> Gig drivers don’t face an edict for speed like past Domino’s drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into the job, with drivers hurrying to make financial incentives, avoid bad ratings, and ensure the food is warm upon delivery.
Annoying corporate policy replaced by society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I
internet - that we unlike the bad policy can't get rid of.
This is just a social credit system designed to control behavior, but attached to your workplace instead of your person.
The proof is simple. If you move this system from a single workplace to multiple workplaces with an ID for the worker, you get social credit.
This is a system that many governments and corporatists are in love with, as it generally “punishes troublemakers” without having anyone who’s a lawsuit target get overly involved. In my opinion, social credit systems are repression and totalitarianism masquerading as systems of personal responsibility.
> society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet
Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.
The customer ratings concept even infected places like your local doctor’s office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or excessive drinking for decades. Doctors are also more likely to give in to patient demands for unnecessary antibiotics or controlled substances when they know it’s going to result in a hit to their ratings if those ratings are related to their compensation.
Every time I’ve visited a car dealer for service in the past few decades, the service manager is almost begging me to give them a “9 or 10” on the survey that will be sent to me afterward. He pleads that I work with him first to address anything that might reduce his rating.
Even vehicle drivers have had “How is my driving?” numbers on the back of their cars for a very long time.
Having customer satisfaction surveys tied to performance reviews isn’t new if you’ve worked in anything customer-facing. It’s just getting more attention now because “gig economy” has become a journalistic buzzword and people are more likely to be sympathetic to an hourly worker than, say, the doctor or service manager at their local dealership.
Even long before all of this, tipping was the standard way of linking customer feedback to compensation. This applied to delivery drivers, too! The hand-wringing over customer feedback being an internet-era gig economy thing is misplaced. It has always been this way.
My SO is a restaurant manager, and she has told me that the only reviews/ratings that have any positive effects are 5s out of 5. 4 out of 5? You might as well have put 0 or 1.
I remember once I bought a car and the salesman said if I had any reservations about giving him a 10/10 on every question in the survey no matter what it was that I should text or call his personal phone and he'd do whatever he could to fix it, also directly saying that it's better for them to have 95% of people not fill it out at all and get 10/10 from everyone else than to have 100% completion with a single 9/10.
I don't know if it's true or not but he told me he lost out on a $10k volume bonus because someone who was extremely happy with everything gave him 9/10 on all questions and in the comments simply put "I wouldn't change anything about my experience, it was great! But perfection is reserved for God."
I've heard this from everyone I've ever bought a car from, everyone I know who has ever been involved with that industry, etc.
Why even have surveys if the point is just to collect 100%s and not actually find things to change without taking money out of people's pockets?
This is classic Goodhart's Law stuff[1]. The key takeaway is that any company that implement these kinds of incentives doesn't actually give a shit about customer experience, they just like to play pretend.
When I'm buying a product on a site like amazon with 5 start rating scale, I find that all of the useful information is found in the 2, 3 and 4 star reviews.
1 star reviews are mostly people pissed off for some reason, people with unreasonable expectations, or competitors trying to hurt their competition.
5 stars reviews are either zero effort reviews from people with low expectations or they are outright fake reviews from people incentivized to inflate the rating.
The 3 star reviews identify key and serious problems with the product that the customer otherwise would have liked. Usually the most information is found here.
4 star reviews identify weaknesses in the product that the customer still liked despite the drawbacks.
2 stars often are the same as 1 star but from less critical people.
The only signal I pay attention to from 1 star and 5 star reviews is if there are too many of them it's a red flag. More than 10% 1 star usually indicates a serious problem with product defects. More than 80% 5 star indicates a product that's buying fake reviews.
Of course it's a simple theory that's exactly the point. It has explaining power though and I find it useful YMMV. What I was trying to get across is that you learn more from the text of the reviewers who voted somewhere in the middle. The 5 star reviews rarely bother to say more than a sentence and they rarely include any useful criticism. The people giving 1 stars are often just pissed off for some reason that will not affect me. Stuff like "It wasn't what I ordered" or "they sent me a used product" - The signal is in the remaining reviews if you take the time to read them.
> Why even have surveys if the point is just to collect 100%s and not actually find things to change without taking money out of people's pockets?
"So if I implement this system then either I get confirmation that everything I'm responsible for is perfect or I get an excuse to save money on labor?" - management approximately 8 seconds before implementing the surveys.
This mirrors my experience in retail. Anything less than the top score is counted as a negative, often counting the 1-9 score as a 0 with the 10 as a 1. The heat lands on a local manager when corporate comes to town. What ends up happening is that the customer-facing employees train the customers to put down 10s.
It's ultimately a metric that's been gamified by everyone involved. I think the cynics keep it around because it gives customers a voice.
Which is ironic, given that it modifies the customer's actual voice when interpreting the numbers in such a toxic way. I point to the cousin comment where a salesman lost a $10k bonus because a customer didn't give them a 10, despite the customer's comment being very explicit that they were extremely happy with the experience, but that they refused to rate anything perfectly, as they reserved that for God. Despite that comment, the 9 was used as justification to deny the bonus, effectively also denying the customer's voice.
Or pull a YouTube/google and just eventually totally remove the option to down vote at all. “ Yeah… we’ve heard the vox populi and ehhh, gonna have to pass on that one.”
To me that’s the crazy thing. You give a 4/5 and immediately you’re asked what was wrong.
It’s also why Netflix moved tot the thumbs up/down system. When they moved into new territories their recommendations system had troubles since some territories would rate everything as “bad”, because in that territory 3/5 meant it was fine and they enjoyed the show.
Yes, these ratings problems aren't new, but they are more pervasive and less useful than ever before. For my part, I just refuse to give ratings or pay attention to them.
The effective binary nature of ratings (if you don't give the best one, you may as well give worst one) was the last straw for me. Ratings are a game that harms both customers and the people providing good and services.
Agreed. And because ratings are so broken, there are multiple ways to game them. In addition to rarely leaving ratings, I rarely trust the damn things either.
In my opinion, ratings need to decay over time. For service workers like Uber drivers any rating >1 year old (or maybe less) should decay to 0 significance. For online retail like Amazon, maybe 2 years but not much longer than that. This not only allows people to "clean up their act" after bad ratings, but makes botting a recurring cost instead of a one-time investment.
App store ratings are gamed through bugging users to rate the app, cozying up to the app store maintainer who can delete reviews, or even Sybil attacks on competing apps.
> Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.
Your electronic report card is now more persistent, and there's a much smaller number of companies dominating these gig industries, and they cross areas (food delivery + driving people, for example). It's not as easy to start over.
The scoring system doesn't necessarily reflect reality.
Separately, there is a drive towards a sort of "social credit rating" that I do think is a bad thing.
In the narrower space of having a criminal history, the US is very different in how that affects people that have done their time. Any company can do a dirt-cheap background check, this makes people close to unemployable. In other countries, like Australia, employers can request a "yes/no" answer to "is this person's history suitable for this specific job" from a government agency...but they can't just get history themselves.
The combination of consolidation in the space into a few giants, and dirt cheap sharing of data across employers is, over time, applying the same sort of permanent mark problem to everyone else. I think it's a bad thing.
Some US states have now adopted "ban the box" legislation which prohibits asking job candidates about criminal history (at least for certain jobs). Of course, it's still tough to explain a 10-year employment gap on a CV.
