| > It's a modernization of an already-proven business model. Chinese food and pizza was orderable by phone, and delivered for free or a small fee, 30 years ago. Different business model. Drivers went back and forth to a single location, and had a fixed delivery radius. A driver who wasn't delivering could also be helping out at the restaurant. Orders could be batched up, go and deliver multiple pizzas in a row. Uber Eats is super inefficient, drivers aren't based at a restaurant, the delivery radius is much larger, density isn't taken into account, and orders aren't batched up from a single location. Or to put it another way, I live in a major suburb of Seattle. All the years prior to Uber Eats, my only delivery options were Pizza from a handful of places. That is it, they had the scale, and I was in their delivery radius, those small # of restaurants had determined it was profitable to deliver to me. Uber Eats comes along, and now restaurants that, honestly, are far enough away that I wouldn't consider driving to pick up food from them, are available to deliver to me. Of course none of that is economically feasible. As stated above, Uber Eats is already less efficient than directly dispatching from a restaurant. In super dense areas (e.g. NYC, SF) maybe couriers can be kept so busy that bouncing from place to place all night long to pick up and drop off food makes sense, but in the suburb of a third tier city? No way is that a good business model. |