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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
no. they are all delivered by car, even if they say it’s by bike.
bikes are too slow for be good for delivery
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Speed is measured differently in the US
yes, miles per hour instead of meters per second
other countries deliver most things using motorbikes, it always sounded ridiculous to me to use a car to deliver food
To be fair, most drivers have multiple ongoing deliveries (and space for them). So it’s not quite one car per burrito
Nicer in the winter to use a car. And depending on the type of service, these might otherwise be used as personal cars
Your personal car doesn’t make 50 deliveries in a day though, so that equation won’t work out.
?? I’m talking about the delivery people owning those cars and using them as personal cars after work, so they’re not being bought just for deliveries
Delivery is good option for people with limited mobility
been disabled since 2017. pays half my salary. gave up driving last year. not good at those prices. wife grows vegetables in summer.
agreed. Just because something is unsustainable if everyone were to have limited mobility doesn’t mean it’s unsustainable.
Why does OP think every delivery is made by car? Often times they are made by bike.
Especially in NYC. Bike delivery has been a thing there long before uberdashhub. Hell, it was a fucking plot point in Spiderman 2 back in 2004:
I think it was TMNT 2 that had a delivery guy on a moped back in like 92.
I see you’ve never been to the Midwest. Or the south. Or anywhere that isn’t Boston/new York/San Francisco.
I mean the post clearly says $30 in fees in New York city
I see you think only america exists
Not where I live.
…if you think delivery is too expensive, maybe don’t get your food delivered, then? Just a thought.
Can’t I do both though?
Both what?
Can’t I not order delivery but also think its absurdly expensive?
I’m sorry sir, we abhor nuance around here
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, I was just asking what two options you were talking about. It was just a normal question with no motive.
It was always obvious that the shared delivery model would result in massive delivery fees. Store employees doing deliveries were always at least partially subsidized by sales. Going third party means another company needs to suck more profit out of each delivery.
I’ve lived several places. In some, I could walk to get food, and I gladly did so. In others, I could not.
Should I have starved?
If your argument is “you should have driven,” then you are depending on cars. Whether it’s the buyer or an employee doing the driving has little effect on how much a car is being used. The environment doesn’t care who’s burning the gas.
in history we learned how most civilizations starved to death until pizza hut started delivering food to people.
before then people would starve as there was no other way to get/prepare food at home.
Don’t expect problems to have neat, individually actionable solutions. Most don’t.
But cooking your food is pretty damn near to being that.
Provided you have time, and the groceries available, and the…
Point is, taking every observation personally is missing the forest from the trees. Objecting to overuse of cars is an objection to a systemic issue (usually insufficientpublic transport), and it won’t be solved by individual action. Responding to it with “Well, I need a car, actually…” is missing the point. Same with delivery: getting into a “well, I can’t walk to food” “well, you should cook”, “well, I …” is missing the point of “there’s a whole mess of traffic that’s both expensive and has been managed without earlier - that’s weird, wonder what changed to cause it?”
I don’t disagree that it’s stupid but my problem is the stacking - Delivery fee and Service fee? The service is delivery! Why are they two fees? Either the cost of the delivery is being itemized in real time ($1.99 for gas, the rest for the human) or the delivery isn’t $1.99! If the cost to deliver an item is $20 and I make $50/hr working a project, maybe having food delivered makes sense.
But also, I know the delivery guy isn’t making all that and he’s delivering five orders so don’t charge me a service fee when I’m already subsidizing you paying him a shit wage.
Everything is shitty either way.
It’s so they can give “free delivery” and still charge a butt load of fees.
The service is delivery!
I read this and thought, “no, the service is that they were able to put pants on and leave their house today, unlike you.”
Please dont take that as a personal attack, I’m just sharing intrusive thoughts when they make me giggle
I use them fairly often because I’m just too fucking busy during the week. I have to get up at 5am to get ready for work, am too busy to take a real lunch break, and get home around 8-9 most nights. And that’s on nights I don’t have meetings (I work in municipal government, and public meetings like Council, P&Z, BOA, etc all meet at nights). We could hire more people, but that would require more income, and that requires council members to vote on raising their own property taxes, not to mention state law regarding tax increases.
Yeah, I could meal prep on the weekend, but that’s essentially allowing work to intrude on my weekends, and fuck that.
I’m essentially buying more time to relax in the very little relaxation time I have available.
How else can they get people to sign up for a $15/month subscription that gives "free delivery " while charging a fuckton for a delivery service?
Isn’t most delivery in NYC done by bicycle?
