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They thrive because people are lazy - both restaurant and their customers. Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their ow

They thrive because people are lazy - both restaurant and their customers. Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. The delivery apps have hundreds of millions in investment in technology and marketing, a lot of it shady. The apps can offer addictive flows that restaurants cannot compete with. The solution out of this is an app co-op model - payment processing (3%) + 2-3% overhead. There are similar offerings in the ride-share world and this should work on the delivery apps as well. I would rather support an app that provides a healthy living to a small company in Tulsa or Talinn that subsidize rents in SF and fatten VC portfolios for an online menu with checkout supported by hundreds of millions in marketing dollars.

ericzawo 6y ago
Restaurants are a lot of things. But lazy is not one of them. Have you ever worked at a restaurant?
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I’ve been an AGM and worked the industry six years plus four years adjacent in catering before finishing college and moving into SWE. Yes an awful lot of them are lazy. I mention him only to mention the scary accuracy of it, but the late Anthony Bourdain has a chapter dedicated to crappy restauranteurs in nearly every book he’s written on the topic of food service as a career (of course his distaste for crappy restaurant owners is poignantly dotted through the entirety of “Kitchen Confidential” to be fair), and I often wonder to this day to hear his voice on the state of affairs in food service during a pandemic, and the micro economy that’s sprung up in food delivery.
- enitihas 6y ago
  Restaurants might not be lazy in their core business functions, but that doesn't make them non lazy on other matters.
  - haswell 6y ago
    You need to find a different word that isn't "lazy". Perhaps a better way to say this is: restaurants are good at being restaurants, but aren't always good at establishing an online presence. A big part of why these delivery services succeed is that they provide a function that restaurants aren't well suited to provide on their own. This isn't about being lazy, it's about an industry needing to adapt to the new expectations of the app economy, and often not having the expertise to do so.
    - arkitaip 6y ago
      > Perhaps a better way to say this is: restaurants are good at being restaurants, but aren't always good at establishing an online presence. That's the majority of all businesses. And like many similar industries, the razor thin margins don't allow restaurants to properly invest in tech.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      A restaurants entire purpose is to provide food for people that’s more convenient than the alternative. If they can’t do that, there is no reason for them to exist. If they can’t survive, someone who can come up with a business model that meets the needs of consumers will take their place. Times change and circumstances change. Businesses either evolve or get replaced. The problem now is that delivery services are being subsidized by VC money or however Uber is getting new money after their IPO.
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  You are right, lazy is the wrong word, irrational perhaps? I have worked in commercial kitchens and have plenty of friends who run restaurants and have spend time in their operations. They regularly complain about the 30%+ they fork over to grubless. 30% is an insane fraction in a business that barely makes an accounting profit! In established restaurants, a significant fraction of the orders come from repeat customers. Moving these repeat customers to a 5% friction channel from a 30% channel can be a game changer. Now when I walk past restaurants, I see banners imploring folks to order from their website. I guess, one silver lining from this pandemic.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > Now when I walk past restaurants, I see banners imploring folks to order from their website. I guess, one silver lining from this pandemic. Lazy is not the wrong word. They couldn't be bothered to put up that website until now. They couldn't be bothered to innovate and wanted to keep people needing to call on their phones. They slashed their own wrists with their mediocrity. This is an area where teenagers routinely make money by building these kinds of websites.
    - acka 6y ago
      > This is an area where teenagers routinely make money by building these kinds of websites. ... only for those websites' backend services to be breached and the customer account data to be shared on the dark nets by other teenagers, ready to rip off and scam innocent customers. Sarcasm obviously, but designing an ecommerce site is a serious affair, not an afternoon pastime.
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        They don't do it from scratch but use a service like Shopify or WooCommerce.
  - KirinDave 6y ago
    The challenge is how they would do that. It requires expertise which itself costs money and time to gain, and it's an ongoing maintenance cost for a small restaurant that may have extremely seasonal revenue. It's not actually clear to me that every restaurant acting individually can actually recover that delivery service fee. There's no economy of scale for them to exploit.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- blondin 6y ago
