Amazon Restaurants
primenow.amazon.com
primenow.amazon.com
For myself, I usually prefer to just go and pick up myself; that's almost always the fastest option.
> For myself, I usually prefer to just go and pick up myself; that's almost always the fastest option.
Most people don't care about getting the absolute fastest option, or if they do, they will still compromise for convenience.
[1] https://www.thestreet.com/story/13248764/1/amazons-got-its-s...
Your assumption runs contrary to the core idea of Amazon. Customer experience is the absolute most important thing.
In your mind if Amazon was optimising for their convenience alone they'd just pocket your money and not bother to ever deliver anything? Because that would the most convenient option for them.
That's called fraud and isn't generally considered a business model so much as a criminal enterprise
Can you give some examples of times when Amazon HASN'T put the desires of the vast majority of customers first?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/10/01/amazon_blocks...
Sometimes theres no dinner ready and in the hecticness of life, we forget to cook the night before so we get into an unfortunate situation of either going hungry until the game ends or cooking and miss the game.
Delivery solves this issue. Take out is definitely faster, but that usually means missing part of whatever game is on. My case obviously isn't universal but given the popularity of sports and how primetime games are only an hour or so after you get home from work, Id think there's a non negligible amount of people with similar situations.
For people with small kids, driving to pick up food can be a huge production, with car seats, diaper bags, strollers, etc. Curbside pickup helps, but delivery is so much easier, and sometimes just as fast.
When I cook it usually takes an hour or so. So getting food delivered frees up that hour.
It's not about being the fastest, though, it's about being more convenient.
And even fastest depends on the area. Where I live (near a city centre) I can chose among 300 restaurants from a centralized meta-ordering service, and have their food delivered in 20-40 minutes.
It will take me 20 minutes to even decide to get up, find my keys, drive around, order and wait for the food.
But 1-hour for rush orders at low cost, or free if you order a meal, could be a good competitive advantage.
Especially if they could find a way for customers to order a lot of meals, like 3-4 times per week, or have a frequent order in some office in the same building you work.
My new hobby seems to be not getting a prime delivery next day, calling Amazon, them apologising and giving me an extra month on my prime subscription for free - which is nice and everything but I'd rather get the service they promise.
A parcel arriving the day after it's ordered is pretty much the definition of a next day service.
The definition Amazon and every other company offering 'next day delivery' is that 'next day' means 'the next day'. As in the day after you buy the thing. It's a much more reasonable interpretation of the term because it's not open to colloquial misunderstandings (in your interpretation there could be day, evening, dusk, night, etc.). Is 5pm day? Is 6pm day?
We moved into a brand new unit, first tenant, new postcode. We basically had to train the delivery companies so they could learn where we are, understandable and fine. Amazon presented a whole extra problem, though.
They use geofencing(?) for their deliveries, so the driver has to be within the bounds of the fenced area to make the delivery. The first driver must have set our fenced area up at the entrance to the trading estate, this meant that for a month a driver (never the same one twice) would show up, ask for my name, scan the package, look confused, apologise, drive 300 m back to the entrance of the estate, scan the parcel and then come back and then ask me to sign!!!
Even when I lived in north Donegal (very rural) I could order parts from Overclockers UK (who use DPD) and guarantee delivery in two days and with a reasonably accurate drop off time window.
I'm less bothered about when a thing will arrive next day (and I don't mind evenings), but it's the not knowing when it'll arrive. Hell I'd settle for a four hour window rather than the current state of affairs with Amazon logistics in the UK.
What also ticks me off is how around this time of year, even in the last week in November, Amazon Prime's one day delivery magically becomes two days and yet is passed off as one day delivery.
They also always find a neighbor to accept the package. Royal mail always leaves a card which means I have to pick it up from a post office (which is only open when I work). The main reason I order nearly everything from Amazon is that most other sellers here use Royal Mail 2nd class, which for my address takes at least 4 days to arrive, before christmas often 2 weeks or more.
Sometimes they leave a card without a tracking number (last month.) That was fun. But at least I knew it was for me.
Because there was the time with the card that had a tracking number but no name or flat number. And then the card that had three digits of the tracking number and no name or flat number.
Royal Mail are pretty awful at being a courier.
Everyone always says "Don't stake your livelihood on platforms you don't control" (e.g. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but what happens when one of those platforms suddenly forces its way into your business? How can a restaurant owner turn them down when all the short-sighted owners nearby are happily signing up?
