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I refuse to use any of these delivery apps, which are kind of useless already. Here in Toronto area, most of the big food outlets are closed, because they are

I refuse to use any of these delivery apps, which are kind of useless already. Here in Toronto area, most of the big food outlets are closed, because they are not able to get workers. The ones that are open, are these mom&pop restaurants, that run on a skeletal workforce. So with fewer restaurants operating, and delivery apps having a limited radius for delivery, I'd rather go and get the order myself, and let the neighborhood restaurer keep more of the money I give instead of losing 30%-40% of the amount as commission (I tip on top of it even though it's a pickup). I'll use delivery apps only if: - They charge the restaurant less than 5% total fees - They charge me 5% - 10% for delivery and processing fees whatever (lets say a minimum of $5 or $10, whichever is higher). Problem is at this rate, Uber Eats or Door Dash or GrubHub wont survive. I understand using these apps is more of a necessity if you have kids and larger number of people at home. But this is not for me. Uber drivers who got cars on subprime loans cannot survive with deliveries only. I'm curious to how they'll get through this storm. At least in this case, Uber has fewer liabilities (all head ache borne by the driver).

toomuchtodo 6y ago
We use Uber Eats for discovery. We'll use it to find new establishments, and on the first order, I'll tip cash to make up for what Uber Eats takes from the restaurant. If we decide to patron the same restaurant again, we order directly from them to avoid the Uber tax for them (edit: as many are aware, margins are slim [3-5% typically] for restaurants and the delivery service tax is onerous on them). Has worked pretty well. Be the change y'all.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Yes, be the change and stop tiping. That's the change that everyone needs to be doing, then the prices would increase to match what the market should actually be, rather than rely on charity of customers. >>I'll tip cash to make up for what Uber Eats takes from the restaurant So you've just allowed Uber Eats to operate another day, because the restaurant can now justify using them and their shitty rates.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    > So you've just allowed Uber Eats to operate another day My understanding is that Uber Eats loses money on each order. Has that changed? If so, I'll stop using them immediately and perform discovery in another way ("Restaurant Roulette"). I want my money going to the folks doing the hard work, not scalpers ("the platform"). Going to keep tipping though, not tipping doesn't fix bigger issues causing the need for it that are out of scope here. Sorry if my economic empathy bothers you (no snark intended).
  - pettazz 6y ago
    Pretty sure all that'll really happen if you stop tipping is that some poor delivery driver gets screwed. Just stop using the apps, order from the restaurant directly, tip your delivery people.
    - gambiting 6y ago
      I do realize that this is a pipe dream, but if literally everyone stopped tipping at once, the conditions would have to improve. Also, I'm from the UK - while tipping in restaurants is semi-common(not expected), tipping delivery drivers is literally unheard of. Doesn't exist, no one does it. And yet.....somehow, delivery drivers still exist as a profession. My point is - every time you tip, you allow shitty employment practices to continue. It's the same as giving money to beggars on the street - they continue begging because they know it works, it's a self sustaining circle.
      - smogcutter 6y ago
        You’re right, broadly, but please don’t do this when you’re visiting the US. You’re screwing over a real life, individual person because it pleases you to make a point.
      - gmanley 6y ago
        So you're from a country where tipping isn't so engrained or important. Here in the US tipping is the main way service workers make money. Most base wages are simply untenable. Now, I'm not saying I like that, in fact I hate it. We are in essence subsidizing their employees. It definitely needs to change but please don't encourage people not to tip. There are realistic ways to get rid of tipping. Just stopping tipping isn't one of them. All your doing is hurting the little man/women. Also comparing them to beggars is pretty out of touch.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> Here in Toronto area, most of the big food outlets are closed, because they are not able to get workers. Huh that surprises me. Here in the UK the big food outlets have gone on a big hiring spree to keep up with the extra demand from people all eating at home.
- myth_drannon 6y ago
  People if they don't have a car, are afraid to take public transportation to go to work. The same happens with some food factories, 10x more orders but half the people are refusing to go back to work.
- wdb 6y ago
  In London McDonalds, Nando's etc were all closed, even most restaurants in China Town are closed. Which food outlets are you referring too?
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Waitrose, Marks and Spencer, high street takeaways, restaurants doing delivery, for example are all open in my village. But we don't have any Deliveroo, UberEats, etc, coverage where I live as it's the North.
- calvinbhai 6y ago
  Need to go off on a tangent to reply. Canada is showering it's unemployed citizens with something similar to $2000 per month unemployment benefits. That's $12.5 per hr for not working, while (minimum wage in Ontario) is $14 per hr. Why would anyone work to get $1.5 per hr extra? When you can stay home and get the free money? (in fact other provinces, $12.5 per hr is above minimum wage). Having something like this for a month or two was probably fine, but right now Canada is paying it's residents to not work while grocery stores / warehouses are not finding enough workers. I was tilting positive of UBI until I saw the effects of this $2K per month scheme in Canada. To immediately solve the problem, Canada can continue giving $2K per month to those who are unemployed, but working in a necessary occupation (say grocery stores, deliveries, warehouses) wouldn't disqualify them from getting the $2K, with a caveat that there's no minimum wage. At that point it's a two sided bidding with grocery stores going lower and workers increasing their bids. At some rate (say $5 per hr or $10 per hr) there's a right balance for supply/demand of labor.
ashconnor 6y ago
Not only is it cheaper to use Ritual. The rewards mean free food.
- lozaning 6y ago
  I still havent figured out what the value prop is of Ritual. It seems like rent seeking between co-workers. If my co-worker buys me a burger, I just venmo her.
  - ashconnor 6y ago
    I’ve never used the group ordering or pickup for friends features. I just want to pickup my food without waiting in line.
  - gbjw 6y ago
    It's a single well-designed app where you can order takeout in a few clicks. It's generally much easier to re-order a past meal on it than it is to call or use some clunky web interface.
