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Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

Food delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. You can’t watch a network football game without seeing commercials about it. It is an exponentially-growing new industry built atop ride-hailing infrastructure, which itself only emerged a few years ago. The driver network can pick up food from literally anywhere and deliver it anywhere within a city-sized radius.

When Steve Yegge just moved to Google, his final posts were about encouraging his readers to work on Big Things like the cure for cancer instead of cat videos. And now his Big Thing is food delivery?

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Food is really, insanely important. Way more important than 99% of Americans give it dues for. In fact food is more important than a cure for cancer. Bad food will kill and maim more Americans long before they get the opportunity to be struck down by cancer.

And for that matter, "Cancers Associated with Overweight and Obesity Make up 40 percent of Cancers Diagnosed in the United States", CDC 2017: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1003-vs-cancer-obes...

And look at this graph (my own work, for something I'm writing): https://imgur.com/KUyUwQy

(Does America have an opioid crisis, or a food crisis?)

Anything that gets more quality food availability to Americans, especially healthier cooked food delivered in lieu of microwaving a frozen processed thing, is an improvement to celebrate.

No. It really isn't. This is a luxury service. If you use it to redistribute uneaten food in-masse, sure. But let's be honest, these services are for those who can afford laziness when it comes to walking outside their door (in a city might I add, where huge amounts of food options are available in a small radius) and getting food.

You're projecting and not seeing the big picture. Cheap, high-quality, and healthy food delivery would be beneficial to all Americans, especially the working class and especially fledgling restauranteurs. Just because you live a life of luxury doesn't mean that all services are luxuries.

Someone who is working oddjobs from 9am-9pm and still barely making next month's rent payment would benefit both from having extra time, and hopefully their health would not suffer if they were eating decent food.

Someone who is barely making rent isn't going to splurge on food delivery fees.

New things tend to be expensive, but when and if they become thoroughly ordinary, they can get cheaper. Why should food delivery be more expensive than food pickup? It's easy to see that you can deliver to somebody and somebody's neighbor for approximately the same cost as delivering to just somebody, and the cost of delivery vs. pickup for one unit is about the same. It's not obvious that this can't work; the best argument against it is that there have been many attempts in the past two decades and no successes at making deliveries much cheaper.

Because there is value in having delivery-you're essentially selling convenience. That comes with a cost

> It's easy to see that you can deliver to somebody and somebody's neighbor for approximately the same cost as delivering to just somebody,

And it's also easy to see if you have to deliver to one person on one side of the city and to another side right after it will be much more expensive. Not only do you have issues of food freshness (which means customer dissatisfaction) but also wear on a vehicle, insurance, gas, etc. To make up for it the cost of delivery will skyrocket-and thus people will not pay the premium.

Also-what about food locations? You're assuming that enough people in a very small radius will want to order the same food from the same place. That will almost never happen.

In the worst case, one person has to round trip between the source and the sink. But although the worst case is the same as the best case without a delivery service, the best case for a delivery service is better. QED.

There is wear on a vehicle, insurance, gas, either way but potentially less with the delivery service than with everyone doing their own fetches.

Yes, I'm assuming there is enough density for there to be actual economies of scale. Yes, it's true that delivery/takeaway sacrifices freshness compared to eating at the kitchen. Yes, it's reasonable to be skeptical about whether any company can achieve the required density and whether the theoretical efficiencies will overcome the friction of employment taxes. Etc., etc. However, pizza delivery has been a very affordable luxury for decades and mail delivery has been obviously cheaper than hand-delivering your mail for centuries. So, I don't buy your claim that delivery services are inherently niche luxuries.

> However, pizza delivery has been a very affordable luxury for decades and mail delivery has been obviously cheaper than hand-delivering your mail for centuries. So, I don't buy your claim that delivery services are inherently niche luxuries.

I didn't make that claim. I'm not arguing for or against the idea-but there are many problems with the model. It's not that easy-the costs don't make sense for the poor. There would be much greater impact for the poor to simply solve the food desert crisis than to have deliverable mcdonalds.

> There is wear on a vehicle, insurance, gas, either way but potentially less with the delivery service than with everyone doing their own fetches.

This is impossible to prove. At worst it's the same as the delivery model-if there is not enough density. And in places WITH enough density, there are food options within walking distance anyway. At best, people pick up food on the way to the store or back home. So there is very little loss to them as they are already driving and out.

