"Delivering restaurant food has always been a hard, thankless job. With the apps..."

"... it is becoming more flexible and better paying — but in some ways less stable. This, said Niels van Doorn, an assistant professor of new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam who spent six months in New York studying app riders last year, 'is what happens with an already precarious work force — what happens to an already invisibilized work force — when these platforms come to town.'... My last day as a food courier began with an order on the East Side that included the notation 'Happy Birthday' next to the recipient’s name. I sang 'Happy Birthday' as I proffered her egg sandwich. 'Oh, thank you!' she said, laughing. (Tip: zero.) It ended 41 miles later in Brooklyn after a failed attempt at a four-delivery sprint that included an order getting taken away from me and assigned to another courier because I was late... In between came a lunch delivery to a Class A office building in Midtown. I was sent to a service entrance where a fellow deliveryman led me down a Dumpster-lined corridor to a crammed holding pen where couriers huddled in near-silence, food packs on their backs. I had stumbled through a dystopian portal. I thought of what a colleague had said the day before: 'You’re one step above an Amazon drone.' I thought of something Professor van Doorn had said, that the couriers’ real value to the app companies is in the data harvested like pollen as we make our rounds, data that will allow them to eventually replace us with machines."

From "My Frantic Life as a Cab-Dodging, Tip-Chasing Food App Deliveryman" by Andy Newman, a NYT reporter, whose "life as a... delivery man" consisted of a few days' work (using a borrowed electric bike). It amazes me that people order food delivered and then don't tip, but I'm not using these apps, and maybe people — especially young people — read the company's pitch as implying that the tip is built into the delivery price. Ah, yes, I'm looking at Uber Eats, and it lists for each restaurant a "delivery fee," which is $3 to $6 or so.