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Unless you're cooking at home, you'd still move thousands of pounds of vehicle to drive to the restaurant, so I'm not sure that food delivery is really any wors
by spankalee 1y ago
Unless you're cooking at home, you'd still move thousands of pounds of vehicle to drive to the restaurant, so I'm not sure that food delivery is really any worse.
It could be a lot better if multiple deliveries are handled per trip.
- ajkjk 1y agobest case scenario is walkable neighborhoods with lots of little tasty restaurants at affordable prices around the corner from everybody. We've got a long way to go on actually building out our own country in a desirable way.
- zonotope 1y agoThis is the correct answer. There are a few pockets in the USA where this is the case like parts of the Boston and New York metro area, but you have be flexible with your definition of "affordable". And that's the point. These places are less than affordable because there's a much higher demand of people who want to live in these kinds of areas than the supply of them. We should build more!
- sp4cec0wb0y 1y agoNice to see someone here with their head on straight.
- spankalee 1y agoYes, and I completely agree with this, but the comparison for this type of food delivery should be apples-to-apples. If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery and when you do it's more likely to be someone on a bike or scooter. Waymo's probably don't apply there. The comparison would be walking vs delivery, and that would obviously come out bad for delivery. If you don't live in a walkable place then the comparison is you driving vs the delivery driving, and that's a wash or even positive for delivery. The induced demand of delivery vs cooking at home (assuming you grocery shop for the week) would be very bad for delivery though.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- austhrow743 1y ago>If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery This makes sense as a theory but it doesn't match my observed reality at all. Everyone I know who frequently orders food on delivery apps live in dense, walkable cities.
- lan321 1y agoI think the main issue is just getting out the door. Whether I walk 5 minutes or drive 10, it doesn't really matter once I get going. The annoying bit is getting off the couch, putting on 'outside' clothes, maybe taking a shower..
- realityfactchex 1y ago> best case scenario is walkable neighborhoods with lots of little tasty restaurants at affordable prices around the corner from everybody. According to the written history, pre-1906 San Francisco had basically that. It seems that the normal middle-class could afford high-quality, delicious food at restaurants, multiple times per week, due to the abundance of local ingredients and overall economic conditions. So, how to get that quality and relative pricing today? Excerpts from "The City That Was: A Requiem of Old San Francisco" by Will Irwin (free eBook, [0], free audiobook [1], HTML version at [2]): > San Francisco was famous for its restaurants and cafes. > they gave the best fare on earth, for the price, at a dollar, seventy-five cents, a half a dollar, or even fifteen cents. > a public restaurant where there was served the best dollar dinner on earth > The eating was usually better than the surroundings. Meals that were marvels were served in tumbledown little hotels. > A number of causes contributed to this. The country all about produced everything that a cook needs and that in abundance—the bay was an almost untapped fishing pound, the fruit farms came up to the very edge of the town, and the surrounding country produced in abundance fine meats, game, all cereals and all vegetables. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3314 [1] https://librivox.org/san-francisco-before-and-after-the-earthquake-by-william-henry-irwin/ [2] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3314/pg3314-images.html
- crooked-v 1y agoA starting point would be actually having enough housing, so workers don't automatically need wages that can absorb the overhead of commuting an hour both ways just to make burgers.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rootusrootus 1y agoAdjusted for income, those prices would be $15-$100 today. That seems in the right ballpark to me. I can get a pretty great dinner for $100/plate, especially if I don't need it to be in a fancy restaurant atmosphere.
- criddell 1y agoWalking doesn't make sense in some cities and it's only getting worse. In Phoenix you risk sun stroke just running from your house to the car.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoPhoenix as a city doesn't make sense. It's entire existence is due to Arizona getting wayyyy too much in the way of water rights for the amount of economic activity that should be happening in it.
