DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why

More evidence Big Tech valuations are driven primarily by worker exploitation. Keep 'em coming.

• Ekaros · 12 hours ago

  It is not like they aren't exploiting businesses either... Looking at Amazon(retail) and almost all SaaS services...

  • toomuchtodo · 12 hours ago

    You eat an elephant one bite at a time. This bite was good, lots more bites to go. I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752 > “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.” "Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."

• ausbah · 12 hours ago

  the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VC’d their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasn’t been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it

  • shadowgovt · 12 hours ago

    And they mostly keep getting away with it because digital makes things preposterously more convenient. I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one. Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.

    • krispyfi · 12 hours ago

      It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?

      • saturn8601 · 12 hours ago

        Are you European or American? To a lot of America, that is considered a good numbers. Its worse in many parts of this vastly large country. The country has chosen to invest heavily in road networks. It appears that you can have one or the other but not both without great expense and reform. I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.

        • mfost · 10 hours ago

          That surface area map is a seriously bad argument: We are talking about bus lines here. Local transit just requires local lines. This isn't about train lines crossing through the whole country. And how come China does a much better job than the US while they have the same surface area? Why aren't you overlapping those two maps?

        • scun · 10 hours ago

          imgur is geoblocked for some of Europe

      • shadowgovt · 11 hours ago

        Wildly underfunded? I don't think so. America underfunded? Yes. There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way. I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement. But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.

• throwaway27448 · 12 hours ago

  Of course! that's always what "disruption" referred to.

• usaar333 · 12 hours ago

  Since when did doordash count as big tech?

  • toomuchtodo · 12 hours ago

    They're not FAANG or MANGA, but they're certainly at the top of https://www.ycombinator.com/companies with 8600 employees and an $82B market cap (as of this comment, ticker DASH). Is "Big Tech" reserved only for the "FAANG MANGA"? If so, my apologies.

    • usaar333 · 11 hours ago

      Yeah that's not big tech. $1 trillion market cap is big tech or 30k+ employees. This is upper end of mid sized. No yc alum counts as big tech

      • jackb4040 · 10 hours ago

        Boy I could not disagree more

• saturn8601 · 12 hours ago

  Valuation yes, but if we take a step back, there must be value there. The idea of Uber really provided benefits to many groups. Example: minorities who were discriminated against by regular taxis, declining service level due to Taxi monopolies, etc. (Similar issues that Doordash solved as well.) How can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between? Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved: 1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves? 2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation? 3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors? I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.

What does "this is not a pay wall" mean - if I have to give personal information over, that is a price. Didn't read - too expensive.

• cgio · 12 hours ago

  I am so trained now, that I didn’t even read what they were asking for. Just closed the tab and came here to see if there was anything of value. Too expensive to even read their wall.

  • qurren · 12 hours ago

    Yep this is what I did as well. I also just close tabs if it ever pops up a "sign up for our newsletter" thing.

• marricks · 12 hours ago

  I mean, test@example.com worked so info doesn't have to be that personal...

• rsingel · 12 hours ago

  Journalism is labor

  • jgalt212 · 12 hours ago

    Information wants to be free. But other than AI slop (where the tokens have become too cheap to meter), information costs money to produce. Pay with you info or your money. It's amazing how many people just cannot come to grips with that concept.

• glitchcrab · 12 hours ago

  https://archive.is/RWt8f

• rurp · 12 hours ago

  Disabling javascript let me read the whole article without any account nonsense.

  • hapax_legomena · 12 hours ago

    I just reload the page and hit 'esc' a bunch of times right after it loads but before the paywall pops up. Works on 3/4 of these soft paywalled sites.

  • andrewflnr · 12 hours ago

    Firefox reader mode also did it.

• pluc · 12 hours ago

  Your identity isn't considered of value to you, you can't monetize it. We can, but since it has no value to you, give it to us for free.

• thehamkercat · 12 hours ago

  Works with any random email, kinda fine tbh

Seems like they spent more on campaigning than they did on the extra pay and fines here though. Who's making these financial calculations?

• bootlooped · 12 hours ago

  They just agreed to a $131 million settlement. The article says this is a hundred times what they spent to prevent Mamdani from getting elected.

