The Hy-VeeDeals.com 250 presented by DoorDash and Hy-Vee Salute to Farmers 300 presented by Google will be the 16th and 17th IndyCar events at Iowa Speedway. Josef Newgarden is the only entered driver to win at Iowa Speedway more than once having scored three wins here. The only other active winners are Simon Pagenaud and Helio Castroneves, which means Iowa is one of only three tracks on the 2022 schedule at which neither Scott Dixon nor Will Power has won

Both Power and Dixon have started from pole at Iowa three times, and of the entered drivers this weekend, they have led 131 and 130 laps respectively. This is dwarfed by three-time winner Newgarden’s tally of 1150 laps led, and the two-time champion’s consistency is impressive too: he has scored top-four finishes in six of his last eight Iowa starts.

Andretti Autosport has won seven of the 15 previous races at Iowa Speedway, with Dario Franchitti, Tony Kanaan, Marco Andretti Ryan Hunter-Reay (three times) and James Hinchcliffe. Team Penske has four wins via Castroneves, Newgarden (twice) and Pagenaud. Chip Ganassi Racing has two wins, thanks to the late Dan Wheldon and Franchitti.

Dixon will make his 299th and 300th consecutive Indy car starts, while Castroneves will match A.J. Foyt’s tally of 369 total Indy car starts.

When are the IndyCar races at Iowa Speedway? Date: Friday, July 22 – Sunday, July 24

Start times: Race 1 – Saturday, 3.05pm Central Time / Race 2 – Sunday, 2.30pm Central Time

How can I watch the IndyCar races at Iowa Speedway? NBC Sports’ coverage of Saturday’s HyVeeDeals.com 250 presented by DoorDash will begin at 3pm CT on NBC, while coverage of Sunday’s Hy-Vee Salute to Farmers 300 presented by Google will begin at 2pm CT on NBC.

Kevin Lee will be the announcer alongside analysts Townsend Bell and James Hinchcliffe. All NTT IndyCar Series practice sessions and qualifying will stream live on Peacock Premium, NBC’s livestreaming product, while NBC’s race telecasts of The HyVeeDeals.com 250 presented by DoorDash and Hy-Vee Salute to Farmers 300 presented by Google will be simulcast on the streaming service. Peacock Premium’s exclusive post-race show will be streamed following the race. The Indy Lights race at Iowa Speedway will be streamed on Peacock Premium while practice and qualifying will be shown on IndyCar Live!

IndyCar broadcast schedule (Central Time) Friday, July 22 3.30-5.00pm – NTT IndyCar Series practice – Peacock Prime Saturday, July 23 9.30-10.45am – NTT IndyCar Series qualifying for Race 1 and 2 – Peacock Prime

Each driver will make a two-lap qualifying run, with the first flyer determining grid position for Race 1, and the second flyer determining grid position for Race 2. 3.00-5.00pm – NBC broadcast 3.01pm – “Drivers, start your engines” 3.06pm – Green flag: HyVeeDeals.com 250 presented by DoorDash (250 laps) – NBC live Sunday, July 24 2.00-5.00pm – NBC broadcast 2.25pm – “Drivers start your engines” 2.30pm – Green flag: Hy-Vee Salute to Farmers 300 presented by Google (300 laps) – NBC live Will the IndyCar races at Iowa be on the radio? IndyCar Radio Network broadcasts: Mark Jaynes is the chief announcer alongside analyst Davey Hamilton. Nick Yeoman (Saturday) and Jake Query (Sunday) are the turn announcers, while Michael Young and Query are pit reporters on Saturday, with Young and Yeoman working the pits on Sunday. All IndyCar races, practices and qualifying sessions air live on network affiliates, SiriusXM 160, racecontrol.indycar.com and the IndyCar app powered by NTT DATA.

Race Notes

How many laps are the IndyCar races in Iowa? Race 1 distance: 250 laps (223.5 miles)

Race 2 distance: 300 laps (268.2 miles)

Track: 0.894-mile oval in Newton, IA

Firestone tire allotment: 14 sets to be used through the double-header weekend.

2020 race winners: Race 1 – Simon Pagenaud (Team Penske-Chevrolet), Race 2 – Josef Newgarden (Team Penske-Chevrolet)

2020 NTT P1 pole-winners: Race 1 – Conor Daly (Carlin-Chevrolet), 18.3711sec, 175.188mph, Race 2 – Josef Newgarden (Team Penske-Chevrolet), 18.3559sec, 175.333mph.

Qualifying lap record: Helio Castroneves (Team Penske-Chevrolet) 17.2283sec, 186.809mph, July 11, 2014.