- coredog64 1y agoGetting onto my hobby horse: The Pima and Maricopa tribes were able to create massive agricultural surpluses from pre-Columbian times to the early 19th century thanks to the Salt River. Phoenix is not a rainforest, but it's also not a bone-dry location. Phoenix today has plenty of water for residential and light industrial use, the problem is the persistence of agriculture. A farm in Phoenix uses something like 100x the amount of water compared to an equal amount of residential use. It was fine when there wasn't a global supply chain that could provide oranges or cotton at acceptable prices, but today the land and water have uses with much higher economic value.
- vel0city 1y agoHow many millions of people lived in the area in the early 19th century? What did their golf courses look like? Did they also ship those agricultural surpluses the Bani Khalid? Is the climate still the same? What we're doing to the land and the realities of how much water the area receives today is vastly different from what was done in the early 19th century. It seems meaningless to me to point out that the area managed to easily sustain some population of people in the early 1800s when so many other fundamental things are different.
- signatoremo 1y agoMany cities or towns don’t make sense, top of mountains, isolated islands, extreme weather. Yet they exist and people live there. They also need services.
- mediaman 1y agoWe're going in the opposite direction. High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants. We're seeing restaurant apocalypse happening in places like Seattle and Denver, because high wages result in high prices which causes lower customer volume which causes higher fixed costs per unit, which causes a death spiral. Denver, for example, has 30% fewer restaurants now, because it's so hard to run one profitably. Lots of little tasty restaurants and high wages for service staff are basically incompatible. Many people in the city don't realize this and advocate for both. Of course, high wages are desirable if they can be accomplished without tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs are there. High minimum wages favor high-volume, fast service chain restaurants that are more labor efficient. Perhaps eventually automation will relax this tradeoff, but I would expect automation to primarily benefit corporate restaurant chains over small local eateries, unless the automation is so general that any restaurant can start using it without technical expertise or R&D.
- zer00eyz 1y ago> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants. Not as much as one would think. Rent (literal) and rent seeking (lending in this case) are the biggest drivers in food costs today. The family restaurant in an owned building is a distant memory. The wholesale price of food is very low at the point of production (farming) and absolutely bonkers at the retail and wholesale levels. Mostly because at every step of the chain there is debt, and massive interest payments that need to be made. The HN set is on one side of the K shaped economy and the other half is looking very much like late stage capitalism. Case in point: Fritos. 4.50 a bag, while the Walmart generic version is under 2 bucks. Why? Because Pepsi (owner of Fritos) is competing with apple for customers, aka SHAREHOLDERS, and has a massive amount of debt compared to Walmart. The primary input in Fritos is corn, whos price is close to 2019 levels.
- jdlshore 1y agoI don’t think that story illustrates the point you think it does. Prices aren’t based on cost, they’re based on perceived value on the part of the buyer, and the marketing and brand recognition behind Fritos raises its perceived value much higher than the generic brand. To put it another way: all generic brands are cheaper than their name-brand counterparts, and that fact has nothing to do with debt or cost structures.
- bombcar 1y agoWe have little restaurants built into every single dwelling unit! They're called kitchens. There's a certain minimum number of foods you need to sell each day which directly controls how many restaurants you can have in a given area. The real solution is burrito tubes: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
- fragmede 1y agoI put my money into the toaster but no food came out. Please send help.
- toast0 1y agoTry your credit card in the microwave ;)
- ajkjk 1y agowell if you redefine the word "restaurant", sure...
- throwaway422432 1y agoSo we should be talking about autonomous delivery of mealkits: HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, Dinnerly, Blue Apron, etc?
- ghaff 1y agoAside from Blue Apron doing something of a reboot recently (and I wasn't wild about what they shipped me)--you don't hear much about the delivered meal kits for a variety of reasons. I know I don't care much for them--and it's not just cost.
- bombcar 1y agoIt’s an incredibly narrow niche; those who want to cook at home but never progress past boxed ingredients.
- carlosjobim 1y ago[flagged]
- ajkjk 1y agoor go to any other country where grabbing tasty food around the corner with your friends is a regular and affordable social activity...
- carlosjobim 1y agoAbsolutely. I think either learning to cook or moving to another place or country, is a whole lot easier than forcing an entirely new urban structure where you currently live.
