Saw this coming from a mile off. It’s just common sense. . employers won’t have their bottom line cut that far. Force them to pay more and they’ll look for other options. You have got things like grubhub. Pizza hut can fire their people and still sell just as many pizzas. This could literally translate into more profit if you think about it.
Surrendering control of your value chain increases profits how exactly? These illegal taxi companies are neither cheaper nor more efficient than bespoke delivery personnel even if you do the thing where you pretend they wont monopsonize and charge your business fuckloads for the “privilege” of using their service-- which they will.
Pizzas have thermally unfortunate form factors, and the illegal taxi companies have almost always had worse delivery times. It’s just a loss for everybody who isn’t a capitalist.
F*ck the people who empower gig economy. Fuck Uber eats, door dash and everything similar.
I look forward to the downvotes again because everyone has their heads so far up their asses but we are the problem. Fuck us.
We are the reason we are racing to the bottom. We expect cheap & fast and we don’t care how it happens as long as it does.
I look forward to the downvotes again because everyone has their heads so far up their asses but we are the problem. Fuck us.
We are the reason we are racing to the bottom. We expect cheap & fast and we don’t care how it happens as long as it does
Yep. Some More News had a sobering bit in their video on the generation war about how Millennials are also responsible for fucking up the world for the people coming after us like the Boomers were (as in, the real problem lies with politicians but we do make it worse in some ways). The gig economy was one example of fucking shit up for Gen Z without us realizing it at the time.
(Obviously the major problem here is that somehow DoorDash and Uber Eats get to pay people less, poorly written regulation that carves out concessions to make shit worse for everyone.)
Been a while since I watched it and I don’t know how well it holds up but it was interesting.
I think about this a lot whenever Airbnb comes up. People mention it and I’m like airbnb caused rents to rise a lot, and I just get deafening silence.
Honestly I would respect “I know it has externalized costs I’m not paying for, but it’s convenient and I accept it’s not the best thing” more than awkward silence or clumsy justifications.
I’m guilty too, sometimes. I should probably order directly from the restaurant instead of using seamless or whatever
People generally should use the best option. Often expense is the metric. These are able to operate at competitive rates because they get away with shenanigans. They should be regulated properly, then their rates would reflect that and people would use them less.
Yeah, it’s this. The only thing innovated by DD or UberEats is avoiding regulation. This is the real cause of all of the enshittification that everyone is seeing. It’s been the plan all along; charge an absolutely unsustainable price, jack things up when you’re the only option. DD is already well along this pattern; it used to be much cheaper, and it’s still going to go up.
Already they are expensive AF. The menu prices on doordash can be like 50% more, then there are the service fees and more.
For every else (like me) who had never heard the term ‘gig economy’ before:
A gig economy is a free market system in which temporary positions are common and organizations hire independent workers for short-term commitments. The term “gig” is a slang word for a job that lasts a specified period of time. Traditionally, the term was used by musicians to define a performance engagement.
Is no one else going to blame an overly specific minimum wage? I couldn’t find anything too specific but in California, it looks like:
- fast food minimum wage: $20/hr, going to $22
- gig drivers: $15/hr
Of course they’re going to outsource drivers, This looks like a nice Christmas gift to UberEats/DoirDash
This is what’s so annoying. I had literal arguments with both people online and IRL about this massive jump in minimum wage and how it would have this exact effect. I was told over and over that it didn’t work like that, that people needed a livable wage, etc. My argument was that not all work has equal value and that minimum wage jobs aren’t intended as jobs you raise a family on. They’re a stepping stone as you enter the workforce and begin to develop/gain skills to be able to do work which has more value. With the insane increase in fast food minimum wage only one of two things will happen. Option one is that the price of the food shoots up and can no longer be competitive. Why would you pay $30 for fast food when you can go to an actual restaurant and get better quality for the same price? This leads many of these fast food joints to close and with it the jobs. Option two is that companies find ways to cut services and/or automate to offset the increased cost. The end result here is that once again the jobs go away.
I would love to have a proponent of this explain to me how no jobs is preferable to lower paying jobs. As a highschool kid, I was grateful to have my minimum wage job.
