541–550 of 580 posts
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We've asked you several times to stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. Please actually stop.
Is it possible for me to delete my account? I emailed about this awhile back and never got a response.
Sometimes legit emails go to spam, though I look over the spam folder pretty carefully too.
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I hate this line of reasoning and so do many economists. It’s not the “opportunity cost” you should be measuring. It’s the “opportunity cost of the next best alternative.” If I am an hourly worker making $50 and going to get food would be an hour that I wouldn’t be working, then yes it is worth $50 to not spend it going to get food. But if I am choosing between watching Netflix and going to get food. The next best al…
I just want to make sure I'm following your train of thought correctly regarding this object. So, say, an hourly contractor who orders delivery so they can get back to work sooner still makes sense to you, right?
If he makes $50 an hour and he can get an extra hour in working, if it is cheaper for him to order food then yes it makes economic sense.
On the other hand if he were at home watching Netflix and he spent the money set aside for his utility bill to eat out and his lights got cut off , the opportunity cost wasn’t the $50, it was that he could have had lights.
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I’m pretty sure that in most countries, a store can’t just sell another company’s products without entering an agreement with them. This agreement allows the company to set a minimum and maximum price for the product. Imagine you’re selling chocolate that you want people to associate with luxury/wealth. To achieve this you might want to limit resellers to be 5 star hotels and luxury stores rather than the 1 dollar st…
I don’t know what countries are like that, but that’s certainly not the case in the United States.
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What? Are we reading the same article? As far as I can tell this new rule caps fees at 10%, it doesn't say anything about charging whatever they want, while being more transparent or disclosing the fees more clearly.
The headline says "Portland approves 10% cap on fees that food delivery apps can charge RESTAURANTS". There's no cap on what they can charge customers. Legal: "Your pizza is $10. Our fee is $3, delivery is $5. Total bill $18." Restaurant gets $10. Not legal: "Your pizza is $10 (but we quietly take $3 of that). Our fee is $3 (but we hid an extra $3 in the pizza!). Delivery is $5. Total bill $18." Restaurant gets $7. L…
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5 minute walk then 20 minute wait then 5 minute walk back. When you're earning $50+ an hour, which many in cities are easily clearing, it starts to make a lot of sense to pay someone else to do your waiting for you.
I hate this line of reasoning and so do many economists. It’s not the “opportunity cost” you should be measuring. It’s the “opportunity cost of the next best alternative.” If I am an hourly worker making $50 and going to get food would be an hour that I wouldn’t be working, then yes it is worth $50 to not spend it going to get food. But if I am choosing between watching Netflix and going to get food. The next best al…
Opportunity cost is exactly that: the next best alternative.
> But if I am choosing between watching Netflix and going to get food. The next best alternative pays $0.
If you could be spending that time earning $50, and you choose to watch Netflix instead—all else being equal—then obviously watching Netflix is worth more to you than the $50. Going to get food thus implies foregoing at least $50 worth of leisure time. The fact that no one is paying you to watch Netflix is irrelevant; monetary compensation is not the sole (or even most signficant) measure of economic value.
So as I understand it Deliveroo and Uber eats charge 25% of the food costs, plus delivery fees on top. Uber eats I know is losing money and Deliveroo are losing a few hundred million per year on revenues of about $500m. Basically cutting the food percentage like this to 10% would imply delivery services are permanently unprofitable? Why have all these restaurants signed up if 25% is so unfair?
Because these delivery services are Moloch[1].
The value these services provide is to customers, not businesses, and the service they provide to customers is pretty minimal. But it's a slight convenience for customers. That means that if one restaurant uses a delivery service, and their competitor doesn't, the first restaurant's ordering experience is slightly easier than their competitors', which gives them an advantage. Let me reiterate that, because it's important: if and only if one restaurant uses a delivery service and their competitor doesn't, using the delivery service gives that company a competitive advantage.
So what happens is first one restaurant starts using a delivery service, and they have a competitive advantage, because none of their competitors are using the delivery service. But one by one, their competitors notice, and start using the delivery service. Finally, there's only a few restaurants left not using a delivery service, and by this point, they have to use a delivery service, or they can't compete.
