The complaint says DoorDash drivers began waiting to batch multiple orders together after gaining virtual visibility into kitchen systems, allowing them to see when pizzas would come out of the oven.
Instead of immediately leaving with a completed order, the suit claims drivers waited “up to fifteen (15) minutes” for additional deliveries, increasing the time between when a pizza is removed from the oven rack and when it leaves the building to be delivered. That delay slowed deliveries, disappointed customers, and caused a sharp drop in sales, the suit says.
The lawsuit also alleges Dashers could see tip amounts and whether orders were cash payments, making some drivers less likely to accept certain deliveries.
Partially related: I remember some months ago, down here in Brazil, UberEats and iFood drivers were getting restless about the complete lack of any rights when working with the apps - no rest time, no charging stations, low pay, all while being told that you’re “being your own boss, working when you want to!”. They usually formed whatsapp groups to complain about that.
In an almost inexplicable twist, the majority that wanted more rights also wanted the govt to stay the fuck away and were against a law that was meant to regulate working for apps. Said law included many of the rights they wanted.
Glad to see American idiocy is spreading /s
A tremendous amount of money has been invested to ensure that it is.
Planned idiocy, but idiocy nonetheless.
Billionaires invest a fortune into media articles, influencers, and fake news to brainwash workers to vote against their own class.
Ironically, the billionaire class is a pretty well organized one to achieve all this. Motherfuckers.
The obvious answer to the problem no one seems to have mentioned yet:
Pay the drivers by the hour, not by the amount of orders.
Performance-based pay has never worked, and always incentivises bad behaviour. They wouldn’t try to batch so many orders for a single trip if it wasn’t the only way they could make passable money.
Paying more money for better results doesn’t fit into the world view of many business decision makers.
No no. We don’t do obvious solutions.
Fire the executives responsible.
Let they who reap the benefits of success be also reamed by the flames of failure.
Did you read the article? Or even the headline, which pretty clearly puts the blame on Doordash drivers gaming the system.
Hold up…
Pizza Hut execs fired all their in-store drivers because California was gonna make them pay drivers a living wage. They then chose to go with Doordash drivers, leading to the ultimate failure of the brand and closing tons of stores nationwide as a result.
So yes. Its 100% on the execs.
The specific pizza hut suing doesn’t operate in California, but that doesn’t mean the California pizza huts that fired their drivers due to the minimum wage change in California arent also suffering the same problem, id expect they are.
The franchisees had no say in the execs choosing to use this new software that let’s the door dash drivers see what’s happening in the kitchen.
The California locations are starting to go through chapter 11. Papa johns uses doordash heavily too, and theyre starting to shutter locations too.
It’ll be interesting to see what % of pizza huts that kept their own drivers vs ditched them for door dash fare better / stay open when all the dust eventually settles from this.
Fair point, although that’s more info than this article provided. But since Doordash came into the picture at the same time as the new software, we don’t know whether the same things would or wouldn’t have happened with the old software. In any case, with claimed losses of $100 Million in sales the plaintiff definitely isn’t a lone pizza place, it’s some large-scale multi-unit franchise business that owns tons of them, and I’m fine with them clawing for each other’s piles of money.
They gave DoorDash drives that data and they are pissed DoorDash drivers acted in their best interest instead of….literally anyone else’s? That’s hardly gaming the system. That’s the system working exactly as designed and management not understanding sales reps lie.
They also made the decision to ditch in house delivery drivers and use doordash in the first place.
I don’t care. Fire the executives anyway.
Right! They must be guilty of something dammit!
These drivers are their own business and they’re just maximizing revenue according to market incentives, just like any other business. So Pizza Hut has enshittified themselves. Well done. I guess it looked a lot better in the excel sheet and presentation.
For context, here is an actual Uber Eats offer to a driver from 5 days ago:
That’s 5.68 an hour, ridiculous. The system should reject anything that’s below minimum wage equivalent at a bare minimum.
I’ve been driving (passengers, not food) for 2 years and you really can’t imagine how predatory and exploitative it is these days. Gas prices way up, fares way down, and Uber just spent $10 billion in our stolen wages on driverless vehicles to replace us. I’m trying to get out ASAP.
Edit: Also, just wanted to add that it’s $5.68/hr BEFORE gas and wear-and-tear expenses.
How do you feel about people who refuse to use ride-share like Uber because it’s exploiting labor? I don’t want to give them any money because fuck them, but some of my friends say the drivers need money so refusing to use it is only hurting them.
I love it. I hope everyone stops using them. I can’t believe I ever supported them. But I think they’ll be hard to get rid of, because they were allowed to shove out the cabs in most areas. Illinois drivers actually created their own app, which is epic. But it took years of work and I have no idea where to start, but I hope more states see that kind of effort.
Around me the Uber did really well and it was 100% the taxi driver’s fault.
They used to do this thing where they would hang around the train station hoping that somebody wanted to go to the airport, because the airport wouldn’t let the taxi drivers sit outside the terminal building but they could go in there if they were dropping someone off, then they would be able to pick up some tourist on the way out, so every time you didn’t want to go to the airport they would always claim that they just got a call and won’t take you. So it was basically impossible to actually use the taxis unless you legitimately wanted to go to the airport.
So people used to call an Uber, and the Ubers would come and pick people up right in front of the taxi drivers and they couldn’t see why this was a problem until much later, when they started to complain and said the local council should ban Uber.
5.68 minus gas and wear and tear on your vehicle.
I do some DD for extra cash sometimes, and see shit like this all the time. I don’t know who’s taking this shit, but it isn’t me.
