[HN Gopher] Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Co...
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Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19
Author : kkcorps
Score : 428 points
Date : 2020-05-06 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Does this signal the start of something like a recession in tech?
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Define tech. It is more for any "service or travel sector
| touching" company essentially that is getting hit. Direct
| software related companies are nearly immune.
| wpietri wrote:
| With the scale of the recession in the rest of the economy,
| it's certain that we'll feel in in tech. Maybe less, in that
| it's easier for us to work and deliver value at at a distance.
| But perhaps more, in that a lot of what we do is an investment,
| and recessions aren't a great time to be investing. A lot of
| software's value is essentially in reducing the cost of labor
| to achieve some result. But with the unemployment rate going
| from historic lows of ~4% to somewhere around 20% [1], reducing
| labor costs is less urgent.
|
| [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/millions-of-lost-jobs-
| may-...
| asdff wrote:
| It doesn't matter that you can work remote if the vast
| majority of the population has no disposable income to buy
| your product or service.
| rswail wrote:
| Reducing labor costs will remain as urgent because companies
| have to deal with a very low demand. So they will layoff and
| automate.
|
| It will accelerate automation.
|
| What's needed is demand, the way for that to happen is for
| government to pay for things and to create jobs.
| wpietri wrote:
| I suspect it depends a lot on the employer. Fewer will go
| out and hire (expensive) software engineers as part of a
| long-term project to (hopefully) decrease labor costs. Some
| still will, but lower capital availability and increased
| uncertainty means a lot of things seen as long-term
| investments will get put off until things are clearer.
| techslave wrote:
| you mean more than the 50% drop in uber's market cap since feb?
| criddell wrote:
| I just looked and Uber is still worth $47 billion. That seems
| absurd to me.
| dredds wrote:
| At least they don't have to fire 1 million.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg
| mrweasel wrote:
| It seems to depend on what you're doing. Microsoft and Amazon
| (In this case the AWS part) both seems to do very well. Video
| conferencing, med-tech, hosting and many others are doing very
| well.
|
| If you drive taxis, like Uber, then you're perhaps not going to
| do well.
| dredds wrote:
| Indeed. MS just announced building a new datacenter in NZ
| (which happens to be close to eradicating CV'19 given it's
| geography) so expansion even during a global crisis is
| certainly possible.
|
| https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/121422743/microsofts-
| signif...
| dehrmann wrote:
| I've pointed it out elsewhere, but the places that have
| been best at eradicating it have been islands. NZ,
| Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan. I suppose
| South Korea is is effectively an island.
| cwperkins wrote:
| This is unfortunate, but I also imagine that Uber may be one of
| the beneficiaries when it comes to re-opening later this summer
| if there are more people that choose to avoid taking mass
| transit. They have talented employees so I hope everyone lands on
| their feet.
| sudhirkhanger wrote:
| Should you hold it against companies which are laying off people
| or doing pay cut?
|
| I have an emotional reaction to this. Maybe I should be equally
| needy and switch jobs as soon as I get a better offer.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| If the alternative is telling employees you suddenly can't pay
| them their paycheck, yes, you should cut early. More than a few
| restaurants have gone under with no warning and leaving all of
| their employees fully in the lurch.
|
| > Maybe I should be equally needy and switch jobs as soon as I
| get a better offer.
|
| If it's actually a better offer, yes you should. Your company
| doesn't have any loyalty to you outside the risk of replacing
| you.
| asdff wrote:
| Great advice for the former bull market, but this could
| backfire in a recession. Last in, first out. Hold on to your
| job for dear life for the next two years.
| rockarage wrote:
| This is a failure in leadership at UberEats. Uber has more than
| one revenue source and delivery is in high demand, UberEats is
| severely losing to DoorDash in food delivery, despite Uber having
| significantly more resources than DoorDash. Uber has billions in
| the bank, Doordash only has hundreds of millions. At the time of
| this posting, Doordash is currently number #13 in the App store,
| UberEats is sitting at #62. Uber has access to capital and
| reserve in the bank. Reserves are often used for a rainy day,
| well it is pouring now. They should be using their position to
| gain market share during this time of peak demand for deliveries,
| should not be losing to DoorDash.
| epylar wrote:
| I ordered some things from UberEats early on in the quarantine.
| The restaurants made several errors and eventually UberEats
| said they wouldn't refund because I was having too many issues
| with my food, and it was 'unlikely' that a person would have
| that many issues. So I don't use them any more.
| PunchTornado wrote:
| Maybe you are too picky? Mistakes happen in restaurants and
| we shouldn't expect everything to be as we want. I never
| asked for refunds even when my food was completely different
| than what I ordered.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Why not? In a physical restaurant you would casually
| mention it to the waiter and they'd apologise and offer to
| replace it for free. Similarly, if you order something
| online and get the wrong items delivered you'd send it
| back.
| quacker wrote:
| All of these comments make me thankful to have Favor as an
| option in Texas: https://favordelivery.com/cities. It's owned
| by HEB and does grocery delivery from HEB as well.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Same experience here, both with wrong food as well as a bug
| in the app which caused a cached, previous cart to be ordered
| instead of the new cart from a different restaurant. I
| actually provided detailed steps to reproduce this and
| screenshots and they couldn't care less.
|
| Both cases ended up with a chargeback.
|
| Deliveroo is similar, they banned a 2 year old account used
| multiple times every day (for both me and my flatmates) with
| over 2k spent on it for supposed fraud when I dared to ask
| for "too many" refunds because of cold/incorrect food (if you
| place many orders you have more probability that something
| goes wrong, but their "fraud" scoring algorithm - that also
| influences whether you can get one-click refunds directly in
| the app - doesn't seem to take that into account).
|
| Both Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats also often lie and
| blame the restaurant for being slow when they can't assign a
| driver. I've had multiple occurrences where an order is stuck
| on "Driver waiting at the restaurant" for 20+ minutes but
| calling the restaurant reveals that the food was ready long
| ago and nobody is coming to pick it up.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Though I'm kinda glad people who refund delivery food for
| being cold get kicked off the platform so that more
| reasonable people who know how to heat food up don't have
| to subsidize you and your expectations.
|
| Btw how many times did you heat up and eat the food anyways
| after getting your refund?
| onemoresoop wrote:
| A restaurant business owner friend of mine is struggling
| to stay open and he lowered his fees to accept more
| orders on Seamless/Grubhub. Quite a bunch of people order
| food, receive it on time only to then, in a couple of
| hours, cancel the order. He filmed himself handing the
| delivery in to the person who ordered and showed it to
| the customer reps at Seamless/Grubhub and they don't do
| anything about it, he basically has to take the loss,
| multiple orders a day already. He isn't delivering to
| that address again if they re-order. But, at least here
| in NYC, there's no shortage of people who cancel they
| orders hours after they eat it.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| How is it even possible to cancel an order hours after
| it's been delivered?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Seems like a technical problem or a shortcoming of the
| platform, but regardless, someone refusing video evidence
| like that (especially from who is essentially their
| business partner and has little incentive to commit
| fraud) is unacceptable. The problem is that support is
| outsourced to monkeys with no real power to investigate
| or change things and it's cheaper to fob you off than to
| assign the issue to someone with at least half a brain to
| see what's going on and make it right.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > more reasonable people who know how to heat food up
|
| If the food was advertised as potentially cold or wrong
| upfront with no guarantees it would be one thing and the
| market will adjust (only people who want to take the
| gamble would order).
|
| It is not advertised as such, and the prices don't
| reflect it either. You are offered a deal where you pay
| money for warm, or at least _correct_ food to be
| delivered. The problem is that one side doesn 't want to
| uphold their part of the deal but still expects the other
| side to uphold its part (aka paying the money). That
| sounds like false advertising to me and we have laws
| against it for a reason.
|
| > how many times did you heat up and eat the food anyways
| after getting your refund?
|
| Cold food actually results in a partial refund which is
| fine by me (though the option for the full refund should
| still be offered IMO, as some foods might not taste the
| same after reheating though I haven't experienced this
| personally). For me cold food was never a big deal, it
| was the incorrect food that made up the majority of the
| problems, often they wouldn't respect the extra options
| like "no cheese", the food would be completely different
| from the description (I guess the restaurant changed the
| dish but didn't update the menu on the app) or outright
| receiving the wrong order with someone else's order
| receipt attached to it.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| It's likely not the restaurant's fault it's cold. And the
| guy making $6/hr to deliver it to you tried their best,
| or got there later than they wanted to.
|
| Once again, if you can't suck up the gamble that is
| delivery food, I'm glad you get kicked off the platform.
| I just wanted to give a response from another pov since
| you felt like you were wronged: I read your account of
| events and think "nice, the system is working."
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > It's likely not the restaurant's fault it's cold. And
| the guy making $6/hr to deliver it to you tried their
| best.
|
| I never said it was either those people's fault (although
| I have seen drivers do other stupid things, like keeping
| pizzas _vertically_ in their delivery backpack).
|
| However it is the fault of the platform for advertising
| something and not delivering on its promise. The platform
| should be aware of how long it takes to deliver (taking
| traffic into account, especially for Uber which has
| access to that data already) and shouldn't risk offering
| deliveries if they can't reasonably guarantee the food
| won't be cold (or at least make it clear upfront - "this
| restaurant is far away and this might be cold - continue
| anyway?").
|
| Again the problem here is we're talking about "move fast
| and break things" scum so being upfront and doing
| business fairly isn't part of their textbooks. Instead
| they hope most people don't kick up too much of a fuss
| and kick the ones that do. For what it's worth, I've
| never lost a chargeback case on these problems so seems
| like at least MasterCard agrees with me?
|
| Not to mention if these were one-offs and everything else
| was great it would be somewhat excusable, but the other
| scummy things I've noticed (like lying about the
| restaurant being slow for their failure to have enough
| capacity) seems like this is not a one-off and the entire
| business plan is to be as scummy as they can get away
| with, preying upon unsuspecting customers who might not
| know they can do chargebacks.
|
| > if you can't suck up the gamble that is delivery food
|
| The problem is that it is not advertised as a _gamble_ ,
| quite the opposite actually. When a supplier sells me a
| product/service I expect them to deliver on their promise
| or compensate me if they get it wrong (I have been on the
| other side of this and made sure to compensate my client
| to make up for my failure). This is how business works in
| most industries, there's no reason why it should be
| different here IMO.
| ccktlmazeltov wrote:
| Honestly I find all delivery services to be pretty poor.
| Maybe it's because I don't tip but my food always get there
| pretty late and it is cold. I've tried tipping and it doesn't
| change much, it's just better to go to the restaurant and eat
| it while it's fresh.
| mifreewil wrote:
| Similar - I use DoorDash all the time and refuse to use
| UberEats ever again, absent they change their refund policy.
| UberEats treats customers like garbage.
|
| Just read the App Store reviews for UberEats. If a driver
| isn't able to deliver successfully they just cancel the order
| and blame the customer by default. Contacting customer
| support is met with robotic replies and they refuse refund.
|
| Last time I just did a chargeback and won't use them again.
| rajup wrote:
| This. I've found UberEats customer service to be severely
| lacking compared to other food delivery services. I stopped
| using them after getting yet another completely wrong order
| (I'm vegetarian and was sent a dish containing meat) and
| having customer service rudely close my ticket without even
| an explanation or refund.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I reinstalled Uber Eats after receiving several generous
| coupons.
|
| That app is _awful_. It took me six tries to login, because I
| genuinely couldn't figure out that the "ok" button was a tiny
| black bar all the way at the bottom of the screen (I was using
| an iPad). I also struggled to change my default address from
| Chicago to LA, and almost ordered food in Chicago _after_
| changing my home address in the app. At multiple steps during
| the ordering process the UI randomly changed, making it really
| hard for me to find what I was looking for.
|
| I'm not surprised that Uber Eats isn't winning. Once my coupons
| are done I'm uninstalling that app and going back to Door Dash.
| askafriend wrote:
| The Uber Eats app is leagues better than the half-assed,
| buggy Doordash app.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I can't recall having seen bugs in Doordash, and my wife
| hasn't complained about it. So YMMV I guess.
| mav3rick wrote:
| A lot of my friends moved to Doordash since they teamed with
| Chase Sapphire Reserve for free delivery.
| ghaff wrote:
| Thanks for the tip. I don't know if I'll ever use it because
| the options around where I live are pretty terrible. But
| maybe I'll be desperate some evening.
| mav3rick wrote:
| Sign up at least. Never know when perks disappear.
| ghaff wrote:
| I did :-) I'll never use it enough to remotely justify
| the normal service, but if I end up using it a few times,
| why not?
| xxpor wrote:
| The timing of the CSR deal was amazing (for customers at
| least). All of my friends have switched to DD too because of
| it.
| ww520 wrote:
| Haven't heard of the deal? How does it work? Using CSR as a
| payment method?
| mav3rick wrote:
| Yes you get DashPass for a year or two. Forgot. And then
| just filter stores by "DashPass". Same with Lyft and Lyft
| pass.
| miked85 wrote:
| https://www.doordash.com/dashpass-v2/chase/sapphire-
| reserve/...
| geoelectric wrote:
| https://www.doordash.com/dashpass-v2/chase/sapphire-
| preferre...
|
| ...shows some for Sapphire Preferred. Looks like a year
| of DashPass for free.
|
| https://help.doordash.com/consumers/s/article/Chase-
| Partners...
|
| I still have a huge problem with DD from their tip-
| handling, though. I know they revised it somewhat but
| they held out longest and have been the shadiest. I'm
| disappointed they're winning.
| servercobra wrote:
| Between high fees and more errors with UberEats, I've stopped
| using them. DoorDash has been decent, but not great. I
| reallllly wish DoorDash would add car make and color, then I'd
| have 0 reason to consider UberEats. I usually walk out of my
| complex around dinner time and there's between 2 and 5 cars
| waiting either to pick up riders or deliver food, so I get to
| go to each and ask if they're for me.
| xwdv wrote:
| After a bad experience with Uber Eats, I swore to never use
| them again, and now I'm glad they are failing. The arc of the
| moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
| draw_down wrote:
| Good grief, using that quote for that purpose. Madness
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Well, DoorDash focused on food delivery since day 1. It wasn't
| Uber's focus until recently. Even if they are doing a great job
| now, it will take time to close the gap.
| rockarage wrote:
| UberEats was founded in August 2014, easy to Google.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Would you say though that Uber's _focus_ was on food
| delivery in the five and a half years leading up to March
| of 2020?
| rockarage wrote:
| Yes, food was and is a major focus for Uber, it's part of
| their pitch for growth: they just don't do
| taxi/rideshare, they do deliveries one of the reasons
| they're valuation dwarfs Lyft.
| Vadoff wrote:
| The primary reason I don't use them is they have 0 customer
| service, it's impossible to talk to a real person for help when
| your order gets screwed up or your driver is a no show (happens
| a lot).
|
| UberEats app is somewhat buggy too. I also feel they lose out
| when it comes to overall restaurant selection.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Their support is outsourced to monkeys which is most likely
| by design to make you give up. If you persevere enough they
| will "magically" (for no good reason, given the circumstances
| haven't changed) give you a refund to shut you up, and if
| not, you have enough evidence for a chargeback anyway.
|
| Charging back those orders would be the right thing to do to
| discourage such behaviour.
| leetcrew wrote:
| haven't tried in a while, but the last time I tried UberEats,
| it was much more expensive than DoorDash. IIRC, DoorDash is
| basically a flat delivery rate for each restaurant, while
| UberEats delivery pricing is more like hiring a point-to-point
| uber driver. if that's still the case, it's not hard to see why
| people would prefer DoorDash.
| mennis16 wrote:
| It's definitely more expensive than most delivery apps, but
| idt it is even because of the delivery fee, which usually
| appears reasonable. They kill you on the percentage based
| service charge. Which is maybe trying to makeup for different
| delivery logistics, but it definitely doesn't explicitly
| price based on delivery difficulty- which makes it much more
| annoying to me.
|
| The only other app I noticed doing this is Caviar. Perhaps
| they assume that people ordering from steakhouses will
| largely not care about the extra service fee, so it makes
| more business sense to jack up the price as much as possible.
| But personally it has stopped me from ordering on multiple
| occasions.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| DoorDash just gives away coupons and if you order frequently,
| DashPass is a great deal. I don't know how DoorDash is
| functioning in a way that is so much cheaper to me the
| consumer.
|
| I'm surprised to learn that DoorDash doesn't have the resources
| as they are giving away a lot of coupons.
| shrimpx wrote:
| UberEats is suffering from some brand confusion. "It's Uber but
| for food." "It Ubers your food." Lots of ordinary people didn't
| bother to understand what this service does, even though they
| use both Uber (for rides) and other food delivery services.
