One thing I don't understand is how the rise of food delivery has gone up so much and is terrible for everyone.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% more than the pizza's
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
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?
Man, what a sad end for Instacart. The leadership team that took over in 2021 absolutely squandered the amazing machine the founders had built, filling the top spots with cronies and sycophants, none of whom had very much interest in the actual core offering of Delivering Groceries. They brought Facebook-lite management and drove out the actual product and business acumen.
By the time the CEO bailed to OpenAI, the damage was done - billions of dollars of opportunity, totally wasted. She left an organization gripped with paralysis, apparently too broken to fix and remain independent.
I feel bad for anyone who joined post 2021... They raised at like $39b that year, then another qtr billion later that year at an undisclosed valuation. This is effectively a "down round" here and everyone who got shares at a $40b+ valuation is getting screwed. I interviewed with them many years ago and ultimately decided against it - their dilution was insane, looked to keep going, and the valuations were absurd at the time already given how few people were actually using it... I think they had maybe a $4b value at the time though. Honestly I think COVID was a huge boon to the company and finally gave them some much needed revenue/membership growth.
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.
Cool they will now charge $50 per delivery and give the drivers -10$ ?
There is zero cost of building matching systems (maybe 200$ worth of Claude subscription). Drivers and restaurants will be better off if they build their own ones. These centralized platforms need to die ASAP.
The cost of this acquisition will likely just get passed down to consumers by increasing the already ridiculous delivery and service fees even further... The only reason why I ever use DD is because DashPass is included in the CSR. Otherwise you pay $10 of extra fees for a $12 burrito.
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.
“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 business model of having a meal order delivered to your door for money has worked for, what, 100 years?
It's just greedy investors destroying the value for the customer by tacking on all these bizarre fees. You see the same with TakeAway-Just Eat. I barely know anyone who still orders food ever since they massively jacked up prices after 2020. Before that you could order a pizza or falafel or whatever without minimum order prize, hidden increased product price, delivery fee, service fee, and idk what else.
Agreed! Delivery works, and will continue to work. Tech platforms attempting to monopolize and suck up all of the aggregate profit from the industry will not.
My initial take to this news was “what about anti trust?!” But I was surprised to learn that DD is essentially non existent in grocery delivery and instacart’s non grocery deliveries are powered by Uber Eats. For two massive brands they really don’t offer the same product.(edit: not effectively, at least) If anything maybe this helps Instacart/DD compete in grocery with the real giants in Walmart and Amazon. I wouldn’t be mad to see DOJ block this but I was just surprised to learn about the landscape of grocery 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...
It's believable to me. I exclusively use Walmart and Amazon for groceries now. The nearest grocery store is 10+ minute drive away and with gas prices, my time, etc. I'd rather just buy online and wait for someone to deliver to my door. It's much quicker than going around the store looking for items too.
It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
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
Might just speak to the competitive advantage of vertical integration. I.E “we make so much off the selling the product we don’t care if the sale originates on or off platform?” It is surprising though that they wouldn’t force users onto their service. They certainly have the power to
They're very multi-modal. Walmart will send deliveries out via Instacart, their own in-house drivers (1 year+ employees internally), Spark Delivery, and even Roadie ("a UPS Company"), though Roadie jobs are for oversize things that need a pickup truck or a van like TVs from what I've seen as a Roadie driver.
Repeating my comment from the dupe: My new years resolution for 2026 was to quit using 3rd party delivery companies. It was annoying at first but I've kept it and life is better without them.
My previous experience was any time something went wrong, no one would take accountability for it and at best I might get a partial refund but never a replacement order.
Having to do a bit more planning for meals is worth eliminating that aggravation from my life. Not to mention the shocking amount of money I'm saving.
> DoorDash to Acquire Instacart to Help Local Stores Win
> to Help Local Stores Win
Any local store will tell you DD is a necessary evil they put up with but strongly dislike overall. From the % of sales they take to the incredibly rude delivery drivers, DD is not well liked.
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.
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.
> Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude.
I want to be clear, the ability to speak English is not what I took issue with. That doesn't bother me and I'm fine with just showing the phone screen, no conversation. The issue I had was cutting the line and essentially demanding they be helped immediately. Wait in line like everyone else. This is a small food stall in a food hall with often just 1 person working the front. If they are actively helping another customer and have a line, I find it unacceptable to think you can cut to the front and immediately demand attention. What message does that send to the customers in line? "You're less important than delivery orders", and I can tell you that isn't the case due to the large chunk that DD takes.
My family member has even considered shutting down DD orders temporarily if/when the drivers act this way and publishing on social media about it. According to them, the loss in sales (and overall profit, which is minor on DD orders) wouldn't matter compared to the publicity/engagement (I don't know, that's not my world).
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.
> 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.
It's a finder's fee, a very old and ordinary concept in business. The more sales you can bring to a company (or could divert to competitors), the more skin in the game you have. That's not to say I think these companies aren't in some ways anticompetitive to the detriment of merchants and DIY shoppers.
The stores often charge higher prices on app for the same items. If there's a sale on items, you won't likely get them on the app. You can say it's a shakedown but you can always refuse DoorDash business and just operate like every other place that doesn't use it. It's not end of the world.
Sure, you could operate without DD. You can also operate without advertising, but it makes it a lot harder to reach customers.
Elsewhere in this post a store owner talks about how DD is a necessary evil. How they have convinced a big chunk of customers to only use DD to order food, and you will lose out if you aren't on the platform.
The supermarket I worked at had a split system. Our internal delivery people had their own checkout area, but it wasn't open 24/7. Doordash and the like had to go through the regular lines regardless.
That kind of thinking is why people call them vulture capitalists. It’s only true until it’s not. if your supplier is treating you like a hostage, you’re probably not very loyal.
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.
That sounds like a scary investment to make on behalf of what's effectively a single customer. Without some kind of contractual commitment that locks in volume and price, they would really have you over a barrel.
I hate industrial/ghost kitchens so much. Accidentally ordered from one with friends and it was so off-putting.
Could see the kitchen areas through a window and they weren't necessarily dirty, but looked sketchy for some reason. Few people, robots delivering orders, one set of cooks making the food. Just dystopian.
We might as well just build ready to eat food factories that pipe the slop directly into your house. We got rid of the "inconvenience" of going out to eat and enjoying a restaurant. Why not get rid of the pesky delivery middle-man too?
Look up commissary kitchens. A ton of food is made that way, and I don’t see it as being all that different.
And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).
Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?
A restaurant with a physical presence with dine in service has a reputation to maintain, a ‘cloud kitchen’ food seller does not have the same reputation to worry about.
> 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.
They are being dispatched to the restaurant to pick up an order which was already placed, and which their system is telling them is ready (whether this is correct or not). They also make less than minimum wage in most markets, and their wage is tied to their efficiency.
I don't understand why you think they should wait in line in restaurants where people order at the counter, to pick up their order which was placed online. And if you want to see this, you should be supporting legislation makes them proper employees who get a proper wage based on their time working.
Dispatched? Don’t drivers pick their jobs? They choose to go to the restaurant with the line.
Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
I don’t get why we’re talking legislation; it’s basic courtesy.
If I said “hey, here’s $5 if you go cut the line at that restaurant,” does that make it right?
> Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
The dine-in customers have not paid for or ordered their food, to do so they must wait in line.
The delivery driver is being handed a bag of food that is ready to go and paid for.
Many restaurants are already set up to accommodate online to-go orders. Chik-Fil-A has a separate drive-thru line for online orders, Chipotle lets people come up and get to-go orders that have been paid, same with Potbelly, it’s very common. It’s mildly annoying when you’re the one waiting in line but I don’t expect a delivery driver to wait in line to be handed a bag.
Drivers ostensibly pick their jobs, but if they reject too many jobs they are put on a time-out and can't take any jobs.
Regarding line cutting - it doesn't quite make sense that someone just picking up a bag that is already prepared should wait in the same line as people who are putting in orders for food. For an extreme example, a BBQ place near me in Brooklyn commonly has lines that are 45 minutes long, with people waiting to order. Should a person who called in an order wait in that line, or just go to the front and ask for their food?
Someone must use these services because they are everywhere in the UK and I find them so annoying for many reasons, not just the ones you mention above.
Lots of people cycling all in black on ebikes on pavements making it dangerous for people to walk around safely and causing chaos for drivers and other cyclists. Also generally supporting big business over small stores. Everyone moans about having individuals charged with these minor traffic offences but in my view just targeting companies like JustEat directly and having massive fines based on employee behaviour would be far more effective.
Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
First off, okay that's great but no one is telling you to go use them. You can continue living your life exactly as you were without needing to judge others who live their lives differently from yours.
Second, clearly there are plenty of people who do use them judging from this $17b acquisition that just happened.
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.
Here's how it works out rationally:
I just got home from work, the kids are a mess, the house needs cleaning, and my spouse is having a work crisis. The kids favorite treat is chipotle. Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
"Hey kids chipotle treats are on the way - but you have to go get your room tidied and leave mom alone" actually does work.
6 million smart, rational engineers, mathematicians, actuaries, professors in the country, each doing this analysis, four times a year, yields 240 million dollars in surcharges without an ounce of laziness.
Is it only $10 extra to have dinner for 4 delivered? IME the cost was much more than that, when you factor in the difference in menu price, the delivery fee, the tip, and the govt surcharges.
Fair! But $10 establishes a lower bound on a rational audience's TAM at a quarter billion a year. If it's higher, the TAM goes up without requiring loss of rationality / non-laziness of the customer base.
>Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
Exactly this. They know humans will likely pick the path of least resistance. And we are generally bad at problems that have compounding long term outcomes. They are essentially preying on our societal circumstances. My story: Brain will resist using energy for creative solution from within if external solution exists for $.
My example is _not_ preying. That $10 does nothing to help our lives if invested in diversified etfs, for example. The _best_ use of that $10 is to alleviate the instantaneous stressors for 4-5 people all at once so we can relax and solve larger problems (my spouse works for pro-social non-profits, for example).
