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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

#91

Post by Arubis »

vecinu wrote: post #40
acwan93 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Grubhub most of the time, and I’ve found the thing that keeps me on the platform is 1) The $10 monthly credit on American Express Gold cards and 2) The 2% cash back from the Rakuten portal, which stacks with the 4x points from the Amex card. Of course, a lot of restaurants end up increasing their prices on Grubhub to make up for their fees, and rightly so (I phone in using the number listed on Apple Maps). I st…

> 1) The $10 monthly credit on American Express Gold cards But the annual fee is $250, how is it worth it? At best if you use the $100 airline credit, which is now hard to "hack", and max out $10/mo on Grubhub, you're still paying $30 for the privilege...

Amex has customer service at least an order of magnitude better than any Visa/MC licensee I’ve dealt with; that’s really what you’re paying for. If something goes wrong with a purchase, they’ll tend to make it right without asking many questions/filling any forms. Lost cards can be next-day’s without charge. They have actual physical offices in non-US nations that can advance you local currency and provide you a new card (among other things) should your wallet be stolen while traveling.

Having utilized card services and customer support heavily for almost two decades with a number of card co’s made me very much an Amex partisan.

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

clairity wrote: post #46
tyre wrote: 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 this round of delivery startups were mostly driven by concentrated capital desperate for return (plus not enough diversity of thought to recognize unconventional but interesting bets), because anyone who remembers webvan knows that the economics of last-mile logistics hasn't changed substantially with faster/ubiquitous computing and mobile. mobile does increase availability slightly and reduces friction a lit…

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by floatingatoll »

BurningFrog wrote: post #61
tyre wrote: 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!

It turns out that human beings are often inclined not to lie for selfish gain, and there is often a certain degree of social pressure not to lie for selfish gain.

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

#94

Post by geitir »

ByteJockey wrote: post #78
bhl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

You're assuming that domino's makes a profit on food delivery rather than breaking even on it. But domino's also makes the food, so if they break even on the deliver, that's fine, they made money on the food. Scaling the delivery part of the business also scales the food part. If you aren't making the food, you have to make money on the delivery alone because scaling your delivery service scales someone else's food b…

I imagine the end goal is the same as with Uber's main business. Automation

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

#95

Post by jboydyhacker »

You can't take two one legged men and tape em together and win a race.

UberEats and Postmates have the worst execution in the space compared to Caviar (owned by DoorDash), DoorDash and Grubhub.

Dara is a banker, he doesn't know anything about operations. This will end bad.

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

#96

Post by Larrikin »

xvector wrote: post #63
csours wrote: 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...

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.

The automatic refund gives that scam price, but if you insist on the full refund plus tax you'll still get it

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

#97

Post by drewrv »

Jommi wrote: post #32
arcticbull wrote: post #27

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.

I'm not sure where you're located, but the Jump bikes in Seattle are now operated by Lime (even though you still rent them in the Uber app for some reason).

https://www.geekwire.com/2020/jump-bikes-return-seattle-lime...

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

#98

Post by jhallenworld »

So city dwellers in the ancient Roman world did not have kitchens- possibly they ate out more than we do.

So there must have been demand for food delivery... I wonder if they accomplished it with slaves?

Well there is some history:

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/01/08/food-delivery/

The Indian "dabbawala" maybe is where it has to go: some kind of standardized service where one driver can deliver to many people in a single traveling-salesman minimized trip. The packaging is designed to keep the food warm for a long time to allow this. But this probably only works for pre-arranged food delivery, not call for food now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

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

#99

Post by mardifoufs »

nemothekid wrote: post #76
mardifoufs wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure I understand - Netflix has the same problem as Disney and HBO, they must spend a ton on content to differentiate.

Yes, most content producers have the same problem but few have to maintain the pace Netflix needs to keep users subscribed to a unlimited platform.

Disney has a very strong and very culturally defining position. They are also more diversified and generate cashflow from multiple sources. Disney+ is also mostly content that has already been "paid for" by either box office sales or licensed merchandise.For example, selling Star Wars toys is very profitable and makes the movies even more profitable. The box office sales usually also more than pay for their production costs.

Netflix does not have any other source of revenue, is totally dependant on month to month subscriptions and has to compete with decades of already made and paid for content that it's competitors can and will often chose not to license to Netflix. To finance that huge catalog they basically took a mortgage on all of their future subscription revenue. Disney can afford to lose all of it's disney+ subscribers as long it's movies are still watched and its parks still visited. It can lose a revenue stream and still be alive

As for HBO, it's owned by ATT and usually has "premium" content. ATT can also afford a few bad years for HBO but the same would be a death sentence for Netflix. I guess my point is that netflix has almost no room for error, it bet everything on never not growing.

What's really going to be interesting for Netflix and for food delivery apps is what will happen once the lockdowns end and when we get back to normal. Will people still have things left to watch that appeals to them after so much free time? Will food delivery stay popular?

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

#100

Post by zeroonetwothree »

mushufasa wrote: post #62
cletus wrote: 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.

A single person isn’t really an efficient use for delivery. When I’m ordering for four people it’s $80+ so paying $20 for delivery is totally fine. And most places I order from are <10min drive.
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