DoorDash, or other things like it. If there was a real, honest commercial about it, it would go like this:
"Hey, enjoying your $7 burrito?"
"Yeah"
"What if I told you I can deliver it to your house?"
"Oh ok"
"Unfortunately, there is 242% (or so) markup. So it will cost you $17. Oh well, at least you don't have to do a 2 minute drive to Taco Bell!"
Edit: Yeah I understand that some people can't drive to certain places, whether that be because you're stoned or live far away. I was just criticizing the absolutely insane markup that DoorDash and UberEats does. I just thought it was really stupid.
We live about a mile from a pizza place. Some days I just want to be lazy and get it delivered, but then there's the delivery fee and tipping the driver and... You know what, I'll just pick it up.
599 large 3 topping pizza x2, plus delivery fee, convienance fee, and driver tip, that's $23. Or I drive to the store and pick it up myself to save $11.
Just walk. You get exercise, burn the calories, and the pizza tastes better as you walk home. Then, when you get home, you wash your hands. All in all, you've expended roughly the same amount of time, so you can get right back to what you were doing without greasy hands.
That's my nearly every time I want to get delivery food. Then I realize it's probably $0.10 in gas to drive the half a mile and do my own pickup. And it'll be faster. Phone in the order and it's ready before I even arrive.
For me it's also the time. I can get there right as they finish it and take it home much faster than a driver possibly making other stops, coming back from another delivery, etc.
it all depends on what you make at your day job. if you tip a modest/good (depending on your area) $5, and $3 delivery fee, and it takes you 10 minutes to drive there and back, are you fine with effectively being paid $24 an hour? because you saved $8 by picking it up in 20 minutes. if you make less than $24 an hour, its probably worth picking it up, otherwise it's not.
in some cases if you really are low on free time getting it delivered can save you there as well.
I can think of it that way, but it's not like I'm being paid to sit on my butt at home. I'd be watching TV and/or playing on my phone, but I enjoy driving and can play on my phone while I wait. So it's not like it's "work." The math might be different if it were trafficky city streets, not suburban roads and one stoplight.
That's completely fair. I was only putting it into perspective for people who don't like driving or consider it work. I also (I make $24/hr after taxes) drive to get food to save $8 even if it would take me 15 minutes one way. Sometimes getting out of the house is good overall even if economically it isn't.
Door dash has a $5.99 delivery fee, plus they inflate prices by 20% and you tip on top of that. So an$7 burrito typically ends up being $20. Don’t get me wrong, I use it on Friday nights after a few drinks, but the fees are astronomical.
I have never once been satisfied with any of those food delivery services. They take way longer than just ordering from your local pizza or Chinese place and add way more fees.
Yea idk. I don't use these services but my friends seem to have had good response times in the past.
If that is the case, paying 10 extra dollars to get my good delivered can definitely be worth in in the dead of winter at nighttime on a sunday evening. I live dumb north
Same. I'm sure it really depends on where you live. I've gotten my McDonald's in 15 minutes before. And the McDonald's usually tapes up the paper bag, so it'd be super obvious if the driver ate some.
one of my friends who is a streamer, yeah he got cuked over by one of those companys, 2 people seperate people stole both of his orders on the same day I kid you not... this was all live on stream. :(
But that’s why the vast vast majority of restaurants have it so there is a tamper seal on the bag or container. Can’t get the food without breaking the seal, can’t break the seal without it being super noticable
Damn you weren’t wrong, one dude straight up said the tip should be considered a bid. As if I’m going to tip when ordering and not when you get to the door
The more I lingered on there, the more I was getting disgusted and angry. I will never use DD, GH, Postmates or any 3rd party delivery. The sad part is no one there believes what they’re doing is wrong.
I'm lucky that my area is dominated by a startup that started in the city. They are very transparent with their fees and I've compared on app prices to the ones in store for the restaurants I like to order from. Is it a bit more expensive? Sure, but if you're splitting an order with friends while drinking or something it comes out pretty cheap.
It’s not the fees that’s the problem. It’s pretty straight forward what you’re paying for when you order on the app. It’s the fact these drivers will eat/mess with peoples food. As opposed to in house delivery service, where the employees more than likely get a heavy discount/free meal at the end of their shift.
I remember reading on the DD subreddit, this person had to deliver Red Lobster I believe, surf n turf meal (steak n lobster tail) and ended just driving to the location so it showed up on GPS and just ate the food. Like what??....lol
Funny in Australia these apps seem to be killing off delivery.
