Well, yes. If you get someone to individually drive something cheap to your home then the cost of the delivery can be a large chunk of the final cost. I don't know why people would be surprised by that.
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Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
61–70 of 121 posts
Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
#62(small typo in the post title: "90% more than" should be "90% more expensive than")
Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
#63[deleted]
Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it's not a defensible business model because anyone can start such a company with very little expenses. I remember using waitersonwheels.com in the mid 90's and it wasn't any better than what's available now. Also, I know waiter.com has been around a long time and makes very good money. Perhaps the SF Bay Area is a unicorn where there are so many people with disposable income that their time is worth more than ov…
You can start such a company, but there's an overhead in getting on the minds of users and restaurant owners. Users don't want to have to keep multiple apps on their phone, or remember that the local Olive Garden uses OnlineFood but that the Greek place uses FoodNGo. We can have them order through the restaurant's web site and let them make the decision, but they're going to get frustrated if the drivers are fragment…
> they're going to get frustrated if the drivers are fragmented across the different services
Why would consumers care about this? For decades (centuries even!) restaurants managed to make delivery work with their own delivery people. And admittedly pooling delivery people is effective for restaurants that don't do a lot of delivery volume, but there's still really a lot of room for fragmentation.
> All people and restaurants want is somebody to get the food from point A to point B, without a lot of differentiation
Here's the thing though: there's a lot of differentiation! In my experience, delivery that's managed by restaurants tends to be orders of magnitude better than from the apps. The app delivery services bundle a bunch of deliveries together in such a way that your food sits around at the restaurant, then goes all over the city, then eventually reaches you an hour after it was made. This kind of thing rarely happens for me when restaurants manage delivery themselves.
> People go to restaurants so they don't have to cook, but they still pay the time to go and sit and wait
I mean... some people go to restaurants for this reason, I suppose, especially at the low-end of the market. But it's really hard for me to believe this is the primary reason people go to restaurants. If it were, you'd expect restaurants to be quite different.
Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
#65Food delivery in its current form will be short-lived. It is a 4 party system where the company controlling the money is the only one that wins. Restaurants are asked to pay 30% of the ticket. The customer is asked to pay more than expected for their meal, a delivery fee, and a tip. For the customer, this can be nearly double for a simple $10 lunch. The driver that has to deliver it gets stuck with fuel, automatic, a…
Don't forget the "service charge" (different to a tip, akin to Ticketmaster) I've started seeing on deliveroo in the UK
Presumably that's because it's not common to tip the delivery driver in the UK -- and if there is a tip, it's a token £1 or so.
Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
#66Who cares? Some people wish to pay for convenience. Let the market figure out what that is worth.
Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
#67I find the niche answer to this fascinating. With kosher restaurants (captive audience) in my city: 1. They increase their prices on skipthedishes and friends, in order to account for the price difference. 2. They add a piece of paper to EVERY ORDER indicating that if you call or text your food would be 30% cheaper, which includes a flat $3 delivery fee, and no need to tip the driver. 3. Many of them run targeted sub…
> They add a piece of paper to EVERY ORDER indicating that if you call or text... That's really clever, given that many of these delivery apps work by inserting themselves invisibly in front of the business. Having a communication channel that you know will reach the customer and that you know the delivery app can't block is a way of getting around some of the constant fight of "how do I make my real site show up abo…
Businesses are deluding themselves here. People use the big apps because they don't want to install a billion different special-case apps, set up their payments, set up their address etc etc etc, or literally phoning the restaurant (people don't want to speak on the phone anymore, they find it awkward.)
Hotels try to berate you for booking through a third-party but I ain't got time to go poking around on their individual websites.
Same with taxis - 'don't use Uber, just install this local app' - nice idea, but I really don't have time or space for a trillion local apps for the cities I visit all working slightly differently and needing different accounts - I try to keep it simple. I don't care if it's 5% better or 5% cheaper - it's 100% overhead compared to a single app and I don't want it.
Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
#68I find it very interesting that, according to my own brief observation, almost the opposite situation is happening in China.
In China the dominant food delivery platforms are ele.me and meituan. The food offered there are not marked-up so ridiculously compared to dining in.
As far as I understand, this is because
1. The demand is huge. People prefer food delivery, especially for lunch, to save time to either play mobile games, or squeeze more hours for work. Another reason is much more choices are available online than say within 10 minute commute.
2. Due to 1, food preparation is often moved to backstreet or upstairs where rent is significantly lower.
3. Due to 2, many sketchy food providers on the platforms are not actually restaurants. So, they don't have to bare the cost of regulation compliance like license or hygiene standards.
Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
#69Food delivery in its current form will be short-lived. It is a 4 party system where the company controlling the money is the only one that wins. Restaurants are asked to pay 30% of the ticket. The customer is asked to pay more than expected for their meal, a delivery fee, and a tip. For the customer, this can be nearly double for a simple $10 lunch. The driver that has to deliver it gets stuck with fuel, automatic, a…
Food delivery by car should actually be way more expensive than it is, if you consider the standard IRS mileage reimbursement rate for driving.
In my country, business mileage rates are based on the depreciation of a car that is quite nice, and quite new. The kind of car a professional salesperson might drive to visit clients.
For a delivery driver to show up in a BMW would be... very unusual.
Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant
#70Food delivery in its current form will be short-lived. It is a 4 party system where the company controlling the money is the only one that wins. Restaurants are asked to pay 30% of the ticket. The customer is asked to pay more than expected for their meal, a delivery fee, and a tip. For the customer, this can be nearly double for a simple $10 lunch. The driver that has to deliver it gets stuck with fuel, automatic, a…
I think you under estimate how many people are lazy and willing to eat all those costs to not leave their house, and have the food delivered right to their door. Even more so in big cities where most of the population doesn't have a car.