Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
New types of restaurants are popping up: 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 th…
You can't. This is the kind of a mistake that all first time entrepreneurs make. Delivery costs too much money. Logistics of getting your labor force to your kitchen is a nightmare.
> 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.
This was tried in NYC during first dot com. Remember purple shirts? They had a competitor with green shirts. That's the unproductive spaces. Rent hikes wiped those out.
Edit: Blind downvotes are laughable. Go walk into your local pizza place and talk to the owners. They will tell you why they are slowly dropping off all the apps. They are giving equivalent of a 20-30% discount in fees for the area they already deliver in.
Ghost kitchens are mostly scams. The ones that aren't are ran out of commissary commercial kitchens that cost an arm and a leg. The "ghost kitchens" are mostly not really legal, sometimes ran out of a house, marketing same stuff under different names. Most of the restaurant overhead for small places does not come from the rent of the floor space. It comes from the rent of the kitchen and compliance with the health codes. And, unlike say taxi commissions, health departments take no crap, which is why the ghost restaurants disappear rather quickly.
It is the "no one did it before" idea of people who have never ran restaurants. It always flops. If it did not, Union Sq Hospitality would have been doing it for years.