6 ms·

This is tangential, but I worked for a food delivery startup (a conscientious one) for a couple of years and food delivery is a terribly extractive business tha

• SoftTalker 1y ago
  It can work, pizza delivery has been able to be profitable for example. But they are set up from the concept to be delivery businesses, and they have that accounted for in their pricing. Doordash trying to extract profit and pay a driver and put that all on the restaurant? No that's not going to work. As a restaurant I'd refuse Doordash orders at any less than full menu price, and paid on pickup not maybe three months later. If the customer wants the convenience of delivery to their door they need to pay for it.
  • amelius 1y ago
    Of course it can work, the delivery companies need to restaurants to stay alive. But they will be barely alive. Are middlemen ever a good idea? What about middlemen that become the gatekeepers of your business.
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • zeroonetwothree 1y ago
      Middlemen are often a good idea, yes. Can you imagine if for every single item you wanted to buy you had to go to the original manufacturer? And now suddenly every manufacturer needs to also become a seller and distributor?
    • zamadatix 1y ago
      Without middlemen every restaurant would have to be farm to table, which is a significant burden from many angles and would probably result in more shutting down than delivery services could. Cutting out the middleman is great... but only when you run the numbers and it makes sense, not as a universal truth.
    • prepend 1y ago
      Middlemen are good when they add value. Like offering delivery when restaurants don’t normally deliver.
      • amelius 1y ago
        But they can deliver without being a middleman. E.g. they can work as contractors for the restaurant. But now, instead, they are the ones taking the customer's orders, and hence they become the portal for the business (and thus, middlemen). Which is a bad situation for the restaurant owners.
    • akoboldfrying 1y ago
      > Are middlemen ever a good idea? You need some toothpaste, some eggs, and some toilet paper. Would you rather go to the supermarket, or to the factory, the farm and the mill?
  • parineum 1y ago
    > Doordash trying to extract profit and pay a driver and put that all on the restaurant? Profit for services? Dastardly. > If the customer wants the convenience of delivery to their door they need to pay for it. They do.
• porphyra 1y ago
  Honestly, food delivery from restaurants is one of these things that is a big economic mismatch. The restaurant is spending tons of money on their nice dining room and part of the price of the food is supposed to be the experience of eating there. Yet, when you are ordering delivery, you are getting a subpar dining experience, plus you have to cover the additional cost of transporting the food. This means that someone is getting squeezed --- the restaurant is not getting paid enough, the delivery person is getting paid peanuts, or the buyer is having to pay a ludicrous price for the food.
  • jowea 1y ago
    The dining experience depends on your feelings and home, and you have to pay for transportation for the entire party to the restaurant.
  • npinsker 1y ago
    That really depends on the place and the person. I don't get much value from eating inside a Chipotle or a pizza parlor.
  • Dylan16807 1y ago
    If half the business is delivery, then the dining room can be half the size and there can be fewer servers. That saves a good fraction of the cost. Apply those savings to a delivery driver, add a $5 delivery fee, and the math can work out fine.
• gleenn 1y ago
  When I worked at a restaurant b2b company that helped pay invoices I learned how razor thin margins most operate on. We even ended up giving out effectively a payday loan to one when they asked for assistance but jeeze those businesses struggle sometimes.
• lokar 1y ago
  For the handful we checked near us, ordering via the restaurant site (for delivery) is cheaper the via uber, even with Uber one
• Calavar 1y ago
  Could you explain further? The restaurant gets the order at the same price, Uber adds delivery fees and a 25% markup on the cost of food. Why would these numbers not work out in the kitchen's favor? Maybe I'm missing something. Genuinely curious.
  • Sayrus 1y ago
    While you pay a markup on the application, UberEats and others keeps 25/30% of the price based on the marked up price. If you make the calculation they usually have to cut into the kitchen margin while the price for the customer stays more expensive.
    • MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago
      Can't the restaurant just say no?
      • _heimdall 1y ago
        Unless something has changed over the last couple years, restaurants opt in to being available on those apps. Uber Eats and the others are generally integrated into the restaurant's point of sales system.
        • ivape 1y ago
          That would explain why they sell less or cheaper food, which appear too high on the app due to the markup they have to add to the price to handle the fees. This would be an alternate explanation to why things seem inflated. Even with inflated ingredients prices, it actually still doesn’t add up how the volume dropped so much such that each unit would need to cost that much more (I’m arguing it can’t just be the ingredient prices being high). The fees adding to the perceptual inflation make sense. It’s more expensive volume or less cheaper volume they can make due to higher ingredient prices PLUS the fees they have to add to cover the delivery service cut. That’s how you get a $20 burger for delivery. This all gets worse when the prices become sticky at the retail place itself (app prices enter the real world). These delivery service are a serious agitator, true disrupter.
