to think that Deliveroo etc should be banned!

[Coastalwalks]

Hi all,

I live in London and was recently nearly knocked off my bike by a deliveroo driver on a moped (he was completely in the wrong, though will not be drawing a road diagram to illustrate lol). When I shouted at him he just made fun of my voice and it enraged me soooo much. These are my chief issues with deliveroo etc:

• There are now so many dangerous drivers either on mopeds or bikes with batteries illegally fitted to them - flagrantly going the wrong way up one-way streets, running reds etc. Very dangerous and a friend of mine recently had someone break into her secure underground parking area to steal her electric bike. There was so much damage to the property and she basically thinks that her bike was nicked to order.
• I looked into it and deliveroo actually acknowledge that deliveroo drivers 'rent out' their accounts to others, many of whom are undocumented migrants - but they put the responsibility on the original driver to check that the person renting the account has the right to work etc! Complete dereliction of duty, and basically facilitates the exploitation / trafficking of illegal immigrants who then have no legal protection, don't pay tax etc...
• On a slightly pious level I think it's terrible and lazy that so many people now think it's normal to be able to just order food in so rapidly - like it is genuinely quite aristocratic to expect to press a button and have a shawarma wrap at your door in <20 minutes. People should learn to cook or at least have to walk round the block to the chippy. It's lazy!
• Meeting the deliveroo orders in small restaurants means it takes twice as long to get your actual food, and it ruins the ambiance when there are loads of deliveroo drivers outside or at the door (though acknowledge this is not the case at Naice restaurants)
• Everyone I know who works in FS has to basically eat a deliveroo at their desk at 8pm every night - maybe without deliveroo everyone could go home a bit earlier ! ! ! !

YABU - let me have my massaman curry you calvinistic treat-hater
YANBU - deliveroo is a scourge

Never used deliveroo. Looks like a giant slave industry in plain sight to me. Also don't see the attraction of paying over the odds for a cold cheeseburger.

Do you genuinely think there’s not a problem with fast food then?

I don't think offering home delivery for it exploits the vulnerable.

And I don't think policing which businesses can offer home delivery will make us all lose weight.

@NonPlayerCharacter I was making the point that by charging him £23 for absolute crap because he’s scared to go out is exploitation because you buy the same crap for £5 if you go out.

Are you this obtuse in real life? Waste of energy, so disengaging.

They're not charging him £23 because he's scared to go out, they're charging him £23 because he's ordering £23 worth of home delivered food.

If it's exploitation of him, then what is your solution? Home delivery should not be chargeable?

Being able to appoint someone to work in your place is one of the things that defines Deliveroo drivers as ‘self-employed’ and allows the company to get away with not paying sufficient tax, sick pay, etc. If the drivers were properly employed, these dangers would go away AND Deliveroo would be properly accountable for its drivers. I have no objection to food delivery, only when it is managed in such and exploitative way.

@KingsleyBorder it is more - imagine all those badly driven mopeds and bikes people have talked about, times that by ten and have a constant stream of them driving in and out of a narrow area 24/7.

I do think the culture of everything being delivered to our door is helping to create a rather grim world to live in. Not least the state of the roads, with lorries carting everything around!

We're spoilt, though; now we're used to this, I don't think we'll ever go back to fetching things ourselves.

I'm a right one for ordering things online, but wouldn't mind collecting them from a nearby pick-up point. Maybe this is a reasonable way forward?

Or drones!!!!!!!!!

Food delivery is not an issue per se. The way platforms push the negative externalities of their business model on to communities is.

I think you have the wrong end of the stick. There is a delivery charge/markup, but it’s not putting up the price from £5 to £23. The £23 will be because he is getting click-happy on the app and ordering a lot of food.

@NonPlayerCharacter You’re very tiresome but there is something called reasonable adjustment, my workplace has it. I like fairness. I think most of us do.

Move to the country. We don't have deliveroo here.

@KingsleyBorder Yes, agree but some of us cannot go out even if we wanted to.

I'm ordering burger king in tonight for tea because I'm not feeling well and sitting in a busy restaurant feels like a terrible idea. And I really fancy BK chips.

It's not exploitation when they are just offering a service. The end user has the option not to use that service they offer. It is not thing only option for him to eat each day. If they were fleecing him in order for him to survive, that would absolutely be exploitation.

That he is autistic / unable to leave the house is not relevant to the service they offer. You could as easily argue that he's being neglected by family who allow this to happen every week or fail to prevent it from happening, but that would be inappropriate and false.

Also £5 for an adult Burger King meal? I guess you've not been near one for decades... Even the in store prices are appalling.

@QuestionableMouse ☺️

There are restrictions though. The same restrictions that apply to any shopping - due you have access to the products? Can you find the money for the product?
Plus more personal ones about whether the product aligns with your own health and well ing based restrictions.

Are you suggesting ‘someone’ should be allowed to decide what we can have (and where)? Who is the someone? On what basis would they make the decision?

It is true that there are surcharges on each item of food, plus the service/ delivery fees. It can be a huge markup.

@CornishPorsche Again I agree with you too, that poster made the statement that I had said that by offering the services to disabled that’s exploitation, which is not what I said and now I have a dog with bone situation from them. That’s what is tiresome.

Some disabled people don’t actually have family to rely on either. I was making a point about fairness but seems to at got lost along the way.

Agree with what you say, but the reason's mainly because there ARE no police on the roads. I think they are holed up inside their nice, warm stations (somewhere?). Well, it is winter....

@CornishPorsche and no haven’t been anywhere near a Burger King but if that is what they are charging I’m horrified.

The renting of accounts will probably come to an end when deliveroo reports the account holders earnings HMRC next year 😂

Delivery food isn’t the same thing as fast food, necessarily. I can get healthy options via delivery - salads, wraps, Buddha bowls…all from restaurants I sometimes go to in person but sometimes prefer to stay at home.

Delivery drivers in general are driving very badly. Large vans too up against time to give way, so they just hurtle towards you on a bend and mount the kerb to get past (with no thought for any potential pedestrians).

Not sure what that means in relation to my post? I was saying you misunderstood how much the delivery charge was.

I have just dated a Deliveroo/Uber Eats driver from a country where there is a big community of migrants here (especially in London) and a good percentage are illegal. It's true that lots of people have more than one account as e.g. when a friend gets a different job or leaves the country they might give you an extra account. Or you might not be eligible for one and therefore will need someone else to sign up for you. In this community, many people have fake documents which includes fake driving licenses so they may have never even taken a theory test or driven at all before (this means they might not have insurance either). He said the day when he made the most money ever was when immigration police were out on the streets of the local city.

Also, because the payment is very low and you need to do more than one delivery at a time to make any money, you need to accept the jobs as soon as they are sent to you which means you will need to look at your phone when driving.

The last I heard there was a plan to tax delivery drivers at source which is a problem for the ones who aren't supposed to be here. There will be some that get around this by account sharing, but generally it will mean fewer drivers (being taxed would make the average pay below minimum wage around here so people are unlikely to see it as an easy way to make money anymore but I'm not in London) and delivery times are slower.
I agree that the people on e-bikes and normal bikes are a menace as I have seen them run red lights and cycle on the pavement. They are probably racing around to complete jobs quickly but this is no excuse for dangerous driving/cycling