Couriers mystified by the algorithms that control their jobs
233 comments
·January 21, 2025constantcrying
yuvalr1
This is true. it also hurts the public, as the drivers are dependent on the number of deliveries the succeed making, thus hurrying up and constantly stressed. This hurts not only their health and quality of delivery, but also increases the risk for traffic accidents.
It is in the best of interest of everyone that these people would get a normal salary.
Aloisius
As long as they get tips, they will continue to speed.
See: pizza delivery people for decades.
conception
In CA at least, Uber effectively bought the protection through an effective ad campaign to pass by popular vote an effectively unrecoverable law to protect themselves.
linkregister
You tell the truth. That said, every other special interest already had a carve out from the authors of the bill. Uber/Doordash/Lyft just wanted the same special treatment.
I voted against the proposition but I also understood why Californian consumers would vote for it.
yusyusyus
Voters have no agency? Kind of a dim view on democratic processes.
HeatrayEnjoyer
Functional democracy is much more than just "everyone casts a vote"
miltonlost
Voters are heavily influenced by propaganda. If they weren't, then there wouldn't be advertising.
zkid18
I recently learned that a courier in Panama can earn around $1,400 a month. Yes, you likely have to work six days a week, but that's well above the average salary in the country.
I'm not sure how the sentiment is in developed countries like the US and the UK. Still, here in Latin America, this presents an opportunity for poorer communities to provide dinner for a family.
constantcrying
In most of the western world the sentiment is that basic worker rights are a necessary element of social stability. And that just because a job "presents an opportunity for poorer communities to provide dinner for a family" it should not be excluded from receiving basic labor protections.
zkid18
I’m not arguing that it’s an unnecessary element. Rather, I don’t agree with the original statement that the government should shut down the services.
mmooss
How did you learn that? Did someone tell you or is there something we can read? I appreciate you mentioning it, I just want to know more about it. Thanks.
pinoy420
[dead]
benced
Because it provides an extremely convenient service that has made life better for most people? People seem to forgot that this class of job used to not exist in our lifetimes. Was it better to be a low-skill worker on the job market in 2010 when these apps didn't exist?
If there are specific labor violations you think are taking place, the appropriate remedy is regulation, not banning.
constantcrying
>Was it better to be a low-skill worker on the job market in 2010 when these apps didn't exist?
If you had a job certainly. Basically any job is superior, as you actually do have some rights.
>If there are specific labor violations you think are taking place, the appropriate remedy is regulation, not banning.
The whole concept is a violation of labor laws. Every aspect is bad.
username135
I don't know enough about it, but a general statement like "every aspect is bad" isn't helpful if I wanted to learn more. Do you have some specific issues?
cogman10
> I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
Because there's a large number of people who take the writings of Ayan Rand and the policies of Ronald Regan as the best way to run government.
Workers' rights are being eroded because we've slowly dismantled and privatized as much of the government as possible.
Workers' rights are incompatible with small government and or libertarian ideals. Much like other rights such as civil rights. Or rights to clean water, air, and food.
Big government isn't perfect, but for its flaws there are benefits having a large organization with a bigger stick to beat in line robber barons whose entire goal is to undermine rights as much as possible to leach maximum profit from society.
constantcrying
>Because there's a large number of people who take the writings of Ayan Rand and the policies of Ronald Regan as the best way to run government.
Are these people currently running e.g. the UK?
cogman10
Well first off, yes for a very long time the party in charge of the UK was the Tories from 2010 all the way up to 2024.
But further, the current prime minister of the UK got there by and large by abandoning Labour party positions in favor of explicitly supporting nothing. Starmer literally used Margret Thatcher, the UK equivalent of Regan, as an example of an excellent prime minister. Starmer is very much the UK equivalent of Bill Clinton, a conservative leader of the historically "progressive" party.
Starmer has been in power all of 7 months now.
nateglims
> I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
It makes money and the current governing/legal doctrine says the government should give a lot of leeway to that. Biden has been touted as the most pro-labor president since about LBJ, but a lot of this is just letting the NLRB mediate every individual starbucks that unionized.
ge96
Not sure if Uber Eats falls under gig work (think so) but I'm glad to have it, I can just turn it on and go. Granted in my case it's not my only job. I usually get $20/hr I know I'm destroying my own car in the process, get in a car crash I'm on my own. But again it's extra money on demand.
exhilaration
I thought you were covered by Uber's car insurance when you were on their clock?
ge96
I would not think/expect that. There is even a commercial insurance you're supposed to have vs. regular
janniehater
[dead]
pjc50
Once you actually read the article .. you see a similar kind of thing to complaints about Youtube or bank demonetization. People are accused of fraud, and have their access withdrawn - but nobody will explain what they allegedly did, because that would leak information about the fraud detection.