It's also toothless when the employer's insurance company can require a (post-hire) background check to cover the employee and failing it is grounds for canceling the hire.
I don't see an obvious solution, because compelling commercial insurance to cover someone with repeat duis/reckless driving/addiction issues in a work truck doesn't feel quite fair, but there needs to be a path to gainful employment for ex-cons if we want our supposedly rehabilitative justice system to have even a chance of working, and there's not a lot of options that aren't customer facing, don't involve driving, and don't put you in some sort of security context or in charge of accounts or money.
Basically, any job that pays worth a damn requires a bit of trust, and we simply don't trust ex cons. And they're probably statistically somewhat less trustworthy, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a path out. For our sake as much as theirs.
Ideally the insurance company only cares about crimes that are relevant to the job; theft or embezzlement for workers handling cash. DUIs for drivers. Etc. There are certain combinations of crime and job that are sensibly going to be risky, but how do you prevent companies from being overcautious? An insurance company that was more optimally cautious than overcautious won't gain much for it.
Why do you need to "prevent companies from being overcautious?" It's their money they're spending, it's their customer relationships they're putting at risk, it's their liability they're increasing by having someone with multiple DUI convictions driving around the work truck.
Criminal history is not a protected class (nor should it be), there's nothing wrong with a company saying it doesn't want to hire people with criminal histories in the recent past for certain jobs, or any job.
While your words imply that you have an ideological opposition to telling businesses what to do, and that external effects need to be ignored. Why do businesses have the right to do things harmful to society so that they can make money?
Businesses get told what to do all the time, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But businesses have a right to choose how they spend their money and who their employees are.
I'd be more than happy having a period of time where these things can't be taken into account (like bankruptcy). But if you have repeat DUIs / reckless driving incidents, you've proven that at least currently you can't be trusted to drive safely. Having a job where operating a vehicle as part of your job isn't a human right so I don't see anything wrong with saying "you're not allowed to have this job." Isn't it much more humane to do that in the application process than firing the candidate in their first week because the insurance will not cover them? Isn't it wrong to force the insurance to cover someone at a loss, or force the employer to pay more to cover this person who probably shouldn't be driving anyway?
The argument isn't about whether to disqualify someone for a job that involves driving if they have a DUI, at least to me.
I mentioned the Australian system...when the employer sends the candidate name/info and the complete job description, and a government agency replies yes/no. I assume they have some criteria for how long ago the offense was, etc. And that candidates generally know if they apply for a job that's not a good match, they will get a "no".
In the US system, even for a job where driving is not involved, the employer gets the full record and gets to decide what to do with that information with whatever arbitrary opinions they have.
Good - they're the ones hiring, they're the ones taking on risk, it's their money they're spending. It should be up to them whether a particular criminal history is relevant to the job. Even if it's not relevant and they just don't want to work with someone with a particular criminal history, isn't that their right?
I had I think, a related issue. I moved, need a new dentist, called one, told them I wanted to take a sleeping pill because it helps me with my anxiety from previous painful dentist visits. They said they'd have their office manager call me back. He vehemently steered me to another dentist. It was ridiculous how much corp-speak he used to try to convince me it was in my best interest. They had a 5/5 rating. I assume it's because they reject anyone the think might lower it.
You're probably reading too much into that interaction. Look for a local sedation dentistry practice. They specialize in managing patients with anxiety. Regular dentists may not be set up to handle patients with major anxiety.
Asking someone to temporarily take on the responsibility of your medical wellbeing while admittedly being on psychotropics is a bit of an ask, isn't it?
Doctors telling patients they're fat doesn't help them get skinnier. The literature is pretty clear that in every double blind study, the category of medical advice or helping make nutrition and exercise plans leads to 0lbs average weight loss over 5 years.
No, but some people do need to be informed of how dangerous it is, and doctors can either prescribe weight loss medications or give a referral to a doctor specializing in medical and surgical weight loss.
Regardless, it’s something I would expect doctors to nag patients about, the same way my dentist nags me to floss.
The person I responded to said that there's no benefit to advice to diet and exercise. Presuming that's true (I doubt that there's 0 effect, and e.g. [1] would disagree), there are still benefits. As I mentioned, advice on dieting and exercising is far from the only tool doctors can reach for here.
There are medical options that doctors can prescribe (or refer to another doctor for a prescription). WeGovy/semaglutide, Adipex, HCG, good old adderall, etc. I haven't followed the space in about a decade so I don't know what's in and what's banned, but I'm aware there are a range of options there. I believe there are some outpatient programs as well, semantically similar to outpatient rehabs.
There are also surgical options that doctors can refer patients to a surgeon for. Laparoscopic bands, gastric bypasses, I think there's a third that I can't recall.
The incredibly sad issue is that doctors are sometimes forced to fall back on advice to diet and exercise because many of these treatments are contra-indicated with common comorbidities of obesity. Anesthesia can be very risky for patients with a BMI of 45 or 50, so they may need to lose weight the old fashioned way until they're at a weight where they can be safely anesthetized. Stimulants (adipex and adderall) are very effective at curbing hunger, but are contra-indicated by high blood pressure which is incredibly common.
I also believe there's a large segment of primary care physicians who aren't up to date on weight loss procedures, because they change fairly frequently relative to something like treating strep throat.
It’s the right thing to do at the individual level. The doctor should be honest with each patient and every individual should be given the chance to act on that honest information, even if studies show that many people have difficulty overcoming weight issues on their own.
"Proven to have no benefit" in this case only means that most people won't lose weight after being told to. A minority will though, so doctors refusing to tell fat people to lose weight is a disservice to the few who stand a chance of making it. The rest should either be signed up for surgery, drugs, or written off as lost causes.
Because, delivery drivers, unlike uber or whatever, are frequently screwed by things outside their control. No parks near the restaurant, so delay in the pickup?
Bad driver!
Restaurant behind on orders?
Bad driver!
Something missing from order?
Bad driver!
Incentives can cause perverse outcomes, but it’s worse when you are not in control of the outcomes at all.
Having worked as a server in college, servers get blamed for everything, and it definitely made me avoid and lose most of my confidence in humans other than close friends and family. People can be just mean and horrible for no real reason. Most are nice and patient, however a significant minority are just awful and must lead miserable, empty lives.
Yeaaaaaah, remember when the bulk of US manufacturing and industry was offshored a few decades ago and pundits were falling all over themselves to explain how we were transitioning to a "service economy"? Well this is what a service economy looks like.
A service economy with proper living wages is absolutely possible. I’m not a fan of such an economy because any country, especially one as large as the U.S., has no reason to be a single sector economy and plus as we saw during the pandemic and are seeing in the Ukraine war, a lack of domestic manufacturing capabilities is a significant strategic threat.
However, the gig economy model is a choice. A choice that can be fixed by simply reclassifying these workers as employees. The gig economy is little more than a way to get around employee protections, and the sooner we face that obvious reality the better.
California voters showed up in droves to prevent that exact classification change from happening, because your average voter is few IQ points away from needing help tying their shoes, and will absolutely eat up whatever lies Uber et al. will pump out.
Good, this is exactly what we wanted. Service worker classification is straight up wealth transfer from delivery users to drivers since competition is so tight and everyone ie being squeezed. The needs of the many outweigh the entitlement of the few. It's unfair for delivery app users to have to subsidize employment for drivers when its clear there's many willing to accept the current terms.
