For context Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart each have about a quarter of the online grocery delivery market with smaller outfits like Kroger and Albertsons eating up the remaining quarter. If you believe this data, that is. https://talkbusiness.net/2025/04/online-grocery-sales-rise-2...
I've had failed or missing deliveries from an Albertson's owned grocery chain and when speaking to the manager of the department, they just subcontract the delivery to DD and UberEats, much like McDonald's does. It's not their own employees doing deliveries.
A few Albertsons stores do their own deliveries, but it's increasingly rare. I used to love my Abertsons deliveries. Always had the same guy (who was super friendly), and it came in a refrigerated truc, so cold products stayed cold.
I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.
Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.
Amazon/Whole Foods in our area seems consistently unable to pack bananas in a way that doesn't result in bruising. I'm beginning to think they train them to put heavy cans on top of bananas for some reason.
It protects the cans from denting...
It's believable to me. I exclusively use Walmart and Amazon for groceries now. The nearest grocery store is 10+ minute drive away and with gas prices, my time, etc. I'd rather just buy online and wait for someone to deliver to my door. It's much quicker than going around the store looking for items too.
It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
I've worked these 1099 grocery delivery gigs and you get paid around minimum wage to lug these very heavy orders of water and juice up stairs, all while adding miles to your own vehicle and bearing the full risk of injury because you're an independent contractor. I hope you tip them well at least.
I wish no one would tip them. Then they'd quit working for minimum wage, then the costs would go up, then I could see the actual cost of the service and make a decision to use it or not.
a tip for an unusual order/circumstance would be fine. Say if you ordered a 50lb bag of cat food, and live on the Nth floor, and the elevators are not working.
> Then they'd quit working for minimum wage
I see no reason to think that was the case. They'll work for whatever rate companies pay them. There are many workers in minimum wage jobs who don't get tips at all. I agree that tipping is a bad practice and that it pushes labor costs onto customers. It will take regulation for companies to stop and tipping culture to change. I'm doing my part to try and keep the problem from getting worse by refusing to tip for almost anything except deliveries and being actually waited on. No matter how much companies beg for tips for basic retail purchases and counter service I don't feel at all bad about turning them down.
I guess you're talking a much higher minimum wage then Kansas. Minimum wage here is $7.25/hr, which isn't enough to live on practically, so it's not hard to find a job for significantly more than minimum wage.
This seems to be you choosing to live in an idealized form of your future vs the actual reality of today. My question is, if you're choosing idealized anyway, why stop at a mundane ideal where anyone has to work for minimum wage at all? Unless you've baked the lower class labor category into your ideal future?
You not tipping doesn't improve anyone's material conditions. You choosing to give money to the exploitative companies does affect material conditions, negatively! To me it sounds like you're trying to doordash your cake, eat it, have it, not pay for it, and get paid for eating it, all at once!
A good chunk of lower class labor isn't tipped.
I don't actually even have DoorDash available, but I can put my money where my mouth is when it comes to restaurants; PLEASE pay your workers a good wage, and then I won't eat there if I can't afford it. I don't know what your wages are, or your operating costs; don't make me guess how much I need to pay your employees for you!
Nobody actually likes tipping btw, the question isn't whether it's good, but rather whether we should as individuals punish individual workers for our own failure to not raise minimum wage or ban tipping.
Regarding the restaurant industry, I used to run a restaurant, and my conclusion is that the economy is fake.
There is no profitable way to run a restaurant legally. Somewhere in the supply chain, if not in the restaurant then in the delivery truck or farm, there are undocumented laborers being underpaid and working in unsafe conditions. If we actually applied the typical worker protections we've come to expect for other blue collar jobs, with the expected wages, the already razor thin margins of the restaurant industry would completely collapse. The only thing left would be vertically integrated oligopolies like McDonald's.
Every meal out, somebody, somewhere, is subsidizing your meal to make it affordable enough for you to buy it. Adding the 28-32% margin that Uber eats charges is just increasing that pressure to the breaking point. It all barely survives through psychological tricks that make it seem cheaper than it is like hiding the tip or tax until after you actually get the full bill.
I think the only way the restaurant industry could function fully legally is if the government was the only landlord. There's just not enough margin to include the margins a landlord expects, and landlords pathologically increase rent to be just below causing a restaurant to collapse, or simply cycle through restaurant after restaurant, not caring about months of lost rent revenue because the high rent cost increases the value of the property.
I don't tip. I don't believe in the practice of tipping and especially with digital platforms I don't trust where the money goes.
If I am tipping, it will be directly and usually in cash and there's only one person who gets that and it's the person who cuts my hair.
Get a different job if you don't like it. Minimum wage jobs are dime a dozen and have joke requirements to get onboarded. It's not like competing for faang or whatever.
Why does your personal activism stop after the point that harms fellow humans but not before the step of rewarding an exploitative corporation that subsidizes its labor cost with tips and your tax dollars through welfare to its laborers?
You're welcome to leave the job. If you're working a job that has tips - get a different job. I don't work a job that has tips and never have. I have worked from minimum wage to 1m+/yr.