| When I saw the first UberEats ads, admittedly just out of the
| corner of my eye without bothering to dig in, it sounded like a
| service that will give me a ride to dinner.
| kingbirdy wrote:
| I don't use UberEats because I've found it to be dramatically
| more expensive. The same order from DoorDash, GrubHub, etc are
| often $5-10 more expensive on UE due to both higher prices from
| merchants and Uber charging higher fees. The only people I know
| who use UE for delivery are already "locked in" to Uber with
| their credit card, having lots of points in their rewards
| program, etc.
| hcnews wrote:
| That's probably because UberEats isn't subsidizing those
| purchases and reflecting real underlying costs. DoorDash is
| still a private company and has the leeway to subsidize a lot
| more.
| asdff wrote:
| I've switched to running my own delivery and just grabbing
| takeout. Cheaper, faster, warmer food, restaurant gets more
| money, such a win win.
| mennis16 wrote:
| Not sure how DoorDash compares but what often made me pause on
| ordering UberEats pre-pandemic was the way they do the service
| charge. It is a percentage (I believe 15%?) of the cost of what
| you are ordering, and it does not appear to go to driver at all
| (tip is a separate prompt + there is a delivery fee)/clearly
| doesn't go to the restaurant. I don't understand why I should
| pay Uber a percentage based on the cost of the meal, when
| GrubHub and some others operate on a flat rate service fee. I
| would sort of understand if it had to do with order size, but
| when you start adding higher end restaurants it really feels
| like a rip off. And it also makes their "deals" feel really
| hollow because who cares if delivery fee went from $3.99 to $0
| when you will often still have a >$10 service fee?
| marcinzm wrote:
| >GrubHub and some others operate on a flat rate service fee
|
| GrubHub charges the restaurant a percentage, it just hides
| that in the cost of the food on it's platform rather than
| making it explicit.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| A lot of these companies do this scummy thing. They charge
| delivery fees, "service charges" _and_ silently inflate the
| prices or charge the restaurant a commission which means
| the price of the food itself is still higher than what they
| actually pay out to the restaurant.
| jariel wrote:
| Unfortunately, none of these facts necessarily line up to
| support your claim.
|
| Uber Eats does not have 'billions' - Uber does. The 'cost' of
| that market share is unknown - who is subsidising and by how
| much more?
|
| Maybe 'Uber Eats' is a 'marginal strategy' in that they can
| leverage the slack time of their drivers into doing something
| else.
|
| Market Share varies from country to country.
|
| They may actually be using their $ to gain market share right
| now, why would you imply otherwise.
|
| Their layoff could be for any number of reasons: convenient
| opportunity to trim the fat, close down some projects and do a
| 'one time writeoff', it maybe mostly just a covid reality. It's
| possible they are laying off more heavily in areas that don't
| have Uber Eats.
|
| Billions in the Bank is not for a 'rainy day' it's for any and
| all sorts of things.
|
| It would take some specific information with respect to Uber
| Eats to see how well they were doing with it.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I'm not sure what it's like in the US, but at least in the UK I
| understand that food delivery demand has plummeted.
|
| I initially thought it would be higher due to people isolating
| and now shopping, but a lot of people now have less disposable
| income to spend on expensive food delivery. Also less
| availability (restaurants closing down)
| apexalpha wrote:
| Here in NL it's exploded. During lunch and dinner times Uber
| / TakeAway / Deliveroo is all you see on the streets.
|
| For many restaurants this is the only income they have and
| it's highly encouraged to order some.
|
| Not many people have gone down in disposable income, though.
| That might be a factor.
| MoBattah_ wrote:
| Netherlands hasn't had increased unemployment due to COVID?
| com wrote:
| Not yet. A combination of work-from-home, a fairly
| limited lockdown and a variety of state and city schemes
| for income support for entrepreneurs, small business and
| a furlough program seem to have limited the impact for
| now. We'll see in 5-6 months I guess.
| apexalpha wrote:
| No we don't have a full lockdown. Many work from home,
| some in A/B teams and if your business had to close
| (cafes, restaurants without delivery, pilot) you still
| get paid except your company can get it reimbursed via
| the government.
|
| So basically our economy kinda just runs on, even though
| a lot less is happening.
|
| Restaurants have switched to delivery if they can. Most
| people I know actually have more money now, since you
| can't really go out and spend it. And May is usually the
| month where Dutch people get their 13th month (bonus).
| gargs wrote:
| The statistics seem to say otherwise -
| https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/16/fewer-employed-in-
| marc...
| tdons wrote:
| Our economy is in the toilet. Large parts of it at least
| (that aren't very visible).
|
| We'll see the wave of defaults and bankruptcies in a
| couple of months.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Define "our".
| tdons wrote:
| The economy of the country The Netherlands
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Thanks it was a bit ambiguous. I hope your economy
| improves soon :)
| rockarage wrote:
| There's significant demand, DoorDash, Instacart, and others
| are hiring drivers to meet demand.
| Traster wrote:
| The thing that I noticed is that because we're more worried
| about food supplies, people are making sure they're stocking
| their fridges and being much more careful about ensuring
| they've got food for every meal - because they aren't just
| going to pop out to grab something. As a result it's much
| more difficult to justify ordering takeaway, because you've
| got to eat the food in the fridge before it goes off.
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| This is mostly accurate in the Bay Area.
|
| People who already had the means to rely on Uber Eats,
| continue to do so. But the rest quickly realize that paying
| $22 for a meal instead of $8 isn't worth it
| usaar333 wrote:
| And less reason to order delivery. At least if you own a car,
| driving to pick your own food up is easier now (less traffic,
| no parking issues, you are less likely to be in a social
| event that prevents you from leaving). And one less
| potentialy infected person handling your food.
| ssully wrote:
| I have done the opposite. Before this, I would do take out
| once or twice a week and just pick it up on my way home
| from work. Never used delivery apps. Since lock down, I use
| Doordash 2-3 times a week.
| jcomis wrote:
| Nope, it's seen nearly triple the usual demand in the US.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| +1 for driving being easier. We park a car on the street in
| Brooklyn. Normally this is a huge hassle where we have
| basically memorized when are good times to use the car so
| we can find a spot again. But twice now we have used the
| car and found our original parking spot still available.
| elliekelly wrote:
| And a good excuse to get out of the house for a few
| minutes.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| And an excuse to turn on your car, and prevent the
| battery from dying.
| stevehawk wrote:
| friendly reminder that just starting a car isn't going to
| prevent the battery from dying. You need to get in a
| decent drive and a 2 mile jaunt to McDonald's probably
| isn't enough.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It's better than nothing, no?
| greenyoda wrote:
| Starting the car takes a lot of power from the battery
| (the battery has to run the starter motor to crank the
| engine), so if you don't drive the car long enough to
| recharge the battery to at least where it was before the
| trip, you'll have less charge than you had before. If you
| repeat that cycle enough times, the battery will
| eventually die.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| My fire department bought a new ambulance.
|
| Emergency lights use a lot of power, as you can imagine.
| Even the LED ones. But we also don't want to idle on
| scene for a while.
|
| So new ambulances (and engines, too) have a nice feature.
| Leave the lights running. Turn the engine off.
|
| When the battery voltage gets low enough, the vehicle
| will start the engine, let it run til the voltage is
| better, then shut itself back off.
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| > so if you don't drive the car long enough to recharge
| the battery to at least where it was before the trip,
| you'll have less charge than you had before. If you
| repeat that cycle enough times, the battery will
| eventually die.
|
| I've not tested the low threshold, but a 20 minute drive
| seems to be more than sufficient.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm surprised why cars still don't include a charge
| controller that counts the amount of energy in/out of the
| battery and gives you a battery gauge, or even a simple
| voltage gauge.
|
| We can do it just fine in cheap laptops (with lithium
| batteries which require more complex charge management),
| why can't we do it for cars that cost tens of thousands?
| TylerE wrote:
| Cars have had voltage gauges for decades. The really
| aren't very useful because essentially by the time the
| battery reads less than its nominal 12v it's basically
| dead.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| True but it will at least confirm that the battery is
| dead, as opposed to something else. I remember back when
| I was a kid my parents' car would not crank (you hear the
| solenoid engage but the engine doesn't turn) and nobody
| had any idea what it was (if you're not a car person and
| this never happens to you it might not be obvious
| especially considering all the other electricals still
| work fine on the slightly lower voltage). A voltmeter
| showing below 12V or a "low battery - <12.2V" light
| would've quickly cleared that up.
| 000000coffee wrote:
| yes, but you don't do it for the battery. You're supposed
| to do it because it circulates fluids
| stronglikedan wrote:
| And a good excuse to just _drive_ for a bit, if you find
| it highly enjoyable, like I do.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Here in Los Angeles, food delivery demand is way up. Almost
| all restaurants have switched to delivery/takeout only, and
| lots of people are doing delivery for food.
| bgs113 wrote:
| Availability seems to be an issue all around. After an early
| lockdown surge of restaurant additions in DoorDash, now
| listings which appear to be available and open have a decent
| chance of getting your order rejected, or just dropping off
| altogether. Restaurants are having a tough time right now,
| and it remains to be seen if poorly-advised re-openings will
| have any short-term positive effect on business.
| [deleted]
| 34679 wrote:
| In addition to less money, as you pointed out:
|
| 1. People have more free time from being stuck at home,
| unable to work, so less need to rely on delivery apps.
|
| 2. People get tired of being stuck at home and one of the few
| permitted reasons to leave is acquiring food.
| [deleted]
| hajderr wrote:
| So now I can ride my bicycle
| nixass wrote:
| Well gig economy has to die some time, or at least in this form.
| Let's hope this is start of it
| Bang2Bay wrote:
| in remote areas where cab drivers would heckle riders for trip
| charges, uber gave a predetermined number which helped. my only
| worry was they not having competition and that has been set right
| with at least one other ipo-ed company.
| werber wrote:
| I've had several restaurants tell me to avoid any food delivery
| platform and they're backing it up with great perks. I'd much
| rather spend extra tipping the person taking the risk than
| financing the middleman. But, I can see value in having a central
| verification system if I'm actually getting in the vehicle.
| calvinbhai wrote:
| I refuse to use any of these delivery apps, which are kind of
| useless already.
|
| Here in Toronto area, most of the big food outlets are closed,
| because they are not able to get workers.
|
| The ones that are open, are these mom&pop restaurants, that run
| on a skeletal workforce.
|
| So with fewer restaurants operating, and delivery apps having a
| limited radius for delivery, I'd rather go and get the order
| myself, and let the neighborhood restaurer keep more of the money
| I give instead of losing 30%-40% of the amount as commission (I
| tip on top of it even though it's a pickup).
|
| I'll use delivery apps only if: - They charge the restaurant less
| than 5% total fees - They charge me 5% - 10% for delivery and
| processing fees whatever (lets say a minimum of $5 or $10,
| whichever is higher).
|
| Problem is at this rate, Uber Eats or Door Dash or GrubHub wont
| survive.
|
| I understand using these apps is more of a necessity if you have
| kids and larger number of people at home. But this is not for me.
|
| Uber drivers who got cars on subprime loans cannot survive with
| deliveries only. I'm curious to how they'll get through this
| storm. At least in this case, Uber has fewer liabilities (all
| head ache borne by the driver).
| safog wrote:
| The restaurants don't lose a full 30% on the order - the items
| on Uber eats are marked up over what you pay when you do
| regular takeout. I wouldn't go so far as to say they don't lose
| any money at all but we won't know exact numbers until Uber /
| restaurant owners publish them somewhere.
|
| Also, having a delivery option I'm pretty sure provides
| additional business (on top of just having dine-in / pick up).
| So, for a restaurant to hire employees and building out a
| delivery service themselves will be much more hassle and
| probably will be more expensive than using a service like
| doordash / uber eats.
|
| Lastly, this is driving a trend towards the so-called "cloud
| kitchens" letting restaurants operate with a subset of staff in
| cheaper to rent places and charging effectively what a regular
| restaurant would for a meal.
|
| The restaurants are going through a paradigm shift now, and it
| will only be accelerated due to COVID - Cloud kitchens can be
| more sanitary / safer to order from than regular dine-in
| restaurants for instance but I don't really feel sorry for
| them. If anything, the drivers doing the delivery are the ones
| getting shafted here and barely making any money. If folks
| start tipping, it will simply mean that Uber can afford to pay
| drivers less - the amount a driver makes won't change very
| significantly.
|
| Overall I'm convinced eats is the future and Uber focusing on
| ride share + eats + self driving (existential threat if someone
| else does it cheaper / better) is the right way to go for the
| company.
| jpadkins wrote:
| cloud kitchen = a new name for drive through food service?
| :-)
| amelius wrote:
| > The restaurants don't lose a full 30% on the order
|
| Doesn't Apple already grab 30% of the in-app payment?
| watermelon0 wrote:
| That doesn't apply for physical goods.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Apple doesn't take any percentage of payment for physical
| goods.
| [deleted]
| umeshunni wrote:
| > The restaurants don't lose a full 30% on the order - the
| items on Uber eats are marked up over what you pay when you
| do regular takeout.
|
| Not to mention that they are saving on labor and rent costs
| on delivery orders by not having to pay additional wait
| staff, get a bigger space more more tables etc.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > Not to mention that they are saving on labor and rent
| costs on delivery orders by not having to pay additional
| wait staff, get a bigger space more more tables etc.
|
| Except business models that were takeout/delivery from the
| start usually had their own delivery drivers. The apps were
| marketed at restaurants that typically were full-service
| but didn't have delivery staff.
| ashconnor wrote:
| Not only is it cheaper to use Ritual. The rewards mean free
| food.
| lozaning wrote:
| I still havent figured out what the value prop is of Ritual.
| It seems like rent seeking between co-workers. If my co-
| worker buys me a burger, I just venmo her.
| cam-perry wrote:
| I agree with the other two comments: 1) it's a much better
| easier for ordering pickup than I've seen from any other
| website or app. It's very easy to build a "Ritual" because
| it saves your past orders. 2) skipping the line is amazing,
| especially in the middle of a breakfast or lunch rush.
|
| My office is huge into Ritual, it was used daily. The group
| ordering makes it way easier than "grab me a burger and
| I'll Venmo you". You can fully customize your own order
| without bothering your teammate with "no pickles, extra
| cheese please". You then pay on your own, so no one has to
| keep track of splitting bills and IOUs. A small bonus is
| that each individual order is packaged separately and
| clearly labelled so that you don't have to fish out items
| and work out whose is whose.
|
| You can definitely achieve the same thing without Ritual,
| but the app takes care of all the pain points and pays you
| in rewards to use it, so why not?
| ashconnor wrote:
| I've never used the group ordering or pickup for friends
| features. I just want to pickup my food without waiting in
| line.
| gbjw wrote:
| It's a single well-designed app where you can order takeout
| in a few clicks. It's generally much easier to re-order a
| past meal on it than it is to call or use some clunky web
| interface.
| lhorie wrote:
| > I understand using these apps is more of a necessity if you
| have kids and larger number of people at home
|
| I have 2 small kids. From my perspective, it actually makes
| less sense to use an app for delivery because having kids often
| implies also having a car (in north america, anyways). So
| driving down to the restaurant for pickup costs considerably
| less than using the delivery option.
|
| I'll still use the app though for the same reason Uber
| originally became popular: there's no need to call or talk to
| anyone, and there's no need to fumble with physical currency
| for payment; you just tap a few buttons, drive to the store,
| pick up your food and go.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Just wait a few more years and you will have free delivery
| children. Oft of my childhood was the call to 'go get the
| pizza!'
| kaybe wrote:
| If they need the car to get the pizza the time window the
| delivery kids can be used might be short..
| calvinbhai wrote:
| I agree with you about convenience of ordering. This was
| often the case when I was in the US. But in canada it's nice
| that all stores I frequent accept credit cards, and all of
| them work with apple pay, so no fumbling with cash.
|
| Probably I'm not like most app users are. If I know a few
| different types of restaurants in the area, and I know
| specific items I like there, I'll just order the same thing
| again and again until I move elsewhere.
|
| If I wanted a new place, new dish every time, probably
| Delivery apps would be a good way to discover
| maximente wrote:
| what about slice? flat fee ($1.95 as of today) and solid
| mission:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/garystern/2019/08/14/slice-help...
| calvinbhai wrote:
| Love their mission. But I think Slice is more for helping
| non-chain pizza shops compete with Dominos/Pizza-Hut/Papa-
| johns.
|
| also $1.95 doesn't include the costs of delivery (delivery is
| handled by pizza shops' existing delivery drivers)
| rootsudo wrote:
| Wow, that is literally right out of Silicon Valley.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo
| benatkin wrote:
| Slice started in 2010 and won an Inc. award in 2018.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slice_(app)
| benatkin wrote:
| I think it's ethical! That would take a hundred dollar order
| for it to meet GP's standard though.
