Deep Dive
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Willie Solis is having a bad day. Let's see what we have. Goodness gracious. It's 7:30 a.m. He's just dropped his son off at school in Denton, Texas. And he's ready to pick up jobs doing restaurant delivery for DoorDash. But there aren't many jobs to pick up. I'm on the DoorDash app and the screen is grayed out at the moment saying that the first time that comes up for schedule is going to be, goodness, 10:30 in the morning.
Just because you turn on the app doesn't mean there are enough deliveries to go around. So some drivers pre-schedule their delivery shifts with DoorDash. A driver can pick a time and place they want to work from a list of available blocks.
Drivers with scheduled shifts get dibs on deliveries. It's a way for the app to manage supply and demand. There's usually enough work to go around so that Solis doesn't have to pre-schedule his shifts. But not today. I want to work, and I'm ready to work. But here I am sitting in a parking lot, not able to work. Unless I drive out to other areas. Solis could drive to Dallas, around an hour away. But there's no guarantee the work would be significantly better there.
It's not until 3 p.m. that Solis finally gets a hit. It's an incoming order from Panera Bread. Before he accepts it, Solis gets more details about the job. It's about five miles away, the base pay would be $2.50, and then he'd earn a tip of $10. Solis does his own cost-benefit analysis. Does the pay cover the mileage? In this case, the job is worth it. So this is one that we would consider a gold mine.
Especially because this trip would allow him to pick up another order from the same location. Two birds with one drive. Picking up two orders here. It's a multiple order. Still, it's the only gig Salis gets. I've only had two orders the whole entire day. Made a whopping $20 and some change. And I got a free Dr. Pepper in the process. Overall today, Salis didn't make enough money to cover the hours he sat around waiting. It's frustrating.
But those hours are also part of the deal. Solis turned to gig work with third-party delivery apps for a flexible schedule, where he could decide his own hours outside a conventional 9-to-5. My son, he does have a disability that I have to be very responsive to. That is the main reason why I need to have this kind of opportunity where I can fix my schedule around what his needs are.
Though, having to wait for hours for any work to come through, on days like this, it doesn't quite feel like Solis is the one fixing his schedule. Today, it feels like the apps make the rules for Solis to bend around, because he needs those goldmine deliveries. This is how it often feels to Solis. So much so that he's turned to activism and is now an organizer for the Gig Workers Collective, which is a pro-labor organization that fights for better pay and benefits for gig workers.
Salisa is just one of many drivers across the country who feel the true cost of this delivery work is much higher than the app's claim. Bottom line is, I don't want to give my time, my energy, my effort, my gas, my miles, my vehicle's lifespan to DoorDash for less than minimum wage. This is Land of the Giants Delivery Wars. I'm Amadal Yukberg.
Literally. That's the word Uber uses on its website.
And the biggest restaurant delivery app by far, DoorDash, its pitch to potential delivery drivers is, quote, your time, your goals, you're the boss. I want to zero in on that last promise. You're the boss. Because many drivers and critics are saying that's not necessarily true. That the relationship between gig worker and app is not an equal partnership. What the relationship truly is, is up for debate right now.
and could be radically redefined moving forward by voters, lawmakers, and even the presidential administration. All the tensions in the, quote, partnership between driver and app come out in a bunch of small and big ways in the daily lives of the people just doing the work.
People like Virginia Blanchard in Amelia, Ohio. Oh, honey, you have no idea what I see on a daily basis. Blanchard called me from her car in the middle of a day of deliveries, and she was very ready to give me her best stories.
Life of a delivery driver day 397. Went to deliver food today. Got a text message from the customer saying, hey, I'm too lazy to come downstairs, but I got a bucket with a rope down there. Can you just put my food in there and I'll hoist it up? Sure. Okay. Got there. Sure enough. He had a gold, I'm not even complaining to you, a gold plated bucket sitting down at the bottom and he's hanging out the third floor window waiting for me to put it in so he could hoist it up.
Thankfully, Blanchard has someone to commiserate with after moments like this. Her husband, Jerry, is also a delivery driver. He'll do Grubhub and I'll do DoorDash and whoever gets the order first will go and pick that up. If it's in his name, he'll pick it up. If it's in my name, I'll pick it up. But I usually do most of the delivering. The couple that delivers together stays together, I guess. 25 years this August.