• bee_rider · 12 hours ago

  Presumably somebody who thinks the Mamdani’s policies will be popular and spread to other jurisdictions. After all, why campaign against an idea that you think will fail? It’d exist as a prominent warning flag for the next group that considers it.

• xboxnolifes · 11 hours ago

  How did you come to that conclusion? The very first sentence explicitly explains that to be false.

• Sohcahtoa82 · 9 hours ago

  In what world is $1.4M greater than $131M?

services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25. then delivery worker made $5 on that order. + the delivery worker expects a tip. which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.

• ehe78qhe · 12 hours ago

  I thought they were built on "time is money". If you make the equivalent of $70 an hour, do you care about spending $15 for someone to bring you lunch and save you 15-30 minutes of your workday?

  • dieselgate · 12 hours ago

    The gig workers are still suckers because gig work sucks. But yes the service is most sensible for higher paid consumers.

    • moate · 11 hours ago

      ...only because the company is committing wage theft to subsidize costs. I don't think it feels reasonable to say "Your employer has to meet certain wages, but they didn't so you're a sucker". If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers. Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.

  • odyssey7 · 11 hours ago

    It was kind of fun doing this math back when I was a freelancer. An hour saved would literally produce more money than the order cost. But really, it would have been better to save the money by making food ahead of time.

    • drop_star · 11 hours ago

      Ya I dont get this argument. Takes me all of 2 mins to grab my lunch in the morning. It's also not a greasy burger that shortens my lifespan and physically disable's me.

      • drdaeman · 11 hours ago

        The whole point of food delivery is for the occasions you can’t (e.g. sudden illness, or time management mishaps) or don’t want to (laziness/tiredness) cook or drive to grab a takeout. You pay a premium for the convenience, someone else takes care of it. Nothing wrong with that, no “suckers” in the general scheme.

    • WesleyJohnson · 11 hours ago

      I've always struggled with this thinking. Yes, you have finite hours in a day and if you spend an hour going to get food then you can't necessarily also be doing freelance work. But if you planned on working 8 hours to earn X dollars, you can still work 8 hours after spending an hour going to get food and still make X dollars. Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep. I guess it makes sense if you're trying to work every waking moment; and I can appreciate that some choose to and some have to.

      • Joker_vD · 11 hours ago

        > Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep. Well, if you value an hour of your sleep or entertainment less than $15 dollars (if, for instance, you like to cook), then sure, spend it on cooking instead. Many of people would rather not, and their revealed preferences show it pretty clearly.

  • someonebaggy · 11 hours ago

    Tony Xu spent three times as much time as the driver did, did he?

  • gennarro · 11 hours ago

    Except they increase the charges of the food also, so you are getting taken advantage of there as well.

  • itopaloglu83 · 11 hours ago

    It’s not just “time is money”, but also the convenience as well. Sometimes you’re sick and need a hot meal, or you’re busy helping someone, etc. Edit: Spelling. “right” to “sick”.

  • kelnos · 10 minutes ago

    This sort of framing is never really valid, because when we go out to pick up our lunch, we generally do not lose part of our wages (for salaried employees). We may stay in the office a little bit longer to make up for it, but then that's a completely independent decision about how much that time is worth to us, plus how much we are willing and able to pay for that time. You might say "going home from the office 30 minutes earlier is absolutely worth $15" to me, but that has little to do with what your effective hourly wage is.

• sokoloff · 12 hours ago

  I don’t think paying someone to perform a service for you makes you a sucker. I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).

  • wat10000 · 12 hours ago

    It’s not like they hide anything about what they’re offering. They advertise service X for price Y and that’s what they deliver. Seems fine. If you don’t think Y is worth it for X then don’t use it. Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.

    • Joker_vD · 11 hours ago

      Oh come on, all of the service personnel survive on the tips alone just fine, like the cashiers, and the nurses, and the receptionists do. Right?

    • nonfamous · 11 hours ago

      Well, they hide the fact that the food prices are marked up for one thing. Even if you pick up yourself, menu prices in DoorDash are at least 20% above the restaurant’s posted prices. That undisclosed upcharge comes on top of the delivery fees and service charges they do disclose — but only after you have made your order.

