The price seems high for something Square presumably needed to unload. Who else would have been bidding it up? And why are food delivery businesses still in a bubble?
That's not a slam on businesses in a bubble phase, either. Many industries go through one before settling into a steady, sustainable state. Just surprised that delivery is still in one, while related industries, like ride-share are cooling off.
It's probably a mostly equity deal, i.e. most of the $410M is not real money. They recently raised $600M and I doubt they'd spend $410M of that on an acquisition.
It would be more interesting if we knew how much they actually paid in hard cash; the rest is effectively just promises of money in the form of a valuation that hasn't materialized in liquid form yet.
Sure, not dismissing it, but it's not the same value. It's not hard cash that the founders/employees can spend, so it's mostly useless in terms of value for research, charity, self-funding new ventures without VCs, investing in other companies, side projects, or whatever else you would do with hard cash.
If you're an early employee of Caviar and got $1M in AMZN stock or options? You could sell it for cash. DoorDash stock? It could be $0 in a few years for all you know, and you quite possibly have no avenues to liquidate it for anything now.
I'm guessing like most things in the US: investors are looking to consolidate so they can get into monopolistic positions and extract resources from the market once they have it cornered. The risk of legislative intervention into such anti-competitive market manipulations is virtually zero.
If they get big enough, next time they steal wages, they won't have to back down. Heck, if they get big enough, they can steal wages, drive the company broke, and then get a bail out to pay the higher ups that are making the decisions that drove the company into the ground in the first place.
We then have the gall to blame Adam Smith, who didn't even believe in separation of funding and management (i.e. he didn't believe in joint-stock companies)
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. The valuation of quite a number of hot companies doesn't make any sense unless they can extract oligopoly rents.
As an example, take Uber. The Economist recently asked whether it can ever make money. [1] And events in the months since don't make it any clearer. [2]
I think tech's wave of quasi-monopolies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) gave investors the notion that similarly dominant players could be established in non-tech fields if they were dressed up as technology plays. So we see absurd amounts of cash being poured into things like Uber and WeWork. Unlike the previous players, we also see them going to IPO while they're still losing money.
And sadly, I think you're right about regulatory laxness. Antitrust regulation has been out of fashion for a long time. And if we see it come back, it could well be more an authoritarian political tool than any actual attempt to ensure competitive markets.
> And if we see it come back, it could well be more an authoritarian political tool than any actual attempt to ensure competitive markets.
I think for there to be political will to redistribute the power that concentrates in monopolies, there needs to be a clear rallying cry.
When you look at the trust busters of the 20th and 19th century, they had a clear rallying cry from the masses: improve working conditions.
I wonder if with automation taking over, the new rallying cry will be UBI? I mean, to pay for such a thing, you need to redistribute social wealth, which is now concentrating in monopolies.
People notice the concentration of money, and the lack in other parts, more than the particulars of how markets work. Then the rallying cry brings about change in unexpected ways, maybe? I don't know, but I'm hopeful.
As to getting downvoted, I'm not surprised, my take: Many people in tech now are very idealistic and have a lot vested into the companies they work with. They truly believe door dash is about 'empowering small businesses' (or whatever pretty words their employer has on the about us).
And the thing is, doordash does do that. But the reason for it's valuation, and the ultimate purpose of the investors, is rent seeking. Providing service is the way to get people hooked, it's a secondary consideration for these investors. So anything that directly or indirectly highlights this discrepancy between what the workers are trying to achieve and what the ultimate company beneficiaries are trying to achieve, will be viewed with hostility by those who so truly want to make the world a better place. Which I think is the majority here. :)
Intervention? The government only discourages anticompetitive practices. Literally buying a competitor is not one, its subject to approval at some amounts, but is not anticompetitive behavior, as in predictably by the rules.
There should be enough role models by now to dissolve whatever egalitarian promise you were fed in elementary school. Why even waste any breath on these completely ineffective set of rules, when you already know the playbook, you spelled it out! Play those cards man, generational wealth is knocking at your door
food delivery service is blowing up because it's still extremely inefficient in the USA. you can get _anything_ delivered in Hong Kong for about $1. some hong kongers don't even have kitchens and live like that for years.
travis kalanick is investing millions of his own cash into this space.
The density of HK is not comparable to basically anywhere in the US, except maybe just Manhattan. The labour sources are also a lot cheaper.
There's room to improve in the US, like making kitchens without the attached restaurant more prevalent, but as long as you have to get in a car to deliver the food, there's going to be the same problems the rideshare industry faces.