As you can tell, Blanchard is very friendly, talkative, and not unfamiliar with the gig economy. Jerry used to be an Elvis impersonator, and she used to be his manager. Elvis work is very much gig work. Now she's on DoorDash, and she's good at it.
I see so many people on a daily basis. I know with the restaurants that I deliver to, who's on staff, who's working. I know how fast I'm going to be able to get my food as soon as I walk in. A couple of years back, Blanchard worked two jobs. One was in her friend's bar, cleaning bathrooms, and the other was as an in-home caregiver. Then she had a cancer scare, and she stopped working. She had to have her thyroid removed.
During her recovery, she turned to food delivery and found she could work as much or as little as she wanted. It was a way to ease herself back into the workforce. And in my recovery time, I...
Started noticing Grubhub and DoorDash was more in our area. So I said, you know what, let's just do that for a little while until I get back on my feet and then I'll go back to work. While we were making so much money doing this, I said, you know what, forget it. We never see each other because I'm always working. You're always working. Let's just let's just do this together.
Blanchard says she loves being able to work with her husband, but the job does come with some challenges. Like with DoorDash, if I don't accept so many offers, my acceptance rate goes down. An acceptance rate is key on an app like DoorDash. If you accept a certain number of orders and deliver successfully, you become a top Dasher. A driver has to maintain a 70% acceptance rate in order to be eligible for top Dasher status. This status is good for a month.
Top dashers get certain benefits, like being prioritized for deliveries. But Blanchard does not qualify for top dasher status. I am a cherry picker when it comes to orders, and I decline offers that are taking me too far and it's going to take me too long to deliver. For instance, an order that would pay $3 going 15 miles away
It would take me that long to get to the restaurant, however long it takes the restaurant to fix the food and give it to me, and then drive it to the person. That's almost 45 minutes for $3. Many drivers we spoke to say they decline low-paying orders. They say they're constantly doing the math on which orders are worth it for them to accept and which are not. You heard Willie Solis go through this routine already. That constant cost-benefit analysis, order-to-order, is like a shadow job on top of their gig work.
And Blanchard has added another layer of calculating to her days doing delivery. She sets a goal to make a minimum of $200 a day. And even with declining certain orders, Blanchard says she almost always hits her goal. This is how we pay our bills. This is how we take care of our two-year-old granddaughter. For Blanchard, it goes beyond the pay, though. It's about control. It gives me the flexibility to still be able to make money at my own pace.
and not have to work a nine-to-five listening to somebody else telling me what to do. Flexibility. The majority of the drivers we spoke to said the number one attraction to gig work was flexibility. We never thought it would be possible to start saving money until I started working this job. Haley Holtz is a part-time delivery worker for DoorDash on the outskirts of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Part-time as in around 20 to 30 hours a week. ♪
Holt says DoorDash allows her a kind of flexibility and financial stability she wasn't able to find in work before. Holt had her first child when she was 20 and left college to focus on her family. Now, during the day when her husband is working, Holt says she gets to be a stay-at-home mom and homeschool their kids. But then at night, she does delivery.
Now, Holtz used to do delivery for Domino's as an employee. And she says, looking back, that the work at Domino's was much more demanding. That there was always something to do, even when there weren't any deliveries. She would have to prep food, answer phone calls, or do dishes.
Whereas with DoorDash, in between orders, you kind of just have a downtime. You're not having to constantly stress yourself, stress your body, stress your mind, deal with people, upset customers, you know, things like that. For Holtz, waiting around for orders isn't a bug in the system. It's actually a feature. She likes that she has that much downtime.
Although she admits there is such a thing as too much waiting. I really try hard every night. Like, I don't want to go home until I've at least made $100. Sometimes that means I'm only making $17 an hour that night if it's a slow night. Or sometimes that means I'm going home after two hours because I had two $50 hours.
Across both the good and the slow nights, Holtz says she still makes much more doing DoorDash delivery than she did working at Domino's, where her pay was $9 an hour plus tips. Holtz feels pretty good about her gig work.
which is a feeling Willie Solis remembers from his early days on the apps. When I originally started this work, I thought I was making really good money. Every order that they sent me, I would accept. And, you know, I felt good about myself until the end of the week came and I saw the actual numbers, how much gas I put in the vehicle, how many miles I put on my vehicle. That was the first time Solis did that shadow labor, the cost-benefit analysis of his deliveries overall.
