118 points WalterSobchak 2 hours ago 89 comments
hubraumhugo 1 hour ago | parent
htrp 1 hour ago | parent
paxy 1 hour ago | parent
boringg 1 hour ago | parent
ocd 1 hour ago | parent
999900000999 1 hour ago | parent
stevenwoo 1 hour ago | parent
paxy 1 hour ago | parent
SoftTalker 15 minutes ago | parent
Pizzarias and other traditional delivery food businesses still hire their own drivers in many cases.
DaSHacka 1 hour ago | parent
cj 1 hour ago | parent
the__alchemist 1 hour ago | parent
And second-order effects like I can always have fresh fruit + veggies / not worrying about rot by getting it in smaller quantities delivered more often.
For those wondering about price: It's much cheaper than takeout or prepared food delivery, but more expensive than getting your own groceries. Offset a bit by less food waste.
toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent
the__alchemist 1 hour ago | parent
reaperducer 39 minutes ago | parent
Says someone with no problems putting on his pants and making a grocery run.
Just try to remember your own words when you get older. You'll get your turn. Everyone does.
Toynbeeidea 39 minutes ago | parent
Mashimo 17 minutes ago | parent
Feels like it will end up more expensive in a few years
stevetron 1 hour ago | parent
stackskipton 1 hour ago | parent
paxy 1 hour ago | parent
chunky1994 59 minutes ago | parent
malfist 47 minutes ago | parent
clcaev 12 minutes ago | parent
I’d prefer more discussion of our current legal/business environment and the economic opportunity it affords or constrains.
For example, antitrust action can spur innovation: Bell/AT&T licensed Unix source code for a nominal fee, largely because the 1956 consent decree restricted Bell/AT&T from selling products outside telecommunications.
boringg 1 hour ago | parent
Merging reduces platform inefficiencies and drivers can work both situation.
I am actually amazed both companies are alive and making a profit.
rckclmbr 1 hour ago | parent
This was literally why Rockefeller was a big proponent of the monopoly. Unfortunately exploitation is the tradeoff that is enables
ocd 1 hour ago | parent
joshstrange 1 hour ago | parent
> to Help Local Stores Win
Any local store will tell you DD is a necessary evil they put up with but strongly dislike overall. From the % of sales they take to the incredibly rude delivery drivers, DD is not well liked.
On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.
brookst 1 hour ago | parent
And all the stuff you mention.
The one restaurant owner I know who’s happy with DD set up an entirely separate kitchen in an industrial park. But to get to the DD revenue necessary to justify that investment, he had a couple of years of DD hell in his main restaurant.
ikety 1 hour ago | parent
Could see the kitchen areas through a window and they weren't necessarily dirty, but looked sketchy for some reason. Few people, robots delivering orders, one set of cooks making the food. Just dystopian.
We might as well just build ready to eat food factories that pipe the slop directly into your house. We got rid of the "inconvenience" of going out to eat and enjoying a restaurant. Why not get rid of the pesky delivery middle-man too?
brookst 51 minutes ago | parent
And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).
Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?
SoftTalker 27 minutes ago | parent
mikepurvis 29 minutes ago | parent
Toynbeeidea 43 minutes ago | parent
Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude. It was a very clear and direct communication. A simple scan, and boom, nothing further needed, I could just scan their items. Thr QR code scan handled payment and everything. They almost always helped with doing thier own bagging: Time is money, after all.
SoftTalker 30 minutes ago | parent
What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.
Toynbeeidea 11 minutes ago | parent
hkhanna 1 hour ago | parent
A couple days after my wife launched her campaign, Instacart did a 180 and told her they had to fire her for running. Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
My wife was also pregnant and she told them. They fired her the next day.
Congratulations on the merger.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/15/instacart...
reticulates 1 hour ago | parent
afavour 1 hour ago | parent
reticulates 1 hour ago | parent
jkaplowitz 1 hour ago | parent
Can you criticize them instead for firing her for something that their Chief Corporate Affairs Officer explicitly gave her permission to do? If it was a matter of pragmatism, they could have declined her request for permission. (One might separately argue about whether this should be a matter of right vs a matter of permission, but regardless, she did seek permission and was granted it.)
skeeter2020 58 minutes ago | parent
That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?
AdmiralAsshat 1 hour ago | parent
thinkindie 1 hour ago | parent
PyWoody 1 hour ago | parent
thinkindie 1 hour ago | parent
SoftTalker 45 minutes ago | parent
If a person made a large contribution or gave other public support to an extremist candidate, an employer might not want any association with that.
