Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19(techcrunch.com)
techcrunch.com
Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/uber-is-laying-off-3700-as-rides-plummet-due-to-covid-19/
553 comments
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.
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.
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.
UberEats was founded in August 2014, easy to Google.
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?
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
Netherlands hasn't had increased unemployment due to COVID?
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.
No we don't have a full lockdown. Many work from home, some in A/B teams and if your business had to close (cafés, 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).
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).
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.
We'll see the wave of defaults and bankruptcies in a couple of months.
The statistics seem to say otherwise - https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/16/fewer-employed-in-marc...
That report says there was a drop of 0.2% in labor participation in March. That's not a lot.
There's significant demand, DoorDash, Instacart, and others are hiring drivers to meet demand.
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.
And a good excuse to get out of the house for a few minutes.
And an excuse to turn on your car, and prevent the battery from dying.
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.
It's better than nothing, no?
yes, but you don't do it for the battery. You're supposed to do it because it circulates fluids
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.
> 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.
I've not tested the low threshold, but a 20 minute drive seems to be more than sufficient.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Basically all cars monitor battery voltage. Many models even have a dashboard gauge for it. But what is that information useful for, other than diagnostics? Why give it dashboard real estate? Besides, you can always pop open the hood and check the battery with a $12 multimeter.
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.
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.
Nice, but a bit deadly in an enclosed space due to fumes.
At least here a drive to McDonalds results in a 15 minute wait in the drive through, so there's more charging going on than just the trip. In n Out is even worse, their line fills up the Costco parking lot...
And a good excuse to just drive for a bit, if you find it highly enjoyable, like I do.
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.
+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.
Nope, it's seen nearly triple the usual demand in the US.
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.
Dine-in service being illegal has certainly made takeout a popular option around L.A. I do wish more people wore masks to pick up the food inside the restaurant, however.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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
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.
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.
The Uber Eats app is leagues better than the half-assed, buggy Doordash app.
I can’t recall having seen bugs in Doordash, and my wife hasn’t complained about it. So YMMV I guess.
A lot of my friends moved to Doordash since they teamed with Chase Sapphire Reserve for free delivery.
The timing of the CSR deal was amazing (for customers at least). All of my friends have switched to DD too because of it.
Haven’t heard of the deal? How does it work? Using CSR as a payment method?
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.
...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.
Yes you get DashPass for a year or two. Forgot. And then just filter stores by "DashPass". Same with Lyft and Lyft pass.
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.
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.
As much as you can hate a service, please consider the the primary "victims" of a layoff are the workers, not the company itself.
I don't think that any specific individual "deserves" to be punished for having worked at a company like Uber. There might be exceptions, and there might be a few specific individuals that crossed the line, but most people do their work and behave with honesty, and they don't deserve your negativity.
I don't think that any specific individual "deserves" to be punished for having worked at a company like Uber. There might be exceptions, and there might be a few specific individuals that crossed the line, but most people do their work and behave with honesty, and they don't deserve your negativity.
They will find new work and recover.
Uber will not.
Uber will not.
Not necessarily. Unemployment at 20% in the US at the moment; not all of them will find another job.
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.
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.
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.
> The only other app I noticed doing this is Caviar.
DoorDash does have a percentage fee. For me it shows "free" delivery and taxes and fees. Tap on taxes and fees and there's a service fee.
I have a Dashpass, so my service fee is cheaper, but I think it's 11% without the pass based on looking at some of my past orders.
I just tested a couple restaurants that are on both Uber Eats and DoorDash and it's pretty mixed in terms of cost. For some reason the delivery fees are really high on DoorDash for some restaurants, but for others they are "free" and the lower service fee tilts things in their favor.
Sometimes the price of the items themselves is different.
Shop around
DoorDash does have a percentage fee. For me it shows "free" delivery and taxes and fees. Tap on taxes and fees and there's a service fee.
I have a Dashpass, so my service fee is cheaper, but I think it's 11% without the pass based on looking at some of my past orders.
I just tested a couple restaurants that are on both Uber Eats and DoorDash and it's pretty mixed in terms of cost. For some reason the delivery fees are really high on DoorDash for some restaurants, but for others they are "free" and the lower service fee tilts things in their favor.
Sometimes the price of the items themselves is different.
Shop around
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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm surprised to learn that DoorDash doesn't have the resources as they are giving away a lot of coupons.
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.
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.
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I've switched to running my own delivery and just grabbing takeout. Cheaper, faster, warmer food, restaurant gets more money, such a win win.
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.
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.
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.
UberEats app is somewhat buggy too. I also feel they lose out when it comes to overall restaurant selection.
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.
Charging back those orders would be the right thing to do to discourage such behaviour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you get banned from UberEats do they blacklist you from Uber as well?
I’m not banned, just refuse to be treated like garbage.
My guess is not.
My guess is not.
the inverse is true. I am banned from Uber and cannot sign up for UberEats
Appreciate the candor. Can I ask — what does it take to get banned by Uber?
Chargebacks usually result in Uber banning you till you pay them back.
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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.
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.
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.
That depends. When I didn't eat meat, I would definitely mention it if the special preps were skipped. But if it's not an issue of dietary restriction and the waiter brings me soup instead of salad as a side, I'll take the soup. I'm not slowing down the whole production line and getting a line cook chewed out so that I can have salad instead of soup.
I honestly consider it a virtue to complain in such a situation. It might seem like it has negative consequences, but the reason I went to the restaurant and not another is because of an expectation they'll do their job as advertised. Bringing the wrong food is doing their job wrong, and letting it slide is indicating that that's ok. It isn't a big deal that has any major meaningful consequence usually, but just because its a small thing doesn't mean its ok. However I agree in not being too frustrated. If I got a wrong order and the restaurant refused to correct it, I'd try to enjoy whatever I got and then plan on that being the last time I visit that place.
This is really amazing, I never thought that there are people who would accept wrong food in a resturant. Also finding it kind of unbelievable that there are so many people who accept cold food. Is it because right now a lot of us are feeling bad for resturants or is it normal behavior for some people?
If you are in a resturant with friends and get a wrong food, would you tell your friends? I am wondering because I have never seen anyone stay quite if their food order was wrong. Just wondering if it may have happened among my group of friends, and they quitely ate their food.
If Amazon ships you a wrong product, would you keep that instead of what you had ordered?
If you are in a resturant with friends and get a wrong food, would you tell your friends? I am wondering because I have never seen anyone stay quite if their food order was wrong. Just wondering if it may have happened among my group of friends, and they quitely ate their food.
If Amazon ships you a wrong product, would you keep that instead of what you had ordered?
Personally, I've made mistakes in daily normal tasks and know how it feels to have people make an issue out of little things. If the end result is the same (it goes in my gut and doesn't taste horrible), I'm not going to complain unless it's completely wrong. Paying for a $25 steak and getting chicken nuggets would be too far, but messing up a side won't ruin my day. It’s stressful working in a kitchen and I’d rather the workers not have too much trouble so long as the things I got taste fine.
I'm also unable to eat a certain common ingredient in cooking, and it's one that virtually every person on earth loves. I've found that complaining just results in them doubling that ingredient and I have no clue why. I've even gotten visible spit in my food before. Picking that ingredient out myself instead of mentioning it is usually better. I've grown a bit of tolerance for not getting what I want.
If I get a different package, it's probably not serving the same role, so I'll complain.
I'm also unable to eat a certain common ingredient in cooking, and it's one that virtually every person on earth loves. I've found that complaining just results in them doubling that ingredient and I have no clue why. I've even gotten visible spit in my food before. Picking that ingredient out myself instead of mentioning it is usually better. I've grown a bit of tolerance for not getting what I want.
If I get a different package, it's probably not serving the same role, so I'll complain.
