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.
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.
Fire the executives responsible.
Let they who reap the benefits of success be also reamed by the flames of failure.
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.
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>
Many Pizza Huts do hire their own drivers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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”.
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.
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.
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.
Pizza hut should be a fucking textbook case study on how to run a much-beloved brand into the ground.
Quiznos might be slightly worse- they were in financial trouble so their brilliant solution was let’s fuck over our franchisees. I’ll give you 3 guesses how that worked out, but you’ll only need one.
Yeah, Pizza Hut used to be the gold standard for Pizza. Sometimes we couldn’t afford it and we’d have to get another brand, but we’d pine for the pizza hut we wished we had.
I had friends whose parents would always order a Pizza Hut pizza every single Friday. Never missed a Friday.
It was so fun to go to the restaurant too. It smelled so friggin’ good in there and those pan pizzas we’re just absolutely perfect fresh served to your table. I think they used to put butter on the crust. It was all dark in there and they had those red candles; almost seemed like a sacred place. lol
Now they’re so terrible. All the chain Pizza places have weird cheese that tastes like shit and all the toppings seem like they’re just fake, like you’re eating plastic or something. Gross.
I used to love going to Quiznos. Never see them anymore hah.
Quiznos had amazing quality when they first opened but it dropped when they tried to compete with the subway $5 footlong deal. They should have differentiated themselves as the premium sandwich brand because while subway is pretty good, Quiznos early on was a whole other level. Me and my housemate at the time used to go there and order 2 subs, one for now and one for later (that often worked out to be right after the first one was done, in practice).
There were some locations that stayed open around here for a like a decade after, but it was always disappointing going there. They were still better than subway but only marginally.
I like Firehouse Subs these days. Not quite as good as Quiznos at its peak, but closer to that than Subway (which was always better than Mr Sub).
Me, too. Used to be 4,700 locations, now down to about 150, apparently.
Apparently if you screw the franchisees and make it impossible for them to make any money, they stop being franchisees and close their stores.
Unfortunately, this outcome could not have been predicted ahead of time.
the franchisee bringing the suit operates ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN pizza huts, i don’t give a shit what happens to them
Wtf, pizza hut doesn’t employ their own delivery drivers anymore? Sounds like they are complaining because they outsourced delivery and now they don’t like how the work is getting done.
It’s why I stopped ordering them. DoorDash marks up the price so much on Pizza Hut it’s not remotely competitive.
Exactly. Hire your own drivers if you want it the way you want it. They made a big deal when California minimum wage went up that they were going to fire every driver and use DoorDash. This is the quality you get with that choice
I was a delivery guy for a local pizzeria once upon a time (and that place still has their own drivers, and even their own delivery vehicles, which is practically unheard of)
And I’m not gonna lie, door dash and such was great for a while because it let me get food delivered from restaurants that otherwise didn’t do delivery.
But I’ve stopped using them, for a few reasons including their shitty business practices
But the straw that broke the camels back in each case that made me delete was them fucking up my order.
And that happens, I’m not particularly mad at the store or the driver, I’ve been there
But the way that these delivery apps handle it is, to me, unacceptable.
When I contacted them, their response was to just issue me a refund.
And to me, what should have happened, is I should have immediately had a replacement sent, expedited as much as possible, at no extra cost.
That’s what we always did when I was a delivery guy, and often with a gift certificate as an apology.
And sure, a refund on top of that would be nice, but really the root issue is that I don’t have the food I ordered. If I order it again, I’m going to the back of the delivery queue, and if I happened to order it when I was low on money I may not even be able to reorder it that day because that refund often takes a couple days to clear.
Consider yourself lucky.
I used them exactly one time. The driver brought the wrong food, the name and order weren’t even close.
Doordash refused to send a new driver, best they could offer was a credit for not even half the price. Even escalating customer service just got the credit converted to a refund, again for less than half of the charge. The rep could not explain to me what service I had received to justify keeping most of my money.
🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doordash-pizza-hut-minimum-wage-hikes-california-new-york-city/
Pizza Hut is laying off more than 1,200 delivery drivers in California ahead of the state’s nearly 30% increase in its minimum wage, to $20 an hour from $16. PacPizza, operating as Pizza Hut, and Southern California Pizza Co. — another Pizza Hut franchise, both gave notice of layoffs impacting workers in cities throughout the state, Business Insider reported, citing notices filed with the state.
OMGAWD just that sentence… what is this place bro
They made a big deal when California minimum wage went up that they were going to fire every driver and use DoorDash.
