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Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

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Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because an enterprising businessperson has no idea how to run a kitchen. Recipes are in many ways the least important part of what a chef provides. They're not secrets. If there's a "secret ingredient" it's that they're using more butter and salt than you'd use at home. What a chef provides is a process. They get the ingredients ordered, at the quality level they want for a price they're willing to pay. They ensure t…

I have enough trouble getting food on the table at the right time when I'm making a relatively simple meal for my family. Reading this description (which seems spot-on to me, though I don't have experience working in foodservice) is making me anxious just imagining it.

It is definitely nerve-wracking. But when things are going well, there's a kind of zen to it. They have the advantage of doing the same thing every day. They know the plan, and they stick to it.

Until something goes wrong with the plan -- somebody calls out sick, the refrigerator fails, an order gets messed up and has to be re-cooked -- and the rhythm gets disrupted. The dining room is full so new orders are getting backlogged, and more mistakes get made because you're off your game...

It's not for the faint of heart. It doesn't have to be as unpleasant as some TV shows make it out to be. But it's a whole different kettle of fish from cooking at home.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#122

Mentions the $650mln they'll pay Just Eat for it, neglects the fact Just Eat paid $7.3bln. Quite the write down. And in just 4 years.

They are actually paying $150 mln in cash and taking on $500 mln in debt.

multi level narketing

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#123
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same way you do for a public company. From trades and valuations. how do you know what trades took place, and how many shares were traded, and at what price?

> how do you know what trades took place, and how many shares were traded, and at what price? Company generally has these records. Various other sources, e.g. PitchBook, compile them. In some jurisdictions ( e.g. UK and India) they have to be publicly announced, though that's becoming less common. TL; DR It is incredibly wrong to suggest private companies don't have a market cap. As in finance 101 wrong.

> Same way you do for a public company. From trades and valuations.

no, it's not the same, because the information is not publicly available. They are the same in that in both cases you multiply two numbers together; they are not the same inasmuch as your ability to know those numbers is vastly different. To say they're the same is misleading.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#124
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of "restaurants" in our town that are just different menus serviced at the same ghost/cloud/dark kitchen. The quality is generally not good. I wonder about the quality at Wonder -- the broader the menu, the harder it is for the preparers to get good at it.

I'm thinking here of an Indian place near my office that graduated from ghost kitchen to food hall restaurant. I had their food both before and after, and the difference was night and day. I actually didn't want to try the food hall version, based on my experience with their ghost kitchen incarnation. But a friend convinced me to give them another chance, and now they're one of my favorite places for when I want to s…

You can change the name, the brand, of a ghost kitchen startup 'restaurant' overnight if you think it's stale due to bad consumer experiences. So you need to care less about those.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#125
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given a per-share price how do you know the per-share price

> how do you know the per-share price Same way you do for a public company. From trades and valuations. Private shares exchange hands in private transactions as well as almost every time the company raises money. If a company issues incentive stock options, they're required to calculate a 409A price, which while a bullshit number, is indeed a per-share price. Corporations, by law, have shares.

But they don't need to publicly disclose it, so "you" probably don't know the price. Someone does, sure.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#126
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is an empty platitude if restaurants won't meet customers where they are - on their smartphones. I'll use my local restaurants' app/webpage when there is one and get pick-up, but if there isn't one, I'll be real - I just use Doordash. When I've got people over and need to order food, it'll take 45 mins between everything else going on to figure out a restaurant, and then another hour to pick some food. And then…

This really seems like exaggeration. Two hours? How many people are we talking about here? Also, nothing you've mentioned really solves your issues. Even with DoorDash, you'll need to pick a restaurant. And DoorDash doesn't solve the problem of someone changing their mind as they are ordering. And then you still have to wait for the food to be prepared and delivered. And there's no guarantee on when it will arrive. S…

You've never herded cats? That time is wall clock time, so to be clear, It isn't 1:45 collectively sitting down and paying attention to that one specific task. (That would be too easy.) Just like how it'll take three days to write six hours of code because of all of the other work stuff going on during a busy week, in my experience it just takes roughly three hours of wall clock time from "start beginning the process of ordering food" to food in mouth. Most of that is spent not ordering food. Finishing up some work stuff or finishing the TV/movie someone put on or hey check out this one video on YouTube/Tiktok/etc and getting sucked down a rabbithole, or a quick game of whatever cards, or a discussion about how someone's life/work/relationship/whatever is going. Just normal distractible people things.

