171–180 of 191 posts
> "the opportunity to build a business that could compete with Big Pizza by uniting tens of thousands of mom-and-pop shops" This summary of Slice's business feels like it ought to be generalizable to other industries. Anyone have other examples of companies trying to do something similar in different verticals? (s/Big Pizza/Big Floral, or something?)
Big Floral does this, for many years already: https://www.ftd.com/
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The download.cnet.com of the pizza world.
I spoke to the my local pizza shop in NYC. He said between grubhub, uberRush, yelp and now slice, they are eating his pizza profit margins. He said he has to deal with 3-4 software / hardware POS products for EACH service. They are sucking him dry. He can't make money BUT needs them to bring the business. Slice takes a 20% "slice" per order / of his business. Flour costs going up, he makes his own mozzerella. UberRus…
That is why I wonder, if these food delivery apps are actually going to be a boon or bane for small mom and pop shops. Sure, they bring in customers but if it comes at the cost of reducing margins it is not good.
Many of the smaller shops might end up going out of business - either because of reducing margins or because they can't find customers later - all their customers might actually expect them to provide service through these apps.
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Which will inevitably lead him to use poorer quality ingredients in order to survive. 3-4 POS is ridiculous for a small business. Why hasn’t this been solved yet?
He said he gets called from india about some app / software that offers a dashboard to connect uberRush, slice, yelp, grubhub guess what? they take a fee on top of the fees from each POS / Software provider he is using. Its a "Layer Cake" fee. Like that movie. Fee on top of fee. Each morning he wakes up to further confusion when what he REALLY wants todo is make damn good pizza. He also said no one comes to eat in hi…
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> Fake cheese, Fake chicken, Fake mushrooms What is fake chicken? Do you want a live, breathing chicken?
The youngest chicken possible, pumped full of saline and water so that when cooked and you cut it with a knife, the cross section looks like playdoh. It has no texture. There is no "grain" to the meat. A chicken breast today (not fed on chemical feed) is £8-£10 each from a decent butcher or a farm. You can get chicken breast from a cheap supermarket 10 for £2.99. These aren't the same thing.
Chicken fed on chemical feed is not "fake" chicken either. I can understand it doesn't live up to your expectations though.
I hate Slice. They basically came in and registered similar domains to existing pizza shops but because they are better at SEO than the mom & pop places, their results out rank the real sites. They even went in and updated unclaimed listings on yelp, google, Foursquare, etc. and put their site. That would be fine if the pizza shops were on board with this. But none of the shops I order from had any clue their orders…
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In the UK? Analog Cheese, Water Pumped Chicken, Ultra Hydrated mushrooms. If I am paying 3 pound for a pizza, I expect it to be shit. If I am paying 10 pound, I expect it to be reasonable.
Cheese you don't like. Chicken you don't like. Mushrooms you don't like. That doesn't make those things "fake."
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This is something i don't get. There's a Papa John near me, on Green Lanes, N4. They charge 18 pounds for a large pizza. On either side of it, there are Turkish restaurants and bakeries where that will buy you an excellent three-course meal with a beer (okay, so the dessert might be the single piece of baklava they throw in at the end). How do they survive?
I think a large pizza is 2-3 meals easily, so per meal cost is 6-9 pounds. It might be worth it in that sense, as compared to the Turkish places.
A few doors down at Harran, you can get a large lamb shish kebab in a box, with rice, salad, bread, chilli sauce, and cacik, for £6.50. And the salad and bread are both really good!
Fun fact, some of the best "italian" pizzeria's in NYC are actually owned and/or run by Albanians. There is a whole generation of Albanians that moved in Italy (after the 90s), learned the trade there and eventually moved in NYC and opened their places. Fun fact number 2: A lot of greek places in NYC are actually operated by albanians. (for the same reasons as above). The main reason is marketing: People in the US kn…
Pizza is pretty universal these days. There was one pizza place near me in college owned by an Indian family; they also sold Indian food. They didn't appreciate it when we tried to order a chicken tikka pizza, though. Another pizza place near where I used to work was run by an Irish guy, who then later sold it to a Chinese guy. Oh, and my favorite pizza place near where I used to live was run by a Dominican guy. I th…
It sounds from the comments that Slice is creating an intermediary where none existed before, by providing a service (acquire g and processing online orders) that's hard for any single restaurant to build at small scale. So when the first few restaurants sign up, it's incremental revenue for them. Over time, though, as every pizza place uses Slice, it's no longer a competitive advantage but expected.
I imagine that, at the early stages, those restaurants that adopt the model win at the expense of laggards. Over time the gains probably accrue to the middle man, with some gains going to consumers (who have a wider range of places to order from) and some losses to the restaurants (who end up competing with the whole extended neighbourhood, and giving margin to Slice for both incremental customers, and customers who would have bought direct before this whole thing started).
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Sounds like a feedback loop. They ought to slowly introduce "Albanian" options to their Italian and Greek menus.
Ask the Cambodian guy who runs a Chinese restaurant how that’s workin out ;)