Richard Stallman's personal site.

https://stallman.org

For current political commentary, see the daily political notes. RMS's Bio | The GNU Project

Reasons not to use food delivery app companies such as Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats

Swiggy, a food delivery company in India, cuts off delivery workers' medical coverage if they don't meet quotas. That is likely to mean they lose coverage if they get sick. The thorough cure for this problem, and many other problrms related to access to medicine, is in a national medical system. But even if a country can't go that far, it can prohibit schemes like this. Stuart, a food delivery subcontracting company which handles delivery for Just Eat in the UK, uses a driver-guidance map system which occasionally sends drivers to the wrong place or via impossible routes. As a result, they fail to complete the job on time, and Stuart fires them. ● Washington DC is suing Grubhub for charging hidden fees and using dark patterns to get customers to pay them. Uber, Lyft and Doordash have set up a lobbying group against workers' right to unionize. ● * DoorDash to pay $5.3 million to S.F. couriers over alleged violations of past benefits* ● Doordash combined low pay with manipulative uncertainty about how low it would be, and drove its drivers to go on strike. ● Doordash makes pages for restaurants without their permission in order to mislead would-be customers of those restaurants. ● The basic reason not to use Grubhub is that it identifies you and puts you in a data base. But there is another reason. Grubhub has come up with a way to route phone calls to restaurants through a Grubhub computer as an excuse to bill the restaurants. ● Grubhub is gouging restaurants, even as it makes dossiers about customers. Don't use Grubhub. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't using Grubhub require running nonfree software and identifying yourself? Get your meal deliveries from local restaurants that will write your address on paper and throw it away after — and pay them in anonymous cash. Food delivery companies have many ways of preying on the restaurants they offer "services" to. "Tips" to Doordash and Amazon food delivery workers go to the company rather than to the worker, they cancel out the whole of the worker's base pay. The article seems to err in equating this to tipping of waiters. They are not the same system. Yes, the waiter's base pay is below minimum wage — but the restaurant does not claw back that base pay when the waiter gets a tip, as Doordash and Amazon do. Food-delivery platforms learn what customers order from restaurants, then set up "ghost kitchens", phony "restaurants" that do only delivery, to put restaurants out of business. I quit food delivery apps – the absurd convenience was not worth the cost. The author of this article considers the cost to society and the cost to her tranquility, as well as the price of food ordered that way. Uber and Lyft are lobbying against the PRO Act, which would facilitate forming unions. So are Instacart and some of the food-delivery companies. This is another reason to boycott them all. (I won't use them anyway since they won't let me pay anonymous cash.) Even in places where Goober drivers are considered employees, the couriers for food delivery compsnies may be denied workers' rights. Food delivery companies can only be profitable if they exploit their workers by underpaying them.

Return to Richard Stallman's home page. Please send comments on these web pages to rms@gnu.org. Copyright (C) 2017, 2018, 2022, 2023, 2024 Richard Stallman Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.