Gross take. Entitled, self-centered, and a ham-handed attempt to co-opt the term "wealth transfer". If you really have this little regard for folks who actually work for a living you should get in your car and go get your own shit.
Except everyone else also works for a living? Wealth transfer is a great descriptor of what that type of policy making leads to since it is in fact exactly taking money from delivery app users and giving to delivery app drivers. Do you disagree with this dynamic? If so where do you think the money for paying these drivers extra comes from?
The amount of people using food delivery apps is some 2.31 billion worldwide. Are you suggesting that some 1/3 of the human population who would prefer to pay less for their food delivery all don't work for a living?
No, this is what a very small section of a service industry looks like. There are millions of people who can have a livable wage in a service industry.
The actual problem that I never see addressed is that should EVERY job be a "living wage" job.
To me that answer is and always has been no. There will always be a need for temp workers.
The meme of a living wage is a nice one. It hits most moral frameworks as fair. The concern I have with it is it isn't defined.
What does living mean? When I belonged to a high demand religion that is known for "helping" its membership, financial assistance was dedicated to the preservation of life only. Not the preservation or growth of the quality of life. So if you had a medical life transition and a mortgage, they might pay for you to dump the mortgage and move to a tiny apartment while also receiving some food pantry items on a semi-regular frequency. Their goal was to keep you alive, not to give you a living. At the time, excess bills like cell phones, internet, cars, etc. were recommended to be removed and/or deducted from assistance given (in urban areas; rural areas cars were not really a focus, there was some autonomy in the people making the decisions). Only what was needed to remain alive.
I bring this up not because I necessarily agree with the approach, but rather to ask what we mean by "living" wage. The typical idea is that it allows people to afford food, shelter, and basic necessities (cue tangent discussion regarding American healthcare). Under this definition, are people willing to bunk up six to a room and expand WIC/SNAP? Because that is what a "living" wage can be -- not a great existence but not dying while working full time.
The usual excuse for this Spartan approach is that there aren't enough resources. For current program funding levels this is true. And in the US, we keep shooting ourselves in the foot for further resource growth -- regulations and policies are continually cherry picked, unprotected, and embattled to the point that the cost burden to maintain even the status quo is overwhelming, whether in implementation (NIMBYism) or in infrastructure (environmental impact studies taking years and decades) or in ideals (protecting water and air via the EPA).
Ideally we could organize, right? Unionize, make our collective voices heard. While a wonderful thing to enable, and there are many great outcomes when it happens, unions are subject to corruption as well -- I am not sure there is a legal framework that helps overcome that particularly pernicious principal/agent problem.
So, in this brief review, we arrive to your same conclusion, that we structurally probably can't support every job having a high enough wage to satisfy each to their wants. We can hope and want and organize for it, but until we have some significant structural changes in society and policy it seems unattainable to me :(
When the majority of wealth isn't owned by a group roughly the size of the population of Fairlea WV we can start having meaningful conversations about what we can and can't afford.
I recommend we not wait that long to begin meaningful change, monarchies have a tendency to stick around until the guillotine is ready, and then many more than the monarchy fall to its impact.
While I don't disagree with anything you've said I don't see a viable path to change. Step 1A is wresting control of legislative bodies from the most well funded individuals and corporate entities on the planet.
Indeed. But the definition of what is protected and by what methods can be somewhat idealistic.
As an almost absurdist starting point that highlights this spectrum - several eons ago byproducts from bacteria poisoned the atmosphere and threatened life on earth until plants and eventually animals evolved, enabling homeostasis to occur.
And some people today live at the periphery of Chernobyl by choice, much like the animals in the exclusion zone that are thriving.
So it's reasonable to point to an implemented standard and consider it an ideal, perhaps even worth defending!
I think you are on the right path. I've seen the arguments that "minimum wage" should be able to afford a median priced 2BR apartment (30% of income). Then who rents the bottom third apartments? I'm all for a bottom tier safety net to keep people off the streets.
So now, as a society, we've decided that slumlords are the key to affordable housing? I swear if the bar gets any lower someone's going to have to rent an excavator to dig the hole.
> There are millions of people who can have a livable wage in a service industry.
There are millions of illegal immigrants, living 5 to a bedroom proping up the resturant industry. The back of house doesn't do very well at all, its only the wait staff that makes a fair wage for the effort.
Richest by what metric? Household debt is up, personal savings are down, and wages have been stagnant here for decades. I'm sure the roughly 750 billionaires currently living in the country are having a fine time of it though.
Apparently we do if having a restaurant industry is desirable. We've already established raising wages to something that might attract less desperate applicants is a non-starter. Now if you were to say pivot the conversation to the H1-B system that fills more desirable jobs...
You trying to make this about me? I'm just the messenger. Restaurant margins don't support increased wages without passthrough to customers. People already bitch about the overhead associated with tipping waitstaff, one can easily extrapolate how they'd react to the changes in restaurant prices associated with labor costs tripling. If that makes you sad take it up with your neighbors.
The reality is that gigs only work for children or the elderly. The quintessential teenage babysitter can only afford to do so because they have parents paying for everything else. The quintessential "retiree" worker can only afford to uber/doordash if they have saved enough up to offset the rest of their spending.
The reality is that for most people, these "gigs" are actually jobs. Qualifying them as "gigs" and saying that people shouldn't depend on them just allows you to feel better about not paying the true cost for the goods/services you are consuming.
If the only dashers/uberers were people who were truly only doing it for "gig work", the platforms would go under. Either that or enjoy your 50 dollar sandwich or 100 dollar uber.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that the population of casual workers is not infinite. The senior who accepts a split shift school bus driver job that no non-semi retired person would accept because it would crowd out their ability to earn full time. The kids who realize a summer of hard work nets them less than a scholarship obtained through a single test or essay. A working parent might barely earn enough to pay for taxes and daycare so they just work on the domestic front.
It should not be considered okay for there to be jobs that cannot earn a decent wage because they are categorized as "supplement jobs." Especially since we observably see people working these jobs full time.
I order doordash on weeknights on occasion. Who is delivering to me if the drivers are just people supplementing on the weekend or during the school day while their kids are away?
If you are working, then you should be treated with dignity.
It might actually be a good policy to de-fractionate jobs. A fast food store will take what could be ten full-time positions, and break those up into thirty part-time positions. It could be mandated that if the total hours of the business's part-time positions are some level above one or more full-time positions, that they must hire the full-timers. While some would no doubt still complain, this should be an improvement for most and business's can't make honest claims that they're suffering economic penalty.
Employer mandates and employee protection laws ironically worsen this problem. When employees gain access to a health plan at 30 hours a week, employers respond by cutting them off at 29 hours or even commit time tracking wage theft. Maybe we could just set pro rata taxes to pay for social insurance programs instead of having a binary distinction between full time employee or not. Imagine if instead of Social Security we had an employer mandate for pensions and nothing for part time workers.
I don't think a gig economy app's open signup process is considered an offer for unemployment purposes. (If it were how would anyone get unemployment payments?)
But in this very thread people are saying things like
"It should not be considered okay for there to be jobs that cannot earn a decent wage ... since we ... see people working these jobs full time."
"...for most people, these "gigs" are actually jobs. Qualifying them as "gigs" and saying that people shouldn't depend on them just allows you to feel better about not paying the true cost for the goods/services you are consuming."
and "...the gig economy model ... can be fixed by simply reclassifying these workers as employees."
