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Move over, quiet luxury. When DoorDash, the delivery giant and Wall Street darling, reports earnings, it offers a telling glimpse into the state of “affordable luxury,” the technically unnecessary spending that indicates a robust economy.
Right now, spending looks solid-ish. In its Q4 2023 report, DoorDash said total order value on its app climbed 22% to $17.6 billion. That’s because more orders were coming in: Total orders on the app jumped 23% to 574 million. Order frequency, the amount of times people ordered on its app, jumped to an all-time high of more than 37 million.
On the back of those solid stats, revenue jumped to $2.3 billion, marking a 27% year over year increase and beating Wall Street expectations.
Not everything was sunny on the delivery front, though. DoorDash’s net losses didn’t narrow as much as Wall Street expected. It lowered its net loss to $156 million, compared to $642 million in the same quarter of 2022. Analysts expected the company to narrow its loss much further, to $61 million.
And labor struggles weighed on the delivery company. Late last year, a New York law required companies to pay delivery workers higher wages, eventually reaching $20 an hour in April 2025. Major players including DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber said the law will unfairly target food delivery services, but an appellate court denied their appeals.
In a call with investors after the earnings report, CFO Ravi Inukonda noted that the company was “absorbing some of the regulatory costs in Q1,” but said he expected those costs would eventually decrease.