The complaint says DoorDash drivers began waiting to batch multiple orders together after gaining virtual visibility into kitchen systems, allowing them to see when pizzas would come out of the oven.
Instead of immediately leaving with a completed order, the suit claims drivers waited “up to fifteen (15) minutes” for additional deliveries, increasing the time between when a pizza is removed from the oven rack and when it leaves the building to be delivered. That delay slowed deliveries, disappointed customers, and caused a sharp drop in sales, the suit says.
The lawsuit also alleges Dashers could see tip amounts and whether orders were cash payments, making some drivers less likely to accept certain deliveries.
These drivers are their own business and they’re just maximizing revenue according to market incentives, just like any other business. So Pizza Hut has enshittified themselves. Well done. I guess it looked a lot better in the excel sheet and presentation.
The obvious answer to the problem no one seems to have mentioned yet:
Pay the drivers by the hour, not by the amount of orders.
Performance-based pay has never worked, and always incentivises bad behaviour. They wouldn’t try to batch so many orders for a single trip if it wasn’t the only way they could make passable money.
Pizza hut should be a fucking textbook case study on how to run a much-beloved brand into the ground.
Quiznos might be slightly worse- they were in financial trouble so their brilliant solution was let’s fuck over our franchisees. I’ll give you 3 guesses how that worked out, but you’ll only need one.
I used to love going to Quiznos. Never see them anymore hah.
Reading the comments here, y’all don’t have insulated bags given by the delivery company over there in the US?!
The actual companies that do delivery, yes. (Dominos drivers, etc) The contracted out ones dont give a single fuck (UberEats, doordash, etc)
Sure, but you can’t trap the heat forever. Eventually, it’s gonna get cold, and even if it doesn’t, people are gonna get annoyed when their orders slow way down.
the franchisee bringing the suit operates ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN pizza huts, i don’t give a shit what happens to them
Guess some finally out-pizza’d the Hut
Pizza Hut and Donatos around here both have approximately 5 customers a day. Me and my wife are sure they’re both fonts for money laundering.
I drove for a backwater dominos in rural NC. You could work an entire Saturday night shift (with 1 or 2 other drivers) and only end up taking 5 deliveries.
During day shifts It would be so dead that I would leave the store for hours (while clocked in! lol) to run errands, browse thrift stores or grocery shop. The manager would text me if there was an order.
It’s still open too.
Close … tax write offs. Failing businesses are actually a big business.
We have some restaurants like that here. Always empty, somehow manage to survive while restaurants all around them close, open as something else and close again etc.
There used to be a place at a local shopping center that was all glass and mirrors and was staffed by very serious young Asian men in sharp suits.
They sold - and only sold - boutique toffee apples.
I knew a guy who went to prison for 8 years for running a drug delivery service out of a pizza franchise. Word got out, he got popular, then arrested. Lol.
In my area that’s Arby’s, tons of commercials, tons of locations, never seen more than a single customer in the drive through at all hours of the day. Every restaurant around them within the same strip will be packed full, drive through line 20 deep, Arbys just sitting there with nothing.
Donatos?
They sell pizza. In all seriousness though, I never looked up their past to know how big the chain was. Wikipedia shows a pretty rocky past where they keep trying to expand, but the management is just too shitty. Including being sold to McDonald’s for a couple years.
Every time we try it again it’s always burnt or undercooked or wrong… Like, you had 4 customers today including us, and you fucked it up. No wonder the parking lot is empty.
Apparently they’ve started selling mostly at Red Robin, which I don’t imagine will go over too well either. Want a $30 thin crust with your $25 burger and fries? Why is my business going nowhere? Has to be a laundering scheme somewhere along the line.
Wtf, pizza hut doesn’t employ their own delivery drivers anymore? Sounds like they are complaining because they outsourced delivery and now they don’t like how the work is getting done.
We ordered dominos from dominos and it was delivered by uber.
Uber are hopeless where I live, so we had a conversation the other night and went to get pizza and picked not to order from them because we don’t want uber to have our food again
Exactly. Hire your own drivers if you want it the way you want it. They made a big deal when California minimum wage went up that they were going to fire every driver and use DoorDash. This is the quality you get with that choice
I was a delivery guy for a local pizzeria once upon a time (and that place still has their own drivers, and even their own delivery vehicles, which is practically unheard of)
And I’m not gonna lie, door dash and such was great for a while because it let me get food delivered from restaurants that otherwise didn’t do delivery.
