beXnlog

Cheap

Saw this article from the NYTimes on Jenny 8's blog:

...there’s a good chance that your deliveryman is being paid almost nothing, with cash tips being his only real source of income. And restaurant delivery workers — particularly Asian-restaurant deliverymen — labor under brutal conditions. These are not union workers at hotel restaurants shrieking about the loss of a pedicure benefit or some other luxury.

Asian-restaurant deliverymen risk their lives every time they set out on their bicycles and travel miles to deliver orders. When they are robbed, a Saigon Grill worker reported, they have to compensate the restaurant for the lost money. When the weather is bad, the workload increases because more customers order in — and then complain if their food takes longer than usual to arrive.

Consumers are largely to blame for this state of affairs. We demand rock-bottom prices. Plenty of New Yorkers are happy to pay extra for organic groceries of dubious merit, but if pork fried rice goes up a dollar at one place we order from any of the five other places in the same delivery radius. We expect free cold sesame noodles, quartered oranges and cans of soda.

And because the price of the food is so low, even the tip isn’t high as an absolute number. There’s only so much money a deliveryman can make $2 at a time.

Not to mention the extremely high murder rate for deliverymen, particularly Chinese immigrant men working in urban areas.

It's interesting to me how people refuse to pay more than $5 per entree at Chinese restaurants or for delivery. These are the same people who routinely pay upwards of $20 for Italian entrees that consist of nothing more than mushy pasta.

posted by beXn @ 12:49 PM