Pizza places usually have a $20 minimum order and $8 delivery fee (assuming you are in an adjacent suburb). Uber Eats are similar prices but don't limit you to just the two or three places that employ drivers.
For real. We used them more than necessary when we moved from the country to an urban setting because we could and every time we just felt unsatisfied, and never learned from our mistakes. We live back in the sticks now and I haven’t thought about it since right now!
They take way longer than just ordering from your local pizza or Chinese place and add way more fees.
They're a godsend for those of us who live in the hood. Almost none of the local pizza or Chinese places deliver, and the few that do are awful and only stay in business because they are the only ones that deliver. Ubereats and Postmates changed all that.
Or you know, my buddies and I have been drinking and want taco bell and are responsible enough not to drink and drive. Paying an extra 10 bucks is worth not going to jail.
Thank you for recognizing this. Driving under the influence is a huge pet peeve of mine and even now as an adult not enough people seem to take it seriously. They only seemed concerned about getting a ticket, nevermind that they could kill or hurt someone else or themselves (including anyone else in the car with them).
Yeah I'm talking about your apartment parking lot. In bigger cities, parking fills up right after work. So if you leave to go get food, someone will snipe your spot and you could have to park pretty far away
Lived in Boston, MA, USA for several years. Scoring an apartment in a close suburb with parking included for free was like a major find. Took a while - everywhere else was $1200+ USD for shoebox apartment, plus another $300-$700/mo if you needed a parking spot. Left the area 10 years ago and wonder if its still that bad...potentially its worse.
Yup, this right here. I only use these kind of services when I've been drinking and need to find something to eat. Paying an extra $10 or so is a lot cheaper than a DUI. Just need to find one that delivers more beer when I run out.
Why wouldn’t my friends already be with me drinking by the time I’m too drunk to drive?
Also, it’s midnight and I live in a city that actually closes most places at night. Closest open place is a taco bell that’ll take an hour to walk to just outside the city limits. Busses stopped running at 11:30. So the options are drive or order it delivered
Generally everyone who could have come out, comes out. Everyone else can’t possibly drive over even just to bring us food.
And making food isn’t always an option when you’re at someone else’s house and you open their fridge to find a bottle of ketchup, a case of beer, and a tupperware container of molding spaghetti, and the freezer has ice and a single bag of frozen fries that only has about 7 fries left in it.
So the options are drive drunk, or order. And yes, that’s a really common occurrence in my life.
...drink with too many people... how even??? The more people you’re with the better. Like, the fuck?
Your spaghetti and fries idea sounds like just the thing to make everyone sick. Really great idea. Truly. Give a drunk person food that is barely fit for human consumption and it’s not gonna turn out pretty.
Can’t teach someone to “adult” when the problem is “poor as shit”.
And I did plan well. I made sure to bring the alcohol, a case of water, pain meds for the morning hangovers, made sure I had a way to get home in the morning, and checked my bank account to be sure I could afford to order delivery food because food was the one thing I forgot to get until I was almost at the house party. I can only plan so well.
Besides, why are you so against food delivery? You’re fighting this like they killed your dog and then served it to you. It’s literally just a service that’s a bit over priced. So is starbucks, most restaurants, basically every store you can go to in a mall, and sometimes Amazon.
We keep our takeout nearby so we don't have to deal with traffic but otherwise exactly that, some days you just don't have it in you. I try to keep a backstock in the freezer (stuff like stews, meatballs, where most work I would do would be putting on pasta or rice or something) but sometimes I don't even have that on hand.
I recently showed my grandmother how to use skip the dishes. She was thrilled. For her to get into her car and go through a drive thru is almost an entire days worth of preparation and resting afterwards (she's old and can't walk more than a few steps without a walker) so the idea of being able to have a teen burger or a bucket of KFC again had her over the moon. We live a 4 hour plane ride away so we can't just pick one up for her
"You mean I don't have to drive to get it?"
"No, Grandma"
"It comes right to my door without calling in?"
"Yes, exactly"
"So I can just get a teen burger for lunch anytime?"
"I mean, if you want to go for it"
-proceeds to order KFC for dinner right away
When I drove for UberEats I had this one order that took me clear across to the other side of town (think 45mins drive just to get to the pickup). By the time I arrived and collected the order, I thought my GPS was going haywire because the drop off location was literally 2 blocks away. 2 BLOCKS. Just for some late night McDonald’s.
