I worked at a local grocery store while unemployed, and I actually PREFERRED the Doordash/Instacart customers.

Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude. It was a very clear and direct communication. A simple scan, and boom, nothing further needed, I could just scan their items. Thr QR code scan handled payment and everything. They almost always helped with doing thier own bagging: Time is money, after all.

Yeah mixed blessing at best. Increased volume, but not every 30-table restaurant is set up to do much more; kitchens are sized to expected in-person dining.

And all the stuff you mention.

The one restaurant owner I know who’s happy with DD set up an entirely separate kitchen in an industrial park. But to get to the DD revenue necessary to justify that investment, he had a couple of years of DD hell in his main restaurant.

I went to a restaurant for a nice meal with my family. We ordered and waited for our food forever, as a steady stream of delivery bags went out the door. It was an hour before our first appetizer came out. It took us a while to figure it out, but there's no doubt the restaurant was incentivized to prioritize delivery orders over customers sitting in front of them.

The supermarket where I shop has a specific checkout station for delivery drivers. I have never seen one in a normal checkout line (not that it might be very obvious, especially if they were shopping not just picking up an order).

What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.

> On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.

That's exactly what it's like in NYC. They just walk up with their huge backpacks straight to the front skipping everyone, turn around bumping people, show their phone, then stand RIGHT in the front as-if no one else exists. It's awful.

I'd love to contribute to a no-delivery store. Pickup or dine-in only.

Edit: Might have to re-think Pickup because that would just become a loophole for delivery. Maybe orders have to be placed in-store for to go.

Going by other comments in this thread it seems like if you kicked out the driver they'd probably get fired from Doordash.

I think your first instinct about antitrust is correct.

Out of the group of people who have food delivered, that food mostly comes from restaurants or grocery stores. Instacart/DD will be a behemoth of food delivery.

For context Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart each have about a quarter of the online grocery delivery market with smaller outfits like Kroger and Albertsons eating up the remaining quarter. If you believe this data, that is. https://talkbusiness.net/2025/04/online-grocery-sales-rise-2...

DoorDash has a ton of grocery delivery, it's the only one i use for that now because instacart has a payments bug. Very weird that the only two big competitors in this space in North America can just merge like this

Interesting perspective.

They do serve the same market for gig workers that don’t want to be ride share drivers, though, right? I wonder what their market share is for that.

DoorDash, at least for a while for me, was significantly cheaper than Instacart for grocery delivery, probably because they were trying to fight their way into the grocery delivery market. Now that they're just going to buy Instacart, this can only mean higher prices to me since they need to pay for their acquisition and they no longer need to compete on price. Great!

> compete in grocery with the real giants in Walmart

In my area Walmart is on Instacart and I've often wondered how that squares with their own delivery service.

Agreed; I look back in horror at how much I spent on delivery fees and tips in my 20s before I took control of this part of my life.

Mind giving more detail into how it went? Did first-party delivery options tend to exist and work well, or did you just adjust your expectations re: convenience?

In what way has life been better without them? I've been considering quitting them as well and I'd love to hear.

Same here, I don’t have to deal with rude delivery people and useless AI based customer service, plus I am not wasting my money delivery and services fees. On top of that I became a home cook!

From a driver persepctive:

DD plays big games with pay, sometimes hides tips, drives down base pay, and stacks orders with good pay and bad pay offers to try and pay drivers as little money as possible.

In a bad economy, there's less people ordering on DD (although higher income earners who aren't as effective by economic effects don't change habits), however, it drives MORE desperate drivers to the platform that accept the low pay orders since they no longer have an income. This drives down all wages for drivers, and costs, which in turn pads DD's margins.

We actually see this seasonally in the summer when more students and teachers join the platform over the break. There's a glut of drivers, you can't cherry pick higher paying orders and most stuff that's left to fight for is low paying, no tip orders. When school starts back up things return to normal.

This is why DD is trying to sign up as many drivers as possible. If you remove the scarcity of drivers, then every low paying gig will eventually get picked up, driving average pay down and you can ratchet down your base pay hoping customer tips make up the slack.