  what OP describes makes sense to me. but you are right, it is perhaps not laziness. it's a case of not knowing how to do it. i mean why isn't dominos, pizzahut, etc. teaching them how to do delivery? with everything going on, with these apps not helping restaurants, i decided to stop using these apps and go get my food myself. i only use apps when i get lazy like OP says.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    To your point, Dominos is. Their pizza order tracker is open source [1]. The code is now two years old but I thought it was really cool of them to even do this in the first place. [1] https://github.com/nikolas/dominos-pizza-tracker https://github.com/nikolas/dominos-pizza-tracker (I’m still hunting the original article where this was announced, the first version they released I’m pretty sure was linked here on HN in the mid 10’s?)
    - blondin 6y ago
      oh wow, thanks for sharing!
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  I think you may be conflating the cooks, waitresses etc. who are certainly not lazy, with the management who tend to be lazy and set in their old ways, not willing to innovate unless absolutely forced to. I suspect the OP had the latter category in mind.
- bigdubs 6y ago
  I think they in the parent comment means customers.
- blfr 6y ago
  OK, complacent then. It doesn't change the argument.
  - basch 6y ago
    It's very common for businesses of all sorts to view anything not their core competency as a cost to be minimized or a distraction, instead of an investment with return. a website and online menu is something that they felt they could get away with the bare minimum, no regard for surfer experience. it, along with maybe throwing some money in an seo pit, with a checkbox in a playbook.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> payment processing (3%) + 2-3% overhead. Is that anywhere near enough to actually pay for a delivery? I have both the Dasher app and the DoorDash app. That delivery I pay $2.99 for leads to the Dasher often being offered $13 on a $30 order with a $4 tip.
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  Grubless et.al can charge as high as 30% for just order and payment processing, delivery through their network is extra.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    I believe that includes marketing as well though?
    - haltingproblem 6y ago
      Yes, marketing/customer acquisition. Promotions are increasingly passed onto restaurants. Restaurants have to opt-in to marketing promotions and then the cost is deducted from the order.
  - Jommi 6y ago
    However that delivery is in part subsidies by this.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Definitely not. But the problem is not that delivery realistically may cost $10-15 to pay for itself, it's that it's coming from the restaurant's margins and being hidden from the customer. If the fees were real, the restaurant wouldn't need to care about pickup vs delivery, but the apps would lose some business because $15 is a good reason to do pickup.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Whose fault is it that restaurants aren’t pricing their services correctly?
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
The home-grown app in Tulsa will never have the capital for marketing and sales reps that allow it to capture a healthy market share of restaurants. And if they do somehow make it, once they become the market leader, they're going to start asking for a larger portion of the pie. That's how business works, be it in Tulsa or SV.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  You are most probably right. But there are community banks, vanguard, mutual insurance companies, agricultural cooperatives. These entities are the exception and not the rule but one can always hope. I know, I know, hope is not a strategy ;)
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  > That's how business works, be it in Tulsa or SV Um, no. Most businesses seek growth by trying to offer new/upsold products and services rather than trying to squeeze their customers for the same service.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    That idea is too much of a reduction of how businesses actually operate. Most businesses that aren't market leaders have to offer new or upsold products and services to grow because they can't throw around their monopoly power. If you control 0.01% of the the entire delivery food sales market, and you raise middleman fees 3x, your (restaurant) customers will take a hike and switch to a different, cheaper delivery app. If you control 75% of the market, your customers might be more willing to accept the increased fees.
  - ramraj07 6y ago
    Only if there's genuine risk of competition. If there's even the slifhtest whiff of lock-in the executives in any sufficiently large organization start milking their customers to enhance their personal portfolio even at the immediate (not to mention the long-term) detriment of the organization itself. See Oracle.
newacct583 6y ago
I think that's about the size of it. This seems like a "bad deal" to restaurants because they aren't really thinking of the problem correctly. Restaurants view having to sell a meal via GrubHub as selling a discounted meal, because the customer pays menu price but the delivery service charges a fee. So the restaurant makes less cash than they would to serve the same food to a table. And the reason they think this is that when customers used to order "takeout", they'd still pay full price and the restaurant would keep all of it. So it feels like they've lost something. But that's all wrong, because takeout used to be "improperly" (per a market analysis) marked up. Serving takeout is cheaper: no need for tables and dishes and servers. Lots of restaurants have known this forever and prioritized their takeout business, and done very well. But now those savings are all being eaten up by another party that is providing useful improved services to the customer, and restaurants don't like it. Well... I guess I wouldn't either, but what they're complaining about isn't so much unfair competition than it is (heh) the elimination of what for them used to be a free lunch. The market will re-equilibrate. It always does. But yeah, until it does the distribution of changes will not be fair. It never is.