  - cam-perry 6y ago
    I agree with the other two comments: 1) it's a much better easier for ordering pickup than I've seen from any other website or app. It's very easy to build a "Ritual" because it saves your past orders. 2) skipping the line is amazing, especially in the middle of a breakfast or lunch rush. My office is huge into Ritual, it was used daily. The group ordering makes it way easier than "grab me a burger and I'll Venmo you". You can fully customize your own order without bothering your teammate with "no pickles, extra cheese please". You then pay on your own, so no one has to keep track of splitting bills and IOUs. A small bonus is that each individual order is packaged separately and clearly labelled so that you don't have to fish out items and work out whose is whose. You can definitely achieve the same thing without Ritual, but the app takes care of all the pain points and pays you in rewards to use it, so why not?
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
Conversely, if restaurants can't survive with apps taking a 30% cut, there may be no market for delivery aggregators. 5% is too little for the aggregator; 30% too much for the restaurant. Perhaps there's a middle ground around 15%.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  one might ask why the commission is necessary at all. unless you're placing an enormous order, a large order isn't really more expensive to deliver than a small order. the bottleneck is much more likely to be the number of stops you can fit into a single loop before the food gets cold than the volume of food you can fit into a single vehicle. the only answer I can think of is that they don't want the customer to realize the true cost of delivery.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    A larger order is more expensive if delivering by bike (think urban areas). The bike would have limited storage space. One large order means fewer small orders performed in parallel by the courier.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      that's a good point that I didn't think of. I live in a less dense city, so deliveries are usually by car here.
  - chongli 6y ago
    I don’t know about Uber Eats, DoorDash, or GrubHub but SkipTheDishes here in Canada doesn’t use “loops”. Every delivery is one-to-one. You place an order, the restaurant confirms it, a nearby driver accepts it and travels to the restaurant to wait for it to be prepared, the restaurant prepares the food and gives it to the driver, the driver delivers it. It’s very inefficient unless your goal is to optimize for quickest delivery and hottest food, which is what it is. However, there is one major efficiency it has over the restaurants paying for their own delivery drivers is that SkipTheDishes has a large pool of drivers to dispatch orders to from all of the restaurants. It’s like having a thread pool you can dispatch jobs to rather than having dedicated threads allocated to each work queue (which may end up idle a lot of the time). Another thing you have to consider is that the drivers need to earn a living. If they only get one or two orders a night and spend the rest of their time waiting around then they can’t afford to do the job so they’ll probably quit. These delivery services ensure that drivers will have a busy shift because their scheduling systems don’t overbook drivers. That all goes out the window if you ask every restaurant to hire their own drivers.
colmvp 6y ago
How does anyone expect food delivery services to survive with only 5% fees? That's insanity. Uber has to also pay for engineers, sales/marketing to get customers/restaurants onto the platform, online infrastructure, customer service for both sides of the market, etc. Delivery is expensive. It's time-consuming, and customers are rarely willing to pay the true cost of it. Most of the restaurant delivery services were bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars last year. They've had a resurgence because of the Covid-19 but that's a blip compared to a normal situation. If people think it doesn't cost that much money to operate, then all restaurants shouldn't have a problem having their own delivery service.
- ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
  Dining out is already a luxury. Paying 20% more just for someone to deliver the food to my door is even more of a luxury, and without the 'dining out' experience. Honestly I don't expect delivery services to survive, and I don't think it would be a tragedy if they ceased to exist.
  - chongli 6y ago
    It certainly would be a tragedy for all of the drivers who lost work and may struggle to feed their families. Many of the drivers are immigrant men who have few other prospects for work.
    - jimktrains2 6y ago
      And maybe that's a societal problem we should be addressing instead of expecting people to give money to silicon valley companies. Don't get me wrong. I've used and use these services at times. I'm not morally opposed to them. I just think that saying that telling someone by not using them they're hurting immigrants is just a whole lot of backwards.
      - chongli 6y ago
        telling someone by not using them they're hurting immigrants is just a whole lot of backwards Backwards? What's backwards about wanting to inform people of all the consequences to their actions? Life is messy and complicated. Far too often people don't want to think about all the consequences to their actions so they can erase that complexity. As an aside, not all of these companies are Silicon Valley-based anyway. SkipTheDishes, the one I use, is a Canadian company.
maximente 6y ago
what about slice? flat fee ($1.95 as of today) and solid mission: https://www.forbes.com/sites/garystern/2019/08/14/slice-helping-the-local-pizzeria-compete-against-the-heavyweight-pizza-chains/#32346fa9704d https://www.forbes.com/sites/garystern/2019/08/14/slice-help...
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Wow, that is literally right out of Silicon Valley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo
  - benatkin 6y ago
    Slice started in 2010 and won an Inc. award in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slice_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slice_(app)
- benatkin 6y ago
  I think it's ethical! That would take a hundred dollar order for it to meet GP's standard though. I hope Slice wins. Their business model is still vulnerable to credit card chargebacks, but they let the restaurant handle delivery and pickup, which is why they might be able to afford taking less of a cut. I can't say Slice's business model will work, but I can pretty much guarantee that taking a 5% cut won't work. Slice also probably needs to pass on credit card processing fees (at least 3%) for any transaction they handle in addition to their flat fee in order for it to work. They provide an option of paying in cash though. Thanx also seems like it might be good. I interviewed as part of interviewing at five companies in five days at TripleByte. That was a surreal experience. I had lived in SF for three and a half years, and had only been gone from SF for two months when they flew me back to SF and I stayed at Hotel Whitcomb. Never had I stayed so close to City Hall when I lived in SF. At the time Thanx was mostly about rewards. I saw them come up when I ordered from a burger place called PINCHO in Coral Gables, which is adjacent to Miami where I live now. It seems like an ideal pivot. Like Slice, it had very good UX.
