Glovo: Why it's time to ban home deliveries with its own brand

The powerful company, with its platform, boasts of being an example of sustainability, including through social initiatives. But meanwhile, it is inundated with fines across Europe for continued irregularities.

di |
Glovo bicycle department in Valencia

Glovo is now a brand we all know. A giant digital platform, created in 2015 in Spain by Óscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud and then acquired, in 2022, by the German group Delivery Hero, Capable of delivering a whole range of products to our homes, from restaurant and pizzeria food to medicines, from small packages to tech products, from wine to coffee. Everything delivered to our homes, conveniently, thanks to the feverish and poorly paid work of a global army of riders.

The platform, With orders placed through its website or a simple app, it continues to break world records. Its 2024 turnover is expected to exceed €1 billion, a 50 percent increase over the previous year; the service is active in 70 countries across four continents, potentially covering a population of 2,2 billion.

Also in Italy Glovo, controlled by the local company Foodinho, which according to the bad habits of the web universe and the sector food delivery In fact, they avoid the taxes paid by any honest small or large entrepreneur, offering a hugely successful delivery service, thanks to a slogan: "Everything delivered to your home and in the shortest possible time."

In fact, any product is delivered with the record speed guaranteed by the riders, with the system of quick commerce, Everything arrives at its destination within 30 minutes, a sort of technological evolution of e-commerce, tailored for those in a hurry to eat their pizza or their portion of sushi.

But Glovo also holds other records, less talked about in its marketing campaigns. These include the fines the platform receives throughout Europe, including in Italy. Aside from the often substantial figures (but it remains to be seen whether the fines are actually paid, between one appeal and the next), what is striking are the motivations.

Violations of privacy and data processing relating to RIDER Employees engaged in the service, who are constantly subject to company monitoring through geolocation. Illegal use of biometric data. Workers falsely classified as self-employed, when they are actually employees. Anti-competitive agreements. Delayed payments of social security contributions. Unauthorized postal activity.

The fines, handed out in droves over the past few years, range from €150 to €329 million. They come from various national and European antitrust authorities, and intersect with another truly unique aspect of Glovo's strategy. Faced with this avalanche of complaints, all well-documented, which reveal the face of an e-commerce giant whose corporate policies are, to say the least, questionable, Glovo invented the sustainability mask and applied it to its corporate face. And has announcing Urbi et orbi “the positive impact and sustainability of its action”, with some social and environmental initiative programs, such as the Glovo Impact Fund: a fund, whose endowment should grow in proportion to the increase in turnover, to finance programs such as Glovo Access, with which, according to the company's announcements, millions of free meals are distributed to NGOs and food banks around the world.

The universe of e-commerce and home delivery it's the kingdom of "odd jobs", a generic word that hides exploitation and continuous violations of safety standards and fair wages for workers. In this book find all the stories and data.

The Shattered Myth cover

Let's assume, at this point, that Glovo's free food distribution campaign is genuine and sincere, and that the advertised results are real and not virtual, but to be a truly sustainable company, wouldn't it be easier to comply with the rules and regulations that exist in European countries to protect the transparency of economic activities and the rights of workers and consumers? To be clear, perhaps it would be better if Glovo, instead of raising funds to earn a sustainability label, became a platform that no longer receives fines at rates reminiscent of the most undisciplined drivers on our roads.

And finally: we as consumers, free to make the choices we want, must accept all these contradictions in silence, without reacting, and as the inevitable fruit of the mechanisms that regulate the sector, opaque by definition, of e-commerce and food delivery?

Perhaps we could do something concrete, strong, and useful to encourage Glovo to be truly sustainable: first, when we order a product, we could ask to receive it not through the service of the platform born in Spain and grown across the planet. There shouldn't be any particular problems in this regard: either the supplier changes the delivery service and chooses another operator, or we change the supplier.

A clean and transparent form of protest, unlike some of Glovo's practices, and its recent idea, then duly withdrawn, to give a mini-bonus to riders ready to work at any tropical temperature, risking their lives for a delivery on the model super quick, very fast and sometimes very risky for those who bring the food to be delivered.

Read also:

Want to see a selection of our news?

Don't Waste