ENTRY LIST RACE 1 No. Driver Hometown Car name Team-Engine  2  Josef Newgarden Nashville, Tennessee  Hitachi Team Penske  Team Penske-Chevrolet  3  Scott McLaughlin Christchurch, New Zealand  Freightliner Team Penske  Team Penske-Chevrolet  4  Dalton Kellett  Stouffville, Canada  K-Line / AJ Foyt Racing  A.J. Foyt Enterprises-Chevrolet  5  Pato O’Ward  Monterrey, Mexico  Arrow McLaren SP  Arrow McLaren SP-Chevrolet 06 Helio Castroneves Sao Paulo, Brazil AutoNation / SiriusXM Meyer Shank Racing-Honda  7  Felix Rosenqvist  Varnamo, Sweden  Arrow McLaren SP  Arrow McLaren SP-Chevrolet  8  Marcus Ericsson  Kumla, Sweden  Huski Chocolate Chip Ganassi Racing  Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda  9  Scott Dixon Auckland, New Zealand PNC Bank Chip Ganassi Racing  Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda  10  Alex Palou Barcelona, Spain Ridgeline Lubricants  Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda  12  Will Power Toowoomba, Australia  Verizon Team Penske  Team Penske-Chevrolet  14  Kyle Kirkwood (R) Jupiter, Florida Sexton Properties A.J. Foyt Enterprises-Chevrolet  15  Graham Rahal  New Albany, Ohio  High Rock Vodka  Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing-Honda  18  David Malukas (R) Chicago, Illinois  HMD Dale Coyne Racing with HMD Motorsports-Honda  20  Conor Daly  Noblesville, Indiana  BitNile  Ed Carpenter Racing-Chevrolet  21  Rinus VeeKay  Hoofddorp, Netherlands Bitcoin Racing Team with BitNile Ed Carpenter Racing-Chevrolet  26  Colton Herta  Valencia, California  Gainbridge  Andretti Autosport w/Curb Agajanian-Honda  27  Alexander Rossi  Nevada City, California  NAPA Auto Parts / AutoNation  Andretti Autosport-Honda  28  Romain Grosjean  Geneva, Switzerland DHL  Andretti Autosport-Honda  29  Devlin DeFrancesco (R)  Toronto, Canada  PowerTap  Andretti Steinbrenner Autosport-Honda  30  Christian Lundgaard (R) Hedensted, Denmark  Shield Cleansers  Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing-Honda  33 Ed Carpenter Indianapolis, Indiana Alzamend Neuro Ed Carpenter Racing-Chevrolet 45  Jack Harvey  Bassingham, UK  Hy-Vee  Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing-Honda 48  Jimmie Johnson El Cajon, California  Carvana Chip Ganassi Racing  Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda  51  Takuma Sato Tokyo, Japan Deloitte Dale Coyne Racing with RWR-Honda  60  Simon Pagenaud  Montmorillon, France  AutoNation / SiriusXM  Meyer Shank Racing-Honda  77  Callum Ilott Cambridge, UK  Juncos Hollinger Racing Juncos Hollinger Racing-Chevrolet ENTRY LIST RACE 2 No. Driver Hometown Car name Team-Engine  2  Josef Newgarden Nashville, Tennessee  Hitachi Team Penske  Team Penske-Chevrolet  3  Scott McLaughlin Christchurch, New Zealand  Freightliner Team Penske  Team Penske-Chevrolet  4  Dalton Kellett  Stouffville, Canada  K-Line / AJ Foyt Racing  A.J. Foyt Enterprises-Chevrolet  5  Pato O’Ward  Monterrey, Mexico  Arrow McLaren SP  Arrow McLaren SP-Chevrolet 06 Helio Castroneves Sao Paulo, Brazil AutoNation / SiriusXM Meyer Shank Racing-Honda  7  Felix Rosenqvist  Varnamo, Sweden  Arrow McLaren SP  Arrow McLaren SP-Chevrolet  8  Marcus Ericsson  Kumla, Sweden  Huski Chocolate Chip Ganassi Racing  Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda  9  Scott Dixon Auckland, New Zealand PNC Bank Chip Ganassi Racing  Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda  10  Alex Palou Barcelona, Spain Ridgeline Lubricants  Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda  12  Will Power Toowoomba, Australia  Verizon Team Penske  Team Penske-Chevrolet  14  Kyle Kirkwood (R) Jupiter, Florida Sexton Properties A.J. Foyt Enterprises-Chevrolet  15  Graham Rahal  New Albany, Ohio  High Rock Vodka  Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing-Honda  18  David Malukas (R) Chicago, Illinois  HMD Dale Coyne Racing with HMD Motorsports-Honda  20  Conor Daly  Noblesville, Indiana  BitNile  Ed Carpenter Racing-Chevrolet  21  Rinus VeeKay  Hoofddorp, Netherlands Bitcoin Racing Team with BitNile Ed Carpenter Racing-Chevrolet  26  Colton Herta  Valencia, California  Gainbridge  Andretti Autosport w/Curb Agajanian-Honda  27  Alexander Rossi  Nevada City, California  NAPA Auto Parts / AutoNation  Andretti Autosport-Honda  28  Romain Grosjean  Geneva, Switzerland DHL  Andretti Autosport-Honda  29  Devlin DeFrancesco (R)  Toronto, Canada  PowerTap  Andretti Steinbrenner Autosport-Honda  30  Christian Lundgaard (R) Hedensted, Denmark  Shield Cleansers  Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing-Honda  33 Ed Carpenter Indianapolis, Indiana Alzamend Neuro Ed Carpenter Racing-Chevrolet 45  Jack Harvey  Bassingham, UK  Hy-Vee  Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing-Honda 48  Jimmie Johnson El Cajon, California  American Legion  Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda  51  Takuma Sato Tokyo, Japan Nurtec ODT Dale Coyne Racing with RWR-Honda  60  Simon Pagenaud  Montmorillon, France  AutoNation / SiriusXM  Meyer Shank Racing-Honda  77  Callum Ilott Cambridge, UK  Juncos Hollinger Racing Juncos Hollinger Racing-Chevrolet
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DoorDash is rolling out a new requirement for alcohol deliveries across the US. The delivery person will need to scan a customer’s ID with the DoorDash app to make sure the buyer is of legal drinking age. They’ll also check for signs of intoxication before handing over the booze (couriers are not allowed to deliver alcohol to someone who is visibly intoxicated).

