5 ms·

I don’t get these platforms. If I want a delivery I phone my local reaturant I want to cook for me and ask them to deliver. (Maybe they have a website instead)

I don’t get these platforms. If I want a delivery I phone my local reaturant I want to cook for me and ask them to deliver. (Maybe they have a website instead) The relationship is between me and the restaurant, whether it’s the local curryhouse (Indian Ocean) or dominos. They may not deliver at all, or they may have a deal with a local taxi firm, or employ their own drivers, that’s upto them. I dont care where they buy knives from, or foil boxes, or prawn crackers, or delivery service. If I dont like the food or the delivery time or another aspect of the service I go elsewhere. Why would I want to replace that with a middleman who can squeeze both sides and offers very little. I know my favourite restaurants, I have a relationship with them. The bulk of the value is mainly at the restaurant, not the delivery or the ordering process. Compare with uber which is identical to any other minicab firm in the U.K., but due to a good app also improves on the value of a hailable taxi, and that’s the difference. I want to do business with the company providing value, not one connecting me via a proxy. It would be like ordering a takeaway in the 80s through the GPO operator, who would take my order and pass it on. Why would I want that?

vesinisa 6y ago
You are an exception then. Most people are compelled by an app that lets them see what restaurants deliver near them, and makes the ordering process really easy - no need for awkward phone calls or the hassle of uncertainty about when will your food actually arrive. The consumer segment who see value in this service is enough large that restaurants will sign up for Deliveroo/whatever to not miss out on the segment, even if that comes with a small premium to the platform. Still, if you want to support your local restaurant you should always order directly with them to cut out the middle man.
- petercooper 6y ago
  Agreed. People's reluctance to actually talk on the phone or to manage uncertainty is often overlooked in the popularity of apps like Uber, Deliveroo, Just Eat, et al. People will, to an extent, trade extra money to not have the ambiguity of human communications placed in the middle of a transaction.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Case in point. I love Vietnamese food, but ordering it over the phone from somebody who struggles with the local language is a challenge for both of us. Without a picture menu I can point at and without nonverbal cues, a misunderstanding can happen and happens.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I think this is a factor, but not the major one. The major one is, you can prepay for delivery using a streamlined (and unified) interface that accepts just about any form of electronic payment you can throw at it. The direct-from-restaurant alternative to that is to be sure you have cash in small enough denominations, or negotiate over the phone for them to take a card terminal - which may not be available, or may extend delivery time significantly (there's usually one or two terminals shared by all drivers, so they have to coordinate orders), or the driver may forget and cause an awkward situation (happened to me). Or you can hope that the restaurant has an online ordering/payment form (most don't) and that it works (many don't) and accepts your form of payment (it's a wash). In my effort to not use the gig economy services, I now ensure I always have small-denominated cash at home set aside for delivery orders - which is a noticeable hassle over just paying with two taps/clicks during ordering.
  - asdff 6y ago
    At the same time, there are real benefits to having a phone call. It's like having waitstaff at the table. You can confirm if an entree comes with rice, or ask if it contains a certain ingredient, ask how big the portion actually is, etc. A lot of times when you click "Orange chicken" on grubhub you are shooting into the dark with what you are expecting. Having to do some private eye work on yelp to get a picture of an entree is no fun.
Nextgrid 6y ago
These platforms aim to solve two problems: 1) restaurants' own tech is usually terrible. Beyond major chains with their own website & order management system, the next best thing is the phone. There's no standard way to obtain a menu, opening times, etc. When you're hungry, simply opening an app and seeing all the options presented to you in a standard way with one-click ordering is valuable. Maybe Google with its phone call AI (don't remember how it's called) and large-scale scraping could be a solution to this. You "order" off the (scraped) menu and Google actually places the phone call on your behalf. The problem is that there's no reason Google will be any better or less evil than the current delivery platforms, so sadly it's not a good solution either. 2) delivery services. Restaurants no longer have to employ delivery staff, and because of the platforms' scale and tech advantage they should be more efficient, ending up paying the delivery person more and the restaurant pays less. This problem seems solvable with a non-profit or a company owned by delivery drivers themselves that would run similar tech and expose the entire fleet via an API for third-parties (including these same delivery platforms) to connect to.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  > 2) delivery services. Restaurants no longer have to employ delivery staff, Or, Restaurants that previously didnt have delivery staff are now able to offer delivery.
  - dspillett 6y ago
