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It's a great time for customers to take advantage of these offers though. I've used over $1000 of Postmates promotional credit and ordered dinners from far-away

It's a great time for customers to take advantage of these offers though. I've used over $1000 of Postmates promotional credit and ordered dinners from far-away restaurants that I'd never have the energy to drive to. $15 dinner item with waived $27 delivery charge? Yes please!

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
FTA 9y ago
Essentially VC is subsidizing part of America's goods then. We could always skip the middlebusiness and just go straight to universal income paid for by these firms.
- ebiester 9y ago
  But universal income will be used by poor people to buy essentials that have low profit margins, rather than an addiction by wealthy people to high profit margin services.
- noway421 9y ago
  Ah truly Silicon Valley is at the bleeding edge of social benefit!
- mason55 9y ago
  Yes, Matt Yglesias once said Amazon is "a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers"
  - michaelchisari 9y ago
    I really don't see the kind of aggressive growth plan and opportunities that Amazon chased after being pursued by many of these current startups. Amazon, Google, Facebook, they all quickly learned that their current model couldn't sustain their pie-in-the-sky valuations, so they pushed outwards in multiple directions. Blue Apron, as an example, doesn't seem to be doing that. And may not be capable of it. If they had a plan to use their valuation to purchase, automate and control the whole farm-to-table product chain, all while building up advanced technical services that can be sold to other tech companies and startups, that might be a different story. But I'm very skeptical that's the case.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      The biggest thing for me is that, if there really is a market for home delivery of fresh food (at least in urban areas)... And there certainly seems to be. There is in the UK and it's growing in the US even if some services like Instacart have their own profitability problems. Meal kits [from the same stores/services] are such an obvious expansion to that and they're already happening. Blue Apron and its dozen or more competitors just seem like such a niche [standalone] offering. I'm pretty darn close to their target demographic and they still don't quite fit my needs. Developing a platform to serve this market presupposes that it's a viable size of market to serve as standalone businesses and I'm not convinced it is.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    No. Bezos himself strongly disagreed with that characterization that he included that quote in his annual shareholder letter for 2013 [1]. Along with a rebuttal. "To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in. More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align. " [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312513151836/d511111dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312513...
- ableton 9y ago
  I like the idea of getting free money every month, but it just wouldn't feel right to live on money that was forcefully taken from someone else, even if they do have a lot of it. Maybe somebody will invent some sort of sustainable voluntary UBI. That would be the best.
  - lawrenceyan 9y ago
    Would you feel better if you were taking from a robot rather than a human? Because that's going to be the reality in about 10-15 years.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - gruez 9y ago
      >taking from a robot rather than a human ...which is owned by a human. not to mention the ambiguity between a tool and a robot. can we expect SaaS companies to be taxed because their servers are "robots"? that is not to say i'm against UBI, but the justification of "it's okay because we're taking it from robots!" doesn't hold.
      - conanbatt 9y ago
        It is the weirdest anthropomorphism to give robots a soul for the hope of being able to exploit them.
      - speedplane 9y ago
        I'm pretty confounded as to why UBI has become so popular. Many people already get a ton of social services from the government. Don't see how getting $20k of UBI per year is better than getting free medical care from Medicaid and subsidized housing from HUD, both which likely add up to the same amount. Don't see why UBI has to be in cash instead of services.
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
- erdle 9y ago
  Just to be clear — most VCs are also getting universal basic income from LPs. Warren Buffet once said most hedge funds were compensation schemes disguised as investment vehicles. The same can be said for the average VC.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - skrebbel 9y ago
    > Just to be clear — most VCs are also getting universal basic income from LPs. Fancy definition of "universal" you got there.
- beambot 9y ago
  And post IPO, pension funds and 401k's crowd in, give the VCs liquidity... Thus completing the cycle and enabling the VCs to do it all over again.
lifeformed 9y ago
How do you get so much Postmates credit?
- throwawaybbq1 9y ago
  Yea .. I wondered that too. I only got 1-2 deliveries free.
Animats 9y ago
Anybody remember Kosmo? There was a brief period around 2000 when you could order a candy bar to be delivered, and they'd waive the delivery charge. (Webvan, though, was a good idea. They just botched the rollout, with 3% market share in 30 cities, instead of 30% market share in 3 cities. Their VCs pushed them into that. Webvan's former fulfillment people quietly went to work, developed Kiva distribution center robots, sold them to many online commerce companies, got bought by Amazon, and are now involved with Amazon's grocery delivery operation.)
- ghaff 9y ago
  Unfortunately I live a bit too far from the nearest major city to take advantage of a lot of this VC-subsidized gravy train. (There are a lot of deals floating around these meal kits but they're still not really a bargain.) Another thing with Webvan--and we'll have to see how this plays out in the Food Delivery 2.0 phase we're in now--is that fresh food delivery really was a premium offering. But it wasn't clear how many people were willing to pay a premium for it. There are a lot of services people will buy if you sell them below cost. Logistics, scale, and just learning what works and what doesn't may change all that. On the other hand, high-quality food delivered to your door is probably not going to appeal to your typical coupon-clipping Walmart shopper however efficient your operation is.
  - michaelt 9y ago
    Another thing with Webvan [...] is that fresh food delivery really was a premium offering. But it wasn't clear how many people were willing to pay a premium for it. The premium doesn't have to be particularly high, in areas with a decent customer density. In the UK, Ocado can deliver a full range of supermarket groceries without needing to mark up the goods, and with a delivery charge below ~$5 with a ~$50 minimum order. And they make a profit while doing it.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      And Peapod is only about $10 (for orders over $60)--and that's with me being far enough out of a city that I can't get Instacart or most services of that type. An effective ~10% adder on prices that are probably not rock bottom is still more than a fair number of people will want to pay. But I agree it's hardly a 1%er luxury item. I'd probably use Instacart if I could get it. I just didn't find Peapod all that compelling when I was using it because of an injury.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