The identity verification measure builds on DoorDash’s existing alcohol delivery rules. You’ll still need to scan your ID into the app before you can complete an order for hooch. Until now, customers only had to show their ID to the delivery person. DoorDash’s goal with the scanning requirement is to make it harder for users aged under 21 to receive alcohol. DoorDash delivers alcohol in 23 states, as well as Puerto Rico, Canada and Australia.

DoorDash

The company tested the dual ID verification measure in several cities. It said the feature made it easier for couriers to verify the user’s identity and age before giving them the order. When it comes to ensuring ID details remain secure, DoorDash says it has “implemented administrative, organizational, technical and physical security controls that are designed to safeguard personal information.” According to the privacy policy, it will permanently delete biometric information that’s no longer needed.

“At DoorDash, safety is a top priority and our goal is to deliver alcohol in the safest and most responsible way possible,” DoorDash’s general manager of alcohol Erik Ragotte said in a statement. “With today’s announcement of two-step or dual ID verification, we’re setting a new industry standard for responsible alcohol delivery. The new safety measures will help ensure alcohol is delivered to people over the age of 21. We will continue to innovate and find even more ways to promote responsible alcohol delivery.”

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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Editor’s Note: As this post has gotten a bit of attention, we wanted to add in the name of my friend’s restaurants. They’re fighting the good fight right now, so if you happen to be in the Kansas area, please support Aj’s NY Pizzeria (it’s NY-style pizza based in Manhattan and Topeka, Kansas, and while I’m biased, it’s good).

If capitalism is driven by a search for profit, the food delivery business confuses the hell out of me. Every platform loses money. Restaurants feel like they’re getting screwed. Delivery drivers are poster children for gig economy problems. Customers get annoyed about delivery fees.

Isn’t business supposed to solve problems?

Last week’s Uber-Grubhub news set off some antitrust alarms for me and got me thinking about the business of food delivery as a whole. But let me start this newsletter with a story about Pizza Arbitrage.

image via RedditIn March 2019 a good friend who owns a few pizza restaurants messaged me (this friend has made appearances in prior Margins’ pieces). For over a decade, he resisted adding delivery as an option for his restaurants. He felt it would detract from focusing on the dine-in experience and result in trying to compete with Domino’s.

But he had suddenly started getting customers calling in with complaints about their deliveries.

Customers called in saying their pizza was delivered cold. Or the wrong pizza was delivered and they wanted a new pizza.

Again, none of his restaurants delivered.

He realized that a delivery option had mysteriously appeared on their company’s Google Listing. The delivery option was created by Doordash.

