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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

FWIW the restaurants behind these actually do a lot better. Imagine you own a restaurant. You serve lunch and dinner. You kitchen is utilized from 11 to 2 for lunch and from 6 to 10 for dinner. With these apps your kitchen now is utilized before 11 prepping food for delivery for lunch and again from 2 to 6, prepping food for dinner. You're now making more on your capital investments and your kitchen staff is getting more hours. The people cooking the food are the same as if you went to a restaurant and the people delivering are the same that would be wait staff. If you didn't feel bad for these people before why would you feel bad for them now because there is an app in front?

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I'd like to believe that but long-term, I expect the app is just a rent-seeking gatekeeper between the restaurant and their customers. We can expect the gatekeeper to turn the screw and make margins barely survivable eliminating quality leaving only a few low cost supply chain optimisers.

We see the same pattern again and again. Small businesses should fight like hell to keep a direct relationship with their customers.

Good use case for http://openbazaar.org

> just a rent-seeking gatekeeper between the restaurant and their customers

Couldn't agree more. I think this central to any discussion about the 'sharing economy'. Uber et al claim to be disrupting established monopolies and their marketing seeks to establish themselves as champions the free market. In reality, they are seeking to build a new monopoly, where they control the information about relationships in a system.

Memory fails me at the moment, but I remember hearing a piece on a podcast recently (it might have been Radiolab) where they discussed how the 'live' view presented by Uber was a prediction coming from their algorithms and that no actual location data was available to the app on your phone until you booked a ride. I thought it was ironic that the new darlings of the free market were operating what was essentially a soviet-style central planning system, albiet with a very modern gloss.

Actually, I work in this space and we (and our competitors such as UberEats, etc) all tap into the restaurant's down time when the kitchen currently isn't being used. That's essentially the pitch as to what's in it for them. Give us your kitchen between 9-10 and will give you sales you otherwise wouldn't have had.

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