Yes, doordash can prey on laziness, and people will fall into laziness, but in my example the _availability_ of the service is providing a price-adjustment for urgency that matches my own rational prioritization of the evening's needs. It's the most rational, mutually-beneficial argument I can make, and it's real in my house from time to time.
This is a question that's going to sound stupid and maybe insensitive, but that aside - how do you think people managed to do this in your exact same scenario for the last 50+ years without having a service like this?
Our own parents went through this exact scenario that you mentioned plenty of times before any of this even existed without having the to pay the $10 fee.
Pizza delivery has been a thing for the last 50 years. And in my own childhood, my parents kept tv dinners and other instant sodium-bombs like easy mac or ramen on hand.
Doordash costs more than that, but chipotle is a good deal more nutritious than the 90's-era tv dinners I remember, so I can understand parents preferring to spend a bit more for that equally-easy solution.
You're getting stones thrown at you when you were trying to be polite.
From my memory we often piled into the car, got dinner, and went home and my parents had to stay up late to clean while we went to bed.
In my wife's memory, one parent couldn't work - all this stuff had to fall on them.
I'm saying the $10 is a nicety, not a necessity. We would be ok without it. I just think we're a little better with it. It's a market system - if I need it, it's there at a price I can justify. Markets are a good thing.
People also used to live in caves and wipe their ass with sticks.
What is this question? Is the idea of new products, technology, or services strange and problematic to you? Convenience is a major driver of invention.
Also when I was growing up my parents would order delivery plenty - but the only option was pizza because the driver worked for the pizza joint. And yes, it’s true, their parents didn’t order delivery, but they also lived in crushing poverty of the Great Depression and could barely afford to feed their kids during every meal.
> I don't really understand how the personal economics for this work out for the majority of the population.
8.5% of American households have no car[1]. That isn't a strict majority, but if you can be charitably informal: paying for grocery deliveries is orders of magnitude cheaper than loan+insurance+maintenance for a car.
If you want to become car-less then the like of Instacart make that a realistic prospective (but Instacart specifically makes no sense because stores usually do it for free if you can tolerate next-day).
The majority of the population isn't using Doordash. A small portion of the population uses Doordash a lot. Think of all the college students who lack a kitchen and can't drive anywhere because they are drunk.
if you look at instacart's business model...they make barely any money on delivery. Vast majority of their profit is from advertising that they sell to brands. They create an audience of buyers with really good data and then monetize through advertising...so for the consumer you get very low cost delivery at the expense of seeing promoted products in the app.
I'll give an example of when I used a grocery delivery service two weeks ago.
I was landing from a flight and traveling home late on a Sunday. I also needed to go grocery shopping that night. I did not have a car at the airport, so my choices were either rideshare home for $70, or take the train for $10. The train takes about 30-40 minutes longer, but saves me $60.
If I did the rideshare, I could probably do the grocery shopping myself and get home a little bit later than when the train would get me home. Or I could take the train, order the grocery delivery, and then get home, unpack, and go to sleep. I chose to take the train and do grocery delivery. When I got home from the train, the delivery driver was walking up to my door with bags in hand. It worked out perfectly.
I could have taken the train and also done the grocery shopping myself, but it would have been very late by then and I had to be up early for work the next day.
> 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.
But nearly all technology and services you pay for arguably boil down to “convenience,” in the sense that people in the past either did the thing themselves or survived without it.
One man's laziness is another man's leisure time. I'd much rather have an extra hour to spend with my kids, read a book, exercise, or really do just about anything else, versus get in my car and fight traffic and parking to go retrieve a bag of food.
Prefacing this by saying it may sound insensitive but from my experience shopping and getting things to eat used to be things people would do with their children and was part of growing up and learning what adults do.
In my opinion this scenario may actually end up promoting unhealthy habits for your children which is what these companies want.
>Sometimes the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
This misses the point. One is you devoting your own time and attention to doing the task, the other is delegating it so you can use your time for other things. Some people are going to burn the extra time scrolling (not great), others are going to help their kids with homework or get a workout in.
I'm all for people getting time back even with the downside that not everybody will choose to use it well. If people are choosing brainrot over living well, there's a bigger issue than delivery services.
"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."
I don't think there are many people using this because they think they get it faster.
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.
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.
Sure, but the pizzeria charges less than $4 for delivery and don't want a tip.
I completely understand the grocery deliveries, it's a trade off, time vs. money. Personally I think the delivery costs are to high, but I also live four minutes away from the supermarket on foot. For others it's one less thing to deal with and they can do the shopping in the evening when the kids are put to bed or have the groceries ready when they come home after a long day. For them the delivery fee is well worth the value the service provides.
It's the $10+ for getting McDonalds multiple times a week I struggle with. People are free to make that choice obviously, but I feel like the delivery services are praying on people who are already struggling, especially when they team up the Buy Now Pay Later companies.
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.
Use your imagination.
Families with newborns, care takers, the disabled or sick, someone who worked a long shift at work and is just tired. The list goes on. Even just being lazy and not feeling like going out to pick up food is fine. You’re really weighing the opportunity cost (time) vs money.
I’m not going judge how folks spend their money. It’s their money and they’re all valid reasons regardless.
> DoorDash said the median payment to be returned to workers amounts to around $48.
> City officials said about 700 workers are owed more than $10,000 each; more than 27,000 workers are owed more than $1,000; and more than 4,000 workers are owed more than $5,000.
DoorDash also spent (from what I can tell) (1+1.4+1.8) million dollars to campaign against Mamdani.
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!"
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).
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.
I love the Mamdani DoorDash story because it demonstrates that government can work. When it doesn't, it's because it's made not to work or the people in charge have absolutely no interest in doing anything than feathering their own nests.
Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.
One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.
Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.
But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).
It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.
Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.
> No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations
This is how income tax was sold to the American public. When it originally started it really only did effect the top earners, but as the years rolled on and inflation happened it impacted more and more people. The reality is these tools that target only the 'wealthy', if they're successful are used to target everyone.
Why do you think more IRS agents would suddenly start "targeting" people who take the standard deduction (87% of all tax returns [1]) and if they did, why do you think that would matter? This is a nonsense slippery slope.
No, the problem was that wealth become concentrated in capital, and we don't tax wealth. Wealth can be leveraged as power without a taxable event. This is the problem. Capital is capturing the largest piece of the pie as ever, and isn't taxed effectively.
This is also why California is voting on a wealth tax.
- He explained, "I don't pay hardly any payroll taxes. Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes." Driving the point home, he emphasized the disparity: "Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes."
- Buffett's effective tax rate was 17.4% at the time, largely due to his income coming from capital gains, which are taxed much lower than ordinary wages. Bosanek, like many middle-class Americans, was paying nearly 36% when payroll and income taxes were combined.
- According to a CBS News report, Buffett quickly clarified that he didn't blame Romney for following the law. "I don't blame Gov. Romney for paying the tax rate he paid," Buffett said. "I blame the U.S. Congress."
- The disparity didn't bother Buffett – it drove him to advocate for sweeping changes to the tax code. In an op-ed for The New York Times, he argued for what would become known as the "Buffett Rule," a proposal to implement a minimum 30% tax on incomes exceeding $1 million. President Obama backed the idea, but opposition in Congress kept it from moving forward.
Republicans and conservatives simply don’t believe in taxes, and will take any action to make it as hard as possible to collect them out of ideology. As you mentioned, Mamdani proves government can work [1], and I look forward to more reps like him as election cycles occur and the US electorate turns over.
The pendulum will swing back, and be the opportunity to prevent this from ever happening again.
(i like taxes, with them i buy civilization, although i prefer they pay for social services and improving quality of life of humans with said resources, not endless wars in the middle east and tax cuts for the wealthiest driven by old men, their ideology, and their egos [n=1, ymmv, my two cents])
I was at Snowflake supporting Instacart as main technical account architect and saw them polish things into place to get to a decent-sounding S-1 and then to go public. It sure was an interesting experience seeing battles between some people just not giving any care to costs and others trying to make money from these little itty bitty consumer transactions. Epic political battles, I tell you.
Could we have more discussion of our current legal/business environment, specifically, the economic opportunities it affords/constrains?
If this merger is approved via consumer welfare standard, should it be contingent upon some constraints? For example, should DoorDash be restricted from participating in the market it coordinates? If it’s a near monopoly in some regions, how will price be controlled without market pressure?
Historically, antitrust action also considers economic opportunity: Bell/AT&T licensed Unix source code for a nominal fee, largely because the 1956 consent decree restricted Bell/AT&T from selling products outside telecommunications.
From a marketshare perspective, it meets test of a monopoly in many localities. There is a "network effect" moat: the app is a storefront, payment gateway, and delivery network. The merger eliminates platform contention, giving customers perhaps greater choice of retailer but foreclosing the next largest platform alternative.
Their platform scopes and coordinates a market. They even recognize this in their announcement: "DoorDash and Instacart believe that communities benefit when Main Street competes"
The "consumer welfare standard" and related contestability doctrine is often used to challenge anti-trust action. However, requiring consumer harm neglects the loss of economic opportunity for providers (eg stores and gig workers).
If contestabilty, not marketshare, is the appropriate test of economic power, then laws may be needed to increase contestability, such as "data portability" rules for store owners so they don't have to key-in product description, availability, and pricing multiple times.
In your example of a new delivery platform entrant who bootstraps using its direct competitor, what legal framework protects that startup? This seems another contestability consideration.
You can also do adversarial interop. Whenever a restaurant signs up, go to them on doordash and have your intern key in all their data.
Heck, they don't even have to sign up. Just copy their listing from Doordash and when someone orders, place an order on Doordash if you can't fulfil it yourself. You'll probably need several phones to scale this, or you could make a doordash account per customer.
Once you have some drivers yourself, go around restaurants in your area and copy down their menus. Have drivers go and make takeaway orders.