  - MoBattah_ 6y ago
clairity 6y ago
yes, this wave of delivery services haven't solved last-mile logistics in any meaningful way over previous waves. their main "innovation", popularized by uber, is outsourcing the capital investment to less sophisticated operators (while matching and real-time routing have improved, those are incremental improvements at best). no one has cracked the core logistics problem involving time or cost, which is the real hump. i can literally order a pizza, walk to the store to pick it up, and return in less time than a delivery service can deliver, and i've saved all that overhead cost and it's warmer/fresher to boot. even moreso with groceries. granted, i'm in a city, but the gambit of delivery is that the city is the real shizzle for delivery. until the logistics problem is solved, it makes little sense to use a delivery app for more than as an occasional novelty or treat.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Once you can walk (easily) to pick up a takeout order, the value of delivery goes down pretty quickly. Not that I have great takeout options near where I live, but I'm going to have to hop in a car and it's going to take me probably close to 30 minutes to pickup an order when all is said and done. If I had good takeout delivery options, I would definitely use them now and then.
  - clairity 6y ago
    fair. the psychology is interesting though. people almost never want food 30 minutes from now. we want food now, when we think of it. but "now" is contextual. empty time between desire and fulfillment is dreadful, to be avoided. waiting for delivery still burns background brain cycles keeping tabs on it (not to mention how much harder it is to decide and order via an app) and therefore isn't a pancea in itself. this is especially true when you want to put those otherwise wasted cycles to work on something more important. if you go to pick it up, you're making progress toward the goal, and "now" stretches out along that task. it feels somewhat like you're getting food "now", even 30 minutes later. you don't feel that same sense of waste. but if you're already wasting time (like watching tv), then the strain of waiting isn't nearly as consequential or burdensome. in any case, if i lived in a more suburban area, i'd still likely rather drive and pick up the food (as we did growing up) than get it delivered. it's still often faster, fresher, and cheaper than delivery apps, and you don't have the parking issues that can make pickup harder in urban areas.
texasbigdata 6y ago
Toronto (and New York) are not representative of 95% of North American cities assuming you live in the GTA.
- lhorie 6y ago
  Assuming you live in Toronto proper. Most of the GTA is pretty sparse and car-oriented. Even northern Toronto (think Steeles) is already relatively suburban.
speeder 6y ago
Where I live the government literally banned you picking up your orders... so sadly can't live like you are doing :( Delivery is only option, I suspect delivery people are making a killing now.
safog 6y ago
The restaurants don't lose a full 30% on the order - the items on Uber eats are marked up over what you pay when you do regular takeout. I wouldn't go so far as to say they don't lose any money at all but we won't know exact numbers until Uber / restaurant owners publish them somewhere. Also, having a delivery option I'm pretty sure provides additional business (on top of just having dine-in / pick up). So, for a restaurant to hire employees and building out a delivery service themselves will be much more hassle and probably will be more expensive than using a service like doordash / uber eats. Lastly, this is driving a trend towards the so-called "cloud kitchens" letting restaurants operate with a subset of staff in cheaper to rent places and charging effectively what a regular restaurant would for a meal. The restaurants are going through a paradigm shift now, and it will only be accelerated due to COVID - Cloud kitchens can be more sanitary / safer to order from than regular dine-in restaurants for instance but I don't really feel sorry for them. If anything, the drivers doing the delivery are the ones getting shafted here and barely making any money. If folks start tipping, it will simply mean that Uber can afford to pay drivers less - the amount a driver makes won't change very significantly. Overall I'm convinced eats is the future and Uber focusing on ride share + eats + self driving (existential threat if someone else does it cheaper / better) is the right way to go for the company.
- jpadkins 6y ago
  cloud kitchen = a new name for drive through food service? :-)
- amelius 6y ago
  > The restaurants don't lose a full 30% on the order Doesn't Apple already grab 30% of the in-app payment?
  - watermelon0 6y ago
    That doesn't apply for physical goods.
  - diebeforei485 6y ago
    Apple doesn't take any percentage of payment for physical goods.
Bang2Bay 6y ago
my concern was uber not having competition and that has been set right with at least one other ipo-ed company. uber for me is as important as local business.
- kkotak 6y ago
  There is no competition because the business is not sustainable. Not everyone gets to raise billions of dollars on a promise of self-driving future - where the per unit economy might be sustainable. When that happens there will be tons of competition.
amelius 6y ago
I feel that delivery apps should have certification like "Fair Trade" [1], so you know that the restaurant owner receives a fair share of the money. [1] https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/ https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/
- forgotmylogin2 6y ago
  Restauranteurs opt-in to their relationship with Uber Eats. If they feel they aren't getting compensated fairly, they can opt-out. It feels quite condescending that you think you need to protect restaurants from Uber when restaurants are already capable of dissociating from Uber. You're essentially saying restaurant owners are too dumb to know what's best for them, so you need to make decisions for them.
  - amelius 6y ago
    This is not how it works. There is a network effect. If everybody uses Uber Eats then as a restaurant owner you have no choice but to opt-in. Talk to some restaurant owners. And to make a more general remark: the free market doesn't always have the desired effect. See for example Net Neutrality which wouldn't exist if the free market had its way.
mcculley 6y ago
I don't understand the appeal of these food delivery services at all. For those occasions where I feel lazy enough to have a pizza or Chinese food delivered instead of walking or driving to pick it up, I don't want a middleman company contracting the job out to some random person. Who thinks that's a good idea? How many layers of profit-taking do people think is acceptable to have random people touching their food along the way? That's setting aside the ridiculousness of all of the one-off trips I see in my building and my neighborhood, burning gasoline to hand-deliver a sandwich.
