Uber Eats undercover: Delivering your food for $1.74 an hour
I went undercover as an Uber Eats courier and made just $1.74 per hour online. Here’s what I learned about the troubling cost of convenience
I just can't use uber eats. It just feels weird. Like, I am fully capable of getting food myself, I know uber eats, doordash etc, pays shit, delivery folks have to wait at the restaurant if its not ready and then fix it if its not. Get my drink from the fountain if I ordered one. And then, drive all the way to my place. I then receive a cold, tossed meal. It's just depressing all around. I don't get it.
I'll pay for delivery of pizza or even something like jimmy johns who have delivery drivers, but having a third party involved just feels wrong.
It's also freaking expensive. When I used it occasionally at my last job we'd get reimbursed up to $20. I usually just got the $12 combo and by the time all the fees were added, I still ended up paying $2-3 out of pocket.
This is how I felt too. Eventually I just stopped using our corporate Grubhub “perk” because I was still paying for it when the entire idea was supposed to be a meal “on the company” once a week for weekly All-Hands meetings.
Another massive pet peeve that made me stop using these fucking delivery services is many times the restaurants would give you less food than if you went there. Take a place like Red Robin and their basket of fries was basically 25% a basket of fries at a marked up cost because they have to pay fees to these companies and lose money.
Plus they often got orders wrong. Not sure if that was on purpose or what, but I rarely got everything I asked for or the mods correct.
Now see, I kinda had the idea for a syndicated delivery service (not online orders, but the internet would have been used to create the order data that would assign drivers) decades ago. I did some part time work delivering food back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I always thought it was so inefficient. The place I was at, was very busy, he had a very large delivery area but even so. There would be times he was paying people to sit outside talking shit to eachother in their cars.
I thought it would make sense to have a larger pool of drivers that service multiple restaurants/take-aways. Adding the economies of scale to the problem to ensure that people were being utilised and lowering the cost to each place using the service. Of course also paying some money to the person running the business that brought it all together.
I don't think I ever considered paying less than this guy did (which wasn't a lot, but would likely translate to $5 or so an hour in the 90s/2000s).
One thing I find really interesting about uber eats/door dash (US)/Deliveroo (UK/EU). When you add up their fees, they take a delivery fee from the user, a service fee from the user, an even bigger service fee from the restaurant and pay the lowest possible fee that will keep drivers interested. Yet I always hear the services are losing money too. How is that even possible?
Take deliveroo in the UK. Looking now I can see (I don't live in a city, so most places are some distance away). A place 4.5 miles away is charging £4.29 for delivery. Let's make up an imaginary order:
Order total: £20 (including sales tax/VAT) User's service fee: £2.39 (it seems to be 11% including the VAT with a maximum set of which I am not sure how much) User's delivery fee: £4.29 (including VAT, since they need to charge VAT on a service) Restaurant service fee: £6 (30% on the VAT included total). I am really unsure how this works entirely in terms of tax though... Total for user: £26.68
Total deliveroo service revenue: Net: £10.57 VAT: £2.11 Total: £12.68
Reading between the lines from what I can see delivery riders are paid between £3 and £6 per delivery. Now, in the cities this is probably great. I do wonder how they do it in the towns and villages. When I look at the list of places available to me most are 3 miles or more away, with some up to 6 miles away. I do wonder how £6 compensates someone doing a 10+ mile round trip at times.
But OK the price they pay drivers doesn't include any tax. So it comes from the Net total. This means per delivery in revenue they are always making £4.50 or more per delivery.
Yes, they need to pay support staff, but they are in low cost geographies. Yes, they need to keep development staff and the usual management overhead And yes, they need servers/cloud time to host this stuff.
Looking this up (not sure how good the source is) their revenue in 2023 was £2.7billion, which I believe. However they lost £38million. Where all the costs come from, I am not sure.
I wonder how these numbers compare to US based operators?
Yet I always hear the services are losing money too. How is that even possible?
Massive amounts of money spent on advertising to get that sweet sweet venture capital. Leeching as much money as they can out of the business into the pockets of investors and C suite parasites. Paying lawyers to fight lawsuits due to skirting laws.
