DoorDash is making employees complete food deliveries at least once per month — and many are far from thrilled.
According to MarketWatch, the software and food delivery firm believes that the program will help employees understand the impact of their work:
DoorDash confirmed Thursday that it told employees this week it is reinstating the program, called WeDash, in January. The company said it has had the program since its inception and in 2018 tied it to a philanthropic effort to address hunger and food waste, but put it on hold because of the pandemic.
The renewed push adds choices for employees who may not be able to do deliveries, a spokeswoman said. Besides WeSupport, which will allow employees to shadow customer-service workers, the company will also eventually offer WeMerchant, a way for employees to take a closer look at the merchant-support side of DoorDash’s business.
However, many employees took to social media to complain. The San Francisco Chronicle reported:
A 1,500-comment thread on Blind, the anonymous social media platform for techies and other white-collar types, was started last week by one disgruntled DoorDash worker.
An engineer with a reported total compensation, or TC, of $400,000 a year griped about the responsibility of having to do a once-a-month delivery. “What the actual f—k?” the engineer wrote on the platform. “I didn’t sign up for this, there was nothing in the offer letter/job description about this.” (Blind requires all users to register using an email for the company they’re employed with, meaning the likelihood of this post being falsified are slim.)
While some people replied to the original post to say it would be a helpful opportunity to develop empathy and learn about the myriad frustrations of delivery workers, others sided with the original poster.
Amid COVID-19 and the lockdown-induced recession, food delivery companies surged in popularity. As the virus hit New York City in the spring of 2020, the City Council temporarily limited the fees that the delivery apps could charge restaurants — specifically, a 15% cap for online orders. The policy was intended as a “lifeline” for restaurants, which complained over fees as high as 30% per order; however, the policy was then made permanent.
The New York Times said:
Girding the argument from food delivery apps is the idea that restaurants do not have to enter into agreements with them. The City Council does not regulate fees from other marketers that restaurants might use, such as Google, Yelp or online reservation apps. The fee caps chosen by the City Council are also arbitrary and not supported by economic impact studies, the lawsuit charges.
Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber Eats have argued that third-party delivery apps allow restaurants to tap into a huge customer base that the apps have spent millions of dollars to cultivate.
“The Ordinance is unconstitutional because, among other things, it interferes with freely negotiated contracts between platforms and restaurants by changing and dictating the economic terms on which a dynamic industry operates,” said the companies’ lawsuit against New York City.