[washicalendar]

Like the person you responded to said, employees working for those stores can do useful work when they aren’t delivering. Here the Domino’s are delivered by bicyclists and those people are doing work for the store when they’re waiting for deliveries. That work justifies them being paid a wage. For Postmates et al., those drivers aren’t doing anything useful during their downtime. They have nothing to sweep or dishes to clean etc. Postmates et al need to pay them enough to make it worthwhile for them, which gets passed onto the customers.

Personally, I’ve ordered a ton of food delivery lately from places I’ve wanted to try but never found time to go. But, I don’t order from them more than once, so those businesses aren’t making a customer out of me.

[mathieuh]

Yes but they said 50% of their income comes from tips and a $1 delivery fee.

I assume tips are generally more than $1 (I may be wrong).

Maybe it’s just not productive to compare different countries’ eating habits in the end, but it seems to me GP is saying that tips make up a meaningful proportion of delivery drivers’ income.

[washicalendar]

My bad, I misunderstood, but I’m not sure how tips are relevant.

It seems like the GP(?, the first poster in this chain) was saying that delivery works for places like Domino’s which hires and pays their own couriers a standard wage. That wage is already accounted for in Domino’s pricing, and since that employee has to show up to work even when there aren’t deliveries they can be put to work. Thus, there are no additional costs to Domino’s as everything is presumably priced taking this into account.

When you outsource your delivery, the company being hired takes a cut. That company (Postmates etc) need to use this cut to pay their couriers. Postmates can only ask for so much before the store just says no, it’s not worth it. Those couriers need to be paid enough that it’s worth it for them to keep delivering. So, Postmates scales up to make up for it in bulk by taking losses by offering deals. Those deals don’t last forever, and customers like me only order because of the deals will just go away.

[donavanm]

Yes, tips will be higher then $1. But thats only germane as a way of the deliverer receiving an average income thats higher than the minimum wage. In locales without prevalent tipping Im going to guess thats made up for with a higher wage or work piece pricing. From the competitive business side the real difference is in higher worker productivity & efficiency for the vertically integrated shop.

[ThrustVectoring]

Tips averaged between $3 and $4 per run, and I got 3 runs an hour at peak. That's more than half if you add all that up, but not all time is peak time, so it averaged closer to 50/50. Plus I subtracted out fuel and car costs from the delivery side of things to net stuff out.