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Amazon Restaurants

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Re: Amazon Restaurants

#171

Post by arkitaip »

gthtjtkt wrote: post #19

This is kind of terrifying after hearing so many life-ruining stories about the rash decisions Amazon makes when dealing with 3rd party sellers ([1] from last week, for example). Everyone always says "Don't stake your livelihood on platforms you don't control" (e.g. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but what happens when one of those platforms suddenly forces its way into your business? How can a restaurant owner tur…

Amazon learns fast. I wouldn't be surprised that x years from now, they run their own restaurants with typical french|italian|asian food.

Re: Amazon Restaurants

#172

Post by ncallaway »

Finnucane wrote: post #138
Dan_Nguyen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my house, we make good use of delivery for one major reason: sports. Sometimes theres no dinner ready and in the hecticness of life, we forget to cook the night before so we get into an unfortunate situation of either going hungry until the game ends or cooking and miss the game. Delivery solves this issue. Take out is definitely faster, but that usually means missing part of whatever game is on. My case obviously…

I care about food more than sports. Which is easy, since I don't care about sports.

But, interestingly, there are other people in the world that feel differently than you.

Re: Amazon Restaurants

#173

Post by Pyxl101 »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #162
Pyxl101 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree many companies could do a better job of being accessible. Providing good customer service is challenging, especially at large scale. I am reminded of when Postmates first launched, and they provided a customer service phone number for assistance with orders. Eventually that number was replaced with a message saying "phone support is temporarily unavailable while we migrate to a new system" and asked you to se…

> We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause: https://np.r…

It seems like you are responding as if I'm holding up those situations as examples of how people ought to behave -- as if I'm for or against what happened in them. I'm not. My purpose in pointing out those examples is solely to demonstrate by example that there are multiple sides to a story.

If you look at trends, people to tend to tell their story in a way that's favorable to them, while making their opponent look like a villain. Certainly not everyone tells the truth, because stories told by different people about the same event are incompatible! I find the examples I mentioned so shocking and interesting because they are examples of high-conflict situations where you can (to different extents) see both sides, where you can meaningfully evaluate a theory of what happened.

Re: Amazon Restaurants

#174

Post by maruhan2 »

Finnucane wrote: post #77
guelo wrote: post #50

This is obviously part of Amazon's effort to build out their own delivery network in order to muscle out fedex, ups, usps, etc. If their drivers aren't delivering packages they can be delivering food. That makes their whole delivery network stronger because it allows them to have more drivers employed driving around town all the time. It's the same reason Uber got into food delivery.

Does that mean your food delivery depends on the package delivery schedule? "Sorry your pizza is cold but we had to deliver a TV first." For myself, I usually prefer to just go and pick up myself; that's almost always the fastest option.

I think it'd be more like alerts being sent to all the drivers asking who is available for pickup.

Re: Amazon Restaurants

#175

Post by paulcole »

Finnucane wrote: post #91
dmurray wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Amazon will figure out that hot food needs to be delivered fast and will generally get prioritised over delivering a TV. > For myself, I usually prefer to just go and pick up myself; that's almost always the fastest option. Most people don't care about getting the absolute fastest option, or if they do, they will still compromise for convenience.

I guess I don't have that much faith in Amazon's ability to prioritize the customer over themselves (i.e., prioritize routing for the least amount of driving, regardless of what is being delivered).

>Amazon's ability to prioritize the customer over themselves

Can you give some examples of times when Amazon HASN'T put the desires of the vast majority of customers first?

Re: Amazon Restaurants

#176

Post by ChadMoran »

untog wrote: post #95
ChadMoran wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Software Engineer with Amazon I have only great things to say. EDIT: I've been at Amazon over 5 years.

Of course, you're valuable. A company is much more interesting to assess according to how they treat less valued workers, like warehouse staff. Amazon does not rate highly in that regard.

Lots of my friends work in CS and they love their jobs.

Re: Amazon Restaurants

#177

Post by kmonsen »

sumoboy wrote: post #81
mfonda wrote: post #73

Amazon Restaurants is a great service which has been around for some time now, at least here in Seattle. I use it pretty much exclusively now instead of other similar services I've used in the past. The minimum order is much lower ($20 instead of $30 or $40 a lot of other services add), there's no delivery fees, and your driver is tracked via GPS with guaranteed delivery windows, so you have a much better idea of whe…

Hybrid car + amazon + uber + lyft + no education other than reading a gps map = lifetime job for drivers. Just like broadband, just need to figure out that last mile for these services.

Lifetime might be a bit strong. Quite likely these jobs will not exist in 10 years due to automation.

Re: Amazon Restaurants

#178

Post by dvdhsu »

khazhou wrote: post #110
ryaneager wrote: post #12

I received a free $20 to Amazon Restaurants for buying something on cyber Wednesday, didn't know that was a thing until I received the email. I used it to order pizza from a local joint, because who doesn't like free pizza. Ordering was interesting, they didn't have the pizza I wanted listed under the pre-made options, so I had to make my own, but there was no option to do half and half and adding additional topping…

None of my friends' brother-in-laws are cofounders at Doordash, so I'm less attached :-) But this is a great example of the lack of customer lock-in. Even the slightest improvement over Doordash, and I'd easily switch to Amazon or just bounce between the two. There's a thai restaurant just a bit out of Doordash range -- that would do it. Pictures on the menus -- that would do it. A "re-order" button -- that would do…

Right -- I think this is a problem for many recent startups like Doordash, Postmates, and even Uber. Their pitch to investors that this was a land grab -- whoever conquers the two-sided marketplace first dominates it and extracts profits later on. And so they need mountains of money to build up both sides of the marketplace.

But it turns out that there's no switching cost on either side of the marketplace: you or I happily switch between both depending on which drivers are closer, and an Uber driver can just open their Lyft app if Uber is slowing down. You'd happily switch from Doordash if Caviar had better photos, and a restaurant can delivery via both Doordash and Caviar.

I think Uber might be able to get out of this by saying "growth / users -> investment -> self driving cars", but I'm not sure what Doordash or Postmates plans to do about it.

Re: Amazon Restaurants

#179

Post by voltagex_ »

Androider wrote: post #156

Amazon Prime Now has a $10 minimum, free delivery, and no markup allowed on the restaurant menus in New York. For me, that makes it the best service available hands down, and actually starts to change my behavior as a customer. If it doesn't cost any more than what I'd pay in person schlepping to the restaurant, the psychological barrier to ordering on a whim is virtually eliminated. It also has that Uber-esque imper…

>But members do pay $99/year for Prime, which isn't a whole lot since it does so much

What do you get out of Prime? I don't have it in Australia (although there's rumblings that Amazon might be starting here) and I thought it was just faster delivery and video.

Re: Amazon Restaurants

#180

Post by ziszis »

paulcole wrote: post #175
Finnucane wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I don't have that much faith in Amazon's ability to prioritize the customer over themselves (i.e., prioritize routing for the least amount of driving, regardless of what is being delivered).

>Amazon's ability to prioritize the customer over themselves Can you give some examples of times when Amazon HASN'T put the desires of the vast majority of customers first?

There are many examples. Here is an obvious one - when Amazon stopped selling Apple TVs to punish Apple. Hard to see how this is good for consumers.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/10/01/amazon_blocks...

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