I both like this meme, because it highlights why doordash cannot ever work in the long run. I don’t like it because it’s wrong about inflation.

The Fake Rich#

In maybe the past 10 years, if you got the right degree, someone with a middle class background could make more money immediately after college than usual. Currently, CEO types are pretty openly plotting how to make sure this never happens again, but it did lead to a cohort of people who did pretty well for a while.

Your 20s are often an important time to learn to save money, to budget, and how to cook for yourself with limited time and money. If you’re actually rich, you don’t need to do this, because you can pay someone to cook for you forever. If you’re fake rich, one day your financial situation will change out from under you and you’ll suddenly find yourself returning to the lifestyle of the average person.

Enter the Burrito Taxi#

These people were willing to spend money to not cook, but not an unlimited amount of money. The real costs of having someone making even minimum wage delivering them an individual meal across town were still too high. But Doordash and similar companies, with VC funding, swept in. Subsidizing delivery meant that Doordash could put their competitors (like in house pizza delivery) out of business. Delivery was being provided below cost, but VCs were willing to do temporarily, in a low interest rate environment, this because they were creating a captive audience. And so it became possible for many people to get way more delivery than would previously have been possible.

I don’t think they planned to create a cohort of people who never learned to feed themselves without delivery, but they ended up doing that. So when interests rates went up and it came time to raise prices, consumers were even more hooked than they planned on. This was great for Doordash, because all of a sudden losing Doordash is something that strikes at people’s feelings of security around food, one of the strongest emotional drives we have.

And because a lot of people depend on it now, they have the political leverage to squeeze workers on the other side. If delivery workers make minimum wage and have health care, this type of delivery will never work financially. The pressure to keep costs low has also gotten stronger, since Doordash’s core audience are starting to feel the financial ground slip away from underneath them.

And because the delivery workers can barely afford to get by, they are pressured to break the law to make deliveries. They park blocking the bus lane, or the bike lane, or in the sidewalk, causing a hazard to everyone around them. They drive recklessly and endanger the people around them. Some benefit partially from the e-bike boom - as does everyone else, since e-bikes have fewer externalities - but often they can only afford cheaper, unreliable, dangerous models, that put the workers in danger. Doordash doesn’t have to tell them to do any of this. They just set up the circumstances where it’s inevitable and pretend it’s not their fault. They don’t even pay the fines if the workers get ticketed.

Burrito Taxis Don’t Work but the Burrito Bus Does#

Doordash, of course, is greedy, but there is also a floor to how little they can charge consumers. The price would be a lot higher if they paid people a fair rate. Think of what a Doordash delivery actually entails.

You order food 3 miles away. A driver drives and picks up the burrito. They then drive to your house. Then someone orders another burrito. Not from the same place, but also several miles away, because residential and commercial areas are usually separate. And then they go pick up, maybe, Thai food or something. And drop it off. One trip for every item. 4-6 miles. Maybe half an hour including waiting at the restaurant per order, so let’s say at minimum wage, they need to make 10 bucks an order, plus the price of gas and depreciation, plus they probably can’t afford to live in SF so maybe they drive from far away. Maybe they have an ebike and so they don’t need to pay for gas, but then maybe their rent is higher.

When I was delivering election signs, I spent a bunch of time thinking about deliveries. The way we did it was, we got a batch of 5-10 signs in a neighbourhood. Sometimes there were some weird one-offs, but it was mostly batches. I’d then plot a route to hit as many as possible in as short a time as possible as safely as possible. I was on a bike and so I’d just park on the sidewalk, making sure to not block the way. It took me typically an hour. Delivering one sign per trip made no sense.

Pizza delivery, I believe, used to work similarly, as well as Chinese takeout and other similar in-house delivery services. This model is less the burrito taxi and more the burrito bus: mass transport for your burrito. You don’t get any arbitrary meal in the city delivered within 15 minutes, but you can get food on short notice for cheap. With e-bikes, in a world without doordash, you could maybe have a low-carbon, safe, reliable vehicle that can carry 20 burritos at once and not have to stop in the middle of the road to make deliveries.

Food Delivery Is Fine, Doordash Just Sucks#

This conversation usually gets bogged down on Twitter/bluesky/etc because of the impossibility of nuance with a short character limit. But the following things are true:

• 90% of the time, people would be happier and better off if they freed themselves from Doordash’s tyranny and learned to cook at home.
• There are times when food delivery is good for everyone, such as if you are sick at home and can’t leave the house. Like yeah in an ideal world we would all have good friend who live nearby and can make you soup, but currently not everyone lives in that world.
• Food delivery is especially important for people with certain disabilities.
• Sometimes you’re just busy or tired or whatever and it’s not your fault Doordash killed reasonable delivery options. Like as far back as Ancient Rome, people would get takeout on the way home from work.

