Whats “AI” about this?
Ha. Take in AI to reduce costs and staff. End up destroying the business.
Charging $30 for a pizza destroyed the business long before Ai could.
Depends how big the pizzas are
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.
This is the problem with turning everything into a metric. It becomes gamed. And people chase the wrong incentives.
Why on earth is a company like Pizza Hut using Door Dash for it’s deliveries? They’re easily capable of running their own delivery service.
They fired them all when state of California was raising the minimum wage. And Doordash as always operated like this. The drivers always deliver multiple orders at once so Pizza Hut is out of luck. Because the driver also the right to refuse to pick up orders.
No way will pick up one order of pizza then drive back for the next. Not happening.
It pushes the responsibility for those drivers onto someone else. Back in the day, if your delivery car was busted you had to get a backup. Now, the franchise is unaffected. Some other DoorDash driver will take their place and the pizza place doesn’t need to lift a finger.
Did the driver get in an accident while delivering the pizza? That’s their problem. Take up the missing order with DoorDash support. Pizza place keeps chugging.
Why would they? Outsourcing is cheaper than maintaining their own fleet of delivery vehicles.
Door Dash is essentially a wage theft app designed to outsource the costs of doing business onto the worker.
To my knowledge they didn’t maintain fleets of vehicles. Least on my side of the country pizza delivery jobs used to be, bring your own vehicle, company might provide you a stupid little hat to put on your car. But they still had to pay you for your time when there weren’t deliveries.
Even when they didn’t provide the vehicle, they still had to insure it and they had to provide workers’ comp if a driver was hurt doing their job. You don’t have to insure Door Dash drivers and if they get t-boned in an intersection or assaulted it’s not your problem.
There’s a trend with delivery apps where they add restaurants to their service listing even if the restaurant hasn’t consented. The apps will configure the menus using copies that have been posted online (sometimes out of date with products the restaurant no longer offers) and use their delivery drivers as middle men to place the orders manually. If you are a large restaurant and the apps are going to list you regardless, there is incentive to reach an agreement and control offerings rather than deal with the customer service impact of misattributed third party issues. Some restaurants maintain their own independent delivery services even when apps force their way into being a competing delivery option.
I wonder this about a lot of my local restaurants. Maybe some of the platforms require it. I know that in my area, everything serviced by Door Dash arrives more than 40m after leaving the store, cold, unappetizing. That makes sense if they’re doing what the article says and waiting for more orders before delivering.
Money. They started by having their own delivery, but 3rd party delivery service became so big it cannibalise their market so they have to use said 3rd party delivery service because that’s where the people are, then they gut their own delivery service. It’s not all their fault, seeing how difficult to run an FNB these day, more so with franchise, they just simply adapt to the situation.
Well, it’s partly their own fault. That’s why you don’t make yourself dependent on unreliable companies except where necessary. That’s common sense, right? Because they might be run like shit, which would destroy your entire business… Of course they may still have a legal case, because Pizza Hut was duty-bound to at least pretend to fix major problems.
Yeah, the reason they gut their own delivery system is purely about money, they’re paying minimum wages for those. In this case the franchisor is the one to blame for the shitstorm, they’re the one that ordered the use of AI. Actually it’s definitely the franchisor fault for the brand to end in this way.
Sadly it’s where people are. Network effects have made DoorDash dominant.
So they’re position is that they had no due-dilligence obligation, no obligation to test it & see what it’d do?
Really??
FAFO at the executive level, then.
They probably got exactly what they deserved…
( & yes, nonaccountability is normal in corporate-culture, it seems )
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I’m no fan of AI, but this doesn’t sound like an AI problem. They switched to using delivery contractors instead of employees to put more of the risk and cost on the delivery drivers. The payment structure to those delivery drivers is not really affected by Pizza Hut’s customer satisfaction, just the number of deliveries they make and tip amount on those deliveries. So the drivers bundle orders and ignore low tip orders.
Pizza Hut can have the lower costs of contractors or the increased quality control of employees and they chose the lower costs.
You misunderstand. The badness was not caused by switching to DoorDash. That happened and was smooth. The badness was caused when Pizza Hut started giving DoorDash drivers tons of extra information about other upcoming orders. The extra information allowed drivers to optimize their deliveries.
This was part of what Pizza Hut described as an AI expansion. Obviously there’s nothing magical happening here, simply more information sharing leading to negative consequences for customers and thus reduced business. But it was marketed under the “AI” umbrella.
