In summary, they pulled the classic gig economy move: Telling your employees that they now have the "opportunity" to "set their own hours" and "maximize their income". Meaning "Your benefits are gone" and "Your labor protections are history". Complete with the most thinly veiled threat possible: That "refusal would make it difficult to renew your contract".
After the Twitter backlash, they came back with a blog post (https://www.e-food.gr/blog/efood-riders-announcement/). It's six paragraphs of generic corporate speak, and the only meaningful part in it is that "They regret the miscommunication, the announcement was in no way threatening or meant to create an atmosphere of unease among our delivery drivers, it was only an option for a new way of collaborating with us". This only intensified the backlash, since the threatening tone of their initial announcement is crystal clear to any speakers of the Greek language without mental deficiencies.
> Complete with the most thinly veiled threat possible: That "refusal would make it difficult to renew your contract".
It wasn't even a thinly veiled threat. A direct translation would be "Otherwise, we would like to inform you that there is no possibility of renewing your current contract".
Yeah, "in no way threatening or meant to create an atmoshpere".
It’s important to contextualize this (1) in the frame of Greece at this point of time —- many individuals still recovering from the recent internationally-renowned fiscal crisis, while corporations have received aid —- and (2) the general sociopolitical context: a long-standing tradition of guaranteed socialized healthcare for everyone (although the wait times are horrible and quality of care is questionable), government-managed pensions, and a promise that everyone should at the very least be okay, if not prosper. Greece’s long standing tradition of a strictly regulated market (as a way of putting overall societal well-being over individual profits) is being forced into the spotlight by reforms “forced on” by the EU and the international funds that bailed Greece out from the fiscal crisis. On the other hand, the populace feels neither responsible nor benefited by neither the crisis, nor the reforms.
An interesting tidbit from the recent labor law that enabled EFood’s action: employers have to report employee-hours-worked and schedule to the government, on a weekly basis, ahead of time, via a poorly design website, or via SMS, and there have been talks of tracking people’s working location and hours via an app…
It’s very interesting to see what will happen over the next few years…
To add some context, before efood almost every shop had its own delivery people, who usually worked off the books, uninsured, providing their own motorcycles, gas, etc. Efood luckily improved on this, but trying to roll it back produced this immense backlash.
Before grabbing the pitchforks on this, please note that:
- The email they sent was about ~100 of the 3,000+ delivery drivers that had a low performance rating.
- Instead of just terminating their 3-month employee contract at once, the company offered them the option to become freelancers (like their major rival, Wolt, does from the beginning).
- This also came after e-food found that some drivers were using fake-GPS apps that changed their location so that the algorithm didn't assign them many deliveries (of course, they were paid by the hour according to their contracts). Paying them by the number of fulfilled deliveries would help with identifying the ones that were slacking.
I am also against the uberization of all work sectors, but I think this just blew out of proportion through social media.
There is a screenshot of the original e-mail that the company sent here. They state that 'according to your batch, we estimate that it would be better to continue working as a freelancer', where 'batch' is e-food's internal rating system.
Come on, no offence, but you sound like astroturfing.
I have no idea how you may be aware of a company's internal information, but the greek article you linked does _not_ mention rating system names.
Also, but when using e-food there's no way to actually rate delivery people, only restaurants (like you claim above with "Negative reviews from customers...").
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Besides, the article this very comment thread belongs to also says "Efood drivers, which the company claimed had lower ratings, received a message" so what are you arguing about exactly? You're shooting the messenger.
> Late on Thursday, Efood drivers, which the company claimed had lower ratings, received a message stating that, in the hopes of “increasing the productivity of the fleet” of drivers, and in the company’s “broader strategy,”
There is a screenshot of the original e-mail that the company sent here. They state that 'according to your batch, we estimate that it would be better to continue working as a freelancer', where 'batch' is e-food's internal rating system.
Online food delivery platforms in Greece will follow the same course as their global counterparts (Uber eats, Grubhub, Doordash). Slow death. Now they try to reduce their labor costs by stretching the limits of the law, so that they survive a little longer.
This was never a profitable business model. I don't understand how so many VC's fell for a supply chain concept that a first year Operations Research student would had figured out that is so inefficient that is not worth pursuing.
Edit: Except if their goal was to become a monopoly and then charge whatever they want for deliveries.
> Now they try to reduce their labor costs by stretching the limits of the law
Why would you say they are stretching the limits of the law? My understanding is that they had no obligation to renew those 3-month contracts.
> Except if their goal was to become a monopoly and then charge whatever they want for deliveries.
Even if that's the case (highly probable), it would still be a huge improvement compared to the pre-efood era when lots of delivery riders would not be paid on time, work (illegally) with no insurance/pension, sometimes even get humiliated by terrible bosses.