|
| I hope Slice wins. Their business model is still vulnerable
| to credit card chargebacks, but they let the restaurant
| handle delivery and pickup, which is why they might be able
| to afford taking less of a cut. I can't say Slice's business
| model will work, but I can pretty much guarantee that taking
| a 5% cut won't work. Slice also probably needs to pass on
| credit card processing fees (at least 3%) for any transaction
| they handle in addition to their flat fee in order for it to
| work. They provide an option of paying in cash though.
|
| Thanx also seems like it might be good. I interviewed as part
| of interviewing at five companies in five days at TripleByte.
| That was a surreal experience. I had lived in SF for three
| and a half years, and had only been gone from SF for two
| months when they flew me back to SF and I stayed at Hotel
| Whitcomb. Never had I stayed so close to City Hall when I
| lived in SF. At the time Thanx was mostly about rewards. I
| saw them come up when I ordered from a burger place called
| PINCHO in Coral Gables, which is adjacent to Miami where I
| live now. It seems like an ideal pivot. Like Slice, it had
| very good UX.
| MoBattah_ wrote:
| How was your TripleByte experience?
| gen220 wrote:
| In my neighborhood in NYC, restaurants are getting much more
| vocal about the commission rate.
|
| We used to be pretty exclusive seamless users in my house until
| we got a letter in one of our bags that roughly read:
|
| "thank you for your order. Especially with the decrease in
| volume during these times of crisis, the grubhub commission
| makes it hard for us to stay in business. please consider
| ordering direct to support your neighborhood."
|
| Since then (near the beginning of the COVID shelter in place
| order), we've ordered with the telephone or custom solutions
| every time. And we've noticed a difference: delivery times are
| literally half of what they were before.
|
| It's interesting to see the `shopify`-ing of restaurants in our
| area: instead of going through the big platform of Seamless
| etc., they're using platforms that appear to be more like
| shopify/stripe (decentralized, meager commissions, no high-
| traffic "discovery" platform). Some of our favorite restaurants
| have even left Seamless/etc, because they're literally _losing
| money_ on orders fulfilled there.
|
| For example, a famous pizzeria nearby used to _never_ offer
| delivery, but recently started offering delivery, with online
| ordering powered by https://pos.toasttab.com/products/online-
| ordering.
|
| I don't know if all of this commotion will be enough to unseat
| the seamless/grubhub/postmates of the world, but I honestly
| hope it does. Restaurants are a tough enough business as it is,
| and the steep commission rates have been converting mom & pop
| places into sweatshops. :/
| cwhiz wrote:
| My wife and I were exclusively using Seamless until we read
| an article in Eater talking about how Grubhub/Seamless charge
| restaurants $6-7+ per phone call.[0]
|
| ..but then when we started trying to call or order directly
| through restaurants, we kept getting turned away and told to
| order through one of the apps. It seems many (most?)
| restaurants aren't in a position to take orders over the
| phone or directly through their website, even for pickup.
|
| [0]: https://ny.eater.com/2020/4/23/21231943/grubhub-nyc-
| phone-or...
| adjkant wrote:
| Similar experience here in NYC/Brooklyn. Got a leaflet in an
| order to use their direct website. They use this, which seems
| to work pretty well and the tech looks solid:
|
| https://get.chownow.com/
| clairity wrote:
| yes, this wave of delivery services haven't solved last-mile
| logistics in any meaningful way over previous waves. their main
| "innovation", popularized by uber, is outsourcing the capital
| investment to less sophisticated operators (while matching and
| real-time routing have improved, those are incremental
| improvements at best).
|
| no one has cracked the core logistics problem involving time or
| cost, which is the real hump. i can literally order a pizza,
| _walk_ to the store to pick it up, and return in less time than
| a delivery service can deliver, and i 've saved all that
| overhead cost and it's warmer/fresher to boot. even moreso with
| groceries. granted, i'm in a city, but the gambit of delivery
| is that the city is the real shizzle for delivery.
|
| until the logistics problem is solved, it makes little sense to
| use a delivery app for more than as an occasional novelty or
| treat.
| ghaff wrote:
| Once you can walk (easily) to pick up a takeout order, the
| value of delivery goes down pretty quickly. Not that I have
| great takeout options near where I live, but I'm going to
| have to hop in a car and it's going to take me probably close
| to 30 minutes to pickup an order when all is said and done.
| If I had good takeout delivery options, I would definitely
| use them now and then.
| clairity wrote:
| fair. the psychology is interesting though. people almost
| never want food 30 minutes from now. we want food _now_ ,
| when we think of it.
|
| but "now" is contextual. empty time between desire and
| fulfillment is dreadful, to be avoided. waiting for
| delivery still burns background brain cycles keeping tabs
| on it (not to mention how much harder it is to decide and
| order via an app) and therefore isn't a pancea in itself.
| this is especially true when you want to put those
| otherwise wasted cycles to work on something more
| important.
|
| if you go to pick it up, you're making progress toward the
| goal, and "now" stretches out along that task. it feels
| somewhat like you're getting food "now", even 30 minutes
| later. you don't feel that same sense of waste. but if
| you're already wasting time (like watching tv), then the
| strain of waiting isn't nearly as consequential or
| burdensome.
|
| in any case, if i lived in a more suburban area, i'd still
| likely rather drive and pick up the food (as we did growing
| up) than get it delivered. it's still often faster,
| fresher, and cheaper than delivery apps, and you don't have
| the parking issues that can make pickup harder in urban
| areas.
| Bang2Bay wrote:
| my concern was uber not having competition and that has been
| set right with at least one other ipo-ed company. uber for me
| is as important as local business.
| kkotak wrote:
| There is no competition because the business is not
| sustainable. Not everyone gets to raise billions of dollars
| on a promise of self-driving future - where the per unit
| economy might be sustainable. When that happens there will be
| tons of competition.
| smallgovt wrote:
| There's a guy that's working on an app that helps you order
| directly from local restaurants so they can save on commission
| fees: https://www.eatnyc.org/
|
| I think the app only covers NYC for now.
| asdff wrote:
| No delivery service is good. Why would I pay more for soggy
| food that left the kitchen almost an hour ago? Restaurant's own
| delivery services don't even suffer from this as they go right
| from store to door. Ubereats et al orders sit for 15 minutes by
| the register waiting for the driver to appear.
| pbalau wrote:
| Not sure how food delivery works in US, but here in London I
| can get my food no late than say 45mins after I placed my
| order (via Deliveroo and afaik JustEat too). And the only
| time I ordered food in US, I had the pizza about 30mins after
| I ordered it (via UberEats).
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| 30 minutes-ish is common in any US city. The only time it
| goes longer is during peek periods.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Conversely, if restaurants can't survive with apps taking a 30%
| cut, there may be no market for delivery aggregators. 5% is too
| little for the aggregator; 30% too much for the restaurant.
| Perhaps there's a middle ground around 15%.
| leetcrew wrote:
| one might ask why the commission is necessary at all. unless
| you're placing an enormous order, a large order isn't really
| more expensive to deliver than a small order. the bottleneck
| is much more likely to be the number of stops you can fit
| into a single loop before the food gets cold than the volume
| of food you can fit into a single vehicle.
|
| the only answer I can think of is that they don't want the
| customer to realize the true cost of delivery.
| chongli wrote:
| I don't know about Uber Eats, DoorDash, or GrubHub but
| SkipTheDishes here in Canada doesn't use "loops". Every
| delivery is one-to-one. You place an order, the restaurant
| confirms it, a nearby driver accepts it and travels to the
| restaurant to wait for it to be prepared, the restaurant
| prepares the food and gives it to the driver, the driver
| delivers it.
|
| It's very inefficient unless your goal is to optimize for
| quickest delivery and hottest food, which is what it is.
| However, there is one major efficiency it has over the
| restaurants paying for their own delivery drivers is that
| SkipTheDishes has a large pool of drivers to dispatch
| orders to from all of the restaurants. It's like having a
| thread pool you can dispatch jobs to rather than having
| dedicated threads allocated to each work queue (which may
| end up idle a lot of the time).
|
| Another thing you have to consider is that the drivers need
| to earn a living. If they only get one or two orders a
| night and spend the rest of their time waiting around then
| they can't afford to do the job so they'll probably quit.
| These delivery services ensure that drivers will have a
| busy shift because their scheduling systems don't overbook
| drivers. That all goes out the window if you ask every
| restaurant to hire their own drivers.
| deminature wrote:
| 'Batched' orders are very common in the US. With some
| very popular restaurants on Grubhub, they'll batch 5-10
| orders for a single apartment building, have the courier
| bicycle to the building and go door-to-door delivering
| them, sometimes multiple on the same floor.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| A larger order is more expensive if delivering by bike
| (think urban areas). The bike would have limited storage
| space. One large order means fewer small orders performed
| in parallel by the courier.
| leetcrew wrote:
| that's a good point that I didn't think of. I live in a
| less dense city, so deliveries are usually by car here.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| 15% is around how much restaurants budget for front of house
| staff, so it would be acceptable at typical prices.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Toronto (and New York) are not representative of 95% of North
| American cities assuming you live in the GTA.
| lhorie wrote:
| Assuming you live in Toronto proper. Most of the GTA is
| pretty sparse and car-oriented. Even northern Toronto (think
| Steeles) is already relatively suburban.
| ccktlmazeltov wrote:
| I don't tip when using these delivery apps and I have no idea
| how they can make money honestly.
| colmvp wrote:
| How does anyone expect food delivery services to survive with
| only 5% fees? That's insanity. Uber has to also pay for
| engineers, sales/marketing to get customers/restaurants onto
| the platform, online infrastructure, customer service for both
| sides of the market, etc.
|
| Delivery is expensive. It's time-consuming, and customers are
| rarely willing to pay the true cost of it.
|
| Most of the restaurant delivery services were bleeding hundreds
| of millions of dollars last year. They've had a resurgence
| because of the Covid-19 but that's a blip compared to a normal
| situation.
|
| If people think it doesn't cost that much money to operate,
| then all restaurants shouldn't have a problem having their own
| delivery service.
| [deleted]
| fock wrote:
| I guess, you can operate a very good and featureful food
| delivery SaaS for a lot less if you skip GoogleAds,
| ridiculous mid 6 figure salaries (for a similar job in every
| place except SV) and building an exploratory machine learning
| arm to compete with the adtech companies you're anyway
| spending money on in this scenario. If you then host your
| servers in some coloc (because you'll have what: a 4 times
| surge capacity on holidays compared to a regular friday?) you
| can even reduce your computing bill (given that without
| needless data collection for your analytics and ML efforts
| your computing power needs will shrink fast...).
|
| Around here most restaurants still use this kind of service
| (often hosted by some lowly webdev).
| harryVic wrote:
| That sounds like a great idea. Why don't you do it?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| You missed his sarcasm. It's what most restaurants are
| already doing: putting up a webpage and having customers
| call them.
|
| Any restaurant worth its salt is already tracking what
| its customers order (on an aggregate basis) because
| that's how they now what supplies to reorder and when.
| fock wrote:
| because it's not interesting too me currently. Also, the
| market is saturated and competing on such a market
| (especially if it's invaded by cash-burning startups)
| isn't fun for sure.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| He says most restaurants _are_. There 's no money in one-
| off webdev consulting for low-margin businesses, which is
| why you won't hear it as a pitch - it's solved with a
| single webpage with a phone number, or _maybe_ a Google
| Sheets frontend. There 's so much human in the backend
| there's not a ton of point automating the frontend.
| munk-a wrote:
| There might be some space in trying to tailor an out-of-
| the-box frontend framework to restaurant ordering. But
| honestly you might get out-competed by
| wix/wordpress/whatever if they ever invested a pretty
| trivial amount of effort into targeting you - it'd be a
| thin thin margin to walk.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 5% fees on top of the true cost of delivery is enough for
| what is essentially an automated process.
|
| Maybe it's not enough for "growth" and "engagement" and
| maintaining an engineering blog about their overengineered
| stack (I call those "engineering playgrounds") but guess
| what? None of those things benefit users.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > If people think it doesn't cost that much money to operate,
| then all restaurants shouldn't have a problem having their
| own delivery service.
|
| Many already do and more are pivoting to delivering
| themselves. The delivery services are terrible and not worth
| their fees.
| [deleted]
| calvinbhai wrote:
| The cost for Uber is to process the cc transaction, cost of
| transportation (the close to minimum wage "net pay" to the
| driver).
|
| I agree Uber has other costs, and I'm not saying it should
| act like a charity and not recover those costs.
|
| So whatever is uber's costs + profit needed, add it as a fee
| for using the app.
|
| Eg: If I order a 2 large pizzas at my neighborhood pizza
| shop, and on their printed menu it is $40 (assume including
| taxes), I'd like to see the same price displayed to me. Uber
| can charge me processing fee and delivery fee of say $20 or
| $30 on top of this (to recover Uber's costs + profit).
|
| Sadly, this is not what actually happens. Ordering the same
| item through delivery app, I see that each menu item is
| costing $1 to $5 more already (happens with Instacart too).
| On top of this I pay a processing fee and a delivery fee. In
| addition to this, the pizza shop guy pays 40%.
|
| Obfuscating price at every step and then proclaiming to be a
| saviour of my neighborhood restaurants, is exactly what ticks
| me off.
|
| Again, I'm not saying delivery apps should be charitable. I
| just want some transparency. The reason I go to a local pizza
| shop, (in addition to satiate hunger and enjoy tasty food) is
| to support the local economy.
|
| Uber can charge the same total amount to me while providing
| the same service, provided they clearly show how much goes to
| Uber and how much goes to restaurant and delivery person.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| My local restaurant has a couple of employees who own old
| beater cars. I call the restaurant, then they send out one of
| these employees with the food. The restaurant charges nothing
| extra beyond the tip, which I select on arrival.
|
| This is how delivery used to work. The lie and promise of the
| startups trying to "disrupt" this is that it's somehow going
| to be better to proxy these interactions through a faceless
| megacorp rather than a small local business.
|
| Well, is that really happening? If I use Uber Eats I get more
| expensive, worse service than calling my local place
| directly.
|
| So maybe these delivery businesses _shouldn 't_ survive, at
| least not as currently envisioned, because they offer
| something that doesn't actually have that much value to most
| people.
| iphone_elegance wrote:
| It's funny, when I was a teenager I delivered Pizzas for a
| small local chain.
|
| I'm pretty sure I made more money and service was faster;
| the delivery fees would a lot cheaper (though hard to
| mentally adjust with inflation in mind though)
|
| Like I'd just relax at the restaurant, chat with the other
| drivers/cooks/servers until 3-4 orders were up and head
| out.. it was pretty nice
|
| Now instead of things being mostly locally owned it's all
| consolidated, impersonal (I got to know the managers, the
| owner, other workers, slower and much more expensive.
|
| prices are also so high I can barely leave a 'great' tip
|
| it's hard for me to think of the most of these delivery
| companies as anything but vultures that just ended up
| injecting themselves into a business and reduce the quality
| of some folks working lives
|
| a big part of me wouldn't mind some economic upheaval just
| to undo our mistakes
| WC3w6pXxgGd wrote:
| This is what happens when the price of labor is
| artificially increased (minimum wage).
| eddieplan9 wrote:
| You know back in the days you can also go to farmer Joe and
| buy a chicken and pay no middle man. Jumping from that fact
| to the conclusion that food supply chain has not much value
| is, naive, to say the least.
| VLM wrote:
| His argument seems to be that unlike supermarkets and
| wholesalers which provide positive value from which some
| profit can be siphoned off, delivery megacorps provide
| negative value so there's not much profit to siphon.
|
| Your argument seems to be that food middlemen should
| exist in some form, although you provide no reason;
| However, the existence and fetishization (for better or
| worse) of "local farmers markets" seems to point in the
| opposite direction.
|
| My local pizza place delivers; there doesn't seem much
| room to create value to pay some engineer's salary and
| some VC profits a thousand miles away. Or rephrased, VCs
| and engineers are expensive, and their offerings can be
| undercut by every local restaurant in the country that
| has a phone and a teenager with a car, which is not
| exactly the strongest network effect or vendor lockin
| I've ever seen in a marketplace.
|
| The delivery market seems to be of the form "We all need
| an offering in the market to stay competitive with
| everyone else losing money on every delivery".
|
| The best possible exit for a delivery startup seems to be
| improving something in the already adequate
| infrastructure then pray Dominos Pizza acquires them.
