Stop Using Uber Eats

Uber Eats. Door­Dash. Instacart. Grub­hub. Deliv­eroo. Post­mates. So many dif­fer­ent apps, but they all have one thing in com­mon. Okay, two things in com­mon. Alright, they have a lot of things in com­mon, but there's one thing in par­tic­u­lar they have in com­mon that I'd like to talk about.

You should stop using them imme­di­ate­ly. They are a can­cer killing you and your coun­try. Wait! Don't close the tab yet. Let me explain.

The Beauty of the Post Office

Before I explain why Uber Eats is so ter­ri­ble, let me explain why the post office is so good. Have you ever felt bad about hav­ing some­thing deliv­ered to you? When you order a pack­age of cat food off Chewy, do you feel a lit­tle twinge of guilt that you didn't just go get it your­self? (OK, if you're using Uber Eats, you prob­a­bly don't, but dig deep.)

Well, you shouldn't. Why? Because the post office is incred­i­bly well-opti­mized and effi­cient, and deliv­er­ing things to your door that way costs essen­tial­ly noth­ing. There's two major rea­sons for this.

1. The postal work­er was going to do your route any­way.

By order­ing some­thing online and hav­ing it deliv­ered to you, you are not real­ly cre­at­ing any extra effort for any­one. The mail truck dri­ves by your home every day regard­less of whether you ordered it or not. The trains, trucks, and planes that make up the nation­al postal logis­tics net­work are going to move regard­less of whether your pack­age is on them or not. If any­thing, order­ing it made them slight­ly more effi­cient, because they're less emp­ty than they would oth­er­wise be.

2. They would have had to deliv­er oth­er pack­ages any­way.

The com­pa­ny (or more like­ly ware­house) that mailed it to you prob­a­bly had oth­er pack­ages going out for oth­er cus­tomers any­way, so the cost of bring­ing it to the post office is effec­tive­ly nil. The cost of the postal work­er bring­ing it to your door is more or less mean­ing­less. The inter­im process of shut­tling your pack­age between post offices is basi­cal­ly free, because all of those offices are already pro­cess­ing mil­lions of oth­er pack­ages and one more is noth­ing.

So if you ever feel bad about hav­ing some­thing shipped to you, don't. The added cost of putting your pack­age in the mix is almost noth­ing for any­one. Peo­ple already need mail, and there's already a sys­tem in place for deliv­er­ing it, so adding your mail to the mix dupli­cates almost no effort at all. That's incred­i­bly effi­cient! (This is called an econ­o­my of scale, by the way.)

But what's the alter­na­tive? What would be an inef­fi­cient way of doing this? Well, imag­ine if you ordered your pack­age, and the com­pa­ny that you pur­chased it from hired some­one to dri­ve out there, pick it up, and dri­ve it all the way to-- Oh. Oh no. Uh oh.

The Hideousness of Food Delivery Apps

"The free mar­ket is the most effi­cient way to allo­cate resources." This is a max­im wide­ly repeat­ed by neolib­er­als every­where, as they spit on bureau­cra­cy and gov­ern­ment waste. Well, if that's true, why is the post office a gov­ern­ment ser­vice, and Uber Eats part of the free mar­ket? It's pret­ty obvi­ous to see that the post office is the vast­ly supe­ri­or mod­el here, honed over 250 years of invest­ment and growth. It's so effi­cient that it has to be delib­er­ate­ly under­mined, or it will out-com­pete pri­vate indus­try, while self-fund­ing.

Uber Eats, by com­par­i­son, has nev­er turned a prof­it, and its par­ent com­pa­ny (found­ed, like many apps, to under­mine local ser­vices, bust unions, and evade reg­u­la­tion) man­aged one prof­itable quar­ter in 15 years. It is essen­tial­ly a fur­nace that investors shov­el mon­ey into to hire a guy to deliv­er cold food to your door so you don't have to put pants on.

Where the post office has made a name for itself with cheap, uni­ver­sal, fast, and prof­itable ser­vice, Uber Eats can ane­m­i­cal­ly play at turn­ing a prof­it only by mas­sive­ly inflat­ing the cost of your food. A $15 meal at a fast food restau­rant bal­loons into a $40 expense to arrive 90 min­utes late to your door, if it arrives at all. The postal work­er enjoys steady work, an excel­lent union, a good retire­ment plan, decent pay and ben­e­fits. The Uber Eats dri­ver is a free­lancer work­ing all hours to scrounge a mea­ger liv­ing by con­vert­ing time, mileage, and gaso­line into income at unfa­vor­able rates.