Doordash undoubtedly used all these tactics. This is just how business works. Obviously doordash didn't order off doordash but they surely integrated restaurant ordering from places that already had their own delivery.
If you have VC funding, subsidize part of what doordash is charging so your prices are lower. IIRC Google did this once to the point where a pizza restaurant repeatedly ordered their own pizzas and made a profit, making front-page HN - don't go that crazy.
Am I on the wrong side of perspective? I imagine of these companies are at big risk in a turn down with low margin - competitive space. The model is a tough one to work
Merging reduces platform inefficiencies and drivers can work both situation.
I am actually amazed both companies are alive and making a profit.
Since the reaction here seems to be universally negative, I’m curious what people see as the benefit of having several gig worker delivery platforms.
As a thought experiment, we currently have a duopoly for ride share. Would we be better off if Uber were broken up into two platforms?
Obviously having one platform would be bad, since there would be no price competition, but what’s the optimal number? Surely, too many platforms would be bad, as the concentration of delivery workers would be terrible on each app, making the whole system inefficient (setting aside whether one things the system should exist at all).
I saw this show up in my newsreader and first thing that crossed my mind was the textbook example of eBay / PayPal acquiring everything, leaving us with probably the worst situation possible for auctions and payments.
Hey - dumb question that is probably a derail: Is there a practical reason in the US to use Instacart over one of the Amazon services? It seems like they are fighting an uphill battle - Amazon has its own grocery warehouses (Prime food), and owns Whole foods. I haven't cross-shopped recently, but am having a hard time imagining them competing on price with either of those services. I suppose the obvious reason is you aren't limited to those two stores, so if you want specialty items, nice baked goods etc you would use Instacart?
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.
> Do you find it, total price charged to card, to be competitive?
Yes. Instacart has low cost retailers like Walmart and Aldi in many areas, and their prices are generally better than Amazon groceries. Now Walmart does also have their own service, so technically you can do that, but then you're limited to just them.
Seems like it should be “DoorDash (YC S13) to Acquire Instacart (YC S12)”, if only to emphasize that this is by far the largest merger of YC companies.
The DoorDash subreddit is an interesting read. Lately, users are reporting being sent to retail stores to work for 30 minute stints. One anecdote: a person described taking a $25 gig that amounted to going to a Target and stocking one specific brand of shampoo. The stockers there had already filled the shelf, so he took a bottle down and then took a picture of himself putting it back.
Doordash was meant to help local restaurants win, now a large percentage of the "restaurants" on DD are ghost kitchens run by DD. The same will happen to grocery stores. It's the enshittification model happening in plain sight.
I just want to say that the colour contrast on this post is atrocious.
#999999 on a white background is a 2.84:1 contrast ratio, when the minimum requirement for body text is 4.5:1. So this page technically violates the ADA and other accessibility laws.
I hate this shit. Just another shameless ploy to find choke points in markets and further immiserate all participants in a two-sided market but the rentiers.
Great, both are generally terrible. Nothing like ordering a pizza and having it sit in someone's car for an hour with a driver who has no attachment to the restaurant, who could not care less about what you think. At least delivery drivers employed by the restaurant had some slight incentive to get food to you while it was still edible.
Third party delivery services essentially break the chain of responsibility... food late and cold? tough luck, but please tip in advance. If you don't tip your driver will be very mad at you, maybe they'll text you about it, and we pay them so poorly that it's actually your fault for keeping them impoverished. Talk to our customer service bots and maybe we'll give you a $5 coupon for your next Doordash order.
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.
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.
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?
IMO grocery delivery is a game changer. I don't use either service, but use a different one[s]. Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's etc, and I don't have to put on outdoor clothes, walk to my car, navigate traffic, navigate the aisles, wait in line, reverse... IMO big QOL of life increase.
And second-order effects like I can always have fresh fruit + veggies / not worrying about rot by getting it in smaller quantities delivered more often.
For those wondering about price: It's much cheaper than takeout or prepared food delivery, but more expensive than getting your own groceries. Offset a bit by less food waste.
> Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's
In my experience its significantly more expensive for groceries: up to 20% for items + service fee + subscription + tip.
I was canceling Instacart subscription and they offered me another year for discounted price ($17). I kept it but I won’t ever extend it for full price given how much more it costs.
I should clarify: I'm referring to Amazon (prime or whole foods), which I understand is significantly cheaper than Instacart. It might be worth cross-shopping in this case.
I suspect this as well. Enjoying it while it lasts... I suspect the facilities being vertically-designed for this helps, but not enough(Especially the prime groceries; I suspect Whole foods has some but not the same extend?)
But if they were gone, the worst is you're putting pants on and getting your own products. There are not essential, they're simply a labor and regulatory arbitrage for gig workers to schlep product to consumers at very low wages.
I get this, but there are a few scenarios where grocery delivery is genuinely amazing.
- My parents are determined to age in place in their home. They get tired more easily than they used to, and aren't capable of doing as much. Especially in the winter, grocery delivery is a huge help for them.
- People with disabilities may or may not be capable of going to the store. Even for the ones who are capable, it is a much larger time commitment.
- For parents of young kids, leaving the house isn't just putting on pants. It's checking diapers, getting the kids to wear shoes, and timing the trip so it doesn't interfere with naptime, feedings, etc. This is a temporary phase! It doesn't take long before the kids are big enough to enjoy a trip to the store.
Yes. I can’t drive for medical reasons and I live in a rural area with poor public transport. If my wife had to stop driving we would have to use grocery delivery or move
I am an avid Instacart user because I have no interest in dealing with the antisocial behavior that seems to manifest at grocery stores. Italian, Mexican, and Asian markets are pleasant but many mainstream grocery stores seem to devolve into Lord of the Flies-style isles of misanthropy where regard for personal space is absent and scowls are the primary mode of communication.
IMHO a semi-weekly grocery delivery service that requires ordering ahead would save everybody gas, time, and money but I've not seen it done anywhere. A small Instacart alike that does this with store-employed drivers seems like it'd be a hit. If it were a national co-op owned by local grocers it'd be even cooler... anybody down to build it?
Antitrust does not have "important service" requirement. What has happened in gaming is another travesty but there is plenty of people who would say it's not "important service". Antitrust must be universal.
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.
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.
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.
TYVM. But I rely on Instacart as I live alone and can't drive anymore since my eye surgery 10 years ago. If I didn't have instacart I don't know how I'd ever get any groceries.
The way this was handled before these gig economy food delivery companies sprang up. People didn't automatically die of starvation because they were disabled and became adults prior to DoorDash. Medicaid and Meals on Wheels fill in some of the gaps depending upon age and state.
These companies springing up put the old ones out of business. For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now. There's no going back to the "old way" when it doesn't exist. And now this kind of consolidation means they get to jack up prices however they want.
> For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now.
Before DoorDash, other than pizza places (who still run their own drivers), what restaurants delivered? McDonald's tried delivery for a short period of time, but other than that, nobody delivered.
Luckily he came of age just as texting took off. I guess in theory he could of relied upon a translator to make phone calls for him, but his life was much improved by modern communication.
Even if new technology makes things easier for 99% of people who are lazy, but is essential for that last 1%, it's a net positive.
Consolidation in this industry is horrible for everyone. Less competition means higher prices and lower pay.
Instacart fired my wife for running for office. My wife asked for approval to run from her boss, the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, who approved it and the company was excited for her to run.
A couple days after my wife launched her campaign, Instacart did a 180 and told her they had to fire her for running. Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
My wife was also pregnant and she told them. They fired her the next day.
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.
We're supposed to sue companies when they treat us like this but few of us do because it's a difficult process. Companies know this and act with impunity.
I wonder if this would have affected the result, though. I haven't been through either process, but it seems like either would be a venue for making your case and getting a fair judgement. My understanding (which could be totally wrong, please correct me) is that companies mostly force arbitration because it is cheaper and less variable than trials, not necessarily because the results tend to be biased toward them. Is that true?
My understanding is that it's cheaper because it is mediated by largely by a single person in a conference room, rather than the heavier process of collecting a jury. And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Collecting a jury doesn't cost the participants of a lawsuit anything. And the vast majority of civil cases do not make it to trial.
>And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
The vast majority of civil cases do not go to a jury, so again, I don't think this is good reasoning. The difference is mostly in discovery, which in an arbitration is stacked against any plaintiff bringing their claims compared to what they'd be entitled to in state or federal courts. That's probably the biggest reason they are less variable, in my experience.
>It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Well according to you, you don't really have any idea of any of this, you are just reflecting your understandings which are based on what?
> Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
But that doesn't mean those biases are not present.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks. (I admitted to not knowing and was open to being corrected. I appreciate you actually correcting my understanding, rather than assuming I hadn't even considered it.)
The issue of whether or not "forced" arbitration agreements are binding is different, but in this context I don't see it being something an employee can get out of. Some states have laws, for example, that destroy arbitration agreements in employment contexts for sexual harassment claims. If you have anything to offer, I'm more than happy to consider it. Short of that, I don't really see what point you're actually making besides "Maybe? I don't know!"
Arbitration is not nearly as one-sided as people make it out to be. It's much more about making sure that the case can be completed quickly than it is about the company winning.
If you have an absolute lay-up of a case (something like "my company fired me because I got pregnant, and lied about by pretending to change their mind about something they'd already approved of"), then you're going to win the arbitration case. Well, more accurately, the company's going to throw a pile of cash at you before it even gets that far, because they screwed up and the first time legal hears about it, the first words out of their mouth will be "you did fucking what?".
It is nigh impossible to cleanly fire an employee from the time you learn they're pregnant, to like a year after they come back from maternity leave. Unless they broke into your office and took a shit on the desk, the default opinion of every judge is going to be "I read about this exact scenario while studying for the bar, literally textbook".