|
| The uphill battle is the main complaints people have
| about fast food is the cost is high, few choices, and the
| food is unhealthy. Nobody seems bothered by logistics
| problems like pizza taking a half hour to arrive or
| routes not being optimized to minimize gasoline
| consumption. Its true that customers are bad product
| designers, thinking of the anecdote of Ford's customers
| wanting a better horse, not a model T. However a business
| model of door to door horse feed delivery, logistics
| optimized by telegraphs in California, was also not a
| winner.
| ypzhang2 wrote:
| It's obvious there is value, otherwise these companies
| wouldn't exist, no matter how much VC money is pumped in.
|
| For consumers:
|
| Ability to order from multiple restaurants through one
| consistent interface / payment flow. This cannot be
| undercut by every restaurant with a phone and a teenager
| with a car.
|
| For restaurants:
|
| A marketing / lead generation avenue that provides,
| ideally, incremental volume that is profitable. If it was
| not profitable, then they wouldn't do it, obviously.
|
| Delivery itself, is just a method to deliver these value
| adds.
|
| The argument can be made whether this value is worth a
| tech infrastructure and the human labor cost of delivery.
| It might be worth it in China, where delivery is actually
| more ubiquitous, but in America, where worker
| compensation / expectation / norms are higher, its
| debatable.
| lovich wrote:
| You should add increased number of options there as well.
| I know there's a ton of resturaunts near me that didn't
| care to get into the delivery business but had no problem
| working with a delivery company like uber eats. This may
| be a much smaller niche though as I'm paid enough that
| the time savings I get from delivery are worth the extra
| 20-30% I pay from going to pick it up myself
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > It's obvious there is value, otherwise these companies
| wouldn't exist, no matter how much VC money is pumped in.
|
| Would you say this about WeWork a year ago? VC-style
| central planning has had a great distorting effect on the
| supply/demand information function of the market.
| ghaff wrote:
| Oh I think there was some value in WeWork. OfficeSpace-
| as-a-Service that was hipper than Regus and offered
| consistency across many cities. But obviously far less
| value than the money being pumped into WeWork would
| suggest.
| ypzhang2 wrote:
| Yes there is value in the product, its like fancy Regus,
| which is a real business. Its not worth what it was
| worth.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I for one will pay extra to order from a nice web UI, and
| not have to make that phone call.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That's entirely the reason Pizza 73 became my goto pizza
| place - it rolled out online delivery in the mid 2000's
| and kept me from ever having to phone again.
| munk-a wrote:
| Hilariously that's not even part of the equation - both
| uber eats and skip the dishes (a canadian local company)
| have terrible UIs.
|
| I do love ordering via the internet without having to
| talk to people though... the best time I've ever seen
| this done was through a local VT pizza shop and the UI
| was pretty much just an HTML form and it was so
| incredibly easy to use.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| A reasonable request! And if that's the primary value add
| of these services, I would suggest that a traditional
| non-unicorn SaaS company[0] could provide a very
| inexpensive web portal for restaurants that handles order
| processing, while leaving the logistics to the
| restaurant.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChowNow
| TylerE wrote:
| Something as simple sounding as a menu can be
| surprisingly complex.
|
| A local burger place's burger has, I just worked out,
| 34,832,528,367,943,700 possible combinations. Some
| options are mututally exclusive, some add an extra
| charge. Etc.
| rstupek wrote:
| and yet doesn't their pos terminal handle all of that
| already?
| TylerE wrote:
| It's all done on paper. It only gets entered into the POS
| as the total "Custom Burger - $17.95" soethign like that
| puranjay wrote:
| > Uber has to also pay for engineers, sales/marketing to get
| customers/restaurants onto the platform
|
| I really wonder how much of this is a self-created problem.
| Would Uber really need that many engineers if it wasn't
| processing data at a massive scale to find the ideal surge
| price for every trip and maximize revenue? Maybe Uber would
| make less money without surge pricing (and the large scale
| data crunching it involves), but then maybe Uber also
| wouldn't need to pay for so many engineers.
|
| Similarly, would Uber really need to pay for marketing if it
| attracted growth organically instead of trying to dominate
| the world within half a decade?
|
| We live in rather strange time for business. It used to be
| that if you wanted to build a $100B company, you spent
| decades in the trenches, reinvesting profits and attracting
| growth organically.
|
| Even a true "unicorn" (not that I care much for that term)
| like Microsoft was worth "only" $35B in 1995, 20 years after
| it was founded.
|
| We've all somehow assumed that this order of things is
| natural when it is far from how the rest of the business
| world functions
| mpol wrote:
| If Uber cannot afford this, maybe it is not a viable
| business. If either the restaurant has more cost than income,
| or Uber has more cost than income, it seems not to be working
| really.
| RoyTyrell wrote:
| f you can't provide a product or service to customers at a
| price they want to pay, too bad but that's capitalism. Not
| every business is viable even if the 'goals' are.
| kkotak wrote:
| No one expects them to survive. The business model is
| unsustainable on unit economy basis. Uber has always lived on
| borrowed time.
| mulmen wrote:
| Sounds like Uber has a bad business model then. Restaurants
| already offered delivery, it's not like Uber invented that or
| even exclusively enables it. Somehow they invented a model
| where nobody is making any money and convinced investors to
| enable it.
| [deleted]
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| Maybe food delivery services isn't solvable using the Silicon
| Valley method -- use insane amounts of rich people's money to
| subsidize product hyper-growth to only later monopolize said
| market to re-coop earlier losses.
|
| If these businesses would grow more sustainably (i.e.
| slower), they wouldn't need such large sums of money to
| operate. They wouldn't over hire at sales / marketing /
| engineering / design / operations/ literally every role. In
| turn, they would be forced to set rates that can cover their
| actual costs while being a good business deal for
| restaurants, as they'd have to be around long enough for the
| delivery company to have any real growth.
|
| There should be economies of scale wrt. a centralized
| delivery platform that services all kinds of restaurants. The
| fact that, say, Dominos has been offering delivery for
| _decades_ means that it's absolutely possible to have a
| sustainable national food delivery business on $8 medium
| pizza deals and $4 delivery charges. The tech delivery
| companies are just plain greedy: I surmise it's their quest
| for "f u" money that kills their business model right off the
| bat.
| kahnjw wrote:
| I'd counter that Pizza hut has a key logistical advantage
| of vertical integration. A delivery service is a very
| different business than a restaurant chain that does its
| own delivery.
|
| I agree that GrubHub, Doordash, and to some extent Uber
| seem bloated when considering the sum total of the markets
| they play in. That doesn't mean these business models
| aren't sustainable, though. Some companies allocate
| resources to a few areas that turn into profit centers,
| some don't. The ones that don't will be sold off or parted
| out. And the cycle will continue. I'd wager that one of
| these companies will survive and turn out to be a
| profitable, healthy business in the next few years. The
| rest will probably be sold off or slowly downsized.
|
| More broadly, to your criticism of SV's investment
| strategy, resource allocation is a hard problem. If you
| want to direct large sums of capital at certain business
| verticals, do you want to grow slowly and steadily over a
| 20+ year period only to find that the economics don't work,
| or do you want to fail fast with some extra waste in the
| middle? Failing fast has some upside to it, though I
| understand why I consistently hear this criticism on this
| site. It feels like the last decade has seen the pendulum
| swing towards fast money and back a little. I don't think
| were as far off from a healthy middle ground as some might
| argue.
| kahnjw wrote:
| Correction: Dominos not Pizza Hut.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > If you want to direct large sums of capital at certain
| business verticals, do you want to grow slowly and
| steadily over a 20+ year period only to find that the
| economics don't work, or do you want to fail fast with
| some extra waste in the middle?
|
| Maybe we'll eventually learn that artificially forcing
| business models to run at accelerated rates creates self-
| fulfilling prophecies of "fail fast."
| kahnjw wrote:
| Except for dozens of counter examples that make up for
| literally multiple trillions of dollars in market
| capitalization.
| mulmen wrote:
| Isn't this textbook survivorship bias? Dozens of
| successes out of how many failures and how much
| misallocated capital?
| samatman wrote:
| Well, no, because for each VC portfolio, it's either
| profitable off the survivors, or it isn't.
|
| The point is that from the perspective of investors, the
| survival of an individual startup is an irrelevant
| metric. What they're interested in is the profitability
| of the whole portfolio.
|
| And _so far_ , a 90% failure rate with <5% wild success
| is a profitable formula. As long as that remains true,
| they have no reason to change it.
| kahnjw wrote:
| Ask that to someone trying to find housing off Sand Hill
| Road in Palo Alto.
| [deleted]
| freepor wrote:
| There were two changes in the "Softbank model" -- first
| was investing at this scale without a real network effect
| or any sort of "moat," and the other was just the sheer
| speed of the investment -- an avalanche instead of a
| snowball. A company like WeWork doesn't have any real
| reason that it needs to grow hyper-fast -- it's a Ben and
| Jerry's.
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-
| letter-i-...
| scarface74 wrote:
| What are those dozens of counter examples?
|
| The big _profitable_ tech companies today didn't raise
| billions in VC money.
| kahnjw wrote:
| Are we talking about investment strategy or cherry
| picking data for the sake of arguing?
|
| 1. There are plenty of companies on the path to IPO that
| didn't take 1B+ in VC money 2. The "sharing" platforms
| are expensive investments because there are so many
| players fighting for market share.
|
| We're talking about a strategy of fast growth vs slow and
| steady. All the companies we've mentioned so far invested
| in fast growth early on, whether from VC or reinvestment.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| That's a false dichotomy. We're also talking about rates
| of fast growth vs. unrealistic hyper-growth. I'd argue
| that as the current tech bubble inflates, we've leaned
| towards the latter. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094568
| kahnjw wrote:
| Let's leave it at this then: if capital is completely
| miss-allocated and a bubble has been inflating over the
| last 5-10 years as you claim, then we'll hear the
| proverbial pop in the next three to six months as a rapid
| pullback in consumer spending unwinds nearly all VC
| backed growth stage companies.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Congrats, we're already in the early stages of the pop.
| But I'm also not claiming that capital is completely
| misallocated, that's another all-or-nothing false
| dichotomy on your part. I'm saying that the current VC
| climate has been dominated by a toxic culture of chasing
| hyper-growth in many inappropriate cases, killing
| companies that otherwise have fine business models by
| subjecting them to stressful expectations. You can take a
| strategy that works in some cases and apply it in a
| wasteful, unrealistic way. That is called a cargo cult.
| Even before this virus crisis we saw earlier this year
| and last year companies in the SoftBank portfolio
| experiencing layoffs in the fallout of WeWork's demise.
| Onwards, not "nearly all VC backed growth stage
| companies" will be unwound, but the ones funded under the
| most reckless of terms will be in grave risk. If you
| haven't seen the bubble popping, you haven't been paying
| attention.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I'm not cherry picking data. Look at the top _profitable_
| tech companies today and compare the amount of money
| invested in them before they became profitable to the
| Uber and Lyft's of today.
|
| Amazon is the outlier when it comes to the lack of GAAP
| profitability for years, but even it was cash flow
| positive.
| pembrook wrote:
| Literally every single company in the top 6 of the S&P
| 500 was financed via private VC-style funding at the
| beginning.
|
| Whether the numbers crept into the billions when the
| company was private or public is irrelevant. The point is
| that for a company to reach scale, they need billions in
| funding from somewhere.
|
| Somebody has to take the risk, and all investors want
| returns for that risk. Public market growth investors
| want rapidly growing companies just as VC investors do.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| One would assume that there are different styles of VC-
| style funding, with different time horizons. My original
| point isn't disputing the need for the existence of VCs
| in some funding cases- I'm not DHH arguing that every
| startup needs to bootstrap- my point is that this cycle
| has shown that VCs pumping in dumb money while chasing
| unrealistic fast returns has led to self-fulfilling
| failures, and a toxic culture that promotes that. The
| original statement:
|
| > do you want to grow slowly and steadily over a 20+ year
| period only to find that the economics don't work, or do
| you want to fail fast with some extra waste in the middle
|
| Seems highly dubious because you can take a perfectly
| fine business model and create an unattainable, doomed-
| to-fail situation out of it by subjecting it to
| unrealistic expectations, as we have seen in dozens of
| examples from the current bubble. Stress testing is not
| useful if it sets artificial pressures that destroys the
| business.
| scarface74 wrote:
| None of the top six companies were funded by billions of
| dollars that were lit on fire like today's companies.
|
| The early companies like Apple and Microsoft were started
| with a few million not even a billion in today's dollars.
| As I said earlier, Microsoft didn't even need the later
| rounds of funding and wanted to bring expertise on board.
|
| The only one of the current top tech companies that
| weren't GAAP profitable at IPO is Amazon and even it used
| its own operating cash to fund growth.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And how much money has been squandered funding the
| startups that do fail? Survivor bias.
| kahnjw wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're getting at. Here are the facts:
| Companies following these accelerated growth trajectories
| now make up a total of 4 trillion in market
| capitalization depending on how you count it. That's
| really just the FAANGs, not the smaller companies that
| are profitable or on the road to profitability [1]. If
| you count everything you can safely say the number is
| closer to 8 trillion.
|
| Every year, VC in the US _as a whole_ invests roughly
| 100B [2]. If you cut out non-growth and non-tech sectors
| I'd guess that number total goes to around 40B, and
| roughly 100B (very rough number) globally.
|
| So yeah, some money gets "wasted" but it creates huge
| market capitalizations that are around two full orders of
| magnitude larger than a single years investment, and
| growing strong year over year.
|
| [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp
| [2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-venture-
| capital-...
| scarface74 wrote:
| Facebook - didn't raise billions and was profitable when
| it IPOd
|
| Amazon - operates on thin to non existent profits for
| years but use much of its own money to grow through
| operating cash.
|
| Apple - definitely didn't raise billions in the 70s and
| was profitable at IPO.
|
| Netflix - I don't know much about Netflix.
|
| Google - grew fast but it also had a profitable business.
|
| Microsoft - famously, MS didn't even need the VC money it
| got early on. It took the money because it wanted the
| expertise of the investors.
| malandrew wrote:
| None of these companies had to deal with the current
| investment environment. It's an arms race. While it's a
| chicken and the egg issue since both Facebook and Google
| provide virality and discovery, respectively, and it is
| those two features, virality and discovery that lead to a
| positive return on investment from blitzscaling.
|
| Besides discovery and virality, there is also the issue
| of falling transaction costs. When Google, Facebook and
| Amazon were founded, you had to maintain your own
| datacenters and infrastructure. That alone produced a
| massive barrier to entry that made competition less
| fierce. Since the advent of AWS and other cloud computing
| platforms, transactions costs for tech companies have
| dropped dramatically so you can't rely on infrastructure
| prowess as a competitive advantage for many tech
| verticals.
|
| You simply can't compare companies that were born and
| matured in different markets with different dynamics to
| those founded in the past 10-15 years. It's apples and
| oranges.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How's that working out for them? Name one tech company
| founded since Facebook that has been massively successful
| - ie massively profitable.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Netflix started in the original dot-com bubble as a DVD
| rental service, and only began streaming in 2007, a
| decade after they were founded. Reed Hastings put up $2.5
| million himself. Not exactly a case of rapid illusory
| hypergrowth like the poster children unicorns of the
| current gig/sharing economy dot-com bubble.
| neuromancer2701 wrote:
| Netflix - created in 1997 with profit from selling Reed
| Hasting previous company. They IPOed 5 years later in
| 2002 don't see anything about VC money. Could be some but
| definitely not the Softbank model back then.
| Animats wrote:
| Doordash tried that, with Doordash Kitchens. Don't know
| why, but their pseudo-restaurants in Redwood City, such
| as Rooster and Rice, have dropped off the Doordash site.
| pembrook wrote:
| In reality, there is no choice between:
|
| A) Silicon Valley-style hyper growth
|
| or
|
| B) Slow and steady growth
|
| Choice B is not actually an option if you want to change
| human behavior and actually benefit from economies of
| scale. This is because of the nature of competition and the
| power of habit. If it takes you 20 years to go national,
| then competitors will have cemented themselves in each
| region you try to operate.
|
| And because humans are creatures of habit, it will be
| ridiculously expensive to get them to change their behavior
| even if you offer a comparatively better service.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Choice B is not actually an option if you want to
| change human behavior and actually benefit from economies
| of scale.
|
| But there's little or no economies of scale in the
| delivery business. A citywide delivery service would be
| equally efficient whether operated by a local company or
| a multinational. The local company may even have an
| advantage in terms of knowing their customers better. The
| only economy of scale I see is access to cheap VC
| capital.
| strken wrote:
| Dominos is famous for charging more for delivery than for
| takeaway. Their "$4 delivery" is no more accurate to the
| true cost of delivering a pizza than the "delivery fee" of
| their competitors.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| The traditional silicon valley approach would be to fund
| _new_ ways of doing delivery. And behind the most click-
| worthy headlines, that is what is happening! [1].