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  Good analysis on the economics of takeout vs. eat-in. Hence the rise of ghost kitchens which are losing the storefront and all the overhead that goes with it - cutlery, tables, servers etc. Grubless et.al are really a discovery platform. Once the customer acquisition happens - restaurants need to move to own the customer relationship. There is so much low-haning fruit there - repeat sales, meal subscriptions, boxed lunches.....
- gkop 6y ago
  Take out customers don’t order high-margin beverages in proportion to dine-in customers. In most of the US, restaurants cannot even sell the highest-margin beverages, alcoholic ones, to go. With the lost beverage margin, increased take out volume is at best a wash for most restaurants.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Then you change your pricing to reflect reality...
tcbawo 6y ago
I'm amazed that Chipotle hasn't packaged it's online ordering app and licensed it to other restaurants. I've never used such a streamlined, polished, and convenient way to make an order for pickup or delivery.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I’ve found Panera Bread’s online ordering system to also be a well crafted order flow. To your question, I wonder if the exact reason they don’t is because they view their order software as something that gives them a competitive edge in their specific cuisines markets. Panera and Chipotle are about as far apart as you can get, sandwiches and soups versus burritos and burrito bowls yet where I see some alignment is how they both have amazing online ordering experiences which allow deep order customization that eschews a lot of friction in doing so. I can’t think of another large chain with similar order experience between the two (Edit: Potbelly, perhaps for sandwiches?)
  - fncypants 6y ago
    Chick-Fil-A’s app is extremely well done. Just this morning I ordered breakfast from a store, but drove to the wrong one and parked. The app noticed this automatically, asked if I wanted to move my pending order to this store, and after pressing “Yes” my food was walked out to my car < 5 mins later.
- ChickeNES 6y ago
  Doesn't the Chipotle app just use DoorDash?
hobofan 6y ago
For food delivery there is CoopCycle[0] in 10+ cities worldwide. I've been seeing their stickers at quite a few restaurants lately in Berlin, where the local chapter formed after Lieferando consolidated IIRC. [0]: https://coopcycle.org/en/ https://coopcycle.org/en/
- ramraj07 6y ago
  This is amazing and I hope it takes off in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if grubhub and uber team together to spend millions in lobbying to ban food delivery co-ops in this country though. Nothing more American than that!
Kapura 6y ago
>Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Ridiculous. This is an assertion made by somebody who has never tried to convince anybody of anything, by somebody who doesn't know the meaning of the word "discoverability," who has no concept of what market dominance means. Without government intervention, you can't "new business model" your way out of this. Especially not in the middle of a pandemic that is being historically mishandled.
quotemstr 6y ago
One man's "laz[iness]" is another man's efficiency. Think of all the other forms of laziness we have: we don't need to do dishes by hand; the printing press saves us having to scribble letters by hand; we have machines wash our clothes; cars spare our feet and our time; hydraulic excavators let us avoid shoveling dirt with our hands; and aircraft let us save the weeks we'd otherwise waste aboard ships and in rail cars. Is using any of these things some kind of moral failing? Of course not, and neither is using a food delivery service. People get a lot of value out of delivery apps. If they didn't, they wouldn't use them. You're asking people to forego something valuable on your say-so. How can that be justified? Every technological innovation is opposed by those used to the old ways or who are financially interested in the perpetuation of inefficiencies from which they benefit. This opposition frequently takes on a moral character, as it has in your comment --- if you use the new thing, you're a bad person making an unethical choice. Well, I reject that.
yomly 6y ago
>Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. But it's more than that. Centralisation of food delivery also means centralisation of your sign-in details + address + payment. In the decentralised model, you rely on each of these restaurants to implement these well and securely. In the least worse case scenario they might go with some login with Google/Facebook solution (which is gross for other reasons). Not to mention the friction (and often sub-optimal sign-on flow) on these independent sites because they lack an army of UX A/B testers. Last time I signed up independently for a restaurant via their app (because they took themselves off Uber Eats) the food took 2.5 hours to come and arrived cold.