FTA 9y ago

Essentially VC is subsidizing part of America's goods then. We could always skip the middlebusiness and just go straight to universal income paid for by these firms.

ebiester 9y ago
But universal income will be used by poor people to buy essentials that have low profit margins, rather than an addiction by wealthy people to high profit margin services.
noway421 9y ago
Ah truly Silicon Valley is at the bleeding edge of social benefit!
mason55 9y ago
Yes, Matt Yglesias once said Amazon is "a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers"
- michaelchisari 9y ago
  I really don't see the kind of aggressive growth plan and opportunities that Amazon chased after being pursued by many of these current startups. Amazon, Google, Facebook, they all quickly learned that their current model couldn't sustain their pie-in-the-sky valuations, so they pushed outwards in multiple directions. Blue Apron, as an example, doesn't seem to be doing that. And may not be capable of it. If they had a plan to use their valuation to purchase, automate and control the whole farm-to-table product chain, all while building up advanced technical services that can be sold to other tech companies and startups, that might be a different story. But I'm very skeptical that's the case.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    The biggest thing for me is that, if there really is a market for home delivery of fresh food (at least in urban areas)... And there certainly seems to be. There is in the UK and it's growing in the US even if some services like Instacart have their own profitability problems. Meal kits [from the same stores/services] are such an obvious expansion to that and they're already happening. Blue Apron and its dozen or more competitors just seem like such a niche [standalone] offering. I'm pretty darn close to their target demographic and they still don't quite fit my needs. Developing a platform to serve this market presupposes that it's a viable size of market to serve as standalone businesses and I'm not convinced it is.
- sah2ed 9y ago
  No. Bezos himself strongly disagreed with that characterization that he included that quote in his annual shareholder letter for 2013 [1]. Along with a rebuttal. "To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in. More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align. " [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312513151836/d511111dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312513...
ableton 9y ago
I like the idea of getting free money every month, but it just wouldn't feel right to live on money that was forcefully taken from someone else, even if they do have a lot of it. Maybe somebody will invent some sort of sustainable voluntary UBI. That would be the best.
- lawrenceyan 9y ago
  Would you feel better if you were taking from a robot rather than a human? Because that's going to be the reality in about 10-15 years.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 9y ago
    >taking from a robot rather than a human ...which is owned by a human. not to mention the ambiguity between a tool and a robot. can we expect SaaS companies to be taxed because their servers are "robots"? that is not to say i'm against UBI, but the justification of "it's okay because we're taking it from robots!" doesn't hold.
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      It is the weirdest anthropomorphism to give robots a soul for the hope of being able to exploit them.
    - speedplane 9y ago
      I'm pretty confounded as to why UBI has become so popular. Many people already get a ton of social services from the government. Don't see how getting $20k of UBI per year is better than getting free medical care from Medicaid and subsidized housing from HUD, both which likely add up to the same amount. Don't see why UBI has to be in cash instead of services.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
erdle 9y ago
Just to be clear — most VCs are also getting universal basic income from LPs. Warren Buffet once said most hedge funds were compensation schemes disguised as investment vehicles. The same can be said for the average VC.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- skrebbel 9y ago
  > Just to be clear — most VCs are also getting universal basic income from LPs. Fancy definition of "universal" you got there.
beambot 9y ago
And post IPO, pension funds and 401k's crowd in, give the VCs liquidity... Thus completing the cycle and enabling the VCs to do it all over again.

lifeformed 9y ago

How do you get so much Postmates credit?

throwawaybbq1 9y ago
Yea .. I wondered that too. I only got 1-2 deliveries free.

Animats 9y ago

Anybody remember Kosmo? There was a brief period around 2000 when you could order a candy bar to be delivered, and they'd waive the delivery charge. (Webvan, though, was a good idea. They just botched the rollout, with 3% market share in 30 cities, instead of 30% market share in 3 cities. Their VCs pushed them into that. Webvan's former fulfillment people quietly went to work, developed Kiva distribution center robots, sold them to many online commerce companies, got bought by Amazon, and are now involved with Amazon's grocery delivery operation.)

ghaff 9y ago
Unfortunately I live a bit too far from the nearest major city to take advantage of a lot of this VC-subsidized gravy train. (There are a lot of deals floating around these meal kits but they're still not really a bargain.) Another thing with Webvan--and we'll have to see how this plays out in the Food Delivery 2.0 phase we're in now--is that fresh food delivery really was a premium offering. But it wasn't clear how many people were willing to pay a premium for it. There are a lot of services people will buy if you sell them below cost. Logistics, scale, and just learning what works and what doesn't may change all that. On the other hand, high-quality food delivered to your door is probably not going to appeal to your typical coupon-clipping Walmart shopper however efficient your operation is.
- michaelt 9y ago
  Another thing with Webvan [...] is that fresh food delivery really was a premium offering. But it wasn't clear how many people were willing to pay a premium for it. The premium doesn't have to be particularly high, in areas with a decent customer density. In the UK, Ocado can deliver a full range of supermarket groceries without needing to mark up the goods, and with a delivery charge below ~$5 with a ~$50 minimum order. And they make a profit while doing it.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    And Peapod is only about $10 (for orders over $60)--and that's with me being far enough out of a city that I can't get Instacart or most services of that type. An effective ~10% adder on prices that are probably not rock bottom is still more than a fair number of people will want to pay. But I agree it's hardly a 1%er luxury item. I'd probably use Instacart if I could get it. I just didn't find Peapod all that compelling when I was using it because of an injury.