[jfengel]

I'm surprised it has taken this long. Everything I thought I knew about economics (and basic finance) has pointed in the direction of imminent pain for consumers, but what I've been hearing is more of a dull ache at most.

I don't want a crisis, and if we avert one I'll happily update my beliefs. But even if the crisis comes I'll have to figure out why it has been so slow.

[electric_muse]

You’re probably underestimating how much credit is available to people. Having money issues? Keep paying your car while you borrow money from Klarna for your DoorDash chipotle.

[Terr_]

Even as someone who barely cooks, I can't fathom the apparent popularity of DoorDash etc. versus the extra cost you have to pay.

[crdrost]

I mean they hide it as best they can. Big restaurants like Applebee's you'll see "2 for $28" not priced at $28 so you can guesstimate the squeeze but otherwise you kinda have to go straight to Starbucks or McDonalds using a mobile app to order your "usual" to compare "here's what it looks like if I use DoorDash, here's what it looks like if I go myself," to find that the actual delivery fee is some $20-25 per order. Even worse, I'm pretty sure that they test algorithms to try to selectively lower this for new customers so that in the early days when you're more aware of the cost it seems like a steal.

Of course, you can arrive at the $20 just by thinking, "okay, I need someone to go do an errand for me, they'll have to drive to the restaurant, wait there for 15-20 minutes, and then bring it back... so it'll cost $15 for the hour of their time plus a few bucks of overhead for the platform plus a few bucks of messed-up-my-order insurance..."

Which gets us to 5 years from now when the DoorDash killer comes out, it'll be called Kourier or something starting with a K, and it'll start with trying to give Target a way to call up some extra trained Target employees, but they're cross-trained in packaging orders for K. One person will pick up 10 carefully-packaged K-orders, take them all to the central delivery hub, they'll get sorted into driverless cars that plot through some neighborhood some 10 stops, it'll be marketed as a real Amazon-killer and fly under DoorDash's nose -- InstaCart might balk, but DoorDash won't. Until they reveal some pizza-delivery partnership and suddenly within a year every restaurant has some K-employee working for them, whose job it is to batch orders down to the bikes that come by.

Sure, delivery times for Kourier will be 75, 80 minutes long at first. People won't mind because you pay $4 for delivery instead of $20. And Doordash/Amazon won't die, Amazon will just buy Kourier and DoorDash will focus on more rural locales.

[Terr_]

> it'll be called Kourier or something

I'll be disappointed if it isn't like Snow Crash (1992):

> The Deliverator, in his distracted state, has allowed himself to get pooned. As in harpooned. It is a big round padded electromagnet on the end of an arachnofiber cable. It has just thunked onto the back of the Deliverator's car, and stuck. Ten feet behind him, the owner of this cursed device is surfing, taking him for a ride, skateboarding along like a water skier behind a boat.

> In the rearview, flashes of orange and blue. The parasite is not just a punk out having a good time. It is a businessman making money. The orange and blue coverall, bulging all over with sintered armorgel padding, is the uniform of a Kourier. A Kourier from RadiKS, Radikal Kourier Systems. Like a bicycle messenger, but a hundred times more irritating because they don't pedal under their own power -- they just latch on and slow you down.

[jmathai]

My son wanted to DoorDash a burrito from chipotle. I told him to look at the final price and compare it to chipotles website.

The $8 burrito is listed on doordash’s website for $11 + a delivery fee they were waiving for a first order (not sure what it would have been).

[Sohcahtoa82]

Delivery fees vary from $4-10, plus tip.

And while tipping is technically optional, it's de facto required. The driver will see the total pay for a delivery before they accept it, and if it's too low, they'll reject it, and DoorDash will offer the delivery to another driver. If you don't tip, then your delivery will be rejected until it reaches some driver that's gotten desperate. By that time, your food will likely have been already made and sitting and waiting for 30 minutes.

[kulahan]

When the popular running theme of complaints is "it's impossible to do X because poor people all work 168 hours a week minimum", it's easy to excuse wasting your money to save time.

[SecretDreams]

It's a game of musical chairs. Very fun until the music stops!

[nine_zeros]

It took long because during the last Trump era, lenders figured out a neat trick - extend the loan terms to 7 years instead of the conventional 5. That, and the low interest rates hooked people. This exaggerated during the pandemic with people taking insane $1000/month loans.

Trump comes back, downturn comes back to main street, and voila - loans running naked.