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DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

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Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#131

Post by Jiro »

Spivak wrote: post #72
b3lvedere wrote: post #8

The driver argued the amount of time it would take to come back to return the bag would mean he couldn’t make enough deliveries to “pay my rent”. There you have it. The actual “business model” of Doordash.

Is this not how every decision is make at a business? Yes it's more personal because of the word rent but "no we can't do this because the in the slowdown we wouldn't make enough sales to pay our employees." I'm surprised people are siding with the restaurant owner here who's a millimeter away from just being a dick and making demands of a rando who he's not the boss of. Making "damaging my reputation" a thing just i…

Giving the impression they have a relationship with the restaurant is exactly why it's damaging the restaurant's reputation. The distinction you make doesn't exist.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#132

Post by Spivak »

Jiro wrote: post #131
Spivak wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this not how every decision is make at a business? Yes it's more personal because of the word rent but "no we can't do this because the in the slowdown we wouldn't make enough sales to pay our employees." I'm surprised people are siding with the restaurant owner here who's a millimeter away from just being a dick and making demands of a rando who he's not the boss of. Making "damaging my reputation" a thing just i…

Giving the impression they have a relationship with the restaurant is exactly why it's damaging the restaurant's reputation. The distinction you make doesn't exist.

The act of sending a dasher to a business they don't have an explicit relationship to deliver their food -- totally fine. The app not making it clear that the restaurant isn't partnered with DoorDash and that they're placing a pick-up order and delivering it to you -- not fine.

Making "damaging the restaurant's reputation" a thing is absurd in all aspects. By the restaurant owner's own logic picking up my own order without an insulated bad shouldn't be allowed -- after all what if I get home and the pizza isn't as good because it's cold? That could hurt their business. Utter nonsense. Do we now have to decide whether "it's fair" that something potentially hurts their reputation? Is a bad review fair if it's about the food, but unfair if it's about the wait?

What DD did is bad because they impersonated the other business, not because people got soggy fries. You stop getting to curate the dining experience the moment they walk out your door.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#133

Post by al_borland »

bko wrote: post #63
forinti wrote: post #42

> You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and…

Isn't this a problem that fixes itself? People have lots of money and throw it at stupid businesses and lose it.

With these food delivery apps they managed to make a system where everyone loses. It’s astounding. When everyone is paying more, while earning less, I’m not sure how the problem fixes itself.

I think these apps just need to go away and business that want to offer delivery can go back to how it used to be done. It was cheaper and better.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#134

Post by itsdavesanders »

al_borland wrote: post #133
bko wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this a problem that fixes itself? People have lots of money and throw it at stupid businesses and lose it.

With these food delivery apps they managed to make a system where everyone loses. It’s astounding. When everyone is paying more, while earning less, I’m not sure how the problem fixes itself. I think these apps just need to go away and business that want to offer delivery can go back to how it used to be done. It was cheaper and better.

IS it cheaper? Better, maybe, depending on the restaurant. But I can’t see how it’s cheaper when you have to hire and insure drivers, manage shifts, deal with delivery areas, fuel costs, more accounting, etc etc.

Also I live in a pretty good sized city of about 350k in our metro area, and before these delivery services only the national pizza places delivered. When I moved here from a larger city I was shocked there wasn’t a single Chinese delivery place. So I’m thinking that the costs and management were just too high.

The right model might be the Waiter on the Way model, which hires regular drivers but can offer the service turnkey. But there needs to be more of those, and there doesn’t seem to be for some reason.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#135

Post by dom96 »

itsdavesanders wrote: post #134
al_borland wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With these food delivery apps they managed to make a system where everyone loses. It’s astounding. When everyone is paying more, while earning less, I’m not sure how the problem fixes itself. I think these apps just need to go away and business that want to offer delivery can go back to how it used to be done. It was cheaper and better.