Just capitalism things.
Last Week Tonight has an episode on food delivery apps. They talk about how these apps don't seem to help anyone. The customer pays more than before, the restaurant loses money, the delivery drivers lose money, and the app loses money.
The general idea seems to be that venture capitalists believe they can change the way the system works so that everyone eventually relies on an app to order food. Once ordering food without using an app becomes impossible, they can charge whatever they want and make a killing.
The key between UberEATS and a much better service you describe is that the drivers need to stay on site, and the site needs to be geographically in the same place.
But yeah, I agree a better model would be tiny GrubHubs that service one, very small restaurant area. Basically the pizza delivery drivers also deliver for the 4-5 restaurants around the pizza place.
It'd be better service for the users, likely cheaper, and better for the restaurants who have 4-7 consistent drivers, and it'd be better for the drivers who actually get an hourly wage on top of their delivery fees.
Someone just has to build the infrastructure for this, have the capital to get started, sell the restaurants on it, and advertise the service.
Also, they handle multiple orders. So, by the time you get your food it’s lukewarm at best, but likely cold and soggy.
Last time I checked out of curiosity, this Mexican place near me sells burritos for $12. After fees and tips, it would’ve been $28 on Uber Eats. It’s just not worth it to me to pay extra, when I can easily drive the 10 minutes myself.
Yeah the cold and soggy is my main criticism. At that point I'd rather cook
Even pizza shops with their own drivers. I'd usually prefer to go get it myself so it's as fresh as possible.
The worst are the places that say they have delivery, take you through the whole checkout process on their own site, and then sends you a link to track your order on door dash or something.
LOOKING AT YOU LITTLE CESARS
During the pandemic I can see why these services blossomed, but I have only used them once or twice - and only in NYC where I didn't have a car, and even if I did, getting around by car and parking is more challenging anyway. (Delivery drivers in NYC get around by scooter which they drive anywhere they want (street, sidewalk, wrong way on the street, they do not care. They'd probably get on the elevator if they could).
To me the service charges and tips are higher than I want to pay and I'll just pick up the stuff myself. It'll probably be hotter anyway since there aren't other deliveries that need to be made before mine. The one exception is pizza where they already have their own delivery people.
I don't share any moral delima with the concept of third party delivery. Conceptually what's different than the branded delivery drivers? Both by the way rely more on tips than anything else for payout to the delivery person, but at least the base pay rate for the branded driver is typically a tiny bit higher. I am bothered by the ratio of what I pay extra for third party services as compared to what the delivery person receives. You can't possibly just drive the price up further to fill the gap, the gap is massive and the prices are already a limiting factor for most to utilize these services. I also relate to the cold tossed meal. There is no effort in training these gig workers or supplying them with proper equipment to deliver the food. It often arrives in a terrible state and there is very little in the way of quality control. If I were a restaurant I would hesitate to let these people represent my food. Conceptually I actually rather like the idea of third party delivery. I don't want to be a domino's employee and deliver pizza, but give me some freedom to pick my hours and a fare wage that doesn't rely on tip culture, and I'll stop by and deliver a domino's pizza every once and awhile for some extra cash. The real world execution though is currently a mess. These companies took advantage of how badly Americans want food delivery and how hard it is for most restaurants to implement it themselves.
Conceptually what’s different than the branded delivery drivers?
So, a lot of conceptual and practical differences beyond the couple you mentioned. I don't order from doordash etc, but I will sometimes order delivery from dominoes or something where they have their own delivery drivers. It's not hard for me to drive a couple miles to pick up my own order, which saves me money, has a better chance of having hot food, and I'm not enabling people making poor choices to work below minimum wage.
That said, I prefer ride sharing apps over taxis.
I a, bothered by the ratio of what I pay extra for third party services as compared to what the delivery person receives. You can’t possibly drive the price up further
The solution already existed. It’s called restaurants delivering their own food. But Ubereats shoehorned their way into the equation to be an unnecessary middleman in order to profit. Exploiting a whole new group of people in the process.