1) Ghost kitchens that only serve via delivery apps. You can save on rent by setting it up in an area with no foot-traffic. You can also get economies of scale.
2) Restaurants with dedicated entrances for delivery drivers. Baar Baar in NYC has a separate place where delivery workers can wait. In other restaurants, they have to wait in the limited dining area. One hopes that the workers still get to use restrooms & get some water, etc.
> 1) Ghost kitchens that only serve via delivery apps. You can save on rent by setting it up in an area with no foot-traffic. You can also get economies of scale.
You can't. This is the kind of a mistake that all first time entrepreneurs make. Delivery costs too much money. Logistics of getting your labor force to your kitchen is a nightmare.
> 2) Restaurants with dedicated entrances for delivery drivers. Baar Baar in NYC has a separate place where delivery workers can wait. In other restaurants, they have to wait in the limited dining area. One hopes that the workers still get to use restrooms & get some water, etc.
This was tried in NYC during first dot com. Remember purple shirts? They had a competitor with green shirts. That's the unproductive spaces. Rent hikes wiped those out.
Edit: Blind downvotes are laughable. Go walk into your local pizza place and talk to the owners. They will tell you why they are slowly dropping off all the apps. They are giving equivalent of a 20-30% discount in fees for the area they already deliver in.
Ghost kitchens are mostly scams. The ones that aren't are ran out of commissary commercial kitchens that cost an arm and a leg. The "ghost kitchens" are mostly not really legal, sometimes ran out of a house, marketing same stuff under different names. Most of the restaurant overhead for small places does not come from the rent of the floor space. It comes from the rent of the kitchen and compliance with the health codes. And, unlike say taxi commissions, health departments take no crap, which is why the ghost restaurants disappear rather quickly.
It is the "no one did it before" idea of people who have never ran restaurants. It always flops. If it did not, Union Sq Hospitality would have been doing it for years.
I'm not sure why all the downvotes here, either. In the SF Bay Area, several companies have tried to be "delivery only restaurants" and they've mostly all been failures -- some spectacular VC-assisted flameouts, some quiet fades.
Ghost kitchens may be scams but I know at least of one QSR in Manhattan that does them successfully. In some instances they are quite profitable if you generate the volume.
Your commission is also a bit off, perhaps you speak from full service experience?
While true that base comm is 20-30, those numbers are always negotiated down. Grub/Seamless will take as low as 12 from high vol regional leaders while UberEats made some deals that are supposedly really low (McDonalds). I don’t have exact numbers but from my recollection they mentioned it in their S1.
While Danny Myers is quite smart, USH isn’t a barometer for the entire industry as his focus is more on full service.
They are not. They are just a different model than a standard restaurant.
What I have observed in my area (UK) is that instead of expanding by setting up a new branch in the costly centre of town, some chains work with Deliveroo to open a ghost kitchen in the industrial area.
That allows them to expand to a new town while saving on capex.
Can you elaborate on the delivery costs and employee travel aspect?
Surely by selecting a location that balances low rent versus proximity to residential areas you could lower operational costs while still ensuring staff could get to work and keep delivery costs low? I get that running a restaurant is a complex and risky business, but i dont think youve really addressed why a delivery only kitchen would fail consistently.
Presumably we're not talking about Shoney's country, if we're talking about food delivery service models.
Incidentally, that was my first estimate for how far in the country I was when I travelled a lot for work: "How many reviews does {insert fast food restaurant} have on Yelp?"
Turns out, people only leave lots of Yelp reviews for Taco Bells when that's the only thing around.
Different market, but Gojek does it profitably. They do delivery, ride hailing, and a bunch of other stuff, and all of their segments are profitable, except ride hailing. They also have a slightly different model, which might not work in other markets. They don’t need to onboard merchants in the same way, because with them the driver pays for the order, and then the customer pays the driver, either in-app or with cash.
Interesting business model, but Jakarta is insanely dense (largest city in APAC) which is probably why its more profitable. In the U.S. you have urban sprawl and suburbs, which increase variable costs of delivery.
Jakarta has ridiculous urban sprawl, has worse traffic than any city in the US, and floods for months in the year. I lived there for years, it’s much harder to get around than LA or NY.
It's a distinction without a difference. It's not like they lose money by offering the delivery service, so they've found some model where delivering food is profitable, it's just that the model involves a tight coupling with the food producer.
It might be more accurate to say that food delivery as a separate business from producing it is hard to profit on.
