Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

about.grubhub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 169 posts

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#31

Post by fragmede »

crmd wrote: post #15

Support your local restaurants. Don’t let these vampire platform companies enshitify your city’s food scene.

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 someone changes their mind while on the phone with the restaurant. Orrrr (after we pick a restaurant) we just pass the phone around.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#33

Post by eszed »

hunter2_ wrote: post #23
darth_avocado wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get $10/month dining credits if you’re an Amex card holder. Imagine the cost of all promotions.

I always wondered if the promotions were handled with restaurants more like "we (the platform) recoup our promo losses via the regular platform fee you (the restaurant) pay regardless" or more like "if a customer uses a promotion, we (platform and restaurant) split the loss, unrelated to the regular platform fee". Like when I use a platform promo for reasons well beyond trying a new place for the first time, am I scr…

Mostly the restaurant, at least in the case of these companies' "free delivery" membership deals. Restaurants pay a higher commission on those orders. (Whether that's enough to outweigh the operating deficit built into their current pricing I have no idea, but some fraction is being passed along to their merchant "partners".)

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#35

Post by sib »

I wonder (no pun intended) how much of this is driven by Marc's residual dislike of Amazon?

Amazon currently has a partnership with Grubhub to provide Grubhub delivery as a Prime benefit.

Amazon competed strongly (some might say unfairly) many years ago with Marc's first big startup, Diapers.com, and effectively forced him to sell to Amazon.

He later started Jet.com and sold it to Walmart - in many ways as a second chance to compete with Amazon.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#36

Post by skywhopper »

bsimpson wrote: post #3

Those weird ghost kitchen things have more than half a billion dollars to spend on acquisitions?! I wonder how this came to be - did they already have that big of a war chest, or did they hear they could buy a name brand and go back to their investors to finance it?

Looks like they only spent $150M in cash and took on $500M of debt to do the ancquisition. They raised $250M from outside investors to pay for it. So sounds like they have $100M to try to make a go of it.

I expect the value to go way down as they squeeze all sides of the equation: drivers, restaurants, and customers.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#37

Post by refulgentis »

bsimpson wrote: post #3

Those weird ghost kitchen things have more than half a billion dollars to spend on acquisitions?! I wonder how this came to be - did they already have that big of a war chest, or did they hear they could buy a name brand and go back to their investors to finance it?

IMHO it's sort of the inverse*: its not that weird ghost kitchen things have $500 mil for acquisitions, its that Marc Lore has enough salesmanship to get private capital to lend $100M to get a turnkey delivery business for his food entrepreneurship, and the banker loans can pretty it up to sound like $600M, and the decision makers at GrubHub get a mildly-embarrassing outcome instead of an extreme outcome. (shutdown)

* I know a decent amount about finance, but don't practice it daily enough to find it second nature. I'd appreciate a similarly colloquial perspective from someone who reads me as naive.

Re: Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

#38

Post by talldayo »

fragmede wrote: post #31
crmd wrote: post #15

Support your local restaurants. Don’t let these vampire platform companies enshitify your city’s food scene.

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…

Ah, but there's the catch. Resturants aren't meeting you there, Grubhub workers are. Resturaunts largely just optimize for takeout, and whether or not your food arrives warm is less of their problem and more of the Grubhub worker's issue. And as delivery drivers quit over low pay and their businesses go bankrupt, I really see no way for restaurants to support this behavior.

Additionally, you have to look at it from a pragmatic perspective. When I visit the East and West coast of the US, meal delivery is popular enough that you might think it's a booming business. Everywhere else it's pretty much dead though. In places where the cost of living isn't enough to compensate for a restaurant and their middleman (read: most of the US), you can't even find a driver most hours of the day. It's one of those nonsense businesses like Uber that seems like a great idea on paper but one that falls apart outside the Bay Area economy. Most places in America are not gentrified enough to pay peons gas money in exchange for hand-delivered McDonalds.

Post reply on HN