The face of faceless delivery

The biggest platforms keep widening the space between food and humanity.

Photo via Unsplash

A New York Times reporter recently spent over 30 hours with food delivery drivers in Los Angeles, working to understand the true state of food delivery in the car-dependent city. 

“Brantley Bush couldn’t shake the fear that he was about to be ripped off,” begins the story under the headline, “$388 in sushi. Just a $20 tip: The brutal math of Uber Eats and DoorDash.” 

The veteran courier, who told the Times he prefers to deliver large or pricy orders, collected three separate deliveries from one sushi restaurant including that huge order, which, the Times reports, might net him a $50 or $70 tip. Instead, he received $20 on the large order, or about 5 percent of the cost of the food. 

“It’s hard to fathom how people could have so much money and tip so little,” he told the Times.

You’d think I would have learned by now to stop being such an optimist about these things, but here we are, stuck with a bad narrative.

The biggest companies make the most money on restaurant transactions while on-the-ground workers come up short.