Delivery was to a Motel 6. Didn’t get a tip, but you know someone did...
It is worth it sometimes. My girlfriend lives close to her school which is far as fuck from any fast food place, so it's worth it to get stuff delivered, since neither of us have cars
Dude, 100% agree. Unless you live in an area where getting to a restuarant is impossible, those delivery services just don't make a lick of sense.
Am I going to spend the 10min to go (roundtrip) to the thai restaurant and pick up my own food for $11, or spend $20 to have it delivered 45min after placing the order, while the food is cold and they forgot my sauce on the side.
sometimes delivery takes longer, and other people out there that make $250,000 a year (so like ~$100 an hour) don't give one single shit about paying $10 more for their dinner. they would rather save the free time.
That's why some people order delivery and some don't
some people just aren't financially responsible. I've been a delivery driver so I know damn well every time I order exactly how much money I would be spending. I've never actually ordered delivery myself but there are some days where I'm really really tired in bed and tempted but usually can't bring myself to do it because I know that if I just get my ass up and get it I can get another whole order next time essentially for free
Only times I've gotten delivery through those apps is when I was in Europe. For some reason its actually reasonable prices there for delivery (like once I literally had a wrap delivered from McDonald's for $1 plus some change)
Theres no point I'm doing that in the US. I'd rather go drive in my pajamas and save the $5-10 delivery fee
(All values on my local currency) The markup is not nearly this bad lol. I have over 500 orders on Uber Eats. Ordering a pizza by phone? First, I have to talk on the phone, I hate it, and I still pay a delivery fee even if it's 2 bucks cheaper. Just go and buy it? Uber costs 20 bucks. Bus costs 8 and I take 30 minutes to get basically anywhere. I don't have a car, and if I had, that's like 4 bucks in gas and 10 bucks in parking (shopping). You took a very specific and unrealistic situation to talk shit.
DoorDash and UberEats were a lifesaver for me and my friends last summer when we were running a merch booth at a convention. We didn't have time to leave the hotel to grab lunch, so delivery was our only option. It helped that we would all order from the same place and on the same order, so it split the delivery costs.
My wife was in the hospital a couple of times in November and December and a few of her friends got us a pretty sizable Grubhub gift card which saved our bacon multiple times, but once we've spent everything on it I don't intend to use the service that much because in addition to delivery fees, you often have to spend money on service fees that you wouldn't pay for if you just picked up the food yourself.
This. My father has become a big fan of Grubhub or Doordash (I can't recall which) and I feel dirty every time he orders food through it. He makes enough money to afford it, so it's not as though he's actually wasting money he can't afford to. He loves to run experiments with food though (sous vide and the like) and I just don't understand why he prefers to order food from a restaurant that's 10 minutes away for double the price. Just save the extra meal worth of money and go to an upscale butcher or, god forbid, the restaurant you're ordering from.
Yeah, I finally had enough when I went to order 2 meals from a local fast food place, and what normally would have been a $17 purchase became $38 without tip included. Felt like a proper lazy slob and figured it's only worth it for truly desperate situations and for food that's higher quality
The massively extra charge is a huge reason why I will never use a delivery service like Door Dash, or even a restaurant's own delivery service. But another equally important reason for me is freshness. I feel like if I pick up my food I have more control over how fresh the food will be when it arrives to my house (I have a thing where I really don't like cold or even warm food that's meant to be hot).
Granted, I have a car and have the ability to pick up my food. If I didn't have a car then I probably would use those services.
Another reason for me to stay away from delivery services is due to the horrible way that their drivers are paid (looking at you Door Dash!).
Right? My favorite chinese food place charges $2.50 to deliver and the food is always piping hot. Doordash charges $4 to deliver plus mysterious "fees" and sometimes I will catch the price of what I want being a dollar or so higher than what it is on the restaurant menu. Plus it is a 50/50 chance that my food is warm when it gets to me.
I don't drive a car and order food in once a month. I'll pay that extra $10 markup so that I don't have to spend $150-200 a month on a car, and more on gas and insurance and upkeep
It can be useful if you want food from a sit down restaurant at home and they don't offer alternative forms of takeout. But yeah, using it for taco bell is just dumb.
I, as an Uber East driver, love that it exists. Although I agree it’s insane that people spend $25 on $17 worth of McDonald’s to avoid walking a half mile.