The cashier at the restaurant isn't going to, (nor should they!) wait on hold for that entire hour of mostly not ordering food. Ordering via phone app doesn't care how long it takes after we start, or that we got utterly distracted and came back to it 20 minutes later.

It starts to take too long when it's more than a dozen or two people, though there usually aren't that many. At some point though, it becomes more effective to get people's dietary restrictions and make decisions for everybody, but just ordering a bunch of pizzas is considered a (delicious) failure mode to be avoided.

Doordash's app mostly doesn't help in figuring out which restaurant to go with, though it does say what got ordered last time. and has a rating and $ signs. The process becomes asynchronous. each person gets the phone and figures out what they want, without the rest of the group just staring at that one person until they finish. No one needs to manage orders beyond passing the phone around and eventually pressing checkout. The person who changes their mind just gets the phone back before the checkout button is pressed and edits the order. Doing that verbally via the phone is terrible. It's also understood that there's no changing after checkout is pressed.

To be clear, restaurants don't have to meet me on Doordash, but they do have to meet me at least halfway, which is on the Internet, and that there are local restaurants who do. They have their own webpage, they take orders there, it isn't run by Doordash, and we just send someone(s) to go pick up the food. At least one of them is operated by Square, which also runs that place's PoS system. So I'm not holding restaurants to some impossibly high bar that none of them seem to be able to meet, just discussing the reality of operating a restaurant in the digital age.

Restaurants modernized and installed telephones and credit card machines and now, they also need a digital presence to compete. There are umpteen restaurants competing for my business and if it's too much friction to eat their food, chances are I'm just not gonna eat there and my business ends up at a competitors.

I mean, they don't actually have to. There are some spots that don't have a website and still only take cash and it's word of mouth, and I frequent them infrequently, but that's their business model, so good for them, so long as it's actually working for them.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#127
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll look up the addresses of restaurants on Uber Eats, using street view, before ordering. Most of them are at bodegas or otherwise non-restaurant spaces.

I recently saw a new burger joint pop up on Uber Eats with an address not far from my home. It turned out to be the address of the last remaining Ruby Tuesday restaurant in my area, but the burger place did not advertise any connection to Ruby Tuesday. Seemed very sketchy to me.

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

Also chuck e cheese, tgi fridays run these.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#128
> [Wonder is] creating the super app for mealtime [...] re-envisioning the future of food delivery [...] pioneering a new category of “Fast Fine” dining.

Press release copywriting is such an artform in ways I'm sure they don't intend for. I don't think I could spin "ghost kitchen ordering app" into that much bullshit. That takes real skill.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#129
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says they're unsanitary? Are they not subject to the same kinds of health inspections that regular restaurants have to go through?

In they U.S. they are often converted shipping containers or poorly regulated rental kitchens

I... don't think that's right?

edit: I did some research. Ghost kitchens are generally inspected by federal or state authorities, but laws for inspection vary widely by state, and it can be difficult for customers to see or understand inspection results. E.g. You go to a restaurant and see the health grade in the window, but when you order from an online vendor who shares the same kitchen with 5 other vendors, it's very hard to trace the food your getting to the kitchen it's being prepared in and the relevant inspection history.

more here: https://www.theregreview.org/2021/01/13/verniero-paranormal-...

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#130
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many normal restaurants do a lot of heating up pre-prepared food as well.

1990s app buzz: discover and distribute music 100,000% more efficiently than brick and mortar! 2020s app buzz: eat food at least as expensive as brick-and-mortar that is no worse in quality!

the easy wins are gone, but the funding is still there!
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