[balaz]

I reject the entirety of your comment but this point struck me:

>It also destroys every restaurant's natural advantage of closeness - if you run a pizzeria and your food is not horrible, you can naturally expect people from about 2 city blocks over to eat there - now, they're competing with every pizzeria in the city.

How is this a bad thing? You want businesses to compete, both in quality and price.

[torginus]

Food delivery reduces competition and increases price - now, instead of having a corner pizza shop, you have a couple massive chains supplying wide geographical areas - the food is not as fresh, the prices are higher due to the delivery markup and extra labor of bringing the food to you, so you likely end up paying more for a worse product, and said money will go to big corporations instead of a local small business

[balaz]

That is only true if the chains are better than the local restaurants. Which, admittedly, is true far too many times. So maybe those local restaurants should improve or close. I'm not here to give handouts, and neither are the users of those apps. Cook food that is better than the slop that the chains serve, which is a tremendously low bar to clear, or close shop.

[cal_dent]

And what happens if the chains are also "slop" but have more capital to continue to dominate a location thereby stopping any potential smaller, but better, local competitor from entering the market? Is that better for the local community or, somewhat more grandly, society as a whole?

[balaz]

How will they stop local competitors exactly? Will they send goons to trash the place?

[GOD_Over_Djinn]

Large businesses can operate at a loss that small businesses cannot sustain. They do this to strangle out competition. Then, after they’ve established a monopoly or oligopoly, they price gouge customers, reduce COGS resulting in inferior product but higher margins, etc.

I’m surprised that this is news to you. This is basically the foundation of antitrust law. Like, this is extremely common knowledge to the point that it mystifies me that you are not aware of it.

[cal_dent]

Come on mate let's be serious here. Monopolistic actions can stop local competition through completely legitimate means (such as temporarily selling products at a loss in a way which smaller competitors cannot due to access to more palatable capital funding for instance). After a certain level in size, competition is rarely about the product alone