"Why would you say they are stretching the limits of the law? My understanding is that they had no obligation to renew those 3-month contracts."
Because these 3-month contracts were renewed for years, and in fact, there are many employees who were employed for over 3 years, continuously, by the company. That makes the non-renewal -> layoff.
"Even if that's the case (highly probable), it would still be a huge improvement compared to the pre-efood era when lots of delivery riders would not be paid on time, work (illegally) with no insurance/pension, sometimes even get humiliated by terrible bosses."
Food delivery platforms are not in the business of providing cash and benefits to drivers. They are in the business of making money. But apparently, they cannot do either.
That's why these labour protection laws exists, to remind those companies even if they think they are not responsible of providing benefits to the drivers that they actually are.
A 3-months contract is not better than non contract at all in the sense that is way tooo short to be able to stabilize your work around it. 3 months contract basically means you'll be as bad as before except that the employer doesn't need to go the illegal route to use the worker (and the employment statistics are better).
Based on what I've read it is more or less the same model we have in my country. Employment contracts are either fixed or indefinite term contracts, you can't renew fixed term contracts indefinitely and they are used in specific situations, one of them being to assess or test someone's abilities before offering an indefinite term contract, so 3 months is a short term but not really in the sense that your new employee doesn't necessarily needs to master the job in 3 months, you just need believe or see that they are learning and being as good as other hires in that amount of time.
In Finland, I always felt that whole thing peaked in making sense with our original platform pizza-online.fi Where it didn't even have own delivery, but aggregator and payment processor. And doing that at reasonable rates. Ofc, it got acquired by VC money and exploitation went up...
> I don't understand how so many VC's fell for a supply chain concept that a first year Operations Research student would had figured out that is so inefficient that is not worth pursuing.
Why not? From my understanding, individual restaurants were doing it for a long time with less efficiency (orders via telephone, staff would be idle when no orders are around and can't do orders for another restaurant during those times). Why wouldn't it be profitable to make that process more efficient?
> VC's fell for a supply chain concept that a first year Operations Research student would had figured out that is so inefficient that is not worth pursuing.
They probably didn't read the news that Uber in the Netherlands just lost there case. Gig economy in the Netherlands isn't allowed. We currently have issues with employees being forced to become entrepreneurs in all kinds of sectors. Most people just agree but don't really understand what is involved.
I think this will also play out in other countries in the EU until it will become an EU issue.
No, Just fake contractors/freelancers. If the job is equivalent to an employment status you are an employee not a contractor. Not able to set their own price or being able negotiate is a big part of this.
"unbiased view of the law" in Greece is a dogwhistle for "right wing/libertarian".
I'll stop this thread here, since hackernews is really not really interested in the internal political differences of the Greek bourgeoisie class and workers.
One thing to consider about services like this is the actual value that they add to the store owners or customers. In my opinion this value is more is less zero! They don't offer anything in the business of delivery. In reality, the store owners are forced to use these services and pay a heavy premium so as to not be left out: If your restaurant can't be found on the app then the customer will prefer the ones he finds!
(Please notice that here in Greece all restaurants had their own delivery people before e-food and other similar companies emerged)
This is really problematic for me. A whole enterprise has been created by inventing a fake need (order food from the internet; why is it so difficult to just make a call?). Nobody actually profits except that particular company(e-food etc)!
To make my point even more; consider the situation 10 years ago. The same pool of people that ordered food are ordering from the same pool of restaurants. However nowadays a percentage of the money goes to e-food (and similar companies). For what?
Myself, I never use these companies because I know that there's a premium that will go to them and either me or the store owner (usually the store owner) will need to pay for that! I just call the store and go there and pick the food up! Also all restaurant owners I have talked to, prefer getting calls directly and handling the orders themselves to avoid paying the e-food premium.
Maybe easy for you but I would never ever order anything if I had to make a call. That's a big no from me.
The other benefit I see is that the app has my payment and delivery details and I don't need to hassle with cash or paying on delivery. Ordering from restaurant A and B is exactly the same and encourages me to try out new stuff.
The third thing is that I can see the delivery courier in realtime on a map and know when they arrive.
With that said, all these benefits would be the same for me if the app was just an aggregator and payment processor with the restaurants handling the delivery themselves.
Yes I can see why it could be difficult for some people to make calls. Also I agree that being able to use your credit card is convenient. However I am not sure that premium that e-food gets is actually worth that convenience...
As I said before almost all the reastaurants had their own delivery people and the major reason for them that decided to use e-food is their fear of missing out the online delivery hype.
If most people at least understood how much better it is for restaurants to avoid the intermediate it would be much better.
