‘Last Week Tonight’ Examines Food Delivery Apps and Who Loses

The Big Picture

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
  examines how customers benefit from convenience and reasonable prices with food delivery apps.
• Restaurants struggle due to high fees, leading to increased meal prices.
• Workers face financial insecurity as independent contractors, indicating a need for change.

Whether you’re in the mood for a hefty meal or craving a single slice of cake on a rainy afternoon, food delivery apps make our lives a lot easier when it comes to having that food brought to our door. The logic of the food delivery cost versus benefit sometimes seems just too good to be true — which means that, of course, somebody is getting the bitter end of that logic. On its new episode, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver took a deep dive into the food delivery apps universe and broke down how it works at four levels: customers, restaurants, delivery people and the app itself.

The first and easiest part of that deal is ours: Customers who sit at home waiting for their food to arrive. We often get the best deal possible, with somewhat reasonable prices, the comfort of not having to walk out of our homes and even get to catch up on Physical 100 while we wait. Easy, breezy. It is not so easy for restaurants, though. As you probably imagine, food delivery apps take a chunk of their revenue for making the bridge between their service and customers. But sometimes that bite is way too big, which is why restaurants are forced to charge more for a meal inside the food delivery apps so that they can still keep some profit.

But sometimes restaurants have to jump through hoops to make this profit happen, especially when you factor in cases such as Grubhub listing food that a particular restaurant doesn’t even have on the menu. What makes it worse is that companies like Doordash and UberEats are also struggling to turn a profit — after all these years in the market, they still haven’t found a way of operating that benefits everyone involved.

Who Is Really Profiting Off Food Delivery Apps? No One, Really

Not that Grubhub, Doordash, UberEats are even trying. The last component of that equation and the ones who have it worse are the ones who actually make all of this happen: Workers. Since they’re listed as independent contractors, they don’t get any help whatsoever to make their jobs easier. Basic delivery items like backpacks, bikes and even helmets are all paid out of their own pockets, and they have no financial security whatsoever in case they get injured while making a delivery.

The worse news is, there’s still a long way to go until food delivery apps find a balance between the service they provide and properly compensating restaurants and workers. As John Oliver underscores, they will first worry about their own profit before even sparing a thought to anything else. In the worst case scenario, it’s a model that can’t last. Because of this, Last Week Tonight suggests the time has come to put some guardrails around it. No joke, no punchline this time.

You can watch the full main segment of the episode above.