As delivery discourse rages, don’t forget the middlemen: apps like UberEats, DoorDash, and Grubhub.
No one is happy about the delivery apps. Not the customers, who feel gouged by an avalanche of fees. Not restaurants, who feel gut-punched by the commission apps take from them. Certainly not delivery workers, who have long been rewarded with a pittance for doing a job that, in a city like New York, has a higher injury rate than that of construction workers.
Amid this dogpile of disgruntlement, the merry-go-round of debating the value of food delivery keeps spinning. After all, some people, especially those with disabilities, rely on such services — but then, it is difficult work, and everyone ought to tip well. Another faction argues that this isn’t fair, because it’s already so unaffordable. The delivery apps themselves recede somewhat into the background, as if their existence is a given. They’re merely fulfilling a demand in the market, naturally taking a cut for themselves — two plus two equals four. Our desire to consume is seen as the problem, the having-cake-and-eating-it-too mentality of expecting affordable convenience.
But we should give credit where it’s due. Delivery apps have expended a lot of effort (and money) making the case that we — restaurants, workers, and consumers — desperately need them. Unhappy about the state of things now? You’ll really be pulling your hair out if you try to force the apps to change. In New York City and Seattle, new minimum pay laws for delivery workers recently went into effect. Immediately, additional “regulatory” fees were charged to customers, and restaurants and delivery workers complained that orders dropped, with Uber claiming in a blog post that they had dipped by 30 percent. Neither city’s minimum wage laws have forced delivery apps to tack on new fees, but both DoorDash and Uber Eats have introduced them nonetheless. The message is clear: If you try to mediate how the apps operate, things will just get worse.
An Uber spokesperson told Vox that there were “consequences to bad regulations and we made these consequences clear in repeated testimony that both cities chose to disregard.” A DoorDash spokesperson wrote that its platform “has to work for everyone who uses it — Dashers, merchants, and customers alike — which is why we’ve opposed these extreme new rules.” They continued that the new laws “require platforms like DoorDash to pay well above the local minimum wages, not including additional pay for mileage and tips. Just as we warned, the increased costs created by these regulations have led to an alarming drop in work for Dashers and lost revenue for small businesses.” Grubhub did not reply to a request for comment.
Some headlines have already declared app-delivery regulations a failure; the Seattle City Council is considering gutting the law while the ink is still drying. At the crisis point of consumers fed up with the cost of food delivery, companies like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub — the three biggest in the US — are insisting on their irreplaceable value to the restaurants, consumers, and workers who have long complained about them.
Kimberly Wolfe, a delivery app driver in Seattle who fought for the wage law with an advocacy group called Working Washington, isn’t buying it. “These guys are doing what I call a corporate tantrum,” she tells Vox. “They’re just cutting off their nose to spite their face.”
What apps take from restaurants and customers
To be sure, delivery apps are convenient. For this ease of use, customers are painfully up-charged. Menu prices are almost always more expensive than ordering directly from restaurants. Then there are the line-item fees that appear on the receipt. There’s the delivery fee, but also the frustratingly generic “service fee” that could cover anything from keeping the apps’ servers up to paying their drivers. DoorDash charges a 15 percent service fee that starts at a $3 minimum. Uber Eats charges an unspecified service fee that depends on basket size. Browsing Grubhub in Seattle, I loaded a sample $62 food order and was levied a $14 service fee. Then add the taxes and tip. For the privilege of having a meal delivered to your home — something pizza and Chinese restaurants have done for at least half a century — you might find yourself paying nearly double the cost of just the food.
For restaurants, there’s a price as well. For the privilege of being found in the apps’ centralized hubs, apps can swipe as much as 30 percent of an order’s subtotal from restaurants, even collecting a commission on pickup orders. That’s if diners choose them over the influx of ghost kitchens and promoted partners.
Much attention has been paid to the fact that delivery apps aren’t profitable, or were on a long road to becoming profitable — but that’s in large part because they chose to invest aggressively in growth over being in the black at the end of the year. Last year, DoorDash’s profit margin was nearly 49 percent. Even after deducting a bunch of its biggest expenses, including driver pay, Uber’s delivery segment pocketed $1.5 billion, an increase of 173 percent from 2022.