Yeah how fucking stupid. Domino’s isn’t the greatest but still delivers their own pies and get added bonus of points to free pizza.
By the way Doordash always worked like that. Why only time ever use it was the last. Food arrived cold due to drivers picking up multiple different orders sometimes at different businesses. Horrible service.
By the way Doordash always worked like that
It really sucks when that happens, but at least DoorDash and Uber tell you that it’s being delivered to someone else first.
What I really hate, is when they are working 2 different apps, have my food, and then go in the exact opposite direction of my home to do the other apps delivery first, and neither service cares as long as it’s delivered to you by the latest expected time.
This is why I stopped using any delivery apps in pretty quick order. They were way too expensive and places that were 10 - 15 minutes away were taking upwards of 30 minutes to get delivered after pickup and arriving cold.
And the only reason it makes sense to do that at all is because Doordash pays their drivers like shit, so they have to find ways to make more money doing things like batching orders.
Honestly I would assume that when they had their own drivers they would leave woth a few orders at a time, (though I could definitely be wrong).
Hire your own drivers if you want it the way you want it.
Read the article, they can’t… Pizza Hut mandates the use of the new system
The lawsuit argues Pizza Hut breached its franchise agreement by mandating continued use of the software while failing to exercise “reasonable business judgment” or modify the system to accommodate Chaac’s reliance on DoorDash drivers.
To me that sounds like Chaac’s reliance on DoorDash drivers is not the norm.
They mandate the system, not outsourcing to DoorDash. That’s a franchise choice. They could use in house drivers with the system.
leave it to lemmy to downvote an objective fact
Okay, but they’re the ones staking their lives on Pizza Hut’s brand for their franchise instead of just making actually decent pizza under their own name and making an honest buck. I couldn’t care less about them seeing the consequences of their own selfish, greedy decisions.
We ordered dominos from dominos and it was delivered by uber.
Uber are hopeless where I live, so we had a conversation the other night and went to get pizza and picked not to order from them because we don’t want uber to have our food again
The trick is any time a third party delivers pizza you call and bitch to the chain. They have zero way to do anything about the problem but refund you or give you a discount.
Infinite free discounts basically. And the dumb part 99% of the time any complaints are normally entirely legit and reasonable cause of how often they fuck up.
If you want your local pizza place to go back to inhouse delivery you HAVE to do this. Or the cheap ass owner 100% will keep going with the cheap out source solution.
Make it more expensive and a loss to out source. Or nothing will improve.
Well shit, that’s what they get for putting all those stoners out of work smh.
Guess some finally out-pizza’d the Hut
Pizza Hut and Donatos around here both have approximately 5 customers a day. Me and my wife are sure they’re both fonts for money laundering.
I drove for a backwater dominos in rural NC. You could work an entire Saturday night shift (with 1 or 2 other drivers) and only end up taking 5 deliveries.
During day shifts It would be so dead that I would leave the store for hours (while clocked in! lol) to run errands, browse thrift stores or grocery shop. The manager would text me if there was an order.
It’s still open too.
Sounds like a dream job lol
We have some restaurants like that here. Always empty, somehow manage to survive while restaurants all around them close, open as something else and close again etc.
There used to be a place at a local shopping center that was all glass and mirrors and was staffed by very serious young Asian men in sharp suits.
They sold - and only sold - boutique toffee apples.
I knew a guy who went to prison for 8 years for running a drug delivery service out of a pizza franchise. Word got out, he got popular, then arrested. Lol.
In my area that’s Arby’s, tons of commercials, tons of locations, never seen more than a single customer in the drive through at all hours of the day. Every restaurant around them within the same strip will be packed full, drive through line 20 deep, Arbys just sitting there with nothing.
Close … tax write offs. Failing businesses are actually a big business.
Donatos?
They sell pizza. In all seriousness though, I never looked up their past to know how big the chain was. Wikipedia shows a pretty rocky past where they keep trying to expand, but the management is just too shitty. Including being sold to McDonald’s for a couple years.
Every time we try it again it’s always burnt or undercooked or wrong… Like, you had 4 customers today including us, and you fucked it up. No wonder the parking lot is empty.
Apparently they’ve started selling mostly at Red Robin, which I don’t imagine will go over too well either. Want a $30 thin crust with your $25 burger and fries? Why is my business going nowhere? Has to be a laundering scheme somewhere along the line.
I’ve seen them here in the PNW and they’re everywhere in Ohio (Columbus based chain).
