What even is the point of delivery anymore

Stamets@lemmy.world to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 691 points –
82

There is no point. You paid $25 for cold fast food, the delivery driver didn’t get paid shit and the restaurant didn’t get paid shit. On the bright side, the shitty delivery app might be profitable next quarter after firing 30% of their staff :)

Weird how no one in that chain is getting rich off of the system, even the app has to fire its workforce to stay profitable. almost like the money gets funneled out of the economy when those apps get used.

Idk who is using all those expensive ass delivery options. Just pick it up, food is fresher and cheaper.

Personally, I have no family to take care of and work from home, and as part of that I gave up on cars. Very good for my finances overall. But it does mean that restaurants that were once a 10 minute drive away are now inaccessible except for delivery.

a 10 minute drive away are now inaccessible

Alright, buddy, three things:

  1. I quite literally have a bad leg and walk with a cane, so fuck running.

  2. The 10 minute drive includes stretches of highway.

  3. I generally don't have three hours to burn in travel time (round trip) when I want to eat at a restaurant.

Most places won't let you use the drive-thru on foot either, and some stores (due to "labor shortages") are drive thru only. So they literally won't serve you without a car.

American car culture is terrible but it's not like we get a choice at the DMV between driving and having functional, walkable towns and cities. You get to be a driver or a second-class person.

This one drives me crazy. Wife and I were walking home late from a night out, wanted McDs (alcohol was involved). The only options were drive through and app ordering for drive through pick up. Thankfully the woman at the uber pickup window let us app order and pick up there, but they aren't supposed to...

Most places won’t let you use the drive-thru on foot either, and some stores (due to “labor shortages”) are drive thru only. So they literally won’t serve you without a car.

That's potentially a zoning code violation. Call up your local government and report it.

(A fast food place near me illegally expanded their drive-thru to two lanes recently; my complaint forced them to rip it out again.)

They're not allowed two lanes? Many McDonald's have them where I'm from.

For the restaurant in my particular example, it's in a neighborhood with special zoning that says they're supposed to not be allowed a drive-thru at all. Unfortunately, even though that old fast-food building had been vacant for more than a year before the current restaurant opened (which means it should've lost its grandfathered-in status), the city failed to enforce the zoning in a timely fashion and they got away with having one drive-thru lane. I'm just glad my city councilperson was urbanist enough to be willing to give the zoning department (or legal department, or whatever) a swift kick in the ass to stop them from getting away with screwing the community a second time!

I had a lady at the McDonalds near me tell me I can’t take my motorcycle through the drive-thru. I was like “wtf? I do it all the time here.”

Okay jeez. Its not uncommon however, for people to believe that a ten minute drive (maybe a 30 minute walk) away is impossibly far to walk. Its very much baked in to "American" car culture to believe like this, and you can resist that culture by sometimes walking instead of driving.

10 minute drive (where I live) is typically 6-10 miles. Average walking speed is 3mph so you're talking over 2hrs. I had to do it once on a tractor and it sucked, and that was doing 10-14mph.

Are you from the EU or something? In America a "10 minute drive" is literally like 2 hours of walking and miles away, we have much faster speed limits here and everything is wayyy more spread out. A EU "10 minute drive" is vastly different from an American "10 minute drive"

Idk how a 10 minute drive is a half hour walk. Average walking speed is 3 mph, so a half hour is 1.5 miles. If you’re driving that in 10 minutes, you’re only averaging 9 mph.

I don’t mean to pile on here because I understand your frustration. I grew up in NYC where basically no one drives, and didn’t get a driver’s license until my 30s when I moved to California for work. Even then I put off getting a car for years, since I like walking and don’t mind “decent” public transit.

But it just became impossible to continue. My commute was an hour and 45 minutes (one way), with about 40 minutes of walking, a train and a bus. I like walking but when it was over 100 degrees in the summer, or raining, or a wildfire smoke day it was miserable. The buses run every 30 minutes so if there’s a missed connection the commute becomes over 2 hours (still just one way). And the train has only 1 line so when there’s a mechanical issue you’re out of luck and just have to call an Uber anyway.