- newfriend 6y ago
  > I don't understand the appeal of these food delivery services at all I'm sure there's no end to the things you don't understand. > For those occasions where I feel lazy enough to have a pizza or Chinese food delivered instead of walking or driving to pick it up, I don't want a middleman company contracting the job out to some random person. You may be surprised to know there are people in different situations than yourself. * What if I want something besides pizza or Chinese food? * What if I don't have a car? * What if restaurants are too far to walk? * What if I'm unable to walk? * What if I have small children that I can't bring with me and can't leave behind? * What if I have something important going on and can't take time to go get food? * What if I don't want to call them on the phone? What if I have anxiety or can't speak? * What if I don't know what kind of food I want, and would like to browse options? * What if I'm new/don't know the area? > How many layers of profit-taking do people think is acceptable to have random people touching their food along the way? So you're ok with the food preparer and other employees, and the restaurant's delivery person "touching" your food, but not a 3rd party delivery person. Anyway, the delivery bag is typically sealed when ordered through these services. Maybe if you thought about it for 5 seconds, you could understand why these services are so popular.
  - mcculley 6y ago
    I've thought about it quite a lot and discussed this with some of the delivery people I see on the street and in my building. I have enjoyed these elevator discussions about the economics of feeding the lazy. Many of them are also surprised that people will pay them to deliver a Jimmy John's sandwich.
lhorie 6y ago
> I understand using these apps is more of a necessity if you have kids and larger number of people at home I have 2 small kids. From my perspective, it actually makes less sense to use an app for delivery because having kids often implies also having a car (in north america, anyways). So driving down to the restaurant for pickup costs considerably less than using the delivery option. I'll still use the app though for the same reason Uber originally became popular: there's no need to call or talk to anyone, and there's no need to fumble with physical currency for payment; you just tap a few buttons, drive to the store, pick up your food and go.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  Just wait a few more years and you will have free delivery children. Oft of my childhood was the call to 'go get the pizza!'
  - kaybe 6y ago
    If they need the car to get the pizza the time window the delivery kids can be used might be short..
  - erik_seaberg 6y ago
    We're always debating buy vs. build, but that seems kind of extreme.
- calvinbhai 6y ago
  I agree with you about convenience of ordering. This was often the case when I was in the US. But in canada it's nice that all stores I frequent accept credit cards, and all of them work with apple pay, so no fumbling with cash. Probably I'm not like most app users are. If I know a few different types of restaurants in the area, and I know specific items I like there, I'll just order the same thing again and again until I move elsewhere. If I wanted a new place, new dish every time, probably Delivery apps would be a good way to discover
gen220 6y ago
In my neighborhood in NYC, restaurants are getting much more vocal about the commission rate. We used to be pretty exclusive seamless users in my house until we got a letter in one of our bags that roughly read: "thank you for your order. Especially with the decrease in volume during these times of crisis, the grubhub commission makes it hard for us to stay in business. please consider ordering direct to support your neighborhood." Since then (near the beginning of the COVID shelter in place order), we've ordered with the telephone or custom solutions every time. And we've noticed a difference: delivery times are literally half of what they were before. It's interesting to see the `shopify`-ing of restaurants in our area: instead of going through the big platform of Seamless etc., they're using platforms that appear to be more like shopify/stripe (decentralized, meager commissions, no high-traffic "discovery" platform). Some of our favorite restaurants have even left Seamless/etc, because they're literally losing money on orders fulfilled there. For example, a famous pizzeria nearby used to never offer delivery, but recently started offering delivery, with online ordering powered by https://pos.toasttab.com/products/online-ordering https://pos.toasttab.com/products/online-ordering. I don't know if all of this commotion will be enough to unseat the seamless/grubhub/postmates of the world, but I honestly hope it does. Restaurants are a tough enough business as it is, and the steep commission rates have been converting mom & pop places into sweatshops. :/
- cwhiz 6y ago
  My wife and I were exclusively using Seamless until we read an article in Eater talking about how Grubhub/Seamless charge restaurants $6-7+ per phone call.[0] ..but then when we started trying to call or order directly through restaurants, we kept getting turned away and told to order through one of the apps. It seems many (most?) restaurants aren't in a position to take orders over the phone or directly through their website, even for pickup. [0]: https://ny.eater.com/2020/4/23/21231943/grubhub-nyc-phone-order-expat-harlem-charges https://ny.eater.com/2020/4/23/21231943/grubhub-nyc-phone-or...
- adjkant 6y ago
  Similar experience here in NYC/Brooklyn. Got a leaflet in an order to use their direct website. They use this, which seems to work pretty well and the tech looks solid: https://get.chownow.com/ https://get.chownow.com/
asdff 6y ago
No delivery service is good. Why would I pay more for soggy food that left the kitchen almost an hour ago? Restaurant's own delivery services don't even suffer from this as they go right from store to door. Ubereats et al orders sit for 15 minutes by the register waiting for the driver to appear.
- pbalau 6y ago
  Not sure how food delivery works in US, but here in London I can get my food no late than say 45mins after I placed my order (via Deliveroo and afaik JustEat too). And the only time I ordered food in US, I had the pizza about 30mins after I ordered it (via UberEats).
  - tick_tock_tick 6y ago
    30 minutes-ish is common in any US city. The only time it goes longer is during peek periods.
smallgovt 6y ago
There's a guy that's working on an app that helps you order directly from local restaurants so they can save on commission fees: https://www.eatnyc.org/ https://www.eatnyc.org/ I think the app only covers NYC for now.
Consultant32452 6y ago
Every restaurant around here just passes Uber's cut onto the customer by raising prices in the Uber menu.
ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
I don't tip when using these delivery apps and I have no idea how they can make money honestly.
connectsnk 6y ago
Nice username :) Does the calvin in the username refer to calvin and hobbes?