In most situations I would probably note the mistake to my friends after I was sure that the waiter was out of ear shot, but not make a big deal out of it. I can think of one person who I wouldn't say anything to until we'd left the restaurant; I know from previous experience that he would bring it up to the waiter.
I think my treatment of the service industry changed significantly in high school, when I actually knew people who were working at restaurants and heard their stories of horrible customers. Having since worked at a restaurant and eaten out with lots of food service people, I believe that food service people tend to treat food service people better than others do (though I've seen exceptions both ways). I'm not trying to say this in a claiming-moral-superiority-via-kindness way, it's just a pattern I think I've seen in the world, and I think it kinda makes sense given the nature of granfalloons.
I think my treatment of the service industry changed significantly in high school, when I actually knew people who were working at restaurants and heard their stories of horrible customers. Having since worked at a restaurant and eaten out with lots of food service people, I believe that food service people tend to treat food service people better than others do (though I've seen exceptions both ways). I'm not trying to say this in a claiming-moral-superiority-via-kindness way, it's just a pattern I think I've seen in the world, and I think it kinda makes sense given the nature of granfalloons.
Isn't it better to point out a mistake so it can be fixed? In my work if I make a mistake I definitely don't want people to ignore it, otherwise how do I get better? You don't have to make a bit fuss or be rude about it, but I don't see anything wrong with pointing out something is wrong. At least it's better than just having a bad experience and not go back next time.
>You don't have to make a bit fuss or be rude about it, but I don't see anything wrong with pointing out something is wrong.
In industries where people tend to treat each other sanely, I would agree. I believe that most kitchens are managed by assholes who chew out their cooks over minor mistakes, so this is a particular case where I don't think I have a choice about how feedback is given. I can be nice to the server, but the only way I can be nice to the cooks is to not make my issue known. If the restaurant industry wants my feedback, the restaurant industry needs to fix this horrible work culture problem. If they could stop sexually assaulting their staff on a regular basis that would be cool, too.
In industries where people tend to treat each other sanely, I would agree. I believe that most kitchens are managed by assholes who chew out their cooks over minor mistakes, so this is a particular case where I don't think I have a choice about how feedback is given. I can be nice to the server, but the only way I can be nice to the cooks is to not make my issue known. If the restaurant industry wants my feedback, the restaurant industry needs to fix this horrible work culture problem. If they could stop sexually assaulting their staff on a regular basis that would be cool, too.
That's a weird stance to me to be honest. If I order something I expect to get that thing. Otherwise why even order? Just sit down and get served something random. Especially if it's a correctable mistake. I mean if the style of cooking is just not to my taste, fine. But if the actual order is wrong, it can be fixed and I expect it to be fixed.
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.
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.
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?
Btw how many times did you heat up and eat the food anyways after getting your refund?
> 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.
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.
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."
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."
> 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.
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.
Here is a tip - If you don't own a microwave, you should not use any delivery app.
If you're fine paying for the company's mistakes yourself that's your problem, but don't expect others to do the same and accept a lower value than was promised and advertised.
No wonder these delivery apps can't turn a profit even with such a high markup. These customers are jerks ruining the ecosystem for everyone else.they just keep hopping from app to app as they get banned issuing chargebacks on food they ordered and ate, because it was cold!
We might need a food credit score to get on these apps soon
We might need a food credit score to get on these apps soon
If they can't turn a profit by reliably delivering the product that was ordered & paid then either they're doing something wrong or it's not a viable business model.
The expectation of regularly getting hot food has been set over the years by the usual pizza delivery services and others. If new competition cannot match that then banning unsatisfied customers will only be a long-term solution if the majority of customers accepts the lower standard, but they are not obliged to do that.
I'm not saying one should always refund the delivery based on any imperfection, but most customers don't do that, otherwise delivery services would never turn a profit. But apparently some people got really bad series of wrong or late deliveries, and that doesn't have to be accepted silently.
The expectation of regularly getting hot food has been set over the years by the usual pizza delivery services and others. If new competition cannot match that then banning unsatisfied customers will only be a long-term solution if the majority of customers accepts the lower standard, but they are not obliged to do that.
I'm not saying one should always refund the delivery based on any imperfection, but most customers don't do that, otherwise delivery services would never turn a profit. But apparently some people got really bad series of wrong or late deliveries, and that doesn't have to be accepted silently.
Pizzas maybe keep the heat longer than eg. a hamburger with Fries or a stake. I mean they are quite moist. I mean if you want hot food pizzas, soup etc. is probably what you can get unless the driver has a heater.
Serving a certain class of customers is definitely not a viable business model unless these customers are charged 100% markup.
I think these customers should just go pick up the food themselves, the rest of us can use the app. Department stores also ban problematic customers who return too many items, so this is not a new concept.
I think these customers should just go pick up the food themselves, the rest of us can use the app. Department stores also ban problematic customers who return too many items, so this is not a new concept.
I feel that both you and the commenter you've been arguing with are making mostly reasonable statements. I also think that for this particular industry you're probably part of the 20% of customers who cause 80% of the problems, and that this is why you're being booted from these platforms. Note that I have not made any statements about the ethics of the platforms' advertising.
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> 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
In my experience, the platforms are doing the exact opposite. A lot of times the driver is there, the food is there, and the driver is being told to wait for more orders. I've called and asked before on some of the platforms where you have the phone number.
That said, I've never seen someone bothered by having to put some delivery food in the microwave, though. It's sort of expected. About the only case where I've seen that is for pizza, and pizza places have their own drivers anyway.
So it's probably a good bet for the platform doing what they do. If you can serve twice as many customers this way, and have to ban 1/5 customers who have no microwave, you'd still come out ahead as a business.
In my experience, the platforms are doing the exact opposite. A lot of times the driver is there, the food is there, and the driver is being told to wait for more orders. I've called and asked before on some of the platforms where you have the phone number.
That said, I've never seen someone bothered by having to put some delivery food in the microwave, though. It's sort of expected. About the only case where I've seen that is for pizza, and pizza places have their own drivers anyway.
So it's probably a good bet for the platform doing what they do. If you can serve twice as many customers this way, and have to ban 1/5 customers who have no microwave, you'd still come out ahead as a business.
> keeping pizzas vertically in their delivery backpack
This is a failstate in the recent video game Death Stranding, which yes, sometimes involves pizza delivery.
This is a failstate in the recent video game Death Stranding, which yes, sometimes involves pizza delivery.
This is worst kind of argument one makes. You are constructing it in a manner that only serves to make the other person look like a jerk while the reality is much more nuanced.
Without any prior knowledge of the actors involved you assign all good traits to one side; the restaurant created a hot meal and the delivery person really tried their best to deliver on time, and then assign bad traits to the customer, they were unreasonable and should be more understanding.
There are people who don't do the right thing and if I am paying for something then I expect to receive what I paid for. You don't know me. Maybe I am struggling financially and the meal I ordered was a once in month treat for my wife and children and we can't afford the luxury of eating out. Maybe we were all looking forward to a family dinner. Maybe the restaurant fucked up. Maybe the driver is running multiple delivery apps and making a killing in these while the orders go cold.
So you can just fuck off.
Without any prior knowledge of the actors involved you assign all good traits to one side; the restaurant created a hot meal and the delivery person really tried their best to deliver on time, and then assign bad traits to the customer, they were unreasonable and should be more understanding.
There are people who don't do the right thing and if I am paying for something then I expect to receive what I paid for. You don't know me. Maybe I am struggling financially and the meal I ordered was a once in month treat for my wife and children and we can't afford the luxury of eating out. Maybe we were all looking forward to a family dinner. Maybe the restaurant fucked up. Maybe the driver is running multiple delivery apps and making a killing in these while the orders go cold.
So you can just fuck off.
