8 ms·

I’ve been delivering for Postmates and DoorDash

67 points by steven 11y ago

jellicle 11y ago
When I read stories like this, my only thought is how little San Francisco resembles any other city in the world. If you are designing your [next big thing] to be successful in SF, it won't be successful anywhere else. If you are designing it to be successful in the real world, it won't be successful in SF. No, people outside SF are not going to pay $15 delivery on an $18 salad in order to receive it an hour late. No amount of venture capital thrown away will change this.
- peternicky 11y ago
  You forgot to include New York in the list. Totally agree with you.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  As a Greek, it's very odd to me why many other cultures don't seem to have the food delivery element. Here, you can get virtually every type of food, from fast food, to street food, to restaurant food, delivered, free of charge, in around ten minutes, from 9 am to 2 am. No other country I've traveled to really had this, you could, at most, get pizza delivered until 10pm or so. Can anyone shed some light?
  - antidaily 11y ago
    Big cities and college towns in the US have delivery of everything. Same hours you mentioned. Some delivery til 4am.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Hmm, I haven't seen that in SF, LA or NY, but it's possible I just didn't know places delivered.
      - maxerickson 11y ago
        It's certainly only a subset of eating establishments in the US that offer delivery, but it is widely available.
      - hencq 11y ago
        My experience is that in NY you can basically get any food at any time you want. SF and LA, not so much.
      - URSpider94 11y ago
        Sorry, but almost every restaurant in NY delivers ... When I lived there we used to have a giant basket of menus on the kitchen counter, everything from sushi to Argentinian arepas to Cajun.
  - GFischer 11y ago
    Here in Montevideo, Uruguay, delivery is huge, and the biggest startup exit in the country was PedidosYa (sold to DeliveryHero), works in Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo https://www.deliveryhero.com/delivery-hero-conquers-latin-america/ https://www.deliveryhero.com/delivery-hero-conquers-latin-am...
- kevindeasis 11y ago
  I see alot of startups, in different forums ie: reddit, producthunt, etc; that have a model like Uber. For instance, Uber for breakfast, etc. It's quite shocking that some people providing X as a service forget into account the demographics of where they are starting. Imagine if there was a startup exactly like Uber and started in Alaska, would it really be successful? So, in addition to what you said, a startup may also not work if it doesn't start (or become successful) in a city like San Francisco/ New York
- 6stringmerc 11y ago
  Very cogent point! Living in North Texas, I recently saw a map highlight thing that showed this region is about the same size as Connecticut. Sure, there are some population density centers to make urban stuff work, but the 'inconvenience' factor of getting around, parking, etc, etc aren't parallels.
- frozenport 11y ago
  In the article it wasn't even in at a later hour! A 33 dollar salad approaches the profligacy of Sodom and Gomorrah :-)
  - Cymen 11y ago
    Is the customer actually paying $33 or is that $15 in VC juice to grease the system?
- sim0n 11y ago
  Except Postmates is already operating in over 100 cities other than San Francisco.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Illuminating! I'm wondering, who can live in San Francisco on $16 per hour?
- detaro 11y ago
  Probably not her main/only job?
- arebop 11y ago
  That could be enough if your housing is free, and with rent control some people have very cheap housing.
- SilasX 11y ago
  They don't. Most likely, they drive in off-rush-hour (like Uber drivers).
- greghinch 11y ago
  6 people in a 3 bedroom?
- SeoxyS 11y ago
  That's about double the minimum wage. I'm sure a lot of people live here on less than that. Sure, they're not paying downtown market prices for housing… but a rent-controlled unit in the sunset doesn't sound implausible.
- lsc 11y ago
  Rent control in San Francisco is... dramatic. My brother lives in SF in a really nice place that has a little bit of a bay view, even, and he made about that much when he moved in. My understanding is that The law prevents the landlord from keeping rent in line with market, and makes it hard for the landlord to evict the current tenant, and even limits how much the landlord can jack up the rent between tenants. Often in situations where one person has the master lease and then rents out rooms, that one person will keep a lot of the difference... but not always. Quite often, it would seem, they are just more picky about choosing roommates. But the upshot is that there are a small number of very inexpensive units in SF. As far as I can tell, you have to know someone (or know someone who knows someone) and then you have to be lucky, and then that someone needs to like you. But if all those things happen? potentially, you can have cheaper rent in SF than you can in San Jose.
Canada 11y ago
The courier must arrive before the food is ready and wait for it. The food must be packed so that the least damage occurs. (eg. crispy needs to breathe, yet be kept warm) The courier must deliver it in under 10 minutes worst case, but within 5 minutes on average. Like the constraint of the speed of light on networks, no amount of money can change this. Some food ages like VOIP traffic. Pizza and Chinese delivery do well in the worst case. They reheat well. Look at what airlines serve. To survive these new delivery services need to make a profit delivering food that is unprofitable for individual establishments to deliver themselves.
- FlamingHotRam 11y ago
  > The food must be packed so that the least damage occurs. (eg. crispy needs to breathe, yet be kept warm) I wonder how much room there is to specialize in doing this right. The vast majority of the time I order delivery, food tends to come in super-budget containers that degrade the experience. Pizzas arriving in cardboard boxes, the taste altered by 10+ minutes of steaming and dripping oil... asian food tends to arrive in the clam-shell styrofoam containers that mush up some vegetables or turn crispy fried food soggy, with sauces in thin plastic cups that invariably leak at least a little... When was the last time anyone rethought delivery? The experience could be so much better. What if soups used parfait-style containers to keep the liquids separate from dry mix-ins (eg fried chicken) until right before consumption? What if pizza boxes had oil-absorbant padding and better venting? And what about standardizing those container sizes like we standardized shipping containers, so food doesn't get jumbled in a plastic bag? Seems like that would open the window to containers with heating/cooling packs as well, which would help batch-deliver orders more efficiently. How much of a market is there for companies that handle shipping and packaging/handling of delivery orders? Owning the full delivery experience instead of just some cars.
