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agate_ t1_iz1yysd wrote

Reply to comment by TheINTL in Orders delivered sized by subtotal and my earnings in 2022 [OC] by Altruistic_Olives

That's the thing: there aren't any corporate profits either. DoorDash consistently loses a hundred million dollars a quarter, and the more business they do, the more money they lose. Read that last phrase again: it's the sure sign of a broken business model.

The problem is easy to see from OP's chart: working 14 hours a day, he makes 2600 deliveries at $26,000/year, or $10 per delivery. Not many people are gonna pay $10 to have $10 worth of Taco Bell delivered, so DoorDash charges less than that and pays OP more, taking a loss.

If we want OP to earn an actual living wage, with health insurance and coverage for gas and wear and tear on his car, it's gonna cost at least $30 per delivery. Ain't nobody on Earth going to pay that much.

Whether you're a customer, a dasher, or a stockholder, Doordash just. Doesn't. Work.

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AftyOfTheUK t1_iz59r9y wrote

>If we want OP to earn an actual living wage, with health insurance and coverage for gas and wear and tear on his car, it's gonna cost at least $30 per delivery. Ain't nobody on Earth going to pay that much.

And as a society, we need to ask why they wouldn't.

That person considering paying also has a car, and gas, and wear and tear to pay for. They also have their own time that's worth something to them, just like the driver.

As a society, if we're in a position that someone with valuable time (say, a white-collar worker) and an expensive car with high gas prices CANNOT justify paying someone with less valuable time and a cheaper, better mileage car, we need to ask ourselves why - what barriers are we putting in place?

From an economical standpoint, having someone who earns 7$5k/year be unable to pay someone who earns $40k/year to do a simple task for them just means we have inefficiencies in our system that we need to work out. When we don't work them out, and leave the status quo, we have a far less efficient economy. The 75k guy has to waste his time and burn more gas to achieve something, and the 40k guy misses out on work.

I'd argue that your $30/hr figure is way too high though, given the number of people currently doing this work for far less.

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