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Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

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Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#281

Post by hakfoo »

haltingproblem wrote: post #169
john_minsk wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree, but on the other side - if 20-30% is too much there will be competitors which offer 2-3% and theoretically all restaurants will move there as well as customers to pay 20-30% less. And tbh this should happen. UBER had to spend billions on marketing and getting their model "right". But now it is clear that such platform is essential for modern city. At some point UBER will have to get this money back w…

Good point. But Yes and no ;) Grub-less et.al are as much about ordering and checkout as they are about discovery . I can rank and view all restaurants offering Sushi in my delivery radius. This is what makes them powerful. Uber et.al are a marketplace. You are absolutely right in that they have zero switching costs but they have a two sided pool of supply (drivers) and riders (demand). This is hard to replicate.

I'm curious if they are actually a major discovery destination.

I suspect most customers are either starting looking for a restaurant they know by name, or one near them to ensure maximum freshness, using Google Maps or Yelp or the like. Only when they've already chosen a restaurant do we transition into the delivery app flow.

I'm sure a lot of money is being spent for chain restaurants to advertise "order via Postmates" or "exclusively on GrubHub"-- again bypassing them as a discovery system.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#284

Post by Natsu »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #247
Natsu wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true if all the plants run all their lines 24x7. If you have some plants that are not at capacity, you can hire additional shifts to produce more, run on weekends, etc. Then you have additional labor costs, overtime, materials costs, etc. to recoup. The manufacturing plant I once worked for had spare capacity for the better part of a decade, so it's not some completely unusual thing and was in fact part o…

Right, but that doesn't mean the price has to increase. If they are profitable and handle all their fixed costs running a single shift, then the second shift should be more profitable at the same price. (Assuming the machines can handle it, etc.)

Depends on how much overtime they have to factor into there. In the short term, especially for short term demand, it's going to be a lot of people making time and a half or 2x more likely than not.

A new shift will take a while to train up and temps are... ugh... don't even get me started about the sort of people temp agencies send. We had some that only lasted a day for not listening and doing stupidly unsafe things. One of them nearly hit me upside the head with a piece of glass because he wasn't paying attention to where he was swinging it. That was his last day on the job, for precisely that reason.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#285

Post by Natsu »

Kaze404 wrote: post #252
Natsu wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which human right is being abused here? People download the driver apps and work for them of their own free choice. As for pollution, if that's immoral, then so is going to the restaurant to eat itself as well as driving in general.

> Which human right is being abused here? People download the driver apps and work for them of their own free choice. Not counting of course the fact that in certain regions of the world, if they don't do that they'll starve to death.

I'm not aware of anyone running Uber, DoorDash, etc. where that's true. They require some sort of transport which prices the poor out of being able to provide that service in the poorest area I know of where such services are popular (Brazil).

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#286

Post by Natsu »

pixl97 wrote: post #242
Natsu wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they may be able to hire additional shifts or work overtime on existing production lines. Not every plant is run at a constant 24x7 three shift schedule. There are plenty of businesses that keep some slack in their manufacturing to respond to changes in demand as part of their corporate strategy, especially if they think there's an opportunity to gain market share.

What percent is that? Also dont look just at manufacturing, but things like transport and raw inputs.

That's the rub, of course, it's going to vary by time and by industry and I doubt anyone but those who run the places can give you real numbers.

But in my experience, there's usually some slack. Maybe not enough to pick up all the demand, but there's some. Maybe they have three shifts but don't work weekends or such. Then they can have people pulling lots of overtime.

Raw materials are usually well-stocked in advance. There is a limit on how much demand can spike before there are issues, of course, but some industries may have weeks or months worth of raw materials stocked. This is going to be highly variable by industry, though. Something like raw glass is nothing like stocking chickens for processing.

For TP I'd guess that they can stock a lot of raw materials, though. It's not made from anything that's going to go bad on them, so they probably stock up a lot based on whatever is cheapest.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#287

Post by esyir »

ethbro wrote: post #267
esyir wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concert case single monopoly that controls both part of the source as well as basically all sales is now comparable to the pile of separate delivery services that compete against each other. A claim that all of these have formed a cartel requires strong evidence.

The pile of delivery services is effectively 3, right? And 2 of those are potentially combining.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1080860/market-share-us-...

Looks like a split amongst 4 right now, as far as the big ones go. This doesn't include the smaller startups as well.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#288

Post by yomly »

haltingproblem wrote: post #6

They thrive because people are lazy - both restaurant and their customers. Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. The delivery apps have hundr…

>Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered.

But it's more than that. Centralisation of food delivery also means centralisation of your sign-in details + address + payment.

In the decentralised model, you rely on each of these restaurants to implement these well and securely. In the least worse case scenario they might go with some login with Google/Facebook solution (which is gross for other reasons). Not to mention the friction (and often sub-optimal sign-on flow) on these independent sites because they lack an army of UX A/B testers.

Last time I signed up independently for a restaurant via their app (because they took themselves off Uber Eats) the food took 2.5 hours to come and arrived cold.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#289

Post by kgantchev »

fzeroracer wrote: post #271
kgantchev wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast is in a position to throttle the internet because voters voted against the interests of the consumers. Specifically, the voters restricted other market participants from competing with Comcast. So the consumers are not acting in their own best interest as consumers and they're not acting in their own best interest as voters. Why is Comcast on the hook? With regards to the sweatshop labor: if you care not to b…

For your first argument: Isn't that argument absolving companies of all blame possible? If a company for example chooses to dump waste in a local river and there aren't any laws preventing that, is that because of the consumers failing to act in their own best interest? I just want to establish according to your logic at which point a company should be blamed for immoral behavior. It's also overly reductive and ignor…

On the issue of moral responsibility, I'm not sure I follow the analogy with dumping waste. Comcast has monopoly status because the government gives them exclusive access to the market. The company should be blames for immoral behavior when it morally responsible for the situation at hand. Comcast didn't make the laws that give it monopoly status, the voters did through their representatives.

Given how many people actually don't even bother to vote, I doubt voter suppression is the problem. It seems like an issue of implementation and limitation of the current political system. In contrast, "voter" turnout by consumers is 100%. Every product you buy is a vote you cast.

With regards to tracing the origins of a product: you're trying to fix a problem that's even worse with government. If you're so concerned that you aren't able to identify the origins of a product with 100% certainty, then we ought to compare it with the baseline: what is the trust factor with government? At any rate, the traceability of a product can get as accurate as you want it to be... so long as you pay enough money to establish it. If you want, you can be flown to every part of the world and you can personally ensure that every fiber of your clothes is not coming from a sweatshop. Of course, that would be insanely expensive, but it is possible. 99.99999999999% of consumers don't want that much transparency.

Re: Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

#290

Post by Kaze404 »

Natsu wrote: post #285
Kaze404 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which human right is being abused here? People download the driver apps and work for them of their own free choice. Not counting of course the fact that in certain regions of the world, if they don't do that they'll starve to death.

I'm not aware of anyone running Uber, DoorDash, etc. where that's true. They require some sort of transport which prices the poor out of being able to provide that service in the poorest area I know of where such services are popular (Brazil).

It's not unusual for poor people who don't own cars to rent (with a Uber driver discount). Otherwise, they work using bicycles in the case of Uber Eats and other food delivery services. Source: I live in Brazil.
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