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To me, this is the key claim of the article: This is not a genuine partnership, it’s extractive. Is DoorDash extracting money from its users, the restaurants

• ponker 6y ago
  The question is, if the prices were raised to sustainable levels, would the market be big enough to justify the amount of unsustainable spending that is going on right now to capture it?
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > if the prices were raised to sustainable levels, would the market be big enough It was big enough in tier-1 cities when it required someone at the restaurant writing down the order, hiring a delivery person and dealing with disgruntled customers. They have at least that market with economies of scale.
• lurker619 6y ago
  I agree 100%. I don't think I'd ever order so much from random local restaurants if they weren't easily available in the doordash/ubereats apps in a standard format at the click of a button. No way would I google, search and decide a menu, then call up, I'd just eat from my local subway every time.
  • black_puppydog 6y ago
    I've started using Deliveroo a bit during the lockdown here in France. But frankly... it's just faster to go downstairs. There are superb restaurants all over the place within literal (!) spitting distance of my door/windows. Snack food, too. I know it's not a short term solution, but the US seems to have painted itself into a bit of a corner by separating commercial and residential areas so much...?
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      The US isn’t that bad, at least where I’ve lived in coastal cities. Reading someone choose subway of all places over a few minutes of using the internet is a first for me.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• goatinaboat 6y ago
  Maybe the drivers are underpaid, maybe the restaurants are underpaid, maybe the food costs too much, but even if they end up charging more money, are they really going to go away like Groupon did? There is this corrosive process of these gig-economy companies, they end up making life just a little bit more shit for everyone. You'll turn a blind eye to the desperate delivery drivers, to the stress of the restaurant owner as he struggles to make payroll (it's a hard enough business already) as the delivery company pushes him to lower prices with the threat of being dropped. Then you'll notice that the quality of the food starts to drop, or one day that restaurant falls off the app, huh, you'll think, wonder what happened to them, never mind. And the deliveries will start to take a bit longer and make more mistakes as the company squeezes the drivers harder and harder... Try paying a fair price for fair value and taking pleasure in seeing businesses owned by your neighbours thrive. It really is a better way to live than spending your time on earth with your face buried in an app exploiting the poorest.
  • lmm 6y ago
    I'm happy to pay a fair price. But I don't want to have to deal with the terrible websites most local restaurants manage to put together, and I definitely don't want to have to phone in my order. Using an app is absolutely a better way to live. If you can make better food than your competitors, you'll thrive - the delivery services make that more true, not less. Stick to your USP and outsource everything else.
    • goatinaboat 6y ago
      If you can make better food than your competitors, you'll thrive I have a couple of friends who have opened and run their own restaurants - there is an awful lot more to it than that and most restaurants fail for reasons that are nothing to do with the capabilities of the chef.
      • lmm 6y ago
        Sure. You currently need to be good at the many different things that make up running a business. But as the non-chef aspects (like your website and advertising, and hiring delivery drivers) become commoditised, that becomes less true.
• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  If we could only isolate these companies in a small geographical sub-segment and let them duke it out there, and then maybe rescue whoever emerges victorious, but otherwise declare the whole thing a Superfund site... What I mean is: you're neglecting the collateral damage. These companies, fighting tooth and claw to win the prize (whether imaginary or real), are destroying the business space in which they operate, and adding to misery of the local communities. > Is DoorDash extracting money from its users, the restaurants and the delivery drivers? Or is it actually providing something of value? The way I see it, they provide a big value to its users - convenience and decent ordering experience. At the same time, they also take away a different value - consistency of quality in delivery (and make you think it's the restaurant's fault). The users are probably net ahead, but there's no free lunch (pun intended)! DoorDash & Uber Eats are providing this value by burning through the supply restaurants and abusing delivery workers. They're strip-mining the industry. (Personally, I'm surprised it's DoorDash that's winning. I was always betting on Uber Eats - because Uber has abuse and sociopathy deep in its corporate DNA, as they did all these things and more while building their international rideshare empire.)
• wwweston 6y ago
  > the delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats just work a lot better than calling up restaurants for delivery did in the pre-app era. Not my experience for takeout. Before: I called in an order, they told me how long it would take, I would arrive, it would be done. After: I submit an order via the app. I receive confirmation and an estimated time. Arriving at the time is optimistic, so I arrive 5 minutes later. I find staff juggling half a dozen (often more) devices, one per app, and converting them to whatever their internal order system is. Frequently they have entirely missed my order and who can blame them because they've gone from phone & counter "inboxes" to more than you can count on one hand. You can ask staff which app tends to be most reliable and they'll tell you which one they pay the most attention to and that has a hope of reaching parity with phone orders. Delivery's a little different of a beast, apps have made the market for that kind of service more "liquid" and responsive, but it remains to be seen exactly what the models look like without growth capital subsidies. > But like music, it won't just go away, it'll be a new business structure that perhaps dominates the industry. If this is the comparison, then be afraid, because streaming has both destroyed a huge amount of value in recordings and redirected a significant portion of remaining value towards new middlemen.
  • dash2 6y ago
    If this were the general experience, then DoorDash would not have got started. Where I live you can still order plenty of food by phone. I prefer Deliveroo. It's simpler and I can see what I'm ordering.
  • Kalium 6y ago
    > If this is the comparison, then be afraid, because streaming has both destroyed a huge amount of value in recordings and redirected a significant portion of remaining value towards new middlemen. Counterpoint: streaming didn't destroy value, it exposed how much value was fictional or an artifice of a dearth of consumer options. Apps have done something similar. They have exposed that many customers, in many cases, don't actually care all that much about things that restauranteurs believed they did. The supposed value largely didn't exist. One example is supposed relationships between vendor and customer. Most people don't have strong, deep, and enduring emotional attachments to relatively generic pizza shops. They do not deeply bond to an artist they kinda like one song from, but otherwise find interchangeable with several dozen other artists on their lofi playlist.