> Merging reduces platform inefficiencies

None of the money saved by reducing inefficiencies will lower prices for consumers or increase pay for drivers. The goal is always to charge customers the most while giving them the least, while paying employees as little as they can get away with. In theory merging also kills off competition that might steal customers and workers by offering better prices/wages, although in practice companies share the same goal of screwing over both consumers and workers and are perfectly willing to resort to collusion in order to do that most efficiently.

> Merging reduces platform inefficiencies

This was literally why Rockefeller was a big proponent of the monopoly. Unfortunately exploitation is the tradeoff that is enables

Profit? Who cares about profit today in tech? It's tomorrow's profit that matters. Whenever that is.

why do you think this is a low margin business? The big expense is software labor and local administrative compliance.

Outside of that, this is ultimately two services where a middleman takes a decent cut while their delivery label is compensated entirely by the customer. Once the model is established and locked-in, this should theoreically be a very easy business to maintain.

always been curious about this, were these guys using snowflake unistore/hybrid tables as a backend data store ? or was it purely just analytics

DoorDash also charges a $2 "regulatory response fee" on every order in NYC. It has a little "info" icon that basically says "look at what these overzealous regulations like absolute minimum of workers rights costs you!"

NYC recovered $131M in unpaid wages from DoorDash.

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani...

Culper Research released a report about a year ago indicating a large component of DoorDash labor is very likely undocumented workers (which is not meant to be derogatory towards these workers, but signal that DoorDash needs labor willing to take gig payments on offer to make the model work).

https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b...

I don't think the platform economics are working post ZIRP ("zero interest rate policy") as wages rise and margins compress, would need more data to understand what forward curves look like.

DoorDash is pretty much scum, stealing $130m in wages from their own "contractors"

Take a salary boost and RSU in cash denominations that show evidence of re-evaluation on funding raises, (vs options at preferred price). Otherwise, yeah, it seems like dilution just hurts.

their comp structure is like all other companies, yearly grants with some band of pay with performance mixed in. some stacking, idk the specifics but recruiters will explain it.

it's bad if you're an investor I guess.

The good news is the US has seen similar economic consolidation in the past, and passed laws to rebalance the economy accordingly.

The bad news is the US has developed a deeply entrenched culture of non-enforcement of laws rich people do not like. Unfortunately, until the culture changes, market pressure is the only avenue for relief.

Is it even possible for doordash to be a monopoly? I understand that just about anyone can set up a website advertising food delivery for cheaper.

Instacart is also integrated with several stores. Kroger and Costco both use Instacart for their pickup and delivery services in their own apps.

They do compete on price. Amazon charges for Prime, charges extra for delivery, and Whole Foods is generally among the most expensive grocery stores. Instacart offers a ton of cheap alternatives.

Instacart delivers for costco

Yeah instacart isn't limited to specific stores, you can even order from multiple stores and group them

From the driver perspective, it permits some redunduncy in case of issues with the company. The support you get as a driver for dd or ic is more or less the same as you get with any internet company: non-existant for anything that isn't routine or touches on allegations of fraud or misconduct.

DD's new metric no longer even lets you dispute reports that an order wasn't delivered, with the obvious issues that come from that: having accounts with other apps in good standing is necessary to maintain your income if and when something stupid happens.

If there was a delivery driver's union, I think the downsides of having too many platforms dramatically reduce.

She was fairly incompetent at FB before that, I was surprised at the CEO gig when it was announced. “Failing upwards” I guess

In some areas it's not a horrible deal. I'm in downtown Montreal, several hundred delivery options within 5km, so there's pretty much always a decent deal on something I'm hungry for. Of course, I'm close enough to walk to plenty of these places anyway, but it's quite nice when I'm sick or extremely busy.

How in gods name is a large pizza $70?

From Dominos you can get 10 pizzas delivered for not much more than that.

