I really don’t understand people who use these? Is it really that hard to go drive to Taco Bell or the grocery store and buy your food there? Every time I have used one of these services I have had a terrible customer experience.
Or are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
And fwiw, I’m not against delivery. I use Amazon fresh frequently but I would argue that is much more efficient. Dedicated drivers and warehouses optimized for grocery is societally useful.
Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
I gift meals to people in other cities when they're in need (sick, childbirth, death in the family) and I'm not nearby to help.
I've had intense working situations where an extra hour of work was worth paying someone $30 to deliver my $100 of groceries.
We've frequently used DoorDash and other services for small business meetings where we wanted to provide lunch, or in some situations where we had to stay late (security incidents, etc) and wanted to provide the team with something better than pizza delivery.
However it's also scary to watch some people who will DoorDash whenever they feel like it without regard to the cost. I watched some eye-opening conversations among college students comparing how much they had spent on DoorDash in the past year, even though they were not in a financial demographic that should have been indulging in delivery.
I use Instacart every week. It's clearly valuable over shopping yourself for a lot of people and the shoppers are clearly making more than "half a dollar".
Maybe you don't have kids or that busy of a schedule?
I use DoorDash all the time. Here in urban San Diego, there are lots of restaurants with no nearby parking – so you either have to park blocks away in a residential neighborhood or have a companion who can grab the food while the driver circles the block. Or carry your tacos home on the bus.
> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
Ok, but then...
> I use Amazon fresh frequently
So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...
Having a terrible experience seems like a local issue, certainly some areas might have a worse pool of delivery personnel than others but where I live the people doing Instacart are primarily women and they do an excellent job. Many women can't do Uber because of the insane levels of harassment, but they are able to do "gig" work like Instacart or UberEats that doesn't involve interacting with random strangers.
Like most things in life, it's not a matter of difficulty, as if I am so incapable of going to a grocery store to buy groceries and the undue hardship it will cause me. It's simply a matter of how I like to budget my time. I judge that the 30 minutes it can take to do groceries is better spent doing other things with my life.
Exactly. I’ll also add two other cases. My 80 year old grandma no longer drives. We live a hour away and visit every weekend to take her grocery shopping, but it’s nice to order her snacks throughout the week.
When our kids were babies we were sleep deprived and their sleep schedule made it hard to randomly go out. Having delivery was so helpful during those years.
And these days I’ll order delivery if I’m feeling sick or just tired.
The servers were seized under a mutual legal enforcement agreement and it remains to be seen if it underwent a separate Dutch legal review.
Quite of a bit of legal footwork gets skipped when the “terrorism” charge is invoked.
But it looks like the servers are not being physically turned over, the disks are being imaged and that is what is being transferred.
Any city that has proper suburban shops, strip malls, or Chinatowns. Avoid anything on Main Street. Look for small hole in the wall proprietor operations. This is one of the few times where economies of scale doesn't make things cheaper so avoid any big brands.
Also, watch a YouTube video or two to get a crash course on fabrics. In the states it's labor that's expensive but the fabrics are usually genuine. Alternatively you can go to South East Asia or places like Hong Kong and Japan too but there's a higher likelihood of fraud when it comes to the fabrics. Labor is about a magnitude cheaper though.
Bring your own fabrics if you want authenticity. Fabrics are cheap (relative to the cost of a nice suit on a tech worker's salary)
Another suggestion (not advice, I am hardly a professional when it comes to tailoring) is to commission more cotton clothing first to start so you can get a feel for the process. Suits are nice and all but are an investment of time and money and need constant dry cleaning. Try some custom tailor daily wear instead of H&M for a change (better quality and contributes to your local economy).
Also knowing that nothing on my plate was tortured for its entire existence on a factory farm is important to me. I still eat meat but it’s either meat I harvested personally or from a local farm where I can verify the living standards. As a consequence I eat significantly less meat. It’s entirely possible to opt out of the industrial factory farming method that abuses animals the entire time
B12 is generally the biggest concern. Vegans need to take vitamin supplements to get it. The B12 in those supplements is produced in factories doing bacterial fermentation
True herbivores have stomachs that can ferment B12 from the plants they eat. We do not
Another one can be iron, depending on your genes. There’s plenty of iron-rich vegetarian options, but heme iron in animal sources typically is absorbed at rates of ~40% while non-heme iron in plant sources is absorbed at 1-10% depending on the specific source. Non-heme iron absorption is also blocked by calcium and magnesium that compete for the same receptors. It’s not impossible to get enough iron in a vegan diet without supplementation, but it requires some careful planning of what sources you eat and how you cook it, and if you’re genetically predisposed to anemia it can be risky without monitoring your bloodwork.
Or are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
And fwiw, I’m not against delivery. I use Amazon fresh frequently but I would argue that is much more efficient. Dedicated drivers and warehouses optimized for grocery is societally useful.
Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
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