And he quickly realized that he was spending more on gas and vehicle maintenance than his base pay would cover. And those aren't even all the costs that drivers bear in the course of their work. There's taxes, car insurance, and these jobs don't come with health care, sick time, or workman's comp if they get injured. A job working in a restaurant or in retail may not offer all those benefits either, but drivers like Solis have to cover the costs nonetheless.
Solis calculated that even at the beginning of his time working with DoorDash, when he was accepting all those orders, feeling great, he actually wasn't even making above minimum wage, not even $7.25 an hour. Many, many gig workers find themselves in that situation where they work really, really hard, very long hours, and at the end of the day, they're not making enough to make ends meet or even just above minimum wage or right at minimum wage or sometimes even below.
This is a complaint many drivers and labor advocacy groups have brought up. But an executive at DoorDash also told us that by national averages, their delivery drivers make between $22 and $25 an hour, though that's only when they're on a delivery. Solis is accounting for all the time he's trying to work, including waiting for jobs. So there can be pretty drastic differences in how drivers experience working for these apps. The pay can be unclear. And for all the drivers we talked to, unpredictable.
This is part of what makes Solis feel that delivery is unsustainable for drivers and that the apps are hiding the real cost of the work. So that's the pay. But a job, any job, is built on relationships. There's the driver's relationship with the apps. And then there's also the driver's relationship with restaurants. Virginia Blanchard, always extra friendly, says she thinks of restaurant owners and staff as her peers.
But sometimes that feeling doesn't seem mutual. If I had to use the restroom and the restaurant was open for people, I wasn't allowed to use the restrooms because I was not an employee or a customer. This is an issue a lot of workers bring up. Being locked out of using restaurant restrooms. Because in many restaurants, drivers are not customers. In fact, they represent the app. But then from the customer's perspective, drivers often represent the restaurant.
This is what is so unique to the gig work of food delivery as opposed to ride sharing, for example. Here there is a triangulation of app, restaurant, and driver that puts drivers in a tricky in-between where who they are and what they represent changes. And that means that often any breakdown between customer, restaurant, and app falls on the driver. Now, if you ask the drivers who they represent, who their boss is, you get a mixed bag of answers.
Willie Solis said, At the end of the day, I had pretty much what I call an app-based boss to report to. And for Blanchard and Holtz, I consider myself my boss. I think when it comes to DoorDash that I am definitely the boss. I decide when and where I work and how much I'm going to make. If that's not a boss, I don't know what is. The algorithms. The algorithms are your boss. This is Veena Dubal.
She's a professor of law at UC Hastings. They're the thing that control when you work, how you work, where you work, whether you get work. They are the boss. DuBall is a big critic of companies that rely on gig labor, including DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub, in part because these companies have sold gig work as independent work where the driver is in control. But DuBall argues that control is an illusion.
After the break, how big tech fueled the explosive growth of the gig workforce and, according to critics, made a false promise to that workforce.
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.
The modern gig economy was defined in the early 2010s in a uniquely opportune moment for gig companies, that is, in the shadows of the Great Recession. You had lots and lots of people who had lost their everything in the financial recession, right? They lost their houses, they lost their jobs. So people were desperate for any income. Sam Harnett has spent a lot of time talking to gig workers about their experiences on third-party apps, and from the heart of the industry, too.
He's a reporter at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco. Harnett says that gig work felt like a natural answer to that entire workforce of people looking for any way to make or supplement an income. And Harnett says the companies that defined gig work in those early years made a really important decision about how to treat their new workforce.
or rather, how to classify their workforce. A company like Uber or DoorDash could have hired their drivers as employees, which is a classification that guarantees set wages, benefits, overtime, and workman's compensation protections, that kind of thing.
But the gig companies went another direction. They classified their workers as independent contractors. They basically came out and said, hey, we're this new technology. We can't be regulated by these old labor laws. And because of that, we should have a different classification. The employee classification and the benefits that come with it were a thing of the new deal. Designed in a world that obviously did not yet have smartphones, gig work was a thing of this new world. Immediate, accessible, informal.
Almost anyone with a phone and email could theoretically sign up and start making money in a matter of minutes. So Harnett says companies like Uber, DoorDash, and Postmates argued that the independent contractor designation was more appropriate for drivers than the more traditional designation of employee. Because, they reasoned, they weren't necessarily the driver's employers. They were a third party who connected drivers with someone who needed a service, a ride or food delivery.
Harnett also adds that there was an important benefit to apps with this classification. It would save them money from having to pay for those guaranteed employee protections. These savings helped fuel the explosive growth of many of these companies early on.