I absolutely share the moral dilemma with the concept of third party delivery. They’re just as useless as health insurance companies, so if you see the problem with the latter, you can def see the problem with the former. (Not to say they’re on the same scale or have similar histories or have equal amounts of blood on their hands, just that they’re similar in structure in a system that work(s)/(ed) fine without them.)
Asian food has been doing to-go for centuries, though. It packs well and keeps well for 30 minutes. In fact there is a to-go only Thai place near me which uses an industrial kitchen and literally a hole in the side of the building to take payments and hand over food. Other restaurants we know in our area stopped seating people during COVID and would just hand out to-go orders at the door. But I can only think of Asian restaurants that did this.
There’s nothing wrong necessarily with having a separate delivery service. Restaurants aren’t good at making menu apps or driving cars. It may be a little awkward fit for restaurants who rent retail space and offer dine-in tables, but the world is transitioning and I fully expect more Doordash-first restaurants operating out of less expensive kitchen space and just skipping the whole dine-in waiter thing.
I hate to hear that Doordash pays so poorly but we always tip 20% or more which, even if it is the only payment the driver receives, usually seems fair for 30 minutes of work. We are a family of four and our order is always over $50. So that’s $10 / 30 minutes or $20 / hour minimum (if everyone used it the way we do). That seems like an okay wage for a job with so much flexibility. Probably the real thing that kills it is gas and wear on the car being invisible costs. Just like with regular Uber drivers.
EDIT: hey /u/womble have you heard of this other American concept called “fuck you, Jack.”
Par for the course based on Uber's history. I stopped using them in lieu of a local/community app...which is honestly absolute garbage, but it is essentially completely pass-through and free for my local area restaurants to use.
I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people's needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.
If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.
This would be a really good fit for federation I think.
Wage discrimination sounds like a fancy way of saying wage theft.
Yep, it's just when they only do wage theft on the most disadvantaged employees that are the least likely to sue them or quit as a result.
It shouldn't be a massive surprise. The whole platform exists as a way to circumvent minimum wage laws for drivers while taking a massive slice of restaurant profits.
No hygiene inspections either, half the places listed aren't even restaurants or takeaways, it's just in somebody's house...
Time to change your name from Patel to Smith
27 an hour after expenses?
Considering that the average pay for doordash workers are usually between 15 to 20 an hour, I'm guessing that 27 an hour is before taking out for expenses.
27 an hour becomes 22.8/h after taxes (assuming you are in a state with no state income tax) minus whatever paid for fuel expenses, and that's before you take into consideration the wear and tear on the vehicle and unless you are flying under the radar(bad idea they'll refuse your claim or even drop you) the increase Insurance costs for using the vehicle commercially
I will definitely be interested to hear about your experience.
This was in Toronto, and to call the ebike courier job market here "oversaturated" would be an understatement.
What a sad country, where people have to accept being paid so little.
I've been arguing for decades that EU needs to tax imports from USA, because USA is using social dumping to compete unfairly.
The US minimum wage is not a living wage, and employers can even go below that if they can claim tips are part of the wage. And they don't even provide healthcare for all. This is causing extreme poverty unbecoming of a developed country, and is social dumping.
USA has created a system where employers are not paying the actual cost of labor. By tilting the power balance to vastly favor employers, and fail to regulate against abuse.
Apparently this is in Canada, which surprises me a little, I thought they were better regulated. This gig economy shit should clearly be illegal, and workers should be paid a reasonable living wage.
Had a colleague that did it as a side gig and no matter how many times I told him to do it, he always refused to do the calculation to figure out how much he was making after expenses.
Living in denial is the only reason we aren’t already eating the rich.
That and fear of imprisonment
I was going to do it as a side hustle, but then I found out that I would have to change the type of car insurance I have, and my rate would go up. If I didn’t and had an accident while delivering, my insurance company would 100% deny all claims - assuming they found out I guess. I wasn’t willing to risk it , and the higher premium cost made it unprofitable.
