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Really interested to see what this does to Deliveroo. I live in central London on a pretty busy street and it's really wild how many Deliveroo drivers there are

• austhrow743 6y ago
  20-30% to not have to have a dining area and be in a trendy location sounds pretty good.
  • MatekCopatek 6y ago
    Sure, but you could always do that and be delivery-only without paying anyone. I think the service you're getting here is primarily the exposure of being on a popular platform. That and them handling the order process.
    • nebolo 6y ago
      So do it? I really don't see the problem. I get that Deliveroo puts you on their platform even if you don't agree (the apps where I live don't do this), but if that's the case the restaurant is still getting the full price for selling their food. The customer pays the extra 20%.
      • Kneecaps07 6y ago
        Some restaurant owners don't like this. It gives the impression that the restaurant is charging that extra money.
        • TulliusCicero 6y ago
          Yeah, there should be a regulation that lets restaurants opt-out, or enforces price transparency on the delivery company's app (must show both original price from the restaurant in addition to final price).
      • wtetzner 6y ago
        > The customer pays the extra 20%. Which means they might order less food than they would have with lower prices. Or that they might decide it's too expensive, and order from another restaurant.
    • chrisseaton 6y ago
      > but you could always do that and be delivery-only without paying anyone Ok so if that's an option then what's the problem?! I don't get the fury here. Restaurants are free to partner with delivery companies. Restaurants are free to not partner with delivery companies. Delivery companies are free to buy and resell product from restaurants and add their own markup. Restaurants are free to decline to sell product to delivery companies who add their own markup. Everyone can do what they want here.
      • bombcar 6y ago
        A number of people don’t like it because the delivery company messes up the order (delivers cold, etc) and the restaurant takes the blame.
        • chrisseaton 6y ago
          This situation is no different to any other resale situation - you address your complaint to the person your transaction was with.
          • manigandham 6y ago
            Realistically people don’t do that. Last touch of any transaction gets all the blame.
            • chrisseaton 6y ago
              > Last touch of any transaction gets all the blame. That's exactly my point - and your last touch is the Deliveroo worker. So take it up with them. They can then take it up with the restaurant if it was the restaurant's fault, but that's their job as the reseller.
          • fakedang 6y ago
            A customer buys from a restaurant on a platform, gets the food served cold, and instead of blaming the platform for bad coordination, blames the restaurant for serving it cold, or blames the driver for serving it cold, often by publicly posting on the same platform which screwed their order, hence deflecting blame from the platform onto the driver or the restaurant.
  • devoutsalsa 6y ago
    You just described a ghost kitchen, a restaurant without a store front. Honestly, I don’t like delivered food that much. It’s usually cold, often gets screwed up (e.g. regular Pepsi instead of Diet Pepsi), and maybe low quality in general. I’m already hesitant to order with Deliveroo most of the time anyway, and if prices go up, I might just finally learn to cook.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      TBH, I find it pretty amazing that anyone with a semblance of a kitchen hasn't been cooking over the past year. I admittedly don't have a lot of good options around where I live but I haven't gotten delivery in years and don't get takeout--from my local pizza place--very often.
    • socksy 6y ago
      Deliveroo pulled out of Germany when it was decided that their drivers weren't self employed. In their absence, we were left with a terrible service called Lieferando ("deliver-ando"), which were not more expensive, but have an unimpressive app, with little incentive to keep you updated on a timescale or deliver things in a very timely manner (leading to colder, soggier food). However, in the last year or so, that's all changed (in Berlin at least) with the introduction of the Finnish "Wolt" (which everyone here is pronouncing like "volt", but come to think of it, perhaps should be pronounced the English way). Like lieferando, they have salaried employees, but the app is much more akin to the deliveroo experience, with people who are on-time and great pictures/food etc. Prices are comparable with what deliveroo had before. I'm sure VC money has something to do with the ability to execute, but assuming that deliveroo had the same, it doesn't seem impossible to run a food delivery service with real employees without huge price hikes.
      • devoutsalsa 6y ago
        I hope they can keep making it work!
  • tchalla 6y ago
    Only if, both options exist. Option A - 100% for a dining area at a trendy location Option B - 80% w/o dining area at a trendy location There are many cases where people say it is Option B but Option A doesn't exist.
    • mytailorisrich 6y ago
      With on-premises service a restaurant must hire waiting staff and manage the tables (tablecloth, dishes, cutlery, etc). Preparing food for takeaway actually saves a lot and that's why restaurants that traditionally offer takeaway in addition to on-premises service often offer 10-15% discount for takeway as a matter of course. Deliveroo is not "robbing" restaurants if they charge 20%...
