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San Francisco Chronicle​

San Francisco's downtown malls are empty. But there's one thing keeping them alive

It's lunch hour in downtown San Francisco. The food court at the troubled San Francisco Centre mall is nearly deserted. Slices of pizza wilt under heat lamps, and some restaurants have their shades rolled down. Outside on Fifth Street, half a dozen men are loading sacks of grease-spattered food onto mopeds and e-bikes, and preparing to haul them across town. They belong to a burgeoning gig work ecosystem that's breathing life into otherwise decrepit downtown shopping malls and their dozens of fast-casual restaurants. 'We couldn't survive without them,' Manuel Ramirez, who operates a burger shop and taqueria in San Francisco Centre, said of DoorDash and Uber Eats. But those apps, in turn, rely on a scrappy workforce of independent contractors who are mostly recent immigrants, gliding through the city on two wheels for what amounts to as little as $8 an hour, including the agonizing waits between orders, by the workers' calculations. Hailing mostly from Nepal, but also Venezuela and Morocco, this small army of couriers awaits their next orders huddled under an alcove outside the former Westfield mall or idled alongside the nearby Metreon shopping center. Clad in puffer jackets and motorcycle helmets they never seem to remove, they seamlessly enter the squall of traffic, dodging Muni buses and muscling cyclists out of bike lanes. They log up to 150 miles a day on their rented, moped-style e-bikes — cheaper than cars, and no driver's license necessary — laden with sushi or burritos in insulated boxes. With the downtown recovery still jagged and office occupancy at a nadir, these delivery orders are a lifeline to restaurant operators like Ramirez. Foot traffic to Izzy and Wooks, his Filipino-inspired burger spot, and Mija Cochinita, his Yucatan-style taqueria, cratered after the departure of Bloomingdale's, the mall's anchor tenant. Now delivery makes up more than a third of his business, though he needs to account for the over 25% fee the platforms charge him. What are fast becoming ghost malls are naturally transforming into something closer to ghost kitchens — centrally located, takeout focused restaurants. At Shake Shack, for instance, bags of burgers and fries piled up at the shop's pickup window during a recent lunch rush, though few, if any customers lined up at the electronic ordering kiosks. And at Chipotle inside the Metreon, online orders now make up about half the sales, said the store's manager, Marvin Ulloa, as he handed off two packages to waiting delivery-app couriers. The value that delivery workers provide comes at personal cost. That's what Manvir Damai was learning as he sat parked outside San Francisco Centre on a Friday afternoon. All around him, other couriers were walking in and out of the mall, gripping crinkly fast food bags and nervously checking their phones. Damai also had his eyes glued to his phone screen, scrutinizing an order for Wetzel's Pretzels. He was already seven minutes late, and in danger of incurring a violation for missing DoorDash's estimated time of arrival. If he accumulates six in a span of 100 deliveries, the company might deactivate his account and pull the plug on his only source of income. 'I'm still figuring out how this works,' Damai said in Hindi, referring to the app that funds his apartment on Geary Street and enables him to send money to a wife and four children in Nepal. In some senses, workers like Damai are the evolutionary descendants of the bike messengers who zipped through SoMa and the Financial District during the first dot-com boom of the 1990s, sweating in cargo shorts as they hauled documents to corporate offices. DoorDash, the largest delivery platform, said 76% of San Francisco deliveries were made on two wheels, which they touted for easing congestion in urban environments. Yet, the rise of food delivery apps has given it new dimensions in a society that expects prompt service. When UC Irvine Law Professor Veena Dubal looks at the moped workforce in San Francisco, she sees exploitation on multiple fronts. 'In what we think of as traditional employment, it would be the job of the company' to provide equipment, safe working conditions and a living wage, Dubal said. She noted that food delivery platforms have bypassed that responsibility by establishing themselves as 'network companies' under California law, meaning they supply the software to facilitate the outsourcing, but don't directly employ the workers. Although voter-approved Proposition 22 guarantees 120% of local minimum wage for every hour that a delivery person spends en route, it does not count the time spent waiting. The San Francisco food delivery market is also particularly competitive. So many people had already created DoorDash delivery accounts in downtown San Francisco and Oakland that, as of late April, some ZIP codes were at capacity. The app promised to send an email notification when space opened for new dashers. (A representative for DoorDash did not provide a figure for its number of Bay Area dashers or its capacity.) A fair number of Bay Area Doordashers treat the platform more as a side hustle, to make extra money or get exercise if they are making deliveries on a bicycle. One casual gig worker who spoke with the Chronicle said he delivers for both DoorDash and UberEats, and concentrates narrowly on grocery orders from Safeway or Target that maximize his earnings. The worker said that since he speaks English, knows how to navigate store aisles to quickly find items and can follow specific directions from customers, he's able to net $30 from a job that takes about 15 minutes — roughly quadruple the amount he would make from delivering fast food. The workers who congregate at San Francisco Centre and Metreon don't have that degree of flexibility. Faced with language barriers, they focus mostly on lower-level fast food orders that are more straightforward, but earn less money. Many, like Damai, treat the gig as a full-time job, routinely clocking 12-hour days to make between $100 and $150. A portion goes toward bike rental, which costs about $330 a month. Slow days are a torment. Instead of zig-zagging along busy roads, a delivery courier might spend hours posted outside the malls, waiting for their phone to buzz. Mehdi Lamari, a recent immigrant from Morocco, was doing just that on a rainy Wednesday. Shaking his head wearily, he flashed the display screen on his phone, with a graph that showed his weekly earnings. On Monday he worked nine hours for $72.28. On Tuesday, he drew $53.29. 'This is not like a real job,' Lamari said. Then there are the brusque or high-maintenance customers, who might snatch food through a door jamb, wander away from a pickup spot or forget to leave the pin number for their apartment buildings. Damai recalled times when someone became incensed that an order was wrong, and dispatched him to fix it. He felt like he couldn't say no. 'I'll drive two or three miles to deliver something worth $5,' he said, convinced that if he rejects any job the app will penalize him. One person who has keenly observed the lives and struggles of delivery-app couriers is Peter Chu, who did gig work for DoorDash as a community college student in Woodland (Yolo County). He realized he could make more profit on a different side of the business. A couple of years ago, Chu and a friend, Benda Zhu, in Davis launched a rental business specializing in electric bikes with cargo racks for food delivery. They expanded HMP bikes to a warehouse in South of Market a few months ago. Located a few blocks from the Metreon and Westfield, it's an anchor point for the growing labor force. Many couriers rent from HMP, at rates ranging from $79 a week to $1,000 for a three-month lease. They also come to the warehouse to fix punctured tires or make other repairs. To reach their largely Nepalese clientele, HMP hired an assistant, Mike Sherpa, who speaks multiple Himalayan languages. When e-bikes are stolen — as they are frequently in downtown San Francisco — Chu might offer the rider a temporary replacement, though if the bike isn't recovered in a week, the renter is responsible for 50% of the loss. This catch, really an outsourcing of risk, strikes Dubal, the law professor, as unsettling. She compares HMP to other businesses that lease cars to ride-hail drivers, entrenching a system of frenetic, underpaid work. 'They are profiting off the desperation of immigrants,' she said of HMP — though Chu instead likened HMP to a business during a gold rush selling shovels. Nonetheless, Dubal went on, 'I don't think they are the primary or only exploiter here. All fingers point towards DoorDash.' Representatives of DoorDash pushed back, insisting that Dashers 'earn what they want, on their own terms' and citing the wage provision in Prop 22. 'Calling that exploitation isn't just wrong, but it's out of touch and offensive,' company spokesperson Julian Crowley said in a statement. A spokesperson for Uber Eats said he could not comment without verifying that the workers 'actually use the Uber Eats platform.' Some delivery workers who spoke to the Chronicle conceded they like the go-it-alone aspect of being an independent contractor. All the same, they were quick to acknowledge the downsides. Work is unpredictable, compensation can swing wildly and the job comes with few protections. Theft is a perennial fear for Damai, who knows that if he leaves his bike unattended with food on it, for as little as two minutes, he'll return to find everything gone. At night he locks it up outside his apartment on Geary Street, hoping for the best. After all, the machine generates his income. It pays the rent, provides a little to send back home and helps Damai live on the margins of a city he can't afford, even as he helps drive its economic recovery.