      • wat10000 · 9 hours ago

        I don’t see a problem with that. They show a price for a product. They have no responsibility to inform you that a lower price for the same product is available elsewhere.

        • kyleee · 9 hours ago

          It’s still rude, have you no shame?

          • sokoloff · 8 hours ago

            This is what distributors do. I don't feel cheated when an Amazon sellers offers something that I can buy for 40% less direct from China, or when a store sells me a loaf of bread for $4 that they paid $2.75 for. If it's worth it to me at the price offered, I'll buy it. If it's not, I won't.

            • dgently7 · 7 hours ago

              amazon is a bad example for this because they aren't just saying here is x for y$. they force the sellers into paying at least y everywhere, even if amazon has nothing to do with the sale. they are using their semi-monopoly to raise your price on x everywhere. sort of the opposite of the "the market will solve it" approach.

      • kelnos · 39 minutes ago

        Aren't the prices marked up by the restaurant, not by DoorDash? I thought it was common practice for restaurants to list higher menu prices on DoorDash (and other delivery platforms) to help offset the platform's cut they take from the restaurant. (Which sounds entirely reasonable to me.) I'm not sure why DoorDash should be responsible for disclosing that; DoorDash may not even know what the regular in-person menu prices are in the first place. The solution to this is to stop allowing delivery services to take a cut of the restaurant's revenue. Instead they should be required to raise their delivery/service fees charged to the customer. Of course, this will likely result in fewer customers, so they don't want to do that, but it's the only honest thing to do. I get that the delivery services do provide value to the restaurants in many cases, but ultimately the customer pays for it either way, so that cost should be made explicit to the customer.

    • jamilton · 10 hours ago

      Most states allow tips to be deducted from wages down to sub-minimum wages for for most tipped workers. Which sucks to be clear, just saying it's not unique to ride-share drivers.

      • wat10000 · 9 hours ago

        That’s bad and should be considered theft. But what DD did is even worse. They didn’t just reduce pay, they hid what they were doing and didn’t even show a tip to the driver unless the tip was more than the guaranteed pay. And they did this to the tune of over sixteen million dollars.

        • dzhiurgis · 6 hours ago

          > And they did this to the tune of over sixteen million dollars So like $1 per driver? Also it's not like the tips they earn correlate with service drivers can provide. At most you can be a bit faster, but generally bound to traffic? (I haven't used them tbh).

          • llbeansandrice · 4 hours ago

            You are excusing literal theft to the tune of $16mm. And the excuse is that the company is so large and vast and dominant that the scale to the company is a drop in the bucket. Does the theft of $16mm become worse if DoorDash was half the size? If I steal $16mm I’d go to jail but it’s no big deal because a corporation did it? The apologia for this is baffling to me.

            • dzhiurgis · 4 hours ago

              Relax it's basically an accounting error.

              • kelnos · 22 minutes ago

                Not to the drivers, it isn't. Not sure why you seem to think that the company only matters here, and the workers are irrelevant. (And no, it's not $1 per driver, way to argue in bad faith.)

          • khriss · 44 minutes ago

            I genuinely don't understand how corporate propaganda in the US got people to get to the point where defending corporations is like a Pavlovian reflex for some people.

      • kelnos · 33 minutes ago

        I think this is different, though. The phenomenon you are talking about is customarily applied to hourly workers, where they are paid a set hourly wage for the time they're on the job, and then tips can deduct from that hourly wage. Hourly workers see both sides of this and can do the math, and know what their take-home will be based on their hourly wage and the tips they accept. For a DoorDash delivery driver, the problem is transparency. Consider a $7 delivery with a customer tip of $5, and the difference between being told: "This delivery offers you $7", or "This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $5 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $2, so the total you receive is still $7." In both cases the customer behavior and end result for the driver is the same, but in the first case DoorDash doesn't even mention the tip, and quietly pockets it. Another example, with a driver tip of $10 instead: "This delivery offers you $7, and the customer added a tip of $3", or "This delivery offers you $7, the customer has added a $10 tip; we have reduced the delivery offer to $0, so the total you receive is $10." The 2nd statement in both cases is the honest one, but of course that would make drivers feel cheated, so DD says the 1st thing, and completely hides that they offset "wages" with tips. Regardless, I personally think this practice (for regular hourly employees or delivery drivers) is garbage; in my state, the tipped minimum wage is set to the same value as the non-tipped minimum wage, so employers don't get to pull that crap.

  • BeetleB · 10 hours ago

    It's been years since I used DoorDash, so I don't remember: Are you saying they don't charge any fees other than the (inflated) price of goods? I'd rather the price of goods be fixed, and they tell me what the delivery fee is.

    • anon7000 · 1 hour ago

      Generally, they inflate prices (or take some % from the restaurant, so the restaurant has to increase prices). And have a small delivery fee. And have a small “city wants DoorDash to pay its workers fairly, so it’ll charge you an arbitrary amount extra” fee And a bag fee. And sales tax. And a tip Oh and don’t forget the service fee. I’m not kidding, this is from a recent receipt. There are 6 fees PLUS the cost of the actual food. Other delivery platforms are similar

• handfuloflight · 12 hours ago

  This just translates to "anyone paying a margin on anything anywhere is a sucker." You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.

• askafriend · 12 hours ago

  My time is more expensive than the $15 extra I pay for the food...who's the sucker. I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.

• Aboutplants · 12 hours ago

  Eh, the difference is that DoorDash is a logistics company performing a service that restaurants do not like running (delivery). It’s not a middleman providing no value

  • mschuster91 · 11 hours ago

    The problem is they use exploitative labor practices (as we're seeing here) and price-dumping funded by infinite amounts of venture capital. It sets customer expectations to unsustainably low pricing and it forces restaurants to either heavily subsidise their own delivery drivers to keep customer prices low or, because barely anyone can sustain that, to shut down their own delivery service and use <gig company> instead. And that in turn gives doordash, uber eats and whatnot access to a lot of data - who orders what and lives where or which restaurant is doing good and which is struggling - that can be sold to third parties. Governments (ICE and other agencies have been caught to just buy data from aggregators), advertisers, credit reporting agencies, political parties, you name it. Sure. As a customer the value that doordash et al provide is hard to understate. A single point of contact, a single set of credentials, a unified UI compared to what used to be a ton of never-updated garbage wordpress installs, reliable tracking... but as a whole, we all lose.

• malfist · 12 hours ago

  > literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so. It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat? Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers? I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.

  • ndriscoll · 11 hours ago

    Skip the line passes are an obvious sucker play; they oversell tickets to the park so that people can go on like 1 ride every 4 hours, then charge again to actually be able to use the ticket you already bought (and simply don't deliver service to the others). Do you think they are unaware of the capacity at which reasonable latencies can be maintained?

    • jayrot · 11 hours ago

      In case you, or anyone else, actually care or are interested, there's a great deep dive video on the history of "FASTPASS" by the youtube channel Defunctland.

      • brendoelfrendo · 10 hours ago

        The Shapeland reveal made me jump out of my chair.

  • bluegatty · 10 hours ago

    "It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. " It's quite different and that's the point. The issues beyond 'apparent value creation are': 1) asymmetries in power between different actors that induces some to make ill advised actions - passing off hidden costs and especially risks 2) externalisations - aka damaging the environment, labour regs (which exist due to 1) 3) misrepresntations in value to end customer - dark patterns, hidden fees, risks not apparent in the transaction. Entire industries would not work if we had to properly account for a lot of things. "I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ri" <- it's not just the 'price' that is high and you're 'willing to pay' - that's fine. That's definitely not 'rip off' because you're not coerced in any way for that - that's just 'high prices. The $10 bottle of water at an event <- that is a 'rip off'. It's all the other things in the system that make it problematic. Last mile delivery by poor people almost should not exist as a business because it depends on externalizing too many things. If they provided healthcare, vacation, job security, didn't force people to run around, all that stuff that removes the 'power and information asymmetry' - and then - it still works as a business, fine but it generally wont. Some businesses are structurally unsound, and people invest in them to take advantage of broken systems (social, regulatory) at the margins. Gambling, day trading. A lot of zero-sum stuff. Now 'Robot Delivery' - that's an entirely different prospect. That's an attempt at real value creation. If we got our act together, everything could be delivered by little robots - today - already in 2026. It would reuire a lot of coordination.