Am I crazy or was pizza delivery free (or very cheap) when i was a child in comparison? I'd pay $5 to deliver most things but the percentage model makes no sense

Here's Instacart's latest quarterly report which tells you exactly where the money is going:

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...

For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.

Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.

Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)

Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)

Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)

That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.

They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.

If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.

Yeah I’ve been doing DoorDash deliveries in SF for close to two years now it’s pretty clear to me that these companies having an adversarial relationship with their drivers is very much so not working. They have an incentive to pay the drivers as little as possible, but the drivers congregate around the most busy spots and so… they talk. Little cabals of people working together form to figure out how to game the system as much as possible, then the platforms adjust strategies to close those holes. Additionally the platforms use every dark pattern and psychological trick in the book to get you to work for less. People quit in response. Theirs no stable group of people doing this work. It shows up in the quality of what the platforms can provide.

If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.

For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.

Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.

The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.

> Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.

only the latter is true. the former is true only for a subset of restaurants.

While your old pizza place probably serves the same amount of pizzas as before, for other restaurants, not specialized in delivery, the number of meals they sell has exploded.

so restaurant make less money per meal, put they make more meals.

also while customers pay more, you could see it as the price of convenience and choice.

Seems like the difference is millions of lines of code and thousands of servers now, vs none of either back then (unless you count some erlang ATT switching code for the phone call you make to the pizza shop).

Making a phone call, then paying with cash, is just crazy efficient. What exactly have we even gained?

>>So where the hell is the money going??

Are we really asking this question in the year of our Late Stage Capitalism lord 2026? Are we confused about the American Oligarchy working with private equity to dash all the labor gains of the mid-20th century?

It's going to billionaire's Yacht & Bunker funds. The gig economy is about inserting tech into the middle of a functioning system to extract wealth for 4-5 dudes' benefit.

I did it a few times years ago when they had huge promotions. And even still I found it to be too expensive on top of being a bad experience.

I do get it. If you just really dont want to spend time on getting/making your own food, dont care about the cost, and are willing to put up with the experience then it serves a purpose. There is also a difference between doing it regularly and rarely.

I'd wager most, although not all (reread this before replies of "but I ..."), of those people doing it regularly are lazy and making a bad financial decisions but thats on them.

> I’ve literally never ordered from any of these 3 companies. ...

>Don’t get it.

I get that it takes full advantage of human tendency to be lazy. A friends stepson works a crappy job seemingly to pay for his door dash. The kid saves almost no money and is always asking his mother for money here and there while living at home with no expenses outside of his door dash and video game purchases. He couldn't afford to buy a bicycle.

do any of you have young kids and dual, heavy stress jobs? DoorDash and Instacart are godsends for families on the go who don't have time to do all this stuff anymore. My wife and I BARELY have time to go grocery shopping and will probably use this service once a month, doordash more than that when we don't have the energy to cook dinner and don't want to wrestle our kid into the car and constantly entertain them at a restaurant.

I'm not sure what the third company you're referring to is (I've read through the article twice and only see DoorDash and Instacart (which I guess is incorporated as "Maplebear", but not a separate company from what it sounds like), but I've ordered from both of them, albeit not recently (my wife and I have been using FreshDirect lately). The value proposition of getting groceries delivered for us is that we don't drive (or have a car) and the grocery store is over 20 minutes away walking distance from us. The extra cost to have them delivered is far less than the cost and maintenance of having a car, and the convenience of being able to have it done even during times when I'm busy working from home is added bonus. My wife also has a condition where the treatment is essentially turning off her immune system every six months, so the safety of not exposing her to something by doing shopping in person is not something I'd ever want to give up.

I guess I could like, get a shopping cart and spent an extra 40 minutes hauling stuff back and forth every time we wanted groceries, but even that would be somewhat dependent on weather; a delivery driver is not going to have to walk 40 minutes in heavy rain and can bring frozen goods in an amount of time that doesn't result in them being soggy or completely melted messes by the time they reach us.