I would expect value of online presence, ordering, payment processing to be somewhere 5-10% of order. I wouldn't call anyone to order, but I do order online. And I would prefer the restaurants own or partnered site for this. I still think there is place for low cost platform that does exactly this. It won't be billion dollar business, but certainly multiple millions is entirely possible.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but these food delivery services does have a convenience factor in their favour: Unified UI (no more weirdly scanned PDF of their menu, or other nonsense), no having to explain over a bad phone line to some person who might not speak your language that well (or you not speaking his) your order, and hoping he wrote the right things down and don't make a mistake, and most important of all, ease of payment. A lot of these restaurants either don't accept card, or expect you to yell your card number across the phone to pay.
In all honesty, I also suspect that there is some value for restaurants, at least some of them, to not have to worry about hiring their own delivery driver. If that's not the case, a disruptive service offering just a unified UI + Payment, but no delivery should have appeared by now.
> no having to explain over a bad phone line to some person who might not speak your language that well (or you not speaking his) your order
This is an edge case in my experience. We're talking immigrants/expats that haven't learned the local language (I'm yet to see a restaurant hiring immigrants not knowing the local language for the front desk / phone duty). Not that it's not worth catering for, but perhaps not at the expense of everyone else.
> and hoping he wrote the right things down and don't make a mistake
This perhaps eliminates excuses. In my experience with on-line ordering, mistakes happen frequently anyway - it's not a communications issue, it's a "cooks and delivery people are extremely busy" issue. They'll just occasionally forget to add some topping or to package the extra sauce you ordered.
> and most important of all, ease of payment.
That is absolutely true. I was a fan of these third-party services because of that - because I could pre-pay using my card online, not bothering about having cash, whether the driver has change, or whether they took the card terminal with them. I was a fan, I no longer am, because mainstream food delivery services are abusive to restaurants and delivery workers.
> there is some value for restaurants, at least some of them, to not have to worry about hiring their own delivery driver.
Depends. Some may prefer their own drivers (e.g. small-scale restaurants, where the drivers are family members, or friends). Some purposefully offer no delivery (e.g. for branding reasons). The new breed of delivery services (Uber Eats, Glovo, etc.) don't give a damn about preferences - they'll offer delivery services for your restaurant whether you want them or not; they won't even ask you for permission. The problems here are twofold:
1. People associate delivery service with the restaurant. The squeezed, exploited drivers of Uber Eats, et al. make mistakes too, deliver cold food, etc. The customers often blame the restaurant. The restaurant suffers branding and monetary loss due to no fault of their own, and with no way of improving the service.
2. The business model of those companies depends on getting people used to ordering food from restaurant through them, and then blackmailing the restaurant into signing up and paying a percentage, or getting delisted. They're forcing restaurants into participation.
> If that's not the case, a disruptive service offering just a unified UI + Payment, but no delivery should have appeared by now.
One would think so, but this is a winner-take-all market; Uber Eats & friends outcompeted previous iterations of services that offered just the UI and payment service.
> This is an edge case in my experience. We're talking immigrants/expats that haven't learned the local language (I'm yet to see a restaurant hiring immigrants not knowing the local language for the front desk / phone duty). Not that it's not worth catering for, but perhaps not at the expense of everyone else
I don't know how it is around where you live, but here literally all ethnic restaurants ( Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, etc.) have ethnic employees with the associated native language. Some are fairly fluent in the main language of the country, but a lot aren't, at all.
Over here, the ethnic restaurants I've been to have at their front desk either ethnic employees with fluency in the local language, or employees from local population. The cooks, on the other hand, are all ethnic and from the few cases I've overheard them talking with other staff, they barely know the local language.
> Uber Eats & friends outcompeted previous iterations of services
If by 'outcompeted' you mean spent massive amounts of investor money to give free stuff away at a loss until they starved their competitors of traffic and/or bought those competitors outright.
A lot of restaurants are fighting back by just setting up their own websites and gradually improving them, and hiring drivers directly. Ultimately I think the pendulum will swing back this way, because as much as it may be nice to have a unified UI, it's not worth paying significantly more for food that takes longer and arrives cold. Especially when, as you say, the system hurts everyone involved in actually preparing & delivering your food.
> The new breed of delivery services (Uber Eats, Glovo, etc.) don't give a damn about preferences - they'll offer delivery services for your restaurant whether you want them or not; they won't even ask you for permission.
This is no longer true with Glovo. I've seen restaurants in the Glovo app that do their own delivery. The app shows it to explain why there's no tracking of the riders for example. Or why they can't give you an accurate estimate.
That's some progress, I guess. I'll be on the lookout for this - I don't use them myself (I'm boycotting this breed of gig companies in general), but people around me do. So far, all deliveries I witness were Glovo riders.
> The same pool of people that ordered food are ordering from the same pool of restaurants.
I don't have hard data. What I know is that the phone-your-order-in didn't work for me. I hate crummy pdf menus. I hate calling a phone number. I hate that they don't understand me. Everything about it sucked for me. I just didn't do it.