toomuchtodo 6y ago

We use Uber Eats for discovery. We'll use it to find new establishments, and on the first order, I'll tip cash to make up for what Uber Eats takes from the restaurant. If we decide to patron the same restaurant again, we order directly from them to avoid the Uber tax for them (edit: as many are aware, margins are slim [3-5% typically] for restaurants and the delivery service tax is onerous on them). Has worked pretty well. Be the change y'all.

gambiting 6y ago
Yes, be the change and stop tiping. That's the change that everyone needs to be doing, then the prices would increase to match what the market should actually be, rather than rely on charity of customers. >>I'll tip cash to make up for what Uber Eats takes from the restaurant So you've just allowed Uber Eats to operate another day, because the restaurant can now justify using them and their shitty rates.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  > So you've just allowed Uber Eats to operate another day My understanding is that Uber Eats loses money on each order. Has that changed? If so, I'll stop using them immediately and perform discovery in another way ("Restaurant Roulette"). I want my money going to the folks doing the hard work, not scalpers ("the platform"). Going to keep tipping though, not tipping doesn't fix bigger issues causing the need for it that are out of scope here. Sorry if my economic empathy bothers you (no snark intended).
- pettazz 6y ago
  Pretty sure all that'll really happen if you stop tipping is that some poor delivery driver gets screwed. Just stop using the apps, order from the restaurant directly, tip your delivery people.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    I do realize that this is a pipe dream, but if literally everyone stopped tipping at once, the conditions would have to improve. Also, I'm from the UK - while tipping in restaurants is semi-common(not expected), tipping delivery drivers is literally unheard of. Doesn't exist, no one does it. And yet.....somehow, delivery drivers still exist as a profession. My point is - every time you tip, you allow shitty employment practices to continue. It's the same as giving money to beggars on the street - they continue begging because they know it works, it's a self sustaining circle.
    - smogcutter 6y ago
      You’re right, broadly, but please don’t do this when you’re visiting the US. You’re screwing over a real life, individual person because it pleases you to make a point.
    - gmanley 6y ago
      So you're from a country where tipping isn't so engrained or important. Here in the US tipping is the main way service workers make money. Most base wages are simply untenable. Now, I'm not saying I like that, in fact I hate it. We are in essence subsidizing their employees. It definitely needs to change but please don't encourage people not to tip. There are realistic ways to get rid of tipping. Just stopping tipping isn't one of them. All your doing is hurting the little man/women. Also comparing them to beggars is pretty out of touch.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> Here in Toronto area, most of the big food outlets are closed, because they are not able to get workers. Huh that surprises me. Here in the UK the big food outlets have gone on a big hiring spree to keep up with the extra demand from people all eating at home.

myth_drannon 6y ago
People if they don't have a car, are afraid to take public transportation to go to work. The same happens with some food factories, 10x more orders but half the people are refusing to go back to work.
wdb 6y ago
In London McDonalds, Nando's etc were all closed, even most restaurants in China Town are closed. Which food outlets are you referring too?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Waitrose, Marks and Spencer, high street takeaways, restaurants doing delivery, for example are all open in my village. But we don't have any Deliveroo, UberEats, etc, coverage where I live as it's the North.
calvinbhai 6y ago
Need to go off on a tangent to reply. Canada is showering it's unemployed citizens with something similar to $2000 per month unemployment benefits. That's $12.5 per hr for not working, while (minimum wage in Ontario) is $14 per hr. Why would anyone work to get $1.5 per hr extra? When you can stay home and get the free money? (in fact other provinces, $12.5 per hr is above minimum wage). Having something like this for a month or two was probably fine, but right now Canada is paying it's residents to not work while grocery stores / warehouses are not finding enough workers. I was tilting positive of UBI until I saw the effects of this $2K per month scheme in Canada. To immediately solve the problem, Canada can continue giving $2K per month to those who are unemployed, but working in a necessary occupation (say grocery stores, deliveries, warehouses) wouldn't disqualify them from getting the $2K, with a caveat that there's no minimum wage. At that point it's a two sided bidding with grocery stores going lower and workers increasing their bids. At some rate (say $5 per hr or $10 per hr) there's a right balance for supply/demand of labor.

ashconnor 6y ago

Not only is it cheaper to use Ritual. The rewards mean free food.

lozaning 6y ago
I still havent figured out what the value prop is of Ritual. It seems like rent seeking between co-workers. If my co-worker buys me a burger, I just venmo her.
- ashconnor 6y ago
  I’ve never used the group ordering or pickup for friends features. I just want to pickup my food without waiting in line.
- gbjw 6y ago
  It's a single well-designed app where you can order takeout in a few clicks. It's generally much easier to re-order a past meal on it than it is to call or use some clunky web interface.
- cam-perry 6y ago
  I agree with the other two comments: 1) it's a much better easier for ordering pickup than I've seen from any other website or app. It's very easy to build a "Ritual" because it saves your past orders. 2) skipping the line is amazing, especially in the middle of a breakfast or lunch rush. My office is huge into Ritual, it was used daily. The group ordering makes it way easier than "grab me a burger and I'll Venmo you". You can fully customize your own order without bothering your teammate with "no pickles, extra cheese please". You then pay on your own, so no one has to keep track of splitting bills and IOUs. A small bonus is that each individual order is packaged separately and clearly labelled so that you don't have to fish out items and work out whose is whose. You can definitely achieve the same thing without Ritual, but the app takes care of all the pain points and pays you in rewards to use it, so why not?