Too late to edit my original comment to clarify: the incumbents are profitable, have enough revenue to recycle into buying up new competition in existing and different markets, keeping the their position and business model alive.
This is the kind of announcement where all three companies put out a happy blog post and no one knows the actual reasoning behind the acquisition or sale.
New business model for Square?: Acquire companies, onboard them onto Square's business platform, sell them
What separates them is the ridiculous amount of VC funding they took and have used on a combination of marketing and buying exclusives. Every actual experience I've had with DoorDash has been rather poor though, and they've gotten in trouble many times (they even got sued by In-N-Out a while back when they re-listed In-N-Out against their wishes using a knockoff logo to avoid trademark infringement). The only reason I ever use them is if I really want something that they have an exclusive on, and even that is rare (usually I'll eat somewhere else rather than order from DoorDash).
How are there network effects in delivery apps? It's a bipartite graph, and the number of restaurant companies is tiny compared to the number of users.
+1 for Seamless in the city, at least within my family/close friends. Might be because NYC has a strong fast delivery network within most restaurants and doesn't truly need a decentralized delivery network. The big draw to these apps to most of my friends has been the delivery of previously undeliverable food (Chipotle, McDonalds etc).
I use doordash 2-3 times a week. It's convenient and cheaper than Uber eats with dashpass. Just remember that if your too amount is less than 6$ it doesn't go to the drivers. It's better to too them with cash
You don't feel upset about how they were, in my opinion, defrauding you and the driver of the tip money? After I learned about what they were doing with tips I decided not to use them again, and considering how much competition there is I really haven't lost anything of value.
This isn't meant to be a triggering comment. I'm genuinely curious to learn about other people's reactions to DoorDash's former tipping system.
Personally: having learned of their scummy practices, I will not be supporting DoorDash or Instacart ever again, regardless of whether they change policy now in response to being exposed.
Why so unforgiving? Because you can't deter unethical behavior by merely asking for a perpetrator to discontinue the unethical behavior if/when exposed. The expected value of a penalty needs to exceed the financial reward of the behavior it is meant to punish. Furthermore, I don't trust companies who are likely to be unethical the moment someone isn't looking.
By their scummy practices, are you referring to their tipping policy?
I'm not sure I fully understand the backlash. Yes, the tipping policy didn't meet people's expectations ... but it seems almost exactly the same s how tipping + wages work for wait staff in restaurants (where restaurants are allowed to pay them less than minimum wage, as long as the difference is offset by tips).
Why are we okay with this policy, which is enshrined in law, for restaurant wait staff but not for delivery drivers?
A reasonable argument is that tips should always go direct to the staff and they should also at least make minimum wage, but that'd represent a huge change from the status quo and people aren't freaking out about how restaurant staff are compensated, so it seems like this hits a different emotional chord for some reason. Maybe it's more evil-seeming coming from a large tech-ish company rather than SMBs?
Firstly, restaurants are not allowed to pay "less than minimum wage" in any US state, though some states have two separate minimum wage rates for tipped and untipped employees. (NB: all west coast states in the US have just one minimum wage that applies for all employees, tipped or not.)
But more fundamentally Instacart and Doordash deceived consumers in a way restaurants don't. Say minimum wage for tipped employees is $4, a restaurant pays a $5 wage and I tip $2, I expect that the staff gets the $5 wage and the $2 tip (whether pooled or otherwise). If the restauranteur uses my $2 tip to cut wages below $5, then that would be illegal and outrageous. The minimum wage amount of $4 does not even enter into the calculation in this example, except defining the floor for the restaurant to pay its tipped employees.
> Why are we okay with this policy, which is enshrined in law, for restaurant wait staff but not for delivery drivers?
Personally, I am not okay with the law. An employer should pay a living wage. That said, I'm biased because I would vastly prefer to avoid the anxiety I feel around figuring out the right amount to tip such that I don't feel scummy nor taken advantage of. I went there to eat some food, not feel anxious.
I just did the same with Amazon since they have the same tip practices as DoorDash. That and reading about the Ring Alarm system being sold by law enforcement it just put me over the edge.
Can I avoid AWS? No, but I can certainly not spend my own money directly on any of their services.
I drove for DoorDash and I absolutely prefer the guaranteed amount with them keeping the tips.
First of all, people tip beforehand so it's not based on quality of service anyway.
Second of all, it makes DoorDash a steady stream of income instead of hoping that you'll be tipped enough. Most people don't tip and if the tip is large enough, you do receive the tip.
