The internet has been shovelling ads at me for food delivery. Uber Eats and Skip the Dishes in particular have paid Google a small fortune to try to get me to buy food on the internet and have it delivered.
It is all a scam, a show, a grandoise lie.
These companies want me to believe that I can have servants. I don't have to do the dishes, cook food, or drive. Best of all, this is all extremely cheap! It is almost too good to be true.
It is too good to be true.
I can have servants, yes. I can get food delivered to me, I can have people show up to drive me places, and I can skip on the whole 'paying for it' bit. But somebody always pays, and in this case it is the people doing those deliveries and driving those cars.
Notice how no company is offering food delivery services where employees that get a salary, benefits, and vacation do deliveries using company vehicles? Know why that is? Because no customers will pay the cost associated with such deliveries.
People doing these deliveries are doing so out of desperation or ignorance. The amount they get paid isn't nearly enough to pay for the costs of car maintenance, gas, and a reasonable wage. They get an hourly wage that works for now, and then they get hit with all the bills later, and the companies that hired them get rich off of the depreciation of the workers' assets.
If you think food delivery can profitably happen for $5, you are delusional. Companies aren't offering that because they are efficient, they are offering that because they are ruining the lives of the gig workers who do the actual deliveries for them. This isn't a company coming in to do things better, it is just another scam to siphon money off from those who are desperate and funnel it upwards.
What Uber and Skip the Dishes and Lyft are doing is simple. They aren't employers paying people to deliver a service, they are banks offering loans to poor people at heinous rates. They are doing the same thing as Cash Money and Money Mart and other similar payday loan businesses do - finding someone who is desperate for cash right now and leveraging them for profit. They ruin people. That is the *only* way their business model works. If you had to pay the real cost of your Uber ride you wouldn't do it, and old style taxis would come back into vogue. If you had to front the actual cost of your food delivery you wouldn't bother because it would cost as much for the delivery as it did for the food.
We can't all have servants. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to exploit you, or the servants.
You actually have to cook. Or you have to drive. Or you have to fucking *pay* for those things. If the deal seems to good to be true, it is.
Actually, it's the shareholders that are paying for these. Uber has lost billions - they've never made any money. It's a massive transfer from rich people to everyone who benefits from subsidized taxi rides and food delivery. The goal is market monopoly with the intent to raise prices then (I don't believe this is a secret goal, it's their long-term strategy to justify current losses).
ReplyDeleteTaxis were too heavily regulated and lacked competition - Beck could have created and Uber-like app.
You seem to also be suggesting that pizza delivery was a scam job for decades. I'm not sure if that's true (or maybe they got really good benefits?). Uber Eats is just scaling that across smaller restaurants that can't justify a staff member who just does deliveries.
Note that no one pays the full cost of food at a restaurant - the price would be too high. It's subsidized by the drinks. To a certain extent food delivery helps reduce costs of having an actual restaurant (which is why some have moved to the no-location model). There is likely a sweet spot of no-location food providers delivering food at a reasonable price.