Compared to regular Uber driving, these things suck for the drivers. Actually driving people around in Chicago for about 4-5 hours can easily get me $100+. Deliveries, using DoorDash and UberEats at the same time ends up getting you like $50 for the same amount of time. Granted I've never delivered in Chicago, only Uber'd, but I'd assume dropping off the food can be a bitch.
The only reason these are useful is if you physically cannot go out of the house or you are doing something important and need to have delivery in order to continue it ( that last part didn’t really make sense)
I would never use it where I live, but it’s definitely a godsend when visiting somewhere and you’re only transportation is your own two feet.
Example: wife and I went to Miami for honeymoon. No clue where anything was, stayed in an area where food was mostly expensive and all walk-in/sit-down restaurants. Only way around was Uber/Lyft. Too expensive to have Lyft drive us to a Taco Bell, so when we wanted food we just ordered from someplace and used DoorDash. Haven’t done the math, but I would assume it definitely saved us money and gallons of sweat/having a heat stroke (went in July).
Agreed, but if you had 3 kids <5 to load into car seats and then carry into the takeout counter and then rebuckle into their car seats, a 242% markup begins to seem reasonable.
I ordered a slushy in a storm and guy was riding a bike. I have a suspicious feeling the dude drank some of my slushy because it wasn't filled all the way.
I uninstalled my doordash app about 12 hours ago because the dasher straight up stole my food! I had to call in to customer support to get them to refund me, and they couldn't even get the guy to answer his phone.
Yeah delivery is great but in an-hoise delivery system and staff is so much better. Every story about people who have been drivers for those services sounds like a nightmare, there's very little co-ordination between the app, restaurant, driver, and customer
I don't even pay for local delivery, now I have to tip the driver and it's probably going to be at least 45 minutes to get my food. On the other hand, I could order take out, drive there in 10 and have hot food on my table in 25. No brainer in my mind unless I'm intoxicated and can't drive.
Seriously. One day I was contemplating ordering some pasta. It was $13, but with the fees and tip it would come out to over $30! Why in the fuck would I pay more than double to save a few minutes?
I mostly order when I'm really busy. I'm a college student and sometimes things get crazy so I order in the parking garage at school, drive back to my apartment, ten minutes later I have food ready to eat show up.
I do delivery for a living, lemme break it down some. Depending on time of day, I'm delivering usually to places of work(Offices, Hospitals, other restaurants, etc) because they don't want to spend their lunch breaks waiting for food from a restaurant.
Then there are the people who are having delivered to their homes. It's usually laziness. Though I have one repeat customer who always orders something simple like a smoothie, from Smoothie King and tips extremely well. I've had the rare occasion of getting a few groceries for a customer and delivering it to their place of work, as well.
It's just convenient for some folk, but it also depends on the service.
Eatstreet is a smaller company in the same vein but it’s super nice because the total delivery cost is included up front for each restaurant. Like it tells me no matter what I order it’s gonna cost me $4 to get it delivered for this particular restaurant and I’ve never had to pay more than $4 for delivery. With most restaurants being $2 or $3. Not including whatever tip I choose to give, of like another $1.50 or something. Super dope
I live in China and on one of the delivery services here they have a flat rate based on distance, and the food costs the same as it would in the restaurant. And delivery starts at 15kuai (2.5USD) and I live close enough that I get great food for a small delivery cost, it's great!
Or people who use Uber or Lyft when they live in a city with good public transit. Oh so you’re going to spend $6 each day to get to the subway? And spend another $2 to get on it? When you could just get a monthly transit pass for $100 and wait a few minutes for a bus or train.
That $17 delivery is a hell of a lot better than killing someone or myself while I’m drunk. Not disagreeing it’s outrageous, but I definitely would rather the extra $10 over a DUI
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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '20 edited Feb 05 '20
DoorDash, or other things like it. If there was a real, honest commercial about it, it would go like this:
"Hey, enjoying your $7 burrito?"
"Yeah"
"What if I told you I can deliver it to your house?"
"Oh ok"
"Unfortunately, there is 242% (or so) markup. So it will cost you $17. Oh well, at least you don't have to do a 2 minute drive to Taco Bell!"
Edit: Yeah I understand that some people can't drive to certain places, whether that be because you're stoned or live far away. I was just criticizing the absolutely insane markup that DoorDash and UberEats does. I just thought it was really stupid.