To confirm, he had never spoken with anyone from Doordash and after years of resisting the siren song of delivery revenue, certainly did not want to be listed. But the words “Order Delivery” were right there, prominently on the Google snippet.

He messaged me asking me if I knew anything about Doordash, and oh boy, did I get Softbank-triggered. I had just read about their $400 million Series F and it was among the WeWorkian class of companies that, for me, represented everything wrong about startup evolution through the 2010s. Raise a ton of money, lose a ton of money, and just obliterate the basic economics of an industry.

Doordash was causing him real problems. The most common was, Doordash delivery drivers didn’t have the proper bags for pizza so it inevitably would arrive cold. It led to his employees wasting time responding to complaints and even some bad Yelp reviews.

But he brought up another problem – the prices were off. He was frustrated that customers were seeing incorrectly low prices. A pizza that he charged $24 for was listed as $16 by Doordash.

My first thought: I wondered if Doordash is artificially lowering prices for customer acquisition purposes.

My second thought: I knew Doordash scraped restaurant websites. After we discussed it more, it was clear that the way his menu was set up on his website, Doordash had mistakenly taken the price for a plain cheese pizza and applied it to a ‘specialty’ pizza with a bunch of toppings.

My third thought: Cue the Wall Street trader in me…..ARBITRAGE!!!!

If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You’d net a clean $8 profit per pizza [insert nerdy economics joke about there is such a thing as a free lunch].

He thought this was a stupid idea. “A business as successful a Doordash and worth billions of dollars would clearly not just give away money like this.” But I pushed back that, given their recent obscene fundraise, they would weirdly enough be happy to lose that money. Some regional director would be able to show top-line revenue growth while some accounting line-item, somewhere, would not match up, but the company was already losing hundreds of millions of dollars. I imagined their systems might even be built to discourage catching these mistakes because it would detract, or at a minimum distract, from top-line revenue.

So we put in the first order for 10 pizzas.

He called in and placed an order for 10 pizzas to a friend’s house and charged $160 to his personal credit card. A Doordash call center then called into his restaurant and put in the order for those 10 pizzas. A Doordash driver showed up with a credit card and paid $240 for the pizzas.

It worked.

Trade 1

We went over the actual costs. Each pizza cost him approximately $7 ($6.50 in ingredients, $0.50 for the box). So if he paid $160 out of pocket plus $70 in expenses to net $240 from Doordash, he just made $10 in pure arbitrage profit. For all that trouble, it wasn’t really worth it, but that first experiment did work.

My mind, as a combination trader and startup person, instantly had the though – just run this arbitrage over and over. You could massively even grow your top-line revenue while netting riskless profit, and maybe even get acquired at an inflated valuation 🙂 He told me to chill out. Maybe this is why he runs an “actual business” while I trade options while doing brand consulting and writing newsletters.

But we did realize, if you removed the food costs this could get more interesting.

Trade 2

The order was put in for another 10 pizzas. But this time, he just put in the dough with no toppings (he indicated at the time dough was essentially costless at that scale, though pandemic baking may have changed things).

Now suddenly each trade would net $75 in riskless profit ⇒ $240 from Doordash minus ($160 in costs + $5 in boxes).

This got a bit more interesting. If you did this a few times a night, you could start to see thousands in top-line growth with hundreds in pure profit, and maybe you could do this for days on end.

So over a few weeks, almost to humor me, we did a few of these “trades”. I was genuinely curious if Doordash would catch on but they didn’t. I had visions of building a network of restauranteurs all executing this strategy in tandem, all drinking from the Softbank teat before the money ran dry, but went back to work doing content strategy stuff.

Was this a bit shady? Maybe, but fuck Doordash. Note: I did confirm with my friend that he was okay with me writing this, and we both agreed, fuck Doordash.

Tricking businesses onto your platform and creating additional headaches for small business owners in the pursuit of Softbankian growth is a bad as it gets. Many restauranteurs were complaining about their Google listings being “hijacked” by Doordash, sometimes even usurping their own preferred delivery.

These underhanded tricks aren’t unique to Doordash though. In recent weeks there has been some great work coming out around a Yelp – Grubhub phone scam. This one is just priceless (seriously, read this Buzzfeed piece). Grubhub for their own sites generates a phone number for each restaurant that goes to a centralized, Grubhub owned call center. If someone calls in and orders via this number, the restaurant gets charged a fee. Apparently, some enterprising BD folks came up with the idea that Yelp could put the Grubhub phone numbers in place of the real restaurant phone number on the Yelp listing. Customers who think they’re “helping” their local restaurants by calling in the order are still creating a fee for Grubhub. 