My argument is that the jobs DIDN’T go away, they just became gig jobs. In the big picture the increase had no effect except for speeding up the transition from one form of delivery job to a different form of delivery job.
Min wage has to cover living expenses because otherwise people are forced to make up the difference from wellfare. So in effect it is a subsidy from taxpayers to companies that pay low wages.
Full time, min-wage workers cannot afford rent for a 1-bedroom flat in 90% of the entire country.
But that IS the jobs going away. You converted a full time job into an occasional time job. Say you were make $15/hr 40hrs/week. That’s $600/week. Now they convert your full time job into a gig job and you’re making $20/hr, but you only work 10 hours per week. You’re now making $200/week. You now need to try and make up that $400/week shortfall in your income. Good thing you got that massive pay increase though, right?
Except minimum wage should support you fully because, as you may have noticed in high school, NOT everyone working at your minimum-wage workplace was “a high school kid”. Walmart and a lot of other places that skate by offering minimum wage effectively outsource the rest of the money they SHOULD be paying to the government - what you may know as “your fucking taxes”. You wanna see less people using welfare? You should be out there demanding companies pay more - some estimates are that Walmart’s profits are effectively buoyed as much as 40% by taxpayer-funded welfare programs like EBT, SNAP, TANF, and various forms of rent assistance, and there are similar numbers for other minimum-wage retailers and workplaces.
“BUT THAT MIGHT RAISE PRICES”, you cry? Well, here’s the good thing - by raising MINIMUM wage, you can go to your boss and say “hey I’m only making $17 an hour doing [highly skilled job], that’s only $2 more than minimum, could we work out a raise?” And if you get your whole workplace to do this, or enough of your fellow coworkers doing similar positions, they would definitely feel far more compelled.
Actually everyone I worked with in high school was a high school kid. The only person older than that was the store owner, and she obviously was making more due to her larger investment/risk.
Here’s the problem with your entire pitch, I’m going to be paying taxes regardless. They will never go down, they will only ever go up. If one problem is solved the government will simply use my taxes for something else. This is how government works. Additionally, increased wages get passed onto the customer. I know many people here like to pretend that they don’t, but prices either go up, or quality/quantity go down. That IS what happens, so I’ll be paying for it either way.
Your whole argument about an increase in minimums allowing other workers to request raises also doesn’t work. Instead what happens is the increase in pay causes an increase in prices, negating the gains across the board. We just saw this exact thing play out during covid. Stores had to very quickly increase the wages they were paying, prices went up, negating the increase in wages.
They should create incentive by taxing the shit out of businesses and offering tax breaks for actually offering living wages and benefits to their employees. If the “correct” answer in capitalism is to find the cheapest solution,
I think this is a novel idea and an interesting thought experiment.
If we passed this federally, I think it’s most likely we see an outsourcing - to ourselves. With the market floor raised so high across the board, distortionary effects would then kick in and what I posit we’d see is a shitload of both business and consumer flight to rural areas.
Prices for rent, obviously, would go through the fuckin roof. This would cause a mass exodus to surrounding areas, but I think business investment would actually beat them, because if you’re paying 60k/year anyway, you may as well put your facility in the cheapest possible location.
Businesses are already shifting toward being physically close to their suppliers/major logistics hubs, to save cost elsewhere, so big “shipping towns” (which are, essentially, a few big wholesale distributors and nothing else) could see massive investment.
What’s weird for me is that this may actually help our housing situation in the medium term, as explosive growth in these areas even out demand hotspots.
Idk about high raises in labor market floors to predict much beyond that, but it’s something I’ll definitely check out.
These aren’t completely pie-in-the-sky proposals, either. Simply tying maximum compensation for publicly owned companies would start this kind of a chain rolling, in a smaller way, I think. Labor prices would jump ludicrously just from the amount of low-skill labor employed by major companies.