We can redefine the set of "we" all we want, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a not-uncommon viewpoint amongst more than just delivery drivers.
Unfortunately the truth of the matter is that the service provided by these jobs is simply not worth enough to support a living wage and the pool of competing candidates willing to do the job is high. The only way to have "our" cake and eat it too requires perpetually subsidizing this line of work with either public funds or funds from increasingly disgruntled investors.
I haven't ordered food from an app in years since the sub-par experience of waiting over an hour for some cold and congealing phad thai is simply not worth the premium when I can order directly from the restaurant, pick it up myself and achieve a better overall experience.
The insane thing is people trying to make a livable wage, maybe? Those drivers don't have the possibility (for whatever reason) to do something else, so gig it is - otherwise they'd be collecting food stamps or robbing at gunpoint. And if there were no such drivers, we'd get no warm pizza at all, how about that?
I used to deliver pizza for an independent company as a student back in 2000 in the UK (North West). I didn't get paid a lot, but it was easy work sitting in a car listening to the radio all evening. Inflation adjusted I was paid £4.57 an hour and 27p per mile. Used to get another £3 an hour in tips from people who didn't want change (this was of course back when everyone paid cash and ordered over the phone), did that for about 30 hours a week, racking up about 400 miles.
I was earning money to spend on new computer bits etc, not to pay rent for a family of 4. I valued the flexibility and the easy life.
The problem comes when people think this type of work is suitable for a full time career, not just a way to "top up" an income - either by working one or two nights a week, or doing it as a student, or doing it after retiring to keep the social aspect.
You probably missed the "don't have the possibility" part of my message. Not everybody has the easy life, with their own car and the parents for safety net, but other commenter already described it much better.
Yeah but what is wrong with saying "this job isn't for them then"? If you are skilled enough to drive a car all day as a job, Amazon will happily hire you to drive a van all day, they pay much better than a local pizza delivery gig(at least here in UK, no idea about where you live obviously).
Or are we really debating whether there is some extremely small subset of people who can only get a job delivering pizzas(somehow) and they can't possibly get any other employment?
What about it? In the UK at least you don't need any kind of special licence to drive for amazon, just a normal B-class licence will do, all of their vans are up to 3.5 tonnes anyway. You only need a C class licence and professional accreditation to drive HGVs.
I’m not sure about the UK but several minutes of frustrated googling only shows offerings for amazons gig delivery program called flex, vaguely ironically.
> The problem comes when people think this type of work is suitable for a full time career, not just a way to "top up" an income
People don't think this work is a full time career, but they often enough don't have another choice. When you have barely (or none at all) language skills, or you're an immigrant whose certifications from their home country aren't recognized, or you're without legal immigration status, there aren't many ways left to make a living - it's either "tech gig work" (deliveries, taxis), construction/trades/restaurant helper or agriculture. The latter options are physically demanding, dangerous options or they don't exist around urban areas, and you often run into issues getting paid or dealing with dangerous/abusive employment - "gig work" options at least pay out reliably and carry less workplace abuse.
Want to fix gig work issues? Offer a decent social safety net so that no one is forced to accept this kind of work just to survive, and the market will (have to) improve on its own.
In the UK companies are crying out for employees on solid reliable wages.
You're right it's a good way to get around immigration law, where someone with a right to work subcontracts the job to someone without and keeps 10/20/50%. That tends to be more the case with things like ubereats rather than traditional pizza-place-employing-driver -- you can't work in dominos without showing right to work, and you can't swap out the employee as people would notice, because you are Alice the driver who's kids have just left home and plays in the local cricket team, not "Driver 24601"
Given that we had no problem getting pizzas, currys etc in 2000 before ubereats I'm not sure I recognise the "without gig work we wouldn't get warm pizza" argument.
> People don't think this work is a full time career, but they often enough don't have another choice.
Then I reckon the solution isn't to add antagonism to the employment relationship they already have, but rather as a community rally around to provide resources to lower their search costs (Note: I assume when you say "don't have another choice" you really mean the finding and switching costs for new opportunities are too high)
> Note: I assume when you say "don't have another choice" you really mean the finding and switching costs for new opportunities are too high
No, I mean that the eligibility is not present.
Getting employment requires hurdles many people cannot pass: you need a registered address to get postal letters (which excludes many homeless), you need valid immigration credentials, you need skill certifications (school or academic degrees, vocational training, ...) for many employments (which foreigners sometimes have a hard time showing (refugees) or getting recognized legally), you need to speak the language, you need to be able to read and write...
For us tech people, a lot of these hurdles don't apply, but the lowest rungs of employment / society have a very difficult time which most of us don't have any experience.
For awhile, I worked in an R&D/policy group that focused on these very issues in the healthcare domain.
I think my point still stands. Community funded programs that helps individuals find their next step, when funded appropriately, are often enormously successful. In the healthcare context, say you want to decrease the number of repeat folks to the ER without decreasing their access -- basically ounce of prevention vs. pound of cure approach. A representative example is person who regularly comes to the ER for insulin issues. In addition to cost pressure, there issues might also source from not have a working fridge or consistent electricity. It is thus cheaper for the social safety net to provide electricity and a basic fridge than to have the person return regularly to the ER for insulin.
Similar workflows and standard of care exist for almost every social ill -- if we have the civic sense to fund it -- to help people take the next step towards bettering their lives.
> And if there were no such drivers, we'd get no warm pizza at all, how about that?
First of all, the horror, second of all, there used to be a thing known as "going outside", and before that there used to be a thing known as "cooking".
That's part of the problem isn't it? It used to be possible to raise a family on a single wage/salary so that the other partner could cook. Now many people end the workday with so few hours or so much stress that they can't cook.
Yeah, and there used to be "subsistence farming" and "living in the forest" and "making everything out of sticks and stones because we don't know any better".
How far back do you want to go to find the optimal configuration of society? Or does it just coincidentally match the configuration that you personally grew up with?
> For instance, the difference between an Uber driver with 4.3 stars and 4.9 stars is consistently obvious.
Yeah, 4.9 drivers explicitly ask for a good rating. It's the same for 4.3 and 4.9 star restaurants in Google Maps.
Reviews make sense if you can read other people's comments, otherwise they are useless. I wouldn't mind if 5-star ratings in service apps were replaced with more detailed "I had a problem" forms.
The thing I find offensive is expecting these people to be providing 4.9 level customer service when they’re getting nowhere near commensurate pay.
Imagine if software devs got a star rating for every new commit, rated on how long it took compared to how many points on the ticket (which someone else decides). And if your rating drops too low you stop getting tickets (and stop getting paid). And your salary sucks to begin with.
The thing I find offensive is people defending a group of workers that do not have to work as a gig worker. I think most people would consider 4.9 service as nothing special and just the due course of delivering food, on time, not opening and eating my food, putting it somewhere accessible. We are not talking about a 3 start dining experience. If they are not making enough money to provide the minimum level of service for delivering food then they should do something else.
That is the problem with gig work though. A lot of it is self-filtering, I will see people doing deliveries/uber rides in high-value vehicles or massive gas guzzlers like trucks. A rational actor would realize this is probably below minimum wage when you account for all the extra costs which leaves you with the rest of the pool of potential gig workers that are not doing the math.
I have no idea what "4.9 level" means. When I used to use uber (before it stopped working reliably in the UK about 5 years ago) they would ask me "how many stars" on a range of 1-5. There was no indication of what this meant or how to judge it. Presumably the idea is that the star ratings are relative and follow a normal distribution, so most are in the middle (say about 70% between 2/could be better and 4/really good, with about 15% being 5/excellent and 15% being 1 terrible.
