[chongli]

The delivery part is where all the overhead occurs. Developers think these services are trivial and making a killing on the markup because they can imagine writing the app and backend themselves. That’s not the hard part!

The hard part is recruiting, training, and managing the drivers. This requires you to hire lots of employees to communicate with the drivers and support them in real time during peak periods (around supper time and weekend evenings).

You can’t automate this stuff away because the drivers are dealing with all kinds of complex, real-world problems. Stuff like addresses of houses that don’t exist, drivers getting lost trying to find apartment suites or even restaurants within a complicated building, aggressive dogs or angry/drunk people, people denying they ordered anything and their contact numbers pointing to a different city...

The Google model of seeing customer support as a problem and automating it into nonexistence doesn’t work here. You’re dealing with hot food that’s cooling fast and hungry people who can’t wait very long and drivers who need to complete a bunch of deliveries in a night in order to make it worth their time.

[RhysU]

Sounds like the restaurants need to form their own Visa [1] so that they might retain more.

[1] https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.

[amaccuish]

We're seeing this from the worker side already [0]

[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa75a8/worker-owned-apps-...