Honestly, I'm surprised insurance companies don't actively pursue this. Like doing a side gig such as this would very easily increase the possibility of claims because you're on the road, so financially speaking it would make sense for them to try to partner through those delivery apps or Research into whether someone is doing it professionally on the side.
Then again I guess it is more financially Justified for them to just milk your insurance money up until the point that you get into an accident and then deny your claim there for being a gig worker
Well this is a more or less solved problem in BC:
https://www.moneysense.ca/earn/careers/gig-worker-rights-in-canada/
The gig worker min wage is 20% more than min wage to account for the "non-engaged time".
I hear the smallest violin Everytime I hear about UberEATS executive complain about the company not being profitable.
I know GrubHub is bad too but I typically only pay a small fee of 3$ for their service and a tip of 20% to the driver.
Yet UberEATS usually includes a $10-15 UberEATS fee which the employee sees none of. Yet "oh no UberEATS is not profitable, oh no my 3rd yacht isn't big enough"
I only use eats if there's a solid promo, and then I pick up the food myself. They don't get the fee, I don't have to tip, and I get the deal. A lot of time the price per item is cheaper on pickup too. Their fees are absolutely ridiculous, and they are just a middleman. They for sure are losing money on me.
Best to just call it in. Even for pick up, all these online providers take a huge cut, eating the profit margin from the people actually making the food you like.
I try to only use online orders for restaurants that have their own website cart. I do sometimes resort to the big ones when I'm busy / lazy, but I make a point to try to make sure the actual restaurant gets my money, because I want them to survive and keep making me tasty food.
Tipping culture caused this mess, meritocracy bullshit
The awful part is, even without tipping the driver the food is drastically more expensive. The restaurant takes an extra cut, The delivery service takes an extra cut. This person's delivering your food practically for free and the meal is already sit down restaurant price.
Just one note, restaurant prices go up because uber eats charges a percentage based fee for each menu item. So, restaurants need to up the prices on the app just to make the same amount of money. Just some good ol' under-the-table fuckery courtesy of Silicon Valley bastards.
My wife and I ran the numbers and, in our area, Uber Eats was pulling in about 1/4 to 1/3 the cost of the meal between charges to the restaurant and the customer. We were discussing opening a non-profit delivery service in our area. Turns out it's pretty hard to do.
Oh yeah, they're going to want to see some serious reason why you shouldn't be paying tax.
It's a lot easier to start an SCorp or an LLC in the US. Starting the corporation's not horribly expensive either
Since you're not selling the product, you probably just need to pay the tax on The money they pay you to do the pickup. You need to start it more like a postmates where they ask you to go pick up the order they placed at some shop. But then I suspect you would have timing issues if you have a limited staff. You couldn't just place the order and then wait a unlimited amount of time for it to show up.
Then there's that daunting problem of when the store screws up the order. Because they always screw up the order.
But you're still going to have to deal with labor laws, You're going to need bonding, a CPA, advertising, presumably a web presence and software maybe across platform cell phone app. These are all things that get easier as the company gets bigger but are rather daunting it small scale.
I guess it's kind of a tough business to break into. Owning my own car, I could place an order, drive to McDonald's pick up the food and come back for pennies. Obviously that 30 minutes is my time but it's time I would spend not making money else wise. Because I'm already spending a couple hundred a month on a car, it's not worth very much for me to pay someone to bring me food. But at a livable wage, plus someone else's maintenance, that's probably $7 to $10, assuming there's a limited number of orders they can pick up at once in a small area.
Uber eats is such a scam. When these new VC companies come on the block offering things that are to good to be true I am constantly saying "we shouldn't support this unsustainable vc funded business, once they have market share they will have killed the competition and then they will raise their prices"
So many places used to deliver at reasonable prices but after years of uber delivering at way cheaper rates they stopped. Now uber delivers at $10 more.
Which means it's financially viable to compete with them again using their own drivers. Uber just trained an entire sector on delivery driving which is a larger pool of labour places can now draw from. And they can start by talking in person to the drivers who conveniently come directly to their business every day.
No because after uber cornered the market uber raised the bar for what kind of fuckery is acceptable. Takeaway shops would do normal prices plus a $10 delivery fee. Now they can double their prices and have contractless uber drivers manage all their deliveries.