It's a bad system, but pretty much every other online rating system is uncalibrated too (they just have different social expectations than the "always give 5 stars" that most people use for taxis and deliveries).
There are plenty of things that could be done, like using the algorithm that was developed for Netflix's prize contest, but nobody seems to be doing them.
No system built for a society that (sometimes) values kindness over honesty will ever give you honest answers. My wife still wants to leave big tips when the service is lousy "they're counting on it to be able to make rent". With stars or similar ratings systems, even cheapskates can be kind. Have you ever seen a thread where someone starts talking about "brutal honesty", and how people react to that term?
>If more than 50% of your replies are "this service was above average", then you have a meaningless system.
Only true mathematically if ratings are for internal comparison only. It could be that the service at restaurant A is consistently above average, because the service at restaurant B is consistently below average. Only their aggregate ratings should show it split half and half.
Does anyone know if Uber rescales the star ratings? For example if you have someone like GP who consistently gives out 3s or 4s, do those get rescaled back up to 5s based on the user’s average?
Most of the general population have no idea what a normal distribution is. You have to put yourself into a common mindset to figure out the meaning of things designed for the general population. It doesn't need to be explained because half the population is too dumb to understand a written explaination anyway.
5 means they did good, anything less means you have complaints that you think are serious enough to warrant effective "demotion" of the driver.
So stupid system with no instructions on how to calibrate.
How do you say someone did a better than expected job if the "baseline" is 5?
If they expect the normal to be 5, why give 1-4 as options. Why not "good" and "bad"
Not to mention the cultural differences between countries. While America loves being over-the-top with fake "oh you are so awesome", other countries (say Japan and the UK) are far more reserved.
> If they expect the normal to be 5, why give 1-4 as options. Why not "good" and "bad"
Some places do use a thumbs up/down rating but I think a lot of companies like the stress the 1-5 or 1-10 ratings put on workers. If you view your workers as easily replaceable, stress is a feature and the false precision lets you say that any particular outcome was data driven.
I think a 3-states scale would be good. Something like “happy”, “not happy”, and ”feared for your life”. You’d want a way to identify outliers. But using a quantitative scale for this is not a good idea.
> Most of the general population have no idea what a normal distribution is.
They have an intuitive understanding of what an average is, though. And when provided a scale the vast majority of people assume that the average is in the middle. If some smart arse grading system is not intuitively understood by someone’s customers (and seriously, people have something like 10 seconds to make that choice), it’s not the users who are stupid.
No, most people when asked to rate something think back to their school days, where "has done all the work we asked for" is either the max grade (A/10/20), or just under (say, A-/9/18). So, most people give 5 stars (or more rarely 4 stars) to drivers that have met their expectations.
That is very country specific. Here scale is 4 to 10. 4 being failure and 10 being essentially perfection. Average work being 7 with 6 below and 8 pretty good and 9 good. Scaling this to 1 to 5 would mean 1 is failure, 2 is not entirely failed, 3 average, 4 good and 5 perfection.
Most people don't think a 3 of 5 rating is "good", rather it's half-way to utter failure. 5 star ratings as used by the general public are calibrated as 5 meeting all reasonable expectations and no special rating given for exceptional performance. Most people don't need instruction on how to rate on this scale, they just give everybody a 5 unless something happened to piss them off.
if there was an objective way to value the quality of a commit, rather than how long it took, then yes, this method of rating would work.
The length of time is not proportionally related to the quality (it's not even inversely proportional - i think there's no relationship between time taken to do a commit and its quality).
Do you really think it’s impossible for a manager to rate a commit or completed ticket (including taking into consideration how long it took vs how long they think it should have taken).
I don’t think many software developers would want to work under such a system. Yet we build them for other people.
> Do you really think it’s impossible for a manager to rate a commit
if the manager is able to know how long something would've taken, it is because the task is simple and already well specified. Therefore, the work will be similar to delivery analogy from the OP. I do believe some places (such as oracle) do this sort of rating (heard from the grapevines).
However, most work i find that require a developer isn't simple tasks, but complex cognitive thinking to come up with a solution. I dont believe a rating system works for such work. Peer judgement, as well as long term results (such as a stable, working system that expands as required in a timely manner) work much better. But by the time the long term comes, the developer's contributions would've been diluted if the team expands massively due to success, or have moved on!
You are misunderstanding. They are not suggesting this would be a good or objective system. The problem is that ratings for drivers/deliveries/restaurants are just as arbitrary as this. I have seen people give 1 star reviews to a restaurant saying that the food was extraordinary but the waiter told them that it is possible to tip by card without them asking.
> Imagine if software devs got a star rating for every new commit, rated on how long it took compared to how many points on the ticket (which someone else decides). And if your rating drops too low you stop getting tickets (and stop getting paid). And your salary sucks to begin with.
> The vast majority of delays I've seen from these drivers is because they are (very obviously) double-apping, in which case I'm happy to have them be affected by terrible ratings.
They are double-apping because you as the consumer are not actually willing to pay what it costs to have someone deliver your food to you as a job. So now you want to enact a punishment on the driver for not making you their sole focus for less than a survivable daily wage.
You don't know if the GP tips or not. I along with some segment of consumers would be happy to pay the true cost of the service. Unfortunately in the last 5 years we are being bombarded everywhere with tips for what should be normal service. It is wildly frustrating.
On the flip side I would argue that if a single app is not paying well enough that a gig worker should try something else for work. Gig work like delivery is a commodity and not defensible. At some point gig workers should try something else if its not making them money.
So a new restaurant/brewery opened up near me; you order food on the touch screen, it buzzes when ready and you pick it up. When done, you put all your dishes on a counter by the dishwasher.
They take your card when they seat you, so all you have to do is walk out.
I found out they add 20% tip to your meal as a standard action.
The business itself is unsustainable. There isn't any good way to provide delivery of most items to most people at a reasonable cost.
Also, the consumer isn't being given the choice, they are provided the cost from the app. The delivery company isn't willing to charge what it costs to have dedicated delivery drivers. That's the real culprit here.
In-app tipping should be discouraged regardless of someone's overall opinion on tipping.
The market and regulatory environment has already set a precedent that stealing tips is de facto legal, and there are many ways to do so in an undetectable way (without a full source code audit) even if it wasn't legal.
> because you as the consumer are not actually willing to pay what it costs to have someone deliver your food to you as a job.
Isn't that the fault of the businesses? People are paying what the business is charging. Are you faulting customers for not paying more than the business asks for the service?
> Isn't that the fault of the businesses? People are paying what the business is charging. Are you faulting customers for not paying more than the business asks for the service?
No, I am painting the reality of the situation in an effort to point out that the OP's attempt to "abuse by ratings" is misplaced.
Where we stand at this point is that the OP wants a service (food delivery), but is receiveing a market discount for that service (the current price of food delivery that does not reflect a living wage for the service provider), BUT the OP is upset by the mechanism through which the market provides them with the discount (double apping). So much so that they wish to abuse deliverers with bad ratings.
The OP mentioned reducing the rating due to late delivery. I don't think that can count as "abusing the delivery people". It's one of the things that as a customer I'd hope would be reflected in the ratings.