    • llbeansandrice · 4 hours ago

      I wonder how quickly businesses would advocate for better land use and city planning if these externalities were more apparent and properly accounted for instead of providing “convenience” in a system that has been designed to be inconvenient.

  • trhway · 10 hours ago

    > That $10 hamburger fast-rise sugar infested bun, non-organic antibiotic infested horrendous animal welfare beef, etc. - the BOM is well under $5, i'd think $3 at best. So, you pay $25 for sub-$5 bill of low quality materials (not good to your health with thus additional expenses down the road). Who is the sucker?

    • sershe · 10 hours ago

      The guy who buys organic, an obvious marketing gimmick with zero scientific evidence behind it... Sorry, couldn't resist.

      • trhway · 9 hours ago

        Fully understand you. I thought for long that way myself. My cat though for example clearly knew the difference :) With time i learnt it myself.

  • wombat-man · 10 hours ago

    I think there's a business there, for sure, but the markup is definitely a problem for some. I think below a certain order volume it might be hard to get enough delivery people at the ready. As they ask customers to absorb more of the cost the volume could drop. If they don't have enough delivery people then that adds to the delivery time which makes it less and less worth it, at least to me. I really dislike the unreliable delivery times. 99% of the time I just use the apps, or more likely the restaurant's site, to place the order and pick it up myself. I have the time to do this though, so maybe it's more valuable to busier people, like parents.

• tstrimple · 12 hours ago

  Doordash and grubhub are insane for single food purchases. But the fees are barely noticed when feeding my family of 5. We use it every other week or so just because of how chaotic school activity schedules can be. When we order sushi/chinese for the kids the bill before any delivery services is around $200 for enough food for dinner and another meal with leftovers. The service charge is like $7 and I make sure the driver gets at least $10 regardless of the distance. Cheaper than if we ate in the restaurant and were expected to give a 15-20% tip.

  • lattalayta · 11 hours ago

    Depends on the restaurant, but each food item is typically more expensive in app (10-30%). And that's before they add fees, service charges, tips, tax, etc.

  • cgriswald · 10 hours ago

    > Cheaper than if we ate in the restaurant and were expected to give a 15-20% tip. You should run that experiment. Get two identical meals, one via delivery the other at the restaurant. Pay close attention to menu prices.

• robomartin · 12 hours ago

  > services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality. Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that. What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc. See the difference there?

  • someonebaggy · 11 hours ago

    Sounds like you agree that suckers pay more.

  • mandeepj · 11 hours ago

    > Mandated and forced on everyone. Nope. It's a marketplace. Your above argument is perfectly applicable to it as well.

  • moate · 11 hours ago

    If you think "high earners with company subsidized plans"(where I assume you fall based on the general demographics of this site, but correct me if I'm wrong) were the target audience of the ACA, you're right to be pissed. It was for the un/underinsured, and people with preexisting conditions. But your comparison is wrong, because you can...elect to not use the service. You could pay less for less coverage (so like, buying food without paying for a delivery fee because you don't need the convenience). Also, the individual mandate was killed (sucking funding out of the whole program), so you could opt out of the service entirely. Nobody is forcing you to have insurance (at a federal level). See the difference there?

  • rootusrootus · 10 hours ago

    > Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to In a sense, I agree with this assessment, and I think it should be corrected. We should allow people to have the older, less expensive plans with their lifetime caps and preexisting condition exclusion. We'd need to work out the details on whether or not we would allow someone choosing those plans from coming back to the ACA plans in the future, though. Maybe for the right price it could work out. Definitely adds complexity, however.

  • preg_match · 5 hours ago

    Your previous plans were subsidized by the insurance company stealing money, basically. As soon as we said “you can’t steal” then surprise! Your plan is more expensive. They stole through denying claims, denying coverage, and more. The reality is that if Obamacare didn’t exist, I would be uninsurable. Yes that might bring your price down. For a bit, until you also become uninsurable, then you’re also fucked. Yes insurance can be very cheap if you only take on fit, healthy clientele who will never use your insurance. But yeah, for society that sucks so we stopped doing that.