His argument is faulty, but the fact of the matter is that Deliveroo owns the relationship with the customer. It's ultimately Deliveroo's job to make sure good food shows up in the right place at the right time. Failing that in a competitive market they will likely lose customers.
There's lots of examples in this thread and elsewhere that frankly most of these delivery companies aren't great at what they do.
Additionally a lot of them are shitty to their vendors (restaurants) - the post that spawned this whole debate being a perfect example. It's not necessarily Deliveroo's job to treat their vendors like royalty, but we give Walmart plenty of well deserved shit for abusing its vendors, no reason Deliveroo should be immune to criticism.
There's lots of examples in this thread and elsewhere that frankly most of these delivery companies aren't great at what they do.
Additionally a lot of them are shitty to their vendors (restaurants) - the post that spawned this whole debate being a perfect example. It's not necessarily Deliveroo's job to treat their vendors like royalty, but we give Walmart plenty of well deserved shit for abusing its vendors, no reason Deliveroo should be immune to criticism.
This viewpoint is bizarre to me.
I get that it's difficult to reliably deliver food from restaurant to apartment in a time which is short enough that the food is still hot (or still frozen, or whatever). But I notice that some restaurants from which I order on Seamless are always correct, always hot, and typically delivered within 20-25 minutes. Others are hit or miss with some or all of those considerations. If some restaurants always get this right, it's hard to imagine that the fault lies with Seamless or gambling.
I get that it's difficult to reliably deliver food from restaurant to apartment in a time which is short enough that the food is still hot (or still frozen, or whatever). But I notice that some restaurants from which I order on Seamless are always correct, always hot, and typically delivered within 20-25 minutes. Others are hit or miss with some or all of those considerations. If some restaurants always get this right, it's hard to imagine that the fault lies with Seamless or gambling.
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.
How is it even possible to cancel an order hours after it's been delivered?
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.
Because like all customer-focused apps, they are focused on customer retention and satisfaction. It’s much better to let customers cancel orders or complain after the fact and just refund their money, than it is to fight with them and have them leave a bad review - or worse, have them request a chargeback, too many of which will get you canceled from your card processor.
Meanwhile, the delivery platforms just push the cost back to the restaurants.
If restaurants had the guts to cancel their service with the delivery platforms, they could squeeze them into doing a better job, but at this time no restaurant can afford not to participate in the delivery economy, at any cost.
Reminds me about an article I read years and years ago about a company that was put out of business by Wal-Mart because Walmart would take almost anything back as a return and just forward it back to the company for a refund. They described getting tractor trailer loads back with empty boxes, boxes with most of the pieces missing, etc - all debited from their sales.
Meanwhile, the delivery platforms just push the cost back to the restaurants.
If restaurants had the guts to cancel their service with the delivery platforms, they could squeeze them into doing a better job, but at this time no restaurant can afford not to participate in the delivery economy, at any cost.
Reminds me about an article I read years and years ago about a company that was put out of business by Wal-Mart because Walmart would take almost anything back as a return and just forward it back to the company for a refund. They described getting tractor trailer loads back with empty boxes, boxes with most of the pieces missing, etc - all debited from their sales.
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Hot food that arrives cold is the same thing as cold food that warmed up. I wouldn’t expect to pay for late food that arrives cold any more than I’d be expected to pay for a melted ice cream cone.
I don't think you can make excuses for UberEats or whatever. Food delivery is not a new problem. I have been ordering pizza and Chinese food for more than 2 decades. It is very rare when we received cold pizza. And most of the time when it happened resturants proactively refunded us or gave coupons for another time.
It is kind of amazing how many times UberEats, GrubHub, etc deliver cold food. Not just for me but vast majority of my friends report same thing.
As a consumer, I rather get refund so bad companies can go bankrupt before becoming too big to fail.
It is kind of amazing how many times UberEats, GrubHub, etc deliver cold food. Not just for me but vast majority of my friends report same thing.
As a consumer, I rather get refund so bad companies can go bankrupt before becoming too big to fail.
I've had a very high number of failures to deliver in a timely manner, and several times when I wasn't delivered anything at all.
Twice, I have been left food that I did not order. Mind you, my house number is plainly visible in three locations from the street. They didn't even ring the doorbell. Just dropped it off on the porch and left.
These problems span across all delivery services.
I don't know who does the delivery for groceries, but I am at an almost 100% failure rate for drivers to follow simple directions. "Leave the order by the large garage door" is all it says. I've only had ONE driver do that.
I've given up on food delivery except for the pizza place that has its own drivers.
As far as I am concerned, all these services can go out of business.
Twice, I have been left food that I did not order. Mind you, my house number is plainly visible in three locations from the street. They didn't even ring the doorbell. Just dropped it off on the porch and left.
These problems span across all delivery services.
I don't know who does the delivery for groceries, but I am at an almost 100% failure rate for drivers to follow simple directions. "Leave the order by the large garage door" is all it says. I've only had ONE driver do that.
I've given up on food delivery except for the pizza place that has its own drivers.
As far as I am concerned, all these services can go out of business.
I too enjoy a soggy burrito and think anyone who complains about being glopp is unreasonable.
I've never had cold food arrive when ordering directly from a restaurant.
If the food arrives cold, it's the platform's fault. If the platform can't figure out how to get food to arrive warm, its providing, in one dimension, a worse service than you would get without the platform.
If the food arrives cold, it's the platform's fault. If the platform can't figure out how to get food to arrive warm, its providing, in one dimension, a worse service than you would get without the platform.
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.
> Maybe it's because I don't tip
I think that without tipping, you can expect your food to be delivered cold and late every order.
I think that without tipping, you can expect your food to be delivered cold and late every order.
The drivers don't know in advance what tip they're getting, do they? Doesn't seem to be the case on UberEats, anyway. Failure to tip will eventually result in fewer available drivers and later/colder deliveries, but it's a statistical thing rather than an individual consequence.
I live out in the middle of nowhere and consider myself lucky that they deliver at all, so if the food is a bit on the cold side I don't normally take it out on the driver. I've had other complaints with UberEats, but overall the service works about as well as can be expected.
I live out in the middle of nowhere and consider myself lucky that they deliver at all, so if the food is a bit on the cold side I don't normally take it out on the driver. I've had other complaints with UberEats, but overall the service works about as well as can be expected.
I have tried tipping, then removing the tip after the delivery, same stuff.
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.
Favor is awesome, I used them a lot when they were a startup. HEB made a really good decision in acquiring them.
Totally had the same experience. Ordered Starbucks and they forgot the coffee. Was 3rd order in a row that was messed up. It's a cluster of mismanagement over there.
I've always wondered what happens if you take a bigco like Ubereats to small claims court over issues like this.
You waste your time, and small claims throws out your case because you agreed to arbitration with UberEats.
They usually don't show up and you get a default judgement
UberEats's customer service, even prior to this has been awful.
While I'd prefer not to use UberEats, they've basically become the only option for a large number of restaurants around.
I've ordered food from a variety of places, including large internationally recognised chains.
About 20% of orders have something wrong. Sometimes it's minor things. Othertimes it's significant - like drinks and dishes missing.
So, I report them to Uber, and get a refund.
However now I get these snarky customer service form emails a few days later that gives these snide tips like "To better improve your delivery experience - make sure to be ready to collect your order promptly" followed by a semi-veiled threats of "We take fraud seriously and will terminate any suspicious accounts"
I'd be more than happy to submit photos or videos showing that the delivery driver gave me one bag when it's marked "1 of 2", or what items were actually in the bag - but no, just shit customer service.
e: I forgot to add - there's also zero way to contact them other than for a specific order.
I wanted to report to them a number of fake restaurants that someone is running out of their apartment. (The restaurant address is an actual residential apartment building, there's no commercial kitchen) There's no way to do that.
While I'd prefer not to use UberEats, they've basically become the only option for a large number of restaurants around.