• eru 6y ago
  Note that the author of the piece has quite a big axe to grind.
  • Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > Note that the author of the piece has quite a big axe to grind. His perceived lack of objectivity doesn't mean he's wrong, and as a person who has been in the Industry and has many friends who own kitchens that have had to deal with their toxic relationship to make payroll his opinions resonate with my own.
    • eru 6y ago
      Sorry, in this case I didn't mean specifically to comment on kitchens. Just for the 'axe to grind', compare the comment on Prop 22 by Mr Slate Star Codex at https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/j9kxl0/my_california_ballot_2020/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/j9kxl0/my_c... with the article submitted here. (I'm linking to a note by Scott Alexander, because he's generally seen as a level headed person. More than anything I could write.)
• Heliosmaster 6y ago
  Incentive are not aligned anymore. Example: I order a pizza through Deliveroo. The driver doesn't care about either the restaurant or me, so he chucks the pizza vertically in his box, ruining it. I get a shitty pizza, I won't order anymore from the restaurant. Compare this with me calling up the restaurant and having one of their employees delivering the pizza: the restaurant has all the incentives for me to enjoy the pizza, since they suffer if they lose me as a client. And no, it doesn't help using something else as deliveroos: the deliverers are all the same (they use multiple apps) and they don't give a shit about the quality of the service (and rightly so, since they are paid peanuts)
  • agustif 6y ago
    Right now restaurants are pretty thankful if you go there to take your delivery! I have even got free cake, and I usually order from places nearby...
  • swiley 6y ago
    I have never had a delivery driver do anything like that.
  • thrav 6y ago
    If a delivery driver gets a series of 1-star reviews, you can bet they’re getting kicked off the platform. + DoorDash actually does refund quite frequently for food issues.
    • labcomputer 6y ago
      The problem is that appshare all have fairly high turnover, even of "good" drivers. Just look at how much Uber spends attracting new drivers. The end result is that there is a constant stream of new, unrated drivers, who can ruin your pizza. With drivers paid by the restaurant, you tended to get the same delivery guy (or a small set of delivery guys) for years at a time.
      • ketzo 6y ago
        Yet another reason that Prop 22 was a total farce... imagine thinking that a salaried employee would provide worse service than someone who's only gonna work at Doordash for 26 hours.
• labcomputer 6y ago
  I don't know how driver pay compares pre- and post-appshare, but on the consumer side, my experience differs from yours. To me, it seems that DoorDash et. al. are delivering negative value to the consumer. My recollection is that most restaurants with takeout also had a delivery option, usually at a smaller percentage cost than DoorDash takes. But, more than that, delivery worked better. Restaurants typically only offered delivery within a few miles of the store. So there was a "critical mass" effect that drivers could learn the territory, and usually had fewer problems finding an address (especially after you ordered more than once). That is especially true if Google maps has the location or entrance pin wrong for your address. Practically, that few mile radius isn't a big limitation for most take-out food because the food will get cold if driven a longer distance than that. Kitchens were also better able to prevent cold food by batching orders to have all of a driver's orders ready at one time. I think these are solvable issues, but, to date, for me as a consumer, DoorDash/Grub Hub/Uber Eats do not deliver positive value compared to restaurants with captive drivers.
  • dpiers 6y ago
    I was raised in a family-owned independent sandwich shop where half of sales came through delivery. I also work at Uber, although not on the Eats side, so my opinion is informed but potentially biased. Bandwidth is the biggest problem small restaurants have in managing a delivery service. If you don't have enough drivers to meet peak demand, you have to either decline orders or make customers mad when their order takes >1 hour to arrive (and disgruntled customers don't typically re-order or tip well). If you have too many drivers, they are making less in tips and you are probably spending more to bring their tipped wage up to minimum wage - and if it happens often they are going to quit. I remember my dad disconnecting the phone at the store when they got too may orders to handle. We ended up using my mom and siblings as the flex/surge delivery capacity. If delivery apps had existed at the time, he would have gladly traded the headache of employing drivers and managing capacity for the ability to make and sell as many sandwiches as he could. In todays' world, if he got 12 orders going to different parts of town at the same time, he could accept all of them and know that if he could make the food, someone would be able to deliver it. Delivery networks also increase courier efficiency by adding the ability to batch deliveries from multiple restaurants and avoiding the need to round-trip every order back to the restaurant when you are done. Couriers on Eats/DD can drop off one meal and be dispatched another from a restaurant nearby, and don't need multiple people who live near each other to order from the same restaurant at the same time in order to have efficiently batched trips. There are efficiencies in the network model that can't easily be replicated by individual restaurants with their own drivers. The gold standard is Dominos but they are a behemoth that can't compare to any other restaurant - they are singlehandedly as large as Doordash.
• gexla 6y ago
  Extractive is more about the relationship than money. It's extractive because the service gains power by becoming the platform. Users go to the app to view food items and order. The app becomes the experience of the restaurant. The service also becomes a major centralized competitor to everyone in the region. How are you going to compete with a service which is fighting a war of attrition backed by millions from Softbank? Rather than many restaurants having delivery drivers, all the drivers then become gig workers. And perhaps this is just the beginning. Where else might this service expand once it has a solid logistics platform in your area? I don't have to think much about winner take all in the social media space. Services like Door Dash, Grab, Uber, etc are taking winner takes all economics to your home town. They have the power to become transformative and we're placing a lot of trust in them to do things right. And they're doing this with questionable transparency, as the article pointed out. How do we know this isn't some massive scam which threatens to upend communities by imploding after they have transformed the way we work and our daily habits? It's too much power IMO.