Then I discovered deliveroo and it just works. I want to use that. In this case the pool of people ordering food from restaurant have certainly grown by one.
Does it make business sense for the individual restaurants to provide the service for me? I don't know and don't care. Their managers can make that decision. As far as I'm concerned their options are "offering the service" or "me buying groceries instead". Since they are the business they should collect the data how much offering the service raises their income and decide based on that if they wish to keep offering.
Likewise the curriers employed should decide if the pay is worth the inconvenience of working this job.
And my government should make sure that the currier companies are sticking to the letter of the law, and that the letter of the law does ensure that the curriers are not exploited. This is among other things one of the services I'm paying my considerable taxes for.
If anyone in this chain of transactions is unhappy with their end of the bargain they should stop. And I will just walk to the grocery store even on those days when otherwise I would have got a treat to myself.
> I just call the store and go there and pick the food up!
What you don't consider is that the restaurant owners cannot decide anymore if using the service is beneficial for them or not! It's either use the service of lose a lot of customers because they will go to the next restaurant. These people are small business owners and can't afford losing customers.
Now, if there was a way all restaurant owners could agree that "nobody will use e-food from now on" then they would definitely decide that since using that service is not beneficial for them.
There's some benefit to the businesses in that people who otherwise wouldn't have heard about them can find them more easily. Personally I order a fair bit more frequently since I can pay by card and I rarely have cash at home.
In the UK the most popular service is probably Just Eat and until recently they didn't have their own drivers. I assume this also meant they took a smaller cut of the order.
if not using the service causes their customers to go to another restaurant, that means the service is beneficial.
It's like saying if the restaurant cannot be on a busy street, then they will lose out to restaurants that _are_ on a busy street. Therefore, the busy street is beneficial to the restaurant.
What my favorite Asian delivery restaurant did is launch their own webshop and tell their regular customers to please order there. They are still on the big aggregator, but at least I order through their own webshop.
However, as many others said I usually don't wanna order by calling. The biggest inconveniences are being misunderstood and not having cash at hand.
They're called delivery companies, but they are actually restaurant/food marketplaces and they got there by conquering the last-step-to-consumer: delivery. In my country they are now trying to make people do groceries using them, but there's been some resistance (both from costumers and from big supermarkets).
There's a huge cultural shift happening in food consumption, caused also by the existence of these services, but not only. I don't think they will be able to sustain this business model much longer.
What is baffling to me is why they're doing this now? They've clearly benefited substantially from last year's lockdowns[0] so what is the rationale for squeezing labor costs? A directive from holding company (delivery hero) following the trend of other players in the space to challenge the working status of the drivers?
As a side note: Since yesterday's twitter backlash, a lot of people are requesting to delete their accounts only to get a response back with a dodgy document[1] stating "that they require time to understand your demand" and "that it will take from 1 to 3 months to process". The say that "they may ask additional identification". They ask for email/username (which they should already have??) and that depending on the frequency of your demands, they may charge you a "reasonable fee" for "administrative costs".
The GDPR require the capability of deleting ones account from a platform be "without undue delay"[2]. I'm no lawyer but their response seems to violate the terms.
> Since yesterday's twitter backlash, a lot of people are requesting to delete their accounts only to get a response back with a dodgy document[1] stating "that they require time to understand your demand" and "that it will take from 1 to 3 months to process".
Two months ago Foodpanda Thailand (also a Delivery Hero subsidiary) took a darker pattern by removing the delete account button in its entirety. This doesn't last long, though if two companies under the same parent company try to do this, I would consider it a parent company's corporate culture, not just the action of its subsidiary.
To elaborate, the massive influx of deletion in Thailand's case is due to Foodpanda's so-called "miscommunication" of labeling a protester (who is caught on camera setting fire against a sacred artifact) a "terrorist". Sympathizers to the protesters' cause then rush to delete the account, only to see a dark pattern mentioned above.
I hate how "entrepreneurs" in the US find new loopholes and make seemingly huge businesses out of it. Then my local sociopaths and greedy investors want to copy this. If the business didn't get so big in the US there would be a very large pushback if anyone tried such abusive practices here.
Just look at what DPD is doing in Switzerland, it is discusting and basically slavery. Abusing contract work to the max.
After the Twitter backlash, they came back with a blog post (https://www.e-food.gr/blog/efood-riders-announcement/). It's six paragraphs of generic corporate speak, and the only meaningful part in it is that "They regret the miscommunication, the announcement was in no way threatening or meant to create an atmosphere of unease among our delivery drivers, it was only an option for a new way of collaborating with us". This only intensified the backlash, since the threatening tone of their initial announcement is crystal clear to any speakers of the Greek language without mental deficiencies.