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

Conversely, if restaurants can't survive with apps taking a 30% cut, there may be no market for delivery aggregators. 5% is too little for the aggregator; 30% too much for the restaurant. Perhaps there's a middle ground around 15%.

leetcrew 6y ago
one might ask why the commission is necessary at all. unless you're placing an enormous order, a large order isn't really more expensive to deliver than a small order. the bottleneck is much more likely to be the number of stops you can fit into a single loop before the food gets cold than the volume of food you can fit into a single vehicle. the only answer I can think of is that they don't want the customer to realize the true cost of delivery.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  A larger order is more expensive if delivering by bike (think urban areas). The bike would have limited storage space. One large order means fewer small orders performed in parallel by the courier.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    that's a good point that I didn't think of. I live in a less dense city, so deliveries are usually by car here.
- chongli 6y ago
  I don’t know about Uber Eats, DoorDash, or GrubHub but SkipTheDishes here in Canada doesn’t use “loops”. Every delivery is one-to-one. You place an order, the restaurant confirms it, a nearby driver accepts it and travels to the restaurant to wait for it to be prepared, the restaurant prepares the food and gives it to the driver, the driver delivers it. It’s very inefficient unless your goal is to optimize for quickest delivery and hottest food, which is what it is. However, there is one major efficiency it has over the restaurants paying for their own delivery drivers is that SkipTheDishes has a large pool of drivers to dispatch orders to from all of the restaurants. It’s like having a thread pool you can dispatch jobs to rather than having dedicated threads allocated to each work queue (which may end up idle a lot of the time). Another thing you have to consider is that the drivers need to earn a living. If they only get one or two orders a night and spend the rest of their time waiting around then they can’t afford to do the job so they’ll probably quit. These delivery services ensure that drivers will have a busy shift because their scheduling systems don’t overbook drivers. That all goes out the window if you ask every restaurant to hire their own drivers.

colmvp 6y ago

How does anyone expect food delivery services to survive with only 5% fees? That's insanity. Uber has to also pay for engineers, sales/marketing to get customers/restaurants onto the platform, online infrastructure, customer service for both sides of the market, etc. Delivery is expensive. It's time-consuming, and customers are rarely willing to pay the true cost of it. Most of the restaurant delivery services were bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars last year. They've had a resurgence because of the Covid-19 but that's a blip compared to a normal situation. If people think it doesn't cost that much money to operate, then all restaurants shouldn't have a problem having their own delivery service.

ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
Dining out is already a luxury. Paying 20% more just for someone to deliver the food to my door is even more of a luxury, and without the 'dining out' experience. Honestly I don't expect delivery services to survive, and I don't think it would be a tragedy if they ceased to exist.
- chongli 6y ago
  It certainly would be a tragedy for all of the drivers who lost work and may struggle to feed their families. Many of the drivers are immigrant men who have few other prospects for work.
  - jimktrains2 6y ago
    And maybe that's a societal problem we should be addressing instead of expecting people to give money to silicon valley companies. Don't get me wrong. I've used and use these services at times. I'm not morally opposed to them. I just think that saying that telling someone by not using them they're hurting immigrants is just a whole lot of backwards.
    - chongli 6y ago
      telling someone by not using them they're hurting immigrants is just a whole lot of backwards Backwards? What's backwards about wanting to inform people of all the consequences to their actions? Life is messy and complicated. Far too often people don't want to think about all the consequences to their actions so they can erase that complexity. As an aside, not all of these companies are Silicon Valley-based anyway. SkipTheDishes, the one I use, is a Canadian company.

maximente 6y ago

what about slice? flat fee ($1.95 as of today) and solid mission: https://www.forbes.com/sites/garystern/2019/08/14/slice-helping-the-local-pizzeria-compete-against-the-heavyweight-pizza-chains/#32346fa9704d https://www.forbes.com/sites/garystern/2019/08/14/slice-help...

rootsudo 6y ago
Wow, that is literally right out of Silicon Valley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo
- benatkin 6y ago
  Slice started in 2010 and won an Inc. award in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slice_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slice_(app)
benatkin 6y ago
I think it's ethical! That would take a hundred dollar order for it to meet GP's standard though. I hope Slice wins. Their business model is still vulnerable to credit card chargebacks, but they let the restaurant handle delivery and pickup, which is why they might be able to afford taking less of a cut. I can't say Slice's business model will work, but I can pretty much guarantee that taking a 5% cut won't work. Slice also probably needs to pass on credit card processing fees (at least 3%) for any transaction they handle in addition to their flat fee in order for it to work. They provide an option of paying in cash though. Thanx also seems like it might be good. I interviewed as part of interviewing at five companies in five days at TripleByte. That was a surreal experience. I had lived in SF for three and a half years, and had only been gone from SF for two months when they flew me back to SF and I stayed at Hotel Whitcomb. Never had I stayed so close to City Hall when I lived in SF. At the time Thanx was mostly about rewards. I saw them come up when I ordered from a burger place called PINCHO in Coral Gables, which is adjacent to Miami where I live now. It seems like an ideal pivot. Like Slice, it had very good UX.
- MoBattah_ 6y ago

clairity 6y ago

yes, this wave of delivery services haven't solved last-mile logistics in any meaningful way over previous waves. their main "innovation", popularized by uber, is outsourcing the capital investment to less sophisticated operators (while matching and real-time routing have improved, those are incremental improvements at best). no one has cracked the core logistics problem involving time or cost, which is the real hump. i can literally order a pizza, walk to the store to pick it up, and return in less time than a delivery service can deliver, and i've saved all that overhead cost and it's warmer/fresher to boot. even moreso with groceries. granted, i'm in a city, but the gambit of delivery is that the city is the real shizzle for delivery. until the logistics problem is solved, it makes little sense to use a delivery app for more than as an occasional novelty or treat.

