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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

Op-ed from a former power user: Uber eats caters in part to the socially anxious and introverted demographic with moderate to high levels of disposable income. It pushes high margin, low-quality, foods at 2x or more pricing - particularly pizza, wings, chinese, and burgers. With some exceptions a large portion of these restaurants delivered already for lower prices, but with less convenience such as order tracking or ordering through an app. Over-time many "power users" of Uber eats and similar apps will regress to only a couple favored restaurants or stop using the app entirely. Uber eats will optimize for these power users to the detriment of non-chosen parties for the worst of the ecosystem as a whole.

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> the socially anxious and introverted demographic with moderate to high levels of disposable income

I've began wondering if Silicon Valley is intentionally growing this demographic. If your customers need you because they are mentally unable to order food without you . . . well that's even better than a lifetime prescription of your medication or selling cigarettes.

It's twice as good if I can slowly train my customers to develop social anxiety by removing transactional interactions with minimum wage earners. That sort of interaction would traditionally service as a stepping stone in developing and maintaining social skills.

Add in social media which constantly has self-condemning memes about social anxiety, embarrassing moments, and so on; and you've got an extremely fertile ground for social anxiety.

I don’t know where this whole idea of minimum wage interactions being a stepping stone in developing social skills came from, because I don’t think these sort of rote, algorithmic interactions help anyone develop anything.

Football players train by dodging around predictable, stationary obstacles, even though on the field they'll need to dodge around unpredictable, moving obstacles.

Just because you need to use 6 skills at the same time in a real game, doesn't mean there's no value in an exercise that only develops 3 of the skills.

I thought Black Mirror was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a business plan.

I don't think it's intentional. I think it's due to aggressive hill-climbing optimization engine driving to the local minima of "increased engagement" of the hyper-engaged subset of populace - combined with the intensely myopic view of investors (as viewed from the incubated startup within a startup which it is).

Many of these stores have a counter or wall full of tablets - 1 for each delivery service. They have an Uber Eats tablet, a GrubHub tablet, DoorDash tablet, Bite Squad tablet, etc.

Maybe in SF. In the rest of USA is just Uber

Seattle, actually.

I’ve seen some restaurants with more than one tablet from the same delivery company. Couldn’t understand that, surely one tablet can handle multiple orders?

GrubHub owned online delivery in Chicagoland five years before Uber was even founded, and still does a better job than UberEats.

I believe it also owns Seamless, and a couple of other services like Eat24.

Seamless / Grubhub was a relatively equal merger - they just use the Grubhub brand most places outside of NYC.

Uber isn’t even #1 in the space, let alone the only one.

In Boston, I've used Eat24, GrubHub, Doordash, but never Uber for food. I actually didn't realize how popular it was until this article.

I stopped using it because the Uber drivers never get out of their car and come to your door (even if you mark this in the app).

I also had a driver drive close to my place and then steal the food - there was no ability for me to rate them and support was some call center that didn’t understand the issue.

DoorDash is a lot better.

I also had a driver drive close to my place and then steal the food - there was no ability for me to rate them and support was some call center that didn’t understand the issue.

Same here, although there's never been any problem getting a refund from Uber Eats in my experience.

My house is several miles out in the middle of nowhere. Someone went to the trouble of bringing my food within one block after a 15+ minute drive, and then they abruptly cancelled the order and disappeared from the map without a trace. I'll never figure out what the point of that was, but I hope they enjoyed my sushi.

Could it be they damaged your order en-route and preferred literally eating the cost of your delivery instead of taking the ratings hit?

At least I've never had a DoorDash driver cancel an order... I'd be pretty pissed if I had planned dinner for the family via delivery and gotten denied at the last minute.

Hard to say. They were driving very slowly through the neighborhood, not like they were likely to have hit anything or otherwise gotten into an accident.

It pushes for higher quality. It allows me to get food from real restaurants that didn't offer delivery otherwise. Same as sitting in.

That being said, I agreed that the margin is huge.

That's deliveroo. Uber is rather your local mcdonald's. My experience is that the service of Uber eats is disastrous. They hire drivers that do not speak a word of english and more often than not don't want to step out of their vehicle. Deliveroo has an OK service.

In London, pretty much all restaurants are on both.

It was actually crazy when Uber Eats appeared last year or so. In a few months they captured all the restaurants from Deliveroo and another truckload of restaurants/chains that never did delivery before.

That should be taught in business class. The power of a brand, destroy your competitors and double the market in a few months.

I don't think it was the brand, but rather the VC funding likely allowed them to offer restaurants better terms.

Realistically if a restaurant uses one delivery service then it's pretty easy to start being on another. So as I've seen most restaurants have one or more such services plastered on their walls.

It's the opposite for my region (DC area). Lots of high-quality restaurants that otherwise don't deliver are on Uber Eats, while GrubHub and Deliveroo is mostly bad fast food and pizza.

Deliveroo is not in DC

Sorry, I was mixing it up with Eat24 I think (which is now owned by GrubHub anyway). I do use Deliveroo sometimes when in Europe, which might by why I mixed it up.

I disagree with your theory but you shouldn’t be downvoted for it.

I think that over time, the cost of delivered food will lower as restaurants that do it well (perhaps these virtual restaurants) become faster, optimize their production and optimize the handoff to the driver. Jimmy John’s subs is an example of a company that has done this with their own delivery drivers.

is that an american perspective? There many places where ordering delivery food is a very ordinary thing.

Is just a clever HN user thing. Delivery is common in USA too.

They're so specific that it's obvious that they're describing their self. The HN trope where someone mistakes their own specific tastes for self-evident commentary on how the world works.

e.g. As if you need social anxiety to appreciate the vast convenience of ordering food to your doorstep.

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