I just paid $20 for a $15 McDonald's order with the annual subscription. It all depends on the restaurant too. I also haven't gone grocery shopping since 2020.

I literally order from all of those companies as do 10s of millions of people if not more.

Curious, isn't it?

I don't order artificial food on apps or go anywhere near the golden arches, but it amazes me that the majority of the app orders are for these chains that sell utter garbage.

It is a bit like a phone, you could open a book to read classic literature or you could doom scroll AI trash all day. For some reason the latter option is invariably chosen over the former.

The money is also ridiculous, I am not sure of golden arches prices with delivery and tip on top, I just don't live like that. However, I always cook from scratch with no animal products, just stodgy vegetables, and I am sure that my weekly food bill is going to be less than one delivered cold and late burger meal of no nutritional value.

Also shocking as a cooking person is how few McDonald's orders are sit down with people. We have ended up with people eating with their fingers in their solitary confinement cars with the worst junk food possible, whereas we once had dinner parties with a proper table, home cooked food of nutritional value, valued company, crockery, cutlery, etiquette and prayers to an imaginary god.

Even stranger is that there is no free healthcare in the USA. Eat this garbage and you have a healthcare bill coming for the obesity, saturated fats blocking arteries, cancer and the rest of the chronic diseases that go with artificial food.

This situation is a product of American corporate ways of doing things and hard to unpick, but with these delivery apps now worth billions, there is now another barrier between healthy eating since this silly gig economy now needs to be kept in existence since jobs and corporate profits depend on it.

That's part of a weird new segment of things they're doing for physical-world tasks, and a separate one of AI training. I assume the shampoo brand was doing some kind of inventory stock audit, perhaps?

I've heard of that being "a thing" where the brand wants to make sure their product is actually out on the shelves properly, so that Dasher probably got easy money verifying the store did their own job properly.

https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/introducing-doordash-t...

I assume it's just their own version of Gigwalk (https://www.gigwalk.com/).

Uber Eats in my area is usually faster than DoorDash. I look forward to the ongoing competition. But, Instacart provides delivery services behind the scenes for Costco and Walmart; having less competition between DoorDash and Instacart will surely lead to higher prices charged to the big box stores. Hopefully Uber steps into the fray to keep them on their toes.

Both provide similar grocery delivery services? Not sure where you're confused

Gig worker goes to Point A, receives a package, and brings it to Point B?

They seem like near-identical businesses to me.

They're literally direct competitors lol

Is this true? Every place I DoorDash from is a place I know and have been to

1) There is a chance the deal is blocked by antitrust regulators, and does not close.

2) Regulatory reviews typically take 6 months to a year. There is an opportunity cost to holding shares over this time, your capital is tied up in shares, when you could instead use the money to buy US 10-year Treasuries that yield around 5%.

Assuming the deal closes at $65 in 12 months, the present value of these shares is $65 / (1 + 5%) = $61.90

I think the discount is the risk of the deal not closing; there will be regulatory approvals, financing, all sorts of offramps ahead.

Also, the market has consistently undervalued Instacart since they went public to begin with, so why stop now? (signed, a not-at-all-bitter former employee)

I don't know why for this specific deal but this could happen if the market expects that the deal won't close, for example if regulators blocked it

Well, we do not really have to quit using them; in my case, for instance, I have two separate accounts with two different phone numbers, and I keep getting 20% to 30% off coupons on one of them most of the time. Whenever I need to get groceries or just get food, I go ahead and leverage one of these coupons, and it works out very well; in the end, the total comes out to slightly less than what I would pay if I went and picked it up myself.

I do deliveries via gig apps for extra cash and to get away from the computer and it's basically a complete toss up.

Some people are professional about it (I bring my own drink carriers, food bags, etc and have a minor Andretti gene so orders are as quick as the law allows), but most of the others I see doing it may as well not be. Slow, lazy, check nothing, and look like they just fell out of a methadone clinic (read: not the person you want showing up at your door in the dark at 8pm).