When COVID hit, I got sick and had to spend several days inside ordering delivery. And more than once, the store was missing half my order. So I then had to make new orders for the food I wasn't able to get the first time -- while they refunded me only for the items they didn't have, leaving me to eat the (multiple) delivery fees and driver tips.
One of them is a worker drone with very little power, the other is the company's founder and CEO who is openly telling people that he believes a decent chunk of his employees don't deserve basic human rights. Quite a difference there, don't you think?
Software, especially open-source has an over-representation of people that identify as LGBTQ. Brendan openly signaled that he thought a good subset of his employees did not deserve the same rights as others. I don't see how he could have been an effective CEO after doing that.
It would've been a huge liability for Mozilla. An employer is not allowed to discriminate on sexuality. Fire any LGBTQ employee, and there's now a decent chance that Mozilla will now have to prove in court that it didn't have anything to do with the CEO openly hating gay people and creating a hostile work environment.
What a strange hill to stand on at this time. The overwhelming public backlash, boycotts, and resulting damage to Mozilla's brand left Eich with no practical choice but to step down.
> The lawsuit says Instacart violated a California law that bars companies from preventing their employees from becoming candidates for public office, among other complaints.
What would be the consequences of ensuring that only those with enough personal wealth to be able to go without a job while campaigning can run for office?
She approached to ask for permission. If they had any reservations, that was the time to discuss them. She did what was expected of an employee. The fact that they blessed her and then went back on their word seems wrong.
Not a lawyer but my intuition says there might be some legal grounds here favouring the wife.
My take is someone even higher up found out later and did not like it. Now it’s entirely possible the individuals who gave their blessings were supportive of the party the wife was standing for, and the ones above them weren’t? Still whoever blessed the campaign did so in their capacity as a senior officer of the company. A total shit show nevertheless.
To the original commenter: sorry this happened to your wife. Hope she’s able to find another job that treats her right. Also congrats on the baby, hoping parenthood makes up for all of this and more. Sending the best of wishes your way.
AFAIK in every US state a company can fire you for any reason that’s not protected, and “we told you this was okay but changed our minds” is as good a reason as any in the law’s eyes.
In many US states a company can fire you even for protected reasons, and just fabricate a reason that isn't protected. Of course there are examples of people fighting this because it sometimes is a fight worth having, but the vast majority just have to accept being discriminated against and try to find another job.
Puerto Rico is technically not a state, but as part of the US, and counted in the statistics of the (federal) Department of Labor, I would also count it as a _not "at-will"_ state.
Correct. If she had something in writing, signed by a person with proper authority in the organization, she might be on stronger footing. But they could just find some other reason, or state "no reason" for her termination, and that's perfectly legal in an at-will employment.
If I ask my employer if I can start a YouTube channel and then after getting permission I start posting videos that make the company look bad, and showing how awesome competitor products were I wouldn't be surprised if I got fired. I wouldn't be fired for the account but what I did with it.
Buuut it’s probably better for society to not kneecap ordinary folks just for trying to run for office. Otherwise, you only get folks in office with deep pockets who can take the hit.
Personal liberty and freedom also require people to be free from economic coercion so that we can exercise those rights. Corporations have an asymmetric amount of power and we should stop anthropomorphizing them.
> "a just society should generally tolerate the intolerant, reserving self-preserving actions for only when intolerance poses a concrete threat to liberty and stability."
Freedom of speech and self-expression applies to just that: words
If intolerance or hate poses a physical threat, or in any way infringes on the liberty and personal autonomy of others, a line has been crossed and must be swiftly dealt with.
Even if an employee has the authority to make a decision, executive leadership should still have the legal right to terminate someone if they disagree with that choice. Let's not make running a business illegal.
Political beliefs or views are not a "protected class" in US federal employment law. That said, most employers at least say that they support political participation, but once you start taking public actions it becomes a bit different.
If a person made a large contribution or gave other public support to an extremist candidate, an employer might not want any association with that.
If running for an office is going to take up a significant amount of one's time, such that it might impact availability for work during normal hours, an employer would care about that.
In this specfic case, if she was featuring "I work for Instacart" in any way in her campaign they might care about that.
If she was saying anything inflamatory or controversial, Instacart might not want to be associated with that.
So running for a nonpartisan office such as a local council or school board or similar would normally not be any issue. Anything where party politics feature prominently is going to be riskier.
It's a standard practice in suppressing democratic norms yes. The US has a long sordid history of the elites absolutely hating when commoners practice democratic beliefs.
Let's not forget that many of our "founding fathers" deeply hated democracy and when speaking of the "democracy problem" of the 1780s in America it was mostly referring to commoners in Massachusetts participating in civic duties.
This tradition has never went away and is still practiced today.
I mean, running for office is essentially a full time job right?
It seems totally reasonable to both have a law that protects a citizen’s right to run for office without losing their job, but it also seems reasonable to require some sort of coordination with an employer.
(Knowing nothing about this, it is seems like it should work roughly like an extended jury duty.)
> Lisa Vedernikova Khanna, a candidate in Virginia, says in a lawsuit that the mobile shopping giant cited concerns her bid could hurt the company with President Donald Trump.
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...
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.
Can you criticize them instead for firing her for something that their Chief Corporate Affairs Officer explicitly gave her permission to do? If it was a matter of pragmatism, they could have declined her request for permission. (One might separately argue about whether this should be a matter of right vs a matter of permission, but regardless, she did seek permission and was granted it.)
How many examples do we need of the Trump administration doing some illegal move then getting slapped down by the courts? This would be a slam dunk for DoorDash. That they chose to capitulate instead is damning.
The courts eventually ruling against the administration doesn’t undo the harm caused. A Trump tirade against Instacart could be a death sentence for the business.
Based on the ground you're treading I'd be careful with your casual use of "death sentence" when talking about something that is nothing of the sort, but behaviours that are only a few steps from the real thing.
>> but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice
That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?
> 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.
One thing I don't understand is how the rise of food delivery has gone up so much and is terrible for everyone.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% more than the pizza's
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
I wrote more about it here
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-food-de...
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?
Man, what a sad end for Instacart. The leadership team that took over in 2021 absolutely squandered the amazing machine the founders had built, filling the top spots with cronies and sycophants, none of whom had very much interest in the actual core offering of Delivering Groceries. They brought Facebook-lite management and drove out the actual product and business acumen.
By the time the CEO bailed to OpenAI, the damage was done - billions of dollars of opportunity, totally wasted. She left an organization gripped with paralysis, apparently too broken to fix and remain independent.
I feel bad for anyone who joined post 2021... They raised at like $39b that year, then another qtr billion later that year at an undisclosed valuation. This is effectively a "down round" here and everyone who got shares at a $40b+ valuation is getting screwed. I interviewed with them many years ago and ultimately decided against it - their dilution was insane, looked to keep going, and the valuations were absurd at the time already given how few people were actually using it... I think they had maybe a $4b value at the time though. Honestly I think COVID was a huge boon to the company and finally gave them some much needed revenue/membership growth.
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.
Cool they will now charge $50 per delivery and give the drivers -10$ ?
There is zero cost of building matching systems (maybe 200$ worth of Claude subscription). Drivers and restaurants will be better off if they build their own ones. These centralized platforms need to die ASAP.
The cost of this acquisition will likely just get passed down to consumers by increasing the already ridiculous delivery and service fees even further... The only reason why I ever use DD is because DashPass is included in the CSR. Otherwise you pay $10 of extra fees for a $12 burrito.
> The only reason why I ever use DD is because DashPass is included in the CSR.
Strong case for B2B sales focus
> 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
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 business model of having a meal order delivered to your door for money has worked for, what, 100 years?
It's just greedy investors destroying the value for the customer by tacking on all these bizarre fees. You see the same with TakeAway-Just Eat. I barely know anyone who still orders food ever since they massively jacked up prices after 2020. Before that you could order a pizza or falafel or whatever without minimum order prize, hidden increased product price, delivery fee, service fee, and idk what else.
Agreed! Delivery works, and will continue to work. Tech platforms attempting to monopolize and suck up all of the aggregate profit from the industry will not.
My initial take to this news was “what about anti trust?!” But I was surprised to learn that DD is essentially non existent in grocery delivery and instacart’s non grocery deliveries are powered by Uber Eats. For two massive brands they really don’t offer the same product.(edit: not effectively, at least) If anything maybe this helps Instacart/DD compete in grocery with the real giants in Walmart and Amazon. I wouldn’t be mad to see DOJ block this but I was just surprised to learn about the landscape of grocery 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...
It's believable to me. I exclusively use Walmart and Amazon for groceries now. The nearest grocery store is 10+ minute drive away and with gas prices, my time, etc. I'd rather just buy online and wait for someone to deliver to my door. It's much quicker than going around the store looking for items too.
It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
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.
> 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.
Might just speak to the competitive advantage of vertical integration. I.E “we make so much off the selling the product we don’t care if the sale originates on or off platform?” It is surprising though that they wouldn’t force users onto their service. They certainly have the power to
They're very multi-modal. Walmart will send deliveries out via Instacart, their own in-house drivers (1 year+ employees internally), Spark Delivery, and even Roadie ("a UPS Company"), though Roadie jobs are for oversize things that need a pickup truck or a van like TVs from what I've seen as a Roadie driver.
I didn't realize DoorDash was so big.
Instacart has it's own unique offerings and propositions, hopefully those don't dissapear, they were invaluable during the pandemic.
Repeating my comment from the dupe: My new years resolution for 2026 was to quit using 3rd party delivery companies. It was annoying at first but I've kept it and life is better without them.
My previous experience was any time something went wrong, no one would take accountability for it and at best I might get a partial refund but never a replacement order.
Having to do a bit more planning for meals is worth eliminating that aggravation from my life. Not to mention the shocking amount of money I'm saving.
> DoorDash to Acquire Instacart to Help Local Stores Win
> to Help Local Stores Win
Any local store will tell you DD is a necessary evil they put up with but strongly dislike overall. From the % of sales they take to the incredibly rude delivery drivers, DD is not well liked.