It's a kind of automated low trust economy. The drivers don't trust the apps, and the app doesn't trust the drivers, so the thing has to be held together by surveillance and micromanagement.
bogzz
I am currently in a nightmare scenario at a new job. I just finished building their website, and it got flagged as a phishing website by Google Safebrowsing because Google seems to think that our analytics subdomain which is a self-hosted instance of Umami Analytics is a phishing attempt.
I requested a review once, they removed the flag. It came back a couple of days ago. I then had to move Umami to its own domain because I couldn't risk this ever happening again (visitors to our root domain were also getting the huge red warning, and our business was coming off as a scam).
Then they flagged the new domain as well. They've removed it again at my request, but I am just counting down the days until it happens again.
There is no way for me to get through to a human to talk about why this is happening.
snailmailstare
They've clearly implemented prejustice, but not correctly. Find that class action lawyer and go fishing!
mystified5016
Have legal send Google a C&D and shoot an email to the FTC about anticompetitive behavior. That's how you get a human involved.
godelski
Even if this works, it represents a failure in the system that needs to be fixed.
(I assume you're just trying to help the parent solve their problem so I'm not trying to be dismissive of your comment)
miohtama
It's called criminalisation of compliance and pre-crime. It exists because there is a compliance-industrial complex selling software to create compliance. More compliance, more revenue. Social discussion does not matter, because what's good and what's bad is determined by software and compliance companies.
Here is a book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
gsk22
> The drivers don't trust the apps, and the app doesn't trust the drivers, so the thing has to be held together by surveillance and micromanagement.
Exactly. And a large dose of gaming the system (or trying to), which reduces trust even further. Why play fair with an unaccountable algorithm?
esafak
That and the use of black box models whose predictions are not explainable.
godelski
What's fun is you can still do black box probing. And guess what, spammers have done this.
I get these emails that look like classic spam like a link to a home depot or wallmart giftcard, but they're addressed to someone who isn't me. After getting a bunch of these I decided to look at the original email. They are being sent to an outlook (e.g. notmyname@biggerish.someShortName01.shortname.outlook.com) and appear from something that looks like a store (e.g. contact_support.csz@fakestore.fr>). It passes SPF and DMARC but fails DKIM.
The content?
It used to be PAGES of stuff like "here's your email password reset link" or "thank you for signing up <legitimate place>". I was confused at first but then realized that yeah, this stuff likely bypass a ML filter. But the spammers have gotten better at it and now they can do it with only a page of content.
Of course, I can easily filter these by just parsing the "To Address" (I use Thunderbird). But I reported tons of these and was deleting them. But in middle of last year I decided to just start collecting them. I have over 50...
This is low hanging fruit stuff... Like a Naive Bayes could handle this. The current solution could probably handle it if they started actually fucking labeling the examples as spam and assumed that the labeling process was noisy (dear god I hope they use at least "legit" "unknown" "spam" and don't assume legit if it isn't marked as spam...)
I have EVEN TALKED TO A PERSON and the issue couldn't be escalated... Which IMO is being complacent in spam.
spacemanspiff01
With regards to bank demobilization here is an interesting article.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
_trampeltier
About Fetlife from 2017, 8 years ago.
With the movement to a cashless world .. many people will loose there whole life because banks will close there accounts.
CaliforniaKarl
I disagree with using "debanking" as an example. At least in the US, banks are required by law (the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), et al) to not divulge certain information. As far as I'm aware, YouTube et al are not under such a legal requirement.
dylan604
While we did not divulge your certain information, we regret to tell you that your certain information was access in a hack that was discovered (9 months later).
if they intentionally or unintentionally were the source of that certain information, there's little recourse for you after the fact
pjc50
The effect is the same, though.
bigs
Sounds pretty close to the dystopian predictions…….
godelski
There's more egregious cases though that I think illustrate the problem at large: no one wants accountability.
A very famous and egregious example is the XBox user who got banned for listing "Fort Gay" as their place of residence[0]. This is a problem that was caused by automation and honestly, could have entirely been resolved with automation too[1]. But it was also a problem that could have been resolved in under a minute were a human given real power to do anything (or recognize that the cheapest labor usually isn't the cheapest labor).
