I’m my area the Uber eats prices are higher than if you order in person. An order at my fave dumpling place is 11$ pick up and listed at 14$ on Uber. Add service fee and tip it’s +20$. Paying almost 10$ extra for a meal to take 45 minutes to get to my house cold is not a good deal.
Why would it be a “deal”. It is a luxury service for those who can afford it. Mostly paying for someone else’s labor which isn’t cheap.
It’s not really luxury though - the orders are often wrong, the food is cold, and it is one of the slowest ways of getting food to eat.
I would eat out the most when I was pulling 14-16 hour days, and I cook at home the most when I work 8 hour days.
I dont think laziness enters into it
I used to cook literally every day of the week, but then I started clinical rotations and now I’m working 14-16 hour days 6-7 days a week. I’ve entirely stopped cooking for myself, even though it was previously my favorite hobby, because there’s no fucking way I can fit it into my schedule anymore. Anyone who wants to call me lazy can go fuck themselves, and doubly so for anyone who argues it’s my fault for paying exorbitant prices for delivery “because there are alternatives”. I don’t have the luxury of voting with my wallet and it honestly makes me made whenever I complain about unregulated prices and am told I should just not use the service and instead do X, Y, or Z option that isn’t even close to practical for me.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t work when there aren’t any alternatives. If all the services are bilking people, then there’s no choice but to stop using an entire type of service. There’s a similar argument in American tipping culture: you can just vote with your wallet by not going out to eat.
But that’s austerity measures and those have been shown definitively to NOT work. People won’t give up most of life’s pleasures and conveniences unless they have to. No one wants to deprive themselves of most of society’s benefits. And they shouldn’t have to. There should be laws regulating how companies charge and introduce fees and what they can charge for to prevent abuse and industry-wide abuse.
But you can vote with your wallet and not use the third party delivery app. Order from the place directly or call and order for pickup depending on the venue. Almost any resteraunt will let you call and order for pickup (that’s already what Uber/GrubHub/etc. do then charge you the fee for the convenience), and they’ll prefer that over the app because they get 100% of the money you pay for that meal
I get that boycotts don’t work, but who the fuck is still paying double/triple instead of picking it up themselves on their way home or just driving out to get it - I haven’t ordered third party delivery since the pandemic since there’s no way I can justify the stupid high cost.
I recently started delivering with DoorDash to add some cushion to my budget and this week I had someone buy a single two pound bag of spaghetti noodles from Safeway.
I got laid $6.75 for the delivery after tip (DoorDash paid me $4.75 and the customer gave me a $2 tip). The noodles cost 3.84 at Safeway, and $4.18 on the app, and Safeway is a zero dollar delivery fee shopping experience.
As far as I can tell, it cost DoorDash a dollar or two for me to make that delivery, and/or the customer paid a lot more than $6.75 for the noodles for it to make sense for DoorDash to take.
It was a sort of surreal experience.
Yes there is an alternative, you don’t use delivery services. It is just a big dumb waste of money.
I pick up all my own food, have never used any of the 3rd party food delivery ripoffs
That’s great. My time is worth less than theses crazy prices and I work better if I get something to eat and this is faster than getting the very limited and terrible food at work. Do I feel like the prices are insane? Yep. But it’s a value call and since there isn’t another option that allows for good quality food quickly, they get my money. This didn’t used to exist and that sucked, so maybe we are just undervaluing how great this is. Would be greater not paying $60 for lunch though, so yeah, I’m gonna keep paying and grumbling about it at the same time. I really hope drone services take off soon and have better pricing.
Tbf, not everyone has a car. I mean, cooking ramen at home and saving up for a car would be a better use of your money, but then people like whoever replies to this that are ideologically opposed to cars would rather have someone else with a car deliver it so they can disconnect themselves from that reality.
Fwiw I also always pick up, I was a delivery driver for 10yr, I can take one more run (to myself).
People not ordering food en masse would hurt small businesses the most. Plus there’s a huge benefit to using an app to order food, which is why they’re so popular. If the system were controlled by the restaurants and interoperable via an open API, we’d at least see some transparency.
The problem is exactly what OP stated: These things are owned by a small number of players, who can exercises control of the market from all sides. They’ve created a chokepoint where they can extract rents without needing to provide value in return.