• peezd · 11 hours ago

  It's just a standard reintermediation play, inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides. Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage . this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.

• jackb4040 · 10 hours ago

  The enshittification model, but with an extra step because they actually have to employ labor. First they exploit their own gig workers, to make an unsustainably cheap product and corner users. Then they exploit users, to monopolize distribution and corner restaurants. Then they exploit restaurants, threatening to cut off distribution entirely if they don't get an increasingly large share of profits.

• quickthrowman · 10 hours ago

  Food delivery services offer convenience for a price. If I hire a courier service to bring some materials and tools to one of my electricians, it’ll cost me a minimum of $50. I can pay a bit extra for food and $10 in tips and fees to have it delivered to me instead of spending half an hour driving to go get it myself. I know what I’m paying for and value the service they provide.

• sershe · 9 hours ago

  I was just ordering some food on Uber eats and noticed that my bill for 50 bucks of food came to $75 or something. So I decided it was wasteful and I'll drive and pick it up myself. I wasted half an hour of my life and driving at rush hour was also stressful. That wouldn't be worth it for 25 bucks but it turned out Uber somehow has a lower price than in person so that brought it down to 21 and then in the restaurant despite it being a counter place with no sitting they pressure you to tip way more than Uber app and I kind of autoclicked it, so my savings are down to like 10 bucks for 30 minutes of stressful driving and waiting in line. I think the delivery charge is totally worth it, especially if you order multiple meals and make any amount of money at your job. You're just paying for convenience and I'm not convinced you're getting ripped off at all. Having some dude drive around town with your burger is expensive. If anything if the allegation is he is underpaid, it should be even more expensive.

• kelnos · 19 minutes ago

  > services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25. Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but when I use these services, the price comes out to something like 20%-30% more than the in-restaurant cost (yes, including the common practice of restaurants increasing menu prices on delivery sites to offset the delivery company's cut of their revenue). Sure, it's often not cheap, but when I use these services it's because I do not want to go and do the pickup myself. I'm paying for that convenience, and I'm fine with it. If you're not, that's fine; no one is forcing you to use delivery services. In any cases where they are actually violating labor laws or being deceptive with their pricing or practices, yes, they should absolutely be punished and stop doing that. But that doesn't change the fact that they provide a service -- delivering food to your door -- and businesses generally charge you when they provide a service. You can argue that the charge on offer is too high for you, but that's a personal decision for everyone to make. And even if it does cost $15 to deliver a $10 burger in some scenarios, there are times when I am happy to do that to save myself 30-45 minutes of driving somewhere, finding parking, waiting, and driving home. My time has value to me, and sometimes I'd rather spend it sitting on my ass at home than driving around town. Lazy? Maybe. But it's my choice.

only $1.4M? DD was not confident in their efforts to stop Mamdani. This is like a couple weeks of work from high priced political consultants in NYC.

• probably_wrong · 12 hours ago

  The article disagrees: > At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race

• thrance · 10 hours ago

  They knew that tons of other PACs and democracy-hating billionaires like Bill Ackman had their back. Cuomo spent $65 (!!!) per vote received, while Mamdani was at $15. Just shows the power of being a politician that actually cares.

If they were honest about it and said something like "we believe our actions were fair and legal and disagree with this decision" it would at least be ideologically consistent. > In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.) This is villain shit.

• InsideOutSanta · 12 hours ago

  "Simply put, we screwed up. We should have given Cuomo two million so we can keep underpaying Dashers."

Even though the press likes to give Mamdani all the credit for these types of things, this started with a law passed under DeBlasio, and most of the investigation was done under Adams.

• xrd · 12 hours ago

  Mamdani deserves credit for taking this all the way. Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel." I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.

  • giancarlostoro · 12 hours ago

    > taking this all the way. How did you arrive to this conclusion?

    • iaw · 12 hours ago

      I think they just explained how corrupt the prior mayor was, this coupled with the disclosure by Mamdani about every prior mayor hiding air safety data after 9/11 paint a damning picture of the priorities of prior NYC mayors in recent memory.

  • Aunche · 9 hours ago

    Yes, the road is long and these sorts of investigations take time. Eric Adams is an old-school, working-class New Yorker. They tend to be corrupt, but they do get stuff done. His administration resolved a $20M Chipotle lawsuit, then launched and resolved a $39M Starbucks lawsuit.