But again, this sort of thing is a great example of how ratings don't actually help anybody. Gaming the rating just to be nice to the service providers makes the ratings worthless to the customers.
What are you suggesting then? A company that is selling warm pizza with prompt delivery should not do anything to incentive employees to deliver on that value prop?
I was a delivery driver for Dominos during that time. My manager (bless her heart, truly) was always saying "DO NOT SPEED OR BE DANGEROUS"; we had literally zero incentives to be on time, or at least we weren't punished if we weren't.
The markup on delivered pizza at THAT time was in the 800% range, so a free pie now and again wasn't going to hurt that much. A lawsuit over a crash probably would, though.
This strikes me as one of those things where scale works against incentives. If you own one store, you're making good money. There's little reason to push your managers to try to drive that margin to 810% by eliminating the occasional free pizza.
But when you own a dozen stores (like one of the stories in the article) all you see are numbers, you don't care, you push as hard as you can to "drive efficiencies" and you end up with managers who are getting yelled at because they're at 97% sub-30m delivery instead of the 98.5% goal or whatever. And then you have a manager pulling a pizza out of a car wreck and giving it to another driver.
I think it is also the decoupling from real people doing real job. The farther you go from ground level work, the easier it is to theorize what they could do - whether it is asking drone operators to bomb some place, or set a policy without setting foot in the store on a daily basis, or do a leveraged buyout based primarily on a spreadsheet driven model, the farther you go away from people whose lives are being impacted, the easier it is for you to make decisions that do not think about them.
"The rise of microwaves and frozen dinners made Americans more accustomed to convenience and averse to going out in public. (One food industry exec described these consumer habits as “cocooning.”) "
Would love to see what this person would think after Covid. If microwaves wrecked this person's outlook on people, covid would have blown their mind
I don't think this one is actually true. I remember TV dinners replacing home cooked meals not eating out.
Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare treat rather than a daily occurrence.
> Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare treat rather than a daily occurrence.
Fwiw some of us still cook at home and go out rarely. It’s cheaper, tastier, healthier, and can be a pretty relaxing evening activity
It was common when you had a stay-at-home parent who did fresh shopping in the day then cooked a meal later for when their spouse (husband) came in just before 6pm (6.30 if he'd stopped off for a pint on the way home)
Not so common when people get in from picking the kids up from daycare at 7.30pm and have to be up and out by 7am the next morning.
Longer commutes, less time at home, and all that extra income has gone into housing and childcare costs. Yeay.
We've made our lives and society so busy and complicated. I've always been confused by how much we collectively value convenience products/services while simultaneously making everything more complex.
I do hope that everyone is living the life they want and I'm just out of touch though. The idea of being away from home and my kids for 12+ hours every day and eating out before going to bed and doing it all over sounds miserable to me, but to each their own!
Sure, there are absolutely people helping make it happen but we each have to accept our due blame for allowing and accepting it.
Companies won't make products that no one will buy. Bosses can't fill roles that no one is willing to take. Executives won't keep their job if employees choose to leave the company rather than work for them.
The one real downside is that learning to cook well at home spoils eating out - it sets your standards for what constitutes a good meal that much higher. If I'm spending €16 on a plate of pasta, it better be a lot better than I can make myself.
You are so right. There are very few things I look forward to when thinking about eating out - french fries is one. I don't deep fry and air fry or baked at home does not compare to the real thing.
Steak is one where I've had better at a restaurant, but it was a $100/person type of place that work paid for. Mine at home is not quite there, but far above the average steak.
When I eat out now I'm hoping to find some combination of spices I don't use or some new idea to take home.
Once I learned how to make a great steak at home, the appeal of going to a high-end steak house has completely lost its appeal.
Sous vide makes steaks 100% idiot-proof. Takes zero skill to get a perfect steak every time. Kosher salt, pepper, granulated garlic, vacuum seal it, drop it into the circulator for ~2 hours, then use whatever the hottest method of cooking you have available to give a quick sear on each side. I use my gas grill pre-heated to about 800 degrees.
But to really kick it up another level, get yourself a smoker. Doesn't have to be a fancy $2000+ offset, a $600 Traeger or even a $200 electric can give good results. Smoke at 225F until it gets to about 125F internal, then sear like above. If you like it extra smokey, you can smoke at a lower temperature.
Now, the only expensive meals I will go out for are seafood. I haven't quite mastered seafood. Fish can be very delicate and fall apart, and it's hard to get the right color on shrimp without overcooking it and drying it out.
The trick with steak, I’ve found, is to think “Steak is $50”. Then you spend that money at the butcher instead of a restaurant. Put it on a skillet for a couple minutes each side and voila, you have a delicious steak way better than you’d find at any normie non-michelin-star restaurant.
Cooking is 60% having good ingredients, 30% avoiding mistakes, and 10% technique.
Steak is the one thing I can get consistently better than restaurants. It's all thanks to the book "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking"
It's a text book size cookbook. The author experiments different cooking methods and documents, taste tests.
It boiled down to seasoning the steak over night so the salt extracts juices and tenderizes. Getting the temperature just perfect using a thermometer (I have a Ninja Foodi Grill that does it automatically).
The quality and thickness of meat also matters. I get mine at Costco or Sam's Club.
My pasta game is a lot better too. Main thing was to stir as the pasta cooks.
Eating at home made me realize how hard restaurants lean on salt and fat to make food taste good.
I don't like eating out anymore because it's all either expensive greasy over seasoned food, or extremely expensive tiny portion food that maybe tastes about the same as home cooked.
We're one of those families as well. We eat out once or twice a month, usually its a social thing when we're going to visit friends or family.
It definitely takes some effort up front. It took us a few years to really build up a good list of go-to recipes we like and get to the point where we could wing it in the kitchen without chasing down recipes for everything.
Part of our motivation was going further down the rabbit hole learning how industrial agriculture and the food industry actually work. Dig far enough and you'll want to plant a garden, raise chickens, and cook at home as much as you can.
> It definitely takes some effort up front. It took us a few years to really build up a good list of go-to recipes we like and get to the point where we could wing it in the kitchen without chasing down recipes for everything.
It can take a bit of time to get to the point where you can experiment and still be confident that the result will be edible, but that time investment is definitely worth it. It’s nice to be able to improvise whatever recipe depending on what’s actually available. It’s like a puzzle game, a kind of reverse Tetris when opening the fridge.
(It’s also nice to have a bunch of no-brain required easy and quick recipe for when you don’t want a challenge)
I have been doing this more and more, for the reasons you cite. Also, restaurants are increasingly doing things (like requiring the use of apps or websites) that make the experience far more unpleasant than it used to be.
So my habits have changed to eating out much more rarely, but at much nicer restaurants.
I often see this mentioned during discussions of home cooking as if it were objective truth, but it confuses me because I enjoy a pie from the local pizza parlor as much as I enjoy my boeuf bourguignon. It's a different experience for sure. There's pleasure to be had in taking the time for the mise en place and coming up with tweaks over time to micro-optimize the flavor, but is it really tastier?
One factor that makes the comparison more apt may be accounting for the price difference. I can cook at home for a fraction of the price, or spend just as much but use much better ingredients.
When I do eat out there is always something nice about not having to cook or clean up. That skews it a bit for me, maybe it wasn't actually as tasty as cooking at home but the whole experience is nicer (on occasion).
And the people who Uber Eats everything or go out for dinner are always the first to cry about cost of living or how prices in restaurants are so high. And then they cry that groceries are the same price.... ahah
I first heard about cocooning in a Faith Popcorn book a friend was reading.