ghaff 6y ago
Once you can walk (easily) to pick up a takeout order, the value of delivery goes down pretty quickly. Not that I have great takeout options near where I live, but I'm going to have to hop in a car and it's going to take me probably close to 30 minutes to pickup an order when all is said and done. If I had good takeout delivery options, I would definitely use them now and then.
- clairity 6y ago
  fair. the psychology is interesting though. people almost never want food 30 minutes from now. we want food now, when we think of it. but "now" is contextual. empty time between desire and fulfillment is dreadful, to be avoided. waiting for delivery still burns background brain cycles keeping tabs on it (not to mention how much harder it is to decide and order via an app) and therefore isn't a pancea in itself. this is especially true when you want to put those otherwise wasted cycles to work on something more important. if you go to pick it up, you're making progress toward the goal, and "now" stretches out along that task. it feels somewhat like you're getting food "now", even 30 minutes later. you don't feel that same sense of waste. but if you're already wasting time (like watching tv), then the strain of waiting isn't nearly as consequential or burdensome. in any case, if i lived in a more suburban area, i'd still likely rather drive and pick up the food (as we did growing up) than get it delivered. it's still often faster, fresher, and cheaper than delivery apps, and you don't have the parking issues that can make pickup harder in urban areas.

texasbigdata 6y ago

Toronto (and New York) are not representative of 95% of North American cities assuming you live in the GTA.

lhorie 6y ago
Assuming you live in Toronto proper. Most of the GTA is pretty sparse and car-oriented. Even northern Toronto (think Steeles) is already relatively suburban.

speeder 6y ago

Where I live the government literally banned you picking up your orders... so sadly can't live like you are doing :( Delivery is only option, I suspect delivery people are making a killing now.

safog 6y ago

The restaurants don't lose a full 30% on the order - the items on Uber eats are marked up over what you pay when you do regular takeout. I wouldn't go so far as to say they don't lose any money at all but we won't know exact numbers until Uber / restaurant owners publish them somewhere. Also, having a delivery option I'm pretty sure provides additional business (on top of just having dine-in / pick up). So, for a restaurant to hire employees and building out a delivery service themselves will be much more hassle and probably will be more expensive than using a service like doordash / uber eats. Lastly, this is driving a trend towards the so-called "cloud kitchens" letting restaurants operate with a subset of staff in cheaper to rent places and charging effectively what a regular restaurant would for a meal. The restaurants are going through a paradigm shift now, and it will only be accelerated due to COVID - Cloud kitchens can be more sanitary / safer to order from than regular dine-in restaurants for instance but I don't really feel sorry for them. If anything, the drivers doing the delivery are the ones getting shafted here and barely making any money. If folks start tipping, it will simply mean that Uber can afford to pay drivers less - the amount a driver makes won't change very significantly. Overall I'm convinced eats is the future and Uber focusing on ride share + eats + self driving (existential threat if someone else does it cheaper / better) is the right way to go for the company.

jpadkins 6y ago
cloud kitchen = a new name for drive through food service? :-)
amelius 6y ago
> The restaurants don't lose a full 30% on the order Doesn't Apple already grab 30% of the in-app payment?
- watermelon0 6y ago
  That doesn't apply for physical goods.
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  Apple doesn't take any percentage of payment for physical goods.

Bang2Bay 6y ago

my concern was uber not having competition and that has been set right with at least one other ipo-ed company. uber for me is as important as local business.

kkotak 6y ago
There is no competition because the business is not sustainable. Not everyone gets to raise billions of dollars on a promise of self-driving future - where the per unit economy might be sustainable. When that happens there will be tons of competition.

amelius 6y ago

I feel that delivery apps should have certification like "Fair Trade" [1], so you know that the restaurant owner receives a fair share of the money. [1] https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/ https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/

forgotmylogin2 6y ago
Restauranteurs opt-in to their relationship with Uber Eats. If they feel they aren't getting compensated fairly, they can opt-out. It feels quite condescending that you think you need to protect restaurants from Uber when restaurants are already capable of dissociating from Uber. You're essentially saying restaurant owners are too dumb to know what's best for them, so you need to make decisions for them.
- amelius 6y ago
  This is not how it works. There is a network effect. If everybody uses Uber Eats then as a restaurant owner you have no choice but to opt-in. Talk to some restaurant owners. And to make a more general remark: the free market doesn't always have the desired effect. See for example Net Neutrality which wouldn't exist if the free market had its way.

mcculley 6y ago

I don't understand the appeal of these food delivery services at all. For those occasions where I feel lazy enough to have a pizza or Chinese food delivered instead of walking or driving to pick it up, I don't want a middleman company contracting the job out to some random person. Who thinks that's a good idea? How many layers of profit-taking do people think is acceptable to have random people touching their food along the way? That's setting aside the ridiculousness of all of the one-off trips I see in my building and my neighborhood, burning gasoline to hand-deliver a sandwich.