> Yes, it's true that delivery/takeaway sacrifices freshness compared to eating at the kitchen.

That's not what I'm comparing it to. It's simply fresher for someone to pick up there own-the delivery driver has to make multiple stops first-so it's possible your food will be really cold/unfresh as opposed to picking it up yourself.

Unless they can also get a job delivering and raise their income 3-5x (like Yegge said in his first piece).

That doesn't make sense, if the goal is to minimize delivery costs eventually that means not paying a driver or paying a driver less.

we are already seeing this with uber. It is very difficult to make good money with Uber after factoring in all costs.

In Indonesia, the job they're leaving to start driving is not like a US job.

Big picture: once food delivery has really taken off and become "normal", the costs of producing that food can drop. In a dense urban setting, which do you think costs more: seating + servers + greeters + dish pit + front desk for payments, or contract delivery drivers with an app? If that turns a $15 restaurant meal into an $8 meal with $5 delivery, that ain't no bad thing.

Someone who is barely making rent could go pick it up from a kitchen only restaurant, drop off another order on the way home and get a meal that would be cheaper & healthier than buying it from a fast food place with full building costs.

Have you never met a waiter who spends all the day's income on drinks and a taxi ride that same night? People can be quite foolish.

I doubt its healthy for people to sit around all day while everything is delivered to them so they never have to go anywhere nor interact with anyone else socially in public.

>"Cheap, high-quality, and healthy food delivery would be beneficial to all Americans, especially the working class..."

Yes cheap, high-quality and healthy food would be beneficial.

There is however nothing inherently healthy about using an app so you don't have to walk further than your front door.

Do you really believe the barrier to people eating healthy is that there isn't an app for them to do so without leaving their couch?

a) All change is incremental, it doesn't have to be revolutionary all at once to be meaningful

b) There is no question that these taxi/delivery apps have reduced costs. Not to mention his vision for the future of food delivery has hardly been implemented.

Apps are merely being tacked on to existing business models. This isn't the world Steve's getting excited about... it's the first baby steps.

But once businesses are designed from the beginning with apps, decentralized delivery, automation, etc in mind - just as he mentioned his sister in law did with her Vietnamese food service (by just getting a commercial kitchen with no retail front-end besides the app).

Nor has the true power of Uber-style delivery/driving apps been close to being reached yet. There is tons of potential for change still to be done, which will further reduce costs.

c) Yegge himself said this goes beyond food/transport

> Here’s the thing, though: Transport and food are only scratching the surface. Same-day food delivery can be generalized to same-day anything delivery, for instance. We’re going to see major disruptors happening yearly (if not faster) for many years to come. Payments and financial services are up next, and they’re a staggeringly huge opportunity.

>"Yegge himself said this goes beyond food/transport"

"Yegge" said it? OMG. The cult of Yegge! I am completely baffled by the swooning on HN over this guy. Wow, he worked at Google?! OMG. He wrote some blog entries 10 years ago?! OMG. What a giant!

That blogpost yesterday was so cringeworthy that he had to walk parts of it back today in another blog post, making him look even sillier. The content and claims were absurd and laughable. My first thought when I read it was "I bet this person has never been abroad before." I would ask anyone apologizing for him and his absurd claims would you be doing this for any other random person writing on medium.com whose name wasn't "Yegge."

Since watching the comedy "Silicon Valley" my perception of blog posts and histories in here has changed for the best.

This reminded me of the montage on season 1 where everybody talks about changing the world when presenting their apps/services...

Lol laziness. Is someone who buys food from a grocery store instead of growing it in a garden? Are you lazy if you heat it on an electric stove instead of chopping wood for a fire? And don't you dare tell me you used a lighter instead of a bow drill.

The whole point of technology is to enable and lower the cost of things people want. It's hard to top food on the list of things people want.

What does that have to do with anything? The US has cheaper and better food than most of the world. If anything the health problems in the US comes from people eating whatever they want rather than staple foods and vegetables.

~40% of Americans get cancer.

This is food service delivery by web vs picking up the phone. It's hardly revolutionary.

>"Food is really, insanely important."

Yes food is important, food delivery as a luxury service in large urban areas, not so much.