This is hor­ri­ble. Why are we doing this? Why do we, as a soci­ety, not col­lec­tive­ly flush this failed exper­i­ment?

The Psychology of Addiction

Lis­ten, I under­stand why peo­ple keep doing this. There are legit­i­mate rea­sons to use Uber Eats. They're not good rea­sons, but they are at least root­ed in hon­or­able log­ic. The basic thought process goes some­thing like this:

1. I have no food in my home.
2. I'm too men­tal­ly and/or phys­i­cal­ly dis­abled to go to the store right now.
3. Prepar­ing food will take even more time.
4. I can just spend a bunch of mon­ey to receive food now.
5. Where I'll get more mon­ey is a prob­lem for future me.

I under­stand it because I am friends with peo­ple who used Uber Eats. I have watched them relapse into it, over and over. I have seen them delete the app off their phone, only to lat­er rein­stall it at a low point. The food you get is usu­al­ly luke­warm and unpleas­ant, if you get it at all, but some­times... some­times it's not! When you order it, you dream of receiv­ing your favorite food, pip­ing hot, right to your door, and some­times, you get it!

This is gam­bling. It's addic­tive. Oth­er peo­ple have more knowl­edge­able and intel­li­gent things to say on the psy­chol­o­gy of impulse-con­trol dis­or­ders, but this is basi­cal­ly the ide­al cus­tomer for Uber Eats. Peo­ple who com­plain about their gro­cery bill going up aren't doing this. The tar­get demo­graph­ic for Uber Eats is peo­ple who have poor impulse con­trol and can't stop them­selves from using it for instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, regard­less of whether they can afford it or not.

Is the grat­i­fi­ca­tion instant? After all, I did men­tion repeat­ed­ly that you have to wait a long time for your food. Well, the grat­i­fi­ca­tion in an impulse pur­chase is not in using the prod­uct you bought. Your brain releas­es dopamine in antic­i­pa­tion of your reward, not just when you receive it. As you can read at the link, the amount of dopamine you receive is actu­al­ly high­er when the reward doesn't always occur. This is why gam­bling is so addic­tive; it's not because you get a steady and reli­able income source!

Maybe some or all of this describes you. If so, Uber Eats is prey­ing on you. It is pro­mot­ing an entire­ly unsus­tain­able stan­dard of liv­ing to you that you do not actu­al­ly receive by using it, at a cost you prob­a­bly can't real­ly afford, and at a soci­etal cost that we def­i­nite­ly can't afford. Please, stop giv­ing it your mon­ey. It's not worth it. I would rather you get curb deliv­ery at the gro­cery store than use these apps. I'd rather you use a meal-kit ser­vice. Any­thing but this.

A Better Food Delivery System

It's not as though there's no prece­dent for this being done well. Back in the day, before mod­ern refrig­er­a­tion, Amer­i­ca rather famous­ly had a food deliv­ery ser­vice: the milk run. It worked effec­tive­ly the same way the post office does, except it was deliv­er­ing some­thing per­ish­able to lots of peo­ple who need­ed it reg­u­lar­ly. It was even sus­tain­able, reusing the emp­ty milk bot­tles. If you pay for a meal kit ser­vice, there's a good chance it's deliv­ered to you by a mail car­ri­er in a refrig­er­at­ed box.

There's no rea­son we have to go to gro­cery stores. There's no rea­son at all that the post office couldn't have a fleet of refrig­er­at­ed trucks, deliv­er­ing gro­ceries Ama­zon Fresh-style, maybe ordered online from gov­ern­ment-run gro­cery stores. This could all be done with tech­nol­o­gy we're already using, with logis­tics we already employ, at an afford­able price. We just have to have the will to do it.

That means iden­ti­fy­ing what the prob­lem is here: cap­i­tal­ism. It means rec­og­niz­ing who stands to lose if we cre­ate a bet­ter world for our­selves, and how they're orga­niz­ing against you. Uber and Uber Eats might be mas­sive­ly unprof­itable, but they are loss lead­ers for dereg­u­la­tion and the under­min­ing of our insti­tu­tions. They will fight tooth and nail to pre­vent any­thing bet­ter from being put in place. They do not have your best inter­ests in mind. These ser­vices are exploit­ing you. They're count­ing on you not to think about it. They're count­ing on you to defend them.

So what do we do? The road to a bet­ter world is long and dif­fi­cult, but to start mak­ing the world a bet­ter place right away, the solu­tion is sim­ple. Embrace social­ism. Read Marx. And for the love of God, stop using Uber Eats.