14 ms·
Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor. Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when
by Johnny555 3y ago
Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor.
Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don't have unlimited piles of money and cities/states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of food to be delivered, but now it's more like $10 - $15 in fees/tip, plus fees hidden in menu prices making that $20 food cost $27.50.
- bombcar 3y agoI wish it could all be managed intelligently; I'm hungry but I can wait, let orders collect and make them all at once or something. Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?
- kevingadd 3y agoThere is some degree of that in these apps already, for example I believe both grubhub and doordash will group up orders so one courier can do multiple deliveries back-to-back in a single trip.
- xp84 3y agoThey do, and they also make that a profit center too by allowing you to pay another $3 to ensure a nonstop point-to-point delivery to you.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- satvikpendem 3y agoThe company Weee which primarily sells Asian products does this sort of batch order, and their prices are the same as grocery stores because they rightly knew that their initial Chinese userbase (and other Asians in general) is extremely price conscious and won't accept such increased fees for delivery. I just listened to a podcast episode about them on How I Built This which is where I got this information, people should give it a listen.
- throwaway2037 3y agoVery nice suggestion. Thank you to share! Here is the open Spotify link to that episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/69PURAcVOhzBcRUQrjkDfc https://open.spotify.com/episode/69PURAcVOhzBcRUQrjkDfc
- geodel 3y ago> how come everything with an app is so much more expensive? After ton of investment investors are finally looking for returns now. And consumers have decided convenience reigns supreme. Right from the SAAS products to daily breakfast customers there is lot of premium on convenience.
- Terr_ 3y ago> After ton of investment investors are finally looking for returns now. We need a quippy phrase for this, but unfortunately "Pump and Dump" is already taken for a kind of stock-market manipulation. Instead, I would like to coin/nominate "Tease and Squeeze". First consumers are teased by the idea that the disruptive new service has invented a magic new secret to low prices and great value... But after the company as achieved some kind of market strangehold, those consumers are squeezed with price-hikes and quality-drops as the investors--who bankrolled the early predatory pricing [0]--try to recoup their investment plus additional profit. [0] Note that the term "Predatory Pricing" usually refers to artificially low prices to destroy competitors, although I can totally understand why some may assume it means preying on customers with high prices.
- rainbowzootsuit 3y agoI've been hearing of scams labeled "pig butchering" — fatten the pig and then slaughter it. The euphemism is pretty close.
- CaptainZapp 3y agoWhat's wrong with enshittification[0]? Granted, Tease and Squeeze has a nicer ring. Then again, the enshittification neologism became standard langue in no time and is understood by everybody. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
- gruez 3y agoIt's arguably less descriptive. "enshittification" only really says "things getting worse", whereas "Tease and Squeeze" describes the whole cycle.
- i_am_jl 3y ago>Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive? The people making the app need a much bigger cut than Domino's. Domino's cut only needs to be big enough to pay their delivery drivers, they make their money selling pizza and the delivery is just an additional service that drives business. The app maker needs a cut big enough to pay their delivery driver and also be the main revenue stream for their entire business since they're not making money off the pizza.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoSo if Uber buys out some small grocery store chains it could work, especially if its in major market cities.
- shagie 3y agoI would contend that Dominos is a pizza logistics company rather than a seller of retail pizza (compare Pizza Hut). https://biz.dominos.com/about-us/innovations/ https://biz.dominos.com/about-us/innovations/ They're not just selling pizza to make money - but also looking at making cars. https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/why-dominos-dxp-delivery-cars-were-anything-but-half-baked/ https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/why-dominos-dxp-d... While I'm not going to claim that was a good idea, the point is that Dominos sees making and delivering pizza as one and the same business. > 154 examples of the DXP cars were built. Along with the delivery driver, each DXP car could carry up to 45 pizzas, 12 two-liter sodas, and all the extra dipping sauces one could ever want. Add to that the fact that the car’s still held their five-year 100,000-mile warranty, were cheap on gas, and created a surprising amount of buzz, it is hard not to look at the DXP program as a success, low production aside.