There are an endless amount of jobs out there that don't have tips involved at all, require similar levels of experience/skill/craft/work-ethic, and pay similarly.
You're also welcome to buy from a company that doesn't offload the fair labor price onto the customer, but instead, you actively incentivize these companies to continue the practice, and punish the worker meanwhile by not tipping. You take advantage of the subsidized lower cost that's normally borne by tipping, actively profiting off this broken system.
Why do you hold humans to a higher standard than corporations?
Incentivize them to what?
I don't do tips. If the company wants to not pay well, it's up to the person to choose to not take the job.
You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.
I feel like people posting on here have drastically lowered in quality. Am I speaking with bots?
> I feel like people posting on here have drastically lowered in quality. Am I speaking with bots?
It is trivially easy to determine I'm a real person by clicking my username and following through to my site. Within two clicks you can find a video of me talking. But since we're in the business of blame game here, why do you choose to interact with a website where you're not even sure it's humans you're talking to?
> You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.
Your interaction with society isn't just through paying for things. You seem to enjoy a situation where things are cheap because the labor cost is subsidized via financial tricks like tip culture, and you can swim through the culturally established cracks by not tipping, basically the definition of antisocial behavior.
If you wanted to protest tip culture and low wages, you could, for example, protest. Or stop giving money to companies that do this. For some reason you've decided to blame humans for trying to make a living in this broken system rather than blame companies, who have far more bargaining power, for engaging in exploitative behavior.
Your purchase of the cheaper, tip culture goods over the more expensive non tip culture goods is a price signal rewarding the less ethical company. That's the incentive I meant. It doesn't make any sense for blaming people trying to make ends meet. I don't quite understand why people think their Uber drivers and waiters and whatnot super duper love these tip based jobs, there's a million reasons they are essentially forced to take whatever work they can get. Do you really believe working class people have the bargaining power or job opportunities to walk away from the minimum wage tipped job? You are here which means you have access to the internet which means you must know that many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - that means they can't miss a single paycheck without catastrophic consequences. So no time to quit and find a new job.
YC may pay for the webservers but there's plenty of commies on here :) for some reason they haven't banned us yet.
So, you're just dumb?
People have the opportunity to walk away from minimum wage jobs all the time. It's unironically the easiest job to walk away from in this world because they are very common and easy to get hired on/off of. Low pay jobs are very common and easy to not take.
The jobs that are hard to walk away from are ones that pay enough for someone to live.
Man, you really sound privileged and like you've never worked a minimum wage job at all or know anyone in these positions. Stop talking!
To clarify, your position is that everyone that works a tipped job is stupid. Correct?
So boy howdy, you must be a super smart guy! Smarter than all those dumbies. I bet you've leveraged your intelligence to accomplish incredible things.
I gotta be real with you man, if you acted like that to your actual delivery driver and they happened to harm you or fuck you your food, I'd understand their POV.
I only tip servers in sit-own restaurants. I don't tip drivers, fast food or coffee shop workers. Sue me.
You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.
Have you been careful about making sure that the prices you're charged when shopping online are the same as what's on the price tag on the shelves? Online shopping makes it extremely easy for companies to overcharge you based on what they think you're willing/able to pay and provides them with valuable data they can use to decide when/how much to raise their prices.
You can also run into problems where employees will select for lower quality produce, and about to expire foods that in-store shoppers will commonly pass over. It's nice that it means less food gets thrown away, but can also mean you can end up wasting your money buying food you can't or don't want to eat.
> You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.
In theory, batching deliveries should delivery economies of scale on vehicle and labour costs.
Judging from other comments, the costs of gas and vehicle maintenance get pushed onto the drivers so probably aren't added to the cost of orders in fees.
So far it saves me money. Nearest Walmart is 10+ miles away.
I haven't really had too many issues with ordering online. It works for me.
I haven't noticed a price difference shopping in store vs online. The local grocers massively overcharge in comparison to Amazon and Walmart.
> The local grocers massively overcharge in comparison to Amazon and Walmart
Those local shops might not have much choice. Walmart has been caught forcing companies to charge every other store higher wholesale prices than what they charge Walmart for the same goods. It's actually illegal, but the FTC doesn't bother enforcing it. Amazon has also been accused of forcing companies to raise their prices elsewhere and if companies refuse amazon removes the “Add to cart” and “Buy Now” buttons from their products pages. Last I heard they were being sued for that, so maybe the situation with amazon will improve.
It's really not the case. I'm talking like 2x the price of products. They basically started charging ridiculous prices because they wanted to gouge on whales. Unsurprisingly, these places are empty when I go into them now compared to ten years ago. They also have no one working at them.
At least where I live (PNW) Fred Meyers (owned by Kroger) uses instacart for their grocery deliveries. It's the same where my family lives in Virginia too.
When shopping from kroger you can pay extra to get 2-3hr delivery from insta cart. If not your order gets routed through a more efficient planned route that hits multiple houses