"Tony Delivers" - just order your food and send him a screenshot
"Tony Delivers" - just order your food and send him a screenshot
https://seattle.eater.com/2024/2/21/24079162/tony-delivers-seattle-delivery-app-fees-downtown
Tony Illes was working as an Uber Eats delivery person when an ordinance passed last year by the Seattle City Council came into effect in mid-January. The new rule required app companies to pay workers like Illes a minimum wage based on the miles they travel and the minutes they spend on the job. The apps say that this amounts to around $26 an hour, and both Uber Eats and DoorDash responded by adding $5 fees to every order (even when the customer is outside Seattle city limits) while calling for the law to be repealed. According to a recent DoorDash blog post, the ordinance has resulted in an “unprecedented drop in order volume,” a drop that Illes felt personally. He told Geekwire that “demand is dead” and told local TV station KIRO 7, “I didn’t get an order for like six hours and I was done.”
So Illes had an idea: Who needs these apps, anyway? He printed up signs with QR codes directing people to a bare-bones website with his phone number, promising that he would deliver food by bike in Uptown, South Lake Union, Belltown, and a chunk of the downtown core for $5 a pop from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily. All you had to do was order the food and send him the screenshot. He called himself “Tony Delivers.”
This is splendid. 100% fuck DoorDash and UberEats.
144Ordered some sushi and cold stone the other day.
Same parking lot.
The dasher picks up my ice cream, does another dash then goes and waits 20 minutes for my sushi for some reason then does another dash.
I was delivered a bag of melted ice cream and the container it was in.
Door dash offered me a refund that was less than the tip and said “they solved my problem” and then I cancelled my dash pass and they can go fuck themselves.
8
There should be more local cooperative delivery services. Small scale, profit sharing.
116I agree, the delivery services are definitely price gouging to a degree. It sucks that we're charged for delivery, service fees AND the item prices are inflated by around 20% too. Thing is, I think there's a bunch of reasons that TonyDelivers will eventually become as bad as the current market leaders. As his company grows, takes on employees, builds infrastructure, overheads increase, management grows - they'll fall into the same "traps"/profit seeking the other delivery companies have fallen into.
22Plus he's got to find a load more guys called Tony.
51They don't have to. Plenty of small businesses stay good and small.
The problem is the ones that spread like cancer.
3
I think the platform that allows efficient distribution of the requests is not that easy to come with. Would need some nice devs to open source one and put it on the fediverse maybe.
5Allocating a job to a driver is the easy part. It's all the other stuff people expect from a delivery app that's the hard part. Like having an accurate DB of stores and facilitating orders/payments. If you don't do that then people can troll with fake orders and stiff drivers. Plus moderation of drivers who steal food or are convicted burglars/rapists (existing apps already suck at that).
But a federated approach would be immensely more complicated to do well and is a privacy nightmare. You'd need to share buyer's address and drivers' current locations to many different instances to facilitate a buyer on one instance and potential drivers on several different instances. All that data needs to be available (and accurate to the minute) to the instance that assigns the job. Similar privacy/logistic issues pop up when you consider payments.
3https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_routing_problem
I think it already on github. I remember reading article on habr by Post of Russia that mentioned they use opensource planner for optimal routing.
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Damn, $5 sounds too cheap. I can't imagine ride to store, pick up at store during busy times and ride to the delivery to be less than 20m. That's barely minimum wage. Prob better off at $8 or $10. Still undercut rideshare rates. Then drop only if there's competition.
97Then also he has to get around. Either he pays for transport, or he has to keep his bike/scooter/whatever in shape.
41Not to mention, all that biking burns a lot of calories he's going to have to eat more to replace.
6
He's undoubtedly counting on tips.
14He might do like 2-5 deliveries per trip if they align.
13classic reddit response.
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don't read the article.
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state confidently that something (which is addressed the article) would be an insurmountable problem
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assert a solution that wouldn't help, but sounds empowering
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Get all the upvotes
He's on a fucking bicycle.
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Paid holiday, paid sickness, pension, occupational accident insurance.
Things that employees at UberEats, DoorDash and Tony Delivers don't get, but that Tony should be getting.
92If you're self-employed, you have to factor that into your tariff yourself. Let's hope Tony's savvy enough and can get by with such a low price.
14
According to a recent DoorDash blog post, the ordinance has resulted in an “unprecedented drop in order volume,”
No, you disingenuous stink sacks. Your $5 "you made an order in or around Seattle" fee did that. Orders would've continued unchanged if you hadn't raised fees.
89But that would have cut into their enormous share of the profits. What kind of monster are you?
38Yeah if investors can't make cartoonish returns for doing literally nothing what's even the point of gouging customers??
15
I stopped using food delivery apps last year. The prices were just absurd. If I want takeout, I go get it myself. This all started when I tipped a dasher and the service was awful. The guy stopped somewhere with my food for 15 mins and then delivered it cold and was rude when I asked why he stopped at a location for 15 mins. Tips are for good service, not shitty late-delivered, cold, food!
Last night, I looked on Grubhub for a restaurant, figured out what I wanted and the total was $34 (not including tip). I called the restaurant and went and got it myself, $25. That's a 36% upcharge for the app alone! Not including any tip!