I've ordered food from a variety of places, including large internationally recognised chains.
About 20% of orders have something wrong. Sometimes it's minor things. Othertimes it's significant - like drinks and dishes missing.
So, I report them to Uber, and get a refund.
However now I get these snarky customer service form emails a few days later that gives these snide tips like "To better improve your delivery experience - make sure to be ready to collect your order promptly" followed by a semi-veiled threats of "We take fraud seriously and will terminate any suspicious accounts"
I'd be more than happy to submit photos or videos showing that the delivery driver gave me one bag when it's marked "1 of 2", or what items were actually in the bag - but no, just shit customer service.
e: I forgot to add - there's also zero way to contact them other than for a specific order.
I wanted to report to them a number of fake restaurants that someone is running out of their apartment. (The restaurant address is an actual residential apartment building, there's no commercial kitchen) There's no way to do that.
I hear you. I hosted an event for one of Uber’s earliest investors and UberEats f@cked up the order and showed up 90 mins late. I even called the restaurant a day in advance. Lots of finer pointing. Never trust them again.
This whole food delivery app business is a rip off for small restaurant owners.
The owners of a few restaurants I frequent all seem to hate these apps for how much they charge them. I heard approximately 30-40%. Sure they do bring in customers specially now but 30-40% seems too high if you consider what it costs the apps.
The owners of a few restaurants I frequent all seem to hate these apps for how much they charge them. I heard approximately 30-40%. Sure they do bring in customers specially now but 30-40% seems too high if you consider what it costs the apps.
How does it compare to cost of hiring a web guy to build out an order system (admittedly, a one time expense) and a full time delivery guy? Pizza places have been doing it for ages, so can’t be that prohibitive.
That you have your own website , app or accept request by phone doesn’t matter, the customers already have Uber or deliveroo app installed with their payment details saved and will use that because is more convenient than signup in another site.
What those apps charge to the restaurant is the money they expend on advertising to have those customers on first place. And the more money you expend on them, more money they will have to outbid you on marketing.
If you are searching on google for any place , you will see almost always advertising from those platforms before the owners site, just like booking does with the hotels, and like that the solution is to give some perks to people that reserve on your own site with reward cards or similar things, and also expend your own money on advertising instead of letting those platforms profit from you.
What those apps charge to the restaurant is the money they expend on advertising to have those customers on first place. And the more money you expend on them, more money they will have to outbid you on marketing.
If you are searching on google for any place , you will see almost always advertising from those platforms before the owners site, just like booking does with the hotels, and like that the solution is to give some perks to people that reserve on your own site with reward cards or similar things, and also expend your own money on advertising instead of letting those platforms profit from you.
> That you have your own website , app or accept request by phone doesn’t matter, the customers already have Uber or deliveroo app installed
I dunno, one rarely wants just some generic burger/sandwich/pizza/sushi, brand loyalty in restaurant business tends to be strong.
I might be in the minority, but I usually start off with the restaurant Web site, and then just end up using whatever takeout/delivery app they link to.
I dunno, one rarely wants just some generic burger/sandwich/pizza/sushi, brand loyalty in restaurant business tends to be strong.
I might be in the minority, but I usually start off with the restaurant Web site, and then just end up using whatever takeout/delivery app they link to.
UberEats losing market share to DoorDash is indicative of UberEats leadership failure. DoorDash engineering is bad, DoorDash policies are bad, DoorDash feeds their PR machine often.
Additionally, UE software is bloated and user-hostile compared to DD and GH.
Additionally, UE software is bloated and user-hostile compared to DD and GH.
The problem? Pricey. The business model doesnt work.
My UberEats experience in west Los Angeles during quarantine has been perfect. When traffic is bad there are more delivery problems (and customer service is truly the worst ever) but recently it's been amazing.
Fees are about to be a big issue though -- to the end user UberEats is a full $2.99 more expensive than Postmates for < $15 subtotal orders. I don't know if that means Postmates is taking an extra $2.99 from the restaurant for those orders.
Either way though, the % of restaurants' orders going through delivery services surely just went up dramatically so those fees are now going to make a bigger impact, I'm sure we'll see the ecosystem change soon.
Fees are about to be a big issue though -- to the end user UberEats is a full $2.99 more expensive than Postmates for < $15 subtotal orders. I don't know if that means Postmates is taking an extra $2.99 from the restaurant for those orders.
Either way though, the % of restaurants' orders going through delivery services surely just went up dramatically so those fees are now going to make a bigger impact, I'm sure we'll see the ecosystem change soon.
I tried to order food with DoorDash. I couldn't figure out how to use the app. I entered my address and selected a nearby restaurant. I picked a couple things on the menu and added them to my order. Never was able to figure out what to do from there. There didn't seem to be a cart or order or anything and there was no call to action. I gave up after a few minutes and deleted the app.
A “view cart” button appears at the bottom of the screen when I add an item to my order (iOS).
Yes I saw that icon, nothing ever showed up there. No badge and when I touched it I never saw what I had already added. I started by tapping the first restaurant they suggested. I viewed the menu, picked an item and set the quantity and added it to cart. Then I picked another item and did the same. I figured that would feed me so I tried to order it. No evidence of any previous interaction was discernible. The cart was empty. Any time I touched the cart icon I just ended up back on the main page of the app and had to pick my restaurant again.
I thought maybe I was picking a restaurant "outside of my delivery range" so I made sure location services were on. No change. The first thing it does is ask for an address, I shouldn't even have to give it my GPS coordinates but hey, who would test that right? When I enter the address I shouldn't even be able to see restaurants that don't deliver to me so I doubt that was the problem.
It just simply did not work at all. I'm not dumb, I tried to give them my money and couldn't figure it out, maybe I finally got old. Maybe I got hit by a cosmic ray.
I can call the local pizza place and submit a delivery order in under 11 seconds:
"Hello mulmen, would you like to hear our specials?" ~2s
"No, thanks" ~1s
"Ok, would you like to repeat your last order?" ~2s
"Yes" <1s
"Is the card ending in 1234 still valid?" ~2s
"Yes" <1s
"Thanks, we will be at 1234 Main St #1 in 45 minutes." ~3s
<click>
Seriously, I timed it. 11 seconds is my best. They have a local call center for their many locations so they pick up almost immediately. Order takers only take orders. I can place an order on their webpage (they don't have an app, why would they?) in under a minute.
Pickup orders from other nearby spots is similar.
I don't understand the value these delivery services supposedly offer.
I thought maybe I was picking a restaurant "outside of my delivery range" so I made sure location services were on. No change. The first thing it does is ask for an address, I shouldn't even have to give it my GPS coordinates but hey, who would test that right? When I enter the address I shouldn't even be able to see restaurants that don't deliver to me so I doubt that was the problem.
It just simply did not work at all. I'm not dumb, I tried to give them my money and couldn't figure it out, maybe I finally got old. Maybe I got hit by a cosmic ray.
I can call the local pizza place and submit a delivery order in under 11 seconds:
"Hello mulmen, would you like to hear our specials?" ~2s
"No, thanks" ~1s
"Ok, would you like to repeat your last order?" ~2s
"Yes" <1s
"Is the card ending in 1234 still valid?" ~2s
"Yes" <1s
"Thanks, we will be at 1234 Main St #1 in 45 minutes." ~3s
<click>
Seriously, I timed it. 11 seconds is my best. They have a local call center for their many locations so they pick up almost immediately. Order takers only take orders. I can place an order on their webpage (they don't have an app, why would they?) in under a minute.
Pickup orders from other nearby spots is similar.
I don't understand the value these delivery services supposedly offer.
Pizza and Chinese restaurants are famous for efficient phone ordering.
Growing up I could get a pizza ordered in 3 seconds flat.