It's frustrating if you try to do it properly but get judged by customers like you're some out of work junkie (when, ironically, most people I deliver to live in a lower-income situation than I do).

From the driver's side, you get inundated with low-paying orders, often rapid-fire as you're driving to either pick up or deliver another order (like so bad that if you're not paying attention, you could get into an accident). Like literal Pavlov's dog, bell jingling over the top of the navigation instructions and a big pop up on screen. Essentially [1].

The entire thing is a psychological rat trap (by design as best as I can tell as these apps aren't terribly complicated to build/design; just scale), so it's not a total surprise when your driver fails to provide good service. They actually make it quite difficult to provide good service (e.g., I routinely get "already picked up" orders on my late night runs w/ no compensation for sitting/waiting on restaurant staff).

I think a lot of people should try doing deliveries via these apps a few times just to experience it. The psychological pressure alone likely makes a lot of people crack. It's all quite fucked up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7my1G0TrwT8

On the other countering opinion, I am a generally happy customer of both parties for years now (I pay for dashpass). I think I’m probably one of their heavier users as I use both services multiple times per week.

Food generally arrives warm and if not, a quick heat up in the air fryer generally solves most things. Soup based noodles are generally packed separately that you need to prepare it at home anyway.

My main gripe is there is the general occasional missed small item (like sauces, a drink), which I do complain about in DD. I imagine DD does provide this feedback to restaurants because it has been trending better over time.

Yep, unfortunately with the minimum wage mandate in CA pushing wages for pizza delivery drivers up to $20/hr led to over a thousand Pizza Hut drivers being laid off.

Unfortunately the existence of the (less-good) delivery options through DD and IC likely facilitated that decision.

Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.

The answer is not to find new pools of desperate people but to improve working conditions (pay, benefits) and on a macro level reducing cost of living so the people performing the work don't have to work so much they stop being able to.

The way you COULD do that is to reduce administrative cost. From their most recent filing, marketing costs them 1/4 of their revenue, R&D (software development) 1/5th, and operations and administration 1/8th each. Their cost of revenue aka what they pay to their "shoppers" aka lower-class labor and the businesses they integrate with is 1/4th of gross, barely a pittance compared to the slush funds for management and investor payouts.

Take a look yourself: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...

Bottom line: they are making money hand over fist, with the vast vast majority not going to workers but the corporate employees and investors. Your issue with delivery drivers is an issue with the bottom-of-the-barrel treatment decided by management - they could solve this problem (EASILY), but they choose not to in order to pay for more corporate employees and to have more profit to shareholders. The numbers are clear as day.

My nephew is currently doing UE/DD/Instacart to make ends meet and if their experience is reflective, most of their customers deserve shitty service. I helped them write some scripts to analyze data from Gridwise (delivery+mileage tracking app) and the tips average around 3-5% of the gross. Even in California with Prop 22, that's not going to add up to a livable wage.

Don't be surprised when the permanent underclass you depend on doesn't give a shit about your moldy strawberries.

The whole gig economy is just underpaid servants as a service. Don't be surprised that they do a less than exemplary job.

It's the lifecycle of many gig-economy apps. They start out good and slowly degrade as they plateau and try to find ways to cut expenses to continue growing.

Labor shortages, in general, just don’t exist. There can be one time shocks like during Covid, but if there is a lack of workers for a specific job or industry, it means that the business is either unwilling to pay for the employees needed for the job, or that the business itself should not function as the cost of the labor needed is unsustainable.

If you want a good servant for a cheap price, you will only find it in a non-industrialized country. In an industrialized nation, all labour is gobbled up by industrially organized employment, because your average labourer produces hundreds of times more value in such employment compared to non-industrial employment. And in this includes restaurants for your food.

There's a reason why supermarkets went from having different counters for asking for your stuff to having you pick out your stuff yourself.

You've continued to use a service for a "few years" while it provides you with rotten fruit?

> I think the main issue has been a big shortage of supply of workers who are willing to do the job

Instacart is profitable, yea? So they don't want to provide a better quality service or they would offer greater incentives to workers.

