I’ve been delivering for Postmates and DoorDash

As if tipping had logical regularity to begin with? You're expected to tip at coffee shops long before receiving the service, and for takeout orders, where there is no service. (At least, they try to dupe you into thinking it's expected.)

"Add a tip to this order when placing it" sounds stupid, but it's only revealing the pre-existing stupidity of the convention it's trying to parallel.

If they go the other route like Uber and say "tip's included", then they trigger an angels-on-a-pin lawsuit about "well which part was the tip because you can't take a cut of that".

I also much prefer this scheme because it makes the drop off faster and more frictionless. Courier knocks, hands over the food, and leaves. It takes only moments, which is great - just like getting out of the car with Uber. No fiddling with devices etc. It avoids the problem of the courier having to stand in the doorway awkwardly while I unbag and check all of the food. Now the drop off is quick and I can assign the rating and tip at my leisure. (If there is a food problem they can't really fix it by then anyway)

I had the same concern about "who/what exactly am I reviewing?" However I eventually resigned myself to simply reviewing the overall customer experience. It's up to Postmates to perform quality assurance on each component of the delivery process.

I think the courier has the most effect on overall delivery quality. Bad couriers will miss restaurant mistakes even when obviously printed on the receipt. Good ones will catch mistakes even if they're not, by reviewing the order verbally on pickup with the host or hostess. There is also a central dispatch component of the service, the phone reps who call in orders; they can also make mistakes. I suspect Postmates could increase their accuracy if they could get restaurants to participate, so they could send orders in writing. Granted, there are certain restaurant problems that Postmates cannot catch: like the kitchen makes and boxes the wrong item without realizing it, such that the wrong item is on the receipt and the host doesn't catch it on pickup. This failure mode seems to be fairly rare at professionally run restaurants though.

A good courier can catch nearly all mistakes by comparing the receipt to the order, and by reviewing it with restaurant staff; and courier delivery is the majority of the variable delivery time since restaurant kitchens typically get food out in 20 min - so overall I also think it is appropriate for them to carry the bulk of the review/rating focus. If you rate 3 stars or lower, Postmates also asks you to check what went wrong: missing items, etc. Ultimately, we should as customers report our experience on each delivery and trust that the service will dig in appropriately to whichever component is responsible for quality failures and fix it - that's one of their value-adds. We should not worry that our reviews will be misused or misapplied because that would be assuming bad judgment on the service's part. As a customer I don't want to, and shouldn't have to, think about where the source of mistakes might be. That's where I've mentally ended up on that issue.

I have had quality issues from time to time, that once led me to send an email to their CEO after a string of 1-3 star orders (no response; didn't ask for one), but lately and most of the time things are pretty good and arrive as they should. Postmates CS has always made mistakes right with me, which is why I kept using them even despite the errors. At one point I worried they would suspend my account for fraud, when I was asking for refunds on 30% of my orders, rising eventually to 50% during what was presumably a growth spurt. But I sent CS pictures of the mistakes (which they said was not necessary) and always got the appropriate refund. Mistakes are fairly rare now, and most of my orders are 5 stars, though I imagine their concession rate will be a major area of focus in general going forward.

Obligatory plug for http://reddit.com/r/EndTipping which discusses these issues, lists tip-free restaurants, etc.

I wonder how much room there is to specialize in doing this right.

The vast majority of the time I order delivery, food tends to come in super-budget containers that degrade the experience. Pizzas arriving in cardboard boxes, the taste altered by 10+ minutes of steaming and dripping oil... asian food tends to arrive in the clam-shell styrofoam containers that mush up some vegetables or turn crispy fried food soggy, with sauces in thin plastic cups that invariably leak at least a little... When was the last time anyone rethought delivery?

The experience could be so much better. What if soups used parfait-style containers to keep the liquids separate from dry mix-ins (eg fried chicken) until right before consumption? What if pizza boxes had oil-absorbant padding and better venting? And what about standardizing those container sizes like we standardized shipping containers, so food doesn't get jumbled in a plastic bag? Seems like that would open the window to containers with heating/cooling packs as well, which would help batch-deliver orders more efficiently.

How much of a market is there for companies that handle shipping and packaging/handling of delivery orders? Owning the full delivery experience instead of just some cars.

it works great for things like soups, noodle dishes, etc. you can heat the soup base or noodles nice and hot and then add the cold ingredients for a nice just-made taste.

someone really needs to figure out how to keep fried food crispy though. that's a billion dollar idea just on its own.

You may as well be amused that sit-down restaurants exist.

In some ways, it really is the perfect thing for silicon valley during boom time. If you are paying three grand a month for a one-bedroom apartment, paying forty bucks for a really good delivered dinner doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

The interesting thing to remember about the first wave of food delivery companies is that some of them survived the crash... which is really quite a feat, because a lot of people went from being really wealthy to being... not. But you can still order from waiter.com.

No other country I've traveled to really had this, you could, at most, get pizza delivered until 10pm or so. Can anyone shed some light?

So, in addition to what you said, a startup may also not work if it doesn't start (or become successful) in a city like San Francisco/ New York

A 33 dollar salad approaches the profligacy of Sodom and Gomorrah :-)

On this same spectrum, an Uber-for-babysitters would fail even more spectacularly than HomeJoy.

My understanding is that The law prevents the landlord from keeping rent in line with market, and makes it hard for the landlord to evict the current tenant, and even limits how much the landlord can jack up the rent between tenants.

Often in situations where one person has the master lease and then rents out rooms, that one person will keep a lot of the difference... but not always. Quite often, it would seem, they are just more picky about choosing roommates.

But the upshot is that there are a small number of very inexpensive units in SF. As far as I can tell, you have to know someone (or know someone who knows someone) and then you have to be lucky, and then that someone needs to like you. But if all those things happen? potentially, you can have cheaper rent in SF than you can in San Jose.