IS it cheaper? Better, maybe, depending on the restaurant. But I can’t see how it’s cheaper when you have to hire and insure drivers, manage shifts, deal with delivery areas, fuel costs, more accounting, etc etc. Also I live in a pretty good sized city of about 350k in our metro area, and before these delivery services only the national pizza places delivered. When I moved here from a larger city I was shocked there…

I lived in a tiny town in Northern Ireland and every chinese/indian/pizza place managed to deliver food just fine. They still do I bet. UberEats/Deliveroo/DoorDash are just skimming the little profit that these operations made (and failing to be profitable)

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#136

Post by nobody9999 »

Door Dash/Seamless/Uber Eats, etc. have driven many low-priced restaurants out of business here in New York City many of which had long traditions of providing delivery services for their food by inserting themselves as middlemen and taking all those restaurants' profits and more.

I realize that in many places, they provide services that never existed before, but here in NYC they've driven hundreds of wonderful mom and pop restaurants out of business while they lost billions.

Those entrepreneurs who ran successful businesses for decades were forced out of business, as their quality, inexpensive food (especially in an expensive place like NYC) only netted them 5-10% profits, which were more than eaten up by the 15-30% charged on every order.

I'd rather starve than give any of those jerks a nickel.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#137

Post by al_borland »

itsdavesanders wrote: post #134
al_borland wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With these food delivery apps they managed to make a system where everyone loses. It’s astounding. When everyone is paying more, while earning less, I’m not sure how the problem fixes itself. I think these apps just need to go away and business that want to offer delivery can go back to how it used to be done. It was cheaper and better.

IS it cheaper? Better, maybe, depending on the restaurant. But I can’t see how it’s cheaper when you have to hire and insure drivers, manage shifts, deal with delivery areas, fuel costs, more accounting, etc etc. Also I live in a pretty good sized city of about 350k in our metro area, and before these delivery services only the national pizza places delivered. When I moved here from a larger city I was shocked there…

>Also I live in a pretty good sized city of about 350k in our metro area, and before these delivery services only the national pizza places delivered. When I moved here from a larger city I was shocked there wasn’t a single Chinese delivery place. So I’m thinking that the costs and management were just too high.

This is interesting. When I was in college I could order Chinese delivery from about 5 different places, and they'd do it until about 4 or 5am. This was in a city of about 78k. After school I moved to another college town. It was double the population with a much more well known school. In this town, I don't think there was any Chinese delivery, and a vast majority of the places closed really early for a college town; maybe 8-10pm.

I wonder if smaller towns with lower rent leave more margin for extra hours and delivery, where as those with higher rents need to focus on staffing the core hours with as few people as possible to make the books balance? Just a theory, as I've never worked in these industries.

Near me, I still see Dominos doing their own delivery, with their corporate owned vehicles. I also see some local pizza places doing their own delivery as well. Jimmy Johns still does its own delivery as well, even if going through Door Dash, they just hand off the order, it doesn't go through the normal Door Dash process.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#139

Post by lotsoweiners »

nsxwolf wrote: post #125
ianferrel wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with that. In the case of food delivery, there's socially and economically useful work of getting food from where it can be efficiently created (restaurants) to where it can be efficiently consumed (hungry people's location). In the absence of that work, the hungry people would be making their own food (less efficient, generally, than restaurant cooking which can do larger batches) or going to get their ow…

It's completely ruined pizza delivery, which used to actually be a pleasant and affordable experience.

How do you figure? I still order pizza, pay a small delivery fee and tip, and receive my order in around 30-45 minutes. I haven’t noticed a change other than I no longer call a store to order and I can get pizza delivery from places that didn’t deliver before.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#140

Post by lotsoweiners »

chasing wrote: post #57
fortran77 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't blowing money like this redistribute it quickly, taking care of the "inequality"? It looks like this is a good way to take wealth from people who have accumulated it (the investors) and disperse it widely. I can't make your argument make any sense.

Burn a billion dollars. Artificially pump the market value of your company by 10 billion dollars. Pizza company gets a few hundred dollars for free. "Haha, we pulled one over on the man!" Go public or sell. Founders and initial investors (likely already wealthy) get billions. Other people take the hit. No, this does not distribute wealth down. It's a ploy to gin up enough excitement that people who are already wealth…

Who the hell cares? When I pay for things I have no interest in thinking about where things are trickling or not. If ten years later DoorDash/other delivery services still have people willing to pay for the service and people willing to deliver the orders for what they are being paid, then the business seems reasonably viable to me.
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