    This can be very significant. Often the cost of delivery is noticeably higher than the cost of making the food in the first place, and customer generally won't want the extra (or at least the full amount of the extra) added to their bill. That can make it difficult (or practically impossible) for a small business to offer delivery. Though I'm not sure how the cost/hassle of dealing with "gig economy" services compares in such matters.
fakedang 6y ago
My father runs a restaurant, so I guess I could give perspectives from both sides. For a customer, it's inconvenient and sometimes daunting to call a restaurant and ask for the menu, then choose the items, then recheck the order with the call desk, then order the food and pay it in cash. With an app, you just need to do a few taps and then order directly from the restaurant, and even pay for it with your card. For restaurants, you get the marketing reach through being on a platform while also getting delivery costs that are on par with what would have been if you hired your own drivers (if you're a low end restaurant). It's obviously much less beneficial for a high end restaurant that relies on dine-ins for higher priced menu items. I've been trying to coax him into moving to Whatsapp based ordering systems (since Whatsapp is big in the old world), but it's hard to do that without Whatsapp chatbots and access to the Whatsapp businesses API.
- agustif 6y ago
  You could leverage Twilio for it's Whatsapp Business API. Also add SMS to the mix if feeling adventurous. If you were to make this, you could also both open source it or run it as a SaaS and give some options to those restaurants that don't want to pay a 30%
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Thanks. This is actually a really good suggestion I can try out. Edit:- btw, SMS isn't effective anymore. Nobody uses SMS now anywhere I've traveled. It's either Whatsapp or Telegram (in the UK mostly).
- sammorrowdrums 6y ago
  Open source taxi hailing and food ordering services, accommodation services that are genuinely open platforms are such a pipe dream of mine - on the one hand there is no reason why existing restaurants, delivery drivers and existing taxi services etc. can't broker their services. Hosting costs, moderation, payment processing and centralisation are major difficulties though. Legality and safety of providers are also significant. So while one side of my brain says - these services could offer and respond to requests in a federated system (akin to activity pub) where you can post menu feeds for example, and respond to requests for your food / taxi / accommodation in a requested location if it is available. The other half of me says - too expensive to host and build, time consuming to build, difficult to get providers to use your protocols, and then difficult to stay non-commercial - and difficult to work out how payments should be done, dispute resolution, reviews issues and the fact that probably the service would end up used to sell sex and scam people somehow because it almost always does... And I shrug and think: this is why we probably can't have nice things.
sfifs 6y ago
Well empirically, most restaurants (at least where i live) did not deliver at all or beyond the immediate vicinity or required an insane minimum order size to deliver before these apps came. Now i can get what i want affordably from the place I like without going to the restaurant. I also don't take up valuable table space so restaurants can serve in person traffic too - lunch and dinner traffic is as busy as ever and hasn't come down. What's happened (again where i live) is market has expanded. Gross margins on restaurants run typically higher than 70% to 80%. Your employee cost is usually fixed, so by even giving off some chunk of the gross margin to these middle men, they're growing revenue and profit. It's not a good idea to assume restaurant owners who sign ip to these apps are idiots. If their revenue and profit was not expanding, they wouldn't be still on the platforms
- plantain 6y ago
  >Well empirically, most restaurants (at least where i live) did not deliver at all or beyond the immediate vicinity or required an insane minimum order size to deliver before these apps came. Now i can get what i want affordably from the place I like without going to the restaurant. The missing piece here that makes the delivery work, is the VC funding. The apps are presently a net win for consumer and restaurant is because some SV VC fund is subsidizing the delivery. Maybe they'll be able to organize a mass delivery network with enough efficiency that it actually develops economies of scale and becomes self-sufficient. Or maybe they'll burn out like Groupon.
watwut 6y ago
In the covid-homework-lunch scenario, I want one app where there are daily lunches from all restaurants around that deliver to me. I dont want concrete restaurant, I largely dont care which. What I want is to look at list of daily menu options and pick one of these.
spacemanmatt 6y ago
I would like my internet served by the game company that publishes content to me. That is between me and my game publisher. If I don't like the game, I can go buy internet somewhere else. (I didn't have interest for the rest of the allegory, but suffice it to say, I find the PP a bit nostalgic)
- midasuni 6y ago
  I don’t pay my ISP for services I consume over it.
Griffinsauce 6y ago
It's quite simple really: small scale logistics (per restaurant) doesn't work and it especially doesn't work for low value transactions. It's either too expensive, not reliable ("we ran out of delivery people, please wait 2 hrs") or just not available at all. Sharing the delivery network across restaurants theoretically allows it to spread the load and solve those issues. The problems come when one company is in control of that network and has a profit motive. The solution here is for restaurants to band together and take control of their logistics.