Finish dialing... doesn’t even ring once. “George’s Pizza”. “Large cheese pickup!” “Ok 10 minutes.” <click>
Now try ordering from Cheesecake Factory. They pickup, and then read a script just to then put you on hold, where you might wait for several minutes before they pickup and make you recite name, phone number (Interrupting you to repeat each segment back as you are saying it), ask you a half dozen questions, finally let you order, insist on repeating it all back to you, etc.
I think it’s funny you’d think a digital menu and checkout cart would increase accuracy. I guess you just can’t win either way.
Growing up I could get a pizza ordered in 3 seconds flat.
Finish dialing... doesn’t even ring once. “George’s Pizza”. “Large cheese pickup!” “Ok 10 minutes.” <click>
Now try ordering from Cheesecake Factory. They pickup, and then read a script just to then put you on hold, where you might wait for several minutes before they pickup and make you recite name, phone number (Interrupting you to repeat each segment back as you are saying it), ask you a half dozen questions, finally let you order, insist on repeating it all back to you, etc.
I think it’s funny you’d think a digital menu and checkout cart would increase accuracy. I guess you just can’t win either way.
The family owned Mexican restaurant across the street is really good too. Something something small business something.
There's another active thread at the moment: "Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life" [1].
I didn't think I had an answer but now I do:
"This isn't a technology problem."
All our shiny bleeding edge hyper-connected disruptive technology can't hold a candle to the level of service pizza shops and Chinese restaurants have been delivering for basically always. Using a pen and paper. Or maybe just shouting! Best we can offer is "Alexa repeat my pizza order" but is that really even better? It's almost exactly the same experience for the consumer but there's some surprising long term consequence like the pizza shop can no longer make ends meet.
I continue to be happy placing takeout orders over the phone like a caveman. A tech company that provides that level of service to their customers will go very far indeed.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092657
There's another active thread at the moment: "Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life" [1].
I didn't think I had an answer but now I do:
"This isn't a technology problem."
All our shiny bleeding edge hyper-connected disruptive technology can't hold a candle to the level of service pizza shops and Chinese restaurants have been delivering for basically always. Using a pen and paper. Or maybe just shouting! Best we can offer is "Alexa repeat my pizza order" but is that really even better? It's almost exactly the same experience for the consumer but there's some surprising long term consequence like the pizza shop can no longer make ends meet.
I continue to be happy placing takeout orders over the phone like a caveman. A tech company that provides that level of service to their customers will go very far indeed.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092657
In general I would agree with you. My sense is that UberEats can't possibly absorb the huge loss of business of Uber's "main" product line. I also feel that Uber's problems will persist for at least 15-18 months, if not for longer.
In this case, you still need to considerably cut your workforce, to be able to use that cash for a "very long" rainy day.
Just IMHO. I can be completely wrong on all accounts.
In this case, you still need to considerably cut your workforce, to be able to use that cash for a "very long" rainy day.
Just IMHO. I can be completely wrong on all accounts.
Doordash seems to have restaurant delivery reasonably well worked out. I've had minor problems with Doordash, and customer service fixes them. You get to see where the delivery person is on a map.
Uber isn't that good when they can't afford to operate at a loss. Their real edge was too much money from Softbank.
Uber isn't that good when they can't afford to operate at a loss. Their real edge was too much money from Softbank.
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.
> 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).
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).
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
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.
Wasn't the Borg devastated by a virus?
TNG was such a good show.
Who's "we"? Uber?
Society, I imagine
We as in the audience here, I think. The tech industry.
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.
Herd immunity is a questionable strategy, so I guess you could say... resistance is futile.
XD
XD
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The East India company is gone, the railroads and US steel aren’t what they once were. And this age shall pass too.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
All that, but no Smartwheel skateboards yet.
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.
>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...
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...
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.)
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.)
> 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.
Regulation is strongly, negatively correlated to competition within any industry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
To be fair, the Borg got beat by a unified, centralized and streamlined society.
>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.
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.
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.
Did Starfleet ever build two ships to the same design?
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.
As an example:
https://youtu.be/CUQ2nmKNH3Y?t=79
Plenty of Galaxies, Excelsiors, and Mirandas (or maybe variants like Soyuz) flying around.
https://youtu.be/CUQ2nmKNH3Y?t=79
Plenty of Galaxies, Excelsiors, and Mirandas (or maybe variants like Soyuz) flying around.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
You will adapt to service us. You're going to become a drone. Resistance is futile.
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?
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?
I'm not going to bet against lower prices, but I am going to bet on low-overhead validation and fault-tolerance going forward.
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)
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)
Unironically huge fan of this phrasing: "It's not like I'm obsessed, I just watch it 24/7"
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.
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.
Good, we wouldn't want any nerds at this site.
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.
Eng layoff is also coming.
This looks to be just for service workers and contractors (like recruiters)
This looks to be just for service workers and contractors (like recruiters)
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.
say bye bye to next years refreshers
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.
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.
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.
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.
They have an earnings call tomorrow. Have to show something before the call.
Friends at Uber have many positive things to say about the company, but all of them have been very clear that a lot of the management layers are populated by people with limited experience. Most likely the engineering lay-off couldn’t get done in time for earnings.
You would not stagger it like that.
My suspicion is that the lay off got leaked and it forced the company’s hand. They are probably scrambling to get everything finalized ASAP.
And eng lay-off requires more planning than customer support lay-off
My suspicion is that the lay off got leaked and it forced the company’s hand. They are probably scrambling to get everything finalized ASAP.
And eng lay-off requires more planning than customer support lay-off
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is the writing on the wall?
First Lyft, then Airbnb, and Uber... are all unicorns taking this kind of hit right now?
First Lyft, then Airbnb, and Uber... are all unicorns taking this kind of hit right now?
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.
Dropbox cancelled its internship program, so not sure if they're doing "fine"
That may have more to do with the difficulties of hosting remote internships though.
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...
I doubt Dropbox have seen a significant drop in paying subscribers or increase in costs in the wake of the coronavirus.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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".
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".
Airbnb is the only unicorn in that list. Lyft and Uber are publicly traded corporations now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[deleted]
> 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.
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.
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.
Lots of tech depends on ad revenue, but that's way down because nobody can buy (or make) nonessential goods during the coronavirus lockdown.
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.
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.
Not all of them. Unicorns dealing with logistics and e-commerce are having a good time, for example.
Does this signal the start of something like a recession in tech?
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-...
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/millions-of-lost-jobs-may-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
you mean more than the 50% drop in uber’s market cap since feb?
I just looked and Uber is still worth $47 billion. That seems absurd to me.
At least they don't have to fire 1 million.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg
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.
If you drive taxis, like Uber, then you're perhaps not going to do well.
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...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/121422743/microsofts-signif...
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.
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.
> 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.
Do drivers count as employees in states like California, but as independent contractors elsewhere? The answer would provide greater context to these numbers.
You can bet that Uber is not counting them as employees, as they're still fighting over AB5.
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...
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.
This is definitely a wizard of oz moment for many "tech" companies.
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.
can you explain what a "wizard of oz" moment means?
It’s a reference to the man behind the curtain being smaller and less impressive than what their original image made them look like.
I suppose it's the moment when Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal the great wizard is merely a man operating a machine.
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.
It means that something is revealed to be fundamentally weaker than it appears.
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
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
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?
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.
- 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]
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.
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.
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.
> - 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/
> 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.
...
> - 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/
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...
[0] https://stratechery.com/2019/neither-and-new-lessons-from-ub...
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
If anything, Uber will save money by not operating. Their cashburn should be substantially lowered if they are not subsidizing rides.
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.
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.
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...
[1] https://benjamintseng.com/2019/04/lyft-vs-uber-a-tale-of-two...
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?
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?
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.
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.
Traffic is heavy in my area.
> 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.
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.