I'm imagining a day in the future where a restaurant goes broke because Amazon had become a significant portion of their orders, but they suddenly got kicked off the service after X number of complaints (happens to FBA sellers all the time). By the time other restaurant owners realize how easily Amazon can destroy their livelihood, they might be too dependent to voluntarily leave. And then all the smug commenters from the last thread will be grateful for another opportunity to say "Well the restaurants should've known better than to sign up in the first place!"
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/5gvgdl/using_a_amaz...
I've worked at a few such companies, and they all work extra hard trying to diversify their revenue sources, for both customers and industry. If it's a startup, then such revenue dependence can mean the difference between being able to go IPO or not.
For the situation you describe for restaurants, they'd have to be vigilant about catering to multiple platform providers, and not neglecting their in-person customers (I've definitely seen a restaurant cater more to delivery rather than sit down, and slowly deteriorating in reputation among customers as order times became longer).
It's just like managing an AAPL supplier contract. Some will thrive, and others will suffer, like the sapphire supplier in Arizona.
http://www.businessinsider.com/gt-advanced-files-for-bankrup...
At some point the corporation decided it wouldn't outsource software development work anymore. They hired some of the key people at my former employer (by then I had already moved somewhere else), and almost overnight they had to close shop because they didn't have a source of revenue anymore.
Wise agencies try to diversify - but any new business brought in will have to deal with The Big Client being the squeakiest of wheels (... that get the grease).
I can't say I've see an agency that has made the "grow other business" transition successfully.
All you can do is hope that you can nail down the next large customer before your existing golden egg figures out they can push you around.
I've often wondered how well a restaurant would do in areas where those platforms are popular if it just dropped its customer-facing storefront entirely and went entirely online delivery.
The drop in operating costs versus the lack of walk-ins ...
I expect you'll see more non-traditional kitchen locations and alternative delivery transport methods (e.g. scooters or Postmates bike couriers) to combat the high rents, congestion and parking issues common to most dense cities.
I can only imagine what would have happened if he didn't post to a website where it gained traction. If it wasn't upvoted out of reddit's new, would he just be completely screwed? Damn...
Anyway, one thing I'd like to add, that I think is important to keep in mind, is that there are two (or more!) sides to every story. This is especially true for stories we hear from an aggrieved party on the news or social media.
We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause:
https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...
A similar situation happened to GitHub founder Zach Holman when he got ousted from the company -- his accuser had a soapbox in the form of her blog and Twitter; the general public only learned more sides of the story when employees decided to post some of their behind-the-scenes perspectives anonymously online.
Be careful drawing conclusions about any particular situation without hearing all sides of the story.
That's an awful example. The employee completely stopped responding after that so we don't know how much of the truth it was (like you said there are two sides and there were tons of rumors he was advised by his lawyer to stop talking; who knows what happened after that).
What's worse is this type of behavior by the CEO was downright despicable. Why? Two scenarios.
1. The employee was correct and it showed other employees that the CEO is willing to lie and berate them in the open public should they have a dissenting, public opinion about the company. Feedback, even if encourages, would completely stop after this event.
2. The employee was a liar and really was terrible. The CEO now has created a permanent remark that cannot be taken back regarding this person's work ethic. Now the employee can't redeem themselves. They can't learn from past mistakes. Every employer in the future of his employment can google search him and have this come up. Unfortunately this is likely to come up more and more as kids grow up with Facebook, post photos of themselves being drunk or otherwise and then seeking employment as they grow up.
Both sides were awful in this example.
If you look at trends, people to tend to tell their story in a way that's favorable to them, while making their opponent look like a villain. Certainly not everyone tells the truth, because stories told by different people about the same event are incompatible! I find the examples I mentioned so shocking and interesting because they are examples of high-conflict situations where you can (to different extents) see both sides, where you can meaningfully evaluate a theory of what happened.
I can't imagine they ban IP addresses lightly.
> One user reported that an account that hadn’t been used to purchase a Pixel was suspended, apparently because it was listed as a back-up address for an account that had.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...
A funded startup on the other hand could go under at moment when their next round of funding doesn't come in. It's also a sure bet that any success you're seeing from them early on will diminish over as they attempt to actually make a profit.
This is a valuable service to the consumer and good restaurants will thrive while bad ones will fail.
Also, any halfway decent owner/marketer knows you need to capture email addresses for people you want to sell to. Never rely on social media alone. Just use it to get them to give you an email.
Transparency has nothing to do with it.
Amazon has a history of shutting down Fulfillment By Amazon seller accounts in an extremely arbitrary and capricious manner.