46I can honestly say I've never used one. I looked at the prices, realised they were all jacked up before the delivery fees were added, and then just got it myself.
My local Chinese takeaway employs their own guy. I really don't know why we had to farm this problem out to silicon valley shysters.
26Yeah me neither.
Slower. More expensive. Exploitative.
Nah.
8My dad has been that guy! We sure ate a lottt of Silver Wok during that time 😋
4
Same. Last straw for me was when I got a pizza that was transported vertically, so it had folded over and the toppings were everywhere. I bought a pizza bag and a rear carrier for my bike and just go get my food every time now.
4The only good thing about delivery apps is that my 80 year-old parents need a job and can't get a job doing anything else at their age.
Everything else about them, from the cost, the cold food, to the wait for something from a shop five minutes away... is just crap.
0
The good side of a free market
25This is a good side? Because Tony most likely can't afford health insurance and probably isn't going to be able to save much for retirement.
This sounds like the desperate side of the non-corporate people involved in the so-called free market to me.
22He knows what is worth his own time to him. He can take routes only when they make sense to him. I looked at the map and it's an 8 Minute bike ride from middle to corner. That's $20 an hour worst case and $50 an hour on average.
He's making more by cutting out the middleman of Doordash who was profiting off his work.
1
Until his profile gets high enough that they find some permit he doesn't have and he gets shut down.
15That's how it was ideally supposed to work, if humans wouldn't be trainable to follow brands and ads.
Sadly they are, so I dunno. Maybe abolishing trademarks and outlawing unrequested ads would work.
After all, it is illegal to do to a person what they haven't requested, right? It is illegal to take a thing from your house without your permission. It should be illegal to put it in there also, it's the same thing mirrored. That would include unrequested ads.
Then we'll see how many people really want to see ads.
12
A girl did something like this in brazil but with nudes. She got really popular after she posted videos on tik tok and got sued by the government for advertising porn and then got even more popular.
24That's disgusting! There's so many though ... Which one!? Which Brazilian eGirl did this and where can we find her?
18Martina Oliveira
7So that we can meticulously avoid looking at her nudes, obviously.
4
Time is a flat circle
20Co-op delivery company in the works?!
Great on Tony, doing the damn thing!
https://fitsmallbusiness.com/what-is-a-cooperative-co-op/
A cooperative, or co-op, is an organization owned and controlled by the people who use the products or services the business produces. Cooperatives differ from other forms of businesses because they operate more for the benefit of members, rather than to earn profits for investors.
Co-ops are organized to provide competition, improve bargaining power, reduce costs, expand new and existing market opportunities, improve product or service quality, and obtain unavailable products or services (products or services that profit-driven companies don’t offer because they see them as unprofitable).
Cooperatives present lots of opportunities for small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs. In this post, I’ll go over how cooperatives work, why you should form one, and how you can start one for your business.
18These delivery services are prime candidates for cooperatisation... which after a quick search using quotes to filter out "corporatisation" it turns out is a word that serious people use.
Anyway, the reason for this is that they are minimal services - all you need is an app and the ability to get that app on people's phones - and almost no investment in infrastructure.
It would be so easy - conceptually, I know software is hard - to replace that app with a cooperative based model, and you could leverage open source to make a general platform that could be adjusted to individual coops' needs, and allowing a customer to use a single contact point for any affiliated services. Each coop then wouldn't meed to develop their own app, it would be ready made for them.
It could also use federation to link up groups for discovery and to weed out scummy groups.
20The fish and chip co-op that used to be nearby was the best - trawlers parked out the back, super fresh produce, generous portions and reasonable prices.
8A real co-op is an interesting thing.
They may require functioning law enforcement more than common kinds of companies, I think.
Well, at least it seems that co-ops were the easiest kind of organizations to victimize in Russian 90s, but I wasn't alive for the most part of it, and then wasn't quite intelligent enough.
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Tony should make a business of helping people set this sort of thing up for themselves!
11You mean like with multi-level marketing?
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That's awesome! Cutting off giant corporations and giving money directly to the person doing the work is exactly what we should be doing. I bet he is making more money than he would have had he worked for any of the food delivery companies even though it's cheaper.
6Many people prefer relative stability with lower average income over freedom.
2I understand that, but from my personal experience, this is not more stable because companies like these will fire a chunk of their workforce without batting an eye for the slightest shift in the market, whereas a self-employed person will just see a slight decline in demand. Also, the difference in income more than makes up for the perceived stability. Sure it isn't for everyone, but as a consumer, I'd rather most of the money I pay won't go to corporate executive's multi-million dollar salary, but to the people actually providing the service.
4EDIT: it seems you are talking about coop vs hired by corp. Even in relatively sane countries(even not EU) you can have stability in coop
1
What’s up homie? I’m Tony. 🤠
4It's not that crazy to think this might actually be tony responding lol. Unlikely
1
Damn I live just outside their range 😭
3Start MAT Delivers
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I know IRS or similar entities wouldn't like, but would it be possible to establish a peer to peer service.
No fees for restorants, all extra money to dashers, and clients would be screwed by service fees.
Honestly looks like a cool project I could look into, but what would be the legality of such services.
3