In Beijing, it’s often cheaper to have food delivered than to get it yourself
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
That's not a same-restaurant advantage.
It's not even really an advantage; restaurants usually don't have open kitchens.
That seems intuitively obviously true...but it's not, entirely; food needs to be finished on site, of course, but central kitchens for restaurant chains (or groups, where the individual restaurants are branded differently) are a common thing, and very often are located in lower rent outskirts than where many of the supported restaurants are.
Another sign of this is if the building doesn't seem to have enough space for a kitchen of a size needed to serve the number of seats in the dining room.
Now, don't me wrong, I'm an excellent cook, and we cook dinner at home most nights of the week. But if there were a food delivery service (via drone, robo-van, whatever) which could delivery me reasonably tasty, healthful cafeteria-style food at a price cheaper than I can make myself (since they can prepare in bulk), I'd be tempted to subscribe.
But the opposite can be true.
There was an article posted on HN in the last six months or so about "virtual restaurants" where established restaurants drive a van or drop a shipping container into a parking lot after hours and set up shop exclusively for delivery purposes in urban areas. The restaurants that actually bother to be part of the neighborhood were pissed about it.
I'm guessing this solely means paying rent?
I'd argue not at all.
It's only a benefit to a very small number of people who have zero requirement to be local residents.
Food vans are contributing far more to communities through their efficiencies.
Main advantage of delivery is that Beijing streets are shit to travel -- too wide, awful traffic, poorly placed metro stops, etc.
Is that because of food safety or the way employees are treated? I can't imagine its that different than how supermarket ingredients are prepared - most people wouldn't like the insides of a chicken slaughterhouse, commercial fishing boat etc either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrv78nG9R04
Whenever I have traveled, I always enjoy trying street food but this has put the fear in me... at least if I travel to China.
edit: slightly disappointed I can't express my feelings by using the vomiting emoji on HN...
Whether gutter oil exists in any capacity whatsoever, it'd be merely a brief encounter with rural Chinese principles and the commercialism of the developed world; therefore it won't stick around for long as China becomes more developed.
https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/04/03/chinese-gutte...
I think e-bikes + delivery can make a dent, but only in the super dense cities where ebikes/escooters are popular/available.
1. At street level it's easy for people outside the house to grab things from it (without having a theft drone, ha ha).
2. In my neighborhood houses often have porch coverings or are too close together for there to be good drone landing places at windows.
3. There are no people to accidentally run into on roofs (usually).
Of course in an apartment complexes