It’s not like they hide anything about what they’re offering. They advertise service X for price Y and that’s what they deliver. Seems fine. If you don’t think Y is worth it for X then don’t use it.

Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.

It's been years since I used DoorDash, so I don't remember: Are you saying they don't charge any fees other than the (inflated) price of goods?

I'd rather the price of goods be fixed, and they tell me what the delivery fee is.

Skip the line passes are an obvious sucker play; they oversell tickets to the park so that people can go on like 1 ride every 4 hours, then charge again to actually be able to use the ticket you already bought (and simply don't deliver service to the others). Do you think they are unaware of the capacity at which reasonable latencies can be maintained?

"It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. "

It's quite different and that's the point.

The issues beyond 'apparent value creation are':

1) asymmetries in power between different actors that induces some to make ill advised actions - passing off hidden costs and especially risks

2) externalisations - aka damaging the environment, labour regs (which exist due to 1)

3) misrepresntations in value to end customer - dark patterns, hidden fees, risks not apparent in the transaction.

Entire industries would not work if we had to properly account for a lot of things.

"I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ri" <- it's not just the 'price' that is high and you're 'willing to pay' - that's fine.

That's definitely not 'rip off' because you're not coerced in any way for that - that's just 'high prices.

The $10 bottle of water at an event <- that is a 'rip off'.

It's all the other things in the system that make it problematic.

Last mile delivery by poor people almost should not exist as a business because it depends on externalizing too many things.

If they provided healthcare, vacation, job security, didn't force people to run around, all that stuff that removes the 'power and information asymmetry' - and then - it still works as a business, fine but it generally wont.

Some businesses are structurally unsound, and people invest in them to take advantage of broken systems (social, regulatory) at the margins. Gambling, day trading. A lot of zero-sum stuff.

Now 'Robot Delivery' - that's an entirely different prospect.

That's an attempt at real value creation. If we got our act together, everything could be delivered by little robots - today - already in 2026. It would reuire a lot of coordination.

> That $10 hamburger

fast-rise sugar infested bun, non-organic antibiotic infested horrendous animal welfare beef, etc. - the BOM is well under $5, i'd think $3 at best. So, you pay $25 for sub-$5 bill of low quality materials (not good to your health with thus additional expenses down the road). Who is the sucker?

I think there's a business there, for sure, but the markup is definitely a problem for some. I think below a certain order volume it might be hard to get enough delivery people at the ready. As they ask customers to absorb more of the cost the volume could drop. If they don't have enough delivery people then that adds to the delivery time which makes it less and less worth it, at least to me.

I really dislike the unreliable delivery times. 99% of the time I just use the apps, or more likely the restaurant's site, to place the order and pick it up myself.

I have the time to do this though, so maybe it's more valuable to busier people, like parents.

It’s not just “time is money”, but also the convenience as well. Sometimes you’re sick and need a hot meal, or you’re busy helping someone, etc.

Edit: Spelling. “right” to “sick”.

It was kind of fun doing this math back when I was a freelancer. An hour saved would literally produce more money than the order cost. But really, it would have been better to save the money by making food ahead of time.

This sort of framing is never really valid, because when we go out to pick up our lunch, we generally do not lose part of our wages (for salaried employees). We may stay in the office a little bit longer to make up for it, but then that's a completely independent decision about how much that time is worth to us, plus how much we are willing and able to pay for that time.

You might say "going home from the office 30 minutes earlier is absolutely worth $15" to me, but that has little to do with what your effective hourly wage is.

The gig workers are still suckers because gig work sucks. But yes the service is most sensible for higher paid consumers.

Tony Xu spent three times as much time as the driver did, did he?

Yes, the road is long and these sorts of investigations take time. Eric Adams is an old-school, working-class New Yorker. They tend to be corrupt, but they do get stuff done. His administration resolved a $20M Chipotle lawsuit, then launched and resolved a $39M Starbucks lawsuit.

> taking this all the way.

How did you arrive to this conclusion?

Is that the explanation your boss forced you to accept when you did 90% of the work and he took all the credit?

Firefox reader mode also did it.

I just reload the page and hit 'esc' a bunch of times right after it loads but before the paywall pops up. Works on 3/4 of these soft paywalled sites.

Information wants to be free. But other than AI slop (where the tokens have become too cheap to meter), information costs money to produce. Pay with you info or your money. It's amazing how many people just cannot come to grips with that concept.

Yep this is what I did as well. I also just close tabs if it ever pops up a "sign up for our newsletter" thing.