      • Jochim 6y ago
        Many of the restaurants on Deliveroo were/are already exclusively takeaways though. I think that in many cases these services have the whiff of rentier capitalism. A third party has inserted themselves into a situation where you previously dealt directly with the restaurant with the intent of extracting value by making both sides dependent on them. The other factor here is the absurd losses these players are chasing. The capital being pumped in to prop them up feels like a hugely distorting factor that is hiding the actual costs of the sector and preventing new entrants/alternatives from entering the market. The upside is convenience. I definitely prefer paying by card/web based ordering but I wonder if there's a way of providing the benefits of these services without handing control over to that middleman.
        • mytailorisrich 6y ago
          > Many of the restaurants on Deliveroo were/are already exclusively takeaways though. That's not my impression, but the pandemic has had a radical effect. > I wonder if there's a way of providing the benefits of these services without handing control over to that middleman. There is but again this has a cost and if you're an independent restaurant it may make more sense to outsource all of this by using a platform. Some platforms allow you to only use them for handling online order taking and payments (Just Eat?) if you think handling delivery in-house makes sense (but I think it often does not).
• roel_v 6y ago
  I feel really bad for small restaurant owners. These large delivery companies totally take over their internet marketing too, registering a domain like '<restaurant name>-<city>.com' and when you go to that website, you really have to pay attention to see that this is not the 'official' restaurant website and if you order through there, it's costing the restaurant a lot of money that they wouldn't miss out on if you'd order through their regular website. I don't understand how practices like that are legal - then again, small restaurant owners have other things to worry about than fighting a 5, 8, maybe 10 year trademark battle against huge tech companies. It's a disgusting abuse of power in my view.
  • nightcracker 6y ago
    This should be straight up illegal and the companies sued to hell for. If I opened a site claiming to be a bank and accepting money on behalf of that bank, and keeping 20% I'd be behind bars for fraud in no time.
    • foepys 6y ago
      Those delivery services employ many lawyers and bet on the fact that a family owned restaurants doesn't have the guts or money to sue. Truly despicable.
      • csunbird 6y ago
        Not having access to the justice because of shortage of money should be illegal instead.
        • FeepingCreature 6y ago
          You can't make a circumstance illegal.
          • csunbird 6y ago
            But you can put down legal protections to prevent this circumstance occurring. It is just like not having access to medical care because you are poor. We put protections to prevent this happening, called public health insurance. For the sister comment: I wonder why companies are not entitled to a public defender, interesting.
• mytailorisrich 6y ago
  > I assume this will cause Deliveroo to either increase fees or reduce service which may inspire more restuarants to hire their own delivery people again. Before Deliveroo (and similar services) restaurants (in UK/Europe since you discuss London) did not offer delivery at all. Handling the whole order (which these days means online/through an app) and delivery in-house is costly and restaurants use Deliveroo because it makes commercial sense. Generally the issue is that, on the one hand I don't think that people are willing to pay much for delivery while, on the other hand, delivery is very low productivity and it's not viable to pay delivery drivers much for this. As someone else commented 20-30% of an order is not crazy compared to the cost of serving on-premises. Moreover, Deliveroo can only charge this to restaurants if they have a deal with them. Low productivity and cost pressures are also why "dark kitchens" are developing: They save on the cost of having a full-blown restaurant geared for on-premises service and they cut travel times for drivers (they can go to a single location and collect from multiple collocated kitchens).
  • lovedswain 6y ago
    > Before Deliveroo (and similar services) restaurants did not offer delivery at all. This is far from universally true, especially Asian takeaways typically hired their own driver, but the practice was also commonplace for many actual restaurants too
    • mytailorisrich 6y ago
      Traditional restaurants (in UK/Europe) did not offer delivery, for them Deliveroo or similar is their first foray into delivery, which is made easy because Deliveroo handles everything. Delivery for traditional restaurants has become a thing in the last 10 years or so when online services popped up. It's strange to argue about this...
      • terramex 6y ago
        In Poland many traditional restaurants did offer delivery through websites such as pyszne.pl and pizzaportal.pl since at least 2010. They hired their own drivers at the time, the switch to 3rd party delivery services happened here fairly recently but restaurant-owned cars are still common.
