How quickly we accepted that it's normal to pay someone to go get our groceries for us. To drive us around when public transportation is available. To run errands for us. To bring us fast food.

Covid capitalized on it.

People don't want to give up that luxury now that they've had it. Even if it makes things cost 2x-3x as much.

Even when we all know its exploitive labor.

It's true delivery and driver services have been around for hundreds of years but now instead of companies with full time employees (with benefits) , the gig employee gets paid less while taking on risk that aren't compensated by the employer (car accidents, gas, car repairs, injury or attacks).

Gig work is a much worse thing than maybe a lot of people realize. And it's also making more people servants to others.

It's moving full time employees with benefits and using company property to no benefits and using their own property that they have to pay for.

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[–] 11 points 6 months ago (10 children)

The only things I have delivered to me are packages and envelopes through the mail.

Granted, I am GenX, but I can’t recall a single time in the last half a decade where I’ve had anything like food delivered. Or used the services of any kind of gig company.

And I simply can’t think of any benefit of doing so. It’s horrendously expensive, and simply not worth the expense.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    You're GenX and have never had a pizza or Chinese food delivered!? Do you live in the sticks? Town I live in now has never had a delivery restaurant (weird for a tourist town) and nobody runs Uber eats or whatever, but when I was a kid in suburbia delivery food was super common, mostly pizza and Chinese.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    No, I have always phoned ahead to order, but I have always picked up the order personally.

    The savings having done so have always been more than the fuel spent to retrieve the order.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Getting food delivered is handy when I'm looking after my kids by myself, but not something I'm in the habit of using, probably use it once per year

    I had to use uber once in the last year when the taxi failed to turn up and I needed to get to the airport.

    I avoid them for the most part as I can find other ways of doing things cheaper

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Uber bought the biggest taxi company in Denmark and the only one operating in my city. There's no way around them...

    Backstory is that Uber was banned from the market due to their gig model (and lobbying from taxi companies), so they returned half a decade/decade later in the only way they could. Funny how other gig models like food delivery isn't outlawed the same way.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    I mean food delivery is a totally legitimate good thing to have, getting food when you can’t is whats what its for.

    The problem is people who absolutely have the means to get their own stuff relying on it almost exclusively just because they are lazy.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    There are definitely use cases for delivery services, like the whole family having COVID and such.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Even at my sickest, I was always able to make something to eat, even if it was simple like cracking open some of my own canned spaghetti sauce and boiling some noodles.

    Being sick has always been a wholly inadequate argument for not making something healthy to eat.

    Now, an evening where a sit-down supper would be impossible - Halloween being our only consistent pizza night - that is a different story. But those happen only a few days a year.

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