But I’ve stopped using them, for a few reasons including their shitty business practices
But the straw that broke the camels back in each case that made me delete was them fucking up my order.
And that happens, I’m not particularly mad at the store or the driver, I’ve been there
But the way that these delivery apps handle it is, to me, unacceptable.
When I contacted them, their response was to just issue me a refund.
And to me, what should have happened, is I should have immediately had a replacement sent, expedited as much as possible, at no extra cost.
That’s what we always did when I was a delivery guy, and often with a gift certificate as an apology.
And sure, a refund on top of that would be nice, but really the root issue is that I don’t have the food I ordered. If I order it again, I’m going to the back of the delivery queue, and if I happened to order it when I was low on money I may not even be able to reorder it that day because that refund often takes a couple days to clear.
Consider yourself lucky.
I used them exactly one time. The driver brought the wrong food, the name and order weren’t even close.
Doordash refused to send a new driver, best they could offer was a credit for not even half the price. Even escalating customer service just got the credit converted to a refund, again for less than half of the charge. The rep could not explain to me what service I had received to justify keeping most of my money.
Yeah how fucking stupid. Domino’s isn’t the greatest but still delivers their own pies and get added bonus of points to free pizza.
By the way Doordash always worked like that. Why only time ever use it was the last. Food arrived cold due to drivers picking up multiple different orders sometimes at different businesses. Horrible service.
By the way Doordash always worked like that
It really sucks when that happens, but at least DoorDash and Uber tell you that it’s being delivered to someone else first.
What I really hate, is when they are working 2 different apps, have my food, and then go in the exact opposite direction of my home to do the other apps delivery first, and neither service cares as long as it’s delivered to you by the latest expected time.
🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doordash-pizza-hut-minimum-wage-hikes-california-new-york-city/
Pizza Hut is laying off more than 1,200 delivery drivers in California ahead of the state’s nearly 30% increase in its minimum wage, to $20 an hour from $16. PacPizza, operating as Pizza Hut, and Southern California Pizza Co. — another Pizza Hut franchise, both gave notice of layoffs impacting workers in cities throughout the state, Business Insider reported, citing notices filed with the state.
OMGAWD just that sentence… what is this place bro
They made a big deal when California minimum wage went up that they were going to fire every driver and use DoorDash.
And the only reason it makes sense to do that at all is because Doordash pays their drivers like shit, so they have to find ways to make more money doing things like batching orders.
Honestly I would assume that when they had their own drivers they would leave woth a few orders at a time, (though I could definitely be wrong).
Hire your own drivers if you want it the way you want it.
Read the article, they can’t… Pizza Hut mandates the use of the new system
Okay, but they’re the ones staking their lives on Pizza Hut’s brand for their franchise instead of just making actually decent pizza under their own name and making an honest buck. I couldn’t care less about them seeing the consequences of their own selfish, greedy decisions.
Well shit, that’s what they get for putting all those stoners out of work smh.
batch multiple orders together… waiting up to 15 minutes to do so? increased delivery times? disappointed customers?
sounds like doordash is doing an exemplary job replacing restaurant-employed drivers.
This shit drives me up a wall. The local, formerly awesome pizza place switched to DoorDash for delivery and it has sucked ever since. Pizza arrives cold since door dash drivers don’t have insulated bags, half the time they chuck it on the front porch and it sits there on the cold concrete even longer.
Delivery driver was always a reliable stoner job, I had so many friends in my youth who delivered pizza. Despite the cloud of weed smoke that came with the pizza, it was always hot and fast. They were motivated to get those tips after all.
Someone finally out-pizza’d the hut!
It doesn’t seem like AI is actually the problem here, as any new tech system could have given that kind of visibility to the DoorDash drivers and resulted in this problem, but either way, it’s an interesting fail, where a maybe good idea, falls apart because of human behaviour.
What the article fails to mention is that part of this door dashers aren’t paid well enough. Door dashers are paid such shit wages that they felt like they had to game the system like this to make the wages worth it. Why leave as soon as a delivery pops, when I can wait a little longer for a second or third order, which reduces how much I am driving and spending on fuel?
Seems like the software could have been updated to batch orders similar to how the drivers were.