Which brings us to the question – what is the point of all this? These platforms are all losing money. Just think of all the meetings and lines of code and phone calls to make all of these nefarious things happen which just continue to bleed money. Why go through all this trouble?

Grubhub just lost $33 million on $360 million of revenue in Q1.

Doordash reportedly lost an insane $450 million off $900 million in revenue in 2019 (which does make me wonder if my dream of a decentralized network of pizza arbitrageurs does exist).

Uber Eats is Uber’s “most profitable division” 😂😂. Uber Eats lost $461 million in Q4 2019 off of revenue of $734 million. Sometimes I need to write this out to remind myself. Uber Eats spent $1.2 billion to make $734 million. In one quarter.

Amazon just bailed on restaurant delivery in the U.S.

What is it about the food delivery platform business? Restaurants are hurt. The primary labor is treated poorly. And the businesses themselves are terrible.

 This Business Insider piece did a good job covering the problematic dynamics of the industry:

As this conflict comes to a boil, one thing is becoming clear: there are no winners in this fight.

Restaurant owners are losing money. Diners are seeing their costs raised, either by delivery companies that need to pay delivery drivers or by the restaurant owners who raise prices to offset delivery fees. And delivery drivers still make low, unpredictable wages frequently with no benefits. 

How did we get to a place where billions of dollars are exchanged in millions of business transactions but there are no winners? My co-host Can and my restaurant friend both defaulted to the notion “delivery is a shitty margin business” when discussing this post. But I don’t think that’s sufficient here. Delivery can work. Just look at a Domino’s stock chart. But, delivery has been carefully built as part of a holistic business model and infrastructure. Maybe that’s the viable model. 

After the start of this pandemic, my friend actually launched in-house delivery at one of his restaurants. He said he’s starting to get a sense of the economics and explained he’s starting to get a sense of the volume required per location to make the economics reasonably work. That’s what is so odd to me about third-party delivery platforms. The business of food delivery clearly is not intrinsically a loser. Domino’s figured it out. Every Chinese restaurant in New York City seemed to have it figured out long before any platform came along. My friend is figuring it out.

That’s the thing about how industries have evolved over the past decade. I know I ascribe ZIRP as the cause of all ills in the world, but this sometimes feels like the greatest ZIRP story ever told.

You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It’s used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices. But is that even viable?

Third-party delivery platforms, as they’ve been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they’ve been subsidized into market dominance. Maybe the right model is a wholly-owned supply chain like Domino’s. Maybe it’s some ghost kitchen / delivery platform hybrid. Maybe it’s just small networks of restaurants with out-of-the-box software. Whatever it is, we’ve been delayed in finding out thanks to this bizarrely bankrolled competition that sometimes feels like financial engineering worthy of my own pizza trading efforts. 

The more I learn about food delivery platforms, as they exist today, I wonder if we’ve managed to watch an entire industry evolve artificially and incorrectly. Arbitrage is about taking advantage of market inefficiencies and for all the newly minted day-traders out there, perhaps it’s time to start looking into frontier markets like pizza. 

Note 1: We found out afterward that was all the result of a “demand test” by Doordash. They have a test period where they scrape the restaurant’s website and don’t charge any fees to anyone, so they can ideally go to the restaurant with positive order data to then get the restaurant signed onto the platform. If we had to pay a customer fee on the order, it would’ve further cut into our arbitrage profits (though maybe we could’ve incorporated DashPass as part of the calculation). 

Note 2: A few months ago, in the pre-pandemic times, I was at an East Village pizza place and watched as the owner was arguing with a Doordash driver. The owner insisted the driver take the pizza in a heated bag so the customer didn’t get cold pizza, but leave an ID so the driver would be compelled to return the bag. The driver argued the amount of time it would take to come back to return the bag would mean he couldn’t make enough deliveries to “pay my rent”. #Innovation.

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There’s nothing quite like free food, and a spate of DoorDash customers received free grub on Thursday thanks to a technological glitch.

SOPA Images | Getty Images

“On the evening of July 7th DoorDash experienced a payment processing issue, and as a result, some users were able to check out without an authorized form of payment for a short period of time,” a DoorDash spokesperson told Entrepreneur. “We were subsequently notified that some users were placing fraudulent orders, and we immediately corrected the issue. We’re actively canceling fraudulent orders, and are in touch with merchants impacted to ensure they are compensated for any unauthorized orders they may have received. We work to ensure that we are always offering the highest quality of service to the communities we serve, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by this.”

The U.S.-based food delivery service was trending on Twitter through Friday after thousands of posts cluttered feeds with customers claiming to accidentally get free deals on everything from McDonald’s to $1,000 tequila bottles.

