Hacker News

points by paxy 15 hours ago | 0 comments

Grocery delivery is an important service for a large chunk of the population. About 40 million people in the country (mostly low income) live in food deserts. Plenty more don't own cars. Doordash & co have burned VC money for a decade to monopolize the delivery pipeline so restaurants and grocery stores rarely hire their own drivers anymore. And now with this kind of consolidation they can raise their prices unchecked.

[–] chunky1994 15 hours ago

Do you have a source that these low income Americans are the ones who are ordering food? My understanding was this was largely people with additional disposable income who were doing it for convenience and not necessity as the product for the price was a good enough trade off. I find it hard to believe low income Americans are getting their groceries delivered when they can’t afford the base prices for the most part.

[–] kotaKat 12 hours ago

Walmart+ actually provides a 50% discount if you have a valid benefits card, so that's "only" $7 a month to get "free delivery" from Walmart on the regular. All sent out to their Spark Delivery low-paid gig drivers.

https://www.walmart.com/plus/assist https://www.sparkdriverapp.com/en_us.html

[–] apparent 11 hours ago

The food desert thing has been debunked. And the notion that millions of low income people are using DD to get broccoli delivered is laughable.