ericzawo 6y ago

Restaurants are a lot of things. But lazy is not one of them. Have you ever worked at a restaurant?

dvtrn 6y ago
I’ve been an AGM and worked the industry six years plus four years adjacent in catering before finishing college and moving into SWE. Yes an awful lot of them are lazy. I mention him only to mention the scary accuracy of it, but the late Anthony Bourdain has a chapter dedicated to crappy restauranteurs in nearly every book he’s written on the topic of food service as a career (of course his distaste for crappy restaurant owners is poignantly dotted through the entirety of “Kitchen Confidential” to be fair), and I often wonder to this day to hear his voice on the state of affairs in food service during a pandemic, and the micro economy that’s sprung up in food delivery.
enitihas 6y ago
Restaurants might not be lazy in their core business functions, but that doesn't make them non lazy on other matters.
- haswell 6y ago
  You need to find a different word that isn't "lazy". Perhaps a better way to say this is: restaurants are good at being restaurants, but aren't always good at establishing an online presence. A big part of why these delivery services succeed is that they provide a function that restaurants aren't well suited to provide on their own. This isn't about being lazy, it's about an industry needing to adapt to the new expectations of the app economy, and often not having the expertise to do so.
  - arkitaip 6y ago
    > Perhaps a better way to say this is: restaurants are good at being restaurants, but aren't always good at establishing an online presence. That's the majority of all businesses. And like many similar industries, the razor thin margins don't allow restaurants to properly invest in tech.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    A restaurants entire purpose is to provide food for people that’s more convenient than the alternative. If they can’t do that, there is no reason for them to exist. If they can’t survive, someone who can come up with a business model that meets the needs of consumers will take their place. Times change and circumstances change. Businesses either evolve or get replaced. The problem now is that delivery services are being subsidized by VC money or however Uber is getting new money after their IPO.
haltingproblem 6y ago
You are right, lazy is the wrong word, irrational perhaps? I have worked in commercial kitchens and have plenty of friends who run restaurants and have spend time in their operations. They regularly complain about the 30%+ they fork over to grubless. 30% is an insane fraction in a business that barely makes an accounting profit! In established restaurants, a significant fraction of the orders come from repeat customers. Moving these repeat customers to a 5% friction channel from a 30% channel can be a game changer. Now when I walk past restaurants, I see banners imploring folks to order from their website. I guess, one silver lining from this pandemic.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > Now when I walk past restaurants, I see banners imploring folks to order from their website. I guess, one silver lining from this pandemic. Lazy is not the wrong word. They couldn't be bothered to put up that website until now. They couldn't be bothered to innovate and wanted to keep people needing to call on their phones. They slashed their own wrists with their mediocrity. This is an area where teenagers routinely make money by building these kinds of websites.
  - acka 6y ago
    > This is an area where teenagers routinely make money by building these kinds of websites. ... only for those websites' backend services to be breached and the customer account data to be shared on the dark nets by other teenagers, ready to rip off and scam innocent customers. Sarcasm obviously, but designing an ecommerce site is a serious affair, not an afternoon pastime.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      They don't do it from scratch but use a service like Shopify or WooCommerce.
- KirinDave 6y ago
  The challenge is how they would do that. It requires expertise which itself costs money and time to gain, and it's an ongoing maintenance cost for a small restaurant that may have extremely seasonal revenue. It's not actually clear to me that every restaurant acting individually can actually recover that delivery service fee. There's no economy of scale for them to exploit.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
blondin 6y ago
what OP describes makes sense to me. but you are right, it is perhaps not laziness. it's a case of not knowing how to do it. i mean why isn't dominos, pizzahut, etc. teaching them how to do delivery? with everything going on, with these apps not helping restaurants, i decided to stop using these apps and go get my food myself. i only use apps when i get lazy like OP says.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  To your point, Dominos is. Their pizza order tracker is open source [1]. The code is now two years old but I thought it was really cool of them to even do this in the first place. [1] https://github.com/nikolas/dominos-pizza-tracker https://github.com/nikolas/dominos-pizza-tracker (I’m still hunting the original article where this was announced, the first version they released I’m pretty sure was linked here on HN in the mid 10’s?)
  - blondin 6y ago
    oh wow, thanks for sharing!
AsyncAwait 6y ago
I think you may be conflating the cooks, waitresses etc. who are certainly not lazy, with the management who tend to be lazy and set in their old ways, not willing to innovate unless absolutely forced to. I suspect the OP had the latter category in mind.
bigdubs 6y ago
I think they in the parent comment means customers.
blfr 6y ago
OK, complacent then. It doesn't change the argument.
- basch 6y ago
  It's very common for businesses of all sorts to view anything not their core competency as a cost to be minimized or a distraction, instead of an investment with return. a website and online menu is something that they felt they could get away with the bare minimum, no regard for surfer experience. it, along with maybe throwing some money in an seo pit, with a checkbox in a playbook.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> payment processing (3%) + 2-3% overhead. Is that anywhere near enough to actually pay for a delivery? I have both the Dasher app and the DoorDash app. That delivery I pay $2.99 for leads to the Dasher often being offered $13 on a $30 order with a $4 tip.