I finally broke down and got a car. My commute is now 30 minutes each way. The gas for my commute is somehow cheaper than the public transit. It’s ridiculous and it shouldn’t be this way, but it is.

ten minute drive (maybe a 30 minute walk)

Are you driving only three times as fast as you are walking? So something in the 13mph range?

Car dependency and pedestrian facilities vary greatly between countries, have you thought about that?

Many Americans simply don't have sidewalks or any other safe routes to navigate to many restaurants and other places, nor do they have sufficiently developed public transport in those same areas (if at all).

Even in Russia, in cities built and/or amended by the Soviets to be walkable or at least accessible via public transport, there's a lot of day-to-day places you're not going to be able to reach without a car unless you have literal hours in your day outside work and other chores; not to mention some people not having the luxury of being able to walk as easily or at all.

A) I've no licence

B) I've no car

C) The only transport near where I live is a bus every hour.

D) there are no fast food places near me outside of a Chinese takeaway that's a 5-10 minute walk up and down steep hills.

A bike isn't an option everywhere, especially in the US. My parents are from the Netherlands, where almost everyone bikes almost everywhere. When they moved to the US, my dad biked to work. Once. To my knowledge, in the 30 years they lived here, he's never decided to try it again.

One of the games I play on my commute is imagining what the bike route would be like. I looked it up once and every path included a high traffic street with no sidewalk; where I live, that's straight up flirting with death. Cycling in my area requires a large group and/or limited capacity for risk assessment.

The only bikes I see on my drive are there in memorial to someone who died there on a bike.

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I do, but am trying to cut down. It became a habit during covid. Restaurants are now jacking their prices up plus the fees and tips on top of that pushes the cost over the top now. Then Uber has the nerve to do multiple deliveries in one shot unless you pay extra. By the time you get your food it's turned to cold garbage. I am getting groceries delivered, which has added cost, but you can get a lot more food for that money. I guess I just hate getting out of the house.

It gets more cost effective the more food you order, 1 meal @ 15$ + 15$ in fees and tips is outrageous, 50% of your total is just fees and tips. But 4 or 5 meals at 50-60$ + 15$ in fees and tips is much more reasonable. The DD fees don't scale to the order size you make (surprisingly lmao).

Fifteen dollars in tips and fees?! wtf?

Is the food delivered with a Porsche and the delivery person personally feeds you or what?!

Over here delivery is like 2-3€, and you tip if the service was above average and well then it's usually by filling up to something convenient (this is based on until recently still mostly using actual cash, so tipping to save the delivery person the time fiddling with change, "just keep the change").

The fee is about 8-10 depending on the restaurant and your area. I usually do a tip of about 5-7 so that I can get better service from the driver. Really, the tip should be thought of more of a "silent bid" for services or a bribe if you want to have fun with it lol

Damn, you tip before the delivery? Then it's really just part of the fee, no? Especially if it's like a bid. :o

Yes, the tip is more of a bribe to encourage the driver to get the food to you in a timely manner.

These meals don't cost the money to be microwaved again, it's just not that good. Better off ordering groceries in that case.

I'm told the most frequent customers are students. Somehow the people with the least money use it the most. Teach your kids to cook...

Most dorms don't have any means of cooking and even ban things like toasters.

Perhaps in your area. Where I live it's pretty common to have a shared kitchen. Probably a product of not teaching them how to cook and them burning down a few buildings haha

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Doordash be like $17 + $4 + $6 = $57.86

And don't forget to tip your delivery driver!

(industry standard is 200% plus more for fast service, preferably in advance)

plus federal tax, state tax, city tax, fuck you tax, and another fuck you convenience fee :)

Skip The Dishes recently made a sneaky update to their app that changed the minimum tip from 10% to 12%. Sneaky bastards.