It was some of what was written, but also about how we don't sit on the front porch and visit with neighbors in the evening, and rarely see our front doors, much less our neighbors.
"wrecked this person's outlook on people"? "Cocooning" was not an insult or meant to imply there was anything wrong with people, it was just a description of a "trend".
(And was probably in part about the large "boomer" generation aging and having kids and thus going out less)
I have recently re-read Snow Crash but, lacking the context (since I live in a difference country), I missed how closely the setting in the book parodied what is described in this article. For instance, the boss of the pizza chain being ex-military was an important plot point later in the book, but I didn't know that the real-life boss being parodied was also ex-military.
i heard snow crash was a great book so i start reading it. immediatley it gets deep into pizza, the deliverator, the extreme attention to on time delivery, universities that specialize in franchising a pizza shop
and then a little farther on you learn part of the book takes place in the virtual internet world. and i’m absolutely sure the pizza stuff is all part of this virtual world…
Hiro/the deliverator, YT, and most of the characters inhabit meatspace and "jack in" to the metaverse. Plenty is virtual but the dystopian pizza delivery is real
Chappie was awesome and Elysium was at least entertaining. Anyway, I was trying to think whose aesthetic a dystopian but wacky futuristic tech movie would suit best
My dad tells a story that happened in 198X while the 30-minute guarantee still existed. He was living in DC and traffic in his neighbourhood was absolutely abysmal at peak hours when gov employees were leaving work. Apparently it could take 20 minutes just to get drive a few blocks.
So he ordered pizza with the delivery time carefully planned to coincide right when traffic was greatest.
Yet somehow the drive was able to get it to his house in 28 minutes. He tried to ask the driver how this was possible, but the driver was allready rushing back to his car.
I drove delivery in the period shortly after 30-minutes-or-N guarantees went away and customer expectations hadn't really caught up to the change. From cutting through park access trails at 60 miles an hour to using an elementary school soccer field as a shortcut between neighborhoods, nothing and I mean nothing was off the table if it shaved minutes off your drive time.
Some basic empathy shows that his intellectual curiosity is not worth putting stress on some dude. That worker clearly is under a lot of pressure to deliver pizzas quickly, that's why he was out the door immediately with no small talk. Think about that delivery guy's state of mind when he realizes he just received an order at rush hour at an address that's hard to reach, and if he misses it he will probably get penalized.
Inspiring people to order pizza that they wouldn't otherwise was the entire point of the campaign.
While I agree it made things unreasonably shitty for drivers, the customer can't really be blamed and shouldn't have to sit at home thinking "am I being a prick by making this person do their job?"
I agree the campaign was foolish overall, and dominos agreed. But there is a big difference from happening to order at a difficult time to purposely choosing the most difficult time. Multiply it by a billion and all that.
There are people who see a system and wonder how it can be broken or misused, or whether there's corner cases where the guarantees the system offers don't hold up. These people sometimes take actions that inconvenience or harm others, but we value them nonetheless because we acknowledge that these systems must be fixed, and this cannot happen if nobody draws attention to it.
If some hacker notices that a website has sequential id's and no session cookies and you can use this to dump their entire database, you think this doesn't cause any stress for the employees?
You think his dad really did it to draw attention to the plight of delivery workers, and not out of desire to be clever, "beat the system" and get a free pizza?
What a nice example of 1980s corporate greed maximizing profits over human life. Modern delivery food delivery services can be seen making the same delivery-by guarantees, so we haven't fully learned our lesson.
> In Domino's annual report last year, Mr. Monaghan said that ''failing to honor the 30-minute delivery guarantee was one of the big disappointments of 1987.'' He added that the delivery performance ''is still totally unacceptable and therefore must be our biggest priority in 1988.''
> ''Not fulfilling a promise is inexcusable,'' he stated in the report. ''It not only goes against everything we believe in, but it's also bad business.'' [1]
Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30 minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered to across thousands of franchisees without introducing significant risk to staff.
> Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30 minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered to across thousands of franchisees without introducing significant risk to staff
Could it not? I'm sure I could organise a pizza restaurant with a 99.9% success rate delivering pizzas within 30 minutes (the nationwide top- performing restaurant in TFA had 99%) and no more crashes than, say, the national per- mile rate for short journeys.
But to achieve this, I'd need the restaurant to be overprovisioned in delivery drivers and conservative in rejecting requests that were too far away or too busy. My restaurant would lose money. The #1 priority is never really punctuality or timeliness or customer service - those are just means to an end. It's always money in the end.
Ha, well I'd do it as a precooked pizza with a light cheese base, then drop precooked toppings on as needed and use heat lamps to melt the cheese. I doubt it'd be tasty, but it'd be fast.
Hypothetically - why wouldn't not having a set amount of time for delivery be corporate greed too? I mean, if a corporation saves money by screwing over the customer it's corporate greed. If it screws over the employees it's corporate greed.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of people left over to screw.
"corporate greed" is gen z talk... The current economic climate has a lot of gen z's suffering, they see capitalism as the problem, thus everything is corporate greed.
It is a low quality signal, along the lines as a fiduciary duty to screw customers for profit.
It seems like an extremely straightforward term to me, describing corporations prioritising their own profit over customer experience. I’m a millennial and I’ve heard the term in use a lot longer than Gen Z have been around.
It is still a pretty stupid term that shows they have understanding of economics shallower than a puddle. Not reducing the profit margin to zero is also prioritizing profit over customer experience.
The article elaborates about that at the end. This isn't "1980s corporate greed". It's just corporate greed, and it's just as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.
I agree in general but I think the 80s deserve special recognition because it marked a turning point in the relationship between wages and productivity[1][2] and the long decline of collective bargaining[3] at the same time it became even more acceptable to brag about wealth because that linked into the Cold War comparisons we made with the Eastern Bloc countries. A lot of older Americans also didn’t track how much things stood in other countries – e.g. the standard of living in much of Europe relative to people doing the same jobs domestically – but I think a lot of younger people are looking at how many trend lines have a knuckle point in that decade and are feeling cheated.
When the 30 minute guarantee ended I had a recipient of my pizza delivery pull a gun on me when I refused to give a free pizza! (I handed it over) An anecdote I tell at parties
You act like most probable place for such an event, when discussing on HN, ain't simply some rural US. Some folks are crazy and vastly unbalanced, period. If they have access to guns, bad shit happens frequently.
The amount of folks in US who legally own guns and never ever should be allowed to touch one is staggering.
More than 50% of that 10.84 consists of suicides - a fairly typical, convenient omission for folks with an agenda. "Get killed" would imply that "you" weren't the actor doing the killing.
Somalia suicide rate: 7.90 per 100K
United States suicide rate: 14 per 100K
How many of these US and Somalia deaths are associated with organized crime?
I ordered a pizza from Domino's in 2019 and it took 3 hours to be delivered. All it took was that one awful experience and I'll never order from them again.
FWIW this happens even with pickup. I used to use their 7.99 pizzas a lot when money was short.
Their app tells you when the pizza is ready, about 30% of the time the pizza was not ready when their app said it was. This means the workers were gaming their timing system with fake pizzas.
Often times I'd be sitting in their pickup area for 20 minutes after the pizza was supposed to be done.
>This means the workers were gaming their timing system with fake pizzas.
Or it meant the person cutting and boxing your order was falling behind.