That would address the cold food issue maybe, but it wouldn’t fix the delay in delivery issue as they wait on starting the pizza so they batch better.
I work 1 day a week at Wendys because life is expensive.
25 years ago when I was a teenager, any fast food place had 2 sources of orders. The ones in the drive thru, and the ones in the lobby ordering at the counter. Thats it.
Now, the majority of the orders are doordash/ubereats/ect. Except here’s the thing.
It’s 4:12pm. You’re at home, you order a daves double. Fair enough. It comes onto our screen at 4:12. Your order is probably ready for pickup by 4:14.
At 4:12 your order also went out to the drivers. They choose if they accept or not. I’ve seen completed orders literally sit there for HOURS. And I don’t mean like 2 hours, but really it was 90 minutes…
No. My one day a week shift starts at 3pm. It runs until 1am. I’ve seen orders that have a reciept printed at 11:30am. I’m showing up at 3pm. The order gets picked up at 9pm.
You know thats not even safe to eat at that point. It wasn’t in a refridgerator. It was just on a counter. Sitting out. I’ve seen frostys get picked up that were just a cup of liquid.
One other thing I noticed. When I was 16, front counter basically never stopped. And if it did, it was like 2 minutes.
Drive thru used to always have a line out the parking lot, sometimes into the street backed up.
These days? It’s like maybe 10 customers total in the lobby for my shift. And the drive thru gets a customer or doordash pickup every few minutes. No lines.
And the reason is simple. There’s two reasons.
First reason is that during covid they tried shifting all business over to these pickup services. Well…without direct control of the services, you’re kind of at the mercy of the workforce that can’t get jobs that have a boss. You are not their boss. They are their boss. You’re allowing them to do your work without any oversight on your behalf. So why would Joe the delivery driver, whos 4 hours late picking up this order, give a shit about quality control? Do you even know if he’s washed his hands? Wendys knows that I wash my hands several times a day. Wendys knows that the sandwich maker wears gloves when handling food. Wendys has no way to say if Joe the doordasher masturbated in his car 30 seconds after picking up an order. A LOT of people don’t like that, and instead just stopped ordering fast food.
The second reason business has collapsed, is the portions. Everything is smaller, and they’ve found ways to make it shittier. Reduce quality. Reduce portions. Cut corners any way you can.
Wendys has two patty sizes for their burgers. A JR and a single. The single is bigger. I had a woman in the lobby a few months ago break my heart. She comes up, and politely tries to say we gave her a JR instead of a single. So we got our gloves on, opened it up, and…it was a single.
When we told her that was what a single looked like these days, she was devistated. She asked “Whys it so small? It didn’t used to be so small…”
And she’s right. A single today is 6oz meat patty. A jr is 4oz meat patty. Those are weights before they cook. When I was a teenager, JR was 5oz, and single was either 8 or 10oz. I can’t remember.
This means a single today is almost as small as a JR 25 years ago. They wonder why young people don’t eat at burger shops like the boomers did in the 60s. It’s because young people aren’t interested in eating that crap. Then they wonder why the boomers aren’t interested in eating there anymore either. It’s because they’re old enough to remember the burgers dave thomas sold when he was alive. They look like premium options compared to today. And even if you adjust for inflation, the burgers back then were still 40% cheaper.
So combine the two reasons. And you got a situation where you order food, from a fast food place. You pay $30 on an order that would have been $8 if you picked it up yourself. It gets to you soggy, cold, and bacteria filled 7 hours later. Would you ever order it again?
This is why the entire fast food business is collapsing.
She asked “Whys it so small? It didn’t used to be so small…”
I think you mean “where’s the beef?”
Say you don’t care about cleanliness of the outside bag, you trust the little seal if any on the bag, and… the order is made fresh AND picked up AND delivered INSTANTANEOUSLY!
Magic! …except… $20 for $7 of food?!?!
PS: general public shouldn’t have that driver cleanliness concern, portions are generally extravagant nationwide (fast food too for combo meals … OK anything beyond bog standard combo), assume extremely-delayed food is rare enough it’s NBD—and still we are on the same page (where it counts!)
