Where I am, it's really common for the price on the menu to be higher on DoorDash or UberEats.
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RE: https://tomkahe.com/@GiftArticles/115451123083571446
Where I am, it's really common for the price on the menu to be higher on DoorDash or UberEats. I had assumed this was to cover their fee to those services. And it's less and less common here for what I'll call "sitdown" restaurants to even be available on those sites.
And this article doesn't really give enough weight (in my opinion) to the ongoing pandemic. Maybe if restaurants worked on air quality and not packing people in so tightly, more folks would feel like they could return to restaurant dining.
I guess what I'm saying is that this article does not reflect what it is like everywhere, but it feels like the author believes that it is.
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RE: https://tomkahe.com/@GiftArticles/115451123083571446
Where I am, it's really common for the price on the menu to be higher on DoorDash or UberEats. I had assumed this was to cover their fee to those services. And it's less and less common here for what I'll call "sitdown" restaurants to even be available on those sites.
And this article doesn't really give enough weight (in my opinion) to the ongoing pandemic. Maybe if restaurants worked on air quality and not packing people in so tightly, more folks would feel like they could return to restaurant dining.
I guess what I'm saying is that this article does not reflect what it is like everywhere, but it feels like the author believes that it is.
@AngelaPreston I get what you're saying (and, agree that their assumptions about the data are a bit privilege-blind), but I think the main point of the article is sound: once again, billionaire capitalists have managed to extract enormous personal wealth by externalizing all their costs onto others and thereby impoverishing what was once a healthy ecosystem of direct commerce. Seems they destroy working ecosystems where ever they go, whatever they touch.
It's a particularly pernicious skill set, looking at a healthy, balanced commerce system supporting an interconnected community and saying to yourself, "I know how I can disrupt these connections, extract enormous wealth, make everyone dependent on the new 'service' I'm providing, and offload the cost and consequences on the very people now paying for the service!" In this case that includes not only the restaurants, but the gig workers and the customers as well.
Staggering, really.
As for indoor air quality in restaurants... Restaurants have notoriously slim profit margins, and fixing air flow/air quality can be a huge challenge. Also, restaurants often don't own the space they're in, (hence trying to pack as many diners into as small a rental space as possible), so it would have been up to the landlord to fix that -- and landlords are notoriously cheap.
When Biden was in office, there were a lot of pandemic grant funds available for small businesses to make those kinds of improvements, but you needed to know they were available, how to apply, have someone who could actually do the applying and tracking of paperwork (it was a lot; I know because our organization did it). Then it turned out there was quite a bit of fraud in the application process, and then we elected an autocrat who doesn't give a crap. So much for air quality.
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@AngelaPreston I get what you're saying (and, agree that their assumptions about the data are a bit privilege-blind), but I think the main point of the article is sound: once again, billionaire capitalists have managed to extract enormous personal wealth by externalizing all their costs onto others and thereby impoverishing what was once a healthy ecosystem of direct commerce. Seems they destroy working ecosystems where ever they go, whatever they touch.
It's a particularly pernicious skill set, looking at a healthy, balanced commerce system supporting an interconnected community and saying to yourself, "I know how I can disrupt these connections, extract enormous wealth, make everyone dependent on the new 'service' I'm providing, and offload the cost and consequences on the very people now paying for the service!" In this case that includes not only the restaurants, but the gig workers and the customers as well.
Staggering, really.
As for indoor air quality in restaurants... Restaurants have notoriously slim profit margins, and fixing air flow/air quality can be a huge challenge. Also, restaurants often don't own the space they're in, (hence trying to pack as many diners into as small a rental space as possible), so it would have been up to the landlord to fix that -- and landlords are notoriously cheap.
When Biden was in office, there were a lot of pandemic grant funds available for small businesses to make those kinds of improvements, but you needed to know they were available, how to apply, have someone who could actually do the applying and tracking of paperwork (it was a lot; I know because our organization did it). Then it turned out there was quite a bit of fraud in the application process, and then we elected an autocrat who doesn't give a crap. So much for air quality.
@anne I'm not a big fan of the gig economy because of how poorly those workers are treated and how few protections they have. That said, it was a big help to me after surgery earlier this year, during radiation treatments, and then after my recent hospitalization that I could get food delivered.
I do wish that people would stop looking at every single service and think "how can I mine that?"
