According to the article, the standard delivery fee is 5.99 and there's a 10% service charge. Surely the purchaser thinks "I'm paying 5.99 to the driver and 10% to DoorDash". It feels like theft. The company is telling the customer one thing, the driver another thing, and stealing the difference.
I have never assumed that the "delivery" and "service" fees went straight to the driver. The "delivery fee" is the premium I pay to get my food delivered and the "service fee" is the premium I pay for using X service to place the order. Trying to assume anything about where each dollar goes once you pay is a little silly. Those line items are prices for services.
I mean when you order Papa John's for example they tell you explicitly that the delivery fee isn't a tip for the driver. In some vague but not terribly meaningful way your delivery fee does pay for the driver's wage but so does the every other form of revenue.
I think, however, most people assume that whatever the price is, the majority of it will go to where the costs are (a human being with a car), and only a tiny amount will go for the cheap stuff (an entry in a database). The middleman's costs are higher than you think (servers, software, credit card fees, etc.), but you still expect they're measured in dimes, not dollars.
If they're taking dollars where they should be taking dimes, you expect somebody else to come in and undercut them. So customers expect that most of a $10+ fee is going to go to the driver, regardless of how that fits into the structure.
That's clearly not the case, and the real question is why. It's not profitability.
Hi, that's not what I said. If I go to AirBNB, it has a cost of the rental and a service fee. I assume that the rental cost goes to the owner, and the service fee goes to AirBNB.
And likewise, if there's a delivery fee and a separate service fee for a delivery, I would assume the delivery fee goes to the one who does the delivery and the service fee goes to the middle man. What's the point otherwise? Why not just merge them into one single fee?
If you had to add "delivery: $5.99" and "process order through FoodApp: $1.99" to your cart would it make more sense? They're services your purchasing. Do you expect the money for the pizza goes to the chef?
> I assume that the rental cost goes to the owner, and the service fee goes to AirBNB.
Why? Hostels.ru negotiates a rate with hotel chains and then charges you as much as they think they can get away with. No reason to think they're related.
That's plausible, although as a relatively naive user, I always thought the 5.99 + 10% was just how they decided to calculate the price to scale with the cost of the order. I never thought that the 5.99 was all for the driver. I might be in the minority though, it would be interesting to see how masses of people generally read that language.