  - qq66 11y ago
    That's what the vertically integrated delivery companies like Munchery do. Ultimately I think this model will win, since the food prep facility does not need to need to pay rent in a restaurant neighborhood, and the food can be designed for deliverability.
caseyf7 11y ago
This helps explain something I've noticed over time using these services. At first, it seemed like most of the delivery people were local and now it seems like they are coming from further and further outside the bay area. When the drivers are driving monster trucks, they probably don't live in an urban area.
- ryanSrich 11y ago
  Wait what? You get postmates delivered via monster truck? How is that even legal?
  - SilasX 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure the parent didn't mean a literal monster truck, but some kind of large, hoisted pickup truck that's more typical of rural areas.
fpgaminer 11y ago
I'm surprised DoorDash et al. didn't do away with tips. It causes consternation for the couriers, is easily forgotten by the customers, and seems to have no benefit. You can choose to set the tip when placing the order, or give a cash tip when the driver arrives. The former is convenient, but meaningless; how do you set a tip for a service not yet performed? The latter is inconvenient, especially if you don't carry the necessary cash. It complicates the delivery interaction, is more likely to be forgotten, and still won't be very accurate. Are you going to take the food out of the bag and check it before you tip and let the courier leave? Uber did away with tips, and it's wonderful. Drivers know how much they're going to make, riders know how much they're spending, there is no awkwardness or pressure, and the rating system does a far better job at maintaining level of service. My only experience has been with DoorDash. They should do away with tips and overhaul their post-experience rating system. Right now the only options are to give one overall rating to the whole experience, which is useless, or to report a problem, and even then you're only able to report one problem. If, for example, both your delivery was messed up and the order was wrong, you can't tell DoorDash about both. You have to choose one. And their customer service takes 12 hours to respond, with completely arbitrary refunds. Compare to Uber who has responded to all my inquiries within 3 minutes. Still worse, when I report a problem with my order (wrong items) ... who gets blamed? Does DoorDash investigate and see who was at fault, to correctly apply blame, or do they automatically blame the restaurant? None of that is made clear to the customer, and so it gives me pause whenever I report problems.
- awakeasleep 11y ago
  Does anyone know how having a tipped postition affects the law? I'm curious if these companies gain some sort of protection (from fulltime workers, from minimum wage laws, etc) by having their employees be paid by tip.
  - josu 11y ago
    I don't think they are considered "employees".
  - MaxGhenis 11y ago
wpietri 11y ago
This is another one of those things that I blame on what is certainly a hot boom and what many call a bubble. Look at HomeJoy for comparison: https://medium.com/backchannel/why-homejoy-failed-bb0ab39d901a https://medium.com/backchannel/why-homejoy-failed-bb0ab39d90... In a saner funding environment, people get small things working reasonably well and then scale up. But with the oceans of cash sloshing around and the land-grab mentality, it's too easy to get something half-assedly working and then throw money at all your problems. Disappointed customers? Give refunds! Give coupons! Do more marketing! Frustrated pseudo-employees? Subsidize them! Do more recruiting! Poach from your competitors!
- will_pseudonym 11y ago
  Home cleaning services and food delivery are quite dissimilar. There is much more trust required of the former, and as a result, once you find someone who you like, you'd rather just keep using them. On this same spectrum, an Uber-for-babysitters would fail even more spectacularly than HomeJoy.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    They are similar in that it's relatively easy to paper over negative gross margins and poor execution by throwing money at them.
    - will_pseudonym 11y ago
      I see! We were discussing different attributes of those businesses. I was more going on the first principle of business, "What problem are we solving for the customer?" I don't have any opinions on the specific financials of any company. I was just saying the fundamentals of HomeJoy were completely wrong. Thanks for the discussion!
nugget 11y ago
Sometimes I wonder if this whole food delivery boom is being supported by millenials who simply haven't faced the need (or desire) to budget yet. How sustainable is spending $25 per person per meal for those outside the top quintile? I know it works in San Francisco and NYC, but how deep is the market elsewhere? Or does that not matter? Maybe a significant number of them will never have families and all that disposable income will go to postmates and doordash instead. Maybe these businesses are built on price insensitive folks in urban areas for regular usage and irregular usage from everyone else?
- qq66 11y ago
  All of these businesses are predicated upon an ever-increasing erosion of the middle class, increasing the number of customers and depressing wages for the workers by increasing the supply of people competing for the jobs.
  - nugget 11y ago
    I suppose that benefits them on both sides of their marketplace: the # of less price sensitive consumers in the upper class increases and the # of (educated, reliable, service oriented) people available for cheap on demand labor in the lower class increases as well. The hourglass distribution is a nice tailwind. I wonder how many young people are temporarily part of the demand equation when they are working 24/7 for a high wage and have no dependents and a low to zero (or negative) savings rate. From watching my friends it seems that once you have a child your attitude towards expenses and savings changes dramatically.
- ashishk 11y ago
  It's possible the prices will fall. Food is a commodity and commodities want to be cheap. Drones, robots, delivery systems, etc. How much of the current cost is labor that will be replaced by software?
- superuser2 11y ago
  Like all food delivery, which has existed for a long time, normal people use food delivery apps occasionally when they want to feed a group, can't leave (in college I worked in tech theater and Grubhub was a godsend for short dinner breaks), or don't feel like cooking today. You may as well be amused that sit-down restaurants exist.

