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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 fo

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.

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.