If running for an office is going to take up a significant amount of one's time, such that it might impact availability for work during normal hours, an employer would care about that.
In this specfic case, if she was featuring "I work for Instacart" in any way in her campaign they might care about that.
If she was saying anything inflamatory or controversial, Instacart might not want to be associated with that.
So running for a nonpartisan office such as a local council or school board or similar would normally not be any issue. Anything where party politics feature prominently is going to be riskier.
63stack 1 hour ago | parent
herval 1 hour ago | parent
patentatt 1 hour ago | parent
charcircuit 58 minutes ago | parent
sheepscreek 51 minutes ago | parent
Not a lawyer but my intuition says there might be some legal grounds here favouring the wife.
My take is someone even higher up found out later and did not like it. Now it’s entirely possible the individuals who gave their blessings were supportive of the party the wife was standing for, and the ones above them weren’t? Still whoever blessed the campaign did so in their capacity as a senior officer of the company. A total shit show nevertheless.
To the original commenter: sorry this happened to your wife. Hope she’s able to find another job that treats her right. Also congrats on the baby, hoping parenthood makes up for all of this and more. Sending the best of wishes your way.
njovin 47 minutes ago | parent
SoftTalker 42 minutes ago | parent
GormHouj 31 minutes ago | parent
charcircuit 39 minutes ago | parent
avs733 50 minutes ago | parent
SoftTalker 41 minutes ago | parent
darkstar999 48 minutes ago | parent
wpm 46 minutes ago | parent
drewbitt 48 minutes ago | parent
willio58 54 minutes ago | parent
assimpleaspossi 48 minutes ago | parent
He called support who contacted the customer and said they were on their way and could he wait five minutes. Of course he did but 30 minutes went by.
Contacted support again who said customer would be there in five minutes but, 15 minutes later, support said to just take the goods back to the store.
He took the goods back to the store but the store refused to accept them. Support said he could just donate them or keep them.
Despite showing the back and forth text messages, he was deactivated for not delivering to the customer.
another_twist 38 minutes ago | parent
lkey 1 hour ago | parent
A truly laughable fig leaf for the non-existent anti-trust regulators.
morelandjs 1 hour ago | parent
the__alchemist 1 hour ago | parent
micromacrofoot 1 hour ago | parent
paxy 1 hour ago | parent
the__alchemist 50 minutes ago | parent
BugsJustFindMe 38 minutes ago | parent
Yes. Instacart has low cost retailers like Walmart and Aldi in many areas, and their prices are generally better than Amazon groceries. Now Walmart does also have their own service, so technically you can do that, but then you're limited to just them.
imzadi 9 minutes ago | parent
thamer 1 hour ago | parent
From the NYT version of this story:
> DoorDash said the median payment to be returned to workers amounts to around $48. > City officials said about 700 workers are owed more than $10,000 each; more than 27,000 workers are owed more than $1,000; and more than 4,000 workers are owed more than $5,000.
DoorDash also spent (from what I can tell) (1+1.4+1.8) million dollars to campaign against Mamdani.
toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani...
Culper Research released a report about a year ago indicating a large component of DoorDash labor is very likely undocumented workers (which is not meant to be derogatory towards these workers, but signal that DoorDash needs labor willing to take gig payments on offer to make the model work).
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b...
I don't think the platform economics are working post ZIRP ("zero interest rate policy") as wages rise and margins compress, would need more data to understand what forward curves look like.
jmyeet 17 minutes ago | parent
Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.
One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.
Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.
But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).
It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.
Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.
micromacrofoot 1 hour ago | parent
Third party delivery services essentially break the chain of responsibility... food late and cold? tough luck, but please tip in advance. If you don't tip your driver will be very mad at you, maybe they'll text you about it, and we pay them so poorly that it's actually your fault for keeping them impoverished. Talk to our customer service bots and maybe we'll give you a $5 coupon for your next Doordash order.
Liuser 15 minutes ago | parent
My main gripe is there is the general occasional missed small item (like sauces, a drink), which I do complain about in DD. I imagine DD does provide this feedback to restaurants because it has been trending better over time.
On a more macro level this consolidation seems to be trending to a 2 party competition. Uber (and Uber Eats) vs Lyft + DoorDash + Instacart. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lyft and DD merged at some point. Well bought by DD. They already have a partnership.
mithr 1 hour ago | parent
ashu1461 51 minutes ago | parent
With this merger I have a feeling that things are only going to go worse.
inom155 38 minutes ago | parent
randbyte 37 minutes ago | parent
tomsellin23 35 minutes ago | parent
themightyquinn 22 minutes ago | parent
themightyquinn 16 minutes ago | parent