Someone claiming to be a software developer at one of the major food delivery apps created a bit of a stir over the weekend with a Reddit post alleging a number of unseemly practices by the unnamed app.
The person claimed that the company refers to delivery drivers internally as “human assets” and assigns them “desperation scores” to calculate how little it can pay them to accept delivery trips. They claimed that so-called priority delivery is a sham, that “regulatory response fees” go into a fund to lobby against courier unions, and that higher tips result in lower base pay for delivery people.
The post struck a chord online, one that reverberated loudly enough to get the attention of the apps themselves. In a strongly worded X post, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said the Reddit post is not about DoorDash; the company later published a remarkable five-point rebuttal on its website. Uber and Grubhub also said the claims do not apply to them.
Uber COO Andrew Macdonald added that the Reddit post was likely a hoax. “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet,” he wrote on X.
He was not the only one to doubt the poster’s account. Casey Newton, a co-host of the New York Times tech podcast Hard Fork, wrote on BlueSky that the poster shared an image of an employee badge that was flagged for being AI-generated. And Harry Campbell, founder of The Rideshare Guy website, noted that the post's portrayal of priority delivery is verifiably false. (It claims that regular orders are slowed down to make priority orders seem faster; in reality, customers who pay the priority fee are guaranteed to have their food dropped off first when a driver is delivering multiple orders in the same trip, Campbell said.)
The Redditor, who used the handle “Trowaway_whistleblow” (sic), did not respond to our request for comment.
Regardless of the post’s veracity, the response to it suggested that there remains plenty of pent-up frustration among food delivery’s rank-and-file, some of whom detected a kernel of truth in the whistleblower’s comments.
“What makes these claims so disturbing is not that they are shocking, but that they fit a pattern delivery workers know all too well,” said Los Deliveristas Unidos, an advocacy group for New York City delivery workers, in a statement to Restaurant Business.
Los Deliveristas has been in a tug of war with delivery apps over pay and tipping transparency in New York for years. It fought for a guaranteed minimum hourly wage for couriers that went into effect last January. In response, DoorDash and Uber raised their fees, but began asking customers to tip only after their order had been delivered in an effort to ease the sticker shock. The city responded with a law that will force tips to happen up front, and last month, DoorDash and Uber sued the city to stop it.
That is all to say that third-party food delivery is still a tightrope walk—a low-margin business with a lot of mouths to feed. It is virtually impossible to keep all of them happy, which leads to some of the uncomfortable truths alluded to in the Reddit post.
“I think what the post hit on is that … when you have a very price-sensitive customer, you obviously want to pay your workforce as little as possible in order to get that order delivered,” Campbell said.
What makes this business model all the more frustrating for stakeholders is the opaqueness of it all. Invisible algorithms determine how much drivers are paid and how restaurants are ranked on the home page. The lack of transparency around how the apps really work naturally leads to rumor and speculation and explosive Reddit posts that may or may not be true.
It all leads us to wonder, once again, whether any of this is sustainable. Despite delivery’s rapid growth and recent profitability, the business still feels tenuous, especially in heavily regulated markets like New York City.
For the record, we sincerely hope the Reddit post is not true. But even if it isn’t, the unrest it created appears to be very real.