I think this wasn't really a bad deal for the drivers, but it was essentially a lie to the consumers: they think tipping will make a difference for the driver, but instead it only makes a difference to DoorDash. What's really needed is a minimum wage that applies to everyone, regardless of employee status.
I just give $0 tips through the DoorDash website (and you have to select $0 TWICE, at both the top and bottom of the checkout page, by the way) and give them tips in cash.
That way DoorDash provides at least a partial matching contribution to my tip instead of eating from my tip.
I don’t have a problem with it although I think it’s good that they changed it. If drivers complain “we’re not getting enough tip” and the company says “OK we guarantee your tips will be at least $5 on this order” that’s the behavior you get. The customer feels ripped off by a program that ostensibly benefited drivers to begin with.
They weren't "defrauding the drivers of tip money" they were normalizing the variance in payments across deliveries by not directly paying the drivers tips and instead guaranteeing a minimum payment amount which was above the delivery fee.
Once they modify their system and move to a system where drivers get 100% of the tips the drivers will probably see approximately the same payouts on average, just with higher variance across drivers. Basically what DoorDash was doing is the same as tip-pooling at a restaurant which isn't exactly a controversial practice.
Why do you expect bad delivery drivers to have poorer tips? I've never adjusted a tip based on the quality of the driver, because I can't measure that. Anyone can hand over a bag of food, so the only thing I see is how long they took. But whether they arrive quickly or slowly is probably the kitchen's fault, or luck of overlapping orders. Realistically, I have nothing to rate them on.
This isn't like restaurant tipping where bad service gets 10% and good service gets 25%+ It's mostly bi-modal, drivers frequently don't get tipped at all. In this scenario reducing variance makes sense because (as many other commenters here note) unless the experience is overwhelmingly bad the tip generally has more to do with the receiver of the order rather than the driver.
The entire point of the tipping system is to have a high variance. The promise, but not guarantee, of tips is what is supposed to incentivize better service.
But in the case of the DoorDash, if you tip using the app, you tip long before you know what the service will be.
It's like walking blindfolded into a restaurant and putting your tip in the hostesses hand before you even see any of the staff, or have any indication of service.
They just announced they plan on changing the policy. It has not changed yet.
Also they announced they were "investigating the issue" for 4 months before, and then didn't make a change. So let's not congratulate them until its been confirmed to be actually working as drivers and customers expect.
While this was definitely not clear to the consumer, it ended up being a preferable model for the drivers as they would get a higher pay on most orders. Not saying that it should be that way, but saying they did that just to steal tips is not true. It was used to guarantee a minimum amount on orders that don't make sense financially.
What the company should have done, ethically, is to just increase base compensation for drivers. You shouldn't be able to dynamically change base compensation based on the quality of the tip that the driver is rewarded, that is pretty antithetical to the entire idea of a tipping economy.
Honestly, more than anything it's just user preference.
There are some restaurants that are exclusive on certain platforms (UberEats for example is exclusive with McDonalds), so if you want that, there's only one game in town, but most people I know who use these platforms regularly (myself included) aren't using them for a specific restaurant. It's more like, "I want sushi! I wonder what is available on my platform of choice?"
Beyond they all have slightly different pricing models, but at the end of the day they all cost about the same.
When Grubhub acquired Eat24 from Yelp and removed the group order feature in favor of signing up for a "corporate" account, it sent much of my business to DoorDash.
I dunno, compared to drivers dedicated to a specific business, I've yet to have an experience with UberEats/Postmates/Grubhub/DoorDash that wasn't leaving me with food that was cold, either because they did not use insulated bags, or they simply took way too long to get to me. When a joint is 15 minutes away, it'd take the driver a literal 60 minutes to drive from the restaurant to me. Your mileage may vary, depending on your region, but it's just a waste of money and time if you ask me.
I’m not an expert but I know that DoorDash partners with large established chains, they power Chipotle and Wendy’s delivery services. GrubHub is getting in in this too: they power Taco Bell’s new delivery service. I bet these deals lead to a more simpatico relationship monetarily. I bet it also avoids stuff like what is said in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20588348
My experience is that it's somewhat regional, but it doesn't feel sudden at all to me. I've used DoorDash for years, and it's because in my area they have much more selection of restaurants, and often faster delivery (which I assume means more drivers). Uber Eats doesn't even deliver to my house even though Uber covers my area.
Personally, Foodler had some nice features I like and Grubhub bought and killed them so I'm not going to be using Grubhub. Can't say I have a strong opinion among the others.
