It is a chilly and windy afternoon, but the Tenderloin office of Candlestick Courier Collective feels warm. Co-owner Miel Amial-Dominguez, 25, walks in after finishing a tag — bike messenger slang for an order — unclips their helmet, and puts their bag on the floor. Their music on a speaker is still playing: Pharaoh Sanders is one of their favorite artists while they ride.
Bicycles, delivery bags, and tools are scattered across desks and floors, and dozens of posters for bike races and toy drives, all organized by messengers, hang on the walls. The posters will soon be part of an exhibit on SF bike messenger history, and there’s plenty to tell, including a critical role in activism that has pushed SF to be more bike friendly.
For decades they’ve dodged vehicles and watched waves of technology — fax machines, email, online document signatures — force them to find new markets for their services. For a while, food delivery seemed to be the ticket, but big tech caught up again, and now messengers must somehow coexist with behemoths like UberEats, Doordash, and GrubHub.
When COVID hit, San Francisco slapped a 15 percent cap on delivery fees to help restaurants that suddenly had to survive on takeout business, but city legislators lifted the cap this week thanks to a compromise with delivery companies that sued.
To keep rolling, Candlestick Courier, which has its own food-delivery app, is moving in two directions that at first blush might seem like opposites. First, it’s working to become a worker-owned collective. (The process is underway.) Second, it has a partnership with GrubHub that anchors its business. “There is always a bit of a surprise when we pull up and [customers] are like, ‘Oh, you’re on a bike, you don’t look like what we typically expect from delivery drivers,” says Amial-Dominguez.
The Frisc sat down with Amial-Dominguez to ask about the daunting competition, the state of city streets, and the future of bicycle messengers in San Francisco.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Does Candlestick Courier have a specialty?
I think a lot of our most long-standing clients have been local restaurants. It is a difficult area to claim as a people-powered bicycle courier company, just because the field is so young, the market is so saturated, and we have multinational companies willing to spend in a month probably what we make in the whole year just to make it more convenient for their customers to stick within their ecosystems.
How do you compete with them?
It is really difficult, but I think a lot of it comes down to personal relationships. Whether it is working with the restaurant workers and owners and building up rapport, or the personal connection we make with our customers. We have an agreement with GrubHub to handle certain orders that come in through them. There is always a bit of a surprise [to customers] when we pull up and they are like, ‘Oh, you’re on a bike, you don’t look like what we typically expect from delivery drivers.’ Oftentimes that will be of interest to people, so I think that is how we are able to maintain those relationships.
How much of your business comes through GrubHub?
A majority of our on-demand orders, those that come in while couriers are working, come through GrubHub, as opposed to people calling us or ordering through our app. As of right now, unfortunately, a good 85 to 90 percent of our business is through this negotiated contract with GrubHub.
I am grateful that we have the opportunity to get these orders, because we don’t necessarily have the capital to make sure our platforms are running smoothly all the time. It is going to be very makeshift make-do. I really can’t understate how scrappy Candlestick has to be to maintain our clients.
Couriers have an interesting relationship to death. It is definitely something I know could happen, and it could be no fault of my own. It could be just because I’m off my game a little bit.
Miel Amial-Dominguez
Any plans to strike similar deals with other companies?
At the moment, I am not sure the opportunity has presented itself.
Despite the Vision Zero program, last year SF had the most traffic deaths in the last decade. Are you scared out there?
Couriers have an interesting relationship to death, for it is a job that brings us very close more often than we would like to admit. While bike messengers tend to be almost adrenaline junkies, there is always the concern not simply that we will get hurt, but that the precarity of our employment will not provide for us if we need health care.
I would not say that I am afraid of dying on the street, but it is definitely something I know could happen, and it could be no fault of my own. It could be just because I’m off my game a little bit. I trust that if something bad were to happen to me, the community as a whole would react and mourn.
Is San Francisco doing enough to keep the streets safe?
While San Francisco is a bikeable city, one just needs to ride down Valencia when it is slightly busy to know that a bike lane is not the best protection that can be afforded. I think San Francisco, like most major cities in the U.S., have options available to begin lessening the dependency on cars and breaking the chokehold our infrastructure has on catering to drivers.
How do you see the next five years?
It is going to be tough. People will want to continue the culture, continue the traditions, but I think what we are seeing on a broad level is the international capitalist system trying very desperately to normalize precarity, normalize cutting benefits, and the devaluation of labor of delivery workers.
That’s going to continue to be an assault on the ability for messenger work to be viable. My pie in the sky dream is that we become a local delivery option, which through our genuine connections with smaller businesses is able to compete with large international delivery companies. Diversify what we deliver — one example of this is creating a delivery network for smaller, locally owned bookstores throughout San Francisco.
Where does the strength come from to keep evolving?
There is such joy and freedom, and the kind of people who become messengers are not going to give that up easily. Dedication is something that you will find in so many different subcultures around biking, almost like an addiction. I would not underestimate the power of having a fulfilling job, there is joy and pleasure that is really difficult to divest people from, especially in an alienating society. There are already so many sacrifices built in. Securing health insurance, any kind of benefits, is a pain in the ass, but I am still committed to this as much as I can because I do not want to go through the alienating process of a nine to five.
When did you become a cooperative?
We are in the process. We have been a sole proprietorship since 2017, the year Candlestick was founded, but a steering committee of eight of us are working to cooperaterize. I am one of the people on that committee. It is a difficult transition [and] involves a lot of finances, transfers of assets, and business plans. We have to make sure we can begin paying people as W-2 employees, providing benefits, and that employment taxes are paid.
There are aspects that give us a competitive edge, such as that ability to maintain and build authentic relationships with other small businesses.
The 15 percent cap on delivery fees is lifting. How will this affect Candlestick?
Maybe [with] less restrictions these apps may show their greed a little more, and that will push customers away from using these apps. The general interpretation is that customers are going to leave these apps because now companies can raise the prices on the delivery fee. Hopefully we are in the position to welcome them.