At least ~15 years ago, the way Domino's timer works is that when the cook puts the order in the oven, they hit a button. ~8 minutes later it says it's ready, which is how long it takes to get through the oven. That was the only input for carryout, delivery had another for when the driver left.
If it was 30% of the time, I'd guess you requested something unusual like "no garlic spray" where the mistake happened or was noticed after the computer says your order is ready, then had to remake it. Or most of the times it was just a few minutes and somebody was boxing it.
> At least ~15 years ago, the way Domino's timer works is that when the cook puts the order in the oven, they hit a button.
The Domino's location near me very obviously hits that button as soon as they get the order when things are busy, regardless of if it's actually going in the oven then or not. I've had many, many times where I arrived at the location, with the app saying "your pizza is ready!", only to have them say "it's not in the oven yet, it'll be 10 minutes" when I ask for my order.
I'm certain the stores and even individual employees are rated on how fast they get the orders done so of course they're going to mess with that system to show the best metrics they can. I'm not even a little bit surprised, nor do I really blame them. Even though it's frustrating to find out my order isn't actually in the oven, I just say "no worries" and wait a few minutes.
>certain the stores and even individual employees are rated on how fast they get the orders done
They weren't fifteen years ago. The only speed incentive was not pissing off the customer. That may have changed, I can't say.
One thing I didn't consider earlier, if the store is busy enough the oven might be full and the cook hits the button to clear the entry they're done with so they aren't confused.
No one ever notices the no garlic spray order. I eat dominos weekly and every time I move, it takes a few weeks for the new store to catch on that I order without garlic, and they always know me after that. Any Dominos ordered while out of town is 75% chance of being wrong. I've given up at this point. Papa Johns and gets it it perfect every time, and I can forgive Little Caesars.
From when I worked the job, when cutting pizza the general flow was; remove from oven, prepare and box, then check what order it was for.
As adding the garlic spray is part of the prepare step, it's really easy to fuck up. It's not uncommon to mess it up, ask for a remake, then mess it up again. When you follow the same steps every time it's hard to skip one.
If you want a tip, the Brooklyn style (I think they renamed it?) doesn't come with the spray by default, so it's easier to stop yourself. Only other difference is the pizza has less dough.
That's really surprising to hear! I have bought 100s of the 7.99 larges (don't get me started on the shift to one topping, where a sauce switch is counted), and have never arrived to an incomplete pizza... Though, I don't leave until the tracker shows done as my store is under a mile away, so maybe there's some speculative execution happening?
I think I had read once on another-site-which-shall-remain-nameless that that timer actually had nothing to do with them, and there actually wasn't a way for the employees to indicate whether it's done or delayed or anything. In other words, that timer was just bullshit.
I would guess the single mistake was that it was accidentality scanned as having being picked up, but wasn't actually picked up, it just sat on a shelf for a few hours.
After the rush calmed down people started saying "hang on, what's this pizza doing here", then they made a new one and delivered it.
Of course the correct thing to do is issue an apology and refund with the replacement.
An offer so good (dangerous, yes) that took a shitty pizza place to a current 16B-ish valuation is a failure?
This is actually a good example of a mediocre product growing due to an incredible offer. Something that most business don’t event bother to consider. Your offer is definitely more important than even features in most cases.
I read about that back then, thought "oh I should give Domino's another try", and it was still terrible. If it was even worse before, I can't imagine how that is possible.
I believe it was 1989 when Dominos came to Staten Island, NY, for the first time. They opened up in Old Town and the entire staff was migrated from GA. They used pickup trucks with Dominos colors and started hiring drivers.
I was one of them, and the policy sucked ass. There was zero incentive for us to beat 30 minutes, and when we did, the customer was always UNHAPPY that we got there on time and would not get any discounts. The tip always sucked when we beat the clock.
When we didn't beat the clock, we got a decent tip. Our manager was an old fart from GA, and while he didn't say anything to promote speeding, he didn't say anything about not beating the clock. After a few accidents in other shops, the whole thing was trashed, which is when the quality of the driver and tips improved significantly. I also don't recall that it was less busy when the policy was removed. All in all, I don't think anyone liked this policy.
This campagin is still alive in China today. But the circumstances are different tho, distances are closer (denser community), and drviers use mopeds insteads of cars (can navigate through cities faster than cars).
And if an order exceeded 30 mins, the customer will receive a 9-inch pizze coupon.
Similar is the case with apps like Uber Eats and Getir. I only know that in Getir they use different algorithms with artificial intelligence to find the shortest and fastest route. I'm sure other vehicles also use it, but I haven't heard such rumors about them.
IMO, what counts as "AI" is one of those "I know it when I see it" things, simply because trying to write a lawyer-proof definition isn't possible.
I'd argue that "AI" doesn't have to be attempting to achieve AGI to be considered AI. For example, "Computer" players in games are AI. This applies whether you're talking something as advanced as a deep strategy game like the Civ series, or something as basic as the ghosts in Pac-Man, or even an automated Tic-Tac-Toe player.
So...is a path finding algorithm "AI"? I dunno. I could go either way.
But like...I seriously can't come up with a real definition of "AI" that wouldn't end up including things that definitely aren't AI. For example, is AI simply any code that seems like it has agency and makes decisions? If so, then is any sort program that triggers execution based on certain detections "AI"? Certainly not. Is it code that attempts to mimic human behavior, even at a basic level? If so, then is AutoHotKey AI? Nope, definitely not.
Not entirely the same thing but navigation and path finding for delivery apps is not a solved problem everywhere.
Especially in places where street data isn't complete or works differently (no street names) than in the western cities where Google Maps etc. are developed.
> Were they that desperate for funding that they had to come up with some AI stuff for an already solved problem?
Path finding is one of the classic AI research areas, back when it mostly meant making robots able to interact with their environment. Yes, it's an "already solved problem", in that we already have several good enough algorithms derived from all that AI research; but that doesn't change the fact that this is "AI stuff", and it doesn't prevent new AI approaches from being used (perhaps something based on neural networks as a path finding heuristic, since we have a lot of computing power to spare nowadays).
Further evidence we should build a Futurama-style series of tubes in cities for delivering items. I'm not joking. Might need extra packaging to pin the pizza down to survive the forces however. Maybe stack the slices and wrap them or something.
I honestly believe a fully automated drone delivery system is easily possible with our current technology, the only issue would be funding and widespread adoption. And the delivery drivers annoyed at losing jobs
And inclement weather, and overhead wires, and crashes, and liability, and NIMBYs, and all the creeps (from local cops to data aggregators to foreign intel orgs) who want access to the data, and ...
You’d probably be able to hire those delivery drivers back as part of the huge fleet of “drone engineers” you’d need to maintain the fleet as they crash, get attacked, batteries run flat…
Will take this as an opportunity to complain about how sub-par dominos ordering is in Canada compared to Belgium. In Belgium, they have a modern website with a real-time tracker for when the food will arrive. In Canada, they have a progress bar that just says “out for delivery” without any indication of how long it will take.
Their website and ordering experience in Canada is so frustrating that I mostly stopped getting Dominos, except for exceedingly rare occasions
> Gig drivers don’t face an edict for speed like past Domino’s drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into the job, with drivers hurrying to make financial incentives, avoid bad ratings, and ensure the food is warm upon delivery.
Annoying corporate policy replaced by society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet - that we unlike the bad policy can't get rid of.