Okay, but he's working on ordering food from your smartphone.

Turns out I can do that from my dumb-phone. I just have to talk to someone.

I wouldn't trivialize food delivery. Eating is literally something everyone has to do, multiple times a day. Improving it by eg making it cheaper, or healthier, is an enormous benefit to society.

I mean, I didn't think about it much before, but now that I have a child, the days of just throwing together random things from the fridge doesn't cut it, and ordering takeout is too expensive. It's either cook every few days or spend tons of money.

If the market starts giving me cheaper, healthier options than ordering pizza, then I'd consider it a huge quality of life improvement, not to mention a huge time saver.

If someone came out with a service where I could get healthy meals delivered to me, with decent nutritional macros (a bunch of protein, not just vegis), and costs which were substantially less than eating out, I would be standing outside their offices on day 1 waiting to sign up. Healthy food delivery services do exist, they just end up being astronomically expensive when you look at the amount of food (calories or macros) you get for your money. I was looking at one a few days ago which was trying to charge me 10-12 dollars for a single 400 calorie meal. As a lifter who eats 3500 calories per day, that is an absolute non-starter.

>"Improving it by eg making it cheaper, or healthier, is an enormous benefit to society."

Just making food cheaper is not an "enormous" benefit to society. For evidence of this see the dollar menu at McDonalds[1]. Food delivery has existed for years now in the US and EU. Please provide any evidence that these services have resulted in either cheaper or healthier food consumption.

[1] http://time.com/money/5085896/mcdonalds-dollar-menu/

err I did write cheaper or healthier. Obviously both is a good option, too.

And I don't know for sure that these new delivery services will result in cheaper and/or healthier foods. I'm guessing (and hoping) that, as per the article, relying on these new delivery "layers" will provide more options, and more options will translate to lower prices.

But either way, that doesn't matter. My disagreement with parent was only whether it's valuable to improve things like food delivery, and I pointed out that the food industry, in general, is incredibly important to most people's lives, so trying to improve it is a huge value to society.

Well, per Steve Yegge's original post, it's distribution in general. My understanding of his general argument is that when distribution is controlled by Amazon, everybody buys everything from Amazon. When distribution is controlled by thousands of independent drivers, everybody buys everything from thousands of independent businesses (like the couple selling food out of their kitchen that he mentioned) and the cost of starting a small businesses goes way down. For a related argument that vertical integration, especially with respect to distribution, leads to homogeneity, see www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-beer-industry/550850/

I've read that the biggest problem in B2C businesses in general is often distribution, so I think the idea is that if grab is successful, they'll boost southeast Asian entrepreneurship and collect a portion of all of that growth

People who purchase a service from Grab are purchasing from a company. Not from independent businesses. There is no difference whatsoever from buying from Amazon. Delivery people perform tasks just like the people working in Amazon's warehouses or delivering their packages.

That was probably around the time when SV was trying to justify its existence with arguing that it could also do 'hard science'. The hype around Theranos maybe being the most prominent example.

I don't think the Grab is innovative either, but it is just as innovative as the majority of popular things coming out of SV in the last decade. I think a lot of the skepticism has to do with it being in Asia, outside the reality distortion field of SV.

What food delivery needs is someone to open big neighborhood commercial kitchens and pump out delicious, healthy, locally sourced food that is reasonably priced and maybe vertically integrated w/ delivery to eat some of the margin currently taken by uber/doordash/drivers.

The Soylent founder had this idea of 'deprecating kitchens' and while I'm not a huge fan of soylent I really liked the idea. We really don't all need kitchens - it's a huge waste of space and everyone cooking for themselves generates a lot inefficiency and food waste. It makes a lot of sense to get your food from local communal kitchens - which is what much of the world does - but there also needs to be a bit of a culture shift around 'food as religion'. It's become a source of virtue signaling and everyone has such specialized food requirements it makes it difficult to economically scale. Right now food delivery is a luxury product but I'm not sure has to be.

> What food delivery needs is someone to open big neighborhood commercial kitchens and pump out delicious, healthy, locally sourced food that is reasonably priced and maybe vertically integrated w/ delivery to eat some of the margin currently taken by uber/doordash/drivers.

Maple tried this in New York City. They had delicious, healthy, locally sourced food and more or less replaced my lunch orders while at work (they were not available in my outer borough).

