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Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

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Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#61
post #42
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw someone online saying how they didn't get their ranch with their pizza, so they called up customer service and eventually got a whole new pizza out of the deal. I understand it sucks to not get your ranch, but come on...

I had a few friends in customer support. This happened all the time. If you spend too long going back and forth with a customer, the salary-based calculation of what it costs the company doesn’t make sense. So you give it to them free. But then it’s not like you have any margins that those come out of.

But as your customers learn that wasting support time pays off, the game is surely over!

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#62
post #38

What I find interesting about the food delivery business is that there's clearly a market for this but nobody's happy. - Restaurants (rightly) complain that the drivers provide a poor service. For example, pizza delivered cold because the drivers have no heat bags. I've even heard of a pizza box mounted vertically on a delivery bicycle. - Customers are unhappy because food can be delivered cold through no fault of th…

> Is this really just a case of people not willing to pay what the service truly costs?

I think so. If a driver spends an hour on delivery, they have to make $15 in NYC or ~$8 elsewhere (USA) to be worth their time. For a single person, that can be the price of the whole meal again.

I've run into this when seeing the fees reflected on a final checkout page, and decided to cook for myself instead.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#63
post #31
post #24

Food delivery is a terrible business. M&A won’t make it better. I worked at LivingSocial in 2012/2013. We used to joke that “we lose money on every transaction but make it up in scale.” Takeout and Delivery was one of the last bets the company made. Basically food delivery. The customer service load is huge, the services aren’t really differentiated, and you have to both pay the driver enough for it to be worth it an…

I saw someone online saying how they didn't get their ranch with their pizza, so they called up customer service and eventually got a whole new pizza out of the deal. I understand it sucks to not get your ranch, but come on...

Perhaps because of this Doordash has been aggressively cutting their refund policies. If an item is not delivered you don't get a full refund and often don't even get a refund for the item price + tax on said item.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#64
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will make sense when cities will have a better infrastructure for targeted deliveries. I'm thinking routes for drones and clear delivery spots. Would not be surprised 30y from now most homes won't have kitchen anymore. You'll have an access where a drone can come in an deliver whatever you ordered.

> Would not be surprised 30y from now most homes won't have kitchen anymore. You'll have an access where a drone can come in an deliver whatever you ordered. I suspect you vastly underestimate how cheap and time effective cooking at home can be. My girlfriend and I just mealprepped 8 meals for $30. Took 15min of active work. The whole week we both get a healthy balanced meal that takes 2min to prepare. No delivery co…

Please reveal your secrets!

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#65
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember JUMP? They were acquired for $200M like, a year and a half ago. As far as I can tell, they don't exist anymore.

Jump bikes still exist. Not sure what you're on about.

a few thousand of them exist, Uber had over 30000 destroyed: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dz94x/uber-acquisition-j...

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#66
post #24

Food delivery is a terrible business. M&A won’t make it better. I worked at LivingSocial in 2012/2013. We used to joke that “we lose money on every transaction but make it up in scale.” Takeout and Delivery was one of the last bets the company made. Basically food delivery. The customer service load is huge, the services aren’t really differentiated, and you have to both pay the driver enough for it to be worth it an…

I think a questions that’s going to pop up is, why does delivery work for a company like Dominos’s (vertical integration) but not Postmates (horizontal)?

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#67
post #24

Food delivery is a terrible business. M&A won’t make it better. I worked at LivingSocial in 2012/2013. We used to joke that “we lose money on every transaction but make it up in scale.” Takeout and Delivery was one of the last bets the company made. Basically food delivery. The customer service load is huge, the services aren’t really differentiated, and you have to both pay the driver enough for it to be worth it an…

Imo Netflix is much worst in that regard. At least in this case, you can hope to won a capital attrition war and become the really big player. But for Netflix, it's literally a never ending spring in a hamster wheel. You have users that can almost instantly leave your platform if you don't have interesting content, so you need to perpetually use whatever money subscriptions generate to produce even more content, even more quickly as you get more users with varied tastes. If you slack on content, you get less subscription money.

Considering that a large part of the culture defining movies/franchises/series IP is also not owned by Netflix, they can't really hope to just end up outcompeting everyone else down the line. Think about it: food delivery is pretty generic, you don't really see the difference apart from cost. So if let's say Uber manages to bring down costs, outrun the current big competitors, and use that dominant position to keep prices lower than future newcomers, odds are customers will just keep using Uber.

But in Netflix's case, people will still want disney movies or HBO series. That means there's no real hope for a profitable market dominating position down the line, so they will need to perpetually produce a very expensive product just to pay off the cost of other expensive product. If Netflix starts to lose subscribers, it still has very fixed costs (content acquisition & debt service for already made content) whereas Uber or Doordash have most of their operational costs directly tied to demand. No orders only means loss of revenue, but no additional losses.

Netflix just seems like a very weird and very... risky investment and much more so than the already very shaky business of food delivery. But I always assume the markets see something I don't, so maybe I'm totally wrong!

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#68
post #38

What I find interesting about the food delivery business is that there's clearly a market for this but nobody's happy. - Restaurants (rightly) complain that the drivers provide a poor service. For example, pizza delivered cold because the drivers have no heat bags. I've even heard of a pizza box mounted vertically on a delivery bicycle. - Customers are unhappy because food can be delivered cold through no fault of th…

I foresee a future where the entirety of listings on food delivery apps will be ghost restaurants - those whose menu and processes are optimized for delivery.

Many high street brick-and-mortar restaurants will shut, but those that remain will likely make being "not available on any food delivery app" a unique selling proposition.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#69
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a few friends in customer support. This happened all the time. If you spend too long going back and forth with a customer, the salary-based calculation of what it costs the company doesn’t make sense. So you give it to them free. But then it’s not like you have any margins that those come out of.

But as your customers learn that wasting support time pays off, the game is surely over!

Most people know that they can harass customer support to do ridiculous things, but they don’t act on it. Maybe because they don’t think it’s an honest way to act, or maybe they don’t think it’s worth their time to harass customer support over something like free pizza.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#70
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would not be surprised 30y from now most homes won't have kitchen anymore. You'll have an access where a drone can come in an deliver whatever you ordered. I suspect you vastly underestimate how cheap and time effective cooking at home can be. My girlfriend and I just mealprepped 8 meals for $30. Took 15min of active work. The whole week we both get a healthy balanced meal that takes 2min to prepare. No delivery co…

Please reveal your secrets!

Mostly, I suspect, the secret is volume. At small scales like a single household for a handful of meals, prep time scales sublinearly with number of servings, because of setup/teardown time, and if you have some experience that can extend to not-identical meals made from similar components.
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