Another is how there's a family suing Google for directing a man to drive off a bridge[2]. Hold your reservations because this is kinda like the McDonald's Coffee lawsuit[3]. The bridge had collapsed in 2013 and the man drove off in 2022. There's multiple parties that share some fault here (like city for not marking and barricading the bridge[4]), but the issue was reported many times and what kind of live map system isn't updating their maps within a decade?
I frequently report spam, phishing attacks, and all sorts of stuff. Nothing gets through. Same with Google maps. Same with literally any app. I can even send to dev channels with patches and things often do not go through. I can sit on a PR for months while others are asking for a merge and then a dev comes back and says "oh, change color to colour" or something, I'll repatch that night, and then the dev goes radio silent (seriously, it is more work to ask me to make that change than it is to do it yourself...).
I have so many frustrations, but the root of it all is that I can't fix problems I find. Even if I can create the fix myself, I can't get them upstream so I don't have to patch every fucking patch that comes down. I think a lot comes down to our mentality of "move fast and break things." This is fine for learning but not fine for production. Who cleans up all the mess left behind? The debt just grows and compounds. I know mitigating future costs is "invisible" but often we're talking about 15 minutes of work. If you don't have that kind of slack in your system then you're doomed. It's like having exactly the number of lifeboats on a ship such that you can accommodate every passenger. That's dumb. You have to over accommodate. Or else you get the Titanic (which underaccommodated, despite being capable of overaccomodating).
[0] https://kotaku.com/xbox-live-gamer-suspended-for-living-in-f...
[1] Step 1: Check user's location. If they aren't masking it, you'll find that they are located in "Fort Gay". Step 2: If it is masked, plug the fucking location into Google Maps or some database with a list of cities and check for a match. Done. Yay. 30 minutes of programming and you saved the company hundreds of dollars in customer service fees and millions of dollars in reputation rebuilding "fees".
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/21/us/father-death-google-gps-dr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
[4] I highly advocate citizen action here. If you live near there, put a pile of rocks or anything in the way to make a barricade. Law comes after you? Fuck the law. Besides, I'm sure it'll make a great news story. We have those for people filling in potholes, this seems much more sensational.
gopher_space
XBox Fort Gay was a classic example of the Scunthorpe Problem[0]. I suppose we need a formal Scunthorpe Test, but this seems like you could solve the Problem with a popup checkbox and text field whenever your filter flags an account.
The seminal Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[1] looks at similar territory from a different perspective.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
godelski
I agree. But also at the root of it is that a problem can't be escalated such that a thinking human that has actionable power can be involved.
The fallacy here is a belief that the filter is perfect. Or really, that any process can be perfect. Even if one could be perfect at a specific moment in time, well time marches on and things change.
I'm all for automation but it has to be recognized that the thing will always break and likely in a way you don't expect. Even in ways you __couldn't__ expect. So you have to design with that failure in mind. A lot of these "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About <X>" could summarized as "Programmers Believe They Can Accurately Predict All Reasonable Situations". I added "reasonable" on purpose. The world is just complex and we can only see a very limited amount. The best way to be accurate is to know that you're biased, even if you can't tell in which way you're biased.
ithkuil
The Scunthorpe effect
randysalami
There is room for a food delivery horror game. Procedurally generated delivery instructions that never make sense. Contact support, have a real voice chat with a LLM that leads nowhere. Don’t make quota? Get hunted and eaten by The Manager. All for tips that don’t pay your crippling medical bills nor allow you transition into better jobs. The horror writes itself.
harimau777
Sorry We're Open is a similar idea except focused on working retail rather than the gig economy. I recommend it!
fatbird
The real challenge would be how you soften the game enough that players don't immediately lose all hope and go outside to touch grass.
kurthr
In game crypto currency betting!
What could go wrong?
randysalami
Great idea! The PC has a phone which they interact with to use the food delivery app, accept orders, get directions, etc. we can also add some other apps like a crypto stock exchange. Here’s where it gets good, we can add a mock of TikTok and X with infinite scrolling. The content is AI generated as well. Makes the game more immersive and more horrific. Imagine getting chased by a monster, carrying someone’s burger and fries, while doomscrolling IckTok. Time to download Godot!!
parpfish
i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
for the driver, consistent pay and the ability to weed out bad clients. for the client, you'd get a trustworthy assistant that should be able to take on a wider range of things that a single app wouldn't do. it may not be as fast as an on-demand delivery apps, but for most things that doesn't really matter.
darreninthenet
My (wealthy) father in law does this, he has a handful of people he can call upon day or night to do whatever he needs, anything from pick something up two hours away to put some additional overnight security on one of his sites/properties... most of them are ex-military Eastern European. I've no idea how he compensates them but they seem happy with him and stick around, and the couple I've spoken to over the years seem nice enough.