- olyjohn 1y agoYeah those places are super tiny and run by one or two people. Or they are running them under an awning and the whole restaurant is built on a bicycle. Try setting up a bicycle restaurant anywhere in the US and see what happens. You can barely set up a taco truck here. Unfortunately to run a restaurant here you need really expensive restaurant real estate.
- bsder 1y ago> You can barely set up a taco truck here. We have a ton of these food trucks all over Austin. Most of them ... just aren't very good. So, apparently, regulations aren't too onerous. And a food truck isn't exempt from the fact that ridiculous commercial real estate prices cause people to be too spread out to be able to service in walking range. And the regulations got tighter because these trucks were blowing up and killing people. I haven't heard about one exploding in a while, so apparently the regulations had an effect.
- shkkmo 1y ago> You can barely set up a taco truck here. I see taco trucks everywhere and there are dozens of food carts within a mile of me. This sounds more like issue that is specific to your area and local government.
- rcpt 1y agoSomehow that's the hardest thing to implement
- rconti 1y agoA major factor in my choice of house location here in the silicon valley 'burbs was to be near "stuff". I have a small strip mall type shopping center with a grocery store a 2 block walk away. Brewpub, taqueria, pizza joint, grocery store, starbucks, UPS store, wine bar, fitness studio, yoga place, etc. Plus there's a post office another block away. Hell, yesterday I walked the 2mi roundtrip to the local Stanford medical outpost to have my blood draw done.
- renewiltord 1y agoIn general, that won't pass environmental review. So at least in most of California that's a non-starter. If you want these things you can't have environmental review, and you can't have community planning, and so on. And we (as a society) would much rather have design-by-committee than what you want. In San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores or not. If you don't want these people to have a voice you can have what you want, but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people then you have to accept that others have different tastes from you.
- shkkmo 1y ago> that won't pass environmental review In what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review? > but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people. Nobody is taking away their right to vote, so it isn't "disenfranchising" someone to put in a second icecream shop in their neighborhood when they only wanted one. > San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores SF seems to have a public feedback and planning problem that dysfunctionally favors nimbyism over regional needs and they end up shooting themselves in the foot with it over and over.
- renewiltord 1y ago> > that won't pass environmental review > In what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review? Try it and you’ll find out.
- shkkmo 1y agoI live in one right now...
- renewiltord 1y agoBuilt recently in America? Where? I guess I'm entirely wrong then, thank you. Do share so I can go look up how they managed to do what they did.
- stetrain 1y agoThe delivery option is more convenient and takes less time out of your day than driving to a restaurant. My suspicion is that most frequent delivery app users are ordering food more frequently and from further away than they would drive to if the delivery apps were not an option. In a similar vein, widespread full-autonomous driving cars will likely lead to more people taking longer commutes by commoditizing the cost of a ride and freeing up the time that would otherwise be spent driving.
- spankalee 1y agoYeah, induced demand is a real thing, and a huge reason to invest in public transit and walkable neighborhoods in the first place, since they benefit from induced demand as well. I personally really support autonomous cars for safety reasons, and to hopefully reduce car ownership, but the definitely didn't solve traffic or the external costs of cars. I hope there's an indirect path from then towards increased public transit.
- Seattle3503 1y agoSingle occupancy vehicles make up most of the traffic on the road. For most people, the most significant cost of being on the road is their time. With self driving cars, our roads will be full of zero occupancy vehicles.
- BurningFrog 1y agoYeah, but it feels less wasteful to move a 200lb person in a car than a 1lb burrito, even though the Burrito car uses less fuel.
- tonyhart7 1y agoYou are cooking at home for multiple eating lol its more effecient and its not even question
- hackernewds 1y agoMultiple deliveries are indeed handled per trip. I order daily, and it is quite obvious. Perhaps it is because of density where I live. What convinces you that it weren't the case?
- aners_xyz 1y agoSpeak for yourself but I don’t need a car to get groceries