4 ms·

it's pretty hard to make delivery work if you (the business) have to pay the delivery person yourself. the key issue is that one person just can't deliver that

it's pretty hard to make delivery work if you (the business) have to pay the delivery person yourself. the key issue is that one person just can't deliver that many orders in an hour. food has to be sent out soon after it is made so it doesn't get cold (although you can do some amount of staging by keeping it on top of an oven). once the food is in the car, you have an even harder time constraint to have it still be hot when it's delivered. this means the delivery person can only carry a limited number of orders and will need to circle back to home base fairly often. basically you have a spinning hard drive trying to fulfill random, low queue depth io requests while maintaining low latency. it doesn't work well. even if you pay the person minimum wage, it's hard enough to break even during peak hours (the profit on an order is already low). it's really hard not to lose money on the driver off-peak. the way your typical pizza delivery place makes this work is by skimping on the ingredients big time, then charging the same amount as nearby takeout places plus a delivery fee. you may have noticed that takeout-only places tend to be a lot better for the same price. now you might ask why restaurants can't just make good food and charge enough so that they actually make money on delivery. unfortunately, most hot food really suffers from being crammed into a little box for 15-20 minutes until it gets to your home. it ends up being closer to reheated leftovers than freshly made food. this tends to create a ceiling for how much money most people are actually willing to pay for takeout/delivery. source: worked in a takeout place and asked the owners of several of my favorite pizza places why they don't offer delivery.

Latty 7y ago
Here in the UK, delivery was standard well before apps—almost every local take-away offered delivery if you phoned up and ordered. Maybe just because the UK is smaller and so they need to cover less distance? I often see people talking about grocery delivery the same way, when all the major supermarkets have been doing it as standard here in the UK for years.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  it could be that the UK is mostly dense enough. there are a few very dense parts of the US where you've been able to get pretty much anything delivered (eg, NYC) for a long time. I don't know much about grocery delivery, but I can think of two reasons offhand why it would be more viable. the first is that the delivery window for groceries is much more forgiving. if you have a cooler, you can keep refrigerated/frozen items at the correct temperature indefinitely. this allows you to load a lot more stuff in the vehicle and plan a more efficient route. the second is just a guess, but I'd bet the typical grocery order is larger than a typical food delivery order, so you make more money per stop.
- osullivj 7y ago
  Certainly delivery was commonplace in the UK by the late 90s. It was unusual in the late 80s. Douglas Adam's first Dirk Gently novel (1987) has an American character who complains frequently about the lack of delivery pizza in London.

Latty 7y ago

Here in the UK, delivery was standard well before apps—almost every local take-away offered delivery if you phoned up and ordered. Maybe just because the UK is smaller and so they need to cover less distance? I often see people talking about grocery delivery the same way, when all the major supermarkets have been doing it as standard here in the UK for years.

leetcrew 7y ago
it could be that the UK is mostly dense enough. there are a few very dense parts of the US where you've been able to get pretty much anything delivered (eg, NYC) for a long time. I don't know much about grocery delivery, but I can think of two reasons offhand why it would be more viable. the first is that the delivery window for groceries is much more forgiving. if you have a cooler, you can keep refrigerated/frozen items at the correct temperature indefinitely. this allows you to load a lot more stuff in the vehicle and plan a more efficient route. the second is just a guess, but I'd bet the typical grocery order is larger than a typical food delivery order, so you make more money per stop.
osullivj 7y ago
Certainly delivery was commonplace in the UK by the late 90s. It was unusual in the late 80s. Douglas Adam's first Dirk Gently novel (1987) has an American character who complains frequently about the lack of delivery pizza in London.