To be honest I wouldn't want to know more details, he's a dodgy fuck
world2vec
I think those kind of assistants are called henchmen ;-)
wil421
My father in law (not so wealthy), has a few people near his beach rental that will do various different things. Including one handyman who will help with whatever.
There are whole management companies who do this type of stuff for vacation rentals. I’d bet there are similar ones for rich people’s primary and secondary homes.
dghlsakjg
Estate/house managers are a very real thing, especially at the high end.
It can vary from basically part time concierge work (get the beds made, and make sure that the fridge is full when I arrive), all the way to full-time management of a property including managing additional full-time staff (maids, chefs, gardeners, etc).
I only brushed against it in being part of the yachting world, but it is fascinating how much money people like this absolutely blow away on making their lives slightly more convenient.
titanomachy
Don't even think about cheating on your wife
panarky
Startup idea: TaskRabbit but for ex-military Eastern Europeans who will do whatever a dodgy fuck wants.
c-linkage
Executive Outcomes?
patrickmay
HenchRabbit?
dzhiurgis
"Execute like a billionaire"
pavel_lishin
> My (wealthy) father in law
> I've no idea how he compensates them
I'm going to guess with a lot of money. That likely doesn't get reported to relevant tax authorities.
ruined
this sounds like the kind of thing you shouldn't post on the internet :)
MathMonkeyMan
Some years ago, I met a guy at a bar in New York who said that he was Donald Trump's personal courier. He rode a bike around the city, and he'd deliver things to Trump in person, who would always give him at least $100 cash on the spot. I didn't believe the guy's story, and it offended him. Maybe he was telling the truth.
korse
This is not unbelievable. I don't even live in a coastal city and I still know a handful of active couriers. They're faster than drivers in congested areas and pretty much get a pass on all traffic control/regulation if they don't truly endanger pedestrians. Not to mention that they don't need parking, can carry their vehicles up stairs and into buildings etc.
Plenty of people know these guys exist and having someone known to you and reliable on speed dial is worthwhile. The $100 also makes sense because it isn't just a tip, it is the 'retainer' to make sure the calls get maximum priority.
ElevenLathe
IIRC the climax of the merger deal described in /Barbarians at the Gate/ essentially comes down to a bike courier race between various offices in Manhattan as last-minute bid adjustments got ferried about. Makes me wonder what the value of the truly fastest bike courier in New York would be to some large investment bank/PE firm/whatever. I imagine they are massively underpaid compared to the value they provide.
windowsrookie
These are primarily people delivering food orders at lunch time for less than $10.
The people paying for these services will not pay what it would cost to have a “personal assistant”.
Also they can only deliver so many orders at a time. If all of your clients order lunch around the same time, it’s not possible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time.
jwagenet
For food delivery, I imagine going back to pre-apps and have restaurant employed couriers for local takeout could be beneficial for both parties.
chongli
The problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above. The driver sits around in the restaurant parking lot twiddling his thumbs and then 10 lunch orders come in over the course of an hour, most of which while the driver’s out delivering the first order. The last order ends up taking 2 hours to get to the customer who is not at all pleased with cold, soggy food long after the lunch break ended.
The food delivery app business works like the insurance business: the aggregate drivers form a risk pool [1] to protect restaurants from the variability of demand. This allows a single restaurant to be able to accept 10 food delivery orders in a matter of minutes just as easily as they would for orders coming in from the tables in their dining room. The app would dispatch up to 10 drivers to handle those orders and even automatically batch them according to proximity of destination.
Of course the app can also handle multiple restaurants in a similar area in the same way so that drivers can be dispatched most efficiently to handle all the demand for an entire city. The more drivers, restaurants, and customers centralize on a single delivery app, the more efficient the system can be (assuming the app developers know how to optimize the transshipment problem [2]).
rob74
Well, you can also - shock horror - drive (or bike, if possible) over to the restaurant and pick up your order yourself! That's of course assuming that the restaurant has another means of placing orders than through the delivery apps (e.g. a phone number)...
parpfish
most of the folks getting ubereats delivery are not the target demo for being a PA client. but you don't have to be super wealthy for the economics of it to work out.
most tech employees make enough that they could pay 10-15 hrs of low wage work every week to do stuff like pick up your laundry/groceries, pick up a food order that you've called in, take stuff to the post office, etc.
trumbitta2
most tech employees in SF
btilly
It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent. Making the gig app as a discovery mechanism.