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.
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.
> Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude.
I want to be clear, the ability to speak English is not what I took issue with. That doesn't bother me and I'm fine with just showing the phone screen, no conversation. The issue I had was cutting the line and essentially demanding they be helped immediately. Wait in line like everyone else. This is a small food stall in a food hall with often just 1 person working the front. If they are actively helping another customer and have a line, I find it unacceptable to think you can cut to the front and immediately demand attention. What message does that send to the customers in line? "You're less important than delivery orders", and I can tell you that isn't the case due to the large chunk that DD takes.
My family member has even considered shutting down DD orders temporarily if/when the drivers act this way and publishing on social media about it. According to them, the loss in sales (and overall profit, which is minor on DD orders) wouldn't matter compared to the publicity/engagement (I don't know, that's not my world).
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.
> 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.
It's a finder's fee, a very old and ordinary concept in business. The more sales you can bring to a company (or could divert to competitors), the more skin in the game you have. That's not to say I think these companies aren't in some ways anticompetitive to the detriment of merchants and DIY shoppers.
> What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. T
In theory it's because that customer wouldn't be purchasing without DD. In practice it's a shakedown.
The stores often charge higher prices on app for the same items. If there's a sale on items, you won't likely get them on the app. You can say it's a shakedown but you can always refuse DoorDash business and just operate like every other place that doesn't use it. It's not end of the world.
Sure, you could operate without DD. You can also operate without advertising, but it makes it a lot harder to reach customers.
Elsewhere in this post a store owner talks about how DD is a necessary evil. How they have convinced a big chunk of customers to only use DD to order food, and you will lose out if you aren't on the platform.
The supermarket I worked at had a split system. Our internal delivery people had their own checkout area, but it wasn't open 24/7. Doordash and the like had to go through the regular lines regardless.
because they can get away with it and some VCs say best companies dont have customers, they have hostages.
That kind of thinking is why people call them vulture capitalists. It’s only true until it’s not. if your supplier is treating you like a hostage, you’re probably not very loyal.
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.
That sounds like a scary investment to make on behalf of what's effectively a single customer. Without some kind of contractual commitment that locks in volume and price, they would really have you over a barrel.
I hate industrial/ghost kitchens so much. Accidentally ordered from one with friends and it was so off-putting.
Could see the kitchen areas through a window and they weren't necessarily dirty, but looked sketchy for some reason. Few people, robots delivering orders, one set of cooks making the food. Just dystopian.
We might as well just build ready to eat food factories that pipe the slop directly into your house. We got rid of the "inconvenience" of going out to eat and enjoying a restaurant. Why not get rid of the pesky delivery middle-man too?
Look up commissary kitchens. A ton of food is made that way, and I don’t see it as being all that different.
And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).
Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?
Many resstaurants are just heating up frozen portions delivered from Sysco or similar providers anyway.
A restaurant with a physical presence with dine in service has a reputation to maintain, a ‘cloud kitchen’ food seller does not have the same reputation to worry about.
Going by other comments in this thread it seems like if you kicked out the driver they'd probably get fired from Doordash.
> 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.
They are being dispatched to the restaurant to pick up an order which was already placed, and which their system is telling them is ready (whether this is correct or not). They also make less than minimum wage in most markets, and their wage is tied to their efficiency.
I don't understand why you think they should wait in line in restaurants where people order at the counter, to pick up their order which was placed online. And if you want to see this, you should be supporting legislation makes them proper employees who get a proper wage based on their time working.
Dispatched? Don’t drivers pick their jobs? They choose to go to the restaurant with the line.
Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
I don’t get why we’re talking legislation; it’s basic courtesy.
If I said “hey, here’s $5 if you go cut the line at that restaurant,” does that make it right?
> Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
The dine-in customers have not paid for or ordered their food, to do so they must wait in line.
The delivery driver is being handed a bag of food that is ready to go and paid for.
Many restaurants are already set up to accommodate online to-go orders. Chik-Fil-A has a separate drive-thru line for online orders, Chipotle lets people come up and get to-go orders that have been paid, same with Potbelly, it’s very common. It’s mildly annoying when you’re the one waiting in line but I don’t expect a delivery driver to wait in line to be handed a bag.
Drivers ostensibly pick their jobs, but if they reject too many jobs they are put on a time-out and can't take any jobs.
Regarding line cutting - it doesn't quite make sense that someone just picking up a bag that is already prepared should wait in the same line as people who are putting in orders for food. For an extreme example, a BBQ place near me in Brooklyn commonly has lines that are 45 minutes long, with people waiting to order. Should a person who called in an order wait in that line, or just go to the front and ask for their food?
Someone must use these services because they are everywhere in the UK and I find them so annoying for many reasons, not just the ones you mention above.
Lots of people cycling all in black on ebikes on pavements making it dangerous for people to walk around safely and causing chaos for drivers and other cyclists. Also generally supporting big business over small stores. Everyone moans about having individuals charged with these minor traffic offences but in my view just targeting companies like JustEat directly and having massive fines based on employee behaviour would be far more effective.
Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
First off, okay that's great but no one is telling you to go use them. You can continue living your life exactly as you were without needing to judge others who live their lives differently from yours.
Second, clearly there are plenty of people who do use them judging from this $17b acquisition that just happened.
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.
No way.
Here's how it works out rationally: I just got home from work, the kids are a mess, the house needs cleaning, and my spouse is having a work crisis. The kids favorite treat is chipotle. Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
"Hey kids chipotle treats are on the way - but you have to go get your room tidied and leave mom alone" actually does work.
6 million smart, rational engineers, mathematicians, actuaries, professors in the country, each doing this analysis, four times a year, yields 240 million dollars in surcharges without an ounce of laziness.
Then add laziness on top.
Is it only $10 extra to have dinner for 4 delivered? IME the cost was much more than that, when you factor in the difference in menu price, the delivery fee, the tip, and the govt surcharges.
Fair! But $10 establishes a lower bound on a rational audience's TAM at a quarter billion a year. If it's higher, the TAM goes up without requiring loss of rationality / non-laziness of the customer base.
Chase Sapphire Reserve would net that out to approximately $0 on a monthly basis after credits and rebates.
>Of all the options for "use money to make this go away so I can focus on the problem" paying $10 surcharge for doordash is by far the cheapest.
Exactly this. They know humans will likely pick the path of least resistance. And we are generally bad at problems that have compounding long term outcomes. They are essentially preying on our societal circumstances. My story: Brain will resist using energy for creative solution from within if external solution exists for $.
My example is _not_ preying. That $10 does nothing to help our lives if invested in diversified etfs, for example. The _best_ use of that $10 is to alleviate the instantaneous stressors for 4-5 people all at once so we can relax and solve larger problems (my spouse works for pro-social non-profits, for example).
Yes, doordash can prey on laziness, and people will fall into laziness, but in my example the _availability_ of the service is providing a price-adjustment for urgency that matches my own rational prioritization of the evening's needs. It's the most rational, mutually-beneficial argument I can make, and it's real in my house from time to time.
This is a question that's going to sound stupid and maybe insensitive, but that aside - how do you think people managed to do this in your exact same scenario for the last 50+ years without having a service like this?
Our own parents went through this exact scenario that you mentioned plenty of times before any of this even existed without having the to pay the $10 fee.
Pizza delivery has been a thing for the last 50 years. And in my own childhood, my parents kept tv dinners and other instant sodium-bombs like easy mac or ramen on hand.
Doordash costs more than that, but chipotle is a good deal more nutritious than the 90's-era tv dinners I remember, so I can understand parents preferring to spend a bit more for that equally-easy solution.
You're getting stones thrown at you when you were trying to be polite.
From my memory we often piled into the car, got dinner, and went home and my parents had to stay up late to clean while we went to bed.
In my wife's memory, one parent couldn't work - all this stuff had to fall on them.
I'm saying the $10 is a nicety, not a necessity. We would be ok without it. I just think we're a little better with it. It's a market system - if I need it, it's there at a price I can justify. Markets are a good thing.
People also used to live in caves and wipe their ass with sticks.
What is this question? Is the idea of new products, technology, or services strange and problematic to you? Convenience is a major driver of invention.
Also when I was growing up my parents would order delivery plenty - but the only option was pizza because the driver worked for the pizza joint. And yes, it’s true, their parents didn’t order delivery, but they also lived in crushing poverty of the Great Depression and could barely afford to feed their kids during every meal.
The usual answer to this question: "things were shitty in the past"
50 years ago most households did not have both parents working full time.
> I don't really understand how the personal economics for this work out for the majority of the population.
8.5% of American households have no car[1]. That isn't a strict majority, but if you can be charitably informal: paying for grocery deliveries is orders of magnitude cheaper than loan+insurance+maintenance for a car.
If you want to become car-less then the like of Instacart make that a realistic prospective (but Instacart specifically makes no sense because stores usually do it for free if you can tolerate next-day).
[1]: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2024.B08201
The majority of the population isn't using Doordash. A small portion of the population uses Doordash a lot. Think of all the college students who lack a kitchen and can't drive anywhere because they are drunk.
if you look at instacart's business model...they make barely any money on delivery. Vast majority of their profit is from advertising that they sell to brands. They create an audience of buyers with really good data and then monetize through advertising...so for the consumer you get very low cost delivery at the expense of seeing promoted products in the app.
I'll give an example of when I used a grocery delivery service two weeks ago.
I was landing from a flight and traveling home late on a Sunday. I also needed to go grocery shopping that night. I did not have a car at the airport, so my choices were either rideshare home for $70, or take the train for $10. The train takes about 30-40 minutes longer, but saves me $60.
If I did the rideshare, I could probably do the grocery shopping myself and get home a little bit later than when the train would get me home. Or I could take the train, order the grocery delivery, and then get home, unpack, and go to sleep. I chose to take the train and do grocery delivery. When I got home from the train, the delivery driver was walking up to my door with bags in hand. It worked out perfectly.