If they only shut them down due to legitimate complaints then sure, you might have a point. The story I linked proved that's not the case, and there are many more like it. That man's life would still be in ruins if he hadn't (luckily) gotten so much attention through Reddit and HN.
The problem is that Amazon often doesn't seem to really investigate issues in any depth at all; they just kick the seller off reflexively. It's trivially easy to be kicked off the platform for reasons other than doing something legitimately "bad," such as software error, human error, or even a deliberately orchestrated fraud campaign conducted by your competitor -- and many other sellers don't get kicked off for doing the same thing, or worse. It's all very random.
Yes, because people are poor at dealing with selection bias. A data source with 100% real and true complaints and favorable reviews can tell any story you want it to with the right filtering, so especially in the presence of a malicious adversary you have to completely discard this data from your decision making.
That's really only on the West Coast. People don't live or die by Yelp here on the East Coast. Frankly, I'm always surprised to see people are still using it after all the revelations of extortionist behavior they were engaging in against restaurants.
That's a false premise, which assumes any and all complaints are made in good faith. Some people are assholes and will leave a bad review because they disliked the person who delivered a meal or any number of other spurious reasons. You really sound like the sort of person who has never worked in any other field than IT and has a naive and largely illusory view of business conditions.
EDIT: Oh, and speaking of Amazon, Google and their automated bans, my SO's company's work account got temporarily blocked by Google recently, apparently for the sin of sending several files in quick succession to her boss' account. Apparently "atypical usage" is grounds for a ban now. Fortunately, the account was unlocked few hours later, and I didn't have to make fuss about it here on HN...
Search discovery: Google, Bing
Social promotion: FB, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc
App & software stores: Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Steam
General commerce: Transaction networks, Paypal, banks, etc
Online commerce: eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Craigslist, Zillow, Priceline, Airbnb, Alibaba, hundreds more
There's nothing new about this. All businesses utilize platforms they don't control. There are no exceptions.
Radio, TV, newspapers, mail catalogs were discovery and promotion before Google search was. The dependency was just as high.
Want to open a hotdog stand or a gas station? The absolute minimum platform you'll be dependent on will be local political system/s in dozens of ways (infrastructure, zoning, health laws, employment regulations, and on and on).
1. This is a metaphor, in case anyone else is feeling pedantic and wants to challenge the notion that eggs are commonly transported in baskets...
Sign up for all of the services: OpenTable, Doordash, Amazon Restaurants, GrubHub, Postmates, everything. That way, when one service does something terrible, you aren't crippled by the single point of failure, and as long as it wasn't terrible enough to sever the relationship, you can take your time rectifying the issue.
I've worked with seven different resorts/hotels doing web-dev and every single one of them absolutely hated TripAdvisor and wished it didn't exist and they didn't have to be on it to survive.
Amazon here is a me-too play here, and I'd be shocked if they reached the concentration to sink a restaurant given so many incumbents.
Now, I don't really care that it's google, but they are the biggest and most likely to be seen. Preferably Bing and Yahoo and DDG would have an equivalent.
For an interesting view of where this has happened before, look no further than FB subsuming publishers via Instant Articles and Google recently doing the same with Amp. They stole all the control of the audience data from publishers, and give out whatever cut they feel is appropriate from ad revenue. Publishers refused to adapt or couldn't adapt fast enough and are royally screwed as a result.
Speaking of them, I think we're overdue for the next cycle of them killing off API access...
Ordering was interesting, they didn't have the pizza I wanted listed under the pre-made options, so I had to make my own, but there was no option to do half and half and adding additional topping had a confusing interface. The menus do not seem to be optimized for each restaurant the way Doordash is, and you must click on an item to see the price.
Also the food wasn't kept in a thermal bag, like pizza delivery does, so it wasn't piping hot when I received it and the delivery members don't have distinct shirts. I probably won't use it ever again since I prefer Doordash, and one of my friends brother in laws is a cofounder/CTO so I feel a false tie to it.
But this is a great example of the lack of customer lock-in. Even the slightest improvement over Doordash, and I'd easily switch to Amazon or just bounce between the two. There's a thai restaurant just a bit out of Doordash range -- that would do it. Pictures on the menus -- that would do it. A "re-order" button -- that would do it.
I like DD, but all I think of it is: "I order food and it gets here."