And yeah they’re slightly more expensive than I’d like, which is a shame as they’re the closest thing to Cassanos you can get outside Dayton.
It doesn’t seem like AI is actually the problem here, as any new tech system could have given that kind of visibility to the DoorDash drivers and resulted in this problem, but either way, it’s an interesting fail, where a maybe good idea, falls apart because of human behaviour.
What the article fails to mention is that part of this door dashers aren’t paid well enough. Door dashers are paid such shit wages that they felt like they had to game the system like this to make the wages worth it. Why leave as soon as a delivery pops, when I can wait a little longer for a second or third order, which reduces how much I am driving and spending on fuel?
Seems like the software could have been updated to batch orders similar to how the drivers were.
That would address the cold food issue maybe, but it wouldn’t fix the delay in delivery issue as they wait on starting the pizza so they batch better.
I work 1 day a week at Wendys because life is expensive.
25 years ago when I was a teenager, any fast food place had 2 sources of orders. The ones in the drive thru, and the ones in the lobby ordering at the counter. Thats it.
Now, the majority of the orders are doordash/ubereats/ect. Except here’s the thing.
It’s 4:12pm. You’re at home, you order a daves double. Fair enough. It comes onto our screen at 4:12. Your order is probably ready for pickup by 4:14.
At 4:12 your order also went out to the drivers. They choose if they accept or not. I’ve seen completed orders literally sit there for HOURS. And I don’t mean like 2 hours, but really it was 90 minutes…
No. My one day a week shift starts at 3pm. It runs until 1am. I’ve seen orders that have a reciept printed at 11:30am. I’m showing up at 3pm. The order gets picked up at 9pm.
You know thats not even safe to eat at that point. It wasn’t in a refridgerator. It was just on a counter. Sitting out. I’ve seen frostys get picked up that were just a cup of liquid.
One other thing I noticed. When I was 16, front counter basically never stopped. And if it did, it was like 2 minutes.
Drive thru used to always have a line out the parking lot, sometimes into the street backed up.
These days? It’s like maybe 10 customers total in the lobby for my shift. And the drive thru gets a customer or doordash pickup every few minutes. No lines.
And the reason is simple. There’s two reasons.
First reason is that during covid they tried shifting all business over to these pickup services. Well…without direct control of the services, you’re kind of at the mercy of the workforce that can’t get jobs that have a boss. You are not their boss. They are their boss. You’re allowing them to do your work without any oversight on your behalf. So why would Joe the delivery driver, whos 4 hours late picking up this order, give a shit about quality control? Do you even know if he’s washed his hands? Wendys knows that I wash my hands several times a day. Wendys knows that the sandwich maker wears gloves when handling food. Wendys has no way to say if Joe the doordasher masturbated in his car 30 seconds after picking up an order. A LOT of people don’t like that, and instead just stopped ordering fast food.
The second reason business has collapsed, is the portions. Everything is smaller, and they’ve found ways to make it shittier. Reduce quality. Reduce portions. Cut corners any way you can.
Wendys has two patty sizes for their burgers. A JR and a single. The single is bigger. I had a woman in the lobby a few months ago break my heart. She comes up, and politely tries to say we gave her a JR instead of a single. So we got our gloves on, opened it up, and…it was a single.
When we told her that was what a single looked like these days, she was devistated. She asked “Whys it so small? It didn’t used to be so small…”
And she’s right. A single today is 6oz meat patty. A jr is 4oz meat patty. Those are weights before they cook. When I was a teenager, JR was 5oz, and single was either 8 or 10oz. I can’t remember.
This means a single today is almost as small as a JR 25 years ago. They wonder why young people don’t eat at burger shops like the boomers did in the 60s. It’s because young people aren’t interested in eating that crap. Then they wonder why the boomers aren’t interested in eating there anymore either. It’s because they’re old enough to remember the burgers dave thomas sold when he was alive. They look like premium options compared to today. And even if you adjust for inflation, the burgers back then were still 40% cheaper.
So combine the two reasons. And you got a situation where you order food, from a fast food place. You pay $30 on an order that would have been $8 if you picked it up yourself. It gets to you soggy, cold, and bacteria filled 7 hours later. Would you ever order it again?
This is why the entire fast food business is collapsing.
You remember that old saw about getting a job done: “fast, cheap, and good - pick two”. Well fast food used to be cheap, and it used to be fast: I could pull up to Burger King drive-through and drive away with a burger, fries and drink in 5-10 minutes for like $7. It might not have been the best food, but it was tasty enough and filling enough that it was worth it.