That's why none of the attempts at making housecleaning part of the gig economy have succeeded.
reaperducer
It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent.
That used to be considered a success, not a failure.
When agencies like Kelly place someone in a position like that, the person is required to work for Kelly for x number of months/years. Once that obligation is complete, they are free to jump to working directly with the Kelly client. Been there. Done that.
This is a solved problem. And solved a hundred years ago.
btilly
Part of that solution is to either sell a cleaning service that people only use occasionally, like deep cleaning of your floors, or to lock the client in to a contract that allows you to detect those private deals.
But the basic, "I'd like someone to clean my house once a week" doesn't work so well. People sometimes stop the cleaning after a bad experience. And sometimes hire the cleaner after a good one. And from the company's point of view, those look exactly the same. Customers will refuse 6 month contracts, and so there is no real recourse.
bongodongobob
That's already a thing, it's a just a normal courier service.
pavel_lishin
> i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
I think you might be over-estimating how much of a personal connection gig work delivery drivers have with the people they deliver to.
How many do you recognize? How many do you even know the names of? I'm not even sure if I've ever had a repeat delivery person, except from one restaurant that does delivery in-house instead of farming it out to one of the services.
parpfish
they don't have connections to them because they're still gig workers going through the app.
but all they need to do to start those relationships would be to drop off a business card if doordash/ubereats/etc sent them to somebody that seemed pleasant/tipped well/etc. then network effects from their as they recommend among their (presumably wealth) friends
emchammer
Don't get on Uncle Enzo's bad side though.
robertlagrant
UpWork would let people do this today.
dacryn
big companies care more about how easy it is to automate the labels, the accounting, the scheduling, ... Saving 2 euro per delivery but requiring a few hour of human effort is typically not worth it
oldjim69
Unionize. Collective action is the only way to stand up to Uber and co.
ryukoposting
How?
There's no workplace to speak in hushed tones. There's no manager or de facto leader to make first contact with union representatives. There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
Make no mistake, I sympathize with you. Rideshare/third-party delivery drivers have become America's new techno-feudalist underclass.
varjag
“It’s not unusual, except that Manna is telling you exactly what to do every second of every day. If it asks you to go to the back and get merchandise, it tells you exactly where to walk to go get it. And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job.”
All described in prescient classic: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
gunian
this sounds like my personal nirvana no human contact but able to exist maybe the buddhists were right nirvana exists...
jdietrich
The ADCU has been representing app drivers and couriers in the UK for years, but they're probably not the best model.
https://www.wired.com/story/adcu-gig-economy-union-toxic-rep...
The reality is that a large proportion of app workers are undocumented. Worker accounts are rented or sold to people who do not have the legal right to work. We can't reasonably address the issue of working conditions on these platforms if we don't acknowledge that fact.
https://inews.co.uk/news/deliveroo-uber-eats-just-eat-illega...
telesilla
Exactly - anywhere you have undocumented or unregistered or undereducated workers you have exploitation. I don't know why this isn't discussed more widely as being a core element of the gig economy.
There isn't a technology or unionization fix for this as it's a social and polite problem. I've looked into cooperative worker-owned solutions but for certain strata of society there are more gaping problems than the algorithm.
parpfish
I’ve often felt like there would be a lot of value for an app that’d simply let gig workers in an area find each other to talk and actually create a “workplace”.
But I’m not sure how you’d fund its creation. No VC would want it and there’s not a wealthy user base to bootstrap it.
bryanlarsen
Typically such things are bootstrapped not by a wealthy user base but by a talented user base who write the code and set up the organization themselves.
However, if you do need some money for boostrapping, there are likely unions out there that would be willing to grant/lend the sums needed, which should be five figures.
Taking VC money would be counter-productive, making you beholden to conflicting interests.
P.S. The motivation for setting something like this up doesn't necessarily need to be purely selfless. It's not going to make you a billionaire, but if successful a non-profit or co-op you set up to do this can pay you a six figure salary for a job that has significant meaningfulness and significant agency (aka control over your own work). And by being a non-profit or co-op the lack of conflict of interest should make it more likely to be successful.