haltingproblem 6y ago
Grubless et.al can charge as high as 30% for just order and payment processing, delivery through their network is extra.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I believe that includes marketing as well though?
  - haltingproblem 6y ago
    Yes, marketing/customer acquisition. Promotions are increasingly passed onto restaurants. Restaurants have to opt-in to marketing promotions and then the cost is deducted from the order.
- Jommi 6y ago
  However that delivery is in part subsidies by this.
coffeefirst 6y ago
Definitely not. But the problem is not that delivery realistically may cost $10-15 to pay for itself, it's that it's coming from the restaurant's margins and being hidden from the customer. If the fees were real, the restaurant wouldn't need to care about pickup vs delivery, but the apps would lose some business because $15 is a good reason to do pickup.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Whose fault is it that restaurants aren’t pricing their services correctly?

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

The home-grown app in Tulsa will never have the capital for marketing and sales reps that allow it to capture a healthy market share of restaurants. And if they do somehow make it, once they become the market leader, they're going to start asking for a larger portion of the pie. That's how business works, be it in Tulsa or SV.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
haltingproblem 6y ago
You are most probably right. But there are community banks, vanguard, mutual insurance companies, agricultural cooperatives. These entities are the exception and not the rule but one can always hope. I know, I know, hope is not a strategy ;)
coffeefirst 6y ago
> That's how business works, be it in Tulsa or SV Um, no. Most businesses seek growth by trying to offer new/upsold products and services rather than trying to squeeze their customers for the same service.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  That idea is too much of a reduction of how businesses actually operate. Most businesses that aren't market leaders have to offer new or upsold products and services to grow because they can't throw around their monopoly power. If you control 0.01% of the the entire delivery food sales market, and you raise middleman fees 3x, your (restaurant) customers will take a hike and switch to a different, cheaper delivery app. If you control 75% of the market, your customers might be more willing to accept the increased fees.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Only if there's genuine risk of competition. If there's even the slifhtest whiff of lock-in the executives in any sufficiently large organization start milking their customers to enhance their personal portfolio even at the immediate (not to mention the long-term) detriment of the organization itself. See Oracle.

newacct583 6y ago

I think that's about the size of it. This seems like a "bad deal" to restaurants because they aren't really thinking of the problem correctly. Restaurants view having to sell a meal via GrubHub as selling a discounted meal, because the customer pays menu price but the delivery service charges a fee. So the restaurant makes less cash than they would to serve the same food to a table. And the reason they think this is that when customers used to order "takeout", they'd still pay full price and the restaurant would keep all of it. So it feels like they've lost something. But that's all wrong, because takeout used to be "improperly" (per a market analysis) marked up. Serving takeout is cheaper: no need for tables and dishes and servers. Lots of restaurants have known this forever and prioritized their takeout business, and done very well. But now those savings are all being eaten up by another party that is providing useful improved services to the customer, and restaurants don't like it. Well... I guess I wouldn't either, but what they're complaining about isn't so much unfair competition than it is (heh) the elimination of what for them used to be a free lunch. The market will re-equilibrate. It always does. But yeah, until it does the distribution of changes will not be fair. It never is.

