| > the delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats just work a lot better than calling up restaurants for delivery did in the pre-app era. Not my experience for takeout. Before: I called in an order, they told me how long it would take, I would arrive, it would be done. After: I submit an order via the app. I receive confirmation and an estimated time. Arriving at the time is optimistic, so I arrive 5 minutes later. I find staff juggling half a dozen (often more) devices, one per app, and converting them to whatever their internal order system is. Frequently they have entirely missed my order and who can blame them because they've gone from phone & counter "inboxes" to more than you can count on one hand. You can ask staff which app tends to be most reliable and they'll tell you which one they pay the most attention to and that has a hope of reaching parity with phone orders. Delivery's a little different of a beast, apps have made the market for that kind of service more "liquid" and responsive, but it remains to be seen exactly what the models look like without growth capital subsidies. > But like music, it won't just go away, it'll be a new business structure that perhaps dominates the industry. If this is the comparison, then be afraid, because streaming has both destroyed a huge amount of value in recordings and redirected a significant portion of remaining value towards new middlemen. |
Counterpoint: streaming didn't destroy value, it exposed how much value was fictional or an artifice of a dearth of consumer options.
Apps have done something similar. They have exposed that many customers, in many cases, don't actually care all that much about things that restauranteurs believed they did. The supposed value largely didn't exist.
One example is supposed relationships between vendor and customer. Most people don't have strong, deep, and enduring emotional attachments to relatively generic pizza shops. They do not deeply bond to an artist they kinda like one song from, but otherwise find interchangeable with several dozen other artists on their lofi playlist.