Aww nah, y’all going to jail. DoorDash not having this pic.twitter.com/kFsfKHmluG

— j (@ItsJB23_) July 8, 2022

Y’all think doordash free till y’all wake up tomorrow & they strip y’all accounts down

— (@__JectBabyTy) July 8, 2022

I’m blew I missed the Doordash glitch. I always miss the free shit

— Tea (@teathescorpio) July 8, 2022

y’all getting free food on DoorDash and ordering McDonald’s ?! y’all trippin

—

Whoever let this glitch happen at DoorDash, you’re getting fired

— Shawna (@lovee_smg) July 8, 2022

The food delivery service recently made several updates to its app, including a new feature that allows customers to leave written reviews for restaurants after ordering and a “most-liked” tab that will allow customers to see top-rated restaurants in their area.

“We’re always thinking about how we can make the shopping experience even more frictionless and relevant for our customers,” Helena Seo, head of design at DoorDash said in a statement at the time. “With the launch of the Most Liked Items feature, we’re saving consumers over 400,000 hours annually, reducing decision fatigue when deciding what to order. We’re excited for consumers to find the delight in discovering new restaurants and dishes, trusted and loved by locals.”

DoorDash’s valuation suffered in pre-market trading earlier this week after Amazon announced a new deal with rival Grubhub that will grant Amazon Prime users a free year of delivery for orders over $12. Shares were down around 7%.

As of Friday afternoon, DoorDash was down nearly 59% in a one-year period following the post-pandemic burst of in-home ordering.

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July 3, 2022 by Lipika Deka

Good news for Shiba Inu SHIB and Dogecoin DOGE holders. Users can now pay for their food deliveries from Uber Eats and DoorDash using their cryptocurrencies enabled by payment service provider BitPay

Besides that BitPay also extended the service to include other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin [BTC], Ethereum [ETH], Bitcoin Cash [BCH], Litecoin [LTC], XRP, Dai [DAI], Wrapped Bitcoin [WBTC], and stablecoins.

However, one has to purchase BitPay gift cards and BitPay cards as Uber Eats and DoorDash do not accept direct crypto payments yet.

Additionally, crypto holders can purchase gift cards through BitPay from a wide range of well-known takeout restaurants including quick service and sit-down favorites like Bonefish Grill, Chili’s, Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Steak ‘n Shake, and many more. 

According to the blog post, a second payment option for users is via BitPay partner Menufy which allows one to pay for takeout or delivery from local restaurants or national chains directly from a crypto wallet.

For Europeans, one can take advantage of the same service using Takeaway.com, the blog added.

BitPay Confirms SHIB, DOGE Acceptance In Uber Eats But Here’s The Catch 3
A month ago, another giant fast-food player- Chipotle, a Mexican restaurant chain, enabled Shiba Inu, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies through the digital payments platform Flexa.

This means of payment was made available in more than 2,975 Chipotle restaurants across the United States.

Shiba Inu Payments Now Enabled in 179 Countries
BitPay began supporting the Shiba Inu coin in December 2021. In early June the payment firm collaborated with a noncustodial wallet Edge where customers can buy, sell, trade, and spend over 130 digital assets.

Through this integration, Shiba Inu payments were made accessible in 179 nations, which has further boosted the asset’s adoption.

And the good news is that the current market drawdown has hardly put a dent in the token’s growing popularity. In fact, SHIB was among the seven new coins that Coinbase Commerce added to its payment options, TronWeekly reported.

From numerous exchanges and supermarket chains to high-end retailers, all have jumped on the bandwagon to add the popular meme coin as a form of payment.

Luxury watchmakers like Tag Heuer, Hublot, and Breitling are some examples that have recently incorporated cryptocurrencies via payments processor BitPay.

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Nobody knew that when Mariners’ outfielder Jesse Winker was hit with a pitch on Sunday afternoon it would result in a huge break for one Doordash driver in Anaheim.

Winker was struck at the top of the second inning. It was the second inning in a row a Mariners’ batter was pitched at, the first coming when Julio Rodriguez was almost hit in the first inning when a pitch went behind his head. After Winker was hit he rushed the Angels’ dugout, and the bench-clearing brawl resulted in Winker, along with numerous other players getting ejected. Mariners fans were thrilled Winkler stood up for the team, but one fan wanted to say thank you directly.

Normally this is where the story would end. A player gets a pizza, the game ends, and it’s just a fun footnote to it all. However, it’s here where things get so much better, because Sofie, the fan who ordered the pizza decided this would also be a chance to reward the Doordash driver with the tip of a lifetime.

