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Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

latimes.com

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Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#11

Post by ericzawo »

haltingproblem wrote: post #6

They thrive because people are lazy - both restaurant and their customers. Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. The delivery apps have hundr…

Restaurants are a lot of things. But lazy is not one of them. Have you ever worked at a restaurant?

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#13

Post by dvtrn »

ericzawo wrote: post #11
haltingproblem wrote: post #6

They thrive because people are lazy - both restaurant and their customers. Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. The delivery apps have hundr…

Restaurants are a lot of things. But lazy is not one of them. Have you ever worked at a restaurant?

I’ve been an AGM and worked the industry six years plus four years adjacent in catering before finishing college and moving into SWE.

Yes an awful lot of them are lazy. I mention him only to mention the scary accuracy of it, but the late Anthony Bourdain has a chapter dedicated to crappy restauranteurs in nearly every book he’s written on the topic of food service as a career (of course his distaste for crappy restaurant owners is poignantly dotted through the entirety of “Kitchen Confidential” to be fair), and I often wonder to this day to hear his voice on the state of affairs in food service during a pandemic, and the micro economy that’s sprung up in food delivery.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#14

Post by enitihas »

ericzawo wrote: post #11
haltingproblem wrote: post #6

They thrive because people are lazy - both restaurant and their customers. Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. The delivery apps have hundr…

Restaurants are a lot of things. But lazy is not one of them. Have you ever worked at a restaurant?

Restaurants might not be lazy in their core business functions, but that doesn't make them non lazy on other matters.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#15

Post by MattGaiser »

haltingproblem wrote: post #6

They thrive because people are lazy - both restaurant and their customers. Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. The delivery apps have hundr…

> payment processing (3%) + 2-3% overhead.

Is that anywhere near enough to actually pay for a delivery? I have both the Dasher app and the DoorDash app. That delivery I pay $2.99 for leads to the Dasher often being offered $13 on a $30 order with a $4 tip.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#16

Post by ganstyles »

As part of trying to provide benefits one would normally get in the office, we provide unlimited Doordash for lunch/dinner. I would prefer to order from places directly, but the choice is either free for me but I order through DD, or pay out of my pocket and order directly. This isn't common I don't think, and we won't have DD anymore after we all go back to the office, but it's a data point.

The accounting is significantly easier apparently when the company just gets a monthly Doordash bill rather than having to deal with individual receipts on concur or something.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#17

Post by remote_phone »

saadalem wrote: post #9

Food delivery is a complex, three-sided marketplace problem area. Balancing the needs of all stakeholders, especially during a time of consistent innovation is challenging.

Found the UberEats employee. I’ve only ever heard UberEats employees call it a 3P/2P marketplace (I have good friends that work at Uber as well).

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#18

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

haltingproblem wrote: post #6

They thrive because people are lazy - both restaurant and their customers. Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. The delivery apps have hundr…

The home-grown app in Tulsa will never have the capital for marketing and sales reps that allow it to capture a healthy market share of restaurants.

And if they do somehow make it, once they become the market leader, they're going to start asking for a larger portion of the pie. That's how business works, be it in Tulsa or SV.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#19

Post by haltingproblem »

ericzawo wrote: post #11
haltingproblem wrote: post #6

They thrive because people are lazy - both restaurant and their customers. Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. The delivery apps have hundr…

Restaurants are a lot of things. But lazy is not one of them. Have you ever worked at a restaurant?

You are right, lazy is the wrong word, irrational perhaps?

I have worked in commercial kitchens and have plenty of friends who run restaurants and have spend time in their operations. They regularly complain about the 30%+ they fork over to grubless. 30% is an insane fraction in a business that barely makes an accounting profit!

In established restaurants, a significant fraction of the orders come from repeat customers. Moving these repeat customers to a 5% friction channel from a 30% channel can be a game changer.

Now when I walk past restaurants, I see banners imploring folks to order from their website. I guess, one silver lining from this pandemic.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#20

Post by kevindong »

> While neither Uber nor Grubhub turns a profit delivering food, they are nonetheless venture-backed and raking in mountains of cash

The author acknowledges that the delivery services are losing money. And yet, the author is essentially saying that the apps should lose even more money because someone else is willing to fund the apps.

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