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Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

marketsaintefficient.substack.com

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Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#241

Post by lozenge »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #57
nomadygnt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopolies are anti-competitive. Without competition there is no incentive for innovation, lowering prices, not price-gouging etc. Is a 10x better product really 10x better if it is also 10x more expensive and there is no alternative?

Not innovating, maintaining high prices, and price-gouging are unstable activities for a monopoly, as in it would open up a void for effective competition. The real anti-competitive actions is that it becomes cost effective to do regulatory capture / pay bribes to politicians. A monopoly can pay to play in a way that fledging competitors cannot. Once the industry has been captured then they can do rent seeking behavi…

The article refutes this even in its URL - markets are not efficient.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#242

Post by RamblingCTO »

almosthere wrote: post #183
Klonoar wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of citing an AI, why don't you cite an actual reputable source? Those facts it ingested and regurgitated no doubt came from somewhere, and you're clearly attempting to use the facts to prove a point. An authoritative source is more helpful than attributing it to [insert ai bot here].

disagree

yes, a "source" that's widely known for producing false information is a reliable source, you're right.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#243

Post by Karrot_Kream »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #114
TylerE wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sysco is probably pretty close if you ignore the extremes of the market.

While Sysco is a monopoly, they apparently don't make anyone angry enough to get rid of them. My guess is that they are pretty even-handed across an entire industry and their customers are knowledgeable enough to not screw up a good thing when they see it.

No I think tech just gets obsessive media coverage these days (both from MSM and from influencers.) I know lots of event companies that hate Sysco, it just doesn't get as many clicks as a tech company does.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#244

Post by RamblingCTO »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #35
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #11

This is essentially the story of tech companies across nearly every industry where they have come to dominate. This is one reason that I see most tech companies as essentially a net negative for society at large, as the goal is nearly always to control a large monopoly (and this is fully admitted by many tech leaders, e.g. Thiel) which the Internet makes possible. Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usu…

And why is a large monopoly a net negative? I read his book and he says that monopolies are 10x better products, and if monopolies are 10x better then why are they bad? Are you arguing that it would be better to keep using 10x worse products, for the sake of there not being any monopolies?

he didn't produce any proof of that statement and I figure neither can you. so let's assume this as false, shall we?

we see lot's of examples of how monopolies (or similar) tend to do rent extraction. that's why we're talking about enshittification so much. it's because they only care about profit (and on a small time frame as well), not the product, not the customers, nor the planet.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#245

Post by Mashimo »

esco27 wrote: post #28

The food industry is due for a good old opensource disruption, where each restaurant can setup their private menu hub (like you would an instagram account), add their payment processing details, and start delivering their own orders. It's a win-win for the restaurant and their recurring customers.

Similar to how JustEats works. Or at least used to. The restaurants have their own driver, and create their own menu. Though I think the cut from JustEats is still quite high.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#246

Post by Tostino »

ghssds wrote: post #196
Tostino wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody that built a TPM product for the industry, I hate prison and school bids. It's so fucking dystopian.

Can you tell us more?

It's lowest bidder, shit tier quality food that is usually a different SKU than they sell retail / food service (because people wouldn't buy it for themselves).

The people making the decision to buy this slop aren't the ones who have to eat it.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#247

Post by niclas-183 »

lynx97 wrote: post #201
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #175

Earlier 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…

I think OP's point wasn't so much about the fundamental services being bad or harmful to most of their users, but rather about the over-optimization of every single tech service toward finding ways to build on people's bad instincts and decision-making to squeeze just a penny more out of them.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#248

Post by jjani »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #239
WalterBright wrote: post #145

Earlier 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…

> 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

Spot on, it's so sad to see this kind of thinking so ingrained in people, when literally 3 seconds of critical thinking would lead to the opposite conclusion. Are kids just as selfish as adults, at every age? Does their selfishness change depending on what they're taught and how selfish their role models are? Is selfishness among adults at the exact same level across decades, eras, cultures, nations?

If the answer to any of these questions is "no" (and anyone capable of using HN should realistically be answering them as such), then it's abundantly clear you can't just hold up your hands and say "oh well, everybody is inherently selfish, 'ts just the way it is". Even the idea of everyone being somewhat selfish isn't really true when you consider the countless cases of people literally sacrificing their own lives through history - and not for some kind of post-mortem glory. One can argue semantics over that still being "selfish" as it's done to further a goal of themselves but that's just wasting everyone's time.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#249

Post by denvermullets »

i stopped ordering delivery for the most part as i'd rather walk and get it than pay the markup. a lot of restaurants are either spinning up their own app with discounts OR are offering a discount for ordering directly thru them. and honestly, i'd rather a local restaurant get more profit than just cutting it over to one of the apps.

a month ago my wife wanted to order chipotle on a lazy sunday and it was $64 for delivery and only $31 when i went to stand in line and get it. unreal.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#250

Post by niclas-183 »

safety1st wrote: post #214
fasterik wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a George Carlin bit about politicians. The punchline is "the problem isn't the politicians, it's the people." His point is that nothing emerges from a vaccuum. Politicians are people just like everyone else, they're just responding to incentives created by a majority vote. Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services. If Carlin were a…

Carlin's actual view is a lot more nuanced than that. Big Tech (along with Walmart, Visa and more) have gotten to where they are by employing illegal business practices such as price discrimination and exclusive dealing. These tactics laid the groundwork for the mass mergers and rollups and the monopolies and oligopolies that dominate America today. The laws on the books which prohibit them, like Robinson-Patman and…

The ever-increasing flood of information (crises, as you call them) will, I believe, eventually become the downfall of our political system. There is already so much to read in a single day that you probably couldn't consume it all in your remaining lifetime if you tried. LLMs will only make this worse. Eventually, super-powers—whether political or economic—will send out so much misinformation about everything that no one can really follow it or distinguish truth from falsehood. People will simply stop participating in the global conversation, and their votes will become obsolete and guided by the most intruiging stories.
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