Feed the driver

Outside a good many restaurants at this time of year there is a plastic table by the delivery door. Dates on it, water, a tray of rice, sometimes a box of juice. It goes out ten minutes before maghrib and it is for the riders.

The riders are the only people in the city working through that minute. Everybody else is at a table. They are on a bike at the end of a long day with somebody else's dinner in the box behind them.

Then watch the rest of the month at the kitchen that fed them.

They wait there between orders instead of at the corner. When two tickets come up together, one from the place that put the table out and one from the place that did not, the bags do not leave the pass in the order the app assigned them. The bag is carried level. The lid arrives where it started. The rider rings from downstairs rather than handing the food to a guard and marking it delivered.

None of that is in the app, in the contract, or in anybody's plan.

It also has no photograph, no caption and nothing on the office wall, and that is the whole reason it works. Everyone in this market can tell the difference between a company that is generous and a company running a generosity campaign. The telling takes about a second.

The generosity people believe is the kind aimed at someone who is never going to see the advertising. Which is awkward, because it is also the kind that cannot be brought into a meeting as a result.