Out of $8.6 billion in revenue in 2023, DoorDash spent almost $2 billion on sales and marketing, and another billion on R&D. It also spent $750 million last year buying back its own stock, a move often used by corporations to boost stock value. Uber has also long poured money into sales and marketing, which includes things like promotions and discounts, as well as R&D, in order to grow. This year, the company is preparing to shell out a cool $7 billion on stock buybacks.
What (little) apps provide to delivery workers
While customers find themselves paying $9-plus service fees on a delivery order, the worker handing you the food might only get a few dollars, all while paying for their own vehicle and fuel.
Wolfe recalls how paltry some of the payouts were before the Seattle wage law, when she would see $2 to $3 for an order before tips. In May 2022, Working Washington aggregated data from over 400 delivery jobs in the Seattle area and found that restaurant delivery workers were making on average $8.71 per hour after deducting basic expenses such as gas, which was far below the city’s 2022 minimum hourly wage of $17.27. During a Working Washington protest at City Hall in 2022, paper bags with receipts showing how much a worker had made on a delivery order were put on display.
“There were quite a few that were negative,” says Wolfe. “Once you figured expenses and all that, you were basically paying them to deliver.”
A 2022 study from NYC’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) found that, after expenses, food delivery workers in the city were making an average of $11.12 per hour — again, sub-minimum wages. Crucially, customer tips made up about half of a delivery driver’s total earnings before expenses. (Data from Solo, which makes software for app-based gig workers, shows that tips make up a similar proportion of pay in Seattle.) A more recent report on the adopted minimum pay projected that drivers’ annual earnings after expenses (and accounting for the common practice of working for multiple apps) would rise from $11,970 in 2021 to $32,500 by 2025. Yet this calculation relies on a key assumption: that customers would keep tipping about the same amount as before the wage law.
It’s hard to imagine that tipping rates in Seattle and NYC would stay the same given that the apps have added friction to the process. On both DoorDash and Uber Eats in these two cities, the tipping prompt now comes up after delivery, not at checkout, when diners are less likely to engage with the app. On GrubHub, the option to tip at checkout is still available, but many NYC-area restaurants on the platform now show lower default tipping options that max out at 12 percent. (Of course, a customer can still input a custom amount.)
It has also likely gone down because deliveries have gone down. Some workers in NYC report that the apps are now locking them out, restricting the number of hours they work. Justice for App Workers, a coalition of rideshare and delivery workers, held a rally in front of New York’s city hall on March 27 to demand that the city address the lockouts. Food delivery workers are saying that they’re “unable to work for hours and days on end,” according to a statement released by the group. Bimal Ghale, a delivery worker in New York who is part of the Justice for App Workers group, told Vox through an interpreter that he used to work five to six hours at a time. “After the minimum wage started, I would be on the apps and after two hours it would lock me out,” he says. “The apps claim the area isn’t busy.” But Ghale is still delivering in the same neighborhoods he did before the new pay law, and the DCWP has also stated that orders have “remained steady.”
An Uber spokesperson said that the city had known workers’ access to apps would become limited due to the new hourly pay rule. “Since the rule went into effect, nearly 6,000 couriers have lost access to the platform, nearly 20,000 people are on the waitlist to work on the app,” the spokesperson said.
Since last December, when the pay rule went into effect in NYC, at least 500 complaints have been lodged with the DCWP alleging that apps aren’t following it. A DCWP spokesperson told Vox that the department was monitoring compliance.
In Seattle, DoorDash has slapped a $4.99 regulatory fee on all orders, and in NYC it charges an extra $1.99. It’s unclear how these meaningfully differ from the catchall service fee, a portion of which can also cover worker pay — except that the labeling points the finger at the law for higher prices. DoorDash’s regulatory response fees are meant to cover the costs of new regulations. The DCWP estimates that if apps passed on only half of their labor costs to consumers, instead of all of it, they would still pocket $232 million a year in revenue. It’s not a given that the apps have to charge us more to pay their workers better.
Apps cry that their hands are tied
Not long after the pay law went into effect, DoorDash published a blog claiming that Seattle businesses had already lost over $1 million in revenue and that workers were making less because orders on the platform had dropped. Grubhub’s write-up on the law’s adverse effects claims that tips are down 26 percent, with no mention of the fact that many of its Seattle-area merchants now show a lower range of tipping options — a tactic the company has used before.