Hiring a whole middleman to chauffer your burrito (if you would be able to do it yourself) is unsustainable even if they walked.
If you “think” enough about it everything but living in cave fucking a rock is unsustainable and a result of you being too dumb to do everything yourself.
Bet you lazy bastards don’t even sew your own leathers. You’d rather “trade your surplus income for goods and services.”
Goddamn millennials.
How so? Do ingredients for home cooking just apperate? Should everyone live on a farm with public transit nearby?
Lol no, literally my point. Transporting food wholesale to a centralized place is sustainable and efficient.
And then how does that food get from the centralized wholesale place to your kitchen? Im not just talking out my ass, this is a heavily studied topic.
Yeah that’s interesting. I wouldn’t mind a food bus that drops off food house to house I’m sure that exists in some places and that’s definitely more efficient. Although I’m sure right now the food is the same price and the service costs extra which wouldn’t happen if it came straight from a distro idk.
I was talking about one person bringing one prepared meal for another person.
Is DoorDash etc one meal at a time? Do they really not consolidate orders? I didn’t realize…
Afaik it depends on the situation. If it’s an efficient route and a driver accepts multiple orders from the same restaurant they might be able to take more than one. But in general they don’t restaurant hop, and back in the day when I had friends who did Uber eats, it would have to be a choice by the person to pick up more than one order at a time, so it’s one driver per restaurant per time window of accepting and order and delivering it at least. And that’s probably only assuming you’re in a busy city and not a slower rural area.
I only say it’s unsustainable because after the food you order from the restaurant is made there are now two people in the chain for a meal for one person. That doesn’t square up even before you factor in the cost.
bringing people food is ableist
It’s kind of wild how the standard fare of pizza and chinese food delivery was absorbed by gig work. They used to be employees of the restaurant.
Technology should have made restaurant deliverer’s lives easier and increased their efficiency. They should have made more money and worked less.
Instead we got gig workers who are basically impoverished wage slaves. They get no rights and no benefits. What is worse is whatever temporary profits they made have been sucked up by corporations by now.
This is a great case study for how to not use technology and how Tech Bros are not disrupters, they are destructors who profiteer, choke out, and then destroy markets.
that’s what capitalism does to technology.
it isn’t there to improve lives, it’s there to funnel as much capital to shareholders as possible
Not sure about other places but here when you order pizza, it is MUCH cheaper to call the restaurant directly and have them deliver it. It’s usually faster too.
Same, local Chinese places near me still deliver as far as I know.
One chinese restaurant out here still does it I since they had a fleet of cars. But the local pizza joints and all the chains just contract through a delivery service app. It isn’t usually doordash or ubereats, but the driver almost always is anyway.
So these days even the delivery apps are middlemen between the restaurant and the drivers. (They provide the menus and the transaction service and coordinate with all available driver delivery apps.)
Of all the modern capitalistic irritations (to put it mildly), this one I really detest. And not least because of how ridiculously popular it is, wtf people? I watch folks I know, who can barely afford the food itself in the first place, then inflate the price by like 40%, just to eat the already (very!) mediocre food…cold. Solely so that they don’t have to leave the house. Just completely unhinged from my POV, and honestly produces almost a sense of alienation in me, I find it so bizarre.
Disclaimer though - I will acknowledge both that I happily enjoy various different foolish things myself, so the point about glass houses is worth my keeping in mind, and also there are some great reasons to use it (limited mobility for one, as another user pointed out).
But sheesh folks. Restaurants largely hate it from my understanding, the drivers doing it hate it (cuz the job - oh excuse me, the preferred exploitation-hiding euphemism is “gig” - is utter shit, a literal minor improvement over straight up homelessness), the environment hates it, the wear-and-tear on a likely broke person’s vehicle and the wear-and-tear on already struggling infrastructure…I mean what the fuckity fuck, seriously. How is this so popular, we’re all insane and just conveniencing our way to oblivion. SMgoddamnH.
Aside from the aforementioned reasonable uses (largely edge cases, let’s be honest), there is precisely one group of people who truly benefit in any serious way from this amazingly destructive nonsense - and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the exact same group fucking us in every other way! Weird!
Sorry. This one really gets me.
The need this came out of COVID and a lack of people wanting to go out. It’s was a decent way to keep business open who would otherwise have to lay off all their staff. Once COVID ended, I assumed it would go away. However, money talks.
My wife was just saying how she thiks GPS is soon going to have a VIP tier to give you the best routes and the longer routes go to the people who don’t pay (but still have their data harvested).
