[JeremyNT]

My local restaurant has a couple of employees who own old beater cars. I call the restaurant, then they send out one of these employees with the food. The restaurant charges nothing extra beyond the tip, which I select on arrival.

This is how delivery used to work. The lie and promise of the startups trying to "disrupt" this is that it's somehow going to be better to proxy these interactions through a faceless megacorp rather than a small local business.

Well, is that really happening? If I use Uber Eats I get more expensive, worse service than calling my local place directly.

So maybe these delivery businesses shouldn't survive, at least not as currently envisioned, because they offer something that doesn't actually have that much value to most people.

[iphone_elegance]

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

[BurningFrog]

I for one will pay extra to order from a nice web UI, and not have to make that phone call.

[JeremyNT]

A reasonable request! And if that's the primary value add of these services, I would suggest that a traditional non-unicorn SaaS company[0] could provide a very inexpensive web portal for restaurants that handles order processing, while leaving the logistics to the restaurant.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChowNow

[TylerE]

Something as simple sounding as a menu can be surprisingly complex.

A local burger place's burger has, I just worked out, 34,832,528,367,943,700 possible combinations. Some options are mututally exclusive, some add an extra charge. Etc.

[rstupek]

and yet doesn't their pos terminal handle all of that already?

[TylerE]

It's all done on paper. It only gets entered into the POS as the total "Custom Burger - $17.95" soethign like that

[munk-a]

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.

[SketchySeaBeast]

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.

[eddieplan9]

You know back in the days you can also go to farmer Joe and buy a chicken and pay no middle man. Jumping from that fact to the conclusion that food supply chain has not much value is, naive, to say the least.

[VLM]

His argument seems to be that unlike supermarkets and wholesalers which provide positive value from which some profit can be siphoned off, delivery megacorps provide negative value so there's not much profit to siphon.

Your argument seems to be that food middlemen should exist in some form, although you provide no reason; However, the existence and fetishization (for better or worse) of "local farmers markets" seems to point in the opposite direction.

My local pizza place delivers; there doesn't seem much room to create value to pay some engineer's salary and some VC profits a thousand miles away. Or rephrased, VCs and engineers are expensive, and their offerings can be undercut by every local restaurant in the country that has a phone and a teenager with a car, which is not exactly the strongest network effect or vendor lockin I've ever seen in a marketplace.

The delivery market seems to be of the form "We all need an offering in the market to stay competitive with everyone else losing money on every delivery".

The best possible exit for a delivery startup seems to be improving something in the already adequate infrastructure then pray Dominos Pizza acquires them.

The uphill battle is the main complaints people have about fast food is the cost is high, few choices, and the food is unhealthy. Nobody seems bothered by logistics problems like pizza taking a half hour to arrive or routes not being optimized to minimize gasoline consumption. Its true that customers are bad product designers, thinking of the anecdote of Ford's customers wanting a better horse, not a model T. However a business model of door to door horse feed delivery, logistics optimized by telegraphs in California, was also not a winner.

[ypzhang2]

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.

[AlexandrB]

> It's obvious there is value, otherwise these companies wouldn't exist, no matter how much VC money is pumped in.

Would you say this about WeWork a year ago? VC-style central planning has had a great distorting effect on the supply/demand information function of the market.

[ghaff]

Oh I think there was some value in WeWork. OfficeSpace-as-a-Service that was hipper than Regus and offered consistency across many cities. But obviously far less value than the money being pumped into WeWork would suggest.

[ypzhang2]

Yes there is value in the product, its like fancy Regus, which is a real business. Its not worth what it was worth.

[lovich]

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