Cooking your own food is pretty cool just saying

When I'm briefly home after my first job and before my second one, I am physically and mentally incapable of cooking. Either food gets delivered while I pass out on the couch or I don't eat.

In a sane world people would be allowed time and energy to prepare food for themselves, sorry it's like that

I think the saner option would be communal food preparation, but like with real human food and not the capitalist slop that is fast food. A lot of people don't want to, or don't have the energy for cooking. It's pretty time consuming and energy intensive, even when you have the time for it. For most of human history communal food prep was the norm.

When I was at school at a fairly large university I ate at the cafeterias and literally I never ate better and more healthy in my life than when I was there. The food was just normal food, and it was always available and high quality. I feel like cafeterias like it should be possible all over the place, sure it was a well funded school but I don't really see why they shouldn't be possible. I dream of returning to school often for that reason, as well as the walkable layout and close knit community.

University meal plan costs are pretty high from what I remember. Sure it's possible, but you need the facilities, you need the people making food for you and cleaning up after. There's reasons making your own meals from stuff you buy at the grocery store can be a fraction of the cost.

When I was in college me and six friends had a dinner coop going where one person would cook a meal each night of the week (the dorms had kitchens). It worked great except for the one girl that would make things like bulgar wheat - like, just a big bowl of boiled bulgar wheat and nothing else. We made sure her night was Thursday, since the tavern in town had all-you-can-eat spaghetti for $1 on Thursdays.

Two of my former coworkers live next to each other. Both are married, but one has a wife who stays home to raise their kids (couple #1), while the other has a working wife (couple #2) and their kids are older. #2 buys groceries for both couples, and #1 cooks the dinners for both couples.

Seems like something like this arrangement could work for others. Free food in exchange for cooked meals.

May I ask why you're working two jobs? Is it the high rent or something? 🤔

Edit: Confused about the downvotes over a simple question. Where I live, barely anyone works two jobs.

My neighbors get everything delivered. Even a single bottle of water. It's insane.

I get everything delivered as well, I mean groceries. It costs me 20 EUR a month to get unlimited free deliveries from Albert Heijn. Prices are similar or the same as in store, I even get the same store discounts, sometimes they give me a free bottle of beer. They also take away my old plastic bottles, and deliver to my door of my umpteenth floor flat. Tips are not expected, no option in the app, the drivers actually run away to the next place as fast as they can after I pay.

I don't see the problem with it. It's good on the environment as well, since I'm better able to plan groceries, I have less food waste, and it is more efficient to truck the groceries to me than everyone making the trip separately.

Questionable whether it's actually better for the environment as the truck runs every day.

I would say it's better to have a large deep freeze as the energy it consumes yearly likely wouldn't even get you to the store and back once.

I go to the city about once a month and go to Costco, which is really a central location that they truck all of the groceries to, and fill my vehicle completely full of the things I can't grow and store way out here in the middle of nowhere.

I run 2 freezers actually, one I fill with meat when we butcher in the fall, the other with vegetables and fruit from the summer, as well as carbs like perogies, tortillas, breads and buns etc.

I know that obviously most people can't do this to my extent but you can buy a 1/4 beef from a farmer, 1/2 pork, frozen fruit and veg from Costco, sausage from a butcher and so on. Then you barely have to shop at all.

The convenience sounds great but I would say that's the main purpose, not environmental reasons. Also, I would be in for the free beer!

The environmental gains come in when me and my 1500 neighbours don't all go to the supermarket one by one, by car or even public transit, but the supermarket delivers a truckload of stuff to us at the same time. Saves the energy of getting 1500 people to the supermarket and back. Consequently, there are fewer people in the supermarket as well, so those are smaller, need less parking spaces, the city has less traffic and all sorts of knock-on effects.

Can you freeze fruit and veggies like that? Me and my ex always meant to get a chest freezer but then covid happened and they were nowhere to be found for two years 😂

Super easy, we don't even blanch. We grow like 20lbs of bush beans, cut tips and tails and chunk to an inch or so long, freeze in bags. Toss straight into a soup or stir fry from frozen. Same for beet tops when we harvest the beets, rinse and chop the tops into packable size, dump into just about anything and they are like fresh.