That is a good point (re: COVID) that I had lost along the way, thanks. Those services did do good during that time, you’re right. I’m not so sure about the GPS thing, but hey, I never thought we’d see half the ugly shit we’re seeing these days, so why not?
My friends definitely think I’m weird cause I don’t use food delivery, but I see it from a germ perspective too. None of those drivers are certified food handler and their car is likely not a safe environment. I keep my cars spotless, but based on everyone’s car I’ve ever been in I’m the minority in that.
Every other point you made I agree with too, but man I just don’t see how people don’t also recognize that your food is travelling in someone else’s potential garbage. Just to save you from what? Getting up and grabbing some food yourself?
Yet another “wtf, y’all?”, good point. I can’t personally say that grosses me out, but I tend to be in the minority on that sort of topic myself, so I totally see what you’re saying. Aint no health inspector checking these vehicles (true of traditional delivery too I suppose).
And I mean…sometimes the drivers straight up eat some food, which is awful from the standpoint of your POV, but also just… truly hilarious to me.
I assume that most deliveries in NYC are by push bike couriers and vesper type scooters. Thats more typical than yank tanks for this sort of thing in most densely populated cities I’ve seen.
It’s mostly scooters and e-bikes.
This cuts both ways actually. you can have 10 guys going through a drive thru or one 1 making 10 stops. The one guy making ten stops results in less traffic and fewer emissions.
Does that happen in a meaningful amount? Drivers getting multiple orders for the same place with close by destinations? I think it’s vastly more common that you just have 10 drivers at different locations on behalf of 10 customers.
I do a lot of DD, and I’d bet that 75%+ of my restaurant orders are a single order going to a single house. I prefer grocery delivery, and it’s probably closer to 50% for those, as we often get a couple of orders at once.
Occasionally we get a single drop off with 2 stops (pick up food from a restaurant and something from a drug or grocery store, and drop them both off together).
I’ve never gotten more than 3 orders at once, and those are pretty rare.
Americans are too lazy to travel to their lunch. However, for the vast majority of the people, you’re not 15 minutes of walk away from a healthy assortment of food. Even in NYC, depending on where you are, it may not be possible to always go to your food. The idea of your lunch being paid is also not common, and you’re expected to be back to working (not done eating) within 30 minutes or less. In many cases, your lunchtime is timed and unpaid. Nurses and hospital staff? Eat the shit downstairs in the cafeteria or nothing; if you’re late coming back from lunch, it’s almost as bad as being late to work itself.
Obviously we can’t pretend that VC funded services like Uber are sustainable nor are the environmental and economic costs. But this aren’t new concepts. Pizza delivery has been a thing my entire life (I’m in my 40s) and services for the elderly, disabled, and needy like Meals on Wheels have also existed for a long time.
We should be having a lot of discussions about support for services like meals on wheels, or on sustainable means of making small courier businesses viable (via bikes or scooters maybe). Instead we constantly get sidelined into this “only the Treatler Youth use Uber Eats to feed your hamburger addictions, why can’t you just cook healthfully for yourself for every meal?!” version of discourse that doesn’t help anyone and doesn’t advance the needle on any actual solutions.
Pizza delivery sure, but meals on wheels it’s for the disabled and elderly. It’s not just food delivery, it’s a social call, a check in on those who might not have anyone else to check on them. Meals on Wheels also doesn’t deliver one meal. It delivers many in one vehicle.
I’m sure there are things to criticize about the program but most of that is probably a lack of funding not delivering meals and food to those who need it.
Sure, that’s kind of my point though. I was discussing with a friend recently what role restaurants would have in the glorious anarchic communist utopia. We hit on the notion that what we call “hot bars” would probably become much more common.
It doesn’t make sense for everyone to cook for themselves or be deeply concerned with the logistics of food. It would be efficient for larger kitchens to make regular group meals and you go pick one up when you’re ready to eat. Something like Meals on Wheels would still exist for all the reasons you say, probably sourcing from their own kitchen or from one of the larger group ones.
I could even see a case for group meal delivery to save time on everyone having to leave job sites to go get food.
I guess my main point here is that I find it more productive and hopeful to imagine these kinds of futures: where everyone is working together systematically to provide convenience and support for everyone. I also find it much more believable as a possible future than rather some cottage core vision of everyone become subsistence smallhold farmers.
(Happy cake day BTW! I hope that cake wasn’t delivered!)
For a couple of years in college, I was part of a food coop of six people who each cooked one night a week for the rest of the group. It worked great, but only because our dorm had a full kitchen which I think is not very common.