67 points by steven 11y ago

When I read stories like this, my only thought is how little San Francisco resembles any other city in the world. If you are designing your [next big thing] to be successful in SF, it won't be successful anywhere else. If you are designing it to be successful in the real world, it won't be successful in SF. No, people outside SF are not going to pay $15 delivery on an $18 salad in order to receive it an hour late. No amount of venture capital thrown away will change this.

peternicky 11y ago
You forgot to include New York in the list. Totally agree with you.
StavrosK 11y ago
As a Greek, it's very odd to me why many other cultures don't seem to have the food delivery element. Here, you can get virtually every type of food, from fast food, to street food, to restaurant food, delivered, free of charge, in around ten minutes, from 9 am to 2 am. No other country I've traveled to really had this, you could, at most, get pizza delivered until 10pm or so. Can anyone shed some light?
- antidaily 11y ago
  Big cities and college towns in the US have delivery of everything. Same hours you mentioned. Some delivery til 4am.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Hmm, I haven't seen that in SF, LA or NY, but it's possible I just didn't know places delivered.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      It's certainly only a subset of eating establishments in the US that offer delivery, but it is widely available.
    - hencq 11y ago
      My experience is that in NY you can basically get any food at any time you want. SF and LA, not so much.
    - URSpider94 11y ago
      Sorry, but almost every restaurant in NY delivers ... When I lived there we used to have a giant basket of menus on the kitchen counter, everything from sushi to Argentinian arepas to Cajun.
- GFischer 11y ago
  Here in Montevideo, Uruguay, delivery is huge, and the biggest startup exit in the country was PedidosYa (sold to DeliveryHero), works in Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo https://www.deliveryhero.com/delivery-hero-conquers-latin-america/ https://www.deliveryhero.com/delivery-hero-conquers-latin-am...
kevindeasis 11y ago
I see alot of startups, in different forums ie: reddit, producthunt, etc; that have a model like Uber. For instance, Uber for breakfast, etc. It's quite shocking that some people providing X as a service forget into account the demographics of where they are starting. Imagine if there was a startup exactly like Uber and started in Alaska, would it really be successful? So, in addition to what you said, a startup may also not work if it doesn't start (or become successful) in a city like San Francisco/ New York
6stringmerc 11y ago
Very cogent point! Living in North Texas, I recently saw a map highlight thing that showed this region is about the same size as Connecticut. Sure, there are some population density centers to make urban stuff work, but the 'inconvenience' factor of getting around, parking, etc, etc aren't parallels.
frozenport 11y ago
In the article it wasn't even in at a later hour! A 33 dollar salad approaches the profligacy of Sodom and Gomorrah :-)
- Cymen 11y ago
  Is the customer actually paying $33 or is that $15 in VC juice to grease the system?
sim0n 11y ago
Except Postmates is already operating in over 100 cities other than San Francisco.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Illuminating! I'm wondering, who can live in San Francisco on $16 per hour?