I could have taken the train and also done the grocery shopping myself, but it would have been very late by then and I had to be up early for work the next day.
> 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.
But nearly all technology and services you pay for arguably boil down to “convenience,” in the sense that people in the past either did the thing themselves or survived without it.
One man's laziness is another man's leisure time. I'd much rather have an extra hour to spend with my kids, read a book, exercise, or really do just about anything else, versus get in my car and fight traffic and parking to go retrieve a bag of food.
Prefacing this by saying it may sound insensitive but from my experience shopping and getting things to eat used to be things people would do with their children and was part of growing up and learning what adults do.
In my opinion this scenario may actually end up promoting unhealthy habits for your children which is what these companies want.
>Sometimes the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
This misses the point. One is you devoting your own time and attention to doing the task, the other is delegating it so you can use your time for other things. Some people are going to burn the extra time scrolling (not great), others are going to help their kids with homework or get a workout in.
I'm all for people getting time back even with the downside that not everybody will choose to use it well. If people are choosing brainrot over living well, there's a bigger issue than delivery services.
"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."
I don't think there are many people using this because they think they get it faster.
The acquisition is for consolidating power the deal is finished DoorDash will basically be the only sheriff in town.
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.
> Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
Virtue signaling.
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.
Sure, but the pizzeria charges less than $4 for delivery and don't want a tip.
I completely understand the grocery deliveries, it's a trade off, time vs. money. Personally I think the delivery costs are to high, but I also live four minutes away from the supermarket on foot. For others it's one less thing to deal with and they can do the shopping in the evening when the kids are put to bed or have the groceries ready when they come home after a long day. For them the delivery fee is well worth the value the service provides.
It's the $10+ for getting McDonalds multiple times a week I struggle with. People are free to make that choice obviously, but I feel like the delivery services are praying on people who are already struggling, especially when they team up the Buy Now Pay Later companies.
It was cheaper to get a pizza delivered before these delivery companies popped up.
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.
So what these services do is bring you food in exchange for money. If you have money and need some food they will bring it to you.
Why would you comment this instead of, i dont know, educating yourself on why is that happening?
I don't know, I cannot look into their head. Why don't you just write that you don't want people to comment that way, that would be more honest.
Use your imagination. Families with newborns, care takers, the disabled or sick, someone who worked a long shift at work and is just tired. The list goes on. Even just being lazy and not feeling like going out to pick up food is fine. You’re really weighing the opportunity cost (time) vs money.
I’m not going judge how folks spend their money. It’s their money and they’re all valid reasons regardless.
Since some other people are posting links about DoorDash, here’s one: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani...
From the NYT version of this story:
> DoorDash said the median payment to be returned to workers amounts to around $48. > City officials said about 700 workers are owed more than $10,000 each; more than 27,000 workers are owed more than $1,000; and more than 4,000 workers are owed more than $5,000.
DoorDash also spent (from what I can tell) (1+1.4+1.8) million dollars to campaign against Mamdani.
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.
I love the Mamdani DoorDash story because it demonstrates that government can work. When it doesn't, it's because it's made not to work or the people in charge have absolutely no interest in doing anything than feathering their own nests.
Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.
One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.
Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.
But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).
It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.
Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.
> No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations
This is how income tax was sold to the American public. When it originally started it really only did effect the top earners, but as the years rolled on and inflation happened it impacted more and more people. The reality is these tools that target only the 'wealthy', if they're successful are used to target everyone.
Why do you think more IRS agents would suddenly start "targeting" people who take the standard deduction (87% of all tax returns [1]) and if they did, why do you think that would matter? This is a nonsense slippery slope.
1 - https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-tax-stats-at-a-...
No, the problem was that wealth become concentrated in capital, and we don't tax wealth. Wealth can be leveraged as power without a taxable event. This is the problem. Capital is capturing the largest piece of the pie as ever, and isn't taxed effectively.
This is also why California is voting on a wealth tax.
Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270764 - October 2026
The 'Buy, Borrow and Die' Wealth Strategy Has Become a $5T Market - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50253630 - October 2026
Warren Buffett has been saying this for years, that his secretary was taxed at a higher effective rate then him.
Billionaire Warren Buffett Calls It 'Outrageous' His Secretary Pays 2x's His Tax Rate – 'If This Is A War, My Side Has The Nuclear Bomb' - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-warren-buffett-ca... - December 16th, 2024
- He explained, "I don't pay hardly any payroll taxes. Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes." Driving the point home, he emphasized the disparity: "Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes."
- Buffett's effective tax rate was 17.4% at the time, largely due to his income coming from capital gains, which are taxed much lower than ordinary wages. Bosanek, like many middle-class Americans, was paying nearly 36% when payroll and income taxes were combined.
- According to a CBS News report, Buffett quickly clarified that he didn't blame Romney for following the law. "I don't blame Gov. Romney for paying the tax rate he paid," Buffett said. "I blame the U.S. Congress."
- The disparity didn't bother Buffett – it drove him to advocate for sweeping changes to the tax code. In an op-ed for The New York Times, he argued for what would become known as the "Buffett Rule," a proposal to implement a minimum 30% tax on incomes exceeding $1 million. President Obama backed the idea, but opposition in Congress kept it from moving forward.
Republicans and conservatives simply don’t believe in taxes, and will take any action to make it as hard as possible to collect them out of ideology. As you mentioned, Mamdani proves government can work [1], and I look forward to more reps like him as election cycles occur and the US electorate turns over.
[1] https://www.mamdanibulletin.com/p/everything-zohran-mamdani-...
The pendulum will swing back, and be the opportunity to prevent this from ever happening again.
(i like taxes, with them i buy civilization, although i prefer they pay for social services and improving quality of life of humans with said resources, not endless wars in the middle east and tax cuts for the wealthiest driven by old men, their ideology, and their egos [n=1, ymmv, my two cents])
DoorDash is pretty much scum, stealing $130m in wages from their own "contractors"
Doordash as an app or a business model always feel scammy and full of dark patterns.
With this merger I have a feeling that things are only going to go worse.
I was at Snowflake supporting Instacart as main technical account architect and saw them polish things into place to get to a decent-sounding S-1 and then to go public. It sure was an interesting experience seeing battles between some people just not giving any care to costs and others trying to make money from these little itty bitty consumer transactions. Epic political battles, I tell you.
Could we have more discussion of our current legal/business environment, specifically, the economic opportunities it affords/constrains?
If this merger is approved via consumer welfare standard, should it be contingent upon some constraints? For example, should DoorDash be restricted from participating in the market it coordinates? If it’s a near monopoly in some regions, how will price be controlled without market pressure?
Historically, antitrust action also considers economic opportunity: Bell/AT&T licensed Unix source code for a nominal fee, largely because the 1956 consent decree restricted Bell/AT&T from selling products outside telecommunications.
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.
From a marketshare perspective, it meets test of a monopoly in many localities. There is a "network effect" moat: the app is a storefront, payment gateway, and delivery network. The merger eliminates platform contention, giving customers perhaps greater choice of retailer but foreclosing the next largest platform alternative.
Their platform scopes and coordinates a market. They even recognize this in their announcement: "DoorDash and Instacart believe that communities benefit when Main Street competes"
If you're making a doordash competitor you can use doordash for order fulfilment on the back end until you build out your network.
The "consumer welfare standard" and related contestability doctrine is often used to challenge anti-trust action. However, requiring consumer harm neglects the loss of economic opportunity for providers (eg stores and gig workers).
If contestabilty, not marketshare, is the appropriate test of economic power, then laws may be needed to increase contestability, such as "data portability" rules for store owners so they don't have to key-in product description, availability, and pricing multiple times.
In your example of a new delivery platform entrant who bootstraps using its direct competitor, what legal framework protects that startup? This seems another contestability consideration.
You can also do adversarial interop. Whenever a restaurant signs up, go to them on doordash and have your intern key in all their data.
Heck, they don't even have to sign up. Just copy their listing from Doordash and when someone orders, place an order on Doordash if you can't fulfil it yourself. You'll probably need several phones to scale this, or you could make a doordash account per customer.
Once you have some drivers yourself, go around restaurants in your area and copy down their menus. Have drivers go and make takeaway orders.
Doordash undoubtedly used all these tactics. This is just how business works. Obviously doordash didn't order off doordash but they surely integrated restaurant ordering from places that already had their own delivery.
If you have VC funding, subsidize part of what doordash is charging so your prices are lower. IIRC Google did this once to the point where a pizza restaurant repeatedly ordered their own pizzas and made a profit, making front-page HN - don't go that crazy.
Am I on the wrong side of perspective? I imagine of these companies are at big risk in a turn down with low margin - competitive space. The model is a tough one to work
Merging reduces platform inefficiencies and drivers can work both situation.
I am actually amazed both companies are alive and making a profit.
> Merging reduces platform inefficiencies
This was literally why Rockefeller was a big proponent of the monopoly. Unfortunately exploitation is the tradeoff that is enables
It's an argument he advanced in favour of monopolies. Then reason he was in favour of being a monopoly was, of course, that it gave him more money.
Profit? Who cares about profit today in tech? It's tomorrow's profit that matters. Whenever that is.
Man, can only imagine this is more bad news for delivery drivers.
Since the reaction here seems to be universally negative, I’m curious what people see as the benefit of having several gig worker delivery platforms.
As a thought experiment, we currently have a duopoly for ride share. Would we be better off if Uber were broken up into two platforms?
Obviously having one platform would be bad, since there would be no price competition, but what’s the optimal number? Surely, too many platforms would be bad, as the concentration of delivery workers would be terrible on each app, making the whole system inefficient (setting aside whether one things the system should exist at all).
I saw this show up in my newsreader and first thing that crossed my mind was the textbook example of eBay / PayPal acquiring everything, leaving us with probably the worst situation possible for auctions and payments.
