Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
251–260 of 290 posts
Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half of the examples given can easily apply to food delivery, namely pollution and human rights abuses.
Which human right is being abused here? People download the driver apps and work for them of their own free choice. As for pollution, if that's immoral, then so is going to the restaurant to eat itself as well as driving in general.
> Which human right is being abused here? People download the driver apps and work for them of their own free choice.
Not counting of course the fact that in certain regions of the world, if they don't do that they'll starve to death.
Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
But aren't there like 2 dozen competing apps trying to do this? Shouldn't that drive prices down? Or is actually legitimately expensive to provide this service? We've been told that evil VCs subsidize service to run at below cost to drive competitors out of business. Uber is often accused of this. Why aren't we seeing that phenomenon here? And Uber is literally one of the competitors.
I would not be surprised if the US market had some level of collusion going on. It just doesn't make sense to me that they aren't currently competing on price. There are some other possible reasons tho, like food actually not being as "commodity"-like as we think it is (like rides are)
That would surprise me. It's unlikely a dozen apps would be able to coordinate like that. The thing about cartels is the first defector can cut prices and capture marketshare, which is what we're supposed to believe evil VC funded cutthroat startups are inclined to do. Raising prices to increase profit but reduce revenue growth is the exact opposite of that.
The other hypothesis is that delivery is simply expensive. The driver has to drive to the pickup place, find parking, stand in line potentially for awhile, drive to the delivery, park again, walk to the delivery location to drop off the item. Most of those things an ordinary uber fare would not have to deal with.
Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keyword "don't like". Moral judgement also.
No, that's ridiculous. Saying you don't like assigning moral judgements to companies is essentially saying you think they should be looked at as neutral. If someone says they don't like cauliflower, that isn't a moral judgment. You are not understanding what is being said or what it implies.
You fail to see the distinction but on a meta level they are the same thing. Labeling something as a "moral thing" and saying you don't like is a judgment. Value? Moral? Esthetic. . We are semantic hair splitting here.
Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not be surprised if the US market had some level of collusion going on. It just doesn't make sense to me that they aren't currently competing on price. There are some other possible reasons tho, like food actually not being as "commodity"-like as we think it is (like rides are)
That would surprise me. It's unlikely a dozen apps would be able to coordinate like that. The thing about cartels is the first defector can cut prices and capture marketshare, which is what we're supposed to believe evil VC funded cutthroat startups are inclined to do. Raising prices to increase profit but reduce revenue growth is the exact opposite of that. The other hypothesis is that delivery is simply expensive.…
Or, this is more like TicketMaster and less like a free market.
Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theres a nice friction removal for the customer. One account, only typing your credit card number in once, a consistent place to make a complaint or get a refund. Visa, Amazon, Apple, Google, or Paypal sort of provide that function, but being able to shop many restaurants with a single identity has its benefits. Something that wouldnt be fixed just by restaurants with nice websites.
One nice theory I've seen floated - which I believe has happened in some places - is for several local restaurants to split the cost of building & running a combined web store and/or app. If word gets around enough that this is a faster or cheaper overall experience, people will migrate. The only catch there is if the stores want to also continue taking GH/DD/UE orders, in which case the menus and branding might have…
It would be insane for restaurants to build their own platforms.
It would be crazy smart for someone to standardize an interface (e.g. REST API), let restaurants implement glue to their systems, and then allow a plurality of delivery services to consume and order through the standard interface.
Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
#257Apps 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…
>> If restaurants put any effort at all into fixing those things, there would not be such a strong demand for apps. In such a world, Some model of Ghost kitchens will thrive anyway, not small restaurants. Why ? The area a kitchen serves will become much larger - distance matters less when you don't need to go pick the food. And even when food freshness matters, there are some solutions like parcooking and finishing t…
This sounds like a future that ends in the Amazon of food... bland, lowest-priced facsimiles of actual product.
Which only seems compelling in a future in which people are literally unable to cook for themselves.
Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
#258They pose it like a moral question that is wrong.
Restaurants left with ugly payments to 'delivery apps' sounds bad, but most of the reason is delivery is expensive!
The bulk of the cost here is not some magical money-making software, it's the time, effort, gas, wear and tear, energy of someone delivering.
Most delivery app companies are losing money anyhow.
A better approach might be to strongly deregulate delivery and taxi services. Let anyone do it, have some industry-standard practices (i.e. you have to register, certain vehicles for certain things, some minimum pricing laws etc.) and then let's see how that works.
Restaurants can literally order a regular taxi for food delivery and such general taxis could be used for a lot of things.
Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
One nice theory I've seen floated - which I believe has happened in some places - is for several local restaurants to split the cost of building & running a combined web store and/or app. If word gets around enough that this is a faster or cheaper overall experience, people will migrate. The only catch there is if the stores want to also continue taking GH/DD/UE orders, in which case the menus and branding might have…
It would be insane for restaurants to build their own platforms. It would be crazy smart for someone to standardize an interface (e.g. REST API), let restaurants implement glue to their systems, and then allow a plurality of delivery services to consume and order through the standard interface.
The POS systems need this natively. So an order from any system is ingested the same as any other ticket typed by an employee on prem.
It needs to be a protocol like email or http, not another company with a proprietary aggregator.
Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's ridiculous. Saying you don't like assigning moral judgements to companies is essentially saying you think they should be looked at as neutral. If someone says they don't like cauliflower, that isn't a moral judgment. You are not understanding what is being said or what it implies.
You fail to see the distinction but on a meta level they are the same thing. Labeling something as a "moral thing" and saying you don't like is a judgment. Value? Moral? Esthetic. . We are semantic hair splitting here.
You are just reasserting the same thing without backing it up in any way. Saying something shouldn't carry any moral weight is not a moral judgement because who would it be judging?
Correcting someone about is not casting a moral judgement. Saying a piece of a system meant to create and capture some value doesn't need to be ascribed good or evil is a statement that can be taken at face value. Trying to say everything is a moral judgement that someone else is creating a false dichotomy is just projection.