Food delivery only made sense as an operating cost of the business, so third party delivery would have only made sense as something that the businesses subsidized. It also only makes sense if it is structured around the busy times of day as well.
I worked in a few businesses in the late 90s that offered delivery. In every case the delivery drivers were basically kitchen staff who went on deliveries OR the business itself was primarily delivery based in the first place and they still had the drivers do some other work around the place during downtime between meals. Both approaches spread the cost of the employees over more than the literal time delivering, because otherwise the cost per hour would be ridiculous. They also delivered food that held up to delivery times, so the food waiting 10-15 minutes before being delivered wasn't an issue.
There was a reason that pizza places and Chinese restaurants frequently had delivery even in smaller towns while things like McDonald's did not. The food held up to delivery and was frequently of a volume that made the restaurant subsidizing the cost of delivery feasible.
I think the trick is you'll never make it just driving for one service, you have to do Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, maybe even Instacart as well if you want to do it for a living.
Just like the people who drive for both Uber and Lyft.
We don't have to use that service. Who's with me?
I've never used the third party delivery apps because it was clear their business model was going to screw over the drivers from the beginning.
And be very expensive for the customer at the same time. Food is expensive enough already without adding more fees and overhead.
I use it, I just tip way more than anyone else in my area tips. Mostly out of guilt, partially out of solidarity for the working person. I like to think my order at bumps that avg hourly rate up at bit.
I feel like it's a double-edged sword.
For as long as there are people willing to tip more, the company can get away spending less and shifting it onto customers.
As a result, workers get highly unpredictable and generaly low income and customers feel guilty for leaving low tips. Everybody but the company loses.
Well, I'm definitely not using any delivery service - we live ~25 mins drive from the nearest town, so it's just not an option.
I've lived most of my life in the countryside and just think that getting someone else to go get my food is a weird concept anyway... I'd go as far as saying that I'm no-one special, so why ask someone else to get my food - just get it myself (lazy, etc.)
Plus, I like driving, so I'm happy to get out of the house for a while (and drive like a delivery driver to get the food home whilst it's still hot)
I will never use uber so long as I shall live.
I was just commenting on a thread about public transportation (there's none where live) and someone commented that they're moving to micro transportation by just buying a $3 Uber every time they need to go somewhere. Even if uber is only taking $1 of that, $2 isn't paying someone to drive you somewhere. Uber drivers should make at least $30/hr.
I haven't done the math but if you don't drive that much, did it beat their yearly costs (maintenance/insurance/gas)? Honestly that scheme is wild but makes total sense for a customer because not having to deal with car maintenance and insurance seems like a good tradeoff. I wonder when the dominos are all gonna tumble for these driving companies
I don't know where the person who commented that lives, but you can't get an Uber five blocks for under $10 around here. If I was that close and walkable I'd just walk. I do know uber is losing drivers locally though because they don't pay enough, certainly not enough for people to maintain their cars. It's predatory employment at this point, and it is becoming normalized.
Where can you take a $3 Uber? If I took an Uber to my next door neighbor's house it would be more than $3.
That's what I was saying too. Maybe somewhere with much lower wages and cost of living.
I think for even the shortest delivery of a place 10 minutes away with a 2 mile distance is supposed to tip at least $5. and if the delivery is done in 30 minutes, that’s an effective wage of $15/hour, that is, if they get orders back-to-back.
Since these shitty companies don't provide vehicles or gas money most of that $15 is going to vehicle costs.
When I delivered for a pizza place in the late 90s in a midwest college town with my own car I got 15-20 per hour between base pay, gas and car use subsidy, and tips. That business was 90% deliveries, so the delivery was baked into the cost.
Americans be crazy. I never tipped in my life and ain't about to start.
"Let me help subsidise a company paying below minimum wage" totally normal not batshit insane idea.
How much did the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, earn last year?
This must be that innovation which is making the world a better place that these tech parasites keep gushing about.
“Minimum wage and the idea that hard work should lead to economic security, can be — and are being — destroyed by these A.I. systems.”
