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Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructi

Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. People are not forced to use DoorDash, UberEats, etc. We never do and are surviving just fine.

digging 2y ago
> Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. No, you've got that backward. Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital. Advertising is a pretty clear example but it's not the limit. I mean, how many people were ordering DoorDash before DoorDash existed? I'm not being entirely facetious - it's impossible for customers to behave in a way that's not allowed by the market. That you are resistant to these tides is not evidence against, it's just accounted for. You're not the target audience. Nor am I. But neither of us has ever made a decision in a vacuum; we choose our purchases from what's available, according to the information we're exposed to.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital Source? The best argument against this is how elastic demand was when ZIRP ended. Customers responded to an underpriced product. When the price was raised to a profit-clearing level, it no longer cleared most of the market.
  - digging 2y ago
    I don't understand your argument. It sounds like customers were reacting to their environment more than driving change.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > sounds like customers were reacting to their environment more than driving change It sounds like customers had agency. Tides of capital gave them more or fewer options, and they chose them at their discretion when the terms were advantageous. When they weren't, ever or any longer, they didn't.
      - digging 2y ago
        ...In other words, because DoorDash is convenient and advantageous for customers, they choose to get food delivered instead of go to the restaurant. And admonishing people for choosing the advantageous option is useless, at best. Does that not follow?
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        You argued "customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital." That's attributing cause and effect. The tides of capital didn't cause the customer behaviour, it enabled existing behaviour to scale. Capital driving behaviour describes diamonds, not DoorDash.
        digging 2y ago
        I'm really confused by your reply, and it doesn't answer the question I posed, so maybe that's that.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  There is no doubt that advertising has a huge impact on customer behavior. But that doesn't mean that consumers are incapable of making choices that go against the grain of the market. It does take a conscious effort, and it's true that most consumers just don't care or can't be bothered with it, or are crushed by too many other things in our modern society to have the bandwidth to even consider their choices.
  - digging 2y ago
    Everything you're saying is exactly in accord with what I posted. Individuals always have choice, but when we're looking at an entire population and seeing that large amounts of people are making a choice that we think is "bad", saying, "Well people just need to stop making bad choices. People are stupid. I make good choices." is ludicrous. Let's assume that the answer really is to ensure individual choices are changed. Who's going to go house to house and educate everyone about why the choice to use DoorDash is problematic? Does this person have the time to customize their solutions to every family's needs? It's insanity. It's an argument that leads nowhere at all; it's an abdication of responsibility (which is totally unnecessary, because the commenter never had a responsibility to change the situation). Hell, it's a call for the audience to also abdicate responsibility they might feel. It's just a useless or harmful way of telling listeners how proud one is to be a statistical exception.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Yeah I was basically agreeing with you.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    >making choices that go against the grain of the market. It does take a conscious effort, and it's true that most consumers just don't care or can't be bothered with it No, it's not that most people are interior and follow the market, it's that the market literally is what most people do. If everyone "went against the market", they'd just have moved the market.
beloch 2y ago
The delivery service in my area has no competition. You order from their version of restaurant menus on which the prices have been jacked up. Then you pay a delivery fee. Then you pay a service fee. Then you have to deal with drivers making minimum wage who can be surly if not tipped enough. It more than doubles the price of a meal, so few people use it. Is this DoorDash's plan once they've driven their competitors out of the market? The market will shrink and it will take quite some time to recoup their expenses. Maybe that's okay in their books. Own the whole pie even if you shrink it.
colechristensen 2y ago
Food delivery has been a thing for a very very long time. The problem here is that there's a $45B company (doordash) in the middle of the person cooking the food and the person delivering the food instead of a high school kid in a funny hat. Exchanging the overhead of a dining room for the overhead of unskilled labor taking food to a place is an easy win for a restaurant. Doordash and the like are taking jobs that you could train a child to do in an hour (take an order, deliver it to a place) and spending billions on the technology to do instead while still requiring unskilled labor to do the job. This is the kind of software that needs to be a small scale distributed open source affair instead of a $45B company with several competitors at the same scale. They started selling their product as if it were basically free by burning investor cache and now they're riding the limited rails of brand recognition and habit while trying to charge for the ridiculous amount they're doing for such a simple task.
- josefresco 2y ago
  > Food delivery has been a thing for a very very long time. > The problem here is that there's a $45B company (doordash) in the middle of the person cooking the food and the person delivering the food instead of a high school kid in a funny hat > This is the kind of software that needs to be a small scale distributed Related: a few years back before DoorDash and the like exploded in popularity there was a local company near me who tried to start a food delivery business. They lasted one summer (busy) season and then made a post on social media about how unsustainable it was. These services (Uber/DoorDash) are only seemingly viable because of the mountain of "investor cache".
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > Food delivery has been a thing for a very very long time. But not at this scale; it was always a side offer from a more select number of restaurants catering more to pressing needs than an "immediate satisfaction" culture driven by same-day shipping.
- dml2135 2y ago
  There are food delivery companies, such as Toast and ChowNow, that seem more restaurant-oriented. As in, they sell an online-ordering-platform-as-a-service to restaurants (sometimes bundled with a POS system), rather than gunning for market dominance on the consumer side of things. I think that's probably a viable model for the future, assuming they don't have VCs that will push them to squeeze restaurants like the big apps, at some point.
mikejulietbravo 2y ago
This is the biggest point. You can simply not use them. Cook your own food or walk or drive or bike to a restaurant. There is a massive market of lazy AF people who also are terrible at personal financial management, and they are the ones complaining.
- dml2135 2y ago
  I hear this a lot but I don't think the "lazy AF people who also are terrible at personal financial management" is really fair. I order delivery through the apps a ton, but it's not because I'm bad at financial management. Like many here, I have a well paying job that takes up a ton of my time and energy during the week, and cooking every night is simply not feasible. Takeout is expensive, sure, but if it enables me to hold down a job that let's me afford it, it's a conscious trade-off that I can make. Could I spend more time meal-prepping and freeze meals instead? Sure. But again, time and energy.
- standardUser 2y ago
  There's also seemingly an army of judgy AF people just salivating at the chance to call other people lazy.
nsxwolf 2y ago
You know, I do go to restaurants, and DoorDash is making restaurants worse. They're becoming DoorDash focused and the dining room experience suffers. Even picking up your own food is becoming destroyed. Orders get made with no regard to the estimated pickup times you used to be able to rely on. Your order might get made immediately and just tossed onto a pickup shelf where it sits getting cold for half an hour. This is all because DoorDash guarantees absolute shit quality and accuracy. Cold food, wrong orders, and they've trained people to not complain by threatening to ban you from the service. So instead of the son of the owner of the pizza place rushing right out to make your order right with an apology, you just accept that an 80% correct order is OK. A whole generation of young adults has come of age with this thanks to COVID, so we're just stuck with it now.

