Hacker News

points by jesse_dot_id 13 hours ago | 0 comments

Food/grocery delivery should be a municipal service like garbage/recycling with no tipping and service provided by full time government employees with good benefits and use of city vehicles. Many, many new jobs, and a public service that everybody would love.

[–] hermannj314 13 hours ago

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.

[–] Narciss 13 hours ago

Is this sarcasm? /jks

[–] levl289 13 hours ago

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

[–] kccqzy 13 hours ago

Many cities already fund taxis. The city of Sunnyvale provides a taxi service under the name of Beam for $3.50 per ride. It does not seem like a big stretch to extend this to food and grocery delivery.

If you don’t want to be taxed for some service, you can always choose to vote to get rid of that service or move to a place without that service. I welcome more experimentation in municipal services.

[–] paxy 13 hours ago

Cool I don’t want to pay for those either. Spend tax dollars on mass transit.

[–] kccqzy 12 hours ago

In America sometimes construction of mass transit requires so much money that it is less cost effective in terms of riders served on a per-unit-cost basis than subsidized taxi. A lot of that tax money goes to intermediate consultants who come up with extravagant station designs that seem to value grandeur more than utility. Another large chunk of that tax money goes to union workers when equivalent non-union workers are much cheaper to hire, and when fewer non-union workers are needed to do the same job than union workers. The sheer size of mass transit projects means they become even bigger. I don’t like this but it is what it is.

[–] fhn 13 hours ago

personal chauffeur to work and back home for $7 everyday? Not a bad deal. Google says insurance is $180/month(higher end) or $6/day. Add gas, registration, maintenance and this is a good bargain.

[–] Buttons840 12 hours ago

If the government is going to get involved here, I would regulate companies like DoorDash or Uber to require them to provide company vehicles to drivers.

When DoorDash drivers subtract vehicle wear and tear, fuel, depreciation, and maintenance from their earnings, their net hourly pay frequently drops below the standard minimum wage.

DoorDash benefits from desperate people who slowly transform their vehicle into cash by laboring thousands of hours. They could have just sold the car; either way they end up with cash but no car.

People need to pay rent, so they look at their capital, owning a car, and then trade away that capital for less than it's worth, and a few years later they are worse off, but at least they made rent for those months.

[–] mtoner23 13 hours ago

transportation is treated as a necessity to a good life. I'm not sure restaurant delivery should be treated the same.

[–] jesse_dot_id 13 hours ago

The cool thing about democracy is that it only matters what the majority wants.

[–] parineum 13 hours ago

The the majority want what you're proposing? I doubt it.

[–] fhn 13 hours ago

no it's not. it's what the politicians and president wants.

[–] DaSHacka 13 hours ago

Exactly, evident in how a taxpayer-subsidized DoorDash is a naive techbro pipe-dream and will stay that way, as it's predictably unpopular.

[–] cyanydeez 13 hours ago

You are taxed by civilization.

What you mean is you want to live in one pond and shit in other peoples because they economicaly immoral.

[–] chiatruntime 13 hours ago

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?

[–] jesse_dot_id 13 hours ago

Contracts with as many private companies as possible using something similar to the Doordash app, ideally.

[–] BeetleB 13 hours ago

Yes, but the city then gets to dictate the quality of the service.

(And no, I don't want the city involved in food/grocery delivery).

[–] billbuild 13 hours ago

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.

[–] nonethewiser 13 hours ago

>We need the government to deliver food to our doorsteps? Shouldn't the stores provide this service?

Here is the neat thing.

They want stores to be government owned too.

[–] Banditoz 12 hours ago

Why should stores be in the business of delivery? It's not a common thing.

[–] nonethewiser 12 hours ago

Pizza delivery has been a thing long before door dash, and is usually much cheaper.

[–] IncreasePosts 12 hours ago

15 years ago, every pizza or chinese food place would have employees hanging out waiting to take delivery orders

[–] tkahnoski 13 hours ago

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).

[–] jesse_dot_id 13 hours ago

I think the best idea would be a free and open source Doordash clone. The local government would contract a local company to handle logistics, so it would still be a private company (like garbage collection), but ideally lots of them spread out through the country. Each local government would decide if it's fully paid for by taxes, subsidized by taxes, etc (like garbage collection). City vehicles repaired/maintained by mechanics like school busses, etc.