detaro 11y ago
Probably not her main/only job?
arebop 11y ago
That could be enough if your housing is free, and with rent control some people have very cheap housing.
SilasX 11y ago
They don't. Most likely, they drive in off-rush-hour (like Uber drivers).
greghinch 11y ago
6 people in a 3 bedroom?
SeoxyS 11y ago
That's about double the minimum wage. I'm sure a lot of people live here on less than that. Sure, they're not paying downtown market prices for housing… but a rent-controlled unit in the sunset doesn't sound implausible.
lsc 11y ago
Rent control in San Francisco is... dramatic. My brother lives in SF in a really nice place that has a little bit of a bay view, even, and he made about that much when he moved in. My understanding is that The law prevents the landlord from keeping rent in line with market, and makes it hard for the landlord to evict the current tenant, and even limits how much the landlord can jack up the rent between tenants. Often in situations where one person has the master lease and then rents out rooms, that one person will keep a lot of the difference... but not always. Quite often, it would seem, they are just more picky about choosing roommates. But the upshot is that there are a small number of very inexpensive units in SF. As far as I can tell, you have to know someone (or know someone who knows someone) and then you have to be lucky, and then that someone needs to like you. But if all those things happen? potentially, you can have cheaper rent in SF than you can in San Jose.

Canada 11y ago

The courier must arrive before the food is ready and wait for it. The food must be packed so that the least damage occurs. (eg. crispy needs to breathe, yet be kept warm) The courier must deliver it in under 10 minutes worst case, but within 5 minutes on average. Like the constraint of the speed of light on networks, no amount of money can change this. Some food ages like VOIP traffic. Pizza and Chinese delivery do well in the worst case. They reheat well. Look at what airlines serve. To survive these new delivery services need to make a profit delivering food that is unprofitable for individual establishments to deliver themselves.

FlamingHotRam 11y ago
> The food must be packed so that the least damage occurs. (eg. crispy needs to breathe, yet be kept warm) I wonder how much room there is to specialize in doing this right. The vast majority of the time I order delivery, food tends to come in super-budget containers that degrade the experience. Pizzas arriving in cardboard boxes, the taste altered by 10+ minutes of steaming and dripping oil... asian food tends to arrive in the clam-shell styrofoam containers that mush up some vegetables or turn crispy fried food soggy, with sauces in thin plastic cups that invariably leak at least a little... When was the last time anyone rethought delivery? The experience could be so much better. What if soups used parfait-style containers to keep the liquids separate from dry mix-ins (eg fried chicken) until right before consumption? What if pizza boxes had oil-absorbant padding and better venting? And what about standardizing those container sizes like we standardized shipping containers, so food doesn't get jumbled in a plastic bag? Seems like that would open the window to containers with heating/cooling packs as well, which would help batch-deliver orders more efficiently. How much of a market is there for companies that handle shipping and packaging/handling of delivery orders? Owning the full delivery experience instead of just some cars.
- qq66 11y ago
  That's what the vertically integrated delivery companies like Munchery do. Ultimately I think this model will win, since the food prep facility does not need to need to pay rent in a restaurant neighborhood, and the food can be designed for deliverability.

caseyf7 11y ago

This helps explain something I've noticed over time using these services. At first, it seemed like most of the delivery people were local and now it seems like they are coming from further and further outside the bay area. When the drivers are driving monster trucks, they probably don't live in an urban area.

ryanSrich 11y ago
Wait what? You get postmates delivered via monster truck? How is that even legal?
- SilasX 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure the parent didn't mean a literal monster truck, but some kind of large, hoisted pickup truck that's more typical of rural areas.