Hey - dumb question that is probably a derail: Is there a practical reason in the US to use Instacart over one of the Amazon services? It seems like they are fighting an uphill battle - Amazon has its own grocery warehouses (Prime food), and owns Whole foods. I haven't cross-shopped recently, but am having a hard time imagining them competing on price with either of those services. I suppose the obvious reason is you aren't limited to those two stores, so if you want specialty items, nice baked goods etc you would use Instacart?
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.
Do you find it, total price charged to card, to be competitive? What if you already have a Prime membership?
> Do you find it, total price charged to card, to be competitive?
Yes. Instacart has low cost retailers like Walmart and Aldi in many areas, and their prices are generally better than Amazon groceries. Now Walmart does also have their own service, so technically you can do that, but then you're limited to just them.
Instacart delivers for costco
Yeah instacart isn't limited to specific stores, you can even order from multiple stores and group them
Seems like it should be “DoorDash (YC S13) to Acquire Instacart (YC S12)”, if only to emphasize that this is by far the largest merger of YC companies.
The DoorDash subreddit is an interesting read. Lately, users are reporting being sent to retail stores to work for 30 minute stints. One anecdote: a person described taking a $25 gig that amounted to going to a Target and stocking one specific brand of shampoo. The stockers there had already filled the shelf, so he took a bottle down and then took a picture of himself putting it back.
Girl in Atlanta got chopped into pieces on a DoorDash delivery. I predict the same outcome once private equity gets its hand on this mess in 5 years.
I'm mostly hoping this doesn't end up affecting Costco delivery, which works reasonably well and uses Instacart behind the scenes.
Doordash was meant to help local restaurants win, now a large percentage of the "restaurants" on DD are ghost kitchens run by DD. The same will happen to grocery stores. It's the enshittification model happening in plain sight.
Is this true? Every place I DoorDash from is a place I know and have been to
Great, just one less competitor in the marketplace.
I vividly remember the ZIRP era when there was a new food delivery (or e-scooter) startup almost every week.
A resounding victory for workers and customers, right?
Right?
I just want to say that the colour contrast on this post is atrocious.
#999999 on a white background is a 2.84:1 contrast ratio, when the minimum requirement for body text is 4.5:1. So this page technically violates the ADA and other accessibility laws.
Major competitors shouldn't be able to acquire each other in any society that cares about healthy markets.
Wow, really didn't see this one coming.
I hate this shit. Just another shameless ploy to find choke points in markets and further immiserate all participants in a two-sided market but the rentiers.
food delivery stayed around, the e scooters not so much
These two slimy companies do belong to each other. Perfect match made in hell.
Great, both are generally terrible. Nothing like ordering a pizza and having it sit in someone's car for an hour with a driver who has no attachment to the restaurant, who could not care less about what you think. At least delivery drivers employed by the restaurant had some slight incentive to get food to you while it was still edible.
Third party delivery services essentially break the chain of responsibility... food late and cold? tough luck, but please tip in advance. If you don't tip your driver will be very mad at you, maybe they'll text you about it, and we pay them so poorly that it's actually your fault for keeping them impoverished. Talk to our customer service bots and maybe we'll give you a $5 coupon for your next Doordash order.
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.
I’d cry “antitrust” but who are we kidding at this point. The relevant parties have likely been paid off already.
"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.
IMO grocery delivery is a game changer. I don't use either service, but use a different one[s]. Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's etc, and I don't have to put on outdoor clothes, walk to my car, navigate traffic, navigate the aisles, wait in line, reverse... IMO big QOL of life increase.
And second-order effects like I can always have fresh fruit + veggies / not worrying about rot by getting it in smaller quantities delivered more often.
For those wondering about price: It's much cheaper than takeout or prepared food delivery, but more expensive than getting your own groceries. Offset a bit by less food waste.
> Even with a tip (I have been doing $15/per delivery), it's not much more expensive than normal groceries at Trader Joe's
In my experience its significantly more expensive for groceries: up to 20% for items + service fee + subscription + tip.
I was canceling Instacart subscription and they offered me another year for discounted price ($17). I kept it but I won’t ever extend it for full price given how much more it costs.
I should clarify: I'm referring to Amazon (prime or whole foods), which I understand is significantly cheaper than Instacart. It might be worth cross-shopping in this case.
How can that be profitable on the long run?
Feels like it will end up more expensive in a few years
I suspect this as well. Enjoying it while it lasts... I suspect the facilities being vertically-designed for this helps, but not enough(Especially the prime groceries; I suspect Whole foods has some but not the same extend?)
But if they were gone, the worst is you're putting pants on and getting your own products. There are not essential, they're simply a labor and regulatory arbitrage for gig workers to schlep product to consumers at very low wages.
I get this, but there are a few scenarios where grocery delivery is genuinely amazing.
- My parents are determined to age in place in their home. They get tired more easily than they used to, and aren't capable of doing as much. Especially in the winter, grocery delivery is a huge help for them.
- People with disabilities may or may not be capable of going to the store. Even for the ones who are capable, it is a much larger time commitment.
- For parents of young kids, leaving the house isn't just putting on pants. It's checking diapers, getting the kids to wear shoes, and timing the trip so it doesn't interfere with naptime, feedings, etc. This is a temporary phase! It doesn't take long before the kids are big enough to enjoy a trip to the store.
I agree, these are all valid use cases, but you don’t need a tech platform to offer and perform delivery.
Not everyone can just "put their pants on." For some, its more of an ordeal at a physical level.
Yes. I can’t drive for medical reasons and I live in a rural area with poor public transport. If my wife had to stop driving we would have to use grocery delivery or move
if they were gone, the worst is you're putting pants on and getting your own products
Says someone with no problems putting on his pants and making a grocery run.
Just try to remember your own words when you get older. You'll get your turn. Everyone does.
Only the lucky get old.
Anyway what a strange attitude to have on a tech forum. Why do we need HN, let's discuss this over a game of bowling!
what a strange attitude to have on a tech forum.
How so? Do tech people never get hurt? They never slip on ice? Blow out a knee playing a sport? Trip over a power cable?
What a strange attitude to think that everyone on a tech forum is identical, and also in identically healthy shape.
"Game of bowling?" Are you a bot, or something?
I’m trying to agree with you, the strange attitude is being anti instacart
Valid!
I am an avid Instacart user because I have no interest in dealing with the antisocial behavior that seems to manifest at grocery stores. Italian, Mexican, and Asian markets are pleasant but many mainstream grocery stores seem to devolve into Lord of the Flies-style isles of misanthropy where regard for personal space is absent and scowls are the primary mode of communication.
IMHO a semi-weekly grocery delivery service that requires ordering ahead would save everybody gas, time, and money but I've not seen it done anywhere. A small Instacart alike that does this with store-employed drivers seems like it'd be a hit. If it were a national co-op owned by local grocers it'd be even cooler... anybody down to build it?
Antitrust does not have "important service" requirement. What has happened in gaming is another travesty but there is plenty of people who would say it's not "important service". Antitrust must be universal.
I know a lot of people who survive (almost) exclusively off take out and delivery. Especially in cities like NYC.
Right but where's the moat?
And takeout and delivery existed before this.
Takeout and prepared food delivery is much more expensive than grocery delivery.
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.
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.
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
TYVM. But I rely on Instacart as I live alone and can't drive anymore since my eye surgery 10 years ago. If I didn't have instacart I don't know how I'd ever get any groceries.
I'd be curious to see if it lowered food prices at all if these services and their upcharges weren't around anymore to influence pricing.
What if you’re disabled and need to order food ?
The way this was handled before these gig economy food delivery companies sprang up. People didn't automatically die of starvation because they were disabled and became adults prior to DoorDash. Medicaid and Meals on Wheels fill in some of the gaps depending upon age and state.
These companies springing up put the old ones out of business. For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now. There's no going back to the "old way" when it doesn't exist. And now this kind of consolidation means they get to jack up prices however they want.
Those restaurants simply didn't deliver at all in those days.
Pizzarias and other traditional delivery food businesses still hire their own drivers in many cases.
> For example check the number of restaurants that hire their own drivers now.
Before DoorDash, other than pizza places (who still run their own drivers), what restaurants delivered? McDonald's tried delivery for a short period of time, but other than that, nobody delivered.
How many of their customers fit this description?
I had a co worker who was deaf.
Luckily he came of age just as texting took off. I guess in theory he could of relied upon a translator to make phone calls for him, but his life was much improved by modern communication.
Even if new technology makes things easier for 99% of people who are lazy, but is essential for that last 1%, it's a net positive.
Consolidation in this industry is horrible for everyone. Less competition means higher prices and lower pay.
"More Choice for Consumers"
A truly laughable fig leaf for the non-existent anti-trust regulators.
Capital wants a monopoly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291135 - October 2026
Instacart fired my wife for running for office. My wife asked for approval to run from her boss, the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, who approved it and the company was excited for her to run.
A couple days after my wife launched her campaign, Instacart did a 180 and told her they had to fire her for running. Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
My wife was also pregnant and she told them. They fired her the next day.
Congratulations on the merger.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/15/instacart...
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.
We're supposed to sue companies when they treat us like this but few of us do because it's a difficult process. Companies know this and act with impunity.
Did you mean "mandatory arbitration"? Suing is such a 20th century action.
I wonder if this would have affected the result, though. I haven't been through either process, but it seems like either would be a venue for making your case and getting a fair judgement. My understanding (which could be totally wrong, please correct me) is that companies mostly force arbitration because it is cheaper and less variable than trials, not necessarily because the results tend to be biased toward them. Is that true?
Have you wondered why its cheaper and less variable than trials?
My understanding is that it's cheaper because it is mediated by largely by a single person in a conference room, rather than the heavier process of collecting a jury. And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Collecting a jury doesn't cost the participants of a lawsuit anything. And the vast majority of civil cases do not make it to trial.
>And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
The vast majority of civil cases do not go to a jury, so again, I don't think this is good reasoning. The difference is mostly in discovery, which in an arbitration is stacked against any plaintiff bringing their claims compared to what they'd be entitled to in state or federal courts. That's probably the biggest reason they are less variable, in my experience.