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
1. https://www.ustravel.org/answersheet
Is this the same Uber from the story yesterday about putting $170m into Lime?
https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-reportedly-considering-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-reportedly-considering-...
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.
So now I can ride my bicycle
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...
The SEC filing: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/0001...
betaby(3)
Out of curiosity, why would a company like Uber employ 26.5k employees? Does this number include drivers (which I doubt)?
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.
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
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
>>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.
> 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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Do you have a source?
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.
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.
If they're that desperate, the company could already lower the wages.
Wages are at the legal minimum.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
In London McDonalds, Nando's etc were all closed, even most restaurants in China Town are closed. Which food outlets are you referring too?
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.
Need to go off on a tangent to reply.
Canada is showering it's unemployed citizens with something similar to $2000 per month unemployment benefits.
That's $12.5 per hr for not working, while (minimum wage in Ontario) is $14 per hr.
Why would anyone work to get $1.5 per hr extra? When you can stay home and get the free money? (in fact other provinces, $12.5 per hr is above minimum wage).
Having something like this for a month or two was probably fine, but right now Canada is paying it's residents to not work while grocery stores / warehouses are not finding enough workers.
I was tilting positive of UBI until I saw the effects of this $2K per month scheme in Canada.
To immediately solve the problem, Canada can continue giving $2K per month to those who are unemployed, but working in a necessary occupation (say grocery stores, deliveries, warehouses) wouldn't disqualify them from getting the $2K, with a caveat that there's no minimum wage. At that point it's a two sided bidding with grocery stores going lower and workers increasing their bids. At some rate (say $5 per hr or $10 per hr) there's a right balance for supply/demand of labor.
Canada is showering it's unemployed citizens with something similar to $2000 per month unemployment benefits.
That's $12.5 per hr for not working, while (minimum wage in Ontario) is $14 per hr.
Why would anyone work to get $1.5 per hr extra? When you can stay home and get the free money? (in fact other provinces, $12.5 per hr is above minimum wage).
Having something like this for a month or two was probably fine, but right now Canada is paying it's residents to not work while grocery stores / warehouses are not finding enough workers.
I was tilting positive of UBI until I saw the effects of this $2K per month scheme in Canada.
To immediately solve the problem, Canada can continue giving $2K per month to those who are unemployed, but working in a necessary occupation (say grocery stores, deliveries, warehouses) wouldn't disqualify them from getting the $2K, with a caveat that there's no minimum wage. At that point it's a two sided bidding with grocery stores going lower and workers increasing their bids. At some rate (say $5 per hr or $10 per hr) there's a right balance for supply/demand of labor.
Not only is it cheaper to use Ritual. The rewards mean free food.
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.
I’ve never used the group ordering or pickup for friends features. I just want to pickup my food without waiting in line.
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.
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?
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?
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%.
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.
the only answer I can think of is that they don't want the customer to realize the true cost of delivery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
15% is around how much restaurants budget for front of house staff, so it would be acceptable at typical prices.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly I don't expect delivery services to survive, and I don't think it would be a tragedy if they ceased to exist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At some point we need to fix societal issues instead of worrying that not consuming goods or services is harmful.
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.
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.
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.
If something is unprofitable, that is a signal that resources are being misallocated.
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.
If you want to create an echo chamber, this is how you do it.
Everything beyond the most rudimentary food, clothing, and shelter is a luxury. It's not very insightful to stick your nose in the air and loftily proclaim something a "luxury," as if your opinion should be taken into account in the boardrooms and executive suites at Uber.
>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.
This is the comment I was responding to. Someone was discussing how much it costs to deliver and why people should be willing to pay more than 5% fees. And my comment that it's a luxury on top of a luxury is nothing more than an explanation of why people aren't willing to pay more.
>It's not very insightful to stick your nose in the air and loftily proclaim
Honestly I'm not sure why you took a comment calling food delivery a luxury so personally, I'm sorry it offended you.
>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.
This is the comment I was responding to. Someone was discussing how much it costs to deliver and why people should be willing to pay more than 5% fees. And my comment that it's a luxury on top of a luxury is nothing more than an explanation of why people aren't willing to pay more.
>It's not very insightful to stick your nose in the air and loftily proclaim
Honestly I'm not sure why you took a comment calling food delivery a luxury so personally, I'm sorry it offended you.
It didn't offend me, no worries. But I do use these services quite a bit, I appreciate the role of the driver (and tip accordingly), and I would prefer that the companies in question survive and prosper.
Is it a "tragedy" if food delivery services cease to exist? Not to me personally, but it would be an inconvenience, and likely something much more serious to the people who work there and to those who drive for them. It's unlikely that those people appreciate being dismissed as unnecessary. In a capitalist society, the fact that they are a luxury doesn't have any bearing on whether they deserve to earn a living. I'm sure you indulge in more than a few luxuries yourself, just not this particular one, and that's OK.
(My comment was) nothing more than an explanation of why people aren't willing to pay more.
Except you went a bit further than that, didn't you?
Honestly I don't expect delivery services to survive, and I don't think it would be a tragedy if they ceased to exist.
You were probably downvoted for appearing insensitive. It happens. Take the 'L' and move on. I usually shoot for a long-term baseline of zero, myself, because I agree with your criticism that HN tends to sound like an echo chamber.
Is it a "tragedy" if food delivery services cease to exist? Not to me personally, but it would be an inconvenience, and likely something much more serious to the people who work there and to those who drive for them. It's unlikely that those people appreciate being dismissed as unnecessary. In a capitalist society, the fact that they are a luxury doesn't have any bearing on whether they deserve to earn a living. I'm sure you indulge in more than a few luxuries yourself, just not this particular one, and that's OK.
(My comment was) nothing more than an explanation of why people aren't willing to pay more.
Except you went a bit further than that, didn't you?
Honestly I don't expect delivery services to survive, and I don't think it would be a tragedy if they ceased to exist.
You were probably downvoted for appearing insensitive. It happens. Take the 'L' and move on. I usually shoot for a long-term baseline of zero, myself, because I agree with your criticism that HN tends to sound like an echo chamber.
No one expects them to survive. The business model is unsustainable on unit economy basis. Uber has always lived on borrowed time.
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Weird somehow many restaurants did and do have their own delivery service. I have heard many pizza places do this
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.
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).
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
Yes, and 30% is way higher than internal FOH or driver labour cost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was actually the first Uber Eats business model, sadly I can't find a source. They'd have a restaurant cook a couple hundred meals in bulk and then the drivers would bulk deliver them.
Letting customers order from restaurants they already know is obviously a bit easier to scale.
Letting customers order from restaurants they already know is obviously a bit easier to scale.
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.
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.
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.
Are you sure Dominos actually profits on the delivery itself, or do they just offer it at/below cost to sell more pizzas?
Delivery is profitable for dominos. But the real money, well that is in garlic bread.
all restaurant business is just a ploy to get people to buy soda
Alcohol and coffee are also helpful.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
Correction: Dominos not Pizza Hut.
> 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."
Maybe we'll eventually learn that artificially forcing business models to run at accelerated rates creates self-fulfilling prophecies of "fail fast."
Except for dozens of counter examples that make up for literally multiple trillions of dollars in market capitalization.
And how much money has been squandered funding the startups that do fail? Survivor bias.
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-...
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How’s that working out for them? Name one tech company founded since Facebook that has been massively successful - ie massively profitable.
Becoming a massively profitable megacorp isn't the only winning formula.
Were Linkedin, Instagram, Beats by Dre, WhatsApp, Tableau, Skype, GitHub, MuleSoft all failures because they were acquired for billions, making lucrative paydays for their founders and investors?
Were Linkedin, Instagram, Beats by Dre, WhatsApp, Tableau, Skype, GitHub, MuleSoft all failures because they were acquired for billions, making lucrative paydays for their founders and investors?
