Regardless of market position, are food delivery companies actually making money at the moment?
Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
71–80 of 350 posts
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, why do you need software? In the 80s, I delivered pizza with no software. The place had a normal cash register, for pickups. People would call, order, and we'd write it down. They it'd go on a wire with a clothes pin, until made. Then it went with the driver. Each delivery was written down before leaving with it. This worked for decades for everyone in the industry, flawlessly, perfectly, without issue. Why…
as long as you've got enough order volume to keep a delivery driver consistently busy, that works fine and the apps are unnecessary. for a pizza restaurant, or anybody else focused on delivery orders, the apps aren't necessary the utility of the apps is to distribute the load from multiple restaurants across a shared pool of delivery drivers, so a restaurant who otherwise wouldn't be able to offer delivery can tap in…
Once you have multiple restaurants, you leave the mom and pop shop scenario, and move into realms of more sensible optimization.
But there are so many independents. And they make very good food. And they still do it without apps, and do very well.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#73The title scared me a bit before I opened the article and realized it was talking about restaurant->consumer food delivery services. While that isn't great, I was initially thinking was that the companies that facilitate the food delivery supply chains around the world were massively consolidated (I sure hope they aren't)
restaurant food distribution is event more consolidated. For example in the Midwest there is really only 1-2 companies you can get your seafood from. It has its pros and cons. Source: I work in restaurants and I also supply these distributors
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#74The title scared me a bit before I opened the article and realized it was talking about restaurant->consumer food delivery services. While that isn't great, I was initially thinking was that the companies that facilitate the food delivery supply chains around the world were massively consolidated (I sure hope they aren't)
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!
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Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#75The title scared me a bit before I opened the article and realized it was talking about restaurant->consumer food delivery services. While that isn't great, I was initially thinking was that the companies that facilitate the food delivery supply chains around the world were massively consolidated (I sure hope they aren't)
I'm pretty sure the food supply sources are massively consolidated. I don't know about the delivery part or why that would matter more than the actual food production. A quick search will lead to quotes like "Four companies now control more than half of the market in chicken processing (Tyson, JBS, Perdue, and Sanderson), close to 70 percent in pork (Smithfield, JBS, Tyson, and Hormel), and nearly three quarters in b…
Margins on food staples like Chicken are very low, which suggests that consolidation is inevitable.
Supermarket margins are also very low.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why is a large monopoly a net negative? I read his book and he says that monopolies are 10x better products, and if monopolies are 10x better then why are they bad? Are you arguing that it would be better to keep using 10x worse products, for the sake of there not being any monopolies?
A monopoly could be 10 times as good, but what is their incentive to be 10 times as good?
We have to distinguish between monopolies that keep their status by being great versus monopolies that have something else going on.
Google (search) is an example of the former. Search is a very expensive business to be in, but most of the costs are in scraping, indexing and software development, not actual query execution. The more users you have, the more you can spend while still keeping margins constant, and the more you spend, the better your engine is, which gives you more users.
This leads to the situation where you only have two competing search engines[1], one of which sucks and only exists because it's propped up by Microsoft. However, this is only true as long as Google keeps their quality up. If Bing suddenly became significantly better than Google, people would gradually start switching.
20th century AT&T is an example of the latter phenomenon. It was a monopoly because of US regulations, which made the barriers to entry insanely high. This meant AT&T could set almost whatever prices they wanted, as consumers didn't have a choice anyway.
[1] Engines like Kagi or DDG don't count, as they still fundamentally rely on Google's or Bing's indexes.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#77Two 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.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone hates calling and apps give customers a list of restaurants with menus to browse. Restaurants also do all of their in-restaurant management with software (why not paper? ask them idk) which I assume has some integration with the app. I can imagine some type of open protocol that lets them self-host an order service though, or at least an open solution that’s hosted by many providers and many separate apps. T…
Maybe we should all make the world a better place, suck it up, and just call? Maybe making the world a better place, means human interaction and less automation.
That would make my own world worse
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
>are you saying the market was so small that it might as well not have existed? They're saying that the space these companies are competing in literally did not exist. It didn't in the US, maybe not 15 years ago, but 20 years ago it was nonexistent.
Waiters on Wheels was founded in 1987 and had cornered the market. But they really only did large orders as far as I'm aware; used more for a corporate lunch than a dinner for two at home.
B2B and B2C are so different from each other they are essentially entirely different market segments, even if they are providing roughly equivalent services.
Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why is a large monopoly a net negative? I read his book and he says that monopolies are 10x better products, and if monopolies are 10x better then why are they bad? Are you arguing that it would be better to keep using 10x worse products, for the sake of there not being any monopolies?
How can a company make delivery 10x better? The expected result of a monopoly are rising prices and at best indifferent service and quality.
> How can a company make delivery 10x better?
By improving the consumer experience. Better optimizations of which couriers go where and by what routes, faster delivery times (and hence warmer food), menus and restaurant directories optimized to show you what you actually want, better delivery time estimation, no need to talk to a human or re-enter your details for each new restaurant, that sort of thing.
At Uber scale, you have people working on improving metrics, and those improvements translate across all the restaurants that exist across the world. "John's Chicken" won't hire their own guys to do A/B testing on which pictures of their food generate more sales.