[chongli]

You nailed it — the primary value of these marketplaces is the consumer facing ordering technology, not the fact that it’s a marketplace.

You’re mistaken. The primary value is the logistics of dealing with drivers. A restaurant supplying its own drivers will always be at a disadvantage to Door Dash/Uber Eats etc because they can never utilize their drivers as efficiently as the big delivery companies. During peak hours, a restaurant may receive a surge of orders that they do not have the drivers to handle. During off-peak hours, on the other hand, they may not have any orders at all so any drivers they employ will be sitting idle, on call.

The marketplace for restaurants that everyone talks about is not the hard one to build. The hard one is the marketplace for drivers. If I’m a restaurant then there’s very little value to me in an app that takes orders but does not provide drivers.

[flibble]

There’s definitely value in a shared driver pool but it does not need to come hand in hand with a consumer facing marketplace. Doordash offer access to their driver pool for orders placed through any channel (Doordash Drive), Uber offers on-demand drivers in a similar way. Companies like Stuart solely offer a B2B last mile delivery service with their pool of drivers.

This isn’t new either — DPD, UPS, DHL have all offered a shared delivery network (for retail) without anyone expecting that anything that is delivered by DHL must be ordered via DHL.com.

[pessimizer]

The hole in this theory is that, unlike general delivery drivers, almost every restaurant's peak hours are at the same time - meaning that there's no reason to think that the app/website would have fewer idle drivers than the restaurants.

The primary value is the logistics of dealing with governments in order to abuse workers with impunity. If a restaurant tried to claim that their drivers were independent contractors that don't need to be paid between orders, they'd be laughed at. Put a massively funded, massively lobbying intermediary between the driver and the restaurant, and it becomes fine.

edit: I'm sure there's a term for this - labor-laundering?

[chongli]

My father drives for one of the big delivery apps. He does not consider it an abuse of his labour. The driver app offers him 4 hour shifts which he takes or rejects as he sees fit.

During his shifts he's essentially busy driving the entire time. Because the app has a big pool of drivers it is far better equipped to accommodate the shifting demand among the restaurants. As it turns out, not every restaurant does equally well on every day's peak hours. The delivery app acts as a load balancer by distributing drivers among restaurants according to demand.

My dad used to drive a limousine for a small, local business owner. He was verbally abused and often forced to drive clients to the airport at 4am one day and other clients to a rock concert at 3pm the next day. The owner also regularly stole his tips. He VASTLY prefers delivering food. He also has no interest in picking up a 9-5 job because he's older and he simply does not want to work more than 24-28 hours per week.