Not A.I, just a terrible system that incentivises (and even demands for public companies) abusive behaviour.
Lol. AI has so very little to do with this. That's only mentioned because it's the latest bogeyman.
Buddy, I cant use that service in any good concience...
I feel like you gotta go out of your way to make so little money doing this. If they actually did it correctly there would be no article to write. Not saying they would get rich but there's no way they did this honestly.
Spoken like someone who's never done delivery work in their life.
I delivered pizza from high school through college. And now I own 2 business that we use third party delivery at. I can assure you literally no one makes this little on these apps even the people who are illegals and doing profit sharing with people with legal accounts make more.
Many of the food couriers I worked alongside were young international students struggling to earn an income while they make their way through school. Others were refugees or undocumented workers, navigating precarious lives.
I honestly wonder if pretty much all of the surge in illegal immigration over the last 5 or 6 years comes down to Uber Eats.
So how many lemmy users are going to stop using food delivery to avoid being complicit? Especially asking if you refused to vote for Kamala Harris because of Gaza - or you can rant about how it's "not the same thing" lol.
I live in California where we attempted to pass a law that would force these companies to hire their drivers as employees. Every gig worker i know bought the corpo propaganda and voted against it. That was when I realized exactly how much of an education and media literacy problem we have in this country.
The education and media literacy problem has been brewing for decades. Our culture is so entertainment addicted, lots of people can't even take a shit without watching something on their phones. I had high hopes in a progressive victory and a slow turnaround, but Trump winning after everything that's happened tells me we've gone over the event horizon into Idiocracy and collapse. Not looking forward to it.
That law still pisses me off. I heard that it got a court check because of a clause in the amendment required a 7/8ths majorty vote in both the Senate and Assembly, but I don't recall if the judge ruled to keep it or abolish it.
California can be such a great state, but sometimes we vote for the dumbest shit because companies lobbied for ads that make no sense but to the dumbest voter. The most recent set of props come to mind.
My buddy who was a driver at the time would try to convince the Uber drivers in the lot at the airport and they all believed the propaganda from TV and radio that was clearly paid for by Lyft and Uber. The majority of the American public are just not intelligent.
So how many lemmy users are going to stop using food delivery to avoid being complicit?
I generally avoid food delivery apps because of the extra cost either way...but if you have a problem with the wages, just tip more. Tip cash if you have it -- there's no way for the app to get its hands on that money!
but if you have a problem with the wages, just tip more.
enabler | noun
en·abler i-ˈnā-b(ə-)lər
: one that enables another to achieve an end especially : one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior (such as substance abuse) by providing excuses or by making it possible to avoid the consequences of such behavior
This is... a weird gotcha. "You claim to be aginast murder, but sometimes you like to order Taco Bell! Checkmate, progressives!"
I personally voted for Harris despite being in California, but I can't afford doordash for going out. It's often:
Meanwhile I can often walk to there and put in my order in the same amount of time. It's often even cheaper to take the bus someplace, then take the bus back. Doordash makes more sense in an urban area, but I don't live in one. And when I am in one, I'm often with a friend who knows how to drive.
I didn't vote for Harris because she's one of them. I also don't use food delivery. Enjoying your feeling of superiority from pointing out the hypocrisy of random group intersections?
Reading comprehension dude - I specifically addressed the Harris question to people who are in both categories.
I don't buy through food delivery apps, I only order delivery if the store itself provides the service.
And I didn't vote for Kamala Harris, not because of Gaza, but because she sucks in a lot of areas. I also didn't vote for Trump because he also sucks in a lot of ways. My state is heavily partisan, so me voting for one or the other feels like more of a wasted vote than voting third party, because everyone knows which party will win my state before the primaries even start, so I might as well juice the third party numbers a bit.
Bootlicker spotted
Working for uber eats is a a choice.
Uber Eating your mum is a choice.
That isnt the point. Also is the US famously lacking in social safety nets and appropriate methods of bettering yourself are generally paywalled? So an unemployed person with no in come hs very little choice in getting work and have to take what they can.
Boot licker.