But tech companies sold this classification to their workers as a way for them to be their own bosses. And they're saying like, well, you know, we want our workers to be able to come and just flip on the app whenever they want and work and then stop working and then work again and stop working. Therefore, you know, they can't be employees.
The promise was independence and flexibility. Drivers would get to choose when and for how long they would like to work. You know, it's like so much of the American dream stuff, right? Like these people, you know, they want to own their own business. They want to be independent. But the promise of gig work as that American dream has fallen short for much of the workforce. By 2018, thousands in the gig economy were experiencing extreme financial insecurity.
According to a 2019 Federal Reserve report, gig workers who supported themselves through the gig economy struggled financially far more than the average worker. Around 60% of people who rely on gig work as their primary source of income said they'd have a hard time paying an unexpected expense of $400 or more. For people who didn't do any gig work, only 38% said they'd struggle with that level of expense.
An executive at DoorDash told us that fully three-quarters of their drivers have other jobs and use DoorDash for supplemental income, so these findings would not apply to the vast majority of their drivers.
Vina DuBall, professor of law at UC Hastings and outspoken critic of the apps, points out that certain demographic groups rely on gig work more than others. Ultimately, this is an economy that is built primarily on the labor of people of color and immigrants. Take San Francisco, for example, a world capital of tech. In 2020, the San Francisco's Local Agency Formation Commission released a study that found that at least 78% of gig workers in the city are people of color.
And they are the new service workers. Like, this is the growth of the U.S. service economy. There is increasingly people who are served and people who are doing the service. The major apps argue, though, that the accessibility of gig work is its strength. And several organizations, such as the California Black Chamber of Commerce and the C.C. Poitier Foundation, agree.
They say gig work has a low barrier to entry, which provides access to income for people who find traditional work challenging. People like the formerly incarcerated, seniors, and disabled veterans. But that brings us back to that promise that gig work affords drivers control over their schedules, wages, and experiences overall. Today, many drivers, labor rights groups, and lawmakers are looking into this promise and how much it holds up.
One place to measure who has control: wages. Independent contractors in other sectors often set their own pay. Think about when you hire a local electrician. They've probably carefully considered the rate they give you, maybe set it high enough to cover health insurance or a week off.
That control is one of the reasons your electrician skipped working for someone else and the protections that come with being an employee. But as KQED reporter Sam Harnett points out, that's not the case with the apps. Uber, Eats, DoorDash, all the apps, they control the rates of what the drivers get paid. Veena Dubaul argues that the apps also shape what drivers are able to make through manipulating their work habits. Here's an example of what she means.
A report from the research institute Data & Society found that while drivers have the freedom to work when they want, once they're online, an algorithmic manager is keeping track of everything they do through "continuous soft surveillance."
It tracks their working hours, their movements, acceleration, and braking habits all through their phone. Instead of exerting direct control over workers, like telling them when to work, telling them how to do their job, they function using nudges. So, for example, DoorDash will send a notification to drivers saying, this is a good time to work, or it's a good area to work. Like, there's a lunch rush hour, get in on it. And of course, that can be really helpful.
But that same, quote, continuous soft surveillance also enables another dynamic that DuBall argues is harmful. So if they don't accept deliveries, then they'll be punished. You heard about this a little bit with Virginia Blanchard, who can't be a top dasher because she declines too many orders. DuBall and that Data & Society report argue that penalizing drivers for their acceptance rates can pressure them into taking on jobs that aren't actually economically worth it.
To DuBall, this is an example of how apps exert control over drivers. Blanchard, the driver who was pretty happy with the pay and loved the flexibility of delivery work, she messaged me a few weeks after our initial interview with an update. She'd been deactivated by DoorDash. Deactivation is basically getting kicked off the platform, getting fired. Blanchard was deactivated for not meeting a metric called completion rate. That's the number of orders a driver accepts and then actually delivers.
Blanchard's completion rate had fallen below DoorDash's minimum of 80%. I asked her why. She says sometimes she would show up to a restaurant and they wouldn't even have started the order. So she'd unassign herself. Because waiting for them to cook the order meant the job was no longer worth the pay. Or sometimes a restaurant would be closed when she showed up to pick up an order. And canceling those jobs would count against her completion rate. She says she's been punished for a mix of her decisions about pay...
and things that are totally out of her control. And her deactivation message says she can't appeal the decision. Veena Dubal argues deactivations like this prove there's an imbalance of power between app and driver. That if the apps want that level of control over the drivers, then something's got to give. And she says there's a key fix.
