Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by tcbawo » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

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…

I'm amazed that Chipotle hasn't packaged it's online ordering app and licensed it to other restaurants. I've never used such a streamlined, polished, and convenient way to make an order for pickup or delivery.

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

#32

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

remote_phone wrote: post #17

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).

Is three-sided in reference to the delivery couriers as a group, or the aggregator food delivery app? Clearly, the remaining two parties would be the restaurant and the hungry customer.

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

#33

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

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?

[deleted]

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

#34

Post by saadalem » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

remote_phone wrote: post #17

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).

I'm not even working on a company xD

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

#35

Post by remote_phone » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

People appear to be forgetting how horrible food delivery was pre-UberEats/DoorDash et al. It was horrible and the food was always cold. Once they started doing food delivery it was a game changer. My food arrived hot enough that I had to wait sometimes but almost always pleasantly warm. To me, it’s worth paying the fees, especially since I don’t have to spend time going out, waiting, driving back. When I go for In’n’out these days, it’s almost an hour spent in total. I would rather pay fees and a tip to get someone to bring it to me.

And quite honestly, without food delivery most of these restaurants would be dead anyway so they really should be thankful. There’s no way they could coerce enough customers to drive down, find parking and wait while they expose themselves to COVID just for a meal.

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

#36

Post by haltingproblem » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #15

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.

Grubless et.al can charge as high as 30% for just order and payment processing, delivery through their network is extra.

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

#37

Post by orev » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

Apps are doing well because they are solving a real problem — translating restaurants’ abysmal web sites, PDF menus, and awful online ordering experiences to apps that “just work”. If restaurants put any effort at all into fixing those things, there would not be such a strong demand for apps.

Obviously this is different for different restaurants, and the skill set needed to run a restaurant is vastly different from running an e-commerce site, but just like they need to figure out how to do taxes and read lease agreements, online presence is a necessary thing in 2020.

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

#38

Post by dmix » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

perlpimp wrote: post #2

I thought delivery apps aren't making a profit either.

Foodora was extremely popular here in Toronto, you’d see the bike delivery people all over the place and they signed up tons of restaurants but they just shut down citing the margins simply not making sense for the business.

It didn’t help that a month before shutting down a group of workers unionized in Ontario, and further threw a wrench in a terribly low margin business and now none of them have a job and the entire city is stuck using Uber

Note: Foodora only shut down their Canadian business, not their European one.

Foodora had acquired Hurrier which was our other homegrown food delivery service here in Toronto, which is obviously no longer an option either. They too were struggling with margins, which I know from speaking to people who worked there.

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

#39

Post by MattGaiser » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

aloukissas wrote: post #28

Many restaurants are asking for a flat-fee alternative, similar to the Shopify model for e-commerce. Whoever brings this to market will win the restaurant owners. And then does the consumer loyalty lie with the app or the restaurant? I.e., would I rather order from restaurants on my favorite app or from my favorite restaurant, regardless of the app? Probably the latter, but who knows!

I am very much the former. I generally open the app before I decide what to eat and then choose there.

A comment I made about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23195743

I am definitely in the minority on that, but not in a tiny minority.

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

#40

Post by hobofan » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

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…

For food delivery there is CoopCycle[0] in 10+ cities worldwide. I've been seeing their stickers at quite a few restaurants lately in Berlin, where the local chapter formed after Lieferando consolidated IIRC.

[0]: https://coopcycle.org/en/