They couldn't hack it, though - the margins weren't high enough and they ended up selling to some UK company and dismantling their New York operation.

Munchery tried this but, at least IMO, the food quality was not great. They had to use a lot of salt and preservatives to make the food hold and transport from their central kitchen. Also they did a lot of things to improve efficiency and cut costs which made the food taste unnatural...

>Food delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. You can’t watch a network football game without seeing commercials about it.

So the "world" is the US? Because the rest doesn't have "network football games" or "food delivery" ads, and tons of countries have had perfectly thriving delivery businesses, even open 24/7.

Anecdote. I can't drive for medical reasons. I lived in an area where the walk to a grocery store was difficult. No public transit either. Seven miles round trip. It was doable, but the store didn't have the best selection.

This was several years ago, and grocery deliveries to my area. Carried a 50 to 60$ delivery surcharge. There are a growing number of food deserts. Delivery of take-out meals isn't that big to me. But delivery of good quality food, that's a bigger deal.

This was transportation in general in South East Asia; coupled with thee possibility of becoming a non corrupt banking system (reading a bit into it there; but if everyone has a ride sharing account with money put in, and they are viewed as more trustworthy than the banks; why not?)

No, his Big Thing is banking. He goes on at some length about how southeast asians don't use banks and don't trust banks to hold their money, but they do trust food delivery companies to hold their money.

However you break into the market, holding everyone's money is a good business to be in.

I think it takes a serious amount of motivation to shift onto the medical field. Large body of knowledge, large regulations, structures of trust. You don't step in and get the spotlight like that. It's vast and not trivial.

Found that really interesting, too. Hopefully he'll talk about it at some point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818

What a difference 2374 days makes. Really, though, Steve can go work for whoever he wants to, as long as he keeps blogging.

I'd rather he go to work wherever he wants to for whatever reasons, but stop blogging about it.

It's clear that the internet is signal boosting his opinions far more then they deserve to be.

> When Steve Yegge just moved to Google, his final posts were about encouraging his readers to work on Big Things like the cure for cancer instead of cat videos. And now his Big Thing is food delivery?

It's where the money is. Online food delivery is growing ridiculously and still have tons of room for growth since it is following the growth of smartphones and the rise of "online taxis". It isn't just food delivery. Grocery delivery, liquor delivery and all other delivery services haven't caught up to smartphone/online taxi service yet.

It's similar to what amazon did with their AWS. Most of their servers were idle. So why not turn that unused capacity for productive use. If you think about it, most taxis ( even online taxis ) are in idle state. So why not use that idle time for delivery.

Also slogans from large corporations or people working for multinationals are just PR nonsense. "Do no evil", "fair and balanced", "just do it", etc are marketing PR rubbish. Steve Yegge, like alphabet, is in the business of making money.

Cancer research is high risk/high reward. Food delivery is low risk/high reward.

What you say is true, but - and I believe that's GP's point - it's also an admission of defeat. There will always be low-risk/high-monetary-reward trivialities to cater for. But when you see your visionaries getting into them, instead of working on the actually important things, that's when you realize, with sadness, that they no longer care.

> Most of their servers were idle. So why not turn that unused capacity for productive use.

That's not how AWS started, according to one of the principals.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-computing...

It's been 14 years. That's enough time to change one's mind about a thing or two.

We only think food isn't important because we have enough of it. It's still at the base of Maslowe's Heirarchy. Having it arrive automatically after pressing some buttons on a smartphone seems like a big thing, no?

Pizza delivery works after some buttons on my dumbphone.

Malnutrition and hunger in the world are not "last mile food delivery" problems, and hence can't be solved by last mile food delivery solutions such as UberEats or whatever Grab calls its service.

People who are dying of hunger aren't dying because food is available 2 miles away from them and they can afford it but don't want to go get it.

If you are going to invoke Maslow's hierarchy, consider that getting food at the click of a button is WAAAAY high in the pyramid.

>We only think food isn't important because we have enough of it.

The question wasn't about food, but food delivery.

For the elderly and home bound, food delivery can literally be a life saver.

I know it's not why a lot of these companies get started. The average person doesn't need food delivery for any substantial value in their life. However, the average person being interested in these types of services make it better for everyone.

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