151–160 of 290 posts
Our city has some local restaurant driven “drop points” for getting lots of restaurant prepared meals at a margin better for restaurants. Please see if your city has something similar as an alternative to grubhub, etc
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But that constricts the supply because if you want to make a short term investment (the length of the pandemic) to increase the supply of home toilet paper, you can't as that investment can't generate a return. Most production is based on demand being there for 5+ years the current prices. If home toilet paper demand will only be high for 2 years you can't make money. You also want prices to increase to discourage ho…
The short term is too short: the investment won't pay back. Almost all profiteering reduces supply by causing hoarding and waste rather than use. Plus the dead weight loss of people killed by lack of PPE.
> 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…
Focusing solely on consumers ignores negative externalities. There are many situations in which cost benefits from such externalities (slavery, pollution, human rights abuses, animal mistreatment) can lead to a favorable marketplace position vs competitors who do not exploit such externalities.
What is more, many of these exploits (slavery, pollution, human rights abuses, animal mistreatment) were or are legal at the time such exploitation occurred. Therefore using legality as sole criterion of propriety is insufficient. A moralistic/ethical take on business is, far from a negative thing, highly necessary.
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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.)
You misunderstand the difference between profiting and profiteering. Nobody is claiming companies should sell toilet paper at cost, but they are saying toilet paper shouldn't get 5x more expensive.
Further, just as the US abandoned domestically made masks after the H1N1 epidemic, and went back to inexpensive overseas versions -- they may do it again with PPE. So you also need to cover the costs for quite-possibly a factory you are building that might stop operating in a year or two.
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> (no one can justify extra manufacturing etc. In cases where the free market isn't incentivized to make the supplies we need, it's the job of the government to take over and make them. "Profiting from catastrophe" as you put it will result in price gouging.
> it's the job of the government to take over and make them And how that usually works is that the government offers to pay a very high price to someone willing to doing so. This isn't all that different as the government then pays 5x for the item.
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Grubless et.al can charge as high as 30% for just order and payment processing, delivery through their network is extra.
I believe that includes marketing as well though?
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You misunderstand the difference between profiting and profiteering. Nobody is claiming companies should sell toilet paper at cost, but they are saying toilet paper shouldn't get 5x more expensive.
IMO some price increase is a good idea to discourage hoarding, promote investment, and promote alternatives like a bidet. But, I think you achieve most of that with simply doubling prices, after that it’s generally more harm than good.
How can one make such a vast claim without knowing things such as cost of input materials, machinery, labor, etc?
> 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…
> 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.
It's not that simple. First we need to know why they don't turn in a profit. Potential reasons include: - Because they pay to the people delivering (I don't think so). - Because keeping the app running is to expensive, i.e. server costs (I don't think so to). - Because they payed a lot upfront to create the app and are still paying it of (Maybe, still unlikely, this would have been their own mistake and go away after…
It costs money to run the services and someone has to pay for that. It's in these services' interest (as well as all stakeholders: couriers, consumers, and restaurants) to keep those costs as low as possible.
Perhaps the entirety of the cost should be shifted to the end user. Legally mandating caps on commissions would force that shift to happen to some degree. I'm not opposed to such a shift.
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 r…