[HN Gopher] Third-party food delivery remains an uncertain business ___________________________________________________________________ Third-party food delivery remains an uncertain business Author : XnoiVeX Score : 13 points Date : 2021-03-08 21:52 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.restaurantbusinessonline.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.restaurantbusinessonline.com) | paxys wrote: | - Restaurants have to pay a big chunk of their margin to delivery | apps. | | - Consumers see increased food prices and other misc charges, | greatly inflating their bill (sometimes up to 2x). | | - Drivers get no benefits, have to pay for | fuel/depreciation/taxes, and sometimes end up making less than | minimum wage. | | - Uber Eats, Grubhub, Doordash etc. all lose billions of dollars | every quarter (and are still valued in the tens to hundreds of | billions). | | I genuinely do not understand this industry. | tomdell wrote: | Just another instance of VCs pumping money into a bad but | appealing idea and propping it up indefinitely at the expense | of society at large. This kind of investment really needs to be | more closely regulated - the businesses never even have to be | successful for the investors to profit as long as they go | public in time to leave retail investors holding the bag before | the crash. | acchow wrote: | > "In 60 years," CFO Stuart Levy said on Thursday, "we've never | made a dollar delivering a pizza. We make money on the product, | but we don't make money on the delivery." | | Domino's charges a $5.99 delivery fee whereas UberEats is | charging me a $4.05 service fee plus a $3.49 delivery fee plus $2 | CA Driver Benefits bringing its total fees to $9.54. | kevindong wrote: | The delivery models are fundamentally different. Domino's (and | restaurants like it that have historically had in-house | delivery drivers) is always single source, multi-destination. | | Uber, Grubhub, DoorDash et. al. are multi-source, multi- | destination. | ev1 wrote: | Don't forget that Uber is also charging the restaurants nearly | the same amount. | bobitsaboy wrote: | Unless it's completely dead, every pizza shop runs multiple | orders at once and their drivers are in and out swiftly. The | food stays fairly hot thanks to commercial heat bags. | | For the delivery apps, the driver has to possibly wait in a | line, check it out, then deliver the order a single order at a | time. | TylerE wrote: | Many of the apps will actually batch multiple orders from the | same restaurant to multiple near(ish) dropoffs. | khuey wrote: | Domino's runs a business designed around delivery with a | delivery-friendly product and runs delivery in-house. UberEats | does none of that. | ev1 wrote: | On the other hand, every time I've ordered papajohns I get a | doordash driver, interestingly. | sharemywin wrote: | Here's the thing. Most food doesn't deliver well. So what | delivers well? Pizza, Wings, Subs. and some Chinese food. Who | already has their own delivery drivers usually. And when they do | they run 3 and 4 deliveries at a time. way more efficient. | | Right now the dynamic has a lot of power towards the delivery | services. So, restaurants will subsidize some of the delivery | cost to sell the food. But in a few months a lot of the | restaurants are going to be crowded as F. because there are less | restaurants to compete with. So, most deliveries are going to | cost $7 plus tip or more. and it won't be as good as right from | the restaurant. | | And I see some of the service really pushing their own shadow | stores because they can make profit off that. | [deleted] | hertzrat wrote: | I get 40% or 70% off coupons every week or so from one delivery | app or another (today's was 40% off, last week was 75% iirc with | a different company). How do you compete with businesses willing | to lose so much money to shut down their competition? A lot of | large or well funded companies practice this but does it really | lead to a healthy market? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-08 23:00 UTC)