as crappy as the standard wage is for most employees of restaurants and grocery stores, yes, its way better than what doordash or instacart or postmates or whatever you use is paying out. These places, guess what, still deliver! i know how easy it is to succumb to "this is the app i know, i click the button without thinking of it.". But you know what's also just a button on an app? a dominoes order. while a dominoes driver doesn't make substantially more than an ubereats driver, there are big differences in:
- consistency of shifts/consistent payout per delivery. there's less of an unpredictability of going to a shift. according to robert, a dominoes and uber eat driver:
The biggest difference for me is that I was actually working regular time shifts, or I would tell them that they could call me if they got really busy as opposed to just flip on my app and look at it and ‘Oh, I don’t want to do that one because it’s not going to be profitable’.
With Dominos, you get sent to wherever...1
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tips are more consistent for pizza/chinese/etc delivery than food apps ("but i always tip 20% for my doordash order!" oooooooooh you are not the majority at alllllll)
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you have to pay for fewer supplies when working for a company as opposed to as a contractor for an app (pizza bag, etc)
in general though i think its a good thing to actively work on getting doordash/grubhub et all out of out your life. I know that for many thats like being told casually to quit smoking like its a simple weekend activity, but reducing the use of stuff like this is directly reducing your reliance on workers misclassified as contractors to enable sub-minimum wage. If not relying on subminimum wage work that you, personally, have control over not using2 is too much effort for you....i dont know what to tell you.
The same applies to grocery delivery, too. In my area stop and shop delivers without using instacart or the like, from store employees in store vehicles that the employees do not need to service themselves. i know safeway has a similar delivery service. there's fewer options than with food delivery but the options are there. and easy.
i get that this might seem petty or pointless relative to the massive scale and collective effort required for the problems the world faces now. but don't use that as an excuse to do nothing. as i imply in a footnote above, even among self identified "leftists" (a term that, online, is about as meaningless as when food calls itself "all natural") the dominant political ideology still defaults to an apathetic libertarianism, based on a tacit acceptance of the imperialist and colonialist structures that underpin capitalism to the point where actually going, okay, what can we do now to try and stop the bleeding a bit will get a strong negative reaction because, oops! that requires effort, and work beyond voting for bernie sanders twice and having a general awareness that the world could, in theory, be better through more community support of each other. well guess what. choosing a different delivery service based on how well they pay their workers is, basically, the least you can do. sure its effort but its like, bottom of the barrel level effort. its doing the same fundamental thing, but with a different interface. once you get into a different pattern it might stick and just becomes the new normal. if even that act of slight adjustment is too much, again, i don't know what to tell you other than...consider where your politics actually come from. consider how much is predicated on access to unquestioned extracted luxury thats Fine Actually merely because you can afford it and Hey, I Tip! stands up to a personal investigation of your morals
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source https://therideshareguy.com/uber-eats-vs-pizza-delivery-driver/
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and i do know that you don't have complete control over this, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism and all that. im typing this from a dell computer right now whose components, frankly, i have no clue the sourcing of. im sure at least something in it sources to some incredibly dismal foxconn factory or similar, not to mention the sourcing of so much else in this room of mine (tv, lithium and colbalt for reusable batteries, silicone watch bands made from petrochemicals, etc). i'm also well aware that being an employee for a company paying you the legally minimum wage and expecting tips to make up the difference is just as much a product of the legacy of slavery in the united states as the delivery app is. i just don't think that the acknowledgement of this means that you should write off any attempt to reduce dependency on this as pointlessly individual solutions to collective problems. maybe this is me going full Immanuel Kant idk but theres a healthy middle ground between using "no ethical consumption under captialism" as an excuse to go full south park apathetic libertarian regarding any attempt to reel in your reliance on unethical personal consumption and the other extreme of going full anprim, which while admirable is hardly scalable