I don't really understand how the personal economics for this work out for the majority of the population.

You'll always get some people who argue that time is money and that the saved time that people have from ordering from these services is an opportunity cost. But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.

So then, all that is really left is convenience. And personally, I don't really find it that convenient at all. Often times the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is meaningfully longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.

In other words - these services really just profit off of laziness. And the sad part is I think we're just promoting a lazy society overall with lots of the newer services being offered.

> Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?

Virtue signaling.

I know what people use them, for convenience. I also know why the business use them, is probably cheaper for them to advertise on this companies instead of trying to lump the users to your own app or worse, to call you business.

I know why they do it, that doesn't mean I like how the world works.

The acquisition is for consolidating power the deal is finished DoorDash will basically be the only sheriff in town.

Maybe the idea is that this market will shrivel once the rest of the populace "wise up" to what the various OPs already know.

DoorDash is like cigarettes, gambling, paid pornography: people are using it in the closet. I know families who order it for 1/3 of the meals or more. Thousands a month in food, so presumably 4 figures in net revenue for DoorDash from a single household.

To say “ i can’t believe people use it “ is obviously a lie. It’s a magic food delivery machine. It’s the closest thing to the Star Trek Replicator we have .

I don’t like it, and you could make a million arguments about why it’s either bad, unhealthy, bad economics etc. But it’s perfectly obvious why the business is huge.

> Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?

Paying an extra $10-12 in tips and fees to have some courier a meal directly to your door is ridiculously cheap, a courier service would charge 4x as much for a similar courier trip.

They probably comment things like "I don't get why people use these services", because they don't get why people use these services. I honestly do not understand the point of your comment.

I was waiting for you to finish this with "she also gives me hugs and pays half of the mortgage".

But DoorDash has a patent on giving you a deal if you combine your order with another restaurant, and giving you a higher price unless it determines that pisses you off and then backing off a little. Those contributions to humanity must be protected.

I don’t want to be taxed for someone else’s burrito taxi.

Must be trolling -- 80-85% of US garbage service is contracted out to private companies. You want Anytown USA to have a contract with Doordash?

We need the government to deliver food to our doorsteps? Shouldn't the stores provide this service? If there were demand and a sustainable business model, wouldn't they? Costco delivers, to commercial customers. I imagine they are not necessarily losing money doing that, but perhaps.

I think the argument here is if you allow delivery to become a local monopoly like other utilities then just make it a utility. However as-is, there's little barrier to entry on adding delivery to any business and it should probably stay that way.

Is it necessary? No. Unfortunately I don't think would be great as a utility because quality of service matters and unlike the actual utilities, there's a lot of arbitrariness to quality of the service.

Availability of vehicles for delivery purposes is an interesting proposition. Charge doordash a tax or fee to maintain a fleet of vehicles that would open flexibility in the job market. (Consider this for ride-sharing as well... basically just reinvented the taxi medallion system but maybe with less restriction).

You want to socialize the costs of pizza delivery?

Municipal services like garbage pickup are generally funded by a mix of per-household fees and property taxes. Property taxes loosely correlate with the size of the household (and yard and construction materials and everything else that scales with price) while the per-household fees can scale depending on how big of a collection can you request.

It's a good system for aligning the costs with the people who use the service.

If you thought all tax money went into a big general bucket and the government decided what services to offer out of that, municipal garbage pickup does not work that way.

There couldn't be a free delivery service because the usage would be all over the place. Someone DoorDashing burritos for breakfast lunch and dinner 7 days a week would use it 20X more than someone doing their once-weekly grocery order. Subsidizing it would incentivize a lot of waste, traffic, vehicle usage, and other things that we actually don't want to incentivize people to use more of.

The only way this could work is with a substantial per-delivery fee, which gets us right back to what we already have with DoorDash.

lol, this is the state of leftist discourse online? Now even completely unnecessary services like DoorDash should be socialized so we can all pay for it? This has to be satire.

