The Dark Side Of Delivery

You've just eyed up a pizza on your food delivery app, and boy does it look good. But do you ever think about what goes on after you hit the 'Order' button? The New York Times' Metro reporter Andy Newman spent six days delivering food as a freelance deliverer for food apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats, and he discovered what the other side of food delivery is like.

Food writer Corby Kummer joined *Boston Public Radio *on Tuesday to describe what full-time deliverers experience.

"The larger truth is delivery people are not treated as people. These apps may be your friend when you want a rose oolong tea delivered to your door in ten minutes, but they are not the food service providers friends and they are definitely not the workers friends," he said.

Kummer related a particularly worrying account from Newman's NYT's article about a DoorDash worker who was injured.

"One of the great quotes in the main story was a DoorDash worker who fell and broke both arms. All DoorDash did was send him or her a 'Get Well Soon' card. Nothing about insurance, nothing about workers compensation, the whole thing was like this nightmarish dehumanizing experience."

Customers tend to negatively target workers in the food business and rude behavior isn't getting any better with technology playing as a middleman, Kummer said.

"Social isolation is considered the main health problem in society right now. It is happening all over society and it is a kind of dehumanizing that comes of only communicating with people on your cellphone via apps and not voice. People aren't being treated as people," he said. "Make sure the tip goes to the worker, open the door, look the person in the eye, say thank you."

Some delivery food apps don't pass on customers' tips to the deliverer, Kummer added.

"Another nefarious, terrible, dehumanizing thing about this is the apps greedily steal your tip. So the customer might think they're tipping well, but the companies apply that tip toward the cost of their delivery and they don't pass it on to the deliverer. They just give the deliverer the guaranteed minimum. Try to figure out or insist that the companies actually say whether the tips go to the workers, because often they don't," he said.

Kummer also pointed out that the delivery service Grubhub steals business from restaurants.

"Think about where you order from and the way the restaurants are being treated. Grubhub is stealing people's restaurant names to create phony websites to take away business from them and steal their commissions."