DoorDash turns couriers' shelf photos into a paid data product days after settling $131.5M over their hours

Rosendo Tacam says he gave DoorDash everything he had, and was deactivated without pay for his final week. His complaint helped trigger the city investigation that closed on 22 September 2026 with a $131.5 million settlement↗, the largest worker settlement in New York City history ⁵. Getting there meant counting what DoorDash had not: 152 million payment transactions and 110 million working hours ².

The hours the app would not count

City law guarantees app-based couriers $22.13 an hour before tips, and investigators found DoorDash leaving categories of trip time and on-call time, the logged-in waiting hours, out of its pay base ². More than $83 million of the deal resolves the on-call dispute alone↗ ³. The median check comes to about $48 ⁴; the average missed payment was $7.70, and 65% of the 264,000 affected couriers were shorted a dollar or less ⁵. DoorDash's own verdict: "Simply put, we screwed up" ⁴.

The next day, the counting became a product

On 23 September 2026, co-founder Andy Fang told the Groceryshop conference that grocery baskets built with Ask DoorDash, the AI assistant launched in June, run 50% larger than non-AI orders↗, check out five times faster and carry 60% more unique products ⁶. The same day, DoorDash opened Brand Center to all US advertisers ⁸: a paid platform selling the inventory and substitution intelligence↗ the company says is drawn from more than a million in-store shelf signals a day, captured on average by Dashers photographing shelves, plus direct catalog control ⁷. Fang supplied the operating rule himself: "AI is only as good as the data that's being fed into it" ⁶.

DoorDash calls them mistakes; the city calls them deliberate

The company blames technical bugs, multi-stop routes and wrong banking details, says fewer than 1% of New York payments were affected, counts $6.6 million that never arrived and $5.7 million that landed late, and puts average earnings near $30 an active hour ³. The city's settlement page↗ calls the underpayment deliberate; the case closed without a hearing ¹. "For too long DoorDash has treated workers as disposable," said Ligia Guallpa of the Workers Justice Project ⁴. The full amount was set aside in earlier quarters ².

Two pipelines, one workforce

For three years DoorDash must file detailed pay data monthly, and the settlement funds rival software from the Workers Justice Project and Princeton's Workers' Algorithm Observatory that lets couriers send regulators their own trip records ¹⁴. Notices reach workers in late October 2026, a second payment round lands in early 2027, and work done between 29 June and 29 November is still being tallied at a 13.79% penalty premium ¹. New York had to sue to make the couriers' hours count. Their shelf photos never needed a lawsuit.