InsideOutSanta
That's a smart idea. It seems like it shouldn't be too expensive to get something like this up and running, but scalability once it's available will be an issue.
Estimates for how many gig workers there are in the US vary between "over 20 million" and "about 60 million." They're already tech-literate, they probably talk to each other, so there's a chance that an app like this would experience very quick growth.
I wonder how gig services would react to something like this. They'd probably try to identify users and deplatform them, so in addition to the financial aspects, one difficult part would be how to protect and anonymize such a platform's users.
null
robertlagrant
> I’ve often felt like there would be a lot of value for an app that’d simply let gig workers in an area find each other to talk and actually create a “workplace”.
What would that mean, to be a workplace?
PittleyDunkin
> No VC would want it and there’s not a wealthy user base to bootstrap it.
More to the point, VCs invented these apps specifically to disenfranchise workers and vaccuum up the lost cost as a bullshit "service fee".
constantcrying
The much greater problem is that they are not employed. They are just self employed people, who take on gigs from various platforms.
They can, by definition, not unionize. Even striking is basically out of the question, as organization is near impossible and most of these people could not sustain months with zero pay.
This needs to be just made illegal, it is just a subversion of labor laws.
prepend
I’m guessing there a discord server somewhere with 90% management agents just waiting to honeypot potential union workers.
Seems like digital workplace should be easier to organize with all the community tools we have.
xnorswap
In the UK you can (and usually do) unionize without a workplace.
Many are industry-specific such as the "Communications wokers' union", but there are also general workers' unions such as GMB [1] or Unite.
It would be possible, indeed probably preferable, to form a "Delivery workers' union". It would be a union of delivery drivers who would pool resources to fight for common rights.
reaperducer
There's no workplace to speak in hushed tones.
There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
SMS. When I drove for Uber, there were massive group chats amongst the drivers. They even organized planned shortages in certain parts of the city when rates got too low.
jordiburgos
Well, those companies have a CEO, Director of Something, etc...
Peroni
They already have: https://www.gmb.org.uk/campaigns/deliveroo/
flerchin
The critical industry of McDonald's delivery will never pay a living wage. There's not enough value. Folks will have to self-select out.
wahnfrieden
McD’s has doubled prices with rising profits
flerchin
That's true, but the delivery people do not work for McD's. They do not legally work for the delivery companies (although practically they do). People that pay for delivery will not pay very much for delivery, generally less than minimum wage. They'll instead get the food themselves.
Aloisius
McD's is a franchise in the US. Franchisees set prices.
lotsofpulp
And it gets those without having to pay drivers (and technically even workers in most McDonalds’ restaurants since they are franchised), so why would they start?
Delivery and final assembly of food is not McDonald’s’ business.
pluc
That's AI working as intended. Your labor isn't considered, only efficiency and profitability. We all better get used to it.
voidhorse
This has been the game of capital since the 1700s. What's new with AI is actually a novel apex of irrationality, wherein the efficiency and profitability is being abandoned somewhat in favor of preservation and control over production (businesses are electing to sacrifice efficient deterministic modes of analysis in favor of less reliable stochastic approaches just because these technologies will allow them to continue to divest the laboring masses of any power over capital)
kridsdale1
The true paperclip problem is done with human hands, enslaved by the efficiency algorithm holding Damocles.
wat10000
The “paperclip maximizer” thing is funny. Change “paperclips” to “money” and you have inscrutable superhuman entities doing it right now.
readyplayernull
That can be fixed with more capitalism, for example there is a business opportunity right there:
> Why, when the restaurant is busy and crying out for couriers, does the app say there are none available?
Let the restaurant know they can call you.
Tossrock
I found this firsthand account of a gig worker trapped by the algorithm pretty compelling: https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/the-gig-economy
titanomachy
> we’re pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads.
That line hooked me
kridsdale1
I didn’t open that, but I love the domain name.
zackmorris
The behavior of service work employers only makes sense when we consider that it's all geared towards the profits of owners and shareholders. There are few or no worker-owned companies, nonprofits or even corporate charters that make workers a priority. So without viable competition, profit-driven (as opposed to wage-driven) companies will continue to dominate.
We need a new mental framework for organizing companies to be worker-owned:
https://www.noemamag.com/overthrowing-our-tech-overlords/
Worker-owned companies would receive a seal of approval from employees so they know where to apply, and companies that exploit workers would risk losing their seal and having their employees jump ship.
To use courier apps as an example: since there is little complexity in matching vendors with delivery workers, then a worker-first app should be able to compete. After all, it's pretty easy to save millions of dollars when employees vote on who gets bonuses and their sizes, rather than just paying the board (CEO, CFO, etc) whatever it skims for itself.
There's still the chicken-and-egg problem of needing users in order to scale. But I think we've been looking at it as a tough sell for too long, instead of offering a product (consistent employment and income with low constraints and commitments) that workers are eagerly looking for already.
_fat_santa
I don't know if food delivery apps will be here to stay long term, their economics just don't work. It seems that everyone involved looses, the tech companies are constantly running in the red, the restaurants get screwed and the drivers get screwed.
Long term, food delivery will still be a thing but likely run by restaurants and smaller local apps.
rlpb
Here in the UK, food delivery companies are required to itemise their fees. The amount they take per order makes no sense to me. Their marginal cost should be tiny. Presumably they have investors and marketing fees to pay, but these aren’t costs that are fundamental to the business model, only to their growth model. Long term I think things will settle down as competition trims out this fat.
tejohnso
Food delivery run by restaurants has existed fine for decades for pizza and chinese food. I guess the delivery app puts too many fingers into the pie.
roughly
It reminds me of the early days of Uber - the value add over taxis wasn’t in the ride itself*, it was the app and the fact that a car would actually show up. I suspect DoorDash et al are similar - the value add is the restaurant selection and the app ordering, not the actual delivery.
(* yes, yes, I too have stories about taxis. I now have stories about Uber drivers, too.)
retrac
Yes. Though at least in my market, that used to have delivery fees or minimum orders that made it unlikely you would order a single sandwich for lunch and have it delivered. The food delivery app services really emphasize that model of consumption but I'm not sure it's viable.
roughly
Re: delivery fees and minimum orders - for all intents and purposes, a burrito delivered via door dash costs $30. I’m pretty sure if you’d offered the sandwich shop $20 more to deliver the sandwich, they’d at least have thought about it. It’s actually kind of wild how much DD & all have managed to change expectations on the cost of food delivery.
rvense
When I think about what a reasonable hourly wage is, I don't see it working in my country at all. My understanding is that the main portion of drivers in Copenhagen is made up of exchange students, who have to work some hours per week to qualify for student aid, so it makes sense for them because the state basically tops up their wages.
meiraleal
That actually sounds like an ideal system for providing opportunities to low-wage workers without locking them into low wages indefinitely
rvense
I think it sounds like a misplaced subsidy. If we're going to use students as state-sponsored labour, surely we can think of a better job for them to do than prop up some foreign enterprise with an unworkable business model...
jaco6
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largest_lad
It is not complicated why this is happening. Even very low wage jobs in wealthy countries pay 10x what people can make in poor countries. The gig economy advances a race to the bottom for wages, in particular because there is zero identity verification or language skills needed for most of these guys.
Of course the number of deliveries that must be completed in an hour increases. Of course the pay per delivery decreases. Of course the delivery bikers are constantly running red lights and getting killed. Of course the shoddy ebikes are burning down the tenements. That is the logic of the market: more, cheaper, all the time.
casey2
The one lesson companies refuse to learn from Apple and Nvidia is that a race to the bottom isn't the optimal strategy in the short, medium, or long term. It only hold both in the super long term in which you assume that innovation is dead or that innovation can be done at no extra cost.
If people had a slightly different perspective on this we would already have drones delivering food, but because of this mistaken belief drones won't be economically viable for the foreseeable future.
Yeul
I don't consider myself a xenophobe but it feels somewhat strange the first thing I ask when interacting with the new servant class is "do you speak Dutch". It's already considered normal that the delivery guy or Uber driver is an immigrant.
Very few locals want to do these jobs and maybe there is something wrong with that I don't know.
skulk
Unfortunately, multi-tiered societies ("those people do THAT work") have been a thing ever since people got the idea to settle down. Maybe for a brief period of time, these tiers could be in entirely separate hemispheres, but things tend to diffuse over time.
donatj
I was really hoping one of the P2P apps would take off. There's no real reason why we need a middle man injecting themselves and taking fees. The apps just get better marketing.