• tclancy · 12 hours ago

  >most of the investigation was done under Adams. Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.

• devindotcom · 11 hours ago

  really we should be giving credit to hammurabi for developing the idea of laws in the first place. where would deblasio be without him??

  • Aunche · 9 hours ago

    Is that the explanation your boss forced you to accept when you did 90% of the work and he took all the credit?

• Freedom2 · 9 hours ago

  Perhaps we should give credit to Adams' parents for having a child, else the investigation would have never kicked off.

Josh Johnson has a great bit about Mamdani: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SCKj7gwbYrc

I'm not so sure this is a victory lol

> Founders: Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore (Stanford students at the time) Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.

• verdverm · 12 hours ago

  Is a dr EA k meme appropriate here? (⌐_⌐)ノ Empathy (•ᴗ•)つ Apathy

• ok_dad · 12 hours ago

  Too bad having their names associated with this immoral politicking won’t cause them problems. An employee stealing a few hundred bucks would get a felony and probably never work a good job again. Founders stealing hundreds of millions from workers get to say whoopsie.

  • sassbadger · 11 hours ago

    Not even a whoopsie. Look how many responders here defend this exploitative behavior that is only enabled through monopolization as "the market regulates this", or "nobody forces them to buy/work there". Pure libertarian brain rot, no better than the communists they always cry about.

• lern_too_spel · 12 hours ago

  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760317/how-to-rule-... is eye opening. When many of us were in college, there was still some idealism about using technology to make the world a better place. Maybe that still exists at some universities, but Sand Hill Road wiped that out of Stanford.

Uber wants DoorDash gone and DoorDash is just making it too easy.

DoorDash and gig companies generally are a play to destabilize employment and turn as many people as possible from employees entitled to benefits and legal protections into contractors that can be discarded at whim. How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers?

• healsdata · 10 hours ago

  Their appeal initially was that they would deliver for places that didn't have their own drivers. So you went from only getting pizza and Chinese delivery to anything being available. Now, everyone is offloading their deliveries to DoorDash. Wendy's first-party delivery is just a wrapper for DoorDash. Pizza Hut used DoorDash if they don't have enough drivers available. Even PetSmart or Petco uses DoorDash for delivery now. Not saying it's right or good, but you could order from Pizza Hut and still get a gig worker if their driver called out stick today.

• tokioyoyo · 10 hours ago

  To play devils advocate, pre-UberEats era, we maybe had deliveries from Pizza places and some Chinese shops. Being able to order from basically everywhere and any time is very convenient. Restaurants are generating more sales as well, so it’s mostly the consumer, by choice, spends more on their dinner.

• Sohcahtoa82 · 10 hours ago

  > How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers? One word: variety. My local sushi place isn't going to have enough delivery orders to justify having delivery drivers on staff. Heck, I remember years ago (Was it the late 90s?) when McDonald's tried to do delivery.

  • cdrnsf · 10 hours ago

    I'll concede the point on variety but I don't think the platforms or their terms are fair to restaurants, delivery drivers or perhaps even customers (though they're clearly choosing to engage). Our favorite Mexican food place in town will fill the orders but isn't happy with them and I imagine they're not alone.

    • kelnos · just now

      [delayed]

• kelnos · 2 minutes ago

  [delayed]

Ever since it was found that they took part of driver's tips for themselves, I didn't trust the company https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/27/doordash-new...

Money influencing politics again exposes flaws in our democracies. Shocking.

This is a reminder to the naive people who think things are getting worse financially because covid/immigrants/gas/AI/supplychain/[insert BS reason], and not just the 1% greed. Things got bad and living wages are not enough substantially after covid at the same time when billionaires are getting exponentially richer, and all above excuses up there are only to distract the public from this simple fact: your life is getting worse because someone way wealthier is stealing your money, and unfortunately legally too because who writes and approves these legislation and laws is part of the game.

• method_capital · 11 hours ago

  Ok, I'll bite. How are the "wealthier ... stealing [our] money"? We don't have to use doordash or claude code or aws or amazon or anything else. We get to choose. When it comes to paying for government, however, I don't believe we're allowed to "opt out". Maybe Mamdani will give us stores so great we'll be forced to shop at them!

