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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

#281

Post by Reason077 »

robocat wrote: post #87
Reason077 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The food service industry certainly has some major global players too. Names like Bidfood, Sysco, PFG, etc. In some cases, these same companies cater/supply everything from prison, school, and hospital kitchens through to fancy airline lounges and high-end restaurants!

> Bidfood Wow - I didn't realise bidfood.co.nz was a US chain bidfood.com (Bidcorp). Food markets keep closing down. The consolidation of restaurant suppliers really affects the quality of taste a restaurant can get. My ex was a cook and the worse restaurants wouldn't even make their own sauces like Hollandaise - she would tell me what brand it was (often a restaurant supplier brand). It is noticeable when the chef h…

> "Wow - I didn't realise bidfood.co.nz was a US chain bidfood.com (Bidcorp)."

It's actually a South African/UK headquartered group, I believe. But operates in many countries around the world.

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

#282

Post by [deleted] »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #279
delichon wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain why people are collectively spending billions of dollars on these services if they provide nearly no benefit to anyone.

I said "nearly," not no benefit whatsoever. Personally speaking, I use it because it allows me to be lazy. Every time I do I say next time I wont.

[deleted]

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

#283

Post by harimau777 »

nradov wrote: post #232
motorest wrote: post #203

Earlier 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 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.

I don't think that simply the ability to perform a task is sufficient for competition. It could still be impossible for a newcomer to compete with established corps' marketing budget and economies of scale.

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

#284

Post by harimau777 »

jack_h wrote: post #217
motorest wrote: post #203

Earlier 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 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.

If five companies competing is anti-competitive, then how many competitors does it take to suddenly become competitive and why? What is the significance of this larger-than-five number? Is it the same across industries? How do you derive it? This seems to rest on the mistaken belief that a corollary of monopolies being bad is that more competition is always better than less competition. If everyone was a competitor i…

Perhaps the issue isn't whether there is a specific number of companies. It seems to me that there is a competition problem when companies behave in a way that is harmful/disliked/bad but no one steps in to provide an alternative because they can't compete with established marketing, economies of scale, network effects, etc.

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

#285

Post by data-ottawa »

leonidasv wrote: post #192
Aurornis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The target audience for consolidated food delivery apps isn’t the person who wants to manage the fine details of ordering from 10-20 different local restaurants. The majority of people using these apps just want to scroll some restaurants and order something quickly. Saving 10% by going through extra steps, installing extra apps, going to a company’s website, and doing custom orders isn’t what most of their repeat cu…

Most consumer are just like that. I'm the one who don't bother ordering directly to get better value, but I started noticing less and less restaurants (that I order from) having this option anymore. They probably saw too little people using it and stopped accepting, sadly.

Having dedicated delivery drivers stops making sense after a while

One benefit of these apps is companies which would never have had a driver now can be ordered, but the cost is all the businesses who did no longer do.

And it’s going to be a hard sell for a small business owner to pay for not employees that are in low demand by the consumer vs the zero fixed cost apps that manage that for you.

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

#286

Post by potamic »

graemep wrote: post #226
grues-dinner wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put a cap on company size. No organisation can be worth more than (say) a few hundred million. You can still make big and complex things but it'll have to be several small(er) companies working in concert, which is already kind of how massive companies work internally anyway. Less efficient, maybe, but I am not entirely convinced that huge companies hoovering up any attempt at competition leads to efficiencies in the…

I have long had ideas on those lines: https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/fix-capitalism

Really good. I have one more proposal.

Capital gains tax that increases progressively with gains, and decreases progressively with duration i.e. incentivize significant investors to create long term value instead of chasing quick exits.

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

#287

Post by immibis »

khurs wrote: post #77
Aeolun wrote: post #46

Two companies now control 90% of the phone market. I think the restaurant food delivery market is quite healthy.

Do you mean the App Stores rather than the phone market? That is soon to be 3, as Harmony OS takes hold in China and other markets.

I thought Harmony was a banned word in China. It's what the government called its own totalitarianism, then it's what the people called the government's totalitarianism, then the government banned it because they don't want people to talk about the totalitarianism.

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

#288

Post by bdcravens »

msgodel wrote: post #269
daedrdev wrote: post #23

I think the truth is restaurant food delivery is a luxgury good, literally “private taxi for your burrito” yet many people spend like it isnt.

Also if it's really an issue for restaurants they can do delivery the way pizza/Chinese restaurants used to do without having to deal with any third parties. Of all the things to worry about this is probably the least important.

It's a bigger issue for consumers who are willing to pay $39 for a $24 dinner.

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

#289

Post by kazinator »

robertlagrant wrote: post #267
kazinator wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech companies are not like other companies because they can trivially create vendor lock-in without any geographic constraints on where the customers are. In fact, it's harder to avoid vendor-lock in in tech; it takes extra work to open things up, possibly a lot of extra work. Even a well-intentioned open-source program can garner a user base which can't easily migrate off it.

The customer is responsible for avoiding vendor lock-in, not the vendor.

Sure! Don't like your country's passport application website? I'm sure debian.org has an alternative for you.

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

#290

Post by bdcravens »

nikolayasdf123 wrote: post #194
daedrdev wrote: post #23

I think the truth is restaurant food delivery is a luxgury good, literally “private taxi for your burrito” yet many people spend like it isnt.

no it is not. meituan in china is very very cheap.

Is it customary to tip the delivery person? This always increases the actual cost.
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