Some vegetables just do not freeze though, no salads of course, only the kinds that you cook.

I rarely buy fresh fruits except for apples these days as they are always poor quality here, and frozen are excellent and far cheaper. Especially berry type fruit like cherries, blueberries, strawberries etc as they go straight from the field to the freezer plant when they are ripe unlike the supermarket crap.

We keep our own apples in the fridge and cellar, same with carrots, beets, potatoes. Onions hang in the basement. Crabapples we have a huge bounty of and core and quarter and freeze, they are great in a fruit smoothie, pie, applesauce etc.

I would highly recommend an upright freezer over a chest aside from secondary bulk meat storage. I have both, the upright you can select your food much better instead of just eating what's on top. Everyone says they will dig in the chest, NOBODY DOES. Modern uprights have similar efficiency and power failure performance, and nothing ends up freezer burnt at the bottom.

Questionable whether it’s actually better for the environment as the truck runs every day.

Albert Heijn makes me think Netherlands, and tall building probably means big city (Amsterdam or maybe Brussels in Belgium..i think AH is big there too) so there's a good chance it may be a cyclist / cargo bike delivering the food. It flips the American shop-bulk-and-store method on its head.

I'm in the Randstad, guilty as charged. Not quite Amsterdam though.

It's actually an electric microtruck or sometimes a full truck, since a bunch of people order out here and a single truck carries many people's groceries. The guys usually get a dolly and have a few laps up and down the cargo elevator.

If I order anything for quick delivery like a pizza, it's always a cyclist or rarely an electric moped. A car wouldn't even find a parking spot, much less get through the city in time.

I only order the original delivered fast food -- pizza.

Same. Pizza and Chinese food travel really well with simple packaging. Burgers and french fries, not so much.

I live 10 minutes from the place I get pizza. I drive to get my pizza, wait for it to come out of the oven and put it immediately into my insulated pizza delivery bag and drive straight home, and then it's still usually too cold for my tastes. Delivery usually takes close to an hour and by that point it's basically frozen.

Literally bitching to my friend how I just spend $13 fucking dollars at McDonald’s and the food was cold and disgusting, I’m tempted to calll my credit card company and issue a chargeback.

Hate to sound like a Karen, but you can try telling the manager. Usually they are pleasant and are willing to compensate you.

You have to try resolve the issue with the store before issuing a chargeback.

Also note that chargebacks cost the company ~$20-50 each, even if the chargeback is ruled in their favour. This means that just threatening that you'll chargeback is usually successful - they don't want to deal with the cost and paperwork associated with it. If you do chargeback, the store will likely block your credit card from being used there in the future.

Stop ordering delivery. I never have used these shitty apps. I also never order pizza delivery. I can't believe how many people trust their unsealed food with strangers who nobody is watching.

Half of the places I order from seal the bags with stickers that make it obvious if someone has tampered with it. And also, I don't really worry about it because I have never done anything to this stranger to make them inclined to tamper with my food. And if they're doing this job, they probably really need the money and don't want to risk getting banned (can't really say fired because they're not technically employees) and are also in such a hurry because every second counts on picking up enough orders in a "shift." Not everyone is out to get me. I've mostly had good experiences with delivery and most of the screw ups are from the restaurant, not the delivery person.

All that said, I should order less delivery. For my health and my wallet. But I just value my time probably far higher than I should.

I love cooking, but it seems I may love not cooking even more.

I've not really used the new food delivery services and with the cost of fast food and freshly made food in supermarkets rising so much as it was, I've actually started making basic dinners at home for myself instead.

I also now buy premade frozen things that I can just pop into a toaster oven for those lazy nights. Probably on par or better than the fast food anyways despite the extra effort of buying ahead of time.

More like when someone buys you lunch but the food and service suck terribly. I tend to complain and then I catch myself.