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adding $5 fees to every order (even when the customer is outside Seattle city limits) while calling for the law to be repealed.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?
Time is a flat circle
Why is the modifier “flat” added here?
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.
They don’t have to. Plenty of small businesses stay good and small.
The problem is the ones that spread like cancer.
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.
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
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.
A real co-op is an interesting thing.
They may require functioning law enforcement more than common kinds of companies, I think.
Well, at least it seems that co-ops were the easiest kind of organizations to victimize in Russian 90s, but I wasn’t alive for the most part of it, and then wasn’t quite intelligent enough.
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
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.
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.
What’s up homie? I’m Tony. 🤠
Tony should make a business of helping people set this sort of thing up for themselves!
You mean like with multi-level marketing?
The good side of a free market
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.
That’s how it was ideally supposed to work, if humans wouldn’t be trainable to follow brands and ads.
Sadly they are, so I dunno. Maybe abolishing trademarks and outlawing unrequested ads would work.
After all, it is illegal to do to a person what they haven’t requested, right? It is illegal to take a thing from your house without your permission. It should be illegal to put it in there also, it’s the same thing mirrored. That would include unrequested ads.
Then we’ll see how many people really want to see ads.
It’s not about the ads, it’s about regulations. The free market dies when regulations get introduced. Especially when these regulations were introduced through lobbying by big corpos, who are trying to protect themselves from competition.
The free market also dies when unregulated companies destroy their competition to become monopolies, destroy the environment and enslave people.
You’re correct in that when companies essentially own politicians and get regulations passed that help them do the above, like the system we seem to have now, then that’s a serious problem.
The answer to that isn’t to get rid of regulations, though. An unregulated free market isn’t going to stop factories from dumping toxic waste into rivers or spewing it into the air. It’s not going to stop companies from paying employees slave wages. And it’s definitely not going to stop companies from using dirty tactics to drive out their competition and become monopolies, as you seem to be suggesting.
A well regulated free market can both reward innovators that come up with new products or services that society values while also protecting the environment and the workers from exploitation, and ensuring healthy competition.
That’s not the system we have now, for sure, but we’re absolutely not going to get there by getting rid of regulations. We need to yank control of the government (and thus the laws) away corporations and the wealthy and give it back to the people.
RCV
And it’s definitely not going to stop companies from using dirty tactics to drive out their competition and become monopolies, as you seem to be suggesting.
This doesn’t seem correct. Historically before IP and trademark laws monopolization was done mostly through actual warfare. The idea of free market doesn’t allow that.
Free market does even more warfare, just less noticable
I don’t think Apple won\lost any wars over US market. I’m talking Hanseatic-Danish wars, colonial wars etc.
It’s about power.
If you get rid of all regulations, then eventually lying better and louder is a winning strategy. If you regulate the market so that it’s no longer agile, then you have monopolies fortified by law.
And depending on who has power, it’s shifted between these two extremes separately for every distinct thing.
So I wouldn’t deal in absolutes.
Damn I live just outside their range 😭
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Many people prefer relative stability with lower average income over freedom.
EDIT: it seems you are talking about coop vs hired by corp. Even in relatively sane countries(even not EU) you can have stability in coop
No, in this case I’m talking about individual vs corporate, coop counting as corporate. Yes, with working law enforcement coops work fine and I very much like the idea. Technically I’m part of one even in one part of my life.
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I agree. Just every such order becomes a social interaction until you get used to it.
Which is not bad even for me with my social problems.
The issues are with 1) brand recognition and ads affecting how consumers behave, 2) regulations which may make it hard for individual businesses of this kind in some countries, 3) information exchange.
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??
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!
World: decent wage
USSA: tip, tip, tip, tip
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.
I bet he makes more money as he isnt getting fucked up the ass by a deliver company
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
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:
