Tony Talks Business
How DoorDash Makes Money
You order a burrito. The menu says 12 dollars. By the time you get to checkout it says 24. Last year DoorDash moved 102 billion dollars worth of other people's food and kept 13.7 billion of it, but the actual profit at the bottom was under one percent of everything that went through the app.
This is how DoorDash makes money, and why everyone in the transaction feels squeezed at once.
Chapters
- 0:00Intro
- 0:21DoorDash moved $102 billion, kept under 1% profit
- 0:44Why everyone feels squeezed at once
- 1:09The fee stack on your screen
- 1:51The menu price is already inflated
- 3:07The restaurant side, where the real money is
- 3:25Commission tiers: paying for visibility, not delivery
- 3:52The squeeze: handing over more than the profit margin
- 4:28DoorDash's own study on markups
- 4:58The advertising business nobody sees on the receipt
- 5:34Paying to be found on the platform you already pay for
- 6:09The subscription: DashPass and the habit it buys
- 7:12Now the driver
- 7:40Why your tip pays most of the wage
- 7:59What Dashers actually earn, and why the numbers disagree
- 9:01The real innovation: nobody owns the car
- 9:22The 2017-2019 tip scandal
- 10:03Restaurants that never signed up at all
- 10:48So, where does the money actually come from
- 12:26Seattle, New York, and the fee that just relocates
- 13:39The burrito, recalculated
- 14:11The food was never the product