haltingproblem 6y ago
Good analysis on the economics of takeout vs. eat-in. Hence the rise of ghost kitchens which are losing the storefront and all the overhead that goes with it - cutlery, tables, servers etc. Grubless et.al are really a discovery platform. Once the customer acquisition happens - restaurants need to move to own the customer relationship. There is so much low-haning fruit there - repeat sales, meal subscriptions, boxed lunches.....
gkop 6y ago
Take out customers don’t order high-margin beverages in proportion to dine-in customers. In most of the US, restaurants cannot even sell the highest-margin beverages, alcoholic ones, to go. With the lost beverage margin, increased take out volume is at best a wash for most restaurants.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Then you change your pricing to reflect reality...

tcbawo 6y ago

I'm amazed that Chipotle hasn't packaged it's online ordering app and licensed it to other restaurants. I've never used such a streamlined, polished, and convenient way to make an order for pickup or delivery.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dvtrn 6y ago
I’ve found Panera Bread’s online ordering system to also be a well crafted order flow. To your question, I wonder if the exact reason they don’t is because they view their order software as something that gives them a competitive edge in their specific cuisines markets. Panera and Chipotle are about as far apart as you can get, sandwiches and soups versus burritos and burrito bowls yet where I see some alignment is how they both have amazing online ordering experiences which allow deep order customization that eschews a lot of friction in doing so. I can’t think of another large chain with similar order experience between the two (Edit: Potbelly, perhaps for sandwiches?)
- fncypants 6y ago
  Chick-Fil-A’s app is extremely well done. Just this morning I ordered breakfast from a store, but drove to the wrong one and parked. The app noticed this automatically, asked if I wanted to move my pending order to this store, and after pressing “Yes” my food was walked out to my car < 5 mins later.
ChickeNES 6y ago
Doesn't the Chipotle app just use DoorDash?

hobofan 6y ago

For food delivery there is CoopCycle[0] in 10+ cities worldwide. I've been seeing their stickers at quite a few restaurants lately in Berlin, where the local chapter formed after Lieferando consolidated IIRC. [0]: https://coopcycle.org/en/ https://coopcycle.org/en/

ramraj07 6y ago
This is amazing and I hope it takes off in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if grubhub and uber team together to spend millions in lobbying to ban food delivery co-ops in this country though. Nothing more American than that!

Kapura 6y ago

>Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off. Ridiculous. This is an assertion made by somebody who has never tried to convince anybody of anything, by somebody who doesn't know the meaning of the word "discoverability," who has no concept of what market dominance means. Without government intervention, you can't "new business model" your way out of this. Especially not in the middle of a pandemic that is being historically mishandled.

quotemstr 6y ago

One man's "laz[iness]" is another man's efficiency. Think of all the other forms of laziness we have: we don't need to do dishes by hand; the printing press saves us having to scribble letters by hand; we have machines wash our clothes; cars spare our feet and our time; hydraulic excavators let us avoid shoveling dirt with our hands; and aircraft let us save the weeks we'd otherwise waste aboard ships and in rail cars. Is using any of these things some kind of moral failing? Of course not, and neither is using a food delivery service. People get a lot of value out of delivery apps. If they didn't, they wouldn't use them. You're asking people to forego something valuable on your say-so. How can that be justified? Every technological innovation is opposed by those used to the old ways or who are financially interested in the perpetuation of inefficiencies from which they benefit. This opposition frequently takes on a moral character, as it has in your comment --- if you use the new thing, you're a bad person making an unethical choice. Well, I reject that.

yomly 6y ago

>Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered. But it's more than that. Centralisation of food delivery also means centralisation of your sign-in details + address + payment. In the decentralised model, you rely on each of these restaurants to implement these well and securely. In the least worse case scenario they might go with some login with Google/Facebook solution (which is gross for other reasons). Not to mention the friction (and often sub-optimal sign-on flow) on these independent sites because they lack an army of UX A/B testers. Last time I signed up independently for a restaurant via their app (because they took themselves off Uber Eats) the food took 2.5 hours to come and arrived cold.