• 34 seconds

    This guy keeps proving me wrong about not liking him. Good stuff. I love being wrong when its beneficial to citizens of wherever. And he seems to be the one politician in the US actually doing something good, who would have thought?

  • 2 hours

    when self driving cars get here these jobs will all be gone and delivery will be super cheap. i can’t wait.

    • 1 hour

      Working for walkability in cities also combat self driving cars.

      • 2 hours

        bro it’ll be here i hope in at least 10 years. then we wont need to buy cars, we can just call a self driving uber and it’ll be cheaper.

        • 3 minutes

          What from Over, Doordash or any of the others lead you to think it’ll be cheaper if/when that happens? Because these companies don’t have a spectacular record of looking for ways to save the customers any money, as far as I’m aware.

        • 11 minutes

          Depends on what you do for work. My wife is all over the place with clients, she will always need a vehicle

  • Just make them roll an extra 15% into the cost of delivery and pay the drivers more. Tips are dumb.

    If you want a luxury food delivery service, then pay the luxury cost.

  • 2 days

    “Uber Eats and DoorDash hid tip buttons and set default tips below 10%. As a result, tips for delivery workers fell 79%,” Mamdani wrote on X. “In January, we made these corporations change their apps.”

    Not on board with this, JUST PAY THEM A PROPER WAGE.

    Tipping culture is stupid.

    • While I share the sentiment, he doesn’t have control over Federal wage laws. Ensuring that being tipped sufficiently is the norm is about the best option he has to protect tipped wages. I’m not sure if he can somehow ban tipped employment within the city or not. If he can, maybe that’ll be planned in the future.

      • Can cities not set their own? Federal minimum wage is the floor if the local legislation doesn’t set a minimum.

        • They can. Seattle’s minimum wage is the highest in the country, and we even have mandated that delivery services pay this minimum wage. Now they show “extra fees” to “pay for this” like they didn’t have the money for it before…

          • Even if prices just go up from inflation, they’ll say it’s because they’re forced to treat people like people.

          • Annoying but it’s a start in the right direction.

            It’s ridiculous anyway that federal minimum wage is still $7.25 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

      • It depends on the state. In Nebraska, two of the largest cities are fighting a legal battle over whether they can raise minimum wage to meet a ballot initiative that the unicameral watered down.

  • What possible benefit is it to these companies to hide the tip button? The usual scam is that the company keeps some or all of the tips for themselves.

    • Corey doctorow writes about this in his brilliant book “Enshittification - Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about ut it.”.

      It’s to take away the power for drivers to choose rides based on earnings.

      The tipping is manipulated by the company both towards drivers and customers, to optimize for profit above predictable earnings for drivers and reliable service and fast deliveries for customers.

      It’s algorithmic manipulation and “twiddling with the knobs” to bring in marginally more profit and less payout per transaction.

      Just like Uber does with it’s transportation services. Drivers that take any ride that comes up, earn less pr drive, while drivers that are reluctant will get incentivised to drive more (and then gradually earn less).

      Companies are using the huge amounts of data they have to manipulate both customers and service providers, it’s the devil in all these “middleman” businesses. It’s a rotten and hugely shitty way of doing things and its gradually becoming the norm for fucking everything.

      I cannot recommend Corey’s book enough, not only is it clear and concise in describing these mechanisms in several markets and technologies, it’s easy to read and witty with Corey’s beautiful bitter sarcastic takes all the way through.

      • Mass data has made everything worse. Everything has to be optimized now down to the 0.000001% to make sure every cent is sucked away from regular people.

    • 1 day

      My guess would be that a lower price will equate to more sales, whilst the company itself doesn’t lose out on any of their revenue.

      • In that case they would like to get rid of tipping entirely, but then the drivers would stop driving.

        My dad drives for Uber Eats and he accepts less than half of all delivery offers that are sent to him while he’s signed in. Many of those offers pay so poorly he would lose money on fuel costs if he did accept them. Shit like somebody wanting him to drive across town to deliver them a single Starbucks drink and putting no tip on the offer. Some of these things are just idiots not knowing how to use the app and picking restaurants that are 10 miles away instead of the equivalent restaurant nearby.

        My dad makes most of his money from expensive orders to high end restaurants where people put down $20+ tips, but those are not common enough to rely on. Thankfully, where we live, the government has forced Uber Eats to “top up” his pay to minimum wage if it falls short, and they aren’t allowed to include tips in that calculation.

    • 1 day

      It just makes their revenue jump a tiny bit.

      Less money spent on tips means larger and more frequent orders.

  • 1 day

    Cities typically offer public transport, so I do wonder what it would it would take for a city to run their own ride-sharing service. There are various open source Uber alternatives, but not sure how good any of them are. Marketing and getting people to use something like this would be the hard part for any independent organization, but a city government should have a much easier time getting people to use it.

    • 1 day

      The state of Massachusetts runs a paratransit system for people who can’t use public transit. It’s expensive and not great. They’ve started to offload some ridership to Uber and Lyft where it makes sense, e.g. people without wheelchairs.

      • 1 day

        Government agencies partnering with Uber and Lyft unfortunately does seem to be pretty common, which goes in the opposite direction of creating less exploitative alternatives.

        • 49 minutes

          Not if the government sets the fees and wages in the contract and tells them to fuck off and goes with the competitor if they are in breach.

  • 2 days

    well i guess we’re going to have

    • Mamdani groceries
    • Mamdani deliveries
    • Mamdani oil?

    he’s the new bezos

    • This is EXACTLY right because Mamdani is PERSONALLY funding ALL those things with his OWN Money!

      -You!

      • I mean, I don’t agree with him, but people slapping their names on something they didn’t personally do isnt uncommon. Just look at Trump.

        Edit: I don’t agree with the top level comment. I realize my wording was ambiguous and could be taken as disagreeing with Mandami

    • Damn, having him nationalize the oil industry with 50% of the revenue funneled towards development of alternative energy. Don’t threaten me with a good time.

    • Yes but without any of the technical or industry knowledge or experience needed to make a viable product within the margins of resource costs.