Simplifying yours then:
You pay $20 for $7 of food, how many more times you gonna do that :D (tech office workers say “MORE!” but, normal people… priced like gold for normals) [low mobility etc. excepted]
You remember that old saw about getting a job done: “fast, cheap, and good - pick two”. Well fast food used to be cheap, and it used to be fast: I could pull up to Burger King drive-through and drive away with a burger, fries and drink in 5-10 minutes for like $7. It might not have been the best food, but it was tasty enough and filling enough that it was worth it.
A few years ago, I was on a road trip and tried stopping at a McDonald’s. It took me 45 minutes to get through the drive-through lane and I was about ready to scream because the layout didn’t show the backup until there was no way to get out. Last year, I was on another trip and stopped at Burger King. Got a burger, fries and drink, and it was over $20.
If fast food is no longer fast, no longer cheap, and was never very good, why would I opt for it?
And they’re still trying to screw people at every corner. I noticed about a year ago that Wendy’s pretty much stopped giving decent deals via the app, and BK is doing the same. 5 years ago you can get two junior Whoppers and two fries with a coupon for $5.99. it’s 12.99 now.
They also ditched the giant large sized foam cups for the plastic ones, which just so happen to be conveniently smaller. All to give the customer less while claiming to be environmentally friendlier. Of course, the cups get chucked into the same dumpster as the rest of the garbage, as the recycling bin is cardboard only.
Beautiful rundown. For my comparatively worthless 2 cents, pretty much everyone I know has extremely strong negative opinions of doordash for much the same reasons you covered. Another factor I hear is people got hooked on it during covid and got financially burned and grew resentful of it after that
I tried it once at the start of covid. My food finally got to me lukewarm ninety minutes after I ordered it. I’m sure the restaurants and drivers have improved since then, but I just can’t justify paying almost double for my food.
May ask what state you work in? Freaking crazy how is customers waiting HOURS for their food without canceling said order?
In some cases DD will refuse to cancel it, or makes it so complicated that the customer has to go through their bank instead for it. So it could be cases where the customer attempted it and was told to screw off, so therefore they just went through their bank for a chargeback instead.
DD would still attempt delivery on those orders, and then likely try to protest the chargeback as well saying the service was “eventually” rendered as food quality is on the food place and DD is just the transport.
Singles are 6oz and juniors 4? At the one I worked at, it’s 4oz for the singles and just under 2oz for the juniors. Maybe it’s a difference between Canada and the US?
I was wondering about this. I remember ads from before 2000 where a single was 4 oz/quarter pound* *before cooking.
Here’s an ad from 1985 where they specifically say it’s a quarter pound single burger.
Amazing insight, thanks for sharing!
I don’t use DoorDash but occasionally order from Taco Bell. Every time I order I watch the car arrive at Taco Bell and wait about 20 minutes before actually picking up my order and then delivering it.
Additionally I know UberEats used to (and maybe still does) offer cheaper delivery if you pick a restaurant another driver was already heading to. (I haven’t used UberEats in years because I found them less reliable.)
Ironically if a restaurant did all the deliveries themselves they would have all the information about how best to optimize delivery. Maybe all the delivery companies can find a way to share this information to minimize travel and maximize speed of delivery.
Total deceptive clickbait headline tho
Agreed. That’s why I left my comment. I don’t like editorializing the titles from the news sites.
franchisee Chaac Pizza Northeast accused Pizza Hut of forcing stores to adopt Dragontail, a delivery-management platform that Pizza Hut described as using artificial intelligence to “optimize” food delivery, despite what the suit calls obvious incompatibilities with Chaac’s business model.
Seems like AI is the problem here. Pizza Hut chose their tool and they get to enjoy the headline.
How does AI impact the door dash driver deciding not to deliver a pizza that’s ready because they can see what future orders are about to be ready?
Pizza Hut discovers that customers are disappointed when they don’t pay a living wage.
Upper management can’t even see it.
Upper Management: WTF are they complaining about, we don’t promise hot food or on time delivery on our website.
When profits are paramount, the people suffer.
Years ago when a company could have bad days and nobody was punished and the customer was always right, now its fuck you customer we need profits.
I was with Pizza Hut when we got that directive of empowerment to do what was best to retain the customer. No manager needed for most things, just treat them well. We had a lot of regular customers, I wonder why. That was a long time ago.
Company that outsourced a part of its business for operational and cost efficiencies upset when outsource company looks for operational and cost efficiencies.
Raise your hand if you’re surprised.
Anyone? Anyone? No?