It’s also a contentious point because being able to feed yourself is, understandably, something people feel strong emotions about. Doordash has positioned itself to try and make itself as essential as possible in people’s lives. I think it is a bit more complicated than just suggesting it’s a matter of laziness and people need to stop being lazy.

But doordash is never going to fix these problems. Doordash is like those fish with the lure that pull smaller fish in. You say you want the lure back, not the jaws. But the lure only existed to pull you into its jaws.

The burrito taxi is not a lazy solution on your part, it’s a lazy solution on Doordash’s part, and is doomed to faliure.

Solutions#

This is a big problem. Long term what I’d like to see is a return to per-business delivery workers, or a delivery worker cooperative, or something. Something where the workers are paid enough and can make deliveries in a safe (and lawful) way, ideally with ebikes so they aren’t adding traffic, and where deliveries happen in batches, so that there isn’t a completely absurd per-delivery overhead.

I don’t really know how to get there but I suspect a big part of it is unwinding laws that falsely categorise delivery workers as “independent contractors” and supporting delivery worker unions. The latter is going to be politically challenging, because a lot of people on the road, including transportation advocates, are extremely annoyed at doordash workers, because of all the externalities doordash causes.

Short term, I would suggest avoiding getting food delivered, but don’t think about it in a moralizing way. We are not going to solve this problem by having everyone spontaneously stop using doordash because they saw a post on the Internet. However, it’s worth avoiding doordash if possible, because avoiding doordash benefits you. If you can learn to cook, even at an extremely basic level, or get takeout from a local business, you have freed yourself from Doordash’s plan to extract the maximum amount of money from you. And if your circumstances mean you do depend on Doordash, it’s not that you’re a bad person - you deserve to have better options.

If you are totally lost, I would suggest as a starting point google “depression meals” and build up in complexity from that - they’re good not just if you’re depressed, but if you for whatever reason have limited time and energy to spend on food. It’s also perfectly fine to eat, like, a sandwich. If you’re used to eating restaurant quality meals, there will be a bit of an adjustment, but I’ve found I’ve come to appreciate eating a wider range of foods: simple meals are comforting and low-stress in their own way, and restaurant meals are much more enjoyable if they’re a special treat.

I think a lot of people say things on this matter that are, to be generous, a stretch. But I don’t think it’s a matter of ignorance so much genuine anxiety about their food situation changing and being anxious about their ability to adapt, and thus seeing any criticism of Doordash as personally threatening. And I don’t think berating people about how they should have learned to cook by now is particularly helping people with that anxiety.

But it’s also probably going to happen at several points in your life that both your personal economic situation will change as well as the situation of society around you. (Remember 2020?) Being able to change your lifestyle and being confident in your ability to do so is a good skill to build, and this is a relatively safe time to practice doing so. If your personal circumstances limit your ability to do so, don’t think of it as a moralistic, all-or-nothing goal, but rather think about what you can do to increase your independence from predatory corporations for your own benefit, even if it’s limited.

It’s wrong about inflation

When people say “inflation” I don’t think it’s actually the number that economists talk about. It’s a general sense of scarcity in a world of pandemics.

When I go to the grocery store I’m slightly mad about food not costing the same as in Toronto 15 years ago. My feelings about prices don’t quite match the calculation of inflation. Food costs stress me a little even if I am in no danger of going hungry. If you’ve ever had to live on a budget - and I’m not talking even poverty, just the normal early 20s experience most people have if you didn’t have a tech internship at 19 - food costs are the part of your budget you probably think about the most because they are the most variable, the one where paying attention makes the biggest difference, and something you can’t avoid or put off, something you think about every day. You can’t rationalize it, people are not rational about fundamental things that matter to their survival.

For example, eggs are a pretty important staple, especially if you often cook and you aren’t vegan. They’re in baking, they’re an easy, cheap source of protein. They’re good for weeks, often past their best before date. Throw them on a slice of bread, in fried rice with some frozen veggies, in a bowl of instant noodles and you’ve got a meal. Because of this, it really matters that they’re scarce, even if it’s actually due to bird flu. Remember how flour was scarce? That’s another staple.

Ok but the numbers say inflation is fine#

There is a school of thought that being right in politics matters. It doesn’t matter at all. This deserves a whole entire blog post, but you are not going to individually convince everyone in the US that inflation is fine. It doesn’t matter if you think this is kind of unfair. The average voter does not spontaneously start believing correct things, that’s why election campaigns involve a ton of money trying to convince people.