much cheaper to stay on top of replacing the chain than have to replace your cassette and chainrings sooner than normal.
I do the basic maintenance stuff myself and then pay a shop to tune up the bike each spring. When you use a bike to commute suddenly $150 a year doesn’t seem like much to spend on it. That’s less than one month of parking at my last job.
$150 a year doesn’t seem like much to spend on it
Holy crap. I have a gearless road bike to just pedal around the neighborhood with (if I wanted to go anywhere legitimate, I’d have to go down a 4-lane highway which I sure as hell am not doing. Hooray America being designed for cars) so I just maintain it myself…
But back when I had a decent 10-speed, which, admittedly, was like 15-18 years ago, a tune-up was like $50. In L.A.
Crazy how expensive things have gotten.
That poster must be adding on stuff like replacement parts and additional maintenance supplies throughout the year. A tune up here in OR is like $75.
I hope so, because $150 is ridiculous for a bicycle tune-up that probably takes less than an hour.
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This is Seattle so unless he’s only delivering on the 1 light rail line they have, it’s gonna almost definitely be by car.
The blurb literally says it’s by bicycle. You don’t even have to read the article.
Ah fair enough did not catch that. As someone who bike commuted in Seattle for years, they’re insane.
It’s not like he’s delivering to the whole city. For the map in the picture, worst case (corner to corner) is like 1.5 miles.
He’s undoubtedly counting on tips.
He might do like 2-5 deliveries per trip if they align.
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Paid holiday, paid sickness, pension, occupational accident insurance.
Things that employees at UberEats, DoorDash and Tony Delivers don’t get, but that Tony should be getting.
If you’re self-employed, you have to factor that into your tariff yourself. Let’s hope Tony’s savvy enough and can get by with such a low price.
If he’s young enough, he might be getting his safety net from parents or something. I could see this being viable part-time work for, e.g., college students.
Yeah especially based on the hours. This sounds like a college student.
I stopped using food delivery apps last year. The prices were just absurd. If I want takeout, I go get it myself. This all started when I tipped a dasher and the service was awful. The guy stopped somewhere with my food for 15 mins and then delivered it cold and was rude when I asked why he stopped at a location for 15 mins. Tips are for good service, not shitty late-delivered, cold, food!
Last night, I looked on Grubhub for a restaurant, figured out what I wanted and the total was $34 (not including tip). I called the restaurant and went and got it myself, $25. That’s a 36% upcharge for the app alone! Not including any tip!
I can honestly say I’ve never used one. I looked at the prices, realised they were all jacked up before the delivery fees were added, and then just got it myself.
My local Chinese takeaway employs their own guy. I really don’t know why we had to farm this problem out to silicon valley shysters.
Yeah me neither.
Slower. More expensive. Exploitative.
Nah.
My dad has been that guy! We sure ate a lottt of Silver Wok during that time 😋
This is how it worked when I drove pizza in high school and college. We were directly employed by the restaurant and got minimum wage plus tips. When GrubHub first started it was through that system. Eventually it expanded so that our drivers would take order for a few different GH restaurants, and then they started pushing the independent contractor thing.
World: decent wage
USSA: tip, tip, tip, tip
USAUS & CanadaDoesn’t fit the narrative.
Same. Last straw for me was when I got a pizza that was transported vertically, so it had folded over and the toppings were everywhere. I bought a pizza bag and a rear carrier for my bike and just go get my food every time now.
You can opt to get paid by the hour which is from the time of pickup to delivery. Maybe that’s why he just parked somewhere to add time to the delivery.
The only good thing about delivery apps is that my 80 year-old parents need a job and can’t get a job doing anything else at their age.
Everything else about them, from the cost, the cold food, to the wait for something from a shop five minutes away… is just crap.
You may know this, but my understanding is that they randomly stop either to do another delivery on a different app, or to get gas/etc. (edit: I don’t think this justifies it to the customer, hence why I’ve stopped using these apps. I do have some sympathy for the driver, I have heard that the companies incentivize them to maintain a streak and take fewer breaks between drives, and somehow it seems like long unnecessary pauses aren’t penalized (perhaps because they’re hard to distinguish from traffic))
I haven’t used delivery apps in a while due to cold food and outrageous prices.
I know IRS or similar entities wouldn’t like, but would it be possible to establish a peer to peer service.
No fees for restorants, all extra money to dashers, and clients wouldn’t be screwed by service fees.