vesinisa 6y ago

You are an exception then. Most people are compelled by an app that lets them see what restaurants deliver near them, and makes the ordering process really easy - no need for awkward phone calls or the hassle of uncertainty about when will your food actually arrive. The consumer segment who see value in this service is enough large that restaurants will sign up for Deliveroo/whatever to not miss out on the segment, even if that comes with a small premium to the platform. Still, if you want to support your local restaurant you should always order directly with them to cut out the middle man.

petercooper 6y ago
Agreed. People's reluctance to actually talk on the phone or to manage uncertainty is often overlooked in the popularity of apps like Uber, Deliveroo, Just Eat, et al. People will, to an extent, trade extra money to not have the ambiguity of human communications placed in the middle of a transaction.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Case in point. I love Vietnamese food, but ordering it over the phone from somebody who struggles with the local language is a challenge for both of us. Without a picture menu I can point at and without nonverbal cues, a misunderstanding can happen and happens.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I think this is a factor, but not the major one. The major one is, you can prepay for delivery using a streamlined (and unified) interface that accepts just about any form of electronic payment you can throw at it. The direct-from-restaurant alternative to that is to be sure you have cash in small enough denominations, or negotiate over the phone for them to take a card terminal - which may not be available, or may extend delivery time significantly (there's usually one or two terminals shared by all drivers, so they have to coordinate orders), or the driver may forget and cause an awkward situation (happened to me). Or you can hope that the restaurant has an online ordering/payment form (most don't) and that it works (many don't) and accepts your form of payment (it's a wash). In my effort to not use the gig economy services, I now ensure I always have small-denominated cash at home set aside for delivery orders - which is a noticeable hassle over just paying with two taps/clicks during ordering.
- asdff 6y ago
  At the same time, there are real benefits to having a phone call. It's like having waitstaff at the table. You can confirm if an entree comes with rice, or ask if it contains a certain ingredient, ask how big the portion actually is, etc. A lot of times when you click "Orange chicken" on grubhub you are shooting into the dark with what you are expecting. Having to do some private eye work on yelp to get a picture of an entree is no fun.

Nextgrid 6y ago

These platforms aim to solve two problems: 1) restaurants' own tech is usually terrible. Beyond major chains with their own website & order management system, the next best thing is the phone. There's no standard way to obtain a menu, opening times, etc. When you're hungry, simply opening an app and seeing all the options presented to you in a standard way with one-click ordering is valuable. Maybe Google with its phone call AI (don't remember how it's called) and large-scale scraping could be a solution to this. You "order" off the (scraped) menu and Google actually places the phone call on your behalf. The problem is that there's no reason Google will be any better or less evil than the current delivery platforms, so sadly it's not a good solution either. 2) delivery services. Restaurants no longer have to employ delivery staff, and because of the platforms' scale and tech advantage they should be more efficient, ending up paying the delivery person more and the restaurant pays less. This problem seems solvable with a non-profit or a company owned by delivery drivers themselves that would run similar tech and expose the entire fleet via an API for third-parties (including these same delivery platforms) to connect to.

madeofpalk 6y ago
> 2) delivery services. Restaurants no longer have to employ delivery staff, Or, Restaurants that previously didnt have delivery staff are now able to offer delivery.
- dspillett 6y ago
  This can be very significant. Often the cost of delivery is noticeably higher than the cost of making the food in the first place, and customer generally won't want the extra (or at least the full amount of the extra) added to their bill. That can make it difficult (or practically impossible) for a small business to offer delivery. Though I'm not sure how the cost/hassle of dealing with "gig economy" services compares in such matters.