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.
What are those dozens of counter examples?
The big profitable tech companies today didn’t raise billions in VC money.
The big profitable tech companies today didn’t raise billions in VC money.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094568
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.
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.
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.
Amazon is the outlier when it comes to the lack of GAAP profitability for years, but even it was cash flow positive.
Isn’t this textbook survivorship bias? Dozens of successes out of how many failures and how much misallocated capital?
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.
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.
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-...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-...
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.
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...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/starship-technologies-is-s...
>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.)
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think it's not solvable with human delivery workers. Hopefully someone tries to do it with robots when we get there.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Around here most restaurants still use this kind of service (often hosted by some lowly webdev).
That sounds like a great idea. Why don't you do it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes there is value in the product, its like fancy Regus, which is a real business. Its not worth what it was worth.
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.
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
I for one will pay extra to order from a nice web UI, and not have to make that phone call.
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
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChowNow
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[deleted]
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.
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.
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!"
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of people simply dislike calling, no matter the reason.
> I'm not sure what the big deal is in calling if I'm just calling in to order a pizza or a sub.
Because the dude answering the phone has a non-zero probability of being completely stoned off his ass. This is not theoretical. I am sad that we didn't record the worst one we ever had--it would have made for the absolute best YouTube video even though everyone would have been saying "That's so fake."
Phone orders are very error prone. Online orders help both sides of the equation. The customer knows exactly what they are getting and can verify it; the restaurant can say "We're happy to comp you for X because we're nice people, BUT this is the receipt THAT YOU ACKNOWLEDGED saying what you actually ordered."
Because the dude answering the phone has a non-zero probability of being completely stoned off his ass. This is not theoretical. I am sad that we didn't record the worst one we ever had--it would have made for the absolute best YouTube video even though everyone would have been saying "That's so fake."
Phone orders are very error prone. Online orders help both sides of the equation. The customer knows exactly what they are getting and can verify it; the restaurant can say "We're happy to comp you for X because we're nice people, BUT this is the receipt THAT YOU ACKNOWLEDGED saying what you actually ordered."
>>I'm not sure what the big deal is in calling
Because I have no desire to talk to anyone on the phone for any reason. if I could get a personal data device with out phone calling capabilities I would choose that. The POTS phone system needs to be relegated to the dust bin of history
The flip side of that as well, is often you can successfully up sell more items via an online system than you can with a phone order system. The number of times I have "add on" to my order due to the online system having options I did not even know was available is a lot higher than the normal "would you like to add" speech that the phone person gives you which is neither compelling and almost an automatic no as most people do not even pay attention to the offer
>if I'm just calling in to order a pizza or a sub.
The number of times Humans have got my order wrong when talking them over the phone is High... the number of times the computer has gotten my order wrong with submitting it electronic is almost zero
>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.
I would love to see your data on where you believe having having your own website with electronic menus do not help
Hell even outside of COVID, if a place does not have their menu online I will not even go to it physically, I like to look at the menu's and prices before even stepping foot in the place. Gives me a good idea on if I will like it or not.
It should be standard for a place to have an electronic menu with online take out ordering, anything less is subpar IMO
Because I have no desire to talk to anyone on the phone for any reason. if I could get a personal data device with out phone calling capabilities I would choose that. The POTS phone system needs to be relegated to the dust bin of history
The flip side of that as well, is often you can successfully up sell more items via an online system than you can with a phone order system. The number of times I have "add on" to my order due to the online system having options I did not even know was available is a lot higher than the normal "would you like to add" speech that the phone person gives you which is neither compelling and almost an automatic no as most people do not even pay attention to the offer
>if I'm just calling in to order a pizza or a sub.
The number of times Humans have got my order wrong when talking them over the phone is High... the number of times the computer has gotten my order wrong with submitting it electronic is almost zero
>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.
I would love to see your data on where you believe having having your own website with electronic menus do not help
Hell even outside of COVID, if a place does not have their menu online I will not even go to it physically, I like to look at the menu's and prices before even stepping foot in the place. Gives me a good idea on if I will like it or not.
It should be standard for a place to have an electronic menu with online take out ordering, anything less is subpar IMO
> 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.
And if you want any other kind of food (or food from any higher end restaurant) delivered, you're SOL.
[deleted]
Or you can, you know, get it yourself. Also, most high-end restaurants didn't do takeout nor delivery before the pandemic.
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.
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.
Not all food fits into the delivery model, burgers will get soggy, toasted sandwiches will get will get cold, salad will be cooked by the warm ingredients, ice cream will melt. For the most part if a food is good delivered then there were already restaurants offering delivery of it.
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.
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.
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
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
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> 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.
Many already do and more are pivoting to delivering themselves. The delivery services are terrible and not worth their fees.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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
> I really wonder how much of this is a self-created problem
It's part of the overfunding game: you can't just take the money and go "yay, 300 years of runtime because we stay lean". Investment is meant to be spent. Burning it all purely on buying market would also be a little too transparent, investors want to believe that they are getting more than that and they need others to believe that as well should they ever desire for greater fools.
But once you add an army of well paid talent to the mix it gets much easier to claim that there's more to your growth than buying market. Even if all they do is cosplay unassailable technological lead.
It's part of the overfunding game: you can't just take the money and go "yay, 300 years of runtime because we stay lean". Investment is meant to be spent. Burning it all purely on buying market would also be a little too transparent, investors want to believe that they are getting more than that and they need others to believe that as well should they ever desire for greater fools.
But once you add an army of well paid talent to the mix it gets much easier to claim that there's more to your growth than buying market. Even if all they do is cosplay unassailable technological lead.
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.
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.
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.
Sometime back Uber added this $0 delivery for a set of rotating restaurants. In my mind what I figured they were doing was clumping orders together to drive down costs... in practice I don't know what they're doing, but I like that idea.
Maybe when this price war ends normal delivery will be something much higher and they offer some kind of flash or pre-order pricing deals on clumped orders. Like $5 delivery for pre-ordering a pizza for that evening from this one restaurant so only one driver needs to go out there. Uber-Pool for your food if you will. Or you place your order at a higher price and if some more people hop onto the order from the same restaurant they cut your delivery price a bit.
Maybe when this price war ends normal delivery will be something much higher and they offer some kind of flash or pre-order pricing deals on clumped orders. Like $5 delivery for pre-ordering a pizza for that evening from this one restaurant so only one driver needs to go out there. Uber-Pool for your food if you will. Or you place your order at a higher price and if some more people hop onto the order from the same restaurant they cut your delivery price a bit.
what about slice? flat fee ($1.95 as of today) and solid mission:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/garystern/2019/08/14/slice-help...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/garystern/2019/08/14/slice-help...
Wow, that is literally right out of Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo
Slice started in 2010 and won an Inc. award in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slice_(app)
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.
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.
How was your TripleByte experience?
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)
also $1.95 doesn't include the costs of delivery (delivery is handled by pizza shops' existing delivery drivers)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Toronto (and New York) are not representative of 95% of North American cities assuming you live in the GTA.
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.
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.
Delivery is only option, I suspect delivery people are making a killing now.
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.
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.
cloud kitchen = a new name for drive through food service? :-)
> The restaurants don't lose a full 30% on the order
Doesn't Apple already grab 30% of the in-app payment?
Doesn't Apple already grab 30% of the in-app payment?
That doesn't apply for physical goods.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
These exhibited the same failure modes as UberEats, et al., namely that your food is cold by the time it gets there.
Delivery works when it's local and immediate--period.
These exhibited the same failure modes as UberEats, et al., namely that your food is cold by the time it gets there.
Delivery works when it's local and immediate--period.
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.
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.
