Eh, they just liked it a lot. But they definitely popularized it and detailed usages of it in books. They didn’t invent “cut it long and thin” though, since that’s just basic knife work whose origin is lost to time.

Maybe it’s just GrubHub then, or their UI and customer service is garbage.

Doesn’t surprise me that it’s shitty on all ends, since I think the only people it benefits are “people who see marginally reduced delivery staff costs”.

I suppose my point was more that publicly owned funded and managed is functionally what government is.
Any issues with government management of a utility is just as applicable to a crowd funded publicly managed one.

There’s nothing stopping us from altering the state to optimally steward the public trust. It’s probably easier because the state already exists, and has mechanics for dealing with the types of civil issues that arise from community organization on complex projects.

The government isn’t something that’s apart from us, it’s made of us.

What, to you, is the actual difference between a community working together and organizing their resources for the common benefit, and a government?

I actually live in a city where the public works is a publicly owned utility, and it’s pretty great. Rates are reasonable, excess revenue goes to infrastructure improvements rather than shareholders, and leadership is paid reasonably ($300k+benefits for CEO equivalent), and key decisions are voted on by the city council.

I’m curious why you want something separate from the government. To me, a crowd funded publicly controlled service is a government service in all but name and accountability.

Yeah, what ended up happening is that the services increase the cost of the items the customer buys by a percentage, and keeps that cost. Then they add a delivery fee that they keep, a service fee, and a tip that goes to the driver. Then they pay the driver a small portion of the fee and markup. Overall they take about 30% of the total cost of the order.

Then they treat the restaurant like a subsidiary and make them use their pickup app, and sometimes advertise a menu that the restaurant doesn’t actually offer.
They also make it difficult to give feedback on the delivery itself, since they take any negative feedback and forward it to the restaurant.

I got a credit for $50 from one of the delivery service, which got me a a normal lunch plate from one of my favorite places (usually $15), and a ~20% tip. Driver tossed the food onto my porch, making most of it spill in the bag, and their system had no way to say “the driver did a bad job”, “give me back the tip”, or anything like that. All I could do was say the restaurant messed up, which they didn’t.

Needless to say, I don’t use them even if it’s free anymore.

You can actually just put the letter in your mailbox. You don’t have to take it to a dropoff.

If you’re willing to drop it off, they also do same day for $4 for packages under 5 lbs inside a local region. They’ll pick it up and drop it off just about anywhere in the country next day for basically the same cost.

Your point stands, but the USPS is a logistical wonder.

That’s an excellent point, but it is still a government service.

Being administered by the government, self sufficient, and mandated to not make excess revenue just makes it a remarkably easy to justify service.

Don’t forget wasteful government intervention limiting what the USPS can charge, and making it so it can take days for packages to make the trek across the continent, without even having the decency to amass stupendous profit margins.

So, a few use cases, but it tends to boil down to convenience.

Some people work from home, and don’t have time to go get food, nor cook anything significant between meetings, and they’re just tired of cold sandwiches and microwave soup.

Spending however long traveling to and from the restaurant isn’t always a valuable use of time compared to whatever else you were doing.
If I’m playing games alone or with friends, I’d rather do that than drive around for half an hour.

If you’ve got kids, loading and unloading them into the car can be a chore.

Or just plain “comfy, don’t wanna leave”.

Delivery is a convenience that people like. Companies switching to a service with more fees that drive the cost up so high is annoying.

A lot of places have, yeah. They viewed the delivery staff as a fixed cost, and thought the services would mean they only paid a fee per delivery, making it a net savings.
Hard to blame them, since that’s what they were told, and it sounds reasonable on the surface.

Well aren’t you the lucky one, getting your food in under an hour.

They’re both popular, and something that you can just not buy if you don’t like them, but people like to complain about because they see the popular thing around, and it bothers them.

Also, pumpkin spice doesn’t have to be artificial. It’s just the spices found in pumpkin pie. It’s usually just cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and ginger.

It can be artificial, but it’s like complaining that “apple” is a seasonal artificial flavor.

It’s worth pointing out that linguistic gender came first. When people started talking about how humans have all these complicated different ways that we can present socially depending on context, it adopted the linguistic notion of gender.

In Spanish, everything is gendered, usually descenable by an -a or -o ending.

So Spanish requires you to pick the male/female linguistic gender to refer to a person in order to say that their gender doesn’t fit on the male/female binary.

I believe Spanish speakers just resolve it by using -o by default, because linguistic gender is not identical to social gender.

It’s roughly like if English made you say “they’re masculine-non-binary”.