None of these tactics are new. Just look at what happened in California after the passage of a ballot initiative called Proposition 22 a few years ago, which allowed app-based gig work companies like Uber and DoorDash to classify their workers as independent contractors, saving them a lot of money. In exchange, they agreed to pay 120 percent of the minimum wage for every hour of trip time — as in, time spent logged on the app, waiting for a ride or for an order to appear, would not count. App companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars backing Prop 22, even threatening to pull out of California if it failed to pass. They also warned that, without Prop 22, prices would go up for customers. A month after the successful vote, delivery apps announced fee increases anyway.
The math doesn’t add up. On the one hand, delivery apps play up the fact that they’re just intermediaries helping facilitate the sale or delivery of a product — they’re not employers, who would be on the hook for far greater payroll taxes and other employment costs than what apps currently pay. On the other hand, they command a steep price from restaurants and customers for matchmaking, of which the workers only see a narrow slice. The apps don’t make the food taste better, or deliver faster, and it’s obviously not cheaper. So who, exactly, benefits from their existence? What do they really add to the tangle of relationships we call the economy? If app companies leave cities like Seattle and New York to avoid having to pay higher labor costs, who would lose?
Wolfe doesn’t seem worried. Her thinking is that if they can’t run a competent business, perhaps they shouldn’t be in business. “Don’t let the door hit you,” she says. “Because you want capitalism — baby, that’s capitalism.”
We eat pigs. Do we need them to process our urine too?
No one tells you, when you donate your kidney, that from that point on you’re a Kidney Guy.
When kidney things happen in the news, everyone you know will text you. When a friend of a friend is diagnosed with kidney failure, as about 136,000 Americans were in 2021, you’ll hear about it. When acquaintances are thinking about donating, you’ll get a call.
It’s been nearly eight years since I donated mine in 2016, and my Kidney Guy status has not faded.
The flurry of kidney texts started anew at the end of March when researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced that they had transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into a living human for the first time.
They weren’t the first to try something like this. In 2021, researchers at NYU conducted the first pig kidney (or “pigney”) donation to a brain-dead patient, finding that the transplant took and the kidney was producing urine, the way kidneys should. They also used a genetically engineered pig to reduce the odds that the human immune system would reject the organ. In 2023, the NYU team repeated the experiment and found that a pigney could last for over two months.
But the Mass General researchers went a step further when they transplanted a pigney into Rick Slayman, a 62-year-old Weymouth, Massachusetts, man who was very much alive. He luckily remains alive as of this writing and is producing urine through the piece of pork that some doctors put in him.
This is unquestionably good news for Slayman, and while routine pig kidney transplants are still a few years off, it’s obviously good for people with kidney failure to have more options.
We shouldn’t let the news distract us, however, from an uncomfortable fact: Humans could, if we wanted to, end the kidney shortage right now without any assistance from our porcine friends.
Why pigneys are a game changer
The Mass General announcement is big news for one simple reason: Not enough humans are donating their kidneys.
While some 135,972 Americans were diagnosed in 2021 with end-stage renal disease, a condition that you need either dialysis or a transplant to survive, only 25,549 transplants took place that year. The remaining 110,000 people needed to rely on dialysis.
Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful. Over 60 percent of patients who started traditional dialysis in 2017 were dead by 2022. Of patients diagnosed with kidney failure in 2017 who subsequently got a transplant from a living donor, only 13 percent were dead five years later.
Life on dialysis is also dreadful to experience. It usually requires thrice-weekly four-hour sessions sitting by a machine, having your blood processed. You can’t travel for any real length of time, since you have to be close to the machine. More critically, even part-time work is difficult because dialysis is physically extremely draining.
Pigneys are exciting because they represent the possibility of a world where dialysis is a relic, like iron lungs for polio.
There’s still a ways to go before this future is realized. Technically, pigneys aren’t even in the clinical trial stage — to date, experiments have been allowed under “compassionate use” rules, and those participating have either been already dead or without any other option for survival. Researchers will need years to conduct formal trials and evaluate the approach for safety and complications.
But these early indications are promising, and logistically, it would be feasible.