- adolph 3y agoHopefully they were made of something nonferrous to prevent pooling by pesky Kouriers. Edit: the Hagerty story was a nice read, thank you for linking to it
- hackerlight 3y agoIs this not corpspeak kool-aid? Dominos and Pizza Hut do the same thing. They deliver pizza to people. Dominos knows how to hype the markets, though.
- benreesman 3y agoThe VC industry is like Hollywood: both smart purveyors of a popular, highly value added service to begin with, both driven by nepotism and inertia via far more scope for capture than your average line of work, and both with a cost structure mostly about the lifestyle of the executive class. when it’s just starting out in something, you get instant classics. when it’s out of ideas but still has the levers of access tilted all the way to “got mine bitches”, you get the late MCU, Uber for X, and OpenAI Larry Summers Edition.
- threecheese 3y agowrt DoorDash (and Instacart etc), along with this squeeze I’ve observed the quality of service decrease severely. Could just be that my sample of a now wider employee pool is crappy, or workers are trying to “scale” to make a living wage with many concurrent orders, but I believe it’s part of the race to the bottom. I love the convenience, but the experience is worsening. How can these vendors continue to profit when lower quality leads to increased refunds?
- geodel 3y agoWell in my observation people keep adjusting lower quality of service. I mean it is not going to be the case that people will start shopping in stores and/or cooking in kitchens.
- gmd63 3y agoDon’t forget moviepass Problem is, when you get an economy acclimated to false prices set by adversarial “business” “strategy”, the only logical result is depression when it’s time to actually create money for investors
- ikiris 3y agoalmost all the cost of doordash is overhead, they still aren't paying anyone that actually delivers food a decent portion of their take.
- refurb 3y agoThis is a weird take. Cheap wages? Both of your examples paid decent wages, especially in the example of Uber. It was just an unprofitable business model subsidized by VC money or Amazon corporate profits. That sounds like a good thing?
- lupire 3y agoIt's bad because it redirects human effort into wasteful activity. Same season communisr central planning is bad.
- card_zero 3y agoHow can you tell that it's wasteful? Seems to me that pointing at activities and saying they're wasteful is exactly the central planning you mentioned. Everything "decadent" looks suspiciously wasteful. Stage shows, exotic fruit, ball games, wedding photography, hats, flowers, songs, pets, tourism, novels, hobbies, diamonds ... it often puzzles me how economic activity makes a country wealthy when only a tiny part of it is efficiently providing health, nutrients and shelter. And in fact maybe 90% of it is wasteful, but nobody has the magic ability to identify exactly which 90%, and that's why central planning wrecks wealth, and VC funding apparently thrown down the toilet may in some mysterious way be beneficial to us.
- pdntspa 3y agomore like $30-$35
- astura 3y agoYeah, I plan on paying approximately double (100% markup) if I'm ordering delivery on an app. That's why I only do it when I'm in a hotel room on a work trip and I don't have the rental car keys. Hotel food is not cheaper, not tastier, and I have way less options (I am a vegetarian).
- mrangle 3y ago"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. As this is an immortal pressure and negotiating tactic. It is incentivized, and therefore we will get more of it. That works both ways, but at some point there has to be a reckoning that accepts that it is better to have employed than unemployed unskilled workers. In the context of a massive and growing unskilled population base. Yet the same people who demand that everyone earn a living wage, sometimes punctuating their points with riots, tend to be the same crowd who wants to import unskilled workers by the millions. There is no effectively borderless world in which most are both employed and not "underpaid". It won't happen both ways. In fact, the pay trend is about to tip massively against fairness. In a manner that even will make economic rationalists uncomfortable. These "fair pay" efforts are a distraction before that storm.
- FpUser 3y agoWith all the increased productivity and advances if we can't support decent living for every person then what's the point? Work yourself to death to make some motherfucker rich?
- data_ders 3y ago> Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?
- tru3_power 3y agoYeah you’re leaving us hanging here! To me it seems like people are learning their worth a little bit more lately and are demanding a little bit more/less financial stress.