Honestly looks like a cool project I could look into, but what would be the legality of such services.
I’ve been dreaming of a future where Uber, DoorDash, etc are devoid of any corporate organization. Developers, drivers and support staff are the only human workers, the rest is organized by a complex, but open source, program.
No investors, no shareholders, every cent goes to the workers. Wages are higher in prices are lower because we aren’t paying five VPs a million dollars a year or sending all our profits to the shareholders.
I think advances in computing and AI could actually make this possible. If only greed didn’t run the world it might be doable
I want free market capitalism that works for us. What we have now if slavery with extra steps
Federated DoorDash?
I’m in.
The funny thing is that sounds a lot like communism, despite being a capitalistic free market service. Corporate communism if you will
The USA is supposed to be a Country of the people, by the people and for the people.
Free market communism sounds American as fuck to me.
Free markets can exist without corporate overlords, we collectively need to stop believing the Capitalism vs Communism false-dichotomy. Hybrid systems are the future, any other pure system devolves into slavery.
That’s not communism, that’s just a worker co-op.
I always wonder why trade organization don’t organize stuff like this. Wouldn’t this be in the interest of the whole gastronomic industry? Pretty much every single restaurant in the country could earn more money (and I know they probably don’t care, but the gig workers could also earn more).
There is billions of dollars in preventing this. Amazon has an entire fleet of people hired for the sole purpose of stopping unionization, which is illegal but they get away with it because power.
This is what happens when money and power write our laws. First step is to get money out of politics. No more millionaires representing people making an avg of 35k a year.
I mean, so long as he’s reporting his income. Plenty of cash businesses operate within the IRS’s good graces. Hell, you can even report your income from selling drugs. The IRS just wants their cut.
If this man who only wants to help people with awesome competition while offering lower prices… somehow is blocked from doing this… it’s time for a rebellion against our overlords.
It’s been time for a rebellion for years, the populace just needs to collectively realize and acknowledge it
Didn’t Uber start as a ride sharing app? As in, “Hey we’re both headed in the same direction! I’ll give you a ride in my vehicle, stranger, if you pitch in for gas.” Then they realized with a few tweaks they could turn their pool of near-slave labor into profit. Enshittification accelerates.
Maybe there’s a Fediverse-like solution for gig work that doesn’t suck all the humanity out of it?
Pretty much yes. The Uber Eats app came later.
Why not a worker’s cooperative? Plusses include no executives earning insane salaries or stockholders to please.
That would be kinda neat. If you’re going to drive somewhere anyway, you register a destination into an app and it calcs a low-cost route to pick something up and deliver it that’s mostly on the way. You get a credit and the next time you go to order something, it uses that credit. If nobody is going your way in the time frame you specify for the delivery, floaters can pick it up for a premium if they wish.
It would only work well if there were a lot of people in on it, so it might be tough to get momentum.
Without centralized management, you might need something like blockchain to manage it.
A girl did something like this in brazil but with nudes. She got really popular after she posted videos on tik tok and got sued by the government for advertising porn and then got even more popular.
That’s disgusting! There’s so many though … Which one!? Which Brazilian eGirl did this and where can we find her?
Martina Oliveira
So that we can meticulously avoid looking at her nudes, obviously.
But there are tons of these women, I don’t really understand why this one stands out? Lemmy has its own collection of women self-posting nudes as, I assume, marketing for something that pays them money.
There’s a lot of women putting fliers on the street advertising their only fan?
I mean, is it the fliers that make it special? That seems like a really strange distinction to get the government involved.
Sorry, in what way is that like this? Like, she put up flyers to advertise her porn after she got sued by the government for advertising porn?
She put fliers like the one OP posted, made tik tok videos putting the fliers and got really popular. Some government agency saw that and sued her for doing advertising of sex services, newspapers reported about it and got even more popular. At some point on the story she paid for big billboards too.
A screen for the OG tik tok that made her famous:
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This is a good side? Because Tony most likely can’t afford health insurance and probably isn’t going to be able to save much for retirement.
This sounds like the desperate side of the non-corporate people involved in the so-called free market to me.
He knows what is worth his own time to him. He can take routes only when they make sense to him. I looked at the map and it’s an 8 Minute bike ride from middle to corner. That’s $20 an hour worst case and $50 an hour on average.
He’s making more by cutting out the middleman of Doordash who was profiting off his work.