We can easily have farms breed 68,000 pigs a year, each giving its kidneys to two deserving human recipients as soon as they’re diagnosed with kidney failure. The US has 75 million pigs alive now for meat production; a few dozen thousand more for transplantation is a drop in the bucket.
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Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
We shouldn’t need pigneys
But there’s something sad to me about the pigney moment, too.
Partly this is because I’m an animal lover who thinks there’s something wrong with killing pigs, which are intelligent animals capable of tasks like playing video games, for meat.
And while I argue there’s obviously less wrong with killing them to harvest lifesaving organs, it seems like a necessary evil at best. Maybe we’ll take one kidney each from the pigs and then send them off to live on a beautiful farm, but I have my doubts.
The bigger issue is that we should not have to rely on pigs at all.
There are more than enough human beings walking around with spare kidneys who could donate them to strangers in need. They simply choose not to.
Getting 136,000 human kidneys for transplant every year in the US is very possible.
We can make up part of the gap by collecting more organs from deceased patients. Organ procurement organizations, which distribute organs from dead people, have been very conservative about which organs they’ll use; federal agencies are now investigating them for fraud. There are likely thousands more organs we could be recovering every year by reforming these groups — but not enough to wipe out the kidney backlog.
We can’t rely on dead people, or pigs, to close the kidney gap in the near term. We need living people.
We could do more to encourage donations. Going through a nephrectomy is real work, and it deserves compensation. Many kidney donors have rallied behind a proposal to give a $10,000-a-year tax credit for every donor for five years, to make up for lost wages and other costs incurred due to donating. This would go a long way toward filling the shortage
But that kind of policy change will take time as well.
In the meantime, we could eliminate the backlog, this year, if a tiny share of adult Americans agreed to donate their kidney to someone who needs one. Not everyone is eligible, but far more than most people think are. Maybe a friend of yours could. Maybe a family member. Maybe you.
This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
The film’s Japan premiere renews critiques about what the movie omitted.
Oppenheimer’s premiere in Japan this past weekend has renewed scrutiny of how the film depicted the devastating bombings that killed more than 200,000 people during World War II.
The Oscar-winning film centers heavily on J. Robert Oppenheimer and follows the physicist’s journey in developing the atomic bomb for the United States. It does not directly show the fallout of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it also does not feature any Japanese perspectives in the form of major characters or testimonials.
While some Japanese viewers noted that the film is from Oppenheimer’s point of view and that the lack of these voices is in line with that, others argued that its focus on his perspective helped glorify his actions and downplay their consequences.
“From Hiroshima’s standpoint, the horror of nuclear weapons was not sufficiently depicted,” former Hiroshima Mayor Takashi Hiraoka said during a premiere event for the film.
These reactions echoed similar pushback the film received in the US — reinvigorating questions about whose stories get told, and whether the ones that Hollywood chooses to focus on offer a limited understanding of the world and gloss over major harms.
Japanese viewers questioned Oppenheimer’s framing
Last year, Oppenheimer’s release coincided with that of the summer’s other big blockbuster — Barbie — timing that prompted a wave of memes and articles about a “Barbenheimer’’ double feature. “Barbenheimer,” however, inspired posts — like that of a mushroom cloud replacing Barbie’s hair — which were heavily criticized in Japan for failing to recognize the impact of the atomic bombs. Warner Brothers, the company distributing the film, eventually apologized for official tweets that had responded to these memes.
In the wake of this controversy — as well as concerns about the sensitivity of the film — the Japanese release of Oppenheimer was delayed. Such timing isn’t uncommon for foreign films, though the movie screened earlier for audiences in other Asian countries in the region including China and Korea.
On Friday, the film premiered with content warnings for viewers, which noted that it could spur recollections about the damage and trauma the bombs caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Those bombs killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki, maimed and wounded tens of thousands of others, and caused higher rates of cancer survivors.
According to several news reports, the Barbenheimer controversy and the nature of the film’s subject matter have added attention to its release in Japan. Hiraoka, the former mayor of Hiroshima, is among those who have commented on the film, along with multiple surviving victims of the atomic bombs, known as “hibakusha.” “Is this really a movie that people in Hiroshima can bear to watch?” Kyoko Heya, the head of Hiroshima’s international film festival, previously asked. According to Variety, the film placed third at the box office in its opening weekend.