- ghufran_syed 3y agoI took it to mean that whatever amount of money people currently think would be needed to be "fair", say, an increase from $20/hour to $25/hour, would within a year or so become "unfair" again, even if inflation was zero. Employers will always want more work for less money, employees will always want more money for less work. Same as the seller of any product would like more money for that product, and the buyer would always like to pay less for the same product. So you can say the company is "greedy"...but that implies that the worker is also "greedy" - which is true for both IF you define it the way I described above. Or you could say that the company (owners) are trying to maximize their return on investment (time + money), and the the workers are trying to maximize their return on investment (of time).
- ryukoposting 3y agoFrom my point of view, Uber and DD were always going to head in that direction because by any objective measure, they are worse than the solution that already existed. The introduction of a middleman created new costs for drivers, customers, and restaurants alike, yet it's actually worse at delivering food than the conventional "drivers work for the restaurant" model. Sure, you get one website where you can see all the delivery options in the area, but the cost is making all of those options shittier. I could rant about how stupid that industry is for hours, but I digress. What Amazon is doing is different because they're actually doing something that adds value, and they're solving a problem that actually exists. Maybe I'm naive for believing any of this matters. To be honest, I never thought much about how the whole system worked. I've only been in an Amazon Fresh twice. It had the "just walk out" thing but I don't have a Prime account so I never used it. I just figured it was UHF RFID. Seems like an obvious solution, but I'm not the engineer responsible for figuring out what to do if you put two exits next to each other.
- jfoster 3y agoIt's true that delivery services add a middle-man, but you don't seem to be considering that they add a lot of value in some important ways: 1. The single website/app is not just useful for discovery, but also to provide a consistent ordering experience. An individual restaurant might take orders over the phone, via their website, or via their own app. Those options will vary from one restaurant to the next. Not great for customers. 2. In the old model, restaurants would have to decide how many drivers to have on hand at any given time. During quiet periods they would have to decide between not offering delivery at all, or having a driver sitting around doing nothing. A delivery service that aggregates demand & supply is very useful for restaurants & drivers. Pooling of resources & layering on surge pricing creates a lot of elasticity. I would argue that what they should have done is tried to at this value at minimal cost to customers, drivers & restaurants. If they were leaner businesses the overall proposition could be a lot better.
- capybara_2020 3y agoYou bring up an interesting point. Just thinking out loud for a moment here. Is the current VC business model potentially the problem area and not the actual businesses? The need for rapid growth/software company like profit margins when these companies need more time and potentially are like non-software companies in terms of profits?
- intended 3y agoFair warning to all who come after - the children comment for a decent distance below are a battle based on correct/ incorrect/ technical/ personal definitions of skilled labor.
- iamflimflam1 3y agoI should have listened to your warning and just skipped it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- UweSchmidt 3y agoDoes that warrant a warning? That's just a natural occuring discussion, and selecting threads to follow is basic forum-reading skill. The rare gems of surprising insight are often found in the depths of slightly off-topic discussions. Previously I've noticed another kind of meta-comment, the top level complaint by a self-appointed moderators about the overall shape of the discussion elsewhere, instead of engaging directly with the actual posts in question.
- intended 3y agoYes. With intellectual pursuits, you can always find diamonds in the rough. Simply due to the effort YOU are putting in, given your then state of mind, knowledge and experience. You can wade through a conversation on creationism and evolutionary denial and understand humanity or even deepen your skills. However that's you - your unique circumstances bringing more to the table. Others would very much appreciate a warning, because they already have working definitions, have seen this argument before and would prefer spending their time on other pursuits.
- UweSchmidt 3y agoWith a little forum experience, who has trouble scanning a thread and seeing it meander away from their interest? So I question the need. Even if there is the need, who should be the judge for others over the quality of a subthread? I would feel presumptuous to pass judgement beyond my vote for each comment. Aren't those diamonds all that matter anyway? Recently I increasingly find new and curious beginnings dampened and limited by intellectually lazy attitudes, by comments that start with "I mean...", that reiterate the default state rather than entertaining a new thought. Inadvertently, well-meaning soft-moderation like yours might steer even more people away from interesting topics. I'd say, leave your vote and move on.
- hnbad 3y agoCase in point: LLMs that only work because of armies of underpaid offshore workers assisting in training.
- hot_gril 3y agoLots of services are great when the parent company is taking a loss on them. Idk if that was the case here, but with Alexa it is, and so was Uber.