That doesn’t address anything I said.
If Tony gets hit by a car while making deliveries, how is he going to afford the hospital bills in a for-profit healthcare system?
If Tony dies and has a family, how are they going to survive until they adjust to the loss of income when he doesn’t have life insurance?
Will Tony ever be able to retire or will he have to be riding a bike, making deliveries when he’s 80?
That’s why this is not a good side of the so-called free market.
There is no good side.
If Tony gets hit by a car while making deliveries, how is he going to afford the hospital bills in a for-profit healthcare system?
We need universal healthcare but Doordash doesn’t provide healthcare for drivers so he hasn’t lost anything. Companies pay for healthcare from your paycheck. The executives aren’t taking lower salaries to pay for everyone’s healthcare.
when he doesn’t have life insurance?
Doordash doesn’t provide life insurance for drivers nor do companies do it for free. Again it comes out of your paycheck even if it isn’t listed as a line item.
Will Tony ever be able to retire or will he have to be riding a bike,
Doordash doesn’t have a retirement plan. Nor do most companies. You put a part of your paycheck in a 401k. The only guaranteed retirement is working for the government. You cannot depend on private companies lasting long enough for your retirement.
Yes, I know Doordash doesn’t have any of those things either, that was my point.
Tony is not beating the so-called Free Market system. He’s still getting fucked by the system. He’s just not getting fucked by Doordash as well.
You cannot depend on private companies lasting long enough for your retirement.
Sounds like a good argument for a government pension plan.
Until his profile gets high enough that they find some permit he doesn’t have and he gets shut down.
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Time is a flat circle
Why is the modifier “flat” added here?
Because body shaming circle-chan is funny.
Edit: I knew this joke wouldn’t land before I even hit enter, but now I must own it.It’s a True Detective quote.
Why is the modifier “flat” added?
That’s what they did in the show
It looks like a line
Ah. Thanks.
True detective season 4. Not a spoiler but won’t get into the details
Oh! Appreciate it, I am planning on watching it soon
The problem is that he’ll get overwhelmed very easily and will either need to be selective about what he takes, or you’ll end up waiting forever. Either way, the experience will be too inconsistent.
Or he will go create a Tony Delivers Co., start exploiting other people.
Or make a cooperative and get other drivers involved and share the revenue.
This is the way.
Co-op delivery company in the works?!
Great on Tony, doing the damn thing!
https://fitsmallbusiness.com/what-is-a-cooperative-co-op/
A cooperative, or co-op, is an organization owned and controlled by the people who use the products or services the business produces. Cooperatives differ from other forms of businesses because they operate more for the benefit of members, rather than to earn profits for investors.
Co-ops are organized to provide competition, improve bargaining power, reduce costs, expand new and existing market opportunities, improve product or service quality, and obtain unavailable products or services (products or services that profit-driven companies don’t offer because they see them as unprofitable).
Cooperatives present lots of opportunities for small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs. In this post, I’ll go over how cooperatives work, why you should form one, and how you can start one for your business.
These delivery services are prime candidates for cooperatisation… which after a quick search using quotes to filter out “corporatisation” it turns out is a word that serious people use.
Anyway, the reason for this is that they are minimal services - all you need is an app and the ability to get that app on people’s phones - and almost no investment in infrastructure.
It would be so easy - conceptually, I know software is hard - to replace that app with a cooperative based model, and you could leverage open source to make a general platform that could be adjusted to individual coops’ needs, and allowing a customer to use a single contact point for any affiliated services. Each coop then wouldn’t meed to develop their own app, it would be ready made for them.
It could also use federation to link up groups for discovery and to weed out scummy groups.
Not that complex software-wise either, probably the sole biggest challenge would be proper geofencing, then routing can be handled externally
Geofencing?.. Why? And for what?
to find restaurants close to a courier
Geofencing is not what you use to find anything
oh sorry then, thought it works like some radar, don’t know what the proper name is for what I’m thinking about then. I’m not a mobile dev so I could be wrong.
The fish and chip co-op that used to be nearby was the best - trawlers parked out the back, super fresh produce, generous portions and reasonable prices.
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Tony should make a business of helping people set this sort of thing up for themselves!
You mean like with multi-level marketing?
Tony’s a gem.
What’s up homie? I’m Tony. 🤠
It’s not that crazy to think this might actually be tony responding lol. Unlikely