digging 2y ago

> Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. No, you've got that backward. Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital. Advertising is a pretty clear example but it's not the limit. I mean, how many people were ordering DoorDash before DoorDash existed? I'm not being entirely facetious - it's impossible for customers to behave in a way that's not allowed by the market. That you are resistant to these tides is not evidence against, it's just accounted for. You're not the target audience. Nor am I. But neither of us has ever made a decision in a vacuum; we choose our purchases from what's available, according to the information we're exposed to.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital Source? The best argument against this is how elastic demand was when ZIRP ended. Customers responded to an underpriced product. When the price was raised to a profit-clearing level, it no longer cleared most of the market.
- digging 2y ago
  I don't understand your argument. It sounds like customers were reacting to their environment more than driving change.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > sounds like customers were reacting to their environment more than driving change It sounds like customers had agency. Tides of capital gave them more or fewer options, and they chose them at their discretion when the terms were advantageous. When they weren't, ever or any longer, they didn't.
    - digging 2y ago
      ...In other words, because DoorDash is convenient and advantageous for customers, they choose to get food delivered instead of go to the restaurant. And admonishing people for choosing the advantageous option is useless, at best. Does that not follow?
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        You argued "customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital." That's attributing cause and effect. The tides of capital didn't cause the customer behaviour, it enabled existing behaviour to scale. Capital driving behaviour describes diamonds, not DoorDash.
        digging 2y ago
        I'm really confused by your reply, and it doesn't answer the question I posed, so maybe that's that.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
There is no doubt that advertising has a huge impact on customer behavior. But that doesn't mean that consumers are incapable of making choices that go against the grain of the market. It does take a conscious effort, and it's true that most consumers just don't care or can't be bothered with it, or are crushed by too many other things in our modern society to have the bandwidth to even consider their choices.
- digging 2y ago
  Everything you're saying is exactly in accord with what I posted. Individuals always have choice, but when we're looking at an entire population and seeing that large amounts of people are making a choice that we think is "bad", saying, "Well people just need to stop making bad choices. People are stupid. I make good choices." is ludicrous. Let's assume that the answer really is to ensure individual choices are changed. Who's going to go house to house and educate everyone about why the choice to use DoorDash is problematic? Does this person have the time to customize their solutions to every family's needs? It's insanity. It's an argument that leads nowhere at all; it's an abdication of responsibility (which is totally unnecessary, because the commenter never had a responsibility to change the situation). Hell, it's a call for the audience to also abdicate responsibility they might feel. It's just a useless or harmful way of telling listeners how proud one is to be a statistical exception.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Yeah I was basically agreeing with you.
- thfuran 2y ago
  >making choices that go against the grain of the market. It does take a conscious effort, and it's true that most consumers just don't care or can't be bothered with it No, it's not that most people are interior and follow the market, it's that the market literally is what most people do. If everyone "went against the market", they'd just have moved the market.

