They promised frictionless convenience.
What they delivered was a business model built on invisibility.
In the glowing blue light of your smartphone, everything feels smooth. Efficient. Benevolent.
Your food arrives. You tip a euro. You move on.
But offscreen, a darker system has taken root one that exploits labor, undermines democracy, and sells the illusion of progress while accelerating collapse. Wolt, efood, and Delivery Hero don’t just deliver food.
They deliver inequality, wrapped in branding and driven by algorithms.
This is not innovation.
This is colonization in app form.
The Gig Lie
Call it what it is: precarity, rebranded.
Couriers aren’t “independent partners.” They are workers without rights. Out of all people working for platforms, 26.3 million (93%) are currently classified as self-employed, but there are suspicions that around five million of those might be misclassified. Employees without protections. Humans rendered disposable by a business model that sees them not as people but as datapoints.
No health insurance.
No paid sick leave.
No labor protections.
No floor, no ceiling only churn.
This isn’t the future of work.
This is the return of the piecework economy Victorian conditions dressed up in UX.
When Speed Becomes a Weapon
Every incentive in this system is structured to de-risk the platform by transferring all risk to the worker.
You crash your bike? You pay.
You get sick? No income.
You protest? You’re deactivated.
The algorithm doesn’t care if it’s raining, if you’re injured, if you haven’t eaten all day. It optimizes for speed, not survival. And when you are late, you are punished. Not by a human manager, but by a faceless system that auto-throttles your income. It is discipline by design.
In another era, we called this automated exploitation.
Now, we call it the gig economy.
Cities Held Hostage
This isn’t just about labor.
It’s about urban capture.
Our streets are increasingly flooded with underpaid workers trying to outrun the algorithm.
Sidewalks blocked. Accidents rising. Noise, pollution, stress.
Companies like Wolt and Delivery Hero externalize the costs of their logistics infrastructure onto cities without paying for the damage.
They add traffic, increase emissions, and then greenwash their way out with vague promises about sustainability.
It’s not just unfair. It’s parasitic.
Accountability Laundering
Let’s be clear: when your food is cold, late, or never arrives, there is no one to call.
Platforms have built responsibility voids—legal and emotional. They point fingers at couriers or restaurants while hiding behind terms of service and automation.
No one is responsible. No one is reachable.
Just bots, emails, and endless loops.
This is not a glitch. It is the model.
When the Market Becomes a Monolith
In 2025, Delivery Hero and Glovo were fined for forming a cartel—colluding to eliminate competition and control prices.
This is not surprising.
This is what happens when platforms scale without checks.
They squeeze local restaurants with high commissions. They replace community-based ecosystems with vertical monopolies. And they do it all while masquerading as friendly middlemen.
This isn’t market disruption.
It’s corporate colonization—a slow bleed of independence, masked as convenience.
Who Rides for Your Convenience?
Mostly immigrants. Mostly men. Often invisible.
They are the foot soldiers of platform capitalism—living in the shadows of our cities, working without protections, vulnerable to violence, burnout, and silence.
These are not isolated stories.
They are structural outcomes.
This is not the exception.
It is the intention.
And the more we accept it, the more normalized it becomes.
The Illusion of Progress
Wolt, efood, and their peers don’t just sell meals.
They sell a mythology—that technology is neutral, that growth is good, that gig work is freedom.
But what they are really doing is hollowing out the rights our ancestors fought for—making them optional, conditional, replaceable.
This is not about tech.
It is about power.
So What Now?
We cannot fight what we refuse to see.
The first step is naming this model for what it is:
Exploitative. Extractive. Unsustainable.
If we allow the gigification of work to continue unchecked, then the rights we still cling to paid leave, safety nets, dignity—will soon vanish for us too.
What was done to couriers yesterday is being beta-tested for all of us tomorrow.
Resist the normalization. Demand regulation. Protect labor. Reclaim your city.
And remember: every tap on your screen is a vote for the kind of world you want to live in.