San Francisco will permanently cap food delivery fees for apps like DoorDash
One thing that the San Francisco cap will do is greatly benefit those who are disabled or otherwise unable to pick up. There is a large segment of the population that simply cannot do what I do and go pick it up. (See my anecdote below.) They&#x27;re house-bound or elderly or disabled or really just have no practical way to get food without delivery. And &quot;services&quot; like DoorDash and UberEats and GrubHub all affect those people in pretty profound ways, and this puts a disproportionate burden on that cohort of customers out there. The rest of us can save money by taking different actions, but for those who rely on delivery for food, they&#x27;re just shit outta luck.<p>And for those people--and even the rest of us!!--the fees are getting out of control. Like, I&#x27;ll routinely order $40 worth of pizza or sushi and somehow my total is $63 not including a tip. Fees of more than 50% for a delivery are just bonkers and unacceptable. This is easily verifiable by just switching the same order from Delivery to Pick Up, if anyone is interested.<p>In an attempt to &quot;fix&quot; this, I signed up for the Door Pass subscription or whatever it&#x27;s called, and instead of making me feel better about ordering, it felt like the &quot;miscellaneous fees&quot; went up to compensate for the delivery fees that were allegedly gone. I felt like <i>maybe</i> I was saving like 5%, but 5% of $63 is only $3 so I&#x27;m still paying $60 for $40 of food... That&#x27;s still bonkers.<p>I didn&#x27;t collect any data on this, to be totally honest, but I felt like I was getting ripped off every time I ordered food. After about 2 months I decided to cancel it, and the entire experience of using DoorDash was so traumatic that I wound up just choosing Pick Up every time and then going to pick it up from the restaurant. It was often faster than delivery, and definitely cheaper.. And then I realized that I was still supporting a company that had [what appeared to me to be] scummy practices, so I just stopped using DoorDash altogether.<p>Now I just go to the company&#x27;s websites, if they have one, and I use that to order. Most of them allow pickup directly without using something like DoorDash.<p>(Note: I don&#x27;t mean to pick on DoorDash specifically, because all of the delivery sites do the same thing, but this article is specifically about DoorDash, so I&#x27;m relating my experience with that.)