We literally just need an app to connect restaurants to couriers.
klodolph
I see the reason for the middle man is to:
1. develop the platform
2. set standards for what “delivery” is
3. be liable for orders not delivered, or orders fraudulently placed
With a P2P app, wouldn’t you be engaging with a courier directly? That would mean that any problems would have to be taken up with the courier, I would think. It makes sense for restaurants to engage directly with couriers because they may have enough volume and repeat business that they can vet the couriers. But it does not make sense to me for individuals to engage with couriers directly, not for small-value items like meals.
Ekaros
Also payment processing. One charge to credit card or whatever is much simpler than having to individually send payment to first restaurant and then to courier.
loa_in_
P2P app could display (orders taken ever), (orders successfully delivered) for every courier. That would be good enough for 90% of costumers, but wouldn't cover the cost of actual fraud for the client.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
Is there something stopping a malicious peer client from lying about those numbers?
Genuinely curious; I've been wondering about how to make a zero-knowledge P2P protocol for turn-based imperfect knowledge games and this sounds directly applicable to that.
klodolph
I disagree with that—I don’t think it would be good enough for 90% of customers. I think it would be about the reverse. Maybe it would be good enough for 10% of customers.
LegionMammal978
In principle, you could have independent review services that publish ratings for couriers. Perhaps they could even make money insuring orders. But then this would run into just the same levels of frustrating opaqueness from the couriers' perspective.
caymanjim
Slice is a delivery platform that focuses on mom-and-pop pizza places. At least when I was involved years ago, they only charged a flat $1/order fee. They helped stores get their menus into the system, and then stores did their own deliveries. This model worked well because a lot of pizza places already had their own delivery drivers—probably more so than any other restaurant type.
I used to use Slice to order because the extra cost was nominal, and the drivers were local and worked directly for the pizza place. Issue with your order? Tell the driver, or tell the store, and it'd be addressed immediately, by real humans. Need to make last-minute changes to your order? Call the place directly and talk to a human. Get to know your driver because it's the same person most nights. Lots of upside.
Except everyone used DoorDash and GrubHub, even though Slice was both a better user experience and a far better experience for the restaurant owner. Slice cost restaurants less, cost consumers far less, and was a better solution in every way. But because the vast majority of the restaurant's deliver business came through DoorDash and other large delivery companies, most small restaurants have gotten rid of their own delivery drivers.
Slice still exists, but I expect it won't experience much growth. The big guys are dominant.
loa_in_
The competitors might have had better profit margin and therefore more ad spending, and more opportunity to expand area. Still, it's better to be akin Slice than to succumb to inevitable enshittification.
prepend
As a customer, I need a middleman/market maker to select participants and provide quality control.
There’s not a good reputation system so I would not use p2p cabs or food delivery because I don’t trust the drivers. At least with Uber, they will give me a refund, etc etc
meiraleal
That's a job for the government, it already has a lot of reputation data about everyone.
prepend
It would be nice if the government ran an identity server and you could check for arrests and convictions and such.
But I wouldn’t really want a government to onboard restaurants, or process refund requests. That seems like a nightmare.
bluedino
In my area we have FB marketplace. People have been doing grocery shopping, delivery, etc for a long time. Heck there's a whole underground restaurant system as well.
EGreg
I have been posting about cutting out the middleman for all sorts of ecosystems. Drivers and Passengers for instance.
For that we need an open decentralized source platform with no profit motive.
That’s what I built: https://intercoin.org/applications
But it takes time to make actually compelling alternatives to platforms that have BILLIONS of dollars behind them, a huge network effect already, and if needed, monopoly lock-in where they can say “it’s either us or them” to market participants.
diggan
> Applications of Intercoin: Making Crypto Mainstream
> Combining Web 2.0 (social) with Web 3.0 (transactional) we call it Web 5.0
I'm sure you mean well, but things like this will never speak to the working class performing the gigs/work itself. You already alienate them by naming the project *Coin ("cryptocurrency is only for the rich to get richer"), and the more flowery language about technology you use, you alienate them further.
If you're aiming to get those folks onboard you need to 1) skip any details about the technical internals, the organization-side internals are much more important to non-tech people and 2) target a specific audience and write specifically addressing their specific needs/problems.
EGreg
And what do you think of this messaging to celebrities, comics etc: https://intercoin.org/community.pdf
dr-detroit
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Workaccount2
My assumption would be that the orgs aren't quite sure how they work either.
Gig workers are a genuine and serious regression in workers rights and employer vs. employee power balance. These "jobs" should not be allowed to exist, at all.
Tech companies have figured out a way to subvert the protections all other employees are subject to. I see absolutely no reason why they should be allowed to do this.
I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.