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Comment by fluxic | Hacker News Reader

I know this concerns parcel delivery, and not food delivery, but for anyone interested, this was a great read on why the unit economy of (non-people) delivery is super rough:

>https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...

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Food delivery is dramatically more time sensitive than parcel delivery; after 10 minutes, the food quality begins to decline sharply, so even if I am okay waiting an hour or two for my food to arrive, "pooling" food is almost certainly out of the question, just 'cause you only have 10 minute before the food starts getting sadder.

Parcels, on the other hand, well, I can tell you it needs to be here at time X, and you can do as many deliveries as possible between now and time X. (I guess that's the same thing, except that for food, X is now +10 minutes.)

With UberEats its transparent when pooling is happening (they tell you the driver is completing another delivery first). It works pretty well.

UberEats is actually very expensive compared to GrubHub etc, so if anyone is making money its probably them.

my impression (and I've been using grubhub more often that uber eats) is that the uber eats pooling is more like the 'uber x' pooling, in that the driver is completing another delivery before it picks you (or your food) up. My impression is that the driver, once they pick up your food, heads straight to you. I could be wrong, as the last few months I've been using doordash.

Is this important? I'm not sure. I mean, it's certainly possible for kitchens to do things (heat lamps, not combining ingredients) to store cooked food longer, things that aren't done in cars, so it is possible that time spent waiting at the kitchen matters less than travel time.

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