newfriend 6y ago
> I don't understand the appeal of these food delivery services at all I'm sure there's no end to the things you don't understand. > For those occasions where I feel lazy enough to have a pizza or Chinese food delivered instead of walking or driving to pick it up, I don't want a middleman company contracting the job out to some random person. You may be surprised to know there are people in different situations than yourself. * What if I want something besides pizza or Chinese food? * What if I don't have a car? * What if restaurants are too far to walk? * What if I'm unable to walk? * What if I have small children that I can't bring with me and can't leave behind? * What if I have something important going on and can't take time to go get food? * What if I don't want to call them on the phone? What if I have anxiety or can't speak? * What if I don't know what kind of food I want, and would like to browse options? * What if I'm new/don't know the area? > How many layers of profit-taking do people think is acceptable to have random people touching their food along the way? So you're ok with the food preparer and other employees, and the restaurant's delivery person "touching" your food, but not a 3rd party delivery person. Anyway, the delivery bag is typically sealed when ordered through these services. Maybe if you thought about it for 5 seconds, you could understand why these services are so popular.
- mcculley 6y ago
  I've thought about it quite a lot and discussed this with some of the delivery people I see on the street and in my building. I have enjoyed these elevator discussions about the economics of feeding the lazy. Many of them are also surprised that people will pay them to deliver a Jimmy John's sandwich.

lhorie 6y ago

> I understand using these apps is more of a necessity if you have kids and larger number of people at home I have 2 small kids. From my perspective, it actually makes less sense to use an app for delivery because having kids often implies also having a car (in north america, anyways). So driving down to the restaurant for pickup costs considerably less than using the delivery option. I'll still use the app though for the same reason Uber originally became popular: there's no need to call or talk to anyone, and there's no need to fumble with physical currency for payment; you just tap a few buttons, drive to the store, pick up your food and go.

calvinmorrison 6y ago
Just wait a few more years and you will have free delivery children. Oft of my childhood was the call to 'go get the pizza!'
- kaybe 6y ago
  If they need the car to get the pizza the time window the delivery kids can be used might be short..
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  We're always debating buy vs. build, but that seems kind of extreme.
calvinbhai 6y ago
I agree with you about convenience of ordering. This was often the case when I was in the US. But in canada it's nice that all stores I frequent accept credit cards, and all of them work with apple pay, so no fumbling with cash. Probably I'm not like most app users are. If I know a few different types of restaurants in the area, and I know specific items I like there, I'll just order the same thing again and again until I move elsewhere. If I wanted a new place, new dish every time, probably Delivery apps would be a good way to discover

gen220 6y ago

In my neighborhood in NYC, restaurants are getting much more vocal about the commission rate. We used to be pretty exclusive seamless users in my house until we got a letter in one of our bags that roughly read: "thank you for your order. Especially with the decrease in volume during these times of crisis, the grubhub commission makes it hard for us to stay in business. please consider ordering direct to support your neighborhood." Since then (near the beginning of the COVID shelter in place order), we've ordered with the telephone or custom solutions every time. And we've noticed a difference: delivery times are literally half of what they were before. It's interesting to see the `shopify`-ing of restaurants in our area: instead of going through the big platform of Seamless etc., they're using platforms that appear to be more like shopify/stripe (decentralized, meager commissions, no high-traffic "discovery" platform). Some of our favorite restaurants have even left Seamless/etc, because they're literally losing money on orders fulfilled there. For example, a famous pizzeria nearby used to never offer delivery, but recently started offering delivery, with online ordering powered by https://pos.toasttab.com/products/online-ordering https://pos.toasttab.com/products/online-ordering. I don't know if all of this commotion will be enough to unseat the seamless/grubhub/postmates of the world, but I honestly hope it does. Restaurants are a tough enough business as it is, and the steep commission rates have been converting mom & pop places into sweatshops. :/

cwhiz 6y ago
My wife and I were exclusively using Seamless until we read an article in Eater talking about how Grubhub/Seamless charge restaurants $6-7+ per phone call.[0] ..but then when we started trying to call or order directly through restaurants, we kept getting turned away and told to order through one of the apps. It seems many (most?) restaurants aren't in a position to take orders over the phone or directly through their website, even for pickup. [0]: https://ny.eater.com/2020/4/23/21231943/grubhub-nyc-phone-order-expat-harlem-charges https://ny.eater.com/2020/4/23/21231943/grubhub-nyc-phone-or...
adjkant 6y ago
Similar experience here in NYC/Brooklyn. Got a leaflet in an order to use their direct website. They use this, which seems to work pretty well and the tech looks solid: https://get.chownow.com/ https://get.chownow.com/

asdff 6y ago

No delivery service is good. Why would I pay more for soggy food that left the kitchen almost an hour ago? Restaurant's own delivery services don't even suffer from this as they go right from store to door. Ubereats et al orders sit for 15 minutes by the register waiting for the driver to appear.

pbalau 6y ago
Not sure how food delivery works in US, but here in London I can get my food no late than say 45mins after I placed my order (via Deliveroo and afaik JustEat too). And the only time I ordered food in US, I had the pizza about 30mins after I ordered it (via UberEats).
- tick_tock_tick 6y ago
  30 minutes-ish is common in any US city. The only time it goes longer is during peek periods.

smallgovt 6y ago

There's a guy that's working on an app that helps you order directly from local restaurants so they can save on commission fees: https://www.eatnyc.org/ https://www.eatnyc.org/ I think the app only covers NYC for now.

Consultant32452 6y ago

Every restaurant around here just passes Uber's cut onto the customer by raising prices in the Uber menu.

ccktlmazeltov 6y ago

I don't tip when using these delivery apps and I have no idea how they can make money honestly.

connectsnk 6y ago

Nice username :) Does the calvin in the username refer to calvin and hobbes?