>It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.
Well according to you, you don't really have any idea of any of this, you are just reflecting your understandings which are based on what?
> Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.
But that doesn't mean those biases are not present.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks. (I admitted to not knowing and was open to being corrected. I appreciate you actually correcting my understanding, rather than assuming I hadn't even considered it.)
Have you proven why? To make my point again: we just feel like it won't work so we don't even try
The issue of whether or not "forced" arbitration agreements are binding is different, but in this context I don't see it being something an employee can get out of. Some states have laws, for example, that destroy arbitration agreements in employment contexts for sexual harassment claims. If you have anything to offer, I'm more than happy to consider it. Short of that, I don't really see what point you're actually making besides "Maybe? I don't know!"
Arbitration is not nearly as one-sided as people make it out to be. It's much more about making sure that the case can be completed quickly than it is about the company winning.
The company, of course, knows all the tricks to win consistently.
That's just as true in real court.
If you have an absolute lay-up of a case (something like "my company fired me because I got pregnant, and lied about by pretending to change their mind about something they'd already approved of"), then you're going to win the arbitration case. Well, more accurately, the company's going to throw a pile of cash at you before it even gets that far, because they screwed up and the first time legal hears about it, the first words out of their mouth will be "you did fucking what?".
It is nigh impossible to cleanly fire an employee from the time you learn they're pregnant, to like a year after they come back from maternity leave. Unless they broke into your office and took a shit on the desk, the default opinion of every judge is going to be "I read about this exact scenario while studying for the bar, literally textbook".
See that's part of the difficult process. Mandatory arbitration clauses aren't even always valid.but we just assume they are.
they want you to sue your phone
Instacart stole money from me.
When COVID hit, I got sick and had to spend several days inside ordering delivery. And more than once, the store was missing half my order. So I then had to make new orders for the food I wasn't able to get the first time -- while they refunded me only for the items they didn't have, leaving me to eat the (multiple) delivery fees and driver tips.
Fascinatingly, this is not prima facie illegal in many US states! Wow. We live in a corporatist hell hole don’t we?
Brendan Eich was fired from Mozilla for a $1k political donation.
Corporatist hellhole was your reaction to that too I imagine.
* Technically resigned, but there was significant pressure from Mozilla.
One of them is a worker drone with very little power, the other is the company's founder and CEO who is openly telling people that he believes a decent chunk of his employees don't deserve basic human rights. Quite a difference there, don't you think?
Software, especially open-source has an over-representation of people that identify as LGBTQ. Brendan openly signaled that he thought a good subset of his employees did not deserve the same rights as others. I don't see how he could have been an effective CEO after doing that.
It would've been a huge liability for Mozilla. An employer is not allowed to discriminate on sexuality. Fire any LGBTQ employee, and there's now a decent chance that Mozilla will now have to prove in court that it didn't have anything to do with the CEO openly hating gay people and creating a hostile work environment.
What a strange hill to stand on at this time. The overwhelming public backlash, boycotts, and resulting damage to Mozilla's brand left Eich with no practical choice but to step down.
“Overwhelming.” Eich made a modest donation to a ballot initiative, which got majority support by California btw.
But in any case, your point is “it was damaging the company, therefore it makes sense to see them gone.” And there’s your parallel.
—
In reality, whether corporate agnosticism is right depends almost exclusively on your feelings of the underlying cause.
What would be illegal about firing an employee who you think is causing your company to get a bad image?
> The lawsuit says Instacart violated a California law that bars companies from preventing their employees from becoming candidates for public office, among other complaints.
What would be the consequences of ensuring that only those with enough personal wealth to be able to go without a job while campaigning can run for office?
The thing about legality is that you kinda get to chose. In your case the companies' interests weight more than the people's interest.
For example in the US it's totally legal to spy on your employees with key loggers &co, in most of Europe it isn't
She approached to ask for permission. If they had any reservations, that was the time to discuss them. She did what was expected of an employee. The fact that they blessed her and then went back on their word seems wrong.
Not a lawyer but my intuition says there might be some legal grounds here favouring the wife.
My take is someone even higher up found out later and did not like it. Now it’s entirely possible the individuals who gave their blessings were supportive of the party the wife was standing for, and the ones above them weren’t? Still whoever blessed the campaign did so in their capacity as a senior officer of the company. A total shit show nevertheless.
To the original commenter: sorry this happened to your wife. Hope she’s able to find another job that treats her right. Also congrats on the baby, hoping parenthood makes up for all of this and more. Sending the best of wishes your way.
AFAIK in every US state a company can fire you for any reason that’s not protected, and “we told you this was okay but changed our minds” is as good a reason as any in the law’s eyes.
In many US states a company can fire you even for protected reasons, and just fabricate a reason that isn't protected. Of course there are examples of people fighting this because it sometimes is a fight worth having, but the vast majority just have to accept being discriminated against and try to find another job.
I think Montana is the only state not "at-will"
Puerto Rico is technically not a state, but as part of the US, and counted in the statistics of the (federal) Department of Labor, I would also count it as a _not "at-will"_ state.
Correct. If she had something in writing, signed by a person with proper authority in the organization, she might be on stronger footing. But they could just find some other reason, or state "no reason" for her termination, and that's perfectly legal in an at-will employment.
If I ask my employer if I can start a YouTube channel and then after getting permission I start posting videos that make the company look bad, and showing how awesome competitor products were I wouldn't be surprised if I got fired. I wouldn't be fired for the account but what I did with it.
Well in normal countries…firing them for something they did outside work. In American vernacular, something something free speech.
You have the right to free speech. Your employer, like anyone else, has a right to not be associated with what you say.
I'm curious to hear other people's perspectives on why they think they should be illegal?
For example: Suppose you hire someone to help you move furniture.
You can decide you dont like the color of their shoes and tell them to kick rocks.
You dont owe anyone a job, and labor for pay is a contractual agreement, nothing more.
Color of shoes is one thing, that’s fair game.
Buuut it’s probably better for society to not kneecap ordinary folks just for trying to run for office. Otherwise, you only get folks in office with deep pockets who can take the hit.
Sure, it's a dick move. But it's important to distinguish "shouldn't" from "legally can't".
Should you be racist? No. Should you call someone fat and ugly? No.
But personal liberty and freedom require we allow people to make choices and have opinions we don't personally agree with.
Personal liberty and freedom also require people to be free from economic coercion so that we can exercise those rights. Corporations have an asymmetric amount of power and we should stop anthropomorphizing them.
I recommend Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/images/2/2e/Paradox_of_...
I think we're on the same page:
Freedom of speech and self-expression applies to just that: wordsIf intolerance or hate poses a physical threat, or in any way infringes on the liberty and personal autonomy of others, a line has been crossed and must be swiftly dealt with.
It limits the ability for someone to run for office. Making it only so people who CAN afford to not work to run. Seems unfair.
Even if an employee has the authority to make a decision, executive leadership should still have the legal right to terminate someone if they disagree with that choice. Let's not make running a business illegal.
I see this totally wild she even had to ask permission for running for office, or at least from an European perspective.
I don't understand it from an American perspective. Is this a standard practice in large companies?
Political beliefs or views are not a "protected class" in US federal employment law. That said, most employers at least say that they support political participation, but once you start taking public actions it becomes a bit different.
If a person made a large contribution or gave other public support to an extremist candidate, an employer might not want any association with that.
If running for an office is going to take up a significant amount of one's time, such that it might impact availability for work during normal hours, an employer would care about that.
In this specfic case, if she was featuring "I work for Instacart" in any way in her campaign they might care about that.
If she was saying anything inflamatory or controversial, Instacart might not want to be associated with that.
So running for a nonpartisan office such as a local council or school board or similar would normally not be any issue. Anything where party politics feature prominently is going to be riskier.
I believe only California lists "political affiliation" as a protected class.
So most states you can be fired for voting wrong.
Apparently.
It's a standard practice in suppressing democratic norms yes. The US has a long sordid history of the elites absolutely hating when commoners practice democratic beliefs.
Let's not forget that many of our "founding fathers" deeply hated democracy and when speaking of the "democracy problem" of the 1780s in America it was mostly referring to commoners in Massachusetts participating in civic duties.
This tradition has never went away and is still practiced today.
I mean, running for office is essentially a full time job right?
It seems totally reasonable to both have a law that protects a citizen’s right to run for office without losing their job, but it also seems reasonable to require some sort of coordination with an employer.
(Knowing nothing about this, it is seems like it should work roughly like an extended jury duty.)
I don't understand why this is getting downvoted, I'm surprised as well
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 ?
Literally article's description:
> Lisa Vedernikova Khanna, a candidate in Virginia, says in a lawsuit that the mobile shopping giant cited concerns her bid could hurt the company with President Donald Trump.
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...
In California the courts look very poorly on that, just in case that ever happens to you.
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.
> I can’t hate Instacart for being pragmatic
Can you criticize them instead for firing her for something that their Chief Corporate Affairs Officer explicitly gave her permission to do? If it was a matter of pragmatism, they could have declined her request for permission. (One might separately argue about whether this should be a matter of right vs a matter of permission, but regardless, she did seek permission and was granted it.)
How many examples do we need of the Trump administration doing some illegal move then getting slapped down by the courts? This would be a slam dunk for DoorDash. That they chose to capitulate instead is damning.
The courts eventually ruling against the administration doesn’t undo the harm caused. A Trump tirade against Instacart could be a death sentence for the business.
Based on the ground you're treading I'd be careful with your casual use of "death sentence" when talking about something that is nothing of the sort, but behaviours that are only a few steps from the real thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out
>> but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice
That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?
I can hate for you then.
Same.
> 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.
Even after being specifically told that running was ok?
> I would be fired
Ok, but _should_ you be fired? And - if so - why?
How much do you think the tip was?