[iso1631]

I've had delivery takeaways in British towns and cities for 2 decades, well before the likes of ubereats and deliveroo.

Those companies do their own deliveries and manage to make enough money to not even charge more for delivery (or offer a collection discount) - although usually a minimum cost of say £20.

Why can't VC companies do it that efficently?

[falcolas]

Honestly, those delivery companies are probably underpaying their employees for delivery. I've worked at a pizza delivery company, and including tips, I earned about $140 a day (inflation adjusted, post-taxes) for delivering pizza all over town. It was certainly not enough to provide for a long-term living, given the vehicle upkeep costs and gas.

[atdrummond]

If I worked that full time, I could easily afford my apartment and other expenses. (Castletown, Isle of Man.)

Now, if I still lived in London? Different story.

Certain restaurant types (high margin, food well suited for delivery) and locales (high population density) seem well suited for delivery. The local steak house? Probably not, for a number of reasons:

- The main profit generator at many sit down venues, drinks, are unlikely to be ordered.

- Impulse add-ons, especially dessert, are less likely. Even with dark pattern upsells on apps. Dining out has many minutes or hours during which additional ordering opportunities are available. Ordering out is a single discrete event.

- On platforms that don’t work with the restaurant, the option of a higher margin delivery-only menu doesn’t exist. Items with low or negative margin can go out the door that otherwise wouldn’t.

- Delivery services seemingly take more for merchant processing than many restaurant chains I’ve helped secure acquiring for. Likely due to much higher chargeback/fraud on digital apps than through traditional delivery or in-restaurant. This is a killer on a low margin vertical such as dining.

[falcolas]

My only real comment here is that you do also have to put anywhere between $5,000 to $15,000 into your car yearly. Between elevated maintenance costs, additional fuel (somewhere around a tank every 2-3 days), and replacing the vehicle when it fails, it eats into the money pretty quickly.

At least, that was my experience.

[atdrummond]

No disagreement. The car would actually eat more of my budget than housing.

[iso1631]

When I think of "Uber", 'well-compensated employee' is not something that comes to mind.

[falcolas]

In personal opinion territory: And that’s a damned shame. Contract drivers should be able to survive on their full time work (and afford any of the externalities pushed on them by Uber) like any other full time worker.

[bootlooped]

Individual restaurants don't do many of the things delivery app companies do: offer an multiplatform app, have a sales team, 401k matching, expensive MBAs, software engineers, and lawyers, etc... A lot of overhead, and how can they really save money? Compare that stuff to just hiring a delivery person for near minimum wage.

[ryan_lane]

Often the person doing deliveries also does other work in the restaurant when there's no deliveries to do. They clean, fold napkins/silverware, etc. The delivery person probably makes more money than an uber eats driver, and it almost certainly costs the restaurant less.

Yeah, it's less convenient for consumers, but at least it won't drive your favorite restaurant out of business.

[iso1631]

And my local Chineese has a phone number, prints a new menu delivered round the estate every year or so.

Maybe throwing billions of dollars of AWS scale microservices isn't always the solution

[deleuze]

It's a harder problem, though. I can order from practically any restaurant at any distance on ubereats.

It's trivial for me to concoct an order that will take ~1h to deliver. With a $15/h minimum wage, that means ubereats needs to charge $15 in fees before making any money just to cover labor.

[nerfhammer]

I suspect this is the real answer.

It probably takes at least twice as long as an equivalent uber ride. The delivery person needs to find somewhere to park twice and spend time waiting in line.