IT IS DELIVERED! Tip info coming if he can reply, I’m hesitant to give my own Venmo/Cash App because I’m certain DoorDash has a maximum tip size. pic.twitter.com/qCuQTgV7Ye

— Sofie ️‍ (@sofieballgame) June 26, 2022

Everyone was following alone as Simranjeet Singh, the Doordash driver, got a pepperoni pizza delivered to the Mariners locker room. To show thanks Mariners twitter got together to tip him to the moon, with 300-400 fans paying their appreciation for Jess Winker forward to Singh, whose seemingly ordinary pizza pickup was anything but. In turned into what the driver called “a life-changing delivery.”

This is one of the best things to ever come out of an ejection in an MLB game. We love to see it.

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What does an increase in gig, freelance, and contract work mean for the identities of people doing those jobs? The author, who drove for Postmates, interviewed other drivers, attended in-person and virtual company meetings, and reviewed and contributed to driver forums on Facebook, Reddit, and other websites, examines the narratives gig workers tell themselves about who they are and what they do. He also challenges us to consider how to make these types of jobs better, fairer, and more meaningful to all types of contingent workers.

Of course Friskies Shreds wet cat food was on the bottom shelf of the last aisle I checked. It was just that kind of day. As I crouched into a kneeling position to inspect the inventory, I scanned the customer’s order glowing back at me on my smartphone: “Any seafood shreds with and without cheese. Twenty cans variety of flavors.” But doesn’t “variety of flavors” contradict the more specific request for “seafood shreds with and without cheese”? Or maybe the seafood category includes multiple flavors? Am I overthinking this?

As a business school professor — and, importantly, not a cat owner — my experience that day was atypical. As a driver for Postmates, however, it was just one of the 238 deliveries that I completed for the popular food delivery platform as part of an 18-month immersive research project to better understand the strategies that drivers use to craft a meaningful work identity. During my time as a Postmate, I drove for 130 hours, interviewed other drivers who had collectively completed 170,000 rides and deliveries on similar platforms (Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart, etc.), attended in-person and virtual company meetings, and reviewed and contributed to driver forums on Facebook, Reddit, and other websites.

In one sense, my recently published findings are not surprising. Like many app workers in the on-demand economy, I too had customers berate me for not having a clairvoyant understanding of their apartment building’s layout, parking restrictions, or door access codes. I too barely managed to earn more than minimum wage, despite selectively driving in some of the most lucrative markets in the country and using the most effective strategies I knew (such as resisting the urge to chase the notoriously quick-to-cool “hot spots” across town, avoiding neighborhoods with too many maze-like apartment buildings, and prioritizing multiple deliveries in one transaction over single orders).

However, my findings also point to something deeper and perhaps more concerning about the changing nature of work and our relationship to it that transcends app work in the on-demand economy. What I observed and experienced was a system that suppresses workers’ uniqueness, experiences, and future aspirations. It was a system that treated people like lines of code to be deployed instead of humans to be developed. This is problematic because work is not simply the translation of physical and intellectual effort into money. What we do on a daily basis for work is part of our broader life narrative that makes us who we are.

Historically, organizations have played a crucial role in defining these evolving stories for employees by providing them with the physical, social, and psychological space needed to process and cope with confusing, disturbing, or anxiety-provoking work situations. For example, traditional organizations offer their employees the appropriate setting and resources to receive or provide advice, encouragement, feedback, and training; to help a colleague solve a problem or work through a negative outcome; to cultivate social connections through a secure and predictable network of coworkers, supervisors, and mentors. Collectively, these features of traditional organizations help employees answer the question “Who am I?” in the context of their work.

Many drivers in the on-demand economy, I found, struggled to answer this question. One driver I interviewed explained, “I try to bring my personality, but the app itself doesn’t really offer that…the app sets the precedent to dehumanize…if you don’t try to inject your personality, it just washes it out…I feel like a robot by the end of the day.” A different driver put it more bluntly: “The driver is invisible [to customers]…the driver doesn’t exist…it’s like you’re not really there.”

It was not until I drove for more than 40 hours in one week in Las Vegas that I finally felt this reality myself. As I wrote in my research paper, what I experienced, and what many of the drivers I interviewed described, was akin to laboring on a stationary bicycle that is literally suspended, unable to gain traction on the path, any path, below – pedaling frantically, yet futilely; technically untethered, yet uninspired; at once dynamic and static.

