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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?

#61

Post by krapp »

remote_phone wrote: post #35

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…

>People appear to be forgetting how horrible food delivery was pre-UberEats/DoorDash et al. It was horrible and the food was always cold.

No one's forgotten anything, that's just simply not true. I've never used UberEats or DoorDash, and I've had food delivered plenty of times over the years, and never had a problem.

I assume this is the same sort of propaganda Uber fans use when they claim taxi service was universally terrible and corrupt before they came along and disrupted everything. No, for the most part both taxis and restaurant delivery worked perfectly well for most people, most of the time.

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

#62

Post by Kapura »

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 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.

Ridiculous. This is an assertion made by somebody who has never tried to convince anybody of anything, by somebody who doesn't know the meaning of the word "discoverability," who has no concept of what market dominance means.

Without government intervention, you can't "new business model" your way out of this. Especially not in the middle of a pandemic that is being historically mishandled.

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

#63

Post by jqcoffey »

MattGaiser wrote: post #49
jqcoffey wrote: post #29

The question I keep asking myself is, if Domino’s can be their own delivery system and now most restaurants are 100% delivery why can’t they do the same thing? I was, a long time ago, a delivery driver for Little Caesar’s and it seemed to work out for everyone without any technology to speak of. EDIT: I am aware of the three party optimization problem for food delivery services. In housing seems to simplify that prob…

1. Location. Dominos has been within 10 minutes of everywhere I have ever lived or vacationed. My last order of Chinese food came from the other side of the city. 2. Tips. Most people do not tip the app drivers. I suspect more people tip the pizza driver as he sees that you stiffed him. Customers are no longer paying for the delivery.

> Location. Dominos has been within 10 minutes of everywhere I have ever lived or vacationed. My last order of Chinese food came from the other side of the city.

Sure, but that doesn’t preclude that Chinese restaurant from having their own delivery function. Each Domino’s restaurant needs to be self sufficient as well. Googling “Chinese food near me” seems to provide the look up.

> Customers are no longer paying for the delivery.

Have you seen the charges from an Uber eats delivery? We stopped using food delivery services entirely and just pick up now to save the ~$20 overhead on dinner.

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

#64

Post by torstenvl »

krapp wrote: post #61
remote_phone wrote: post #35

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…

>People appear to be forgetting how horrible food delivery was pre-UberEats/DoorDash et al. It was horrible and the food was always cold. No one's forgotten anything, that's just simply not true. I've never used UberEats or DoorDash, and I've had food delivered plenty of times over the years, and never had a problem. I assume this is the same sort of propaganda Uber fans use when they claim taxi service was universal…

Taxi service was absolutely terrible before Uber. You couldn't order a taxi from an app, there were never enough of them, you couldn't figure out what the price was before ordering so there was no direct competition, many localities had an anticompetitive licensing scheme on top of that, and a not insignificant number of drivers would take you the long way during off-peak hours IOT inflate the price.

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

#65

Post by dathinab »

Just a random idea:

Maybe some people could setup a non-profit platform to connect delivery driver and restaurants and is focused on transparency?

Operating such a platform shouldn't be to expensive. The major cost (I guess) lies in advertisement and paying people to actually do the delivery.

I believe customer being able to see how much of the price goes to the platform, the delivery driver and the restaurant (maybe required by a law?) would not just open up the eye for unfair practices but also for understanding why prices are higher when delivering (as it becomes clear that 3 parties instead of one need to live from the money).

Given how many complains against delivery services cropped up in the recent half year on hacker news it maybe might be time for (small&mid-sized) restaurants to organize?

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

#66

Post by JCharante »

haltingproblem wrote: post #50
JCharante wrote: post #41

The industry in the US is ridiculous. In a different country my friends run a newish (7 months?) cafe where they aren't on any apps. Instead you can send them a facebook message or call, and they will dispatch a shipper to you. They will then send one of their baristas who aren't busy, or if necessary they've built up a list of delivery drivers who like to hangout near their restaurant, they "sell" the food to the sh…

Grubless 30% does not include delivery. That is the just the ordering and payment processing.

The 30% doesn't subsidize the shipping at all? How expensive is to to upload a picture of a menu, have someone keep an eye on a cell phone for text messages, and take credit card payments if you want to go cashless. Surely the benefit of having a "verified" payment method doesn't outweigh the shrink that would be caused by having people pay on delivery or run it through Square or something. Setup a shopify or literally anything.

30% might be worth it if the only way people will discover you is if they search "pizza" into an app and you have the highest rating within the first three results, but if people are seeking out your restaurant as returning customers then you shouldn't need to pay 30% for a very expensive ad.

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

#67

Post by vegannet »

Uber Eats isn’t really in the business of delivering food, it’s in the business of discounting the cost of food delivery. If your favourite local restaurant raised investment to be able to reduce their prices to below cost they would have a queue of people at the door... but would they be thriving? The moment Uber Eats can’t afford to continue to subsidise the cost of their food delivery model they won’t be “thriving” any more and local players will fill the vacuum.

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

#68

Post by swiley »

mhh__ wrote: post #54

> why should I'm not a huge fan of moralistic takes on business. If you're selling something dangerous then that's wrong, but it's very easy to be blinkered from a high position. If people want to buy food in a certain way I can't really blame them - arguably the same with Uber and taxis, Uber has disrupted an industry which was fairly uncompetitive and politically charged (Their prevalence indicates the customers ap…

Yeah I feel like the “people shouldn’t profit from catastrophe” thing is a big part of why it’s still hard to get PPE (no one can justify extra manufacturing etc.)

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

#69

Post by quotemstr »

Because that's what the market says is important --- and the market is just the average of the true preferences we individually reveal through our spending choices. The market isn't just some abstraction: it's the will of all of us combined. And who is the author of this article to override this will?

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

#70

Post by dathinab »

dathinab wrote: post #65

Just a random idea: Maybe some people could setup a non-profit platform to connect delivery driver and restaurants and is focused on transparency? Operating such a platform shouldn't be to expensive. The major cost (I guess) lies in advertisement and paying people to actually do the delivery. I believe customer being able to see how much of the price goes to the platform, the delivery driver and the restaurant (maybe…

PS: Just for clarification I mean the major operating costs. There is a higher upfront cost in properly bootstrapping this platform.
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