So let's go back to the competitive advantage here: if a restaurant uses a delivery service and their competitor doesn't, using the delivery service offers a competitive advantage. But that's not the situation we're in any more: the restaurant is just using the same delivery service everyone else is, so none of them get a competitive advantage from using it. Instead, the entire restaurant industry has just let this middle man into their business that provides no competitive advantage, but charges rent.
The rational thing, of course, is for restaurants to create a united front and all agree not to buy into the delivery services in the first place. However, it only takes a few short-sighted restaurants breaking rank for a short-term profit, for that to all fall apart. Cooperation at this level has to have teeth, because there are incentives to not cooperate. But in the US, there's a strong faction of people who think any regulation is bad, so regulation that actually solves the problem won't happen. The best that can be done is to limit the problem with measures like this 10% regulation.
Ultimately, the best solution that can work without regulation might be local delivery service cooperatives, which allow businesses which don't have the delivery throughput to maintain their own delivery staff to pool resources, while not giving up a large percentage to rent-seekers outside their community.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200528004232/https://slatestar...
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Don't you see? My time is too valuable to do anything vaguely unpleasant. The entire economy would suffer if I had to pick up my own food.
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but yes - that's spot on. It's exactly that kind of attitude I've seen far too often in the culture of well-paid tech workers. Their lives are all about optimization of time resources / time management, and everyone should bow to their needs - if it results in them shaving off some minutes here and there. After all, they're making $300k/year working on important products,…
You're right. If their leisure time were merely worth as much as their regular wages then they ought to be working those 30 minutes instead. Since in fact they made the opposite choice, they clearly value their leisure time more than what they would have earned by spending that time working.
This is a regulatory response to Silicon Valley’s implementation of predatory pricing. Let me explain: Predatory pricing is defined as “the pricing of goods or services at such a low level that other suppliers cannot compete and are forced to leave the market.” For silicon valley startups like Doordash and Grubhub this is accomplished by acquiring customers at a significant loss in ways that may often seem idiotic. e…
"Although the FTC examines claims of predatory pricing carefully, courts, including the Supreme Court, have been skeptical of such claims." Which means that predatory pricing rarely, if ever, exists. If you don't like the 25% delivery fee, GET OFF YOUR ASS AND GO GET YOUR OWN FOOD.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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We're moving from an age of consumers going to the good/service and to the good/service going to the consumer. In particular younger generations see delivery as a norm. It's less about being lazy or having high expectations and more a case of it being baked into the culture of younger generations now. I work for a takewaway / food delivery company and it's facinating listening to what our customers are saying. I hear…
Sounds incredibly wasteful, no matter the economics involved.
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5 minute walk then 20 minute wait then 5 minute walk back. When you're earning $50+ an hour, which many in cities are easily clearing, it starts to make a lot of sense to pay someone else to do your waiting for you.
I hate this line of reasoning and so do many economists. It’s not the “opportunity cost” you should be measuring. It’s the “opportunity cost of the next best alternative.” If I am an hourly worker making $50 and going to get food would be an hour that I wouldn’t be working, then yes it is worth $50 to not spend it going to get food. But if I am choosing between watching Netflix and going to get food. The next best al…
Put in just your 9-5 then bail or put extra time and effort in to your career. Many high earners in cities are doing the latter. You take the time you'd be using not only be getting your food but cleaning, mowing, looking after your car; all of the work that isn't your job, and use it to earn more instead. The higher you earn, the more this makes sense to do.
Hours are interchangeable. Sure if you order food at 7:30, get it delivered at 8, and you spend 7:30-8 watching Netflix then yeah the next best alternative for that half an hour was $0. That's not where the trade off happened though. It's when you left work at 6 instead of 5. It's when you answer that phone call or email you otherwise wouldn't have later that night. It's going out for drinks the next day with that weird guy you shared an office with until he left a few weeks ago to work at a company you really want to move to.