For what it's worth, the general vibe I've gotten from couriers has been that Caviar is one of the best food delivery apps for them, and that DoorDash is among the worst.
As a user though, Caviar is the worst delivery service I have ever used though. Food is often cold & sometimes wrong across 3 cities. I have stopped using it, even when it is the only option for a restaurant I like.
Super interesting it varies by person. Caviar has had the best delivery experiences consistently and if I've ever had an issue like a squished pizza they immediately dispatched a new one or gave me a refund. Plus they are cheaper than Uber Eats (the consistently worst app for me) and Doordash delivering to Pacific Heights/Cow Hollow in SF.
Agreed, I've recently stopped using Caviar altogether after numerous wrong or undelivered orders in a row, all of which they failed to take any real responsibility for and blamed on the drivers. Adding insult to injury, Caviar seems to be more expensive than alternatives.
It's funny, I know almost no two people with similar experiences (user or courier).
For example as a user I have literally never had a good experience with Caviar. It almost always wrong in different ways.
As a courier one time the guy called and said that the restaurant was taking so long that Caviar would no longer pay him to wait so we ended up paying him out of pocket to cover it (he said we could cancel and get our money back but that he'd also get nothing after waiting for a very long time).
Uber Eats, as a user, has usually worked pretty well. As a courier one of them told us they constantly have out of date restaurant menus, people order from them, the restaurant substitutes or ignores it completely and now they have to deal with an angry person.
It really feels like restaurants are not equipped to handle these types of services and all of the services don't train their people if at all, as well as treating them kinda like crap many times.
I was a Caviar courier in a past life, it paid very well for someone with just a bike ($20-$25/hr before taxes).
That courier was full of shit. You get paid regardless of customer status, and you also get paid per minute over a certain delay threshold. Sounds like you just got a bad actor.
> That courier was full of shit. You get paid regardless of customer status, and you also get paid per minute over a certain delay threshold. Sounds like you just got a bad actor.
I mean, that's basically what he said but that it had been an hour and a half (IIRC) and he said Courier would stop paying him to wait.
I live in a building that has a confusing relationship with it's name vs. the street its on. Uber (and Uber Eats) has never worked for me properly, and I always have to meet the courier at the door. Caviar always delivers directly to my door.
I hear you. It was so difficult for couriers to deliver where I live that I literally developed a single page website with pics and instructions. Now I just text them the url and access code.
I had to provide detailed instructions as well, and as soon as I did I never had another problem. But I don’t know why. My house isn’t hard to find at all. I even asked around and all my friends thought it was bizarre. (I moved here about five years ago so at the time ‘the first time’ was fresh in minds). I suspect they were relying on the map instead of address numbers because their map used to be off by two houses.
I also once opened the door after waiting about five minutes after getting the “driver is approaching” notification to hear two people bitching about “how ridiculous” it was finding my place. They were in my driveway but could not find the front door. My house is on a hill so the door is down a flight of stairs from the garage but it’s only about 20 feet away and plainly visible from the street.
The problem with where we live is more a circumstance of bad environment that messes with drivers, which upon realizing this, spurred me to make the website to include pictures.
The building itself looks like a garage from the road, so many pass by the unmarked door they need to enter the code on. Also, there's three consecutive lanes you can turn right onto, so when Waze tells them to turn right, only 33% of drivers get it correct else they get lost in a maze of parking lots and dead ends. This is also after the driver successfully navigates a roundabout (hard for some US drivers) and does not accidentally getting back onto the interstate because the lanes are not clearly marked.
Can I steal this idea? I have the same issue. I had been dealing with it via detailed instructions that I'd paste into any comment box possible thats not the restaurant one (postmates has two, at least)
Interestingly, that is exactly what Square planned to do with Caviar: integrate with Square POS so both use the same system and build a tightly integrated marketplace.
As a customer, I’ve quit Doordash. They used to have decent customer service, where, although your order was screwed up, they’d generally fix it. They had a weird habit of always offering a $5 credit though, sometimes even when the part of the order that was screwed up cost more. But you could reach a real person pretty easily.
A lot has changed since then, and we’ve had several pretty negative encounters with them including one where the CS rep basically accused us of lying about not receiving our food. (I suspect it was misdelivered because the map software they used put our address as our neighbors house two doors down.)