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/starship-
| technologies-is-s...
| puranjay wrote:
| I also don't think that food delivery is something that
| needs to happen at a global scale. The market is local
| enough that you can have one player for every city or
| region that can grow organically, charge lower rates, and
| be beneficial for everyone involved.
| Lammy wrote:
| The Bay Area's dual refusal of housing and transportation
| made the delivery apps necessary in the first place, so I
| agree it may not be a great place to look for a solution.
| If housing and retail space were more abundant there would
| be more options within my immediate area, and if
| transportation were better my "area" would be even larger
| than it is now with what's comfortable to reach on foot.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Are you sure Dominos actually profits on the delivery
| itself, or do they just offer it at/below cost to sell more
| pizzas?
| bthater wrote:
| Delivery is profitable for dominos. But the real money,
| well that is in garlic bread.
| nerfhammer wrote:
| all restaurant business is just a ploy to get people to
| buy soda
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| No, it's not. The most you can charge for a soda is $3
| around here. Even if you make 95% profit ($2.85), pretty
| much every single food item will make far more profit. A
| $12 salad will net you $9, a $15 dollar pasta will
| probably net you $12, a $40 steak will net you $20, and
| so on.
|
| Gross profit matters far more than profit margin. Also
| the best way to be profitable is to increase sales
| relative to fixed costs, rather than trying to squeeze
| every dime out of limited sales.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Alcohol and coffee are also helpful.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Dominos is arguably quite a bit larger than the mom & pop
| restaurant I did delivery for, but... for us it was
| break-even or a very tiny loss. I don't remember exactly
| the number, but delivery was $5; $5 charged to the
| customer, $5 paid to the driver. I think it was waived
| for large orders (>$100?), but those were pretty rare.
| Tips were all for the driver as well. On a good night,
| you could make $20-30/hr; on a holiday night (New Year's
| Eve was my favourite), it'd be more like $40-$50 once you
| factor in the tips.
|
| Was it overall a living wage as a sole source of income?
| No, not at all. There was usually only a small window
| every day when people actually wanted delivery. Was it
| good money for the number of hours worked? Sixteen year-
| old me sure thought so!
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I think it's not solvable with human delivery workers.
| Hopefully someone tries to do it with robots when we get
| there.
| SilasX wrote:
| >Maybe food delivery services isn't solvable using the
| Silicon Valley method -- use insane amounts of rich
| people's money to subsidize product hyper-growth to only
| later monopolize said market to re-coop earlier losses.
|
| I tend to agree, and also because I don't think food
| delivery can be easily decoupled from the preparation (for
| ready-to-eat orders). I mean, restaurants have done it
| profitably for ages, but whenever one of these SV companies
| tries it, I hear all kinds of stories about how, unless
| everything goes right, the whole process becomes tedious an
| frustrating.
|
| Like, the order's wrong, and it has to restart through
| Uber's whole system. And the runners can't look inside to
| verify the order because (legitimate) health regulations.
| And it just ends with an unsatisfied customer who has some
| credit on the app.
|
| But I do think there is a _way_ to SV-ize food delivery,
| like if they could get economies of scale to work for food
| delivery. Imagine this:
|
| A restaurant knows at least one customer needs their dish
| to start prep at 5:30pm. The website indicates they're
| starting one then anyway, so you get a discount for
| ordering the same food to start at the same time.
|
| Meals can be batched easily -- it costs them much less than
| N times to scale up the order to N servings or customers.
|
| Ditto for (in urban areas) delivering to the same building
| or block. If they only have to stop once, they can offer a
| discount to anyone ordering the same thing in the same
| building.
|
| This is exactly the kind of thing where it pays to be a
| broad platform that everyone's on, and has kinds of
| monopoly profits, and provides legit consumer value.
|
| (Disclaimer: I registered a domain name suitable for this
| kind of service but haven't otherwise advanced it.)
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > runners can't look inside to verify the order
|
| I was an Uber/Lyft driver, and I tried delivery a couple
| times way back before covid-19. One pickup was 5
| identical, unlabeled containers, two of which were
| special orders. Having worked in restaurants before,
| there was no way in hell I wasn't going to visually check
| them (also I don't recall this being prohibited before).
| Turns out, one was wrong-- so the other 4 got cold while
| that one was re-made and I sat for 20 minutes. All told,
| it took me 45 minutes to bring mostly cold food to an
| unhappy person and I made about $4. Not. Sustainable.
|
| It sounds like you have some good ideas and are thinking
| in the right direction, though. Streamlining your whole
| operation to minimize the possibility of errors and
| reduce wait times is one of the most important things to
| focus on in my book. Give people fewer choices.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| Weird somehow many restaurants did and do have their own
| delivery service. I have heard many pizza places do this
| gizmo686 wrote:
| The question is, how much do those restaurants charge
| themselves in a delivery fee? It wouldn't suprise me if
| they spend more than 5% the value of the purchase on making
| the delivery; in the same way that I expect more that 5% of
| a typical dine-in meal to go to fund the in-restaurant
| eating space.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The delivery driver is an hourly employee, so the % they
| pay depends on how many pizzas (or meals, if not a pizza
| joint) that driver delivers.
|
| For this reason, most mom-and-pop restaurants limit their
| delivery radius to places their delivery drivers can
| reach within 10 minutes or less of driving (so the driver
| can make at least 2 deliveries an hour).
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > The question is, how much do those restaurants charge
| themselves in a delivery fee?
|
| Usually not much, if anything. They keep the employees on
| the clock, and factor in labour cost much like a dine-in
| restaurant factors in the cost of your server.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| They may not have a literal line item on an internal
| spreadsheet corresponding to how much of each bill goes
| towards delivery, but they are still paying for
| performing the delivery. When they outsource this
| service, they pay a third party for doing it, but save on
| the costs of doing it themselves. When you consider how
| expensive the third party is to the restaurant, you also
| have to consider how much they would be spending if they
| do it in-house.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Yes, and 30% is way higher than internal FOH or driver
| labour cost.
| Retric wrote:
| Delivery apps have a vastly higher overhead because the
| drivers are not based out of a single high volume restaurant.
|
| With traditional deliveries operating over a tiny radius back
| to base. Drivers can do multiple deliveries at the same time.
| Pick up a new stack of orders and quickly be out the door
| again, this means they need fewer people during rush and thus
| much lower overhead.
|
| Some people are willing to pay 10+$ an order to have a much
| wider selection of restaurants from a huge area. But, that
| doesn't scale to the kind of volume these companies expect.
| munk-a wrote:
| The high volume portion is an interesting component - uber
| eats and whatever else cast very wide nets of the
| restaurants they'll deliver for while, prior to the SV
| injection, only some restaurants could reasonably afford to
| sustain delivery drivers. Sure, being centralized allows
| you to allocate only a portion of a driver to a given
| restaurant but that comes at the cost of complexity and
| likely a reduction in either parallelized deliveries or
| quality of service.
| c22 wrote:
| For what it's worth, these ride-share delivery drivers also
| grab multiple orders at a time if they can. It's one of the
| reasons delivery takes so long. I've observed drivers
| putting in additional orders that just came in (and waiting
| for them) while they are picking up. I also think they'll
| swing by (and often wait at) two or three places to get
| orders before heading out to deliver.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| There's a limit to this though. If the food gets cold or
| otherwise bad due to waiting too long, people will ask
| for money back or orders will go down.
| munk-a wrote:
| Compare this to a restaurant running their own service
| that can chose not to prepare meals while waiting for
| more orders to roll in - so the delivery might not be as
| quick as it potentially could be, but the food is
| fresher.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The main edge the restaurants with their own delivery
| has. UberEats just black boxes the restaurant excepting
| it to treat the delivery guy as a ordinary customer. That
| process has to be so wasteful compares to bulk
| preparation and delivery.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Foodsby has a cool model.
|
| 1. Set a time. Say 11:00 or 12:00. The food will be delivered
| at this time, no other time.
|
| 2. Set a location, a little table in the lobby of various
| buildings where the Foodsby driver drops off the food.
|
| 3. One driver goes to the various restaurants, and goes to
| the various dropoff points. One trip at one time can serve
| hundreds of customers.
|
| -------
|
| Every foodsby trip is synchronized to the time. As such, all
| orders and deliveries are batched together, saving time and
| effort on all parties involved.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Dining out is already a luxury. Paying 20% more just for
| someone to deliver the food to my door is even more of a
| luxury, and without the 'dining out' experience.
|
| Honestly I don't expect delivery services to survive, and I
| don't think it would be a tragedy if they ceased to exist.
| chongli wrote:
| It certainly would be a tragedy for all of the drivers who
| lost work and may struggle to feed their families. Many of
| the drivers are immigrant men who have few other prospects
| for work.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| And maybe that's a societal problem we should be
| addressing instead of expecting people to give money to
| silicon valley companies.
|
| Don't get me wrong. I've used and use these services at
| times. I'm not morally opposed to them. I just think that
| saying that telling someone by not using them they're
| hurting immigrants is just a whole lot of backwards.
| chongli wrote:
| _telling someone by not using them they 're hurting
| immigrants is just a whole lot of backwards_
|
| Backwards? What's backwards about wanting to inform
| people of all the consequences to their actions? Life is
| messy and complicated. Far too often people don't want to
| think about all the consequences to their actions so they
| can erase that complexity.
|
| As an aside, not all of these companies are Silicon
| Valley-based anyway. SkipTheDishes, the one I use, is a
| Canadian company.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| You can say the same thing for every food truck or small
| restaurant you've ever passed. The simple act of ordering
| food from one place instead of another risks putting the
| other out of business and that family out on the streets.
|
| At some point we need to fix societal issues instead of
| worrying that not consuming goods or services is harmful.
| chongli wrote:
| I'm not saying "don't fix societal issues." Some people
| lean on the "fix societal issues" line to the exclusion
| of all else though. They let the perfect be the enemy of
| the good.
| VLM wrote:
| If delivery driving is going to be socialized as a jobs
| program, is it the ideal jobs program? I think not.
|
| There must be unprofitable business activities that would
| make better jobs programs. Student stipends, vocational
| training, teachers aides for natives learning foreign
| languages, subsidized English language lessons, almost
| anything would be a better investment for immigrant men
| than subsidization of unprofitable delivery services.
| Arguably just handing out money and skipping the
| unprofitable business activity would cause less damage
| and waste to the environment.
| WC3w6pXxgGd wrote:
| If something is unprofitable, that is a signal that
| resources are being misallocated.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I can't edit my post any more, but it makes me sad that
| this is sitting negative, when what I did was point out
| that food delivery is a luxury. This whole business of
| delivering everything has only really taken off in the last
| 3 years.
|
| If you want to create an echo chamber, this is how you do
| it.
| ragebol wrote:
| > Delivery is expensive. It's time-consuming, and customers
| are rarely willing to pay the true cost of it.
|
| I think that's the main problem. Delivery isn't free and so
| far has been subsidized by Uber's investors or draining the
| restaurants. Which didn't have a choice because they where
| being undercut.
|
| We'll end up with either paying a reasonable price for
| delivery or picking it up yourself. Or maybe robots, but
| those aren't free either.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Pizza parlors and Chinese restaurants have successfully been
| delivering food for decades with their own delivery staff.
|
| It's only the Silicon Valley delivery services that are
| unable to profit from delivery, because they insist on paying
| executives and engineers 6+ figures when all of the value is
| in the delivery drivers, not the wasteful overhead.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| This. I have a family member who runs a restaurant and
| employs his own delivery drivers, and has been profitable
| for decades. He lists food on GruHub as well, but charges
| all of the markup through to the customer. He includes a
| flyer with the delivery that says in large text "We have
| our own drivers! Call us with your order and save 20%
| compared to GrubHub!"
| syshum wrote:
| >>Call us with your order and save 20% compared to
| GrubHub!
|
| He should probably invest in his own online ordering
| system, they are not complex is should not cost that
| much.
|
| personally I hate calling in orders, this holds true even
| if I am just picking it up, I prefer to use an Online
| order system.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure what the big deal is in calling if I'm just
| calling in to order a pizza or a sub.
|
| That aside, at least part of the value of the aggregators
| is a lot of people apparently want to just go to one
| place and order from a variety of restaurants.
| Personally, I don't really get it--I just have menus from
| the very limited number of decent takeout options around
| where I live--but setting up your own site doesn't help
| with that.
| Leherenn wrote:
| A lot of people simply dislike calling, no matter the
| reason.
| SilasX wrote:
| I'm not sure that works as an explanation, because Pizza
| Hut executives are pretty well compensated too, and their
| app also shows all the signs of being overengineered (or
| rather, over rockstar ninja'd).
|
| I think it's more of an issue of the (ready-to-eat) food
| production and delivery being too highly coupled for a
| third party to bolt on a profitable service, as in my other
| comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093747
| umeshunni wrote:
| > Pizza parlors and Chinese restaurants have successfully
| been delivering food for decades with their own delivery
| staff.
|
| And if you want any other kind of food (or food from any
| higher end restaurant) delivered, you're SOL.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| In LA at least, I can get Indian, Mexican, and Thai food
| delivered as well. And salads, if I really want to waste
| my money. In call cases, deliveries are by the
| restaurants own delivery staff.
|
| And higher-end restaurants generally don't deliver at
| all, on _any_ delivery service* because the quality of
| the food can be diminished during transit. Some have made
| exceptions during the COVID19 lockdowns, and some have
| simply closed down for the duration.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Or you can, you know, get it yourself. Also, most high-
| end restaurants didn't do takeout nor delivery before the
| pandemic.
| [deleted]
| take_a_breath wrote:
| Restaurants are outsourcing the delivery to these
| companies. Many of the restaurants near me never offered
| delivery until Grubhub, Uber Eats, etc. allowed them to at
| little cost. The reason they didn't offer delivery before
| these options is exactly because of the economics of doing
| so.
|
| It may turn out that the economics of the technology-
| middle-man aren't sustainable either. In which case they
| will have to decide between managing deliveries in-house or
| stopping deliveries.
| amelius wrote:
| I feel that delivery apps should have certification like "Fair
| Trade" [1], so you know that the restaurant owner receives a
| fair share of the money.
|
| [1] https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/
| forgotmylogin2 wrote:
| Restauranteurs opt-in to their relationship with Uber Eats.
| If they feel they aren't getting compensated fairly, they can
| opt-out.
|
| It feels quite condescending that you think you need to
| protect restaurants from Uber when restaurants are already
| capable of dissociating from Uber. You're essentially saying
| restaurant owners are too dumb to know what's best for them,
| so you need to make decisions for them.
| amelius wrote:
| This is not how it works. There is a network effect. If
| everybody uses Uber Eats then as a restaurant owner you
| have no choice but to opt-in. Talk to some restaurant
| owners.
|
| And to make a more general remark: the free market doesn't
| always have the desired effect. See for example Net
| Neutrality which wouldn't exist if the free market had its
| way.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Every restaurant around here just passes Uber's cut onto the
| customer by raising prices in the Uber menu.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| We use Uber Eats for discovery. We'll use it to find new
| establishments, and on the first order, I'll tip cash to make
| up for what Uber Eats takes from the restaurant. If we decide
| to patron the same restaurant again, we order directly from
| them to avoid the Uber tax for them (edit: as many are aware,
| margins are slim [3-5% typically] for restaurants and the
| delivery service tax is onerous on them). Has worked pretty
| well. Be the change y'all.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yes, be the change and stop tiping. That's the change that
| everyone needs to be doing, then the prices would increase to
| match what the market should actually be, rather than rely on
| charity of customers.
|
| >>I'll tip cash to make up for what Uber Eats takes from the
| restaurant
|
| So you've just allowed Uber Eats to operate another day,
| because the restaurant can now justify using them and their
| shitty rates.
| memonkey wrote:
| The assumption that the apps would raise wages if people
| suddenly stopped tipping seems misguided. It's possible
| that people would just work longer and harder for the cash
| because they're desperate.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If they're that desperate, the company could already
| lower the wages.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Wages are at the legal minimum.
| ivalm wrote:
| There is always hysteresis. People don't just operate on
| some smooth indifference curve. You cant lower wages (due
| to past wage history), but total comp can go down (due to
| less tipping and companies not increasing wages).
| Furthermore, lots of gig/restaurant workers operate close
| to minimal wage, which further drives wage inelasticity
| (eg companies cannot drive down their wage).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > So you've just allowed Uber Eats to operate another day
|
| My understanding is that Uber Eats loses money on each
| order. Has that changed? If so, I'll stop using them
| immediately and perform discovery in another way
| ("Restaurant Roulette"). I want my money going to the folks
| doing the hard work, not scalpers ("the platform").