Inflation would be bonkers and you can’t raise interest rates too fast or you basically nuke your economy, so how this plays out for the average joe is anyone’s guess. Fun to think about tho
I can’t for the life of me think that this will be good for them though. Food delivery services are notoriously shitty/slow. If I order a pizza and have to wait for an intendent person to come pick it up and deliver it when ever is convenient for them? Thats not gonna work for me… and I would be loud and boisterous to the company.
In an alternate timeline where restaurants never thought to offer delivery (or regulated against it…since objectively it is kind of strange how we do it now), but did offer takeout, I’d expect private food courier services would have thrived. Especially in denser areas.
Even in an era before DoorDash and internet, it’d be a call-center/concierge style.
But also gig drivers aren’t getting the minimum. Uber and Lyft promise you’ll make the minimum through the ride fares if you work a whole hour. But that doesn’t happen. Many people don’t notice because the pay is distributed across the rides but some have actually done the math with their daily totals. They also just lost a court case about paying mileage, so they not have to reimburse mileage they weren’t doing before.
With a business climate like that it’s no wonder everyone else is jettisoning delivery drivers. The rideshare companies are getting away with murder by comparison.
Pizza Hut made over $6 billion last year, you’d think they could afford to pay their drivers.
There’s 19,000 pizza huts, but most all of them are franchises. It’s not “pizza hut” firing drivers over this. It’s franchise owners. Also, if you were to do some napkin math, 19,000 (I know. Just california, but that would hardly be fair to everyone else) pizza huts needing say…5 drivers each at 40 hours a week paid 20 means a cost of about 28 after insurance and such… that’d be 95 thousand drivers…$106,400,000 a week…$5,532,800,000 a year.
Shit gets expensive.
But face it. Delivery drivers make a lot in tips. People have been willing to do it using their own vehicles for decades while they make super low minimum wages. Making $20/ hour plus the tips will have the delivery guy out doing everyone else at the restaurant, which means their pay will have to go to like $35/hour which means a stupid pizza is gonna cost $30. Let uber eats handle the deliveries.
$20/hour is only part of employee compensation. It does not include benefits or taxes. Your employer pays a lot of taxes on your behalf.
Don’t even get me started on the money and time taken to recruit, hire, and train new employees.
Don’t misunderstand me. I support a higher minimum wage. I am a firm believer that minimum wage should be $25/hour and increases should be tied to inflation.
Don’t even get me started on the money and time taken to recruit, hire, and train new employees.
For delivery drivers?
Know how to drive? If not, next. Here’s the pizza. Put it on a flat surface in the vehicle, don’t throw or flip it. Use Google maps to get to the house. Hand it to the customer. Come back. Done.
Pizza in Boston delivered by door dash is routinely right about $30 before tip. My credit card offers free door dash premium whatever it’s called and I usually choose places offering a promo and tend to order early when there are also promos. That brings things down to the $20s. But it’s generally about $30 with tip even doing all that. If I’m not paying attention it’s easy to order a $45 pizza.
To be fair I don’t eat from pizza Hut or Dominos or other chains. Those might be a few percent cheaper.
That’s half my point, though. You choosing to pay $30 through door dash or Uber eats is your choice. The restaurant isn’t charging way more for their pizzas because they have to pay everyone on staff a lot more. Delivery has been outsourced and so have the added costs that go along with it.
What pizza hut has 5 full time drivers? There’s only 1200 people affected by this and 560 locations so a little more than 2 per location. Now let’s look at the cost those delivery apps charge 30%. So if 35% of sales are deliveries now theyre paying Uber ~110k to deliver their pizzas. 28$/hr is high closer to 23-25$/hr for overhead. That’s roughly what the delivery drivers would have cost and now they’re getting way shittier delivery service and people are much less likely to buy pizza from them. Sounds like a dumb move.
5 too many? I just figured there’d be like 2 delivery people at any given time and trying to have 3 on Friday and Saturday night.
But as to Uber, that’s the customers choice if they want to pay an arm and a leg to have pizza brought to their door. It won’t much effect the pizza hut. Store dedicated delivery drivers are a thing of the past now. They’ve been outsourced.
Of course the can pay their drivers but think of the poor shareholders who may see 0.1% less profit or the CEO who may get only 99% of their usual bonus. Oh the horror!!
