Doordash absolutely is rent seeking, though. Restaurant operators are paying the rent—for being furnished with SaaS services that used to just entail calling the restaurant and placing a takeout/delivery order. Nevermind the SaaS platforms restaurants have to pay for in order to integrate their SCM software with the ordering apps.
We used to call to order a pizza. Now, both the restaurant and we—the consumers—pay various abstracted-away “fees” to have a middle man do the same fucking thing.
The restaurant doesn’t “own” the software, and it doesn’t “own” the data produced by its day-to-day operations. They pay to have third parties warehouse and manage their sales data for them, and sometimes even sell that data back to them for additional fees.
What fucking stupid, late stage capitalist, Pollyanna codswallop. Wow.
DoorDash doesn’t provide a delivery service. They don’t pay delivery drivers to deliver, they don’t provide vehicles, benefits, or even consider drivers employees. People pay DoorDash for access to use their software/platform to receive requests from customers for delivery services. DoorDash offers a series of contract plans in which a driver pays fees for various tiers of DoorDash acting as a payment processor, can opt for a per-job rate reductions to guarantee a “base job rate” (without any guarantee of jobs assigned), and are otherwise uncompensated for “non-active” time.
The exploitation comes in the form of a monopolized rentier platform. In the same way that you might pay a landlord for access to a space to rest your pretty little head at night, restaurants and drivers pay premiums for access to a digital space to market services to one another. DoorDash doesn’t make anything other than software, and you can’t even “buy” DoorDash’s software.
Instead of creating value through the production of goods, DoorDash acts as a digital landlord that extracts surplus value (rent) from both restaurants and laborers by controlling the digital infrastructure necessary for exchange.
Just like a landlord, DoorDash owns the digital “land” (i.e. the application, algorithm, and user interface) connecting customers, merchants, and workers.By controlling this infrastructure, DoorDash acts as a tollbooth. It charges restaurants a high commission fee (ranging from 15% to 30%+) for every order. This fee is a form of monopoly rent, where DoorDash takes a portion of the restaurant’s profits simply for allowing them to access customers, similar to a landlord extracting rent.
DoorDash does not cook the food or directly employ the delivery workers as staff (again, they’re “contractors”, which DD has lobbied heavily to ensure). The restaurant produces the value (the food), and the driver performs the labor of delivery. They are a glorified phone service, however convenient or “neato” you might think they are.