But it turns out that there's no switching cost on either side of the marketplace: you or I happily switch between both depending on which drivers are closer, and an Uber driver can just open their Lyft app if Uber is slowing down. You'd happily switch from Doordash if Caviar had better photos, and a restaurant can delivery via both Doordash and Caviar.
I think Uber might be able to get out of this by saying "growth / users -> investment -> self driving cars", but I'm not sure what Doordash or Postmates plans to do about it.
Turns out now we use it so much and I've found that the value is that I can order by phone when I leave work and by the time I get home the food will be arriving at my door.
The real value to me is that I can order dinner! They've had a few hiccups in the early days but now its pretty solid!
Does "order by phone" mean mobile app or calling in an order? I would guess app but with Alexa and the other speech recognition tech they have, voice orders doesn't sound that far off either.
Skip is very popular here in Winnipeg since this is where they're headquartered, but always seemed like the underdog in the overall market. Wondering what will become of Skip, and how Just Eat and the others will keep duking it out from here now that Amazon is in the ring too.
I've never understood why someone would want to be glued to their phone/tablet watching every move their pizza makes. Seriously, just why would you possibly care what street it's currently on?
This is particularly useful for me as I then know when to listen out for the door, and I've confidence in the ETA knowing they're just a street away from me.
In cities this shouldn't be easy to track anyway. And then you could also jsut follow the Uber bike. Don't think that the fact that someone ordered food is private (what they ordered might be).
At the moment they are clearly winning (at least here), so they might be right. They have quite a bit of cash and are buying out smaller players for coverage across US and EU.
[1]: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2016/12/15/...
Amazons marketing people have some explaining to do :)
Amazon could probably beat out the low-end guys simply by using vehicles and containers capable of keeping the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold.
And the next step, is using that network to deliver chilled meals employees will take home(in an isolated container). At low enough price point, and high quality(which munchery seem to do) this could replace many dinners,a very big business , while also offering a disruptive attack on Walmart, and restaurants in general.
Either way, Seamless/Grubhub have turned to utter garbage since their merger. I'm happily using Delivery, but much like Uber/Lyft, these are commodity businesses that I can switch between at zero cost to myself. So I'll give Amazon a try too.
There's also Sprig, Fooda and some other food delivery services I've left out.
If it doesn't cost any more than what I'd pay in person schlepping to the restaurant, the psychological barrier to ordering on a whim is virtually eliminated. It also has that Uber-esque impersonality to it: the delivery guy doesn't wait around after dropping of your food in your typical managed NY apartment building (literally racing down when I get the call, I've never been able to spot them), since they're tipped up front. In fact, the last service I can remember that was such a no-brainer improvement when introduced, was Uber X.
That's not sustainable you might say. But members do pay $99/year for Prime, which isn't a whole lot since it does so much, but is increasingly a larger part where Amazon makes their margin from.
What do you get out of Prime? I don't have it in Australia (although there's rumblings that Amazon might be starting here) and I thought it was just faster delivery and video.
Uber eats is the best of these I've found, but it's a pain meeting at the curb.
Amazon restaurants has by far the worst drivers though, I think compounded by tipping before they deliver, and no ratings system
That can't possibly be sustainable over the long run.
This is an option, you should be able to select whether you want to meet your courier at the curb for faster food or wait for them to find parking and come to your door.
A friend of mine is a Dasher. You do tip before they arrive, and they have no idea how they've been tipped--they just get whatever the total of all the tips of their shift are... I've never been so disincentivized to tip.
The rating system also sucks because the app will force you to rate your last experience if you haven't the next time you try to order. Lots of five stars from me because, when I'm trying to get my dinner to my house ASAP, I can't be bothered to give an accurate and fair rating.
I imagine this effect would be even more pronounced with "the everything store" encompassing an ever-larger portion of total commerce.
I'm hard-of-hearing, so online ordering is a godsend compared to the old days of calling up a fast speaking, often accented person with terrible background noise. So if the choice is between calling one restaurant, or ordering online from a different restaurant, I will always pick the online ordering.
The restaurant without online ordering eventually closed, despite the fact the neighborhood has really boomed, and I'm sure no small part of it is because of their refusal to do online ordering.
If I'm going to a sit down restaurant, I'm making the effort to leave my couch, so I want the food to be a higher quality. Trucking in potentially cheaper lukewarm soggy food doesn't feel like it can be made up for with just ambiance of the new place I'm sitting.
The thrill of having a pizza arrive by drone could justify a hefty premium for a kids birthday party.
I would really like to see the air delivery though. Maybe a calzone or stromboli would be more viable.
