All fueled by illegal/irregular/undocumented migrants.
I think there will be some sort of socio-economic reckoning from this in the future...
Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
231–240 of 350 posts
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anti-trust for an industry where there are at least five companies doing well in any given space? That's not called a monopoly, it's called competition. Edit: I wasn't accusing everyone who is critical of tech of being a Luddite. The attitude that nearly every tech company is a net negative for society goes quite a bit beyond criticism.
> Anti-trust for an industry where there are at least five companies doing well in any given space? That's not called a monopoly, it's called competition You need to be completely out of touch with reality to read an article on 5 companies dominating a global market and your take from that info is that there are no anticompetitive practices because 5 is more than 1.
There is infinite competition for food delivery. People can just go pick up their own damn food.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anti-trust for an industry where there are at least five companies doing well in any given space? That's not called a monopoly, it's called competition. Edit: I wasn't accusing everyone who is critical of tech of being a Luddite. The attitude that nearly every tech company is a net negative for society goes quite a bit beyond criticism.
> Anti-trust for an industry where there are at least five companies doing well in any given space? That's not called a monopoly, it's called competition You need to be completely out of touch with reality to read an article on 5 companies dominating a global market and your take from that info is that there are no anticompetitive practices because 5 is more than 1.
In the IO literature it would be expected that five companies of vaguely similar size in oligopolistic competition (say Cournot competition for simplicity) would be pretty close to the equilibrium of a perfectly competitive market.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Local communities" existed for millennia and didn't manage to reduce the child mortality rate and extreme poverty rate to effectively zero. I know neoliberalism is a dirty word, and there are plenty of problems with the modern world, but I would rather live in a neoliberal global society than the "local" world of 200 years ago.
Again, you have many more options than just 2.
What are those other options, and where have they been proven to work at scale?
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#235The elites don't want you to know, but you can pick up your own food for free. I have picked up 200 pizzas.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's an air of let's go back to the good old days when we were hunter gatherers to the whole thing. I strongly disagree. On the contrary, I see the arch of many technological advancements in that, in the beginning, they solve a crucial need, but then once they solve that problem they attempt to hijack the positive feedback systems of humans (e.g. addiction systems) to stay in power. Consider the food industry. M…
Just because Americans have an obesity problem doesn't make every food vendor a drug dealer. Come on, get real. Basically everything that is being sold can be abused by the user. Does that mean every vendor of anything is potentially a bad actor? I believe you are exaggregating. BTW, I virtually never thought about Thiel when I ordered a Pizza. Is there a reason why you drag the owners into this? It basically sounds…
It’s by degrees right? You can make a business that treats people as well as you can manage while feeding yourself, but almost anybody will want more than that, and some people want way more than that for a variety of social and innate reasons. Eventually you cross some arbitrary threshold where you’re doing, or at least enabling, really awful mistreatment of people and you use the level of indirection you have or some ideology or some excuse to justify it, but that’s when it’s a problem. People above the parent commentor’s wage class just so happen to also be the people most susceptible to this process, which is why they’re in a high position in the first place. Also, not that this is particularly important, but many or most of them (the extremely rich) dislike and look down on you because they need to in order to feel alright about their position. You don’t owe them kindness that they won’t return.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#237Tragic that I spent much of my economics classes at high school and university learning about "perfect competition". I get that it's a theoretical underpinning, and rarely a reality, but still. I remember learning that monopolies being really frowned upon ... and yet here we are ... in a world of increasing monopoly.
The last two decades have been a joke in relation to anti-monopoly action.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#238I think the truth is restaurant food delivery is a luxgury good, literally “private taxi for your burrito” yet many people spend like it isnt.
Restaurant delivery... I tend to agree. 'nonperishable food' or 'properly packed short travel' (i.e. dairy/frozen) IMO is a fairer niche of 'could be non-luxury with better societal outcomes', except for the 'as close to JIT as possible'. There's ways to optimize the process to where something on the scale of 10-20 homes could get their main groceries delivered two or 3 times a week and the overall cost would be lowe…
I totally agree in theory, in the same way I agree that Amazon delivering everything from a nearby warehouse is far more optimal than having thousands of small bookshops or random shops in prime locations.
I think that's the main vision behind Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens since he left Uber. You could order food prep for your week from a choice of menus, and the food would be prepared in an industrial kitchen for you and thousands of other people around you. It's basically restaurant-quality food that you can eat at home and isn't frozen.
Unfortunately for the meal prep market, I believe the break-even point for scale is much more difficult to achieve. Food is like hardware but with a much shorter end-of-life. You would need consistency in ordering to avoid excess spoilage and to operate at scale within small geographical pockets to make the delivery worthwhile. I really believe this could work with the right demographics and in the right geography, it's just much harder than simply delivering takeaways.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's the bit on Youtube (I couldn't find an Archive link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSAxtIYM08 This is the right conclusion, and I love sharing that video for that reason. As of 2025 everyone globally has everything they need to make the world a great place for everyone. Instead, people continue to take the lowest energy route for their personal actions, which means they do not even think about the external…
> I've tried to start multiple non-heirarchical anarchist cooperative organizations and the number one challenge is finding people who will put the group ahead of the individual. It just doesn't happen. I could have saved you the trouble if you'd just asked me! Over 20,000 communes have been started in the US. None have survived. What baffles me is why people keep believing they can work. Free markets work because it…
> it harnesses the inherent selfishness of everybody
the biggest lie we're constantly being told: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Ostrom.html. this really annoys me, we're not inherently selfish. at least not most people. free markets don't work in any rate. how do you even come to this conclusion?
also, lots of counter examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've tried to start multiple non-heirarchical anarchist cooperative organizations and the number one challenge is finding people who will put the group ahead of the individual. It just doesn't happen. I could have saved you the trouble if you'd just asked me! Over 20,000 communes have been started in the US. None have survived. What baffles me is why people keep believing they can work. Free markets work because it…
I’m very aware of those unfortunately I was a devotee of Mr Rogers growing up and I’ve seen really successful people start from nothing and help others 40 years of hope in humanity is hard to kill but it finally died so that’s that It took proving it mathematically to get me there
I don't know, there are plenty of (long running) examples to be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives