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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

#241

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

Talanes wrote: post #233
londons_explore wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This food will be ready to collect at 17:35 and 45 seconds, and if it isn't, we wont be paying you". Restaurants would soon figure out how to use a couple of timers to get every order done on time. There could also be a deeper integration to ensure that, for example, there are no more than 3 orders worth of fries being cooked at once, or no more than 2 pickups per minute scheduled, to avoid overloading that part of…

Have you ever worked in a restaurant? What you're describing would be a massive undertaking to manage with just a single corporate partner, much less with a collection of independent and small chain restaurants.

Once you own the delivery space, you can crush restaurants into submission just like the darlings of the tech space have done: Apple, Google, Amazon.

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

#242

Post by the-dude »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #236
missedthecue wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean there wasn't a way to remote order in ancient Rome. You'd have to go yourself or send someone.

Have a pyre at your home's roof, and an arrangement with a restaurant to send a meal when they see it on fire. I'm joking, of course.

They had multistory appartment buildings. What if you didn't live on the top floor?

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

#243

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

baxtr wrote: post #206
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is mostly limited by requirements to get food there quickly. If we knew what we wanted ahead of time, scheduling delivery ahead of time would make it easy... since you could use a delivery route (to deliver 2-3 items nearby). A single winner may be able to make it work since you can do 1-2 pickups and deliver to two nearby homes.

Huh. Interesting! How about a food truck with a kitchen that drives a pre-defined route to delivers pre-ordered food?

Unfortunately you can't cook while a food truck is moving.

It's not illegal, just difficult (don't ask how I know)

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

#244

Post by giarc »

mardifoufs wrote: post #37
cglong wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the services I've tried in this space, only Postmates lets you request items from businesses they aren't partnered with. This was a huge win once when I needed groceries delivered quickly.

So they can go to the restaurant and order for you? That's interesting. I can't imagine it being very efficient or very fast though, how do they manage to not lose tens of minutes per order on non partnered restaurants/stores?

I wonder if an overseas call centre employee is the one calling in the order, not the delivery driver?

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

#245

Post by CaptainZapp »

jon-wood wrote: post #209
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 worked for five years at a grocery delivery company, and even there it was a nightmare trying to keep delivery routes profitable - that was with at least 5 hour's notice on what people had ordered, and pre-selected delivery slots, which meant we could peak at each driver doing 10-12 drops an hour if they were in an area with a high customer density. I have no idea how companies like Deliveroo expect to make a consi…

> Having said that, I do now wonder if you could make the model work by offering very cheap, or even free, delivery on the condition that you place the order a few hours in advance for a pre-selected delivery time.

While a nifty idea, I don't think it really works. I see two major obstacles:

Food ordering is instant (or almost instant) gratification. You want your food and you want it now. Or if not now then in 30 minutes, max. You may have the odd outlier, who plans accordingly and orders dinner at noon.

The other problem would be the customers at the end of the delivery route. While that doesn't matter much for groceries that sauce on the former tasty duck à l'orange may be mighty congealed and rather unappetizing once it arrives as one of the last deliveries of a route.

I just don't think that there's enough of a market for pre planned food deliveries and quality assurance would be impossible.

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

#246

Post by CaptainZapp »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #176
richthegeek wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber Eats has done this to me and it made me stopped using them. Driver needs to wait for the second meal to be prepared, pack it together, take a detour to the other place and spend time delivering it. So your meal arrives late, cold, and crushed after you paid full-price for the delivery.

> Driver needs to wait for the second meal to be prepared, That's the rub right there. If you're the winner in the market, can send info to a restaurant to keep your food hot (or even hotter than normal) and can schedule it perfectly it will work. Once you spend a couple of billions into the infrastructure to make it happen, you can totally make a couple of hundred thousands worth of profit - 2020 Startups.

Let's just say that such places could never count me in as a customer.

The quality of the food delivered is dubious, to put it mildly, just by the very description of the process.

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

#247

Post by CaptainZapp »

rm445 wrote: post #203
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is mostly limited by requirements to get food there quickly. If we knew what we wanted ahead of time, scheduling delivery ahead of time would make it easy... since you could use a delivery route (to deliver 2-3 items nearby). A single winner may be able to make it work since you can do 1-2 pickups and deliver to two nearby homes.

Yeah, that's why the churn of food-delivery companies isn't going to end unless external factors cut off the flow of investment. It's conceivable that one winner could be massively profitable, at enormous scale, with all the efficiencies of a significant proportion of the population being bought-in and everything from schedules to menus to delivery vehicles optimised to make the service effective. (Here is your daily…

Doesn't really sound like good food, though, if that's something you're interested in.

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

#248

Post by leereeves »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #241
Talanes wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever worked in a restaurant? What you're describing would be a massive undertaking to manage with just a single corporate partner, much less with a collection of independent and small chain restaurants.

Once you own the delivery space, you can crush restaurants into submission just like the darlings of the tech space have done: Apple, Google, Amazon.

If you force restaurants to optimize everything for timing, you'll end up delivering food on par with McDonalds.

And if it turns out customers are willing to pay restaurant prices for McDonalds quality delivery, then McDonalds themselves will start a delivery service to compete with you.

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

#249

Post by js2 »

YawningAngel wrote: post #201
marvin wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. That's a novel use of stupid index fund money. Just get your shitty investments listed on the stock exchange and cash out. Index fund buyers don't care, they'll swallow it right up and it's free to crash and burn at their expense. You could even do it deliberately, as long as it follows securities regulations. Being a pure momentum strategy, index investing has no intelligence. At one point this would make index…

Indices don't include unprofitable companies for exactly this reason.

There are several total market indexes and funds which follow them. They hold companies proportional to their market capitalization, irrespective of profitability. VTI holds 29,546,017 shares of Uber as of 5/31 for example.

https://investor.vanguard.com/etf/profile/overview/VTI

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

#250

Post by js2 »

maps7 wrote: post #218
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a wealth transfer scheme. Wealth is transferred from ordinary folk via the IPO-retirement-fund axis to the plethora of agents involved in the whole scheme, from the employees bashing out code and UX, right through to everyone involved the M&A and IPO and the whole tax / tax agent / government tax agency cadre. It's not trickledown . It's deluge-up economics.

Is retirement fund money really being put into Uber?

VTI holds 29,546,017 shares of Uber.

https://investor.vanguard.com/etf/profile/overview/VTI

Anyone investing in the total market via VTI, ITOT, etc will hold Uber.

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