fpgaminer 11y ago

I'm surprised DoorDash et al. didn't do away with tips. It causes consternation for the couriers, is easily forgotten by the customers, and seems to have no benefit. You can choose to set the tip when placing the order, or give a cash tip when the driver arrives. The former is convenient, but meaningless; how do you set a tip for a service not yet performed? The latter is inconvenient, especially if you don't carry the necessary cash. It complicates the delivery interaction, is more likely to be forgotten, and still won't be very accurate. Are you going to take the food out of the bag and check it before you tip and let the courier leave? Uber did away with tips, and it's wonderful. Drivers know how much they're going to make, riders know how much they're spending, there is no awkwardness or pressure, and the rating system does a far better job at maintaining level of service. My only experience has been with DoorDash. They should do away with tips and overhaul their post-experience rating system. Right now the only options are to give one overall rating to the whole experience, which is useless, or to report a problem, and even then you're only able to report one problem. If, for example, both your delivery was messed up and the order was wrong, you can't tell DoorDash about both. You have to choose one. And their customer service takes 12 hours to respond, with completely arbitrary refunds. Compare to Uber who has responded to all my inquiries within 3 minutes. Still worse, when I report a problem with my order (wrong items) ... who gets blamed? Does DoorDash investigate and see who was at fault, to correctly apply blame, or do they automatically blame the restaurant? None of that is made clear to the customer, and so it gives me pause whenever I report problems.

awakeasleep 11y ago
Does anyone know how having a tipped postition affects the law? I'm curious if these companies gain some sort of protection (from fulltime workers, from minimum wage laws, etc) by having their employees be paid by tip.
- josu 11y ago
  I don't think they are considered "employees".
- MaxGhenis 11y ago

wpietri 11y ago

This is another one of those things that I blame on what is certainly a hot boom and what many call a bubble. Look at HomeJoy for comparison: https://medium.com/backchannel/why-homejoy-failed-bb0ab39d901a https://medium.com/backchannel/why-homejoy-failed-bb0ab39d90... In a saner funding environment, people get small things working reasonably well and then scale up. But with the oceans of cash sloshing around and the land-grab mentality, it's too easy to get something half-assedly working and then throw money at all your problems. Disappointed customers? Give refunds! Give coupons! Do more marketing! Frustrated pseudo-employees? Subsidize them! Do more recruiting! Poach from your competitors!

will_pseudonym 11y ago
Home cleaning services and food delivery are quite dissimilar. There is much more trust required of the former, and as a result, once you find someone who you like, you'd rather just keep using them. On this same spectrum, an Uber-for-babysitters would fail even more spectacularly than HomeJoy.
- wpietri 11y ago
  They are similar in that it's relatively easy to paper over negative gross margins and poor execution by throwing money at them.
  - will_pseudonym 11y ago
    I see! We were discussing different attributes of those businesses. I was more going on the first principle of business, "What problem are we solving for the customer?" I don't have any opinions on the specific financials of any company. I was just saying the fundamentals of HomeJoy were completely wrong. Thanks for the discussion!

nugget 11y ago

Sometimes I wonder if this whole food delivery boom is being supported by millenials who simply haven't faced the need (or desire) to budget yet. How sustainable is spending $25 per person per meal for those outside the top quintile? I know it works in San Francisco and NYC, but how deep is the market elsewhere? Or does that not matter? Maybe a significant number of them will never have families and all that disposable income will go to postmates and doordash instead. Maybe these businesses are built on price insensitive folks in urban areas for regular usage and irregular usage from everyone else?

qq66 11y ago
All of these businesses are predicated upon an ever-increasing erosion of the middle class, increasing the number of customers and depressing wages for the workers by increasing the supply of people competing for the jobs.
- nugget 11y ago
  I suppose that benefits them on both sides of their marketplace: the # of less price sensitive consumers in the upper class increases and the # of (educated, reliable, service oriented) people available for cheap on demand labor in the lower class increases as well. The hourglass distribution is a nice tailwind. I wonder how many young people are temporarily part of the demand equation when they are working 24/7 for a high wage and have no dependents and a low to zero (or negative) savings rate. From watching my friends it seems that once you have a child your attitude towards expenses and savings changes dramatically.
ashishk 11y ago
It's possible the prices will fall. Food is a commodity and commodities want to be cheap. Drones, robots, delivery systems, etc. How much of the current cost is labor that will be replaced by software?
superuser2 11y ago
Like all food delivery, which has existed for a long time, normal people use food delivery apps occasionally when they want to feed a group, can't leave (in college I worked in tech theater and Grubhub was a godsend for short dinner breaks), or don't feel like cooking today. You may as well be amused that sit-down restaurants exist.