It surprises me that you are getting such a strong reaction about a service that used to be extremely common and not even cost extra. Used to be - in my part of the world anyway - a greengrocer would come by and drop off your order and take a new one, the milkman would pick up bottles and drop off your milk, the ice man would come. It is hard to go out and do all these things with kids and with day jobs, and it does not take much marginal cost to take care of one more house in the neighborhood. Imagine rejecting receiving a birthday card in the mail as an irresponsible extravagance.

Grocery deliveries for the elderly and disabled are an excellent public service. But it's a hard sell to make everyone pay for stoners to get a $30 burrito delivered at 2am.

My politics are whatever the exact inverse of this opinion is.

Why would any of these jobs be new? People are already doing them. Would you not just reduce the earning potential by removing tips?

Are you kidding me? I don't use these services because I can save a lot of money by driving, taking public transit, or (gasp) walking to buy groceries or food myself. 100% do not want to be taxed to pay for some lazy individuals food delivery.

Is this satire? It sounds exactly like what someone would say if they were trying to parody a big government liberal. The idea of turning an expensive, optional convenience into a government-run service and touting job creatoin is a bit too on the nose.

I practically spat my coffee out at this comment, it is so wildly unrealistic.

And "should"... what?

The US doesn't even have public single-payer healthcare. Maybe revisit that priority list.

Why?

In my area, garbage collection is not done by the city, you pay a quarterly subscription to a private company if you want pickup. If not, you take it to the dump yourself. Some of my family live somewhere there are 3 of these pickup companies operating (which also pick up on different days).

Just saying, city run trash is far from universal.

No. Freaking. Way.

I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.

(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).

For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.

> The only reason why I ever use DD is because DashPass is included in the CSR.

Strong case for B2B sales focus

If the economics are only working because of regulatory capture and gig worker labor, let the business fail.

This was never going to be sustainable long term based on the economics, it was a securities and investor grift. Those with stock did well (“the stock is the product”), consumers did well while the subsidies lasted, workers made the least gig platforms could offer, and the ride is coming to an end as true labor costs and regulations catch up. Similar with Uber and Lyft, and Airbnb. It was all a financialization play that worked under ZIRP but no longer works.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074978 said it best:

“Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.”

> The cost of this acquisition will likely just get passed down to consumers ... included in the CSR

I believe it has been passed down to you, either knowingly or not

Why shouldnt it go through?

Considering that I can go pick up the food myself, I think there's a very healthy competitive market here. In fact, that is what I do, all the time (when I'm not also competing with them by cooking my own food, using ingredients I purchased myself).

Good thing it’s a completely unnecessary service.

The "your evil local government makes us(you) pay this fee" fee is great!

And instacart didn’t ?

How much money do this companies plan to extort from restaurants, who will try to pass it to customers, to pay such a big chunk of money?

"DoorDash and Instacart believe that communities benefit when Main Street competes"

That's rich! Communities benefit when small businesses compete against each other. Announced as part of a merger of two giant public companies.

But doordash says this merger means more choice for the consumer, how could antitrust play a role here? I mean, unless they're lying about removing choices from the market place will result in more choices in the market place, but doordash wouldn't do that would they?

I mean neither of these companies provide an important service. If they both disappeared tomorrow I think most people wouldn't care.

That sounds great, now convince consumers they don't want Monopoly one-stop platforms where they can order/purchase anything they can think of.

Capital wants a monopoly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291135 - October 2026

My son lost his job so did InstaCart for a while. He got really good at it and started making good money. Then they sent him to an apartment complex but didn't give him an apartment number.

He called support who contacted the customer and said they were on their way and could he wait five minutes. Of course he did but 30 minutes went by.

Contacted support again who said customer would be there in five minutes but, 15 minutes later, support said to just take the goods back to the store.

He took the goods back to the store but the store refused to accept them. Support said he could just donate them or keep them.

Despite showing the back and forth text messages, he was deactivated for not delivering to the customer.

Fascinatingly, this is not prima facie illegal in many US states! Wow. We live in a corporatist hell hole don’t we?