fakedang 6y ago

My father runs a restaurant, so I guess I could give perspectives from both sides. For a customer, it's inconvenient and sometimes daunting to call a restaurant and ask for the menu, then choose the items, then recheck the order with the call desk, then order the food and pay it in cash. With an app, you just need to do a few taps and then order directly from the restaurant, and even pay for it with your card. For restaurants, you get the marketing reach through being on a platform while also getting delivery costs that are on par with what would have been if you hired your own drivers (if you're a low end restaurant). It's obviously much less beneficial for a high end restaurant that relies on dine-ins for higher priced menu items. I've been trying to coax him into moving to Whatsapp based ordering systems (since Whatsapp is big in the old world), but it's hard to do that without Whatsapp chatbots and access to the Whatsapp businesses API.

agustif 6y ago
You could leverage Twilio for it's Whatsapp Business API. Also add SMS to the mix if feeling adventurous. If you were to make this, you could also both open source it or run it as a SaaS and give some options to those restaurants that don't want to pay a 30%
- fakedang 6y ago
  Thanks. This is actually a really good suggestion I can try out. Edit:- btw, SMS isn't effective anymore. Nobody uses SMS now anywhere I've traveled. It's either Whatsapp or Telegram (in the UK mostly).
sammorrowdrums 6y ago
Open source taxi hailing and food ordering services, accommodation services that are genuinely open platforms are such a pipe dream of mine - on the one hand there is no reason why existing restaurants, delivery drivers and existing taxi services etc. can't broker their services. Hosting costs, moderation, payment processing and centralisation are major difficulties though. Legality and safety of providers are also significant. So while one side of my brain says - these services could offer and respond to requests in a federated system (akin to activity pub) where you can post menu feeds for example, and respond to requests for your food / taxi / accommodation in a requested location if it is available. The other half of me says - too expensive to host and build, time consuming to build, difficult to get providers to use your protocols, and then difficult to stay non-commercial - and difficult to work out how payments should be done, dispute resolution, reviews issues and the fact that probably the service would end up used to sell sex and scam people somehow because it almost always does... And I shrug and think: this is why we probably can't have nice things.

sfifs 6y ago

Well empirically, most restaurants (at least where i live) did not deliver at all or beyond the immediate vicinity or required an insane minimum order size to deliver before these apps came. Now i can get what i want affordably from the place I like without going to the restaurant. I also don't take up valuable table space so restaurants can serve in person traffic too - lunch and dinner traffic is as busy as ever and hasn't come down. What's happened (again where i live) is market has expanded. Gross margins on restaurants run typically higher than 70% to 80%. Your employee cost is usually fixed, so by even giving off some chunk of the gross margin to these middle men, they're growing revenue and profit. It's not a good idea to assume restaurant owners who sign ip to these apps are idiots. If their revenue and profit was not expanding, they wouldn't be still on the platforms

plantain 6y ago
>Well empirically, most restaurants (at least where i live) did not deliver at all or beyond the immediate vicinity or required an insane minimum order size to deliver before these apps came. Now i can get what i want affordably from the place I like without going to the restaurant. The missing piece here that makes the delivery work, is the VC funding. The apps are presently a net win for consumer and restaurant is because some SV VC fund is subsidizing the delivery. Maybe they'll be able to organize a mass delivery network with enough efficiency that it actually develops economies of scale and becomes self-sufficient. Or maybe they'll burn out like Groupon.

watwut 6y ago

In the covid-homework-lunch scenario, I want one app where there are daily lunches from all restaurants around that deliver to me. I dont want concrete restaurant, I largely dont care which. What I want is to look at list of daily menu options and pick one of these.

spacemanmatt 6y ago

I would like my internet served by the game company that publishes content to me. That is between me and my game publisher. If I don't like the game, I can go buy internet somewhere else. (I didn't have interest for the rest of the allegory, but suffice it to say, I find the PP a bit nostalgic)

midasuni 6y ago
I don’t pay my ISP for services I consume over it.

Griffinsauce 6y ago

It's quite simple really: small scale logistics (per restaurant) doesn't work and it especially doesn't work for low value transactions. It's either too expensive, not reliable ("we ran out of delivery people, please wait 2 hrs") or just not available at all. Sharing the delivery network across restaurants theoretically allows it to spread the load and solve those issues. The problems come when one company is in control of that network and has a profit motive. The solution here is for restaurants to band together and take control of their logistics.