• iancmceachern 1y ago
  Second this, it also allows you to build a real relationship with the other folks in your community
• incognito78211 1y ago
  I worked for a food delivery company (Uber Eats / Doordash / Deliveroo / Just Eats / GrubHub — one of them), and while I can't argue with what you are saying, the company wasn't making any money either. I think after 5-10 years of working there they finally managed to make like 20 pence per order. No one is winning with food delivery, not the restaurant, not the rider, not the company. We would have loved to have reduced the % taken and pay our riders more, but customers wouldn't pay it — they'd just go to Uber instead. Oh the hypocrisy of people picketing in the streets against gig work but not willing to pay more than 3 or 4 bucks for their food to be delivered... I found it incredibly frustrating because we truly weren't the bad guys. Sigh.
  • nothrabannosir 1y ago
    Most people I know who lampoon delivery services were around for the days before they came upon the scene, and they think that was better. Restaurant owners I've heard on the subject, tend to agree. The economics should not work out, delivery services should allow for economies of scale, but greed and anti competitive pressure eat it all.
    • Larrikin 1y ago
      There is no scale to be had at local delivery. Between various services, banks, and credit cards, I get the paid tier of all the delivery apps for "free", so I am paying the absolute minimum. It makes no sense to me for these "scalable" companies to pick up my food, drive in the wrong direction, wait at another restaurant, then continue to drive in the wrong direction to drop off that order, and then get me my cold food that I still paid more for than menu price with an expected tip the driver can see before they even pick up my order. I gave up on the whole concept once I moved somewhere with more than two places that are walking distance. Not all of them are great but it's still a better deal than a terrible delivery from an amazing place at a huge mark up. The worst time line is the cheap places that used to offer free delivery growing up having their delivery handled by a lightly skinned version of DoorDash. If you think you can use a coupon for a discount you actually are just paying the full price of their delivery fee without the delivery service discount you get directly from DoorDash.
• tonyhart7 1y ago
  remember back then a lot of restaurant have their own delivery service that can deliver at no extra fees good times
• hackernewds 1y ago
  If the numbers didn't add up Doordash wouldn't have millions of restaurants signed up nor drivers. If not for Doordash, they would've gone out of business during COVID. Now I wonder what conscientious delivery app you've worked for, and if they are still around
  • igleria 1y ago
    numbers don't need to add up if you don't have an alternative to survive. That is why a lot of jobs get away with paying peanuts, because 3 peanuts is more than 0 and people need to eat.
• torginus 1y ago
  This has been one of my strongly held beliefs and pet peeves - the fact that you need fast food delivered tremendously increases the human cost of making that food. For example, making a pizza is what, 10 minutes, or less, when adding up all the labor involved in a restaurant setting. In comparison, taking said pizza, even around the block, with the courier having to arrive take it somewhere, is I'd estimate at least 15 mins. Someone has to pay for that human labor, and considering how expensive it is, and not only that, VC funded food delivery startups want to take a huge markup on that. Something has to give. Crap wages for couriers, restaurant staff, skimping on raw materials etc. It's much better for everyone involved to cut out the middle man, have restaurants on every corner (considering in most apartment blocks, nobody wants to live on the ground floors anyways), with the upper floors used for apartments or offices. This is hardly an original thought, tons of European cities I've been in do this.
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  • edwcross 1y ago
    A city I lived in had this, but when the restaurant owner retired, they explicitly forbade the ground floor from being used for some food-related business. It turns out the residents upstairs were always complaining about the smell. NIMBYism won. A better solution would have been some mandatory grease/odor filters. Just to point out that "restaurants in every corner" is not always easy to do, especially in residential blocks. I honestly think that "cooking your own food" (with the help of modern kitchen utensils, time-saving equipment, and the exception being collective canteens/cafeterias for specific groups such as students) is economically advantageous. Because even today in many European cities, many of those tending to restaurants are immigrant labor or somewhat disadvantaged groups who are implicitly pushed towards such jobs due to lack of alternatives.
    • torginus 1y ago
      I used to rent an apartment exactly like this in Vienna, the only problem was the somewhat loud and lively crowd late in the evening, never had any smell issues, and this was a 100 year old building
• gambiting 1y ago
  My favourite chinese restaurant doesn't take card in person - they say if you want to pay by card then order through JustEat. So clearly they are happy to not only take the hit on card fees but also on whatever JustEat takes over just having a card machine in-store. I would actually go and pick up in person more often but the lack of a card machine kills it for me.
• deleted 1y ago
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