The Pizza Hut corporation will be fine. These are franchises we are talking about. The franchises pay an initial fee of $25k and then 6% + 4.75% sales/marketing fees to Pizza Hut.
It’s the owners of the franchises that are responsible for fucking over their employees. While Pizza Hut could reduce their fees, they won’t. Franchise owners could increase pay, but they won’t. It’s more likely that the franchise owners will offload deliveries to Uber and Door Dash and not have to worry about managing drivers anymore.
The entire model sucks, so I am not blaming franchise owners over the corporation. They are both at fault for relying on the extortion of teenagers or other people who don’t have extremely profitable job skills.
https://franchise.pizzahut.com/faqs/
Edit: Also, these aren’t one-off mom and pop franchise owners anymore. These are franchise owning conglomerates that likely have more negotiable franchise fees.
Won’t offloading the delivery to those services cost even more? They take a pretty hefty cut of the sale. Last I heard it was around 30% of an order.
It’s staggering how many people don’t understand the difference between franchises and corporations on wall street in the internet age
It’s staggering how many people assume things without looking into them. In this case, it’s a corporation called Pac Pizza, LLC and makes over $25 million per year that’s doing the layoffs. I think they can pay their delivery drivers an extra $4 (according to the USA Today article linked above) per hour.
If they had to pay all of their less than 500 employees (according to the Zoominfo page linked above) the extra $4 per hour, and they all worked full time, 40-hour weeks all year, the company would have to pay just over $4 million in extra wages.
Assuming the franchises make the low end of the estimated revenue linked above, $4.5 million would be 16% of the total. Increasing prices by 16% to cover that cost is far less than the approximately 40% customers end up paying when using third-party delivery services.
All in all, this sure seems like the franchise corporation (probably in cahoots with Pizza Hut proper) is just using these delivery jobs as a political stunt in opposition of the mandated wage increase.
Here’s the takeaway, though. Any employer, including but not limited to mom-and-pop businesses, that can’t afford to pay its employees a living wage should not be in business.
It’s staggering how many people assume things without looking into them. In this case, it’s a corporation called Pac Pizza, LLC and makes over $25 million per year that’s doing the layoffs. I think they can pay their delivery drivers an extra $4 (according to the USA Today article linked above) per hour.
If they had to pay all of their less than 500 employees (according to the Zoominfo page linked above) the extra $4 per hour, and they all worked full time, 40-hour weeks all year, the company would have to pay just over $4 million in extra wages.
Assuming the franchises make the low end of the estimated revenue linked above, $4.5 million would be 16% of the total. Increasing prices by 16% to cover that cost is far less than the approximately 40% customers end up paying when using third-party delivery services.
All in all, this sure seems like the franchise corporation (probably in cahoots with Pizza Hut proper) is just using these delivery jobs as a political stunt in opposition of the mandated wage increase.
Here’s the takeaway, though. Any employer, including but not limited to mom-and-pop businesses, that can’t afford to pay its employees a living wage should not be in business.
Who the fuck eats at Pizza Hut these days? Good riddance tbh.
Yeah, overpriced shit imo.
Papa Johns is the only 1 of the big 3 that maintained their quality.
At least Dominos is cheap.
Pizza hut is both expensive and bad.
Yeah, but fuck Papa John’s:
Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter Says Company Will Reduce Workers’ Hours In Response To Obamacare. In the wake of President Obama’s reelection, one CEO is doubling down on his criticisms of Obamacare. Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter said he plans on passing the costs of health care reform to his business onto his workers.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/papa-johns-obamacare-john-schnatter_n_2104202
Domino’s in my region built a dough manufacturing facility and changed their sauce a few years ago.
It’s been good since. Not the best, but absolutely good enough for the guys when watching the game or for a quick meal for the kids when needed.
I like Domino’s. I would go there at least once a week when they had a 3-topping large takeout deal for $8. When they changed it to 1-topping, I stopped going.
Papa John’s is better for quality, but it’s also more expensive. Some locations would have a 2-topping $8 large carryout deal, but they were rare and I don’t think any of them do it anymore.