Reclassify gig workers from the independent contractor status that gig companies advocated for back in the early 2010s to the protected employee status, the one with benefits codified more than 80 years ago.
which is an idea that regulators and lawmakers in California share. Good morning. I think we are now live. In May 2020, the Attorney General of California, Javier Becerra, along with the most prominent city attorneys in the state, gave a virtual press conference and called out the gig companies. Uber and Lyft both claim that their drivers aren't engaged in the company's core mission and cannot therefore qualify for benefits. We say otherwise.
He went on to say that California was suing the companies. Our lawsuit that we are filing today together asserts that Uber and Lyft gained an unfair and unlawful competitive advantage by inappropriately classifying massive numbers of California drivers as independent contractors. The attorney general claimed that the companies were violating a new law in the state called AB5.
Passed in 2019, AB5 created much stricter rules for companies that wanted to classify workers as independent contractors. Companies like Uber and DoorDash did not meet that new threshold. They were required to reclassify gig workers as employees. The apps didn't listen. Actually, they went further than that. They turned to the ballot box with Proposition 22. Prop 22 was a ballot initiative pushed by the apps.
It asked the public if a handful of tech companies, including Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Postmates, could be exempt from AB5 and continue to classify their workers as independent contractors, just with a few more benefits. Prop 22 promised that workers would get an hourly wage at least 120% of the local or state minimum wage while out on deliveries, along with other limited benefits like a healthcare subsidy for drivers working 15 or more hours per week.
If you live in California, you probably remember that you'd have to put work into not knowing about Prop 22. And that's in part because the companies behind it poured money into the initiative. In fact, it was the most expensive ballot measure in California's history. The company spent over $200 million to promote it combined. DoorDash gave nearly $52.1 million, second only to Uber, which gave more than $59 million.
Some would argue this was all for good reason. So a lot of people are, when they think about independent contractors and about gig workers, I think the concern is that they're being exploited. This is Paul Oyer. He's an economist at Stanford. He does not think reclassifying gig workers as employees would be a good deal for the workers. He says that gaining some benefits and protections would come at the cost of the thing that brought so many people to this work in the first place, flexibility.
If you were to make DoorDash drivers employees, it's not like they would just suddenly have exactly the same deal they have now and then on top of that some set of benefits. What would happen is Uber Eats and DoorDash would change their services in a way that changed the driver's lives too. And maybe for some drivers those changes would be for the better and for a lot of drivers those changes would be for the worse.
Oyer says that if a driver is reclassified as an employee, the companies could institute set work schedules. Pretty much the opposite of flexibility. Another drawback. They couldn't be an employee of DoorDash and an employee of Uber Eats. They'd have to pick one. That's fine for some people. But for many of the people, the most valuable part of these platforms is the flexibility it affords them. The fact that it allows them to work when they want to.
There are very few other jobs where you can literally say, "I am stopping work now." And a half hour later, you can say, "I'm starting work again." In the end, the California public agreed with the apps and workers who did not want to be classified as employees. In November 2020, Prop 22 was approved by more than 58% of voters. So delivery drivers who work for the apps in the state are still independent contractors, just with a few more protections and benefits than before.
But it's not enough for the advocates who are still seeking employee protections. And their hands are tied by Prop 22, says KQED reporter Sam Harnett.
So now, like, it basically kicked the decision to the federal government. Like, there seems to be very little that labor and workers' advocates can do in California now to get these app workers' employee benefits and protections. It would have to now come from the federal government. And the federal government is paying attention. The Biden administration and the Department of Labor have signaled that they're going to take this fight on.
The administration has said it believes that the independent contractor model that gig work companies rely on violates workers' rights. In an interview with Reuters in April, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said that the department will have conversations with companies in the coming months to make sure that workers have access to consistent wages, sick time, and health care. That's what's happening on the federal level.
there's a lot happening at the state level too. Now you're seeing DoorDash, Lyft, Uber, they're looking to pass similar laws either through the legislatures or through ballot initiative in other states around the country. Prop 22 emboldened the apps to take the same fight across the country. Lawmakers are considering bills similar to Prop 22 in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Illinois. But AB5, the California labor law that came before Prop 22, has also emboldened regulators.
In July 2020, the Massachusetts Attorney General filed a lawsuit against the gig companies challenging how Uber and Lyft classify their drivers. And these fights matter at all levels of the restaurant delivery ecosystem. The apps themselves have made it pretty clear that they want to avoid the employee classification. They're putting a lot of resources into this fight. Their business models are predicated on delivery workers not being classified as employees.
So could these companies even stay in business if they're forced to reclassify? I talked to the vice president of delivery at Uber about all of this.
He's in charge of Uber Eats, and his name is Pierre-Dimitri Gorkoti. I don't think it puts into question the viability of Uber as a company of the delivery business model, quite honestly, but it does change some of the financial equation and therefore could mean fewer trips, but higher prices potentially, which we think is bad for everyone, but not something that from a pure business model perspective would prevent a company like Uber from operating and growing.
So, Gorko T says Uber Eats wouldn't be wiped out if drivers were reclassified as employees. But there would be consequences that trickle down to other key members of this delivery app ecosystem. He says the cost of employing drivers would be higher, and those costs would potentially be passed on to consumers and restaurants. Gorko T adds that fewer people would sign on to be delivery drivers because there'd be less flexibility in it.
This would also have consequences for consumers. Fewer drivers would potentially reduce service areas and probably also raise prices. Chris Payne, the president of DoorDash, says that it is drivers who have the most on the line, though. I would say that what we focus on is our drivers want flexibility and choice. When I talked to Payne about reclassification, he hammered this point about flexibility.
One stat that I think will blow you away is that the average DoorDash driver drives for four hours or less a week. This is not a full-time job. And those people, Payne says, don't need to be employees. They have other full-time jobs. He says Prop 22 was great news for those people and the drivers who work more hours. Best of both worlds. It essentially codifies that this flex work continues, right? It's exactly what dashers wanted.
But it also says there's a path to earning more benefits, health care, 120% minimum wage, et cetera, for active hour, those types of things that were added to that program. And so when I read the announcement from the Secretary of Labor and his call that he wanted to have a conversation with industry participants, I think it's fantastic because I think it's an opportunity for us to
to have a dialogue about this new way of working and basically make the law catch up to the exciting potential that exists in the market today. Payne admits then the law has some catching up to do. In Texas, delivery driver and activist Willie Solis agrees. But the stakes for him are personal. And they're really high.
He relies on gig work for all of his income. Because while he questions the amount of control the apps exert over drivers, they still offer more flexibility than traditional jobs. So how he's classified, employee or independent contractor, really matters.
And Solis' preference is actually to keep his independent contractor status. When I did construction work as my own business, I can tell you that I was completely in control of my earning potential in every single way. For Solis, that's what it means to be an independent contractor. But he says that at the end of the day, he and other drivers just don't have that kind of control when working for the apps.
I recognize and realize that the only way that we are going to get companies to respect us as either true independent contractors or give us employment rights and benefits, one way or the other, the only way that's going to happen is when these companies are held accountable. If they're going to treat us like employees, then we should be classified correctly. For now, Solis and delivery workers across the country are watching how the fights over worker classifications play out.
and how the results of these fights affect a workforce that's growing and seemingly at a crossroads.
How drivers are classified may be up in the air in some places, but in the app economy, the definition of a restaurant is shifting too. When restaurants go online, online comes to the restaurants. As you guys know, I like to give away money, but in this video, we're going to do it a little different. MrBeast is one of the biggest YouTube stars on the planet, and thanks to the world the delivery apps built,
Mr. Beast is in the food business. I've never ran a restaurant before. Money for you. Money for you. Money for you. Money for you. You better come get a Beast Burger. Delivery apps have opened up a new frontier. Restaurants that never open their doors to diners. There are ghost kitchens, virtual restaurants, and celebrity brands spreading nationally, and they only exist online. ♪
How delivery apps are shaping the future of food. That's next week on our final episode of Land of the Giants Delivery Wars. Land of the Giants Delivery Wars is a production of Recode, Eater, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Noor Wazwaz is the show's producer. Megan Kinane is our editor. Brandon McFarland engineered this episode. And Alex Letterman is our fact checker. Special thanks to Charlotte Silver and Lucy Morales for their help with this episode.
Sam Altman is Recode's editor-in-chief. Amanda Kloot is Eater's editor-in-chief. Jolie Myers is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Amadal Yakbar. You control when and how you listen to Land of the Giants. It's available anywhere you get your podcasts. Subscribe and leave us a review. We'd love to know what you think.