My last experience with them: The app told us to contact them for an ETA on our food. The actual status of our order wasn’t clear. We had a dasher and then we didn’t have a dasher. There was no way to contact them. We tried “Contact the dasher” and the number didn’t go through. We tried to use the chat functionality (which is ridiculously buried under four or five levels of clicks and even then not immediately obvious” when it used to be basically automatic if you clicked “help”) and it wouldn’t connect us. We tried another number which also didn’t go through. The website had a message about difficulty placing orders at that time but ours was already placed.
So there we sat in limbo not knowing if the food would ever arrive and no way to contact anybody. Should we just go out to eat? We didn’t know. We did use their web form contact them, but the response came way too late to not have ruined our meal time. Eventually our order was cancelled and to their credit they gave us $50 credits but meh.
This may have changed since I don't really use Caviar, but I'n not surprised since I think Caviar's delivery/service fees are the highest (which is why I don't really use it).
Perhaps keeping it separate is a good thing technically.
DoorDash app and website are a dumpster fire with usability and bugs galore.
The issue is as a user is if you bring this up to DoorDash support they have no internal process for handling reported issues with the app and website and letting the development team know.
It's odd, in that I never really thought about Caviar as a competitor to DoorDash -- but that's because I know them mostly as the company that bought Zesty (just before Caviar itself was bought by Square). Zesty specializes in catered group meal delivery. The company I'm at now uses Zesty once a week; the company I was at before used them five days a week, and the company before that used a competitor (ZeroCater, I think) five days a week.
As far as I know, DoorDash wasn't in that space before; I wonder if that's part of the reason for the acquisition. (The alternative is that they may not be interested in that side of the business at all and shut it down.)
Everyone's seemed to gloss over this but this deal seems to be as much an acqhuisition as an acquisition. Do some research on who Gokul Rajaram is. He ran ads at FB and Google was a very significant leader. I don't think the margins of food delivery have changed. Remember Square couldn't get Uber to pick up Caviar for $100 million around the time Square had its IPO. Also I imagine the price involves DoorDash seems to be banking on a closer relationship with Square as well.
It is not illegal to buy competitors (commenting only on US law). It can potentially violate antitrust laws if you eliminate all competition in a market by buying out competitors. But given the existence of Seamless/Grubhub, Uber Eats, and others, plus most of the restaurants still take phone & fax orders, it would be difficult to argue Doordash buying Caviar corners the delivery market.
IANAL, but as far as I know generally the standard is "is this likely to cause meaningful harm re: pricing/quality to consumers?" See https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a... for a fair amount of context. Horizontal mergers happen every day in the private markets (like this transaction), and generally they're a good thing: you're likely to get a premium by selling to a strategic rather than a financial investor (e.g. private equity) since they can value synergy. And anyone who's taken an entrepreneurship course knows that having a larger variety of potential high-quality liquidity events incentivizes the creation of new businesses. The problem is when enough of a market is consolidated in a way that might allow the consolidator to adjust pricing in a consumer-hostile way, which isn't touched by this specific transaction.
To your more general question of "how is this not a play at eliminating competition" - consider it more "can we (DoorDash) make more money operating Caviar by finding synergies with our existing infrastructure, than we pay for Caviar based on a model that describes Caviar operating under Square without that benefit?" That's a question of efficiency, not competition, and it's generally a good thing.
In US law, eliminating competition is generally fine. It's only a problem when there is a monopoly or close to a monopoly. DoorDash doesn't seem close to having a monopoly on food delivery.
It would be very strange if all acquisitions of competitors were considered a violation of antitrust law. It's something that I would expect to be very common in a well-functioning, fiercely competitive market.
I think this is good for Square. Maybe not a good reflection on their previous, scattered product strategy but they appear to be getting more focus on fairly horizontal services for SMBs. Caviar was always a bit nichey for them.
I’m trying to figure out if their Developer API is a chasing-Stripe distraction for them or a good defensive move.
We're going to see more consolidation, but are any of these companies addressing the treatment of their delivery drivers, or issues that are starting to crop up, like delivery drivers eating food that they're delivering?
Howdy! Software Engineer at Postmates here. Our CEO has put forth an opinion piece[0] on CNN talking about his views and actions concerning this very thing. You might find it interesting:
I felt the same way about the name. I visited a coworker in 2014 and he was like "oh, hey, it's getting close to lunch, let's order some Caviar." And I was like, "uh, isn't that a little ritzy?"
Seriously, I don't know the logic behind behind that name.
That's not a slam on businesses in a bubble phase, either. Many industries go through one before settling into a steady, sustainable state. Just surprised that delivery is still in one, while related industries, like ride-share are cooling off.