So far, I've only ever used Amazon when I have a coupon. It would be cool if I could accumulate Amazon restaurant credit as an option when I choose No Rush Shipping or have some form of loyalty/rewards system. Else, I'm just going to choose whatever is cheapest, even if slightly less convenient. And that's just me. Other users' loyalty could be even more elusive I'm sure.
So, what happens when this happens to these restaurants? Like, say I 'open' up a restaurant inside of my apartment. Maybe I list the address as some other place, or I just risk the local health inspector showing up unannounced. But I only sell via Amazon, and I get some friends and family to write reviews of my kitchen, or maybe I just pay some 'bots to do it too. Amazon has problems already with that fly-by-night operation, how are they going to combat it?
For reference, this was an issue with GrubHub last year:
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Seamless-Restaurant-Gru...
http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/11/grubhub-seamless-ghost-res...
* delivery time = 30 minutes
* minimum wage + minor benefits = $10/hr
* cost of vehicle, gas and other logistics = $5/hr
...then they must charge $10 per delivery. If you squeeze and wiggle may be you can bring this down to $7 or so likely not considering downtimes in between peak hours. I thought this was the reason why most door-to-door delivery services eventually failed or switched to catering. What is the new business innovation here?
30 minutes delivery time per order seems way too high, I'd expect 10 minutes or less per order. They don't deliver just one order at a time. That said I'm sure margins are razor thin and the drivers get paid like shit.
At its core Amazon has always been a logistics company. They already put warehouses close to airports so it's not much of a stretch to take over the air freight. Last mile is another issue, UPS, USPS, FedEx and the rest will continue doing that for a long time.
It's not just possible, it's already in the works.
Back in March Amazon announced plans to lease 20 Boeing 767s. Their first plane flew at an airfair in Seattle a few months ago. Recently they've been showing off their long-haul Prime semitrucks around Seattle.
Factor in Amazon Logistics (last-mile Fedex/ups/usps alternative) and Amazon Fresh (last-mile food delivery)... it's happening. I think we can expect big plays in 2017.
* they also have their drone thing... I think that's just a moonshot hype project.
That said, the UI isn't quite as user friendly. It feels bolted on top of Prime Now, so you don't really have a typical menu, a regular shopping cart is used and shared with Prime Now which just feels a bit off. I think it would feel much nicer if they built a website specific to food ordering instead of trying to shoehorn it into Prime Now.
I should add that Amazon did this with Amazon locker as well. Northern VA got coverage well before DC. My suspicion is some kind of incentive that VA is providing to Amazon, the same one that attracted Amazon to build its huge us-east data center in VA.
I was going to suggest that No VA is more affluent than DC, but in that case they shouldn't be in Baltimore.
It's kind of like competing with Amazon or Google for cloud infrastructure. Very few companies need all of those machines or that tech, they have no use for it other than renting to people. Amazon and Google on the other hand already needed that tech. They are essentially renting their own excess.
If I am with a group of people we can go to restaurant anyway. On the other hand, eating out alone is awkward, so ordering online becomes more attractive.
Are they delivering 24/7 or at least in the evening? A killer feature for normal amazon would be delivery at a time where people are home from work instead of during working hours...not sure why this isn't a thing yet.
Unilever has like 8 different ice cream brands in different countries all sharing the same logo and mostly selling the same products.
I can't say I'm having an easy time keeping track of which service to use for what.
Can someone explain the point of this post?
The benefit is that the delivery fee is included into your Amazon Prime plan.
Now, in my opinion, Sprig is a much more affordable everyday meal option when you get the membership. There's also Doordash, GrubHub, EAT24, UberEATS, Postmates... etc. You'll find some restaurants are not available in some apps.
However, when I read how they threat their employees: it sounds horrible.
Let's hope they never get to the tipping point that they can threat Restaurants, like their employees.
That said: I like it that they try out new things and don't care about failing.
EDIT: I've been at Amazon over 5 years.
IMO, the best indication of a company's general sense of ethics is the way they treat their lowest-paid employees. Amazon doesn't instill confidence in that regard.
The recent HackerNews Amazon hate-train has been a huge bummer and mostly does not reflect reality.
Should big companies just start linking directly to things they want us to buy on HN, with no context? Is that encouraged here?
Amazon does interesting things with tech and logistics. This is their latest foray and is interesting to this audience/niche. I understand your concern, but if this was just mindless advertising, I would think it would receive short shrift from the down voters and would disappear fairly quickly. As it happens this is pretty interesting zeitgeist news.