|
| Going to keep tipping though, not tipping doesn't fix
| bigger issues causing the need for it that are out of scope
| here. Sorry if my economic empathy bothers you (no snark
| intended).
| pettazz wrote:
| Pretty sure all that'll really happen if you stop tipping
| is that some poor delivery driver gets screwed. Just stop
| using the apps, order from the restaurant directly, tip
| your delivery people.
| gambiting wrote:
| I do realize that this is a pipe dream, but if literally
| everyone stopped tipping at once, the conditions would
| have to improve.
|
| Also, I'm from the UK - while tipping in restaurants is
| semi-common(not expected), tipping delivery drivers is
| literally unheard of. Doesn't exist, no one does it. And
| yet.....somehow, delivery drivers still exist as a
| profession.
|
| My point is - every time you tip, you allow shitty
| employment practices to continue. It's the same as giving
| money to beggars on the street - they continue begging
| because they know it works, it's a self sustaining
| circle.
| stepbeek wrote:
| I live in the UK and know plenty of people who tip
| delivery drivers. Not to the extent of the US admittedly.
|
| Do you have a source?
| gambiting wrote:
| A source for what? For people not tipping delivery
| drivers? I live in the UK and I have never heard about
| anyone tipping delivery drivers - you are literally the
| very first person I've read about that tips delivery
| drivers in the UK. So no, no source, personal experience.
| smogcutter wrote:
| You're right, broadly, but please don't do this when
| you're visiting the US. You're screwing over a real life,
| individual person because it pleases you to make a point.
| gmanley wrote:
| So you're from a country where tipping isn't so engrained
| or important. Here in the US tipping is the main way
| service workers make money. Most base wages are simply
| untenable.
|
| Now, I'm not saying I like that, in fact I hate it. We
| are in essence subsidizing their employees. It definitely
| needs to change but please don't encourage people not to
| tip. There are realistic ways to get rid of tipping. Just
| stopping tipping isn't one of them. All your doing is
| hurting the little man/women. Also comparing them to
| beggars is pretty out of touch.
| mcculley wrote:
| I don't understand the appeal of these food delivery services
| at all. For those occasions where I feel lazy enough to have a
| pizza or Chinese food delivered instead of walking or driving
| to pick it up, I don't want a middleman company contracting the
| job out to some random person. Who thinks that's a good idea?
| How many layers of profit-taking do people think is acceptable
| to have random people touching their food along the way?
|
| That's setting aside the ridiculousness of all of the one-off
| trips I see in my building and my neighborhood, burning
| gasoline to hand-deliver a sandwich.
| supernova87a wrote:
| When a person starts to have discretionary spending power, or
| starts to feel to not have to be cheap any more, the
| previously unimagined items or services that one didn't feel
| one needed, inflate greatly.
| newfriend wrote:
| > I don't understand the appeal of these food delivery
| services at all
|
| I'm sure there's no end to the things you don't understand.
|
| > For those occasions where I feel lazy enough to have a
| pizza or Chinese food delivered instead of walking or driving
| to pick it up, I don't want a middleman company contracting
| the job out to some random person.
|
| You may be surprised to know there are people in different
| situations than yourself.
|
| * What if I want something besides pizza or Chinese food?
|
| * What if I don't have a car?
|
| * What if restaurants are too far to walk?
|
| * What if I'm unable to walk?
|
| * What if I have small children that I can't bring with me
| and can't leave behind?
|
| * What if I have something important going on and can't take
| time to go get food?
|
| * What if I don't want to call them on the phone? What if I
| have anxiety or can't speak?
|
| * What if I don't know what kind of food I want, and would
| like to browse options?
|
| * What if I'm new/don't know the area?
|
| > How many layers of profit-taking do people think is
| acceptable to have random people touching their food along
| the way?
|
| So you're ok with the food preparer and other employees, and
| the restaurant's delivery person "touching" your food, but
| not a 3rd party delivery person. Anyway, the delivery bag is
| typically sealed when ordered through these services.
|
| Maybe if you thought about it for 5 seconds, you could
| understand why these services are so popular.
| mcculley wrote:
| I've thought about it quite a lot and discussed this with
| some of the delivery people I see on the street and in my
| building. I have enjoyed these elevator discussions about
| the economics of feeding the lazy. Many of them are also
| surprised that people will pay them to deliver a Jimmy
| John's sandwich.
| colinbartlett wrote:
| If one can bill their time at $200/hour and it takes 30
| minutes to go get a sandwich, is it lazy to pay someone
| $10 to do it for them or just good economics?
| mcculley wrote:
| I have often (pre-COVID) employed my comparative economic
| advantage and had other people make meals for me in a
| restaurant. I have occasionally had my assistant pick up
| a meal when I am working. I still don't see the appeal of
| having two other legal entities involved in a fast food
| transaction.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Every level of civilization is built not on laziness but
| on convenience and the additional freedom that
| convenience brings. I'm sure at some point someone was
| complaining that people were eating bread from grain they
| didn't grow themselves.
| speeder wrote:
| Where I live the government literally banned you picking up
| your orders... so sadly can't live like you are doing :(
|
| Delivery is only option, I suspect delivery people are making a
| killing now.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Here in Toronto area, most of the big food outlets are
| closed, because they are not able to get workers.
|
| Huh that surprises me. Here in the UK the big food outlets have
| gone on a big hiring spree to keep up with the extra demand
| from people all eating at home.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| People if they don't have a car, are afraid to take public
| transportation to go to work. The same happens with some food
| factories, 10x more orders but half the people are refusing
| to go back to work.
| wdb wrote:
| In London McDonalds, Nando's etc were all closed, even most
| restaurants in China Town are closed. Which food outlets are
| you referring too?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Waitrose, Marks and Spencer, high street takeaways,
| restaurants doing delivery, for example are all open in my
| village. But we don't have any Deliveroo, UberEats, etc,
| coverage where I live as it's the North.
| stcredzero wrote:
| I wonder if Tesla could modify their car models, such that the
| passenger compartment can be on a different HVAC system than the
| front compartment?
|
| Now that the world has a recent concrete demonstration of what it
| means to be in a pandemic, with all of the emergent problems
| revealed in gory detail, shouldn't we change some things so that
| we can cope better in case it happens again? Like I've said, no
| one buckles their seatbelt in expectation of getting into a high
| speed crash on their current trip, but we prepare for such a
| severe circumstance due to the cost/benefit.
| binaryblitz wrote:
| Even if that was a viable option, where would people go?
| stcredzero wrote:
| To essential work. To essential businesses. To carry out
| their epidemiological tasks. To someplace not crowded. Etc.
| Reubachi wrote:
| I admire your problem solving ideas, but engineering this to a
| point that is 1. effective at mutually/exclusively recycling
| two sets of air and 2. cost effective is impossible.
|
| Would be akin to putting twin turbochargers in a cheap car
| which already has extremely high engine compression. it could
| be done, but only a very select customer base would pay for it,
| and would likely not see any benefits they don't already see
| from "free" things like disinfecting, social distance, etc.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _I admire your problem solving ideas, but engineering this to
| a point that is 1. effective at mutually /exclusively
| recycling two sets of air and 2. cost effective is
| impossible._
|
| Pretty much the same things were said about seatbelts.
|
| _Would be akin to putting twin turbochargers in a cheap car
| which already has extremely high engine compression._
|
| Why? Please quantify and back this up. Seems to me that such
| mods are not that extreme. Plenty of cars in the past were
| not built by default, but were rather modified to be
| taxicabs, such that there was a wall and window completely
| between the passengers and front compartment. I see no reason
| why making that airtight is cost prohibitive. Heck, I bet
| people would've said that making a car's HVAC system
| bioweapon-agent proof would be cost prohibitive. Tesla just
| went and did it, and is putting that system into cars
| designed to hit a lower price tier than they had previously.
|
| _but only a very select customer base would pay for it,_
|
| Same thing was said about seatbelts. I bet plenty of Uber
| drivers who couldn't work otherwise right now would sign up
| for some kind of lease deal.
|
| _and would likely not see any benefits they don 't already
| see from "free" things like disinfecting, social distance,
| etc._
|
| Well, for one thing, Uber would be able to operate a
| passenger "rideshare" business during a pandemic.
| stevehawk wrote:
| is the 'front compartment' the 'frunk' (front trunk)? What are
| you trying to accomplish? Cooled compartments for
| food/beverages in a car is old tech (many cars have had chilled
| glove boxes/consoles)..
| stcredzero wrote:
| _is the 'front compartment' the 'frunk' (front trunk)? What
| are you trying to accomplish?_
|
| That's where you'd keep another body. jk. I meant the front
| half of the passenger compartment, with the driver.
| winter_blue wrote:
| No, he means that the air circulation (HVAC) is separate for
| the front and rear seats. So an infected driver can't infect
| a customer sitting in a rear seat.
|
| The frunk is just a trunk for storing things in the front,
| common on Tesla cars.
| Traster wrote:
| It's worth remembering that COVID isn't airborne, it's
| transmitted through droplets, so a simple plastic panel
| would be sufficient. Which is basically what traditional
| taxis in major cities very often already have.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _It 's worth remembering that COVID isn't airborne, it's
| transmitted through droplets, so a simple plastic panel
| would be sufficient._
|
| True that, though I was thinking about rideshare being
| robust against any pandemic, going forward.
| dublinben wrote:
| Non-Techcrunch article: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/uber-to-
| lay-off-3700-employe...
|
| The SEC filing:
| https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/0001...
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| > In an SEC filing dating back to last week, Uber disclosed plans
| to layoff 3,700 employees. The figure amounts to around 14%
| percent of the ride hailing giant's total workforce.
|
| Do drivers count as employees in states like California, but as
| independent contractors elsewhere? The answer would provide
| greater context to these numbers.
| wpietri wrote:
| You can bet that Uber is not counting them as employees, as
| they're still fighting over AB5.
| sp332 wrote:
| No, California is still fighting it.
| https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/05/california-sues-to-make...
| In New Jersey they are though
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/nyregion/uber-new-jersey-...
| as well as the UK https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/31/uber-loses-
| appeal-against-la... and France
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-05/trump-pus...
| nojito wrote:
| masquerading as a "tech" company when you're nothing more than a
| physical service company is the biggest realization here.
|
| This is definitely a wizard of oz moment for many "tech"
| companies.
| pb7 wrote:
| Tech or not, what difference does it make? Lots of tech
| companies hurting equally due to loss or reduced business.
| Everything is connected these days.
| dbancajas wrote:
| can you explain what a "wizard of oz" moment means?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It's a reference to the man behind the curtain being smaller
| and less impressive than what their original image made them
| look like.
| pstuart wrote:
| I suppose it's the moment when Toto pulls back the curtain to
| reveal the great wizard is merely a man operating a machine.
| topkai22 wrote:
| In the wizard of oz, the "great and powerful wizard" is
| actually a tiny old man with no powers who uses stage magic
| tricks, which is revealed at the climax of the movie by a
| tiny dog pulling back a curtain.
|
| It means that something is revealed to be fundamentally
| weaker than it appears.
| person5 wrote:
| __Spoiler Alert __
|
| The wizard isn 't actually a super powerful wizard. It's
| literally just a dude behind a curtain talking into a
| microphone and operating some contraption. [1] If you hear
| someone use the phrase "man behind the curtain" this is what
| it's referring to.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWyCCJ6B2WE
| leetcrew wrote:
| I've seen a lot of similar comments regarding various companies
| over the last week or so. what exactly is a "tech company", and
| what makes it different from a normal company (eg, a bank) for
| whom tech is still an integral part of the product?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| In this case, it's probably labeled a tech company because:
|
| - Founded by IT people (Garett Camp co-founded StumbleUpon) -
| HQ in San Fransisco - Uses technology to link drivers and
| consumers
|
| An USP compared to a traditional taxi company is their app,
| which added convenience to taxi services - don't have to call
| someone, don't have to worry about handling money, etc.
| [deleted]
| alphast0rm wrote:
| Ben Thompson wrote an interesting article "What Is a Tech
| Company?" on Stratechery [1] recently where he discusses the
| trademark characteristics of tech companies and makes a
| convincing argument as to why Uber could be considered one:
|
| > Note the centrality of software in all of these
| characteristics:
|
| > - Software creates ecosystems.
|
| > - Software has zero marginal costs.
|
| > - Software improves over time.
|
| > - Software offers infinite leverage.
|
| > - Software enables zero transaction costs.
|
| > The question of whether companies are tech companies, then,
| depends on how much of their business is governed by
| software's unique characteristics, and how much is limited by
| real world factors. ...
|
| > Uber, meanwhile, has long been mentioned in the same breath
| as Airbnb, and for good reason: it checks most of the same
| boxes:
|
| > - There is a software-created ecosystem of drivers and
| riders.
|
| > - Like Airbnb, Uber reports its revenue as if it has low
| marginal costs, but a holistic view of rides shows that the
| company pays drivers around 80 percent of total revenue; this
| isn't a world of zero marginal costs.
|
| > - Uber's platform improves over time.
|
| > - Uber is able to serve the entire world, giving it maximum
| leverage.
|
| > - Uber can transact with anyone with a self-serve model.
|
| > A major question about Uber concerns transaction costs:
| bringing and keeping drivers on the platform is very
| expensive. This doesn't mean that Uber isn't a tech company,
| but it does underscore the degree to which its model is
| dependent on factors that don't have zero costs attached to
| them.
|
| He walks through a few other examples as well (e.g. Netflix,
| Airbnb, WeWork, Peloton), would definitely recommend reading
| the whole article.
|
| [1] https://stratechery.com/2019/what-is-a-tech-company/
| huevosabio wrote:
| He also has an interesting follow-up [0] where he looks at
| it from the gross margin point-of-view. His main point is
| that when you look at it from the perspective of what the
| rider pays, their margins are much lower and implies that
| perhaps it should not be categorized as a tech company (in
| the zero marginal costs and massive gross margins).
|
| [0] https://stratechery.com/2019/neither-and-new-lessons-
| from-ub...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| From the point of view of "does it matter if they're
| profitable", a "tech company" has more of their costs up
| front (to develop the software), and their costs increase
| less with volume. So, once you've got the software made, "all
| you need to do" (still a big deal) is get customers, and you
| will become profitable (ignoring software maintenance that
| gets costlier as you scale up, etc). Costs may go up due to
| server capacity, etc. but not nearly as fast as revenue.
|
| But, if your cost structure isn't really like that, then if
| you're not profitable when you're small, that's a signal that
| you're not a good investment.
|
| A lot of companies with cost structures more like a
| conventional company, that weren't profitable, tried to claim
| that they were a tech company and therefore as they scale up
| they would become profitable. Some investors fell for this,
| or thought that someone else would when it was time to IPO.
|
| Whether this logic was ever valid is, IMHO, debatable. But in
| this case it's a moot point, because Uber (and Lyft, and
| Lyme, and WeWork, and etc.) don't have a cost structure that
| looks like a tech company. They may use software, but most of
| their costs do absolutely scale up as they get more
| customers.
|
| Uber would have been having layoffs this year regardless, I
| think, they are just doing it now because they have an
| external shock to blame it on.
| asdff wrote:
| It's all semantics at this point. Every company can be a tech
| company depending on how you carve up your definitions. My
| head cannon is if the stock tracks along with the rest of the
| FANGs, it's a tech company.
| runT1ME wrote:
| Being able to predict ride demand, optimal routes, and pricing
| on the fly seems like a complicated enough of a problem that it
| would both require a lot of engineering and provide enough
| value over just a 'physical service company'.
|
| I certainly enjoy using Uber and Lyft over Taxis, and when I
| travel for business I never rent a car these days where as I
| would always rent a car when confronted with the alternative of
| dealing with Taxis. Do you think i'm overestimating the
| advantage the software brings to the experience?
| asdff wrote:
| It seems like a job for a generalized logistics company to
| source to niche companies. Why keep reinventing the wheel?
| It's a waste of engineering.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| This is the first in a series of cuts, and this cut didn't effect
| anyone in tech, it's mostly the front line service agents. We
| expect 800 eng layed off globally as has been reported in leaks.
| vvladymyrov wrote:
| Yeah. Previous round of layoffs in 2019 had 3 distinct phases:
| non-technical (i.e. marketing) first, then engineers in Uber
| Prime, and then Uber ATG
| alephnan wrote:
| Eng is not part of tech?
| bsimpson wrote:
| Read the comment again.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > front line service agents
|
| Given the customer "service" I've had from Uber Eats, the only
| explanation I have is that they employed monkeys and I don't
| consider them a big loss (even though the most likely
| explanation is that Uber paid them too little for them to give
| a shit about their job).