Some Japanese people who saw the film questioned both the lack of Japanese perspectives as well as the tone of the movie, which they saw as lauding both Oppenheimer and his work on the Manhattan Project.
“The sense of excitement among people celebrating the experiment and the dropping of the atomic bomb. I felt incredibly disgusted,” Erika Abiko, an anti-nuclear activist, told the BBC.
“Of course this is an amazing film which deserves to win the Academy Awards,” Kawai, another viewer in Hiroshima, told Reuters. “But the film also depicts the atomic bomb in a way that seems to praise it, and, as a person with roots in Hiroshima, I found it difficult to watch.”
@bbcnews In August 1945, Oppenheimer’s nuclear bomb killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and at least 74,000 people in Nagasaki. Today, the biopic about Oppenheimer’s life was released in Japan. #Hiroshima #Nagasaki #Oppenheimer #Japan #NuclearBomb #History #HistoryTok #Cinema #CinemaTok #Films #Movies #BBCNews
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Director Christopher Nolan has responded to such critiques in the past, noting that the film is intended to capture Oppenheimer’s perspective, so it doesn’t go beyond that. “To depart from [his experience] would betray the terms of the storytelling,” Nolan has said. “He learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio — the same as the rest of the world.”
Certain Japanese moviegoers agreed with this sentiment, stating that the film’s emphasis on Oppenheimer and exclusion of other experiences made sense. Others noted that it still served as an important cautionary tale despite failing to fully capture what took place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“This was really a film about Oppenheimer the man, and the way he wrestled with his conscience, so in that sense, I think it was right not to broaden it out too much to show the aftermath,” Mei Kawashima, a Hiroshima resident, told the Guardian.
Broadly, though, many Japanese viewers expressed discomfort with Oppenheimer’s storytelling and felt the portrayal was incomplete. “The film was only about the side that dropped the A-bomb,” Tsuyuko Iwanai, a Nagasaki resident, told NPR. “I wish they had included the side it was dropped on.”
These reactions build on a conversation about missing voices
At its core, the Oppenheimer discourse is about which characters get humanized in major films — and who gets to narrate these stories.
“I was uncomfy watching yet another movie about tortured white male genius when the victims of the atrocities glossed over by the script — Japanese people, interned Japanese Americans, and Native Americans — had no voice,” Li Lai, a Taiwanese American media critic, wrote last July.
The exclusion of Japanese people in the film has been a major point of contention, as has the erasure of stories of Native Americans and Hispanic Americans who lived near New Mexico sites where significant bomb testing took place.
Both Native and Hispanic communities in the region were displaced by the construction of Los Alamos, and residents who lived close to test sites have experienced disproportionately high rates of cancer and infant deaths in the decades since.
By leaving these voices out of the movie, critics say Oppenheimer fails to fully grapple with the impact of the titular character’s actions — and the violence that followed.
The film’s premiere in Japan has forced a confrontation of some of these concerns. There’s been debate, too, about whether Oppenheimer could have shown more of the trauma from the bombings, or if that approach would have been harmful and effectively gawking at the suffering.
Naoko Wake, a Michigan State University historian who has interviewed survivors of the bombings, notes that thoughtfully including such images could be vital for awareness when there has been so little understanding of Japanese civilians’ perspective.
“I ask my students every time I teach this subject, ‘Have you ever been exposed to any of the images outside of the mushroom clouds?’ They say that they have never seen images from ground zero or any effects of radiation exposure,” Wake told Vox. She points to a scene of Oppenheimer turning away from photos he’s being shown from the bombings as a potential moment in which the film could have allowed viewers to bear witness as well.
Beyond videos or photos of the violence, no Japanese characters were included to express or convey the effects of these weapons, either. It’s possible to envision a scene of a radio broadcast featuring interviews with Japanese people describing their experience with the horrors of the bombs, for example.
Notably, this pushback matters because it raises questions about whose perspective gets to be the definitive one in storytelling — including on such high-profile platforms.
“Hollywood is a powerful tool for white perspectives,” Ponipate Rokolekutu, a professor of race and resistance studies at San Francisco State University, told KQED. “They don’t want other histories to be known.”