[citricsquid]

There's a company in Brighton (England) called "dinner2go" (http://dinner2go.co.uk) that offer this sort of service (a "food taxi") and it's absolutely fantastic. They've been around for a few years now but they don't seem to have expanded beyond Brighton which would indicate to me that it's not a particularly lucrative business.

They charge pretty ridiculous delivery prices, on a $15 meal I pay $15 delivery, and I assume the time that it takes to place the order, collect the order and deliver the order mean they're not making great amounts of money on that $15. They do deliver well though, when my food arrives it's been <15 minutes from McDonalds to me so it's always delicious.

Something I've been wondering for a while is why don't places like McDonalds, Burger King and In-N-Out do delivery? The only conclusions I can come to are that either they make money by upselling extras in the restaurant and someone ordering from home exercises greater constraint (eg: just ordering 1 burger and fries) OR that delivery isn't as profitable. Does anyone here have any experience in fast-food and know why?

[potatolicious]

Humans are really, really expensive. Even working at minimum wage, the amount of time it takes to get from point A to B in most cities is large enough that the effective human cost (not to mention fuel, insurance, etc) can easily go above $5. Are most people inclined to pay a $5 surcharge on a $10 fast food meal?

Not to mention the costs go up if you demand prompt service, since there needs to be more slack in capacity.

In certain places like NYC they skirt around this by not having on-staff delivery people, and simply contracting the deliveries out piecemeal, on-demand... The trick to supporting this is, of course, lax labor laws (I wouldn't be surprised if most of the delivery people aren't making minimum wage), and an enormous concentration of restaurants to justify the supply of an independent delivery force. This is unrealistic in a lot of jurisdictions.

[mikescar]

I drove delivery during high school and college, and did food service work as well. I really enjoyed delivery and did pretty well for a younger person working on tips.

I tried working for one of those 'food taxi' companies, who provide delivery from a selection of restaurants that don't have a dedicated staff. There was a $10 charge or $15 for food from two restaurants. The restaurant staff generally didn't care about moving fast for me as a driver as it was relatively rare. And the customers weren't inclined to tip because they assumed that $10 or $15 they paid went to me, which of course it did not.

After these experiences, I just don't think the people that want fast food delivered would generally tip enough, or be OK with paying any delivery fee that would cover costs + profit for the fast food company.

That said, interested to see how this works. It's a novelty because people love In-N-Out, there's a slick web component, and it targets a relatively well-to-do audience in San Francisco.

[eps]

There is an urban legend that the only two profitable items in McDonalds are fries and soda. The rest is just there to sell these two.

[TeHCrAzY]

Evbn, you seem to be hellbanned, and your comment history makes things look (to me!) that its probably unjustified or a mistake. Email pg!

[Evbn]

It's not really meaningful to try to say whether a single item is profitable, since they are so interrelated, but the fries and soda are certainly very high margin.

[greedo]

Part of it (ironically I know) is quality. McDonalds is really obsessive about french fry quality, and their fries suffer dramatically after about 7 minutes. By the time they would get to your house/apt, they'd be dead. Pizza and chinese food is much more resilient.

In high school, the McD I worked at sold food to one of the local school cafeterias, so we had to cook over 200 burgers and fries all at once. By the time we were done, the oldest burgers were about 5 minutes old, same with the fries. After delivery, the food was a good 30 minutes old. Made me shudder, but the stuff was insanely popular at the school. I guess the cafeteria couldn't cook their way out of a paper bag.

[bobwebb]

I live in Brighton and the vast majority of people I know use http://www.just-eat.co.uk/ which is basically an online wrapper for ordering takeaways. It covers loads of the local places and you usually get free delivery within a ~2 mile radius for orders over £8 or a ~£3 surcharge for delivery. You can order pretty much any kind of fast food from there, although the big companies (McDonalds, etc) don't deliver.

[huetsch]

McDonalds and KFC do deliver in major Chinese cities. The biggest difference is the cost structure. Chinese cities have a very high population density, which makes delivery much easier. They also have relatively cheap labor (although this is changing). And people here ride electric scooters, which are much faster at navigating big cities than cars. McDonalds in Beijing charges a little less than $1.50 USD for delivery.

[philwelch]

There's a certain price level where delivery is cost-effective, somewhere around $15-20 or so. Pizza and Asian take-out usually meet that bar, but fast food doesn't necessarily.

This obviously changes as density increases.

[mikhaill]

FYI. It works in some localities. Many of the New York City McDonalds have delivery offered by the restaurant itself.

[dkrich]

I live in the outskirts of DC and the other day at a light at a shopping center in the burbs I saw a Burger King delivery car. It was branded and everything. I have to say I didn't understand the economics of it.