  • watwut · 10 hours ago

    Wealthy choose the goverment amd most of its agenda. People dont get much choice and choosing from available options is framed as "support".

    • method_capital · 10 hours ago

      Doordash - ie "the wealthy" - spent to prevent Mamdani from getting elected. They failed. What on earth are you complaining about again?

      • thrance · 10 hours ago

        Mamdani is very much the exception that confirms the rule. And ever since he's been inaugurated, he's been turned into a boogeyman by the right, successively called a "communist", then an "islamist", and often both. And even in his own party, the dominant """moderate""" branch does everything it can to hide his success and popularity, from fear that the electorate would wake up to how utterly corrupt and ineffective the DMC is.

      • jackb4040 · 10 hours ago

        You're insulting the intelligence of everyone on this website by even attempting this argument. The handful of upset elections by young socialists who want to decrease the political hegemony of billionaires does not amount to evidence that the political hegemony of billionaires isn't real.

  • thrance · 10 hours ago

    > How are the "wealthier ... stealing [our] money"? Wages not catching up with inflation? Everything getting more expensive? The BBB giving massive tax cuts to the rich, while cutting government programs (which are a form of redistribution)? > We get to choose Up to a point, and it's naive to think that people are getting poorer only because of bad personal choices. The younger generations not being able to afford homes isn't because they're all bad with their finances. Treating housing as a speculation vehicle instead of an essential commodity is a political choice, and it was made by a political class completely permeated by moneyed interests. Look, you don't even need to know about the "how". The gini index is getting worse, billionaires are turning into trillionaires while public infrastructure and social services are crumbling. It's natural, and correct, to connect the dots.

    • tokioyoyo · 10 hours ago

      > The younger generations aren't able to afford homes because they're all bad with their finances Home ownership of Gen Z is aligned with millennials’ home ownership at their time. I agree about the K shape economy stuff, but it’s a bit more tricky than “everyone is poor”.

      • jackb4040 · 10 hours ago

        Millenials were in college during the Great Financial Crisis. They're not exactly an example of a generation whose aspirations were met.

  • tamimio · 10 hours ago

    You don’t get to choose, that is the illusion of choice that everyone (or rather most) believes. The stealing is indirect, and it has many forms like: - tax structure: investment income get taxed less than payroll etc etc - tax avoidance: offshore, trusts, using companies to write off the tax plus the benefit provided by the government on these write offs. Using assets to loan more with speculation, worse, the buy borrow die model where they borrow against the asset and the heirs inherit the gains never taxed, among many ways and loopholes. - asset inflation: low interest rates increase the stock and property, good for who owns it, while the poor get to pay higher rent, the cantillon effect - the housing and zoning topic, and how it’s one of the pillar of such indirect money stealing, a topic that needs a book to describe but the solution is simple, depreciating housing as assets. - monopolies and few (or one) companies controlling the price, or hold down the wages, to keep poor people poorer and shifting the money more to who controls the scheme - poor people end up usually paying even more with overdraft fees or higher interests, punishing the poor even further, and these interests goes to lenders and shareholders. - that leads the wealthy to be able to lobby to shape the interests and taxes to their liking, the subsidies etc. when a crisis or hard time happens, all tax payers get to pay and shoulder that but in times of booms the profit stay and remain private. And many more cases or situations, hell, not just monetary stuff, even remote work was attacked because it shifts a slight of power dynamics to employees rather than the employers.

  • settsu · 9 hours ago

    > We don't have to use doordash or claude code or aws or amazon or anything else. I know you think you're dunking here, but unfortunately you're just proving that either: - You genuinely don't understand how the real works for vast amounts of people, in which case it would behoove you to educate yourself (maybe start by looking into topics like food deserts or Walmart's business practices in small towns) - You're consciously making a strawman argument, in which case please don't insult us with that BS

(YC 2013)

• routing_table · 6 hours ago

  We need a black bar on HN not just whenever a prominent computer scientist passes away, but also when a YC company behaves unethically. But it's too impractical. It'll probably be on throughout the year.

I hope no one orders from anything from them ever again