| noad wrote:
| It's starting to feel like we just built the Borg from Star Trek.
| Everything bigger, everything more centralized, everything more
| efficient and streamlined and outsource everything you're not
| good at. Economies of scale so massive you can argue they are
| just monopolies. Every new venture needs to scale to billions or
| it's not worthwhile. Some competition and innovation, but mostly
| just growth throw acquisition and assimilation.
|
| Wasn't the Borg devastated by a virus?
|
| TNG was such a good show.
| jachell wrote:
| Who's "we"? Uber?
| twomoretime wrote:
| Society, I imagine
| wpietri wrote:
| We as in the audience here, I think. The tech industry.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| We humans and our economies, I'd imagine. Because the problem
| isn't just Uber. It isn't even just tech. The fear of meat
| shortages is because we've condensed to very few, very large
| meat distributors, and a couple of them had outbreaks. I know
| less about this first-hand, but previous comments on HN have
| detailed how optimized the toilet paper supply chain is such
| that it can't absorb people working from home all of a
| sudden. Bigger, more standardized, more efficient, ruthlessly
| so, and then can't handle a virus. Borg-like.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| To be fair, the Borg got beat by a unified, centralized and
| streamlined society.
| aphextron wrote:
| >To be fair, the Borg got beat by a unified, centralized and
| streamlined society.
|
| Hardly. The Federation is, well, a _federation_. A loosely
| collectivized body of disparate groups, each with their own
| goals but united through a common cause. This was one of the
| central tenets of TNG; that diversity is strength.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'd say that Starfleet is pretty unified though. Individual
| diversity was absolutely strength, but Starfleet was
| unified, and when it was divided that was major plot
| points.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Did Starfleet ever build two ships to the same design?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Yup. Just thinking off the top of my head in TNG for the
| Galaxy Class alone there was the the USS Galaxy, USS
| Enterprise and USS Yamato. There were also a ton more
| visible during the Dominion War.
| rpeden wrote:
| As an example:
|
| https://youtu.be/CUQ2nmKNH3Y?t=79
|
| Plenty of Galaxies, Excelsiors, and Mirandas (or maybe
| variants like Soyuz) flying around.
| [deleted]
| Izkata wrote:
| I think GP was referring to Hugh, which was the idea of one
| person and not actually a virus (they decided against that
| plan before the end of the episode as well). But also there
| were various events during Voyager - at least twice the Borg
| were stopped by an infectious agent. Icheb's people for
| example were reduced to a bunch of farmers with genetic
| engineering skill, before they created their pathogen. Then
| in the finale, it was Admiral Janeway going rogue, not with
| the backing of any society.
| etblg wrote:
| The borg were beaten by a show that was desperately running
| out of steam and enthusiasm, falling back to mediocre writing
| to wrap up plots and endings.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The Borg were defeated by a rogue, time traveling captain who
| had no qualms with violating her unified society's rules to
| kill the Borg.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| Herd immunity is a questionable strategy, so I guess you could
| say... resistance is futile.
|
| XD
| edoceo wrote:
| Introduction of the individual eventually get them. Episode is
| "I, Borg", season 5 - Geordie names him Hugh.
|
| I'm not a nerd who remembers all this Star Trek stuff - I just
| watched the episode a few days ago (because I have TNG on
| repeat)
| curiousllama wrote:
| Unironically huge fan of this phrasing: "It's not like I'm
| obsessed, I just watch it 24/7"
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Yeah it has an interesting nuanced apathy to it.
|
| Not a high level of enthusiasm but considered the current
| best option. I know in High School I often went with
| identical breakfast despite being sick of it because I
| found others would leave me feeling fatigued before the
| late lunch hour block I was scheduled to have.
| panzagl wrote:
| Good, we wouldn't want any nerds at this site.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| The Borg was heavily implied to be a caricature of Western
| Capitalism. The similarity is not accidental.
|
| You will adapt to service us. You're going to become a drone.
| Resistance is futile.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| I mean, all those economies of scale either result in lower
| prices (say meat packing and feed lots), or allow extra R&D to
| make the product better (say, image recognition in Google
| Photos).
|
| Decentralization, redundancy, shock absorption is something you
| have to explicitly value and pay for (with lower quality and/or
| higher prices) and I don't think this is more than a niche
| preoccupation. Maybe this pandemic will change things, but do
| you really wanna bet against lower prices?
| ikeyany wrote:
| I'm not going to bet against lower prices, but I am going to
| bet on low-overhead validation and fault-tolerance going
| forward.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| I agree. Somehow we should discourage large companies and
| create a system that favors more smaller companies. I really
| don't see the value in having huge companies like Apple or
| Amazon that need to absorb more and more businesses to keep
| growing. They hinder innovation, trample over smaller companies
| but have the power to shape countries' policies to their
| advantage.
|
| In the past there was a size limit to managing a company but
| unfortunately technology allows for more and more central
| control so the trend to ever bigger companies will probably
| continue.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Cyberpunk called this back in the 70's, 80's - Corporations
| come to rule the world and states become less and less
| relevant.
|
| I sometimes feel like we live in that world already just
| without the cool neon/fashions.
|
| Drones, militarisation of the police, massive corporations
| that are basically immune to governments on a basic level.
| topkai22 wrote:
| I think a fair amount of cyberpunk also had an eye to the
| past, with the East India company and others like it
| serving as reference points to the mega corps of the
| "future"
|
| The East India company is gone, the railroads and US steel
| aren't what they once were. And this age shall pass too.
| asdff wrote:
| Just like how the breakup of bell liberated us from
| oppressive telecoms monopolizing our neighborhoods, and
| fostered competitive innovation in this field, right? It
| doesn't matter how many companies there are in an
| industry if the functional consequences on your life by
| that industry as a whole are the exact same if they were
| a single monolith. If it quacks like a duck...
|
| You say the railroads are a bygone era, just drive
| through San Marino to see what railroad money has bought
| and continues to buy to this very day. This wealth did
| not evaporate, it has only grown.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| All that, but no Smartwheel skateboards yet.
| asdff wrote:
| There are electric skateboards and that crazy onewheel
| thing. I've seen a very cyberpunk ebike rider in my
| neighborhood. No shirt, full gas mask, rides straight up
| the steepest hills and will stare you down until you look
| away first.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > just without the cool neon/fashions.
|
| We have EL wire and plenty of awesome cyberpunk fashion is
| available on places like Etsy. I fully support making
| cyberpunk fashion a thing. If I have to live in a dystopia,
| I at least want to look good doing it.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >I sometimes feel like we live in that world already just
| without the cool neon/fashions.
|
| I honestly think we'll see a cyberpunk renaissance (in
| terms of aesthetic) starting later this year and definitely
| in 2021. Not just because a game like Cyberpunk 2077 is
| coming out, but because of things like the Cybertruck
| (https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck) - it looks outlandish
| now, but I believe the designers knew what they were doing
| and understand trends and aesthetics better than most non-
| professionals.
|
| Then there are upcoming massive Hollywood releases like the
| Matrix 4 coming in 2021, as well as a reboot of Videodrome
| and Akira, plus games like Watchdogs: Legion etc.
|
| More mainstream culture is also embracing cyberpunk at the
| moment. Take the rapper Lil Nas X -
| https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/45887/1/lil-
| nas-x... or the musician Grimes -
| https://www.pcgamer.com/grimes-reveals-how-her-
| cyberpunk-207...
|
| Hell, this is a bag from Louis Vuitton that just screams
| "cyberpunk":
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18617427/louis-vuitton-
| ro...
| phil21 wrote:
| > Somehow we should discourage large companies and create a
| system that favors more smaller companies.
|
| At risk of a very low-information me-too comment...
|
| Yes, this. I'm finding it very hard to place myself on the
| "political spectrum" to even label what my beliefs are or
| find allies to join forces with.
|
| If you could sum up my (economic at least) political thoughts
| on the matter it would be "whatever system results in lots of
| small merchants competing in a market that does not allow for
| huge monopolies to exist". I want thousands of 100 person
| companies competing, not one giant Google. How realistic that
| is, is of course a very open-ended question - and certainly
| some problems exist with the theory when you need to get
| "scale" projects done that require large organizations of
| people.
|
| I still have no idea what political or economic system that
| is, but I believe that's the balance where we optimize both
| for economic security as well as the human need for agency.
|
| For now, I simply try to vote anti-monopoly as much as I can,
| but in recent decades that doesn't mean much as no one is
| even talking about breaking up these giant telecoms/media
| companies/etc.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| This will probably be very unpopular but I think
| progressive taxation of companies would work. This would be
| disruptive for a while but I think over time smaller
| companies would thrive in such an environment.
| mrkstu wrote:
| To be fair, Apple generally buys small companies and adds
| their capabilities to their toolbelt, rather than growing its
| size through acquisition and Amazon is similar.
|
| Now if you mean LINES of business, then yes, they both
| regularly expand into new lines of business and then dominate
| them, either in skimming the profit (ala Apple) or just
| altogether (Amazon.)
| kansface wrote:
| > Somehow we should discourage large companies and create a
| system that favors more smaller companies
|
| Regulation is strongly, negatively correlated to competition
| within any industry.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| There are many ways governments already encourage or
| discourage certain behaviors, be it taxes, IP laws or other
| regulation. Right now they are written for the winners (big
| companies) but it doesn't have to be that way.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Let's really dig into this. Monopolies are bad, but I
| wouldn't clamp down on the size of companies per se. There is
| a much more clever thing to do:
|
| Managers wanting to seem self-important, and speculation-
| prone owners, are too obsessed with growth and seek to
| maximize revenue. Even maximizing profit is still meh,
| because that still creates some incentive for growth. What we
| really want companies to maximize is _profit / revenue_, or
| _profit / employee_. In other words, productivity for
| productivity's sake.
|
| BTW, co-ops are generally great, and already have the
| incentive to maximize _profit / employee_. Perfect!
|
| But how do we get non-employee owned companies to do the
| same? Tax them based off of revenue rather than profit. Then
| they will only grow if they don't need to burn productivity
| in the process. Yes, capital expenditures no longer have the
| nice side benefit of reducing profit, but the incentive for
| productivity makes up for it.
|
| Also, it's fair because stupid things like income tax are
| effective taxing revenue rather than profit, and finally it's
| also way simpler to levy / harder to evade.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I am all for increased productivity but there are two big
| issues there even putting aside fallacies about efficency
| and growth being bad.
|
| One is that it promotes a skewed specialization on the high
| margin while neglecting the lower margins which may be
| important and essentially by definition are in high demand
| if they got big enough for that economy or scale in the
| first place. It is largely inequitable as it discourages
| the low end from showing up at all.
|
| Two is that it inherently misvalues resources based upon
| what it sees as revenue vs not. It echoes the Soviet
| mistakes in thinking of their workers as serfs with free
| labor and new tools as expensive because they cost revenue.
| Said revenue would continue down the chain as one's gains
| are another's losses that need to rise virally down every
| logistical step leading to needless repetition to "start
| from scratch" with vertical intergration.
| jasonv wrote:
| I get that people use delivery, but I can't even remember the
| last time I got food delivered. I order for pick-up now (you
| know, now)...
|
| No judgement, just one of those "Wow, people do a thing that
| never occurs to me to do..." moments.
|
| (OK, I did get Thistle in SF.)
| asdff wrote:
| The delivery fee is like the price of another entree. I'll
| deliver the damn thing myself.
| waterfowl wrote:
| Seems technology sparing. One of the big things that this crisis
| has made me realize about uber/lyft/airbnb and other disruptive
| entrants in regulated spaces is that they have to have footprint
| in pretty much every market they operate in - their staff scales
| more w/ use than a pure software operation. Explains their
| "bloated" staff counts better than just "oh they're venture
| backed and blitzscaling" imo.
| duxup wrote:
| I wish there was a rundown on what everyone does / what all
| those folks do at those companies.
|
| Not saying they don't need them, it's just that there are a lot
| of "Wait that needs X people?" situations and I wish I knew
| what they did for a given use case.
|
| Accounting?
|
| Does uber need a lot of local reps for regulatory requirements?
|
| I think a lot of "omg what do they do?" is actually curiosity.
| this_user wrote:
| Uber is pretty bloated in the engineering department, because
| they are suffering from NIH syndrome, and had to implement
| custom solutions for everything. They could certainly be much
| leaner in that regard.
| duxup wrote:
| NIH is such a disease.
|
| I work on a SaaS product, we have a really small team.
| Accordingly we can't afford a lot of NIH when it can be
| avoided.
|
| I talked to a semi-competitor and they noted they built a
| thing, we have that thing too ... 24 different devs on that
| project and they do have some extra features ... but it
| took them 9 months of 24 devs (not all full time granted)
| and my boss and I hammered it out in a week.
|
| Our customers are using it, meanwhile they haven't sold it
| to anyone.
|
| Now I'm sure there are advantages to their work but as far
| as what it does ... pretty much the same thing as far as
| core functionality goes :O
|
| The amount of cycles NIH can scoop up is astounding.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| It was interesting that recruitment was called out
| specifically. If 3700 people make up only 14% of the
| workforce that puts their pre-layoff total around 26k. I
| wonder how many recruiters a company of that size needs.
| asdff wrote:
| Uber has a physical building in my neighborhood and I have
| absolutely no clue what possibly happens in there. I've never
| seen activity. It's not even an office buiding, looks like an
| old Karate gym or something.
| duxup wrote:
| Maybe they're really a front for money laundering?
| sida wrote:
| Eng layoff is also coming.
|
| This looks to be just for service workers and contractors (like
| recruiters)
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| Core product will probably be alright, though there may be
| some trimming. Secondary stuff like internal tool teams, BIs,
| etc. will probably catch the brunt of it. If you're an under-
| performer or on a PIP and didn't get cut already I'd start
| looking.
|
| Uber was already a long-term market capture play. They were
| losing money but grabbing the market with the hope that
| they'd be able to get automated cars on the road in time.
| That was kind of sustainable (for a while, anyway), but now
| they're getting even less cash and will likely have to cut
| back to the must-haves.
| luckylion wrote:
| Engineering will likely be hit on the team/project-level, I
| suppose? If you need some amount of tech people to run your
| operation, it's hard to say "well, we're doing fewer rides,
| we can now fire 50% of tech". But they may well be cutting
| back the side-projects and exploratory R&D.
| trollski wrote:
| say bye bye to next years refreshers
| bsimpson wrote:
| Why would you stagger them like that?
|
| Layoffs have got to be terrible for morale. I'd expect you'd
| want to minimize the anxiety by getting all the uncertainty
| out of the way.
| 1MoreThing wrote:
| They have an earnings call tomorrow. Have to show something
| before the call.
| lcfcjs2 wrote:
| The delivery food options are so over-priced, I'd rather just get
| my fat arse off the couch, and pick up my food.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Is the writing on the wall?
|
| First Lyft, then Airbnb, and Uber... are all unicorns taking this
| kind of hit right now?
| leonidasv wrote:
| Not all of them. Unicorns dealing with logistics and e-commerce
| are having a good time, for example.
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| > Is the writing on the wall?
|
| Not yet. The earnings call in Q2 (Not Q1) will be the true
| writing on the wall.
|
| > are all unicorns taking this kind of hit right now?
|
| Not just unicorns but also other startups that are unprofitable
| and have a high burn rate are taking a critical hit.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Which seems to indicate it's not COVID, it's the end of easy
| money that's causing these issues. I'll bet any other
| recession would leave the same footprint as far as crushed
| startups.
| manuelflara wrote:
| Well, it makes a lot of sense that companies that make money in
| hospitality and transport would be taking a big hit. Other
| unicorns like Dropbox, Stripe etc that work pretty much
| exclusively online, however, are doing fine.
| ssharp wrote:
| Stripe is a different situation than Dropbox. Besides being
| predominantly online, Stripe is also directly involved in
| online transactions, including ecommerce.
|
| Shopify, which is 100% ecommerce, just reported record
| numbers.
|
| With quite a bit of retail shutdown as well as many people
| not wanting to leave their home, lots of money is shifting
| online, and these ecommerce enablement companies are going to
| benefit a lot.
