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If you are dumping to own the market as a monopoly, and so is your competitor, and both of you are buoyed up by seemingly limitless investor finance, then all t
by JulianMorrison 5y ago
If you are dumping to own the market as a monopoly, and so is your competitor, and both of you are buoyed up by seemingly limitless investor finance, then all that happens is that investors' money moves into the customers' pockets.
- sva_ 5y agoI know a few people who've mostly survived on Uber Eats' welcome coupons for weeks now.
- mstipetic 5y agoAnd previous well functioning economies get destroyed in the process
- batshit_beaver 5y agoIf pervious economies were so well functioning, why couldn't I easily order pretty much any food from any restaurant within a 50 mile radius with a click of a button before Uber and DoorDash came along?
- maedla 5y agoOne could always just call
- tempest_ 5y agoThere existed many companies/people who would collect whatever you wanted and bring it where ever for a fee with a phone call. People would not be willing to pay the price however.
- ska 5y ago> If pervious economies were so well functioning An efficient economy doesn't mean you can do anything you can imagine is technically possible; it means that market rates with everything priced in properly will discover whether or not enough people value it enough to pay for it.
- onemoresoop 5y ago50 miles radius? I bet you weren't only not tipping the delivery guy but also complained your food was cold. Local economies were functioning well before for years, you were getting food from around your area, which is perfectly acceptable and efficient.
- compiler-guy 5y agoBecause those economies functioned in a relatively closed system of finance, and the actual cost of delivery was covered within that system. The actual cost of delivery is reflected in the price of getting the delivery. Or, if no delivery was easily available, it was because the cost of keeping such a system up, running, and easily available was higher than could be managed profitably. Doordash works today because venture capitalists are throwing millions of dollars at it, and dramatically subsidizing the cost of the delivery. In other words, you can do that today because someone else is willing to pay. The VC's money won't last forever though. The question is if the economies of scale it creates will be enough to reduce the cost of delivery such that it is a sustainable business. Most available data says "Probably not."
- Marazan 5y agoConcierge services have always existed. You weren't willing to pay the unsubsidised price.
- tw04 5y agoBecause most people weren’t willing to pay more for the delivery than their meal, so nobody bothered.
- SonicScrub 5y agoYou absolutely could do that before. The average person just couldn't afford the prices until it became heavily subsidized by VC money.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoTwo things can be simultaneously true - delivery was under-served and over-priced, and taxis charged too much, often because of viciously expensive auctions for limited legal taxicab slots, with the city raking it in and the drivers having to recoup it from fares - Uber and friends are exploitative dumping schemes that tighten the screws on their gig workers even while they firehose money at customers
- selectodude 5y agoI would hesitate to consider the flag hail taxi market, at least in my (semi extensive) experience, to be at all we’ll functioning. I couldn’t get a taxi in Chicago with a full beard. Period.
- lordentropy 5y agoI don't know what fantasy well-functioning economy you are taking about. You had to manually call a taxi company, and wait for an hour for a taxi that might now even show up.
- stefan_ 5y agoBecause it turns out personal chauffeurs for sustainable prices is just not that big a business?
- kn100 5y agoI have been thinking about this every now and then - I, and many others, hold no loyalty to any particular ride sharing or food delivery app, and the cost to switch to the one that is offering deep discounts is almost zero. I know people who are constantly exploiting these sign up offers across many businesses that are pulling the same sort of ridiculous discounting that Uber pulled - and therefore are effectively living off investor cash. I've always wondered what the extreme end of this could look like. It seems like here in London companies in this same area are popping up almost weekly in areas like grocery delivery, food delivery, ride-sharing, etc, and they almost all have absolutely crazy initial sign up discounts. I suspect there is an entire class of people that are effectively taking advantage of this and I wonder how much they manage to save.
- htrp 5y agoI suspect it's a not trivial amount of money. this reminds me of the San Francisco subsidy (the ability of people living in San Francisco to utilize a venture capital back startup for almost every aspect of their life at a tremendous discount) from a couple of years ago, anecdotally living expenses can be reduced by nearly 30%