A few years ago, I was on a road trip and tried stopping at a McDonald’s. It took me 45 minutes to get through the drive-through lane and I was about ready to scream because the layout didn’t show the backup until there was no way to get out. Last year, I was on another trip and stopped at Burger King. Got a burger, fries and drink, and it was over $20.
If fast food is no longer fast, no longer cheap, and was never very good, why would I opt for it?
Funnily enough McD of all places tries to go quality route, at least where I live. Upped standards, renovated places, improved services and it…works. Their places are occupied. Like it’s still fast, quality wise it’s okay, price wise it’s okay. So they survived xD
She asked “Whys it so small? It didn’t used to be so small…”
I think you mean “where’s the beef?”
Was over at Burger King iirc
And they’re still trying to screw people at every corner. I noticed about a year ago that Wendy’s pretty much stopped giving decent deals via the app, and BK is doing the same. 5 years ago you can get two junior Whoppers and two fries with a coupon for $5.99. it’s 12.99 now.
They also ditched the giant large sized foam cups for the plastic ones, which just so happen to be conveniently smaller. All to give the customer less while claiming to be environmentally friendlier. Of course, the cups get chucked into the same dumpster as the rest of the garbage, as the recycling bin is cardboard only.
Beautiful rundown. For my comparatively worthless 2 cents, pretty much everyone I know has extremely strong negative opinions of doordash for much the same reasons you covered. Another factor I hear is people got hooked on it during covid and got financially burned and grew resentful of it after that
I tried it once at the start of covid. My food finally got to me lukewarm ninety minutes after I ordered it. I’m sure the restaurants and drivers have improved since then, but I just can’t justify paying almost double for my food.
Say you don’t care about cleanliness of the outside bag, you trust the little seal if any on the bag, and… the order is made fresh AND picked up AND delivered INSTANTANEOUSLY!
Magic! …except… $20 for $7 of food?!?!
PS: general public shouldn’t have that driver cleanliness concern, portions are generally extravagant nationwide (fast food too for combo meals … OK anything beyond bog standard combo), assume extremely-delayed food is rare enough it’s NBD—and still we are on the same page (where it counts!)
Simplifying yours then:
You pay $20 for $7 of food, how many more times you gonna do that :D (tech office workers say “MORE!” but, normal people… priced like gold for normals) [low mobility etc. excepted]
I used to work for a (fully remote) company that would give $20 in UberEATS credits if you had a lunchtime meeting. I’d always get like a $10 fried chicken lunch and still pay a couple bucks out of pocket because of all the fees. And the food showed up cold about two hours later.
I seriously don’t understand how anyone thinks it’s a service worth using.
May ask what state you work in? Freaking crazy how is customers waiting HOURS for their food without canceling said order?
In some cases DD will refuse to cancel it, or makes it so complicated that the customer has to go through their bank instead for it. So it could be cases where the customer attempted it and was told to screw off, so therefore they just went through their bank for a chargeback instead.
DD would still attempt delivery on those orders, and then likely try to protest the chargeback as well saying the service was “eventually” rendered as food quality is on the food place and DD is just the transport.
Singles are 6oz and juniors 4? At the one I worked at, it’s 4oz for the singles and just under 2oz for the juniors. Maybe it’s a difference between Canada and the US?
I was wondering about this. I remember ads from before 2000 where a single was 4 oz/quarter pound* *before cooking.
Here’s an ad from 1985 where they specifically say it’s a quarter pound single burger.
Amazing insight, thanks for sharing!
I don’t use DoorDash but occasionally order from Taco Bell. Every time I order I watch the car arrive at Taco Bell and wait about 20 minutes before actually picking up my order and then delivering it.
Additionally I know UberEats used to (and maybe still does) offer cheaper delivery if you pick a restaurant another driver was already heading to. (I haven’t used UberEats in years because I found them less reliable.)
Ironically if a restaurant did all the deliveries themselves they would have all the information about how best to optimize delivery. Maybe all the delivery companies can find a way to share this information to minimize travel and maximize speed of delivery.
Total deceptive clickbait headline tho
Agreed. That’s why I left my comment. I don’t like editorializing the titles from the news sites.
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.
Seems like AI is the problem here. Pizza Hut chose their tool and they get to enjoy the headline.
How does AI impact the door dash driver deciding not to deliver a pizza that’s ready because they can see what future orders are about to be ready?
You could ask Pizza Hut’s corporate lawyers to tell you their employer’s side of the story…