This contrasts sharply with the messaging that platforms use to attract drivers: You can “move forward without limits” (GrubHub) as you “drive toward what matters” (Lyft). “From aspirations to relationships” (GrubHub) “no matter what your goal is” (Amazon Flex), you can “achieve your…long-term dreams” (DoorDash) because “you move the world” (Uber). At the end of the day, “you’re the boss!” (Waitr). Yet, these possibilities felt elusive, if not insulting to drivers, many of whom felt “stuck in the cycle [of driving]…going nowhere and this is month after month after month,” as one driver explained to me.

Frustrated by the platforms’ unfulfilled promises, many drivers described exploiting a fundamental irony of on-demand work: The same characteristics that drivers experienced as threatening and depersonalizing (exposure to algorithmic management, no access to coworkers, few legal protections) also reduced personal accountability concerns. “You are in a car, in a private setting…you will never see that person again, you have no obligation to them,” said one driver. Another driver added: “If you’re in the corporate world and you are sitting with your boss…you need to be careful what you’re saying, and how you’re reacting…But in driving…if I say I like blue, and you don’t like blue, I don’t care, you know…because my manager is not going to look at me.”

Outside the scrutiny of coworkers, supervisors, and repeat customers, some drivers successfully clung to unchecked fantasies about a more desirable future. (“Every day you meet many people [while driving], one of them can change your life!”) Others rationalized away the more common negative experiences they encountered while driving (one driver claimed to have “a pretty good track record” having “only had one barfer and one person urinate in my car”). In addition to internally shaping, if not distorting their experiences, many drivers retreated to private online driver groups on Facebook and other platforms to exchange stories about the good and the bad; the absurd and the hilarious — seeking to negotiate their personal narratives by connecting with and comparing themselves to other drivers. These identity management tactics provided drivers with just enough psychological relief to continue driving.

When I decided to end my voluntary immersion in the driver community, I could not shake the feeling that the depersonalization of app workers is a feature, not a bug, of an economic model born of and emboldened by transformations that are underway across the global economy. This includes increasingly prevalent work arrangements characterized by weak employer-worker relations (independent contracting), strong reliance on technology (algorithmic management, platform-mediated communication), and social isolation (no coworkers and limited customer interactions).

Importantly, the effects of these transformations reach far beyond the type of low-wage gig workers that I studied; freelancers more broadly face similar existential questions and challenges. With the coronation of agile workforces and customer-first philosophies nearly complete, the psychological contract — the unwritten expectations and obligations between workers and organizations — is at risk of being re-written before our eyes. Indeed, the three C’s underlying strong psychological contracts — a career that offers personal growth and upward mobility, a community that fosters social connections and belongingness, and a cause that infuses one’s work with meaning and purpose — are all but absent for independent workers of all stripes.

At the core of the issue are changing preferences and practices with respect to “renting” instead of “buying” talent to meet organizational objectives. For example, a survey of C-suite executives and senior managers revealed that more than 90% think that leveraging digital freelancing marketplaces is either “very important” or “somewhat important” and more than 50% reported that their expected use of digital talent platforms in the future “will increase significantly.”

From this perspective, the 40 million Americans who have rented out their services to technology platforms like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash may be canaries in the coal mine of the new world of work. What they experience today, millions more are likely to experience in some form in the future.

Of course, there are no easy solutions to these issues; many are existential and will require a reckoning involving values and priorities at the societal level. In the meantime, familiar ways of becoming and expressing oneself at work may no longer hold. As forces continue to erode traditional forms of identity support, meaningful self-definition at work will increasingly rely on how we collectively use and misuse innovative technologies and business models.

For example, how can companies deploy algorithmic management in a way that doesn’t threaten and depersonalize workers? How can focusing on the narratives that underlie and animate identities help workers reimagine what they really want and deserve out of a career coming out of the pandemic and the Great Resignation? Will increasingly immersive and realistic digital environments like the metaverse function as identity playgrounds for workers in the future? How will Web3 broadly, and the emergence of novel forms of organizing specifically (e.g., decentralized autonomous organizations or DAOs), affect the careers, connections, and causes that are so important to workers? What role can social media platforms, online discussion forums, and other types of virtual water coolers play in helping independent workers craft and sustain a desirable work identity? In short, how can we retain the human element in the face of increasingly shrewd resource management tactics?

Now is the time for us to earnestly engage with these questions — from those who design, lead, and regulate these technologies and business models (software engineers, CEOs, and politicians, respectively) to those who study, teach, and help others cope with the implications of them (researchers, educators, clinical psychologists, respectively).

Hanging in the balance is the well-being of independent workers the world over, many of whom are struggling to answer the question “Who am I?” in the context of their work.

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