The Columbus Way

I am once again asking Columbus to stop outsourcing local government to vipers like Doordash.

Photo by Griffin Wooldridge on Unsplash

The evolution of the gig economy has allowed a specific type of American to live like the ultra-wealthy with a private fleet of chauffeurs, maids, grocery shoppers and food deliverymen.

It was always unsustainable given that none of these apps were ever profitable. They were built on venture capitalist money on the hunt for The Next Big Thing. The pandemic only crystallized the math.

Those sugar daddy prices are over. Even if they weren’t, they should be avoided. These apps are run by evil tech gremlins who steal as much money as possible from restaurants and workers in our city and extrapolate that wealth to the coasts.

Take DoorDash, the food delivery service that doesn’t “openly disclose its fees.” These losers apparently aren’t satisfied with being parasitic middlemen that screw over local restaurants. They also had to steal directly from the workers who inflated their company’s value in the first place.

Here are some recent headlines:

• DoorDash data breach exposes customers’ personal and financial information.

• DoorDash to pay $2.5 million after stealing drivers’ tips.

• DoorDash to pay $5.325 million for not paying San Francisco workers benefits.

• DoorDash agrees to pay $100 million are misclassifying California and Massachusetts drivers.

There’s also a class action lawsuit filed in January that alleges DoorDash defrauded its customers by advertising no delivery fees while secretly charging customers hidden fees in the purchase price of items.

This is only the brazen theft we know about it. Their entire model was based around exploiting mostly foreign drivers and bilking their lazy-ass customers. In a functioning society, its executives would have been frog-marched into prison since there are few things worse than paying a worker less than they earned on the day.

But in America, we have 17 mayors willing to launder DoorDash’s reputation to pretend they care about “food insecurity.”

Here’s a list of unimaginative leaders that should be removed at the next opportunity:

• John Giles – Mesa, Arizona.

• Regina Romero – Tucson, Arizona.

• Libby Schaaf – Oakland, California

• Patricia Lock Dawson – Riverside, California.

• Michael Hancock – Denver, Colorado.

• Luke Bronin – Hartford, Conn.

• Jane Castor – Tampa, Florida.

• Andre Dickens – Atlanta, Georgia.

• Brandon Scott – Baltimore, Md.

• André Sayegh – Paterson, NJ

• Vic Carstarphen – Camden City, NJ

• Kathy Sheehan – Albany, NY

• Shawyn Patterson-Howard – Mount Vernon, NY

• Malik Evans – Rochester, NY

• Donald Grebien – Pawtucket, RI

• Levar Stoney – Richmond, Virginia.

• Victoria Woodards – Tacoma, Washington.

DoorDash plans to support the cities’ efforts by “providing $1 million Community Credits Gift certificates, DoorDash proprietary data on on-site food access, direct funding for in-kind charitable food delivery and DoorDash logistics via Project DASh to meet the unique needs of each community.”

“The White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health highlights the urgent need for public-private sector collaboration to break down barriers to food access,” said DoorDash vice president of communications Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean in the release.

This is where Bill Clinton-styled neoliberalism has led the Democratic Party. In the olden days, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have created a federal program to deliver food directly to poor people. Can’t have people thinking somebody got a handout, though! Focus groups might not like that one.

Nowadays, we get a corporate hobgoblin pimping “Community Credits Gift certificates,” a bankrupt series of nouns that only make sense to the hobgoblin class.

This company has stolen from its workers and customers multiple times! And now I’m supposed to believe this cabal got together and decided to fight “food insecurity” in America?

Look at how this is getting presented by Mayor Suburbs:

Mayor Andrew Ginther @MayorGinther

Combating food insecurity requires us all to work together. That’s why we are proud to announce our partnership with DoorDash to broaden food access across #Columbus in support of the @WhiteHouse Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. #WHConfHungerHealth

Another hilarious innovation from a “public-partner partnership” is the politically correct way of saying “tax break” to freaks like Ginther. Love the image choice, too. Definitely looks like somebody who is food-insecure enjoying a meal delivered to their tent by a DoorDash executive.

You’ll notice how there are no details on how DoorDash will “broad food access across Columbus.” That it’s a cellphone application already means it won’t be able to cater to some of the most food-insecure populations in Columbus. Is DoorDash going to start delivering to homeless encampments? Consider me skeptical.

What’s much more likely is that DoorDash, seeing the class action lawsuits accrue in press headlines, circled the wagons and decided to unleash a publicity blitz around a non-controversial political idea like food insecurity.

The Lazy Mayors Caucus also gets to pretend they are doing something besides laundering DoorDash’s reputation by allowing them to pretend to perform a service that city governments should be conducting themselves.

That, after all, is the Columbus Way.

THOSE WMDs. Whether this girl deserved to die or not… The red state murder problem… Military records show JR Majewski got a DUI on an Air Force base… NFT trading volumes collapse 97% since January peak… The simple Dutch cure for stress.