Yeah, if it comes out below minimum wage there should be a higher amount being paid to the driver for the delivery side of the payment, expecting anyone to work for pretty much just tips is very bad business. I wish more of the price increase on the menu went to the driver.
It should be minimum wage plus standard mileage cost at minimum, perhaps. In the US the IRS rate is 72.5 cents per mile right now, so if you figure that in for the 19 mile trip that’s over $13 just to break even.
It’s a 19 minute / 2.4 mile trip. But your point still stands - you’re not covering wear and tear.
Ah, well thanks for the correction! That number just attached to the wrong variable in my brain I guess.
Last time I ordered from them. I selected pick up and waited until a few minutes before the time was up to leave to get it. When I got there on their screen it showed my name and ready. I waited an additional twenty minutes to get my pizza. Don’t know if the people working there marked it completed or if it was their system but I haven’t been back in a while.
As someone who worked in fast food in quite a few different places it is very common in my experience that orders are marked complete before they really are.
The stats matter to the heads, so the managers keep up the stats to look good. That is why when you go through a drive through and they ask you to pull up? They are wiping that order so it looks as if it was done faster and bringing it to you when it’s really ready.
It’s a classic thing of stats being focused on to the point that the stat is essentially made useless since it gets cheated.
I haven’t worked FF in roughly 10-15 years though, and this was my experience, so grain of salt and all that.
No salt needed for me. Peverse incentives are the norm in nearly every industry.
Love how on the page for this article taking about how an AI system fucked up so bad there is a 100m lawsuit over it… there are AI ads offering to sumerize the article…
Also, I can’t lie, I feel no fucking sympathy for the massively wealthy elites that own this 100+ franchise company. If they hired their own drivers and payed their employees well I’d be singing a different tune but fuck these capitalist pigs. I hope they sue each other into oblivion.
I’m actually quite surprised because in the UK pizza hut do hire their own drivers. I assumed that they would in the US as well but I guess not.
Why would they do that when they can make an extra $0.03 this quarter? </s>
Lots here still do too.
But I notice that both Pizza Hut and Papa Johns will send orders out to DoorDash when they don’t have enough drivers, or if the orders don’t have good tips / don’t line up with areas the drivers are going to.
I also know you can order Pizza Hut from DoorDash directly instead of via the Pizza Hut website.
Many Pizza Huts do hire their own drivers.
Clown timeline
This is exactly how Skynet started
“We’re a franchise and we want to cheap out on a working system by implementing a new technology which is a sycophant AI full of bugs and problems, which has a high risk of causing us a shit load of money. But then we get angry and sue if it doesn’t work.”
Well, you get what you paid for.
It’s like the early days of the internet. Companies like airlines going online with their ticket system with little to no cyber-security, and then complain when loads of people fly for free by just giving themselves a free ticket or lose loads of money by a simple bug charging people $0.
Maybe wait for a proper and safe working system instead?
Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me.
franchisee Chaac Pizza Northeast accused Pizza Hut of forcing stores to adopt Dragontail, a delivery-management platform that Pizza Hut described as using artificial intelligence to “optimize” food delivery, despite what the suit calls obvious incompatibilities with Chaac’s business model.
I’m all for hating ai bullshit but some people do so to blindly
You don’t know what a franchise is do you?
The franchises are just businesses that are told what to do by Pizza Hut Central HQ who have to be obeyed for the franchises to keep their franchise. So if pizza hut want to implement an AI system then an AI system is implemented, how is that the fault of the franchises?
Pizza hut isn’t a franchise?
It’s literally in the title of the post.
Pizza Hut, LLC is an American multinational pizza restaurant chain and international franchise founded in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, by brothers Dan and Frank Carney. The chain, headquartered in Plano, Texas, operates 19,974 restaurants worldwide as of 2025.
I think you’re confusing “franchise” and “franchisee”.
While it may not work well for everyone, this is my solution: How To Make Pizza Hut’s Pan Pizza At Home | Allrecipes - YouTube
All I care about is the apple pizza, and the cherry pizza.
Apple Pizza what are you mad, wait a minute, isn’t that basically just like a pie? I mean you’re not putting cheese on it are you?
Yes, they were the desserts.
https://yumwithmia.com/pizza-hut-cherry-dessert-pizza-recipe/ https://tastejusthome.com/pizza-hut-apple-dessert-pizza-recipe/
Unfortunately imitations never hit right. Probably on account of baking it rather than using a pizza oven.
Well, thechincally all pizzas are pies.
I was hoping there’s some kind of free exploit thing with the AI to give myself free pizza.
This has gotta happen somewhere eventually as companies integrate their agents deeply into their systems.
To me it sounds like the suit should be against Doordash not Pizza Hut.
Unless the contracts say you gotta deliver orders right away, not much they can do. They didnt have to outsource their delivery, they could have used their own drivers.
Reading the comments here, y’all don’t have insulated bags given by the delivery company over there in the US?!
The actual companies that do delivery, yes. (Dominos drivers, etc) The contracted out ones dont give a single fuck (UberEats, doordash, etc)
Not to worry though! They’ll happily sell you an overpriced one for all that money they aren’t paying you.
Sure, but you can’t trap the heat forever. Eventually, it’s gonna get cold, and even if it doesn’t, people are gonna get annoyed when their orders slow way down.
Doordash ubereats etc don’t. You have to buy your own, and while doordash for example will happily sell their own employees one. They are thin and tiny and extremely ineffective.
Insulated bags may be provided to delivery drivers employed by the pizza restaurants. But doordash drivers need to buy that shit for themselves
There’s an edible tracker in the sauce