beloch 2y ago

The delivery service in my area has no competition. You order from their version of restaurant menus on which the prices have been jacked up. Then you pay a delivery fee. Then you pay a service fee. Then you have to deal with drivers making minimum wage who can be surly if not tipped enough. It more than doubles the price of a meal, so few people use it. Is this DoorDash's plan once they've driven their competitors out of the market? The market will shrink and it will take quite some time to recoup their expenses. Maybe that's okay in their books. Own the whole pie even if you shrink it.

colechristensen 2y ago

Food delivery has been a thing for a very very long time. The problem here is that there's a $45B company (doordash) in the middle of the person cooking the food and the person delivering the food instead of a high school kid in a funny hat. Exchanging the overhead of a dining room for the overhead of unskilled labor taking food to a place is an easy win for a restaurant. Doordash and the like are taking jobs that you could train a child to do in an hour (take an order, deliver it to a place) and spending billions on the technology to do instead while still requiring unskilled labor to do the job. This is the kind of software that needs to be a small scale distributed open source affair instead of a $45B company with several competitors at the same scale. They started selling their product as if it were basically free by burning investor cache and now they're riding the limited rails of brand recognition and habit while trying to charge for the ridiculous amount they're doing for such a simple task.

josefresco 2y ago
> Food delivery has been a thing for a very very long time. > The problem here is that there's a $45B company (doordash) in the middle of the person cooking the food and the person delivering the food instead of a high school kid in a funny hat > This is the kind of software that needs to be a small scale distributed Related: a few years back before DoorDash and the like exploded in popularity there was a local company near me who tried to start a food delivery business. They lasted one summer (busy) season and then made a post on social media about how unsustainable it was. These services (Uber/DoorDash) are only seemingly viable because of the mountain of "investor cache".
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> Food delivery has been a thing for a very very long time. But not at this scale; it was always a side offer from a more select number of restaurants catering more to pressing needs than an "immediate satisfaction" culture driven by same-day shipping.
dml2135 2y ago
There are food delivery companies, such as Toast and ChowNow, that seem more restaurant-oriented. As in, they sell an online-ordering-platform-as-a-service to restaurants (sometimes bundled with a POS system), rather than gunning for market dominance on the consumer side of things. I think that's probably a viable model for the future, assuming they don't have VCs that will push them to squeeze restaurants like the big apps, at some point.

mikejulietbravo 2y ago

This is the biggest point. You can simply not use them. Cook your own food or walk or drive or bike to a restaurant. There is a massive market of lazy AF people who also are terrible at personal financial management, and they are the ones complaining.

dml2135 2y ago
I hear this a lot but I don't think the "lazy AF people who also are terrible at personal financial management" is really fair. I order delivery through the apps a ton, but it's not because I'm bad at financial management. Like many here, I have a well paying job that takes up a ton of my time and energy during the week, and cooking every night is simply not feasible. Takeout is expensive, sure, but if it enables me to hold down a job that let's me afford it, it's a conscious trade-off that I can make. Could I spend more time meal-prepping and freeze meals instead? Sure. But again, time and energy.
standardUser 2y ago
There's also seemingly an army of judgy AF people just salivating at the chance to call other people lazy.

nsxwolf 2y ago

You know, I do go to restaurants, and DoorDash is making restaurants worse. They're becoming DoorDash focused and the dining room experience suffers. Even picking up your own food is becoming destroyed. Orders get made with no regard to the estimated pickup times you used to be able to rely on. Your order might get made immediately and just tossed onto a pickup shelf where it sits getting cold for half an hour. This is all because DoorDash guarantees absolute shit quality and accuracy. Cold food, wrong orders, and they've trained people to not complain by threatening to ban you from the service. So instead of the son of the owner of the pizza place rushing right out to make your order right with an apology, you just accept that an 80% correct order is OK. A whole generation of young adults has come of age with this thanks to COVID, so we're just stuck with it now.