51–60 of 172 posts
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Jakarta has ridiculous urban sprawl, has worse traffic than any city in the US, and floods for months in the year. I lived there for years, it’s much harder to get around than LA or NY.
That probably explains why their model has the driver taking on the liability then.
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It's funny, I know almost no two people with similar experiences (user or courier). For example as a user I have literally never had a good experience with Caviar. It almost always wrong in different ways. As a courier one time the guy called and said that the restaurant was taking so long that Caviar would no longer pay him to wait so we ended up paying him out of pocket to cover it (he said we could cancel and get…
I live in a building that has a confusing relationship with it's name vs. the street its on. Uber (and Uber Eats) has never worked for me properly, and I always have to meet the courier at the door. Caviar always delivers directly to my door.
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food delivery service is blowing up because it's still extremely inefficient in the USA. you can get _anything_ delivered in Hong Kong for about $1. some hong kongers don't even have kitchens and live like that for years. travis kalanick is investing millions of his own cash into this space.
The density of HK is not comparable to basically anywhere in the US, except maybe just Manhattan. The labour sources are also a lot cheaper. There's room to improve in the US, like making kitchens without the attached restaurant more prevalent, but as long as you have to get in a car to deliver the food, there's going to be the same problems the rideshare industry faces.
1) Ghost kitchens that only serve via delivery apps. You can save on rent by setting it up in an area with no foot-traffic. You can also get economies of scale.
2) Restaurants with dedicated entrances for delivery drivers. Baar Baar in NYC has a separate place where delivery workers can wait. In other restaurants, they have to wait in the limited dining area. One hopes that the workers still get to use restrooms & get some water, etc.
The price seems high for something Square presumably needed to unload. Who else would have been bidding it up? And why are food delivery businesses still in a bubble? That's not a slam on businesses in a bubble phase, either. Many industries go through one before settling into a steady, sustainable state. Just surprised that delivery is still in one, while related industries, like ride-share are cooling off.
I'm guessing like most things in the US: investors are looking to consolidate so they can get into monopolistic positions and extract resources from the market once they have it cornered. The risk of legislative intervention into such anti-competitive market manipulations is virtually zero. If they get big enough, next time they steal wages, they won't have to back down. Heck, if they get big enough, they can steal w…
Intervention? The government only discourages anticompetitive practices. Literally buying a competitor is not one, its subject to approval at some amounts, but is not anticompetitive behavior, as in predictably by the rules.
There should be enough role models by now to dissolve whatever egalitarian promise you were fed in elementary school. Why even waste any breath on these completely ineffective set of rules, when you already know the playbook, you spelled it out! Play those cards man, generational wealth is knocking at your door
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That probably explains why their model has the driver taking on the liability then.
The driver doesn’t take on any liability at all, it’s all backed by the company. I’m not sure why you’re so keen to shit on this business when you don’t seem to know anything about it or the market it operates in.
For what it's worth, the general vibe I've gotten from couriers has been that Caviar is one of the best food delivery apps for them, and that DoorDash is among the worst.
We're going to see more consolidation, but are any of these companies addressing the treatment of their delivery drivers, or issues that are starting to crop up, like delivery drivers eating food that they're delivering?
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/18/perspectives/principles-gig-e...
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The driver doesn’t take on any liability at all, it’s all backed by the company. I’m not sure why you’re so keen to shit on this business when you don’t seem to know anything about it or the market it operates in.
Relax, I'm not attacking you or the business - you said this: "because with them the driver pays for the order, and then the customer pays the driver" which seems like a liability for the driver. It makes sense in a region that floods regularly.
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HK was just an example. it's true for most/all chinese cities.
Most/all Chinese cities are denser with cheaper labor than any US city so the point stands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Neither Shanghai or Beijing would make top 20 on this list