[–] drdec 13 hours ago

> I think the argument here is if you allow delivery to become a local monopoly

What monopoly? I can barely remember all the companies in this space, GrubHub, UberEats, PostMates, etc.

[–] haliskerbas 13 hours ago

PostMates was acquired by Uber almost 6 years ago. https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

[–] kspacewalk2 13 hours ago

You want to socialize the costs of pizza delivery?

[–] criddell 13 hours ago

I had a similar reaction but after thinking a bit, I can see some merit in the idea.

I wouldn't mind if my mom had access to a free grocery delivery service. She's 80 and has very bad vision.

[–] lotsofpulp 13 hours ago

So why not give your mom (and all moms) cash? Then they can order food delivery if they want, or not if they don’t.

Fairer, simpler to implement, no avenues for corruption.

[–] gunsle 13 hours ago

Or we could just not pass absurd tax hikes to pay for grocery delivery, and then everyone has more money in their pockets and can freely choose to give it to their mothers for delivery. Forcing everyone into it via tax collection is literally absurd.

[–] criddell 11 hours ago

Are you also opposed to school lunch programs that provide free or very low cost food to students?

[–] jesse_dot_id 13 hours ago

I basically want to socialize the costs of just about everything if people find it to be a useful public service. I'd like a single-payer streaming service like ITV, too. It gets very annoying to be gouged on all sides by corporations that don't care if the service is good or not, only how much money they can extract from people regardless of their station in life.

[–] Fernicia 13 hours ago

So TV licenses are not gouging, but a Netflix subscription is?

You live in a fantasy land if you think streaming services are not competitive and providing better value for money than public broadcasting companies.

[–] BeetleB 13 hours ago

I have no idea how much I pay for public broadcasting, but I'd give up all my streaming services before I give that up.

[–] jesse_dot_id 13 hours ago

Fantasy land = the United Kingdom?

[–] CuriouslyC 12 hours ago

If there were economies of scale that enabled it to be more broadly available, and that was competitive in terms of utility gain per dollar invested, why not. IMO the government should be utility maximizing for its citizens, whatever that looks like.

[–] faefox 13 hours ago

We're socializing the costs of everything else. I'd much rather my tax dollars go to pizza delivery (and single-payer healthcare) than lining the pockets of tech monopolists and the military-industrial complex.

[–] wuliwong 13 hours ago

Those are the only two options of course!

[–] Aurornis 12 hours ago

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.

[–] gunsle 13 hours ago

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.

[–] watercast 11 hours ago

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.

[–] tencentshill 13 hours ago

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.

[–] CSMastermind 13 hours ago

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

[–] ibejoeb 13 hours ago

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

[–] johntarter 13 hours ago

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.

[–] yesb 12 hours ago

It wasn't stated that it would be funded by income taxes. There is a long list of government services that are funded mainly by usage fees.

That said, I'm not convinced of this idea either. But if you're not going to enforce antitrust laws, it seems preferable to a private monopoly.

[–] nonethewiser 13 hours ago

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.

[–] jesse_dot_id 13 hours ago

It's not an optional convenience for some people. And no, not satire. We should be using local governments to drive competition as frequently as possible in my opinion. I believe in municipal broadband and cellular service as well.

[–] Uncle_Brumpus 12 hours ago

I do agree that there is a small minority of people who greatly benefit from delivery services due to disability, hardship, or otherwise, but the thought of tax dollars paying to deliver Tom's crunchwrap supreme because he's a little high and really wants taco bell grinds my gears in a particular way.

I'd have no problem with a subsidized service for those that NEED it, but for those that just WANT it? Nope. But then you get into the sticky messy world of how to determine need.

[–] tofuahdude 12 hours ago

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

And "should"... what?

[–] electroweak 13 hours ago

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

[–] jesse_dot_id 13 hours ago

I'm talking about local governments and not state or federal level, which is out of the scope of this conversation. I agree FWIW, but anyone with any degree of capacity for critical thinking would agree.

[–] Jabrov 13 hours ago

Why?

[–] nancyminusone 13 hours ago

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.

[–] BeetleB 13 hours ago

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.