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Dropbox cancelled its internship program, so not sure if
| they're doing "fine"
| robjan wrote:
| I doubt Dropbox have seen a significant drop in paying
| subscribers or increase in costs in the wake of the
| coronavirus.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| That may have more to do with the difficulties of hosting
| remote internships though.
| whafro wrote:
| Is that because of financial straits, or because they
| didn't think they could support an impactful and valuable
| internship program remotely? I could certainly understand
| the latter...
| munchbunny wrote:
| I wouldn't think of it as "all unicorns". Lyft, Airbnb, and
| Uber are especially exposed to COVID related issues because
| their revenue sources, like the travel industry, are directly
| affected by all of the COVID countermeasures.
|
| However, I think you can make a pretty good argument that it's
| going to turn into a general economic depression, which means
| pretty much every company is going to take a hit sooner or
| later. Millions more people (in the US) will be struggling to
| make ends meet over the next few months, and that's going to
| have bad ripple effects.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| A lot of us are holding our breaths.
|
| First travel related companies, which is mostly consumer, like
| tourism (flights, ...) and in-person services (house cleaners,
| ...). In parallel, weaker companies in general (enterprise
| startups that raise megarounds wothout megarevenue).
|
| Scarier is 1-2 financial quarters later. No clue yet, but as
| the b2b's relying on b2c's start missing their numbers for more
| than 1qtr, who knows. Can they just reduce by say 10% +
| consumer divisions, or were too exposed?
|
| A big saving grace is, in bigger co's, annual budgets mostly
| passed in dec--feb, so a lot of flex time ahead. So if commerce
| starts thawing , there will be cuts, but not so bad. Long-term,
| whole tourism etc sectors hurt, more about reshuffling for
| everywhere else.
|
| A silver lining is for startups: this is a time of chaos,
| agility, big moves, digital, and soon, m&a. I have a talk on
| Friday w 200+ people registering last minute - in our industry,
| we are lucky to be quite busy, but every week is a surprise
| right now! More importantly, we are volunteering on health
| interventions and people are sick: $ is useful but not #1.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Airbnb is the only unicorn in that list. Lyft and Uber are
| publicly traded corporations now.
| albertshin wrote:
| No - just the ones that focused on physical services. e.g.
| Notion (valued $2b) just raised an addl $50m and no major news
| on layoffs
| newacct583 wrote:
| Not even them. Amazon and Grubhub sell "physical services"
| and seem to be doing great.
|
| I don't know that this is so mysterious at all: Uber and
| Airbnb sold transportation and travel, which are two segments
| disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
|
| It has nothing to do with their "Unicorn" status at all. Uber
| is suffering for the same reason taxi cabs are. Hotels are
| getting pinched along with Airbnb. But taxis and hotels
| suffer in traditional ways, whereas startups show up on HN.
| But there's no "startupness" to this analysis at all.
| rswail wrote:
| Exactly. Not all tech darlings are in the same industry.
|
| The "disrupters" disrupt oligarchic industries with
| stagnant business models. They don't "disrupt" the actual
| industry they're in.
|
| Anything travel related is going to be screwed for the
| foreseeable future. There will be very little international
| travel for at least another 6-12 months. Cross-European
| travel restrictions are already being talked about. The US
| will continue to have community transmission in their
| "open" states. There is no business travel.
|
| Things are moving (food etc). People aren't.
|
| Australia and New Zealand have discussed opening their
| travel and perhaps expanding that to the Pacific nations,
| which have been mostly spared due to isolation.
| eternalban wrote:
| "We're all working for these guys now".
|
| That was the astute remark of the cafe/restaurant owner
| when I asked her how the business is going. (It's a lovely
| cafe/little hole in the wall in Brooklyn selling Brazilian
| fare.)
|
| She first expressed gratitude for having an understanding
| landlord and the arrangements they have made. "And we were
| already set up for delivery unlike some others", she said.
| I remarked "business must be good for these delivery
| services", to which she replied "We're all working for
| these guys now".
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| No, not all Unicorns are taking this kind of hit. Most
| obviously, Zoom was a unicorn before this started and...they
| are doing fine. I'd expect a fair number of enterprise or B2B
| unicorns to be okay but consumer-facing ones to be more likely
| to be hurting. Atlassian just had their earnings call and beat
| targets, for instance.
| hobs wrote:
| Yeah, same things with non-unicorn tech, market downturns are
| traditionally bad for some sectors, but you spend money on
| automation, reduction in staffing costs to get the same thing
| done, and reducing waste - software can help you with that.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I used to work for a B2B fraud detection SaaS provider. I
| haven't heard about any layoffs, I've heard fraud is _up_ ,
| right now, and your fraud prevention vendor is probably low
| on the list of services to cut. That said, I'm sure some of
| their customers were hit hard, and that does ripple down.
| asdff wrote:
| Zoom is doing fine until a proper company like Microsoft
| decides to step up to the plate and deliver an objectively
| better product with more resources supporting it. Sysadmins
| who've flocked to zoom for lack of a better alternative will
| gladly flock back to a company that can better support their
| products.
| rchaud wrote:
| Theyve been trying for nearly a decade with little to no
| luck. Skype was acquired in 2011 and Skype for Business is
| a joke, even in enterprise settings like my workplace.
|
| Everybody has moved on to Zoom, even though SFB is
| available via our org wide Office365 implementation. I do
| use it to send quick messages to coworkers in different
| regional offices, as their online/offline status is a
| useful indicator of their availability since it's connected
| to their outlook Calendar. And the screen sharing feature
| is good, there are never any compatibility issues. But as a
| voice or video call system, it's not great. Zoom has had
| far lower switching costs.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Expected. Uber/Lyft will get through it but have to prepare for a
| though time ahead. I'm pretty optimistic that things will soon
| start getting back to normal, gradually of course. However,
| business travel (and personal) will take a while to recover.
| Companies already canceled all large events for the year. All
| academic conferences this year are remote, etc. Most tech
| employees were already told to keep working remotely until at
| least Sep/Oct. So even with very optimistic projections, things
| will start looking better for these companies only next year.
| tomashertus wrote:
| My prediction is that this crisis will completely change
| business traveling as we know it. It will have extended
| negative impact on the whole travel industry. The US "Business
| Travel" industry is $300B/year industry [1] and I think we will
| see more than 50% drop in coming years. That's 2.5M jobs in
| danger.
|
| 1. https://www.ustravel.org/answersheet
| rswail wrote:
| No one is driving around, other than Uber Eats and deliveries,
| there is nowhere for people to go. There's no one flying, so no
| airport traffic. There's no sports events, there's no
| entertainment districts active.
|
| If anything, Uber will _save_ money by not operating. Their
| cashburn should be substantially lowered if they are not
| subsidizing rides.
| xfitm3 wrote:
| Traffic is heavy in my area.
| komali2 wrote:
| Maybe on San Francisco. Houston for example is opening right
| back up, grandma's health be damned. Traffic is heavy on i45
| again. All those people are driving somewhere.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Well, that's true for where you live right now, which I
| assume it's the US. Many places around the world start
| reopening. US is probably 1-2 months behind, at least some
| states like NY and MA. But obv things won't go back to normal
| immediately.
| karthikb wrote:
| This is older analysis [1] but Uber is profitable on each
| ride in their biggest markets _until_ you deduct the OPEX of
| the main co. The burn of sales, marketing, engineering,
| support, their rider safety team, the driver inspection and
| on boarding centers, leases, etc all continue on with or
| without riders.
|
| [1] https://benjamintseng.com/2019/04/lyft-vs-uber-a-tale-of-
| two...
| jbn wrote:
| isn't it the case that they could decrease their burn rate
| by downsizing sales, marketing, etc.. ?
|
| At the same time, this time presents a unique opportunity
| for their engineering: how often does the market give you
| several months to breathe? Isn't this the time to polish
| the product, to finally fix all that tech debt you
| accumulated?
| karthikb wrote:
| Yes. That's why they're laying people off, and why Uber
| stock is _up_ in after hours trading. Because of these
| layoffs, their margins have actually improved. Doesn't
| make things any better for the people who find themselves
| without a job, though.
| alexeichemenda wrote:
| There is a misconception that Uber loses money on every ride.
| If you look at their SEC filing, it's not how they actually
| work (I won't have time to do that search for you now but
| will try to edit my post later). TL;DR of their SEC filings:
| They're not losing money on every ride, they just have such a
| high baseline of fixed costs (payroll being one) that they
| haven't started being profitable. Doing fewer rides right now
| is actually killing their profitability.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| > I'm pretty optimistic that things will soon start getting
| back to normal
|
| Based on what? Raise your hand if you're excited about either
| driving or being driven by strangers now. I think we're looking
| at several years _post_ -vaccine before one can credibly argue
| that peoples' comfort with that sort of thing will have
| recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Ditto AirBnb.
| pseingatl wrote:
| If the drivers are independent contractors, they can't be laid
| off. They will just not get any more assignments for the moment.
| fredley wrote:
| Is this the same Uber from the story yesterday about putting
| $170m into Lime?
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-reportedly-considering-...
| alexeichemenda wrote:
| Uber burning money on opex and Uber investing in Uber's future
| (through Lime) are two very different ways to spend money.
| Don't expect Uber to stop spending money, it'll simply do that
| differently.
| betaby wrote:
| That's bad. Fired employees now going to bring toxic culture of
| leetcode style interviews to the other companies + NIH on top.
| Before such things were mostly contained in 'FAANGAULURU'
| companies. Now that will planted in more sane companies. Sad
| indeed.
| pb7 wrote:
| What makes Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Uber,
| Lyft, etc not sane? Your envy?
| luckydata wrote:
| Mostly that they confused being successful with being good.
| Once you think everything you do is good because you're
| making money, you end up in pretty ridiculous places before
| you open your eyes and realize there was little correlation
| between what you THOUGHT matters and what actually does.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| What good can be done by that which isn't successful in
| some way? And I including learning new from failure as a
| type of success.
|
| The goals may be noble but proverbially adding body number
| N+1 to the casualty pile by running into the poision gas
| leak doesn't do anybody good. Success is at least a
| precondition for effectual good.
| pb7 wrote:
| What I'm hearing you say is that you know better than
| millions of consumers? Millions of people find value in the
| services that these companies provide and voluntarily
| exchange their disposable income for them. And here you are
| saying they're wrong and you know better. Who are you to
| say these things?
| blobbers wrote:
| He has a point. Millions of people use facebook. Millions
| of people use meth. Neither of things are good for you.
| pb7 wrote:
| How clever! Grandma seeing pics of her grandchildren on
| the other side of the world is totally the same as a meth
| tweaker in Appalachia. Color me convinced.
| tjr225 wrote:
| That is a misrepresentation of what people use facebook
| for. I assume you are fully aware of its negative use
| cases.
| pb7 wrote:
| No, it's not. 2.6 billion people use Facebook every
| month. The vast majority is used for good. The rest falls
| on malicious _people_ , not Facebook. Facebook, like a
| hammer, is a tool. You can use it to build a house or you
| can use it to bash someone's head in. Most people
| consider hammers to be pretty useful.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And to mix metaphors, if all you have is a hammer,
| everything looks like a nail.
| asdff wrote:
| What would you say to a consumer buying a pack of
| cigarettes? Not every business is benevolent. Tobacco
| knows 50% of its consumers will die from its product.
| betaby wrote:
| As I said - toxic culture of leetcode style interview and NIH
| syndrome. On top of that constant scandals
| https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-company-scandals-and-
| co... So my fear that all that now going to be spilled over
| other companies by ex-employees.
| pb7 wrote:
| These top tier engineers from Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft aren't
| going to suddenly downgrade to your average mom-n-pop shop
| because of business-related failures. You have nothing to
| worry about.
| greendave wrote:
| Okay, I give up. Who's the third U?
|
| Also, why all the hate for the National Institute of Health?
| crakhamster01 wrote:
| NIH = Not In House, a common trope in big tech to push for
| using software that's built in-house rather than existing
| solutions.
| jointpdf wrote:
| NIH = "not invented here", I think.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
| colinmhayes wrote:
| National Institutes of Health. It's an organization made up
| of many institutes.
| lhorie wrote:
| Leet code style interviews are something the engineering org
| comes up with. The layoffs mentioned in TFA are in comm ops and
| recruiting orgs.
| cwhiz wrote:
| Why are all the top comments about UberEats or food delivery
| apps? UberEats isn't mentioned in the article at all and this has
| nothing to do with food delivery whatsoever. I thought I was in
| the wrong comment section at first... but nope.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why would a company like Uber employ 26.5k
| employees? Does this number include drivers (which I doubt)?
| robteix wrote:
| Sales, marketing, legal in every market they operate in.
| Remember they don't have to deal only with different countries,
| but different states and municipalities in each of them, each
| with their own laws and ordnances and lobbying needs.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They have a presence in every country they're active; likely a
| big chunk of it is customer services, both for consumers and
| drives. Administration as well, they are handling a lot of
| money after all between a lot of people. See
| https://www.uber.com/us/en/careers/ for what positions they
| hire for.
| manquer wrote:
| Customer service is rarely in-house in these kind of
| companies, The bulk of it is usually done by contractors and
| staffing firms . It is cheaper as they don't have to pay the
| same kind of benefits and of course of-shored
| olivermarks wrote:
| Couple of points
|
| 1 Where we live Whole Foods in store purchases have been cheaper
| than Safeway, who they are trying to put out of business Walmart
| style. Prime home delivery has got very expensive per item (and a
| lot of the items ordered don't show up, shown as out of stock) in
| comparison to buying in store.
|
| 2 100 years ago it was normal in most Western world countries for
| small vendors to deliver food to homes. Milkmen in the UK had
| electric milk floats until the 1980's, delivery bicycles and
| tricycles were very common until the 1960's, and smaller local
| vendors almost invariably offered local delivery. I spoke to an
| Ocardo delivery van guy in February based in Coventry UK who told
| his route went into Wales 90 miles away. In the US we are
| consuming incredible amounts of packaging to buy small items from
| Amazon.
|
| I'm not seeing value in centralizing delivery through large
| entities via casual delivery people unconnected to the businesses
| they are delivering from, I see massive profits for a tiny number
| of people and zero oversight of our private business, what we
| order and from who. I'd like to see a return to local anonymous
| delivery via private arrangements with local vendors.
|
| As a seperate topic I'd also like to know that my every move in
| an Uber/Lyft etc is not being tracked, filed away by God knows
| who and sold.
| sneak wrote:
| > _I 'd like to see a return to local anonymous delivery via
| private arrangements with local vendors._
|
| Building a polished, stable, feature-complete mobile app for
| the two major platforms generally costs about a million dollars
| if you want it to be world class. Of course you can reduce
| scope or polish or pick only one platform, but that's roughly
| what it takes.
|
| Who's going to pay to develop the apps that these local
| businesses use to do online ordering, to sway customers away
| from Uber Eats et al? The reason these organizations are
| achieving market penetration is because their UX is polished.
| Yelp made a whole (predatory) business off of small business
| owners being bad at websites.
|
| I'd love to see it become more decentralized via private
| arrangements, but there are real costs to entering the market
| due to software developers not being cheap. I'd also love to
| see a resurgence in use of the web for such things, but despite
| being able to bookmark websites to one's homescreen, it's still
| not quite at the point where using a website feels like an app,
| and users care a lot about that stuff.
| asdff wrote:
| Do you need a mobile app? Ultimately, your order is given to
| the chef on reciept paper in chronological order, completely
| analog like it's always been with cooking and restaurants.
| Even fast food restaurants just replace the reciept paper
| with a screen emulating reciept paper. You can replicate this
| functionality with some cheap device and an
| orders@yourrestaurant.com address.
| sneak wrote:
| Yes, you need a mobile app. Users won't order from the
| places that don't have a mobile app.
|
| Mobile apps do things that mobile websites can't, such as
| integrated payments and geolocation.
| olivermarks wrote:
| When I was a kid we had a paper book at the local
| greengrocers/general store, paid the bill every two weeks
| with cash.
| priyankc wrote:
| That is still the case in many local grocers in India. We
| pay them once a month. It becomes their local advantage.
| throwaway_1512 wrote:
| I think this is pretty amazing offense move played by the Uber
| CEO.
|
| As we enter the recession, with oil prices at all record low,
| driver earnings are automatically higher and riders are little
| more patient with sobering environment. In this mode, the support
| expectations are less than what they used to be before. There
| isn't a desire for a super prompt response, and since support
| costs are linear (more reps -> faster ticket resolution), it's
| quite wise to reduce the cost of both synchronous (for drivers)
| and asynchronous support agents (for riders).
|
| For the recruiting, since most of hiring is either frozen or
| happens through referrals, outbound hiring is going to be quite
| minimal and you only need recruiting co-ordinators for interview
| scheduling and admin. It doesn't make much sense to have so many
| recruiters in such environment.
|
| For the GH hubs, if psychiatrists are moving online to
| telehealth, Uber green light hubs are way more simpler to be
| executed remotely via Zoom.
|
| I am classifying this as a offense move, because the defense
| would have been to raise more money through debts and so many
| companies are doing it, Uber could have played the same move.
|
| It's pretty scary though, if this does set the precedent for
| other companies, unemployment recovery in HR/Support is going to
| very very slow.
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