441–450 of 580 posts
Now all they have to do is force delivery apps to deliver at that price point. But since they can't do that, they'll simply skip Portland. Maybe 30% is too much, but 10% is way to little. The company, drivers etc have to share that $5 off a $50 order and a lot of that is cost (car, gas, insurance)
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Yet take-out is also the same price and doesn't require any of that overhead. Although you are saving on a "tip", which is yet another weird fee attributed to a third party rather than waitstaff just earning straightforward wages - cost-responsibility-dodging is rampant in this industry. What's probably driving this dispute over commissions is that restaurants still need to pay for that dining space during Covid, so…
I mean, shipping prices when shopping online also aren't the exact cost of shipping your package. "Free" shipping when you hit a minimum order is still being paid for in the price you pay per-item. Pretty much no prices magically reflect true costs anywhere. Delivery is no different. I don't know why you think delivery deserves to be super-transparently-related-to-costs when literally nothing else is in business exce…
In general, sure. But the combinations generally simplify the transaction rather than obscuring it. Shipping cost can be built into product price. People balk when a product cost gets hidden in the shipping price.
As I said, the specific problem here is a delivery service purporting to charge one price for delivery, while hiding the actual cost of their service within the purported price of the food. That's borderline fraudulent.
Your whole argument is to keep insisting that there is nothing wrong with this. But it's akin to soliciting collections for charity, and then taking 20% of the donations as your administrative fee. Just because some money went where you said, does not mean you're entitled to allocate the rest how you see fit. We've also seen similar play-fast-and-loose-with-customer-money behavior from this industry where tipping a worker caused their wage to be reduced.
Since our argument has consisted of mostly talking past one another, I have to ask - what exactly is so repellent about making delivery companies disclose the actual price of their service?
> In fact, there has never been a time in human history when [restaurants] had more choices for delivery. Those are facts
I'm not disputing your "fact", I'm disputing your framing. If we were talking about orders from a restaurant's own website, being handled by a contracted delivery vendor, it would be appropriate. But the Silicon Valley nouveau-middleman business plan is to become popular and capture entire markets through network effects. It's disingenuous to frame signing up with a given service as some isolated choice, when those services actively work to inject themselves into existing customer relationships.
And sure, there is general competition between services. It's just not competition that results in reasonable market terms. Just like your examples of airlines and credit cards, market failure generally invites regulation, which is exactly what we're seeing here.
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Why would you tip the restaurant staff?
Because tipping restaurant staff is what normal people do when they go out to restaurants in the U.S. Those same people still prepare and package the food, even when someone else delivers it.
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It's doubtful that these services are actually spending 25% of each food order on providing the service. The money goes to expansion, marketing, loss leaders, and other supposedly temporary overhead. They're hoping that when they reach scale and have eliminated competitors, they'll turn a tidy profit, the way Amazon did. It's not at all clear that they really need to spend that much money on their expansion or that t…
If you have nobody using your delivery service, you can't maintain deliver-ers. You're running a three sided marketplace in which you need to have both minimum wages and work for your delivery folks, enough orders for the restaurant to bother, and enough restaurants and ok enough prices for the consumer. That's why it's expensive. That's why you need marketing who doesn't just take out a facebook ad but literally vis…
You might be missing a step there though. They struggle to get and keep drivers at a price that consumers are willing to pay, which is obviously tightly related to the problem of getting customers.
If they paid $100/hr, they'd have more drivers than they knew what to do with. They only struggle with getting drivers because of the economics of the customer.
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I don't really get it. Doordash or whatever says 'for $x we will put a WhateverBurger burger into your hand'. As long as that's what they achieve, this seems fundamentally honest to me. As a consumer I don't really care where that $x goes to - Doordash, WhateverBurger, delivery person... doesn't seem my business to interfere in people's private financial agreements. The diner gets offered a deal and can take it or no…
A restaurant is a brand and a brand gets to determine the pricing of their products. Pricing is one of the ways customers relate to the brand's identity. Having a 3rd party, which may still add value to both the brand and end-user, interject and abstract from the brand's determined prices is unethical, period. These delivery services should really be increasing their delivery fees to cover their costs, but they know…
But that’s just not true. Branded products vary in price on different retailers. A can of Coca-Cola can be wildly different prices in different places. Are you not used to this as a consumer?
> Having a 3rd party, which may still add value to both the brand and end-user, interject and abstract from the brand's determined prices is unethical, period.
I don’t understand - have you never bean to a supermarket or a department store before? They sell other brands in their store. Do you not realise they’re also marked up?
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I fail to grasp what you are implying. Please explain.
You announced that below some percentage of the population, people don't matter and shouldn't be accommodated. By your logic, I showed that Portland doesn't matter. I hope we can all agree that this is a very stupid conclusion, and therefore you should rethink your argument. We accommodate disability because it is the right thing to do. We require businesses to spend extra money, lowering their profits, in order to p…
I'd flag your insulting "stupid conclusion" statement, but I'm sure someone else will do that for me.
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Exactly what happened in SF. Uber Eats stopped delivering to Treasure Island as a result: "The Order limits our ability to cover operation costs, so we have had to revise the areas Uber Eats can deliver to in the city. Unfortunately, this means we cannot continue to serve customers in Treasure Island. The Mayor’s Emergency Order limits the commissions we charge restaurants for access to our platform and delivery serv…
That makes no sense to me. Why can't they charge people ordering from Treasure island higher?
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We don't even let health insurance to charge people different rates based on pre-existing conditions anymore, which is what drove health insurance premiums through the roof.
Healthcare premiums were steadily marching higher from the 1970s onwards, and continued to do so post-ACA at about the same annual growth rate.
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We don't even let health insurance to charge people different rates based on pre-existing conditions anymore, which is what drove health insurance premiums through the roof.
The whole reason for health insurance in the first place is for healthy, wealthy, or young people to pay for unhealthy, poor, or old people. That’s the whole reason for any kind of insurance. It’s a mechanism for lucky people to pay the costs of unlucky people. And even lucky people pay for it it because you never know how your luck will change. If you take your idea for a pricing model to the extreme, everybody pays…
Insurance is pooling of risks so participants in the pool are insured against medical costs they can’t afford.
This is the right move - local restaurants are hurting and, sadly, the internet is a place where big corps with large budgets have leverage over passionate little guys working their butts off. For those who want to help, I built a chrome extension similar to Honey that shows a local restaurant's direct ordering website as you're about to order from that restaurant thru a third party service. If direct ordering isn't…
I got kinda burned when I tried to order direct from a restaurant. The last time we ate there they included a little "order online" card with a link to their website. So the next time, in the spirit of supporting businesses directly, I went to their site and ordered. They did use a third-party handler (ChowNow I think?), but I figured it was a kind of order management third-party. In fact, after placing the order, I got an additional email from that third-party handler congratulating me on ordering directly from restaurants, and that they explicitly don't charge restaurants a fee. Neat, right? Well, Lo and behold, behind the scenes they just used DoorDash to handle delivery...
That sucked because A) it was more hassle for me to sign up for Yet Another Account, and B) I have DashPass (free delivery and discounted service charge) but didn't get to use it, so it ended up costing me more even with the coupon the restaurant threw in.
Hell, there are even pizza places around me that use DoorDash for delivery. Pizza places, for goodness sake!
It's a weird world I suppose.