• kukx 6y ago
  "Let's pay them." Ok, with whose money? I am all for good pay for everyone. The problem begins when we detach the pay from the value created by the worker. In many cases worker may become too expensive to hire. So trying to force business to pay more may result in less people having job.
  • Jochim 6y ago
    Lots of businesses aren't viable due to the costs of business being greater than the price people would be willing to pay. Pay isn't being detached from the value of the worker, what's being said is that if you're unable to produce enough value from the worker in order to pay them well enough to live then your business isn't viable. Gig economy companies like Deliveroo are particularly hostile to their labour force. Without fixed wages for employees they're directly incentivised to flood the pool of workers with as many people as possible. The consequence of this is that delivery times are lower, but the compensation available to each employee is greatly reduced compared to traditional delivery models.
    • FeepingCreature 6y ago
      I mean, I don't really see where the harm to the worker is by offering them the option.
      • Jochim 6y ago
        The same could be said for child labour or health and safety regulation. If a child is desperate enough to work why shouldn't we let them? Why don't we allow workers to choose to work for companies that put their wellbeing at risk? The reason is that it ends up not being a choice of the worker at all, incentives align in such a way that these are no longer an "option" but instead a replacement of existing work/choice that had much better outcomes for the worker than the replacement. A great example of this would be "voluntary" exemptions from overtime protections in the UK. There is a default limit on the maximum amount of overtime most workers can undertake. The employee can optionally agree to lift this limit. In practice every employee is given a form to sign along with their employment contract that agrees to lift this limit. It no longer becomes a choice of the worker but one of management. The same thing happened with "zero hours" contracts. Theoretically they allow employees to be more flexible in how much they work. In reality they remove the ability for workers to plan time or budget due to uncertainty in how often and when management decides they will be working. The key thing is that this replaced the existing, more reliable, system of work not because employees chose it as an option, but because employers unilaterally switched to it. I'd argue further that the gig economy itself is both a cause and a symptom of economic instability in the lower working class. It emerged from the inability of this group to find to find enough stable, well paying work. It accelerates that economic instability by forcing workers into an even more precarious position. With a zero hours contract the economic uncertainty came from the fact that you didn't know when you'd be working. With gig work you know when you'll be working but you won't know what you'll be paid. This is a fundamental shift in the social contract of employment, in that the risk of loss is born by the employer and in exchange the employer keeps any profit. In the gig economy the employer shifts that burden onto the employees without a corresponding shift in control/profit.
• jillesvangurp 6y ago
  A Dutch judge ruled on Deliveroo just a few days ago that they are not self employed and should be considered employees: https://www.nu.nl/economie/6116722/deliveroo-koeriers-zijn-ook-volgens-het-gerechtshof-geen-zzpers.html https://www.nu.nl/economie/6116722/deliveroo-koeriers-zijn-o... The consequences would be union negotiated salaries are applicable as well as other perks of being employed (sick leave, vacation, etc.) and time spent waiting at a restaurants is counted as work.
• AniseAbyss 6y ago
  I remember when Uber was a hype. Stories about people making a lot of money. Didn't last long.
• jessesoo 6y ago
  This question has been bothering me for a very long time now, does a food delivery platform really require the 20-30% fee to operate? If so, what justifies it? Or is it because of the spike in demand due to the pandemic so they can get away with it?
  • TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Food delivery is labor intensive. 20-30% is probably unreasonably high for a big order, but if you're only ordering a couple of dishes that percentage probably makes sense.
    • ivanbakel 6y ago
      This. Every "expensive" service can largely be traced back to the sheer cost of having someone on their feet all the time to perform it. 20% of my typical takeaway order price would require one complete delivery every ~30 mins to earn a living wage in my city - that sounds pretty reasonable.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      Food delivery seems like the sort of thing that should be a set/tiered price. When I last used grocery delivery years ago that's how it worked.
      • TulliusCicero 6y ago
        It should probably be both, since the amount of space a deliveryperson has can be limited (especially those on bikes).
• sharpercoder 6y ago
  "Your margin is my opportunity" - J. Bezos
• xwolfi 6y ago
  Poor restaurant, having all these people lining up to buy food at the price they specify themselves. What a robbery ... Dude I don't know what you think business is, but restaurants aren't slaves: they mark whatever price they're comfortable with on their menu, generate margin, and if they don't like it, they close the door, or heh, refuse service to Deliveroo. It's not robbery if the client would never even have heard of you without it, and god the indian restaurant two streets away I discovered after 5 years missing it thanks to Deliveroo knows who they owe this new addicted client to :)