  > "a just society should generally tolerate the intolerant, reserving self-preserving actions for only when intolerance poses a concrete threat to liberty and stability."

I see this totally wild she even had to ask permission for running for office, or at least from an European perspective.

How's the lawsuit going?

Wow. Cant you sue for wrongful termination ? I am assuming this was considered and not followed through. What are the legal details here ?

It should be illegal to do what instacart did to your wife.

They always had a slimy reputation. I interviewed there very early on and two of the engineers interviewing me told me they fire people 1 day from vesting constantly...

Sounds like your wife has a good case for a lawsuit

And still people will continue to use their services. :(

I am of course very sympathetic to your wife and think it is outrageous that someone should lose their job this way but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice. I hope she wins the lawsuit and gets paid out but I can’t hate Instacart for being pragmatic.

> Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!

I think it's a fully justified reason. If I'm in a senior position and I say something that in someway hurts the company reputation/income, I would be fired. If the company liveness depend on me being fired, the I think the decision is justified.

There are situations where this makes sense.

I gift meals to people in other cities when they're in need (sick, childbirth, death in the family) and I'm not nearby to help.

I've had intense working situations where an extra hour of work was worth paying someone $30 to deliver my $100 of groceries.

We've frequently used DoorDash and other services for small business meetings where we wanted to provide lunch, or in some situations where we had to stay late (security incidents, etc) and wanted to provide the team with something better than pizza delivery.

However it's also scary to watch some people who will DoorDash whenever they feel like it without regard to the cost. I watched some eye-opening conversations among college students comparing how much they had spent on DoorDash in the past year, even though they were not in a financial demographic that should have been indulging in delivery.

I use Instacart every week. It's clearly valuable over shopping yourself for a lot of people and the shoppers are clearly making more than "half a dollar".

Maybe you don't have kids or that busy of a schedule?

Have you considered that it’s convenient?

I use DoorDash all the time. Here in urban San Diego, there are lots of restaurants with no nearby parking – so you either have to park blocks away in a residential neighborhood or have a companion who can grab the food while the driver circles the block. Or carry your tacos home on the bus.

> I really don’t understand people who use these?

> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?

> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality

Ok, but then...

> I use Amazon fresh frequently

So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...

Wife and I work full time + kids. We'd rather spend time with our kids than shop 2-3 hours a week.

Infant+Costco+Instacart is a game changer. There is a life before and after this.

Having a terrible experience seems like a local issue, certainly some areas might have a worse pool of delivery personnel than others but where I live the people doing Instacart are primarily women and they do an excellent job. Many women can't do Uber because of the insane levels of harassment, but they are able to do "gig" work like Instacart or UberEats that doesn't involve interacting with random strangers.

Like most things in life, it's not a matter of difficulty, as if I am so incapable of going to a grocery store to buy groceries and the undue hardship it will cause me. It's simply a matter of how I like to budget my time. I judge that the 30 minutes it can take to do groceries is better spent doing other things with my life.

disabled people who can't have a drivers license would like to have a word with you

Not a busy mom, I take it

I mean right away you're assuming everyone has a car, if you don't have one then a service like this can save you a lot of time getting groceries.

There's also times when you have people over and don't want to leave to pick something up.

And times when you are too tired or sick and don't want to leave the house

Americans are busier than they've ever been.

Think really hard - why would doordash laborers be like that? Each thing you state - rudeness, brashness, drug addicts, convicts, etc, are all signs of desperation. People don't want to rush through their life or work as if being whipped. Its a job of indiscriminate last resort because they are paid as little as humanly possible and forced by an algorithm to adhere to timetables. Doordash and Instacart both make hefty profits, and spend at least 2-3x on their corporate employees and executive management as they do those actually performing the work. Your complaints are a direct reflection of the system that they control - if you want more pleasant laborers, ask them to make their labor less demanding.

> they yell into the phone to their wife/girlfriend in some other language (Venezuelan/Cuban?)

Spanish.