People really, really need to learn to cook for themselves. Nothing wrong with the odd takeout, or even delivery but I sense a lot of people live on deliveries all the time and waste a fortune

I remember seeing a video about a similar service in the Netherlands for delivered groceries.

They deliver by bike, are faster by bike.

...and still are a bit of a controversial issue.

I worked as an engineer at a food delivery company and I almost never used my own companies app, these companies charge both the customer and the restaurant and the restaurants raise the prices of their menu on the app to compensate for it, plus the delivery takes a long ass time and the food arrives cold. And the business is still mostly unprofitable and these companies stay afloat from investments while they suffer losses.

Isn’t most delivery in NYC done by bicycle?

It was always obvious that the shared delivery model would result in massive delivery fees. Store employees doing deliveries were always at least partially subsidized by sales. Going third party means another company needs to suck more profit out of each delivery.

This is dumb, hating for the sake of hating just shows a low level of thinking. Cars are very useful tools that have practical applications that aren't going away any time soon, and delivery services are an example of that.

The issue with cars is that we decided to designed our cities and towns around them at the expense of pedestrians, culture, and the environment. This has spawned societies that are plagued with long commutes, inactive lifestyles, dangerous infrastructure, smog, and an arms race to get comically huge cars. Criticizing the car industry, the car lobby, specific aspects of cars, or our urban layouts is perfectly valid. Blindly hating on cars just because they're cars is counterproductive.

Do delivery drivers in NYC really use cars? 🤨

Obviously we can't pretend that VC funded services like Uber are sustainable nor are the environmental and economic costs. But this aren't new concepts. Pizza delivery has been a thing my entire life (I'm in my 40s) and services for the elderly, disabled, and needy like Meals on Wheels have also existed for a long time.

We should be having a lot of discussions about support for services like meals on wheels, or on sustainable means of making small courier businesses viable (via bikes or scooters maybe). Instead we constantly get sidelined into this "only the Treatler Youth use Uber Eats to feed your hamburger addictions, why can't you just cook healthfully for yourself for every meal?!" version of discourse that doesn't help anyone and doesn't advance the needle on any actual solutions.

What do you want to me to do instead? Cook myself all the time? Go outside? No thank you.

Afaict it's 22$, you tipped 8$. That's a pretty wide margin.

Regardless, still too much, I just pick stuff up with my bicycle when I can.

"I have to order Doordash because I live in a food desert"

"Can you taxi to the grocery store and back for about the same as the delivery fee?"

"No"

I only demand the raw ingredients to be grown halfway around the world, shipped by climate-controlled container in giant cargo boats, trucked from the port to the backstore, kept in refrigerated display cases, and sold in disposable containers.

But it's the last mile that's going to change the world, you see.

A lot of people are bad with money and are way too ready to pay too much for convenience. This service has uses, but if you aren’t tied by need to use it, it’s pretty wasteful expenditure.