Two weeks ago, Tony Illes found a hole in the marketplace. He was working as an Uber Eats delivery person when an ordinance passed last year by the Seattle City Council came into effect in mid-January. The new rule required app companies to pay workers like Illes a minimum wage based on the miles they travel and the minutes they spend on the job. The apps say that this amounts to around $26 an hour, and both Uber Eats and DoorDash responded by adding $5 fees to every order (even when the customer is outside Seattle city limits) while calling for the law to be repealed. According to a recent DoorDash blog post, the ordinance has resulted in an “unprecedented drop in order volume,” a drop that Illes felt personally. He told Geekwire that “demand is dead” and told local TV station KIRO 7, “I didn’t get an order for like six hours and I was done.”
So Illes had an idea: Who needs these apps, anyway? He printed up signs with QR codes directing people to a bare-bones website with his phone number, promising that he would deliver food by bike in Uptown, South Lake Union, Belltown, and a chunk of the downtown core for $5 a pop from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily. All you had to do was order the food and send him the screenshot. He called himself “Tony Delivers.” In a very short amount of time he became a local micro-celebrity — he’s appeared on the Seattle Restaurant Podcast, done an AMA on Reddit, and recorded himself with his QR code taped to his bike helmet asking if any e-bike companies could hook him up with a deal for a better bike. He’s a symbol of resistance against both the rising cost of restaurant food and the all-encompassing, dehumanizing effects of the Silicon Valley–enabled gig economy.
If that sounds a bit grandiose, you haven’t met Illes, who has a cab driver’s gift for seamless, stream-of-consciousness conversation. During an hour-long interview last week with Eater Seattle he said he was in the middle of a 45- or 46-hour fast; sang the virtues of small, village-like communities where everyone knows each other; talked about the “bystander effect,” the phenomenon where people don’t intervene to help others because they think someone else will; and predicted that we were entering a new era he dubbed the “empathy economy.”
Illes says that even before the ordinance and the higher delivery fees, the delivery app model wasn’t working. For one thing, companies like Uber Eats charge restaurants commissions in order to be listed on their apps, cutting into their already thin margins. But Illes also bemoaned the way delivery apps have deprived both customers and delivery people of human interaction — people tap orders into their phones, and the food is sometimes left at the door without even a hello-thank-you wave.
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In Illes’s telling, the business school grads who run companies are “trying to over-index on efficiency.” This means not just pushing delivery people to work as quickly as possible, it means replacing expensive grocery store clerks with self-scanning machines, at every turn trimming the time- and money-consuming personal interactions in favor of frictionless transactions. But customers, Illes says, “didn’t know that they wanted [this interaction] until it’s gone. And now they’re saying, ‘You know what, I kind of do miss the grocery clerk.”
Illes does ask something of his customers that the apps don’t — he requires that they meet him in person in order to get their food. Sometimes he’ll talk to them or take a selfie for his Instagram, but other times it’s just a quick transaction. Illes believes that even just a momentary exchange matters. If you see the person delivering your pizza, you’re bound to feel more connected to that person, more grateful for them. “I don’t know if people know that they need it,” Illes says of this sense of connection. “But I’m going to give that to them.”
“It’s pretty much the antithesis of the ultra-efficient Silicon Valley ethos,” says Gus Glover, a friend of Illes who helped him launch the Tony Delivers business. “It’s food delivery, but on some core level, you want to at least acknowledge the person handing off the food.”
Illes wouldn’t say on the record how much money he’s making as Tony Delivers or how that amount compares to his old Uber Eats gig. (“Everyone is asking how this works financially and I’m thinking about the culture,” he says.) He insists that this project isn’t about maximizing his profits. “I’m not really like a business-orientated person. I’m more like a person’s person,” he says. He plans for Tony Delivers to be part of several connected projects aimed at fostering that sense of connection that we’ve lost. He’s vague on details — “I don’t want to give away the entire idea,” he says — but Tony Delivers is just the tip of an iceberg of plans Illes has.
“He has a million ideas all at once,” Glover says. “And he sometimes struggles to organize his thoughts the right way, but he always has good intentions.”
But Tony Delivers doesn’t need to be anything bigger than it already is, which is one guy on a bike showing up to deliver food, probably smiling, probably asking how you’re doing, a bolt of disarming kindness in a city that even before we all got addicted to screens was known for being standoffish. That seems worth $5.
“I think the most valuable thing that you can do is make someone feel like you really care and understand them,” he says. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
