Why the crazy rush? The unrealistic side of food delivery

Food delivery apps have become an integral part of a city’s framework worldwide over the last few years. New York has DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats, London uses Deliveroo, Just Eat and Food Hub and Tokyo thrives on Damaecan, Wolt and FineDine. 

But there is also a menace in common. The safety of delivery workers is becoming increasingly questionable. In New York, many delivery agents have been robbed of their e-cycles at gunpoint and in London, accidents involving delivery agents have led to detailed surveys to take stock of this situation. 

The woes are similar in India but with a slight difference and yet, they are to be taken seriously.
 
In the capital city Delhi, around the 80s and the 90s, it was common for commuters waiting at a traffic signal to start honking in anticipation of it turning green. It was a futile effort at getting a programmed electronic device to sense their angst. 

What it did lead to was the development of a digital clock on the signal that displays the time left before it turns red or green. This has become common in cities across the country and while the honking has pretty much stopped, impatience is far from quenched. Even with a few seconds left, the ones running against the clock will happily jump it, only to be stopped by the traffic police if they are unlucky.  

ALSO READ| Netizens in anguish after seeing delivery agent eating from plastic packet on roadside

Of the regular defaulters in today’s India, food-delivery agents on their motorcycles and scootys are clearly amongst the top few. 

The pressure to deliver on time is the key reason why they risk their lives and endanger others by jumping signals, riding on the wrong side of the road and zipping through traffic with inches to spare between vehicles. Some have even had fatal accidents. But who is really to blame? The answer to this question eventually circles back to both the consumer and the mammoth food-tech ecosystem. 

The most convenient argument here would be to bring up the fact that there was a time when people happily waited days for packages to arrive with no means of constant tracking, or that food delivery would regularly take longer than the time promised by the restaurant and the concept of an automated ‘partial refund’ did not exist. 

So then why the sudden need for speed? But that is akin to wondering why the mobile phone has become integral to our lives when there was a time we lived happily without it! 

We need to pick it up from where it is. Just like every other evolution in tech across the spectrum, food-tech is also constantly evolving. The fundamental problem is with how the simple luxury of ‘convenience’ has been leveraged beyond measure by a competitive industry that thrives on hype. 

The seeds of the Indian food-tech giant Zomato were laid when co-founder Deependar Goyal found a convenient way to make menu cards accessible to his co-workers at the company he worked at, by scanning them and uploading them on the office intranet. What was originally a genuinely helpful gesture free-of-cost, led to the multi-million dollar monetisation of the very same convenience it had set out to provide.

Today, along with every possible restaurant, even street food vendors have their menus up on local apps Zomato and Swiggy for delivery. The delivery time for each order varies but a commitment of partial refund is made to the consumer if the order does not arrive within the mentioned time.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Groceries are also available with a '10 minute' delivery time promise from the time they are ordered. This is where the vicious circle starts.
 
These companies try and outdo each other by leading the consumer to believe they are making things increasingly convenient for them by decreasing the time it takes for them to get their order. An expectation is set and the bar keeps on getting raised higher. But the amount of anxiety this expectation creates takes away from the time saved. 

Should the order be even slightly delayed, a chat starts between the consumer and the aggregator’s customer service and time that could have been used elsewhere is consumed in irritation. The customer service dangles a lollipop laced with freebies and bonuses and the next order is placed in no time. The movement is constant and doesn't show signs of slowing down anytime soon. 

Even though food delivery platforms clearly mention that they do not penalise their agents for late deliveries, the rush on the road tells a different story. It clearly does not look good for a delivery agent to be repeatedly late. They also get calls from both the consumer and the company’s service team if they are late. Hence, a constant state of urgency is created which leads to rash decisions like jumping traffic signals and wrong-side driving.
 
The fact is that a solution seems tough. Traffic police do penalise these delivery agents from time to time but the cycle continues. The larger problem is with the hype that has been created around the ‘urgency’ to achieve convenience over the years and neither consumer nor aggregator sees this as a problem. 

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)  

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