| 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. |
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.