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/
[1] https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a difference between economies of scale and technological advances enabling the leverage of comparative advantage and the situation with Uber Eats. Uber Eats is just VC cash being burned to employ human labor to hand-deliver fast food to the lazy and gluttonous. It's not appealing to me. I understand some people will enjoy it while it lasts.
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?
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.
You have an assistant though? How is my uber eats driver any different in that case?
Do you trust your Uber Eats driver? As I said, I understand the appeal of the occasional food delivery. I don't understand how delivery of fast-food at such scale can be sustainable. Right now it is making it possible to have cheap fast food delivered. I don't see how that works once the VC cash is all burned up. That is, until it is fully automated.
Who cares how many entities are involved? Why does it matter?
It really doesn't matter to me what random person delivers my Amazon package. I care about what I eat.
The fact that it is fast food is what surprises me. There's so little value added for so much money. I'm sure it appeals to other people. I ride elevators with Uber Eats drivers delivering a Subway sandwich. That's a ridiculous investment for such a terrible meal.
The fact that it is fast food is what surprises me. There's so little value added for so much money. I'm sure it appeals to other people. I ride elevators with Uber Eats drivers delivering a Subway sandwich. That's a ridiculous investment for such a terrible meal.
> feeding the lazy
To avoid that group, I suppose you have to cook all your food yourself?
As a society, we take on different specializations and, as a result, increase overall efficiency. No reason to call this specialization out as something that only serves the "lazy".
To avoid that group, I suppose you have to cook all your food yourself?
As a society, we take on different specializations and, as a result, increase overall efficiency. No reason to call this specialization out as something that only serves the "lazy".
Maybe it is mean of me to consider the consumption of fast food as lazy. I did eat fast food myself frequently when I was younger and I consider that version of myself to be lazy. Nowadays I know I can wait to have a proper meal in almost all occasions. Regardless, if do decide I can't function without a Chick-Fil-A sandwich, I won't have it delivered by a middleman.
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.
I get that. I enjoy same-day Amazon deliveries and other benefits of modern technology and industrial scale.
I'm still not going to have random middlemen hand-deliver terrible fast food for me.
When we have truly driverless cars and robots delivering food it will make sense to me. Until then, it's just an artifact of there being too much VC cash needing to be burned intersecting with laziness.
I'm still not going to have random middlemen hand-deliver terrible fast food for me.
When we have truly driverless cars and robots delivering food it will make sense to me. Until then, it's just an artifact of there being too much VC cash needing to be burned intersecting with laziness.
> I don't understand the appeal of these food delivery services at all.
The appeal was that these services would work with almost any restaurant that had takeout but not delivery.
Personally, if I were a restaurant, I would use these services to gauge how much interest my clients have in delivery. Once I pass a certain threshold or during peak times, I would hire my own drivers and do my own delivery while cutting out the SillyVally VC backed services.
11:37 PM on Tuesday--sure, Uber gets that one, LOL. Peak Friday from 5:00PM to 10:00PM--I'll have my own drivers for that timeslice, thanks.
The appeal was that these services would work with almost any restaurant that had takeout but not delivery.
Personally, if I were a restaurant, I would use these services to gauge how much interest my clients have in delivery. Once I pass a certain threshold or during peak times, I would hire my own drivers and do my own delivery while cutting out the SillyVally VC backed services.
11:37 PM on Tuesday--sure, Uber gets that one, LOL. Peak Friday from 5:00PM to 10:00PM--I'll have my own drivers for that timeslice, thanks.
That would be a great strategy, in my opinion.
I think one point I failed to make is that I'm astounded that restaurants are outsourcing such an important role on the higher end. But at least it makes sense on the higher end.
On the lower end (hand-delivering a Subway sandwich) it is just a clear sign of VC cash being set on fire.
I think one point I failed to make is that I'm astounded that restaurants are outsourcing such an important role on the higher end. But at least it makes sense on the higher end.
On the lower end (hand-delivering a Subway sandwich) it is just a clear sign of VC cash being set on fire.
> 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.
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.
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!'
If they need the car to get the pizza the time window the delivery kids can be used might be short..
We're always debating buy vs. build, but that seems kind of extreme.
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
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
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. :/
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. :/
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...
..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...
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/
https://get.chownow.com/
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.
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).
30 minutes-ish is common in any US city. The only time it goes longer is during peek periods.
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.
I think the app only covers NYC for now.
Every restaurant around here just passes Uber's cut onto the customer by raising prices in the Uber menu.
I don't tip when using these delivery apps and I have no idea how they can make money honestly.
Nice username :)
Does the calvin in the username refer to calvin and hobbes?
Does the calvin in the username refer to calvin and hobbes?
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.
I have an emotional reaction to this. Maybe I should be equally needy and switch jobs as soon as I get a better offer.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)..
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.
The frunk is just a trunk for storing things in the front, common on Tesla cars.
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.
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.
True that, though I was thinking about rideshare being robust against any pandemic, going forward.
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.
That's where you'd keep another body. jk. I meant the front half of the passenger compartment, with the driver.
Even if that was a viable option, where would people go?
To essential work. To essential businesses. To carry out their epidemiological tasks. To someplace not crowded. Etc.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
When I was a kid we had a paper book at the local greengrocers/general store, paid the bill every two weeks with cash.
That is still the case in many local grocers in India. We pay them once a month. It becomes their local advantage.
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 [email protected] address.
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.
Mobile apps do things that mobile websites can’t, such as integrated payments and geolocation.
Delivery food is one of those things that’s really hard to not centralize. If I don’t know what I want, a common problem for delivery food, a centralized app makes it much easier to browse for choices and easily get what you want.
Milk is still delivered like this in the UK today.
Our UK family neighbour told us the milk used to be delivered via a big urn on a horse and cart in the 50's. As the cart came along customers would come out with jugs and the milk was ladled out to them. Then things progressed to a centralized milk bottling factory and delivery first by horse then by electric float...
If the drivers are independent contractors, they can't be laid off. They will just not get any more assignments for the moment.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
The delivery fee is like the price of another entree. I'll deliver the damn thing myself.
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.
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.
Well gig economy has to die some time, or at least in this form. Let's hope this is start of it
Glad. Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.
I don't feel bad if Uber takes a bigger hit. Earlier, I loved the potential of Uber to make transportation better but it hasn't materialized (for me at least). I had an "animal farm" feeling about Uber when I was trying to find a ride from the airport around midnight. They would match me, then cancel the ride and then match me to a ride at a higher rate. This went on for an hour and I eventually paid the same as I was paying for a cab before. At least with a cab, I could have reached home quicker. So as a consumer, I lost in every way. Yes, I hate the cab drivers and their behaviors but Uber wasn't any better for my particular situation.
I have also had similar experiences with UberPool. I was charged extra because the route was longer. It wasn't worth for me to complain about $10 but I stopped using UberPool later.
I have tried food delivery a couple of times and the extra cost was so expensive that I just didn't feel like it was worth it. I get that they need to charge a certain amount for the service to be sustainable/profitable. I didn't find it to be worth it.
They also played a lot of games with the Amex Platinum credits. So I closed the Amex Platinum card as well. It was not worth playing the games to save $15 a month.
I have also had similar experiences with UberPool. I was charged extra because the route was longer. It wasn't worth for me to complain about $10 but I stopped using UberPool later.
I have tried food delivery a couple of times and the extra cost was so expensive that I just didn't feel like it was worth it. I get that they need to charge a certain amount for the service to be sustainable/profitable. I didn't find it to be worth it.
They also played a lot of games with the Amex Platinum credits. So I closed the Amex Platinum card as well. It was not worth playing the games to save $15 a month.
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Why can't a company just fail any more because it's never made a single cent in profit? And likely never will.
The inside baseball of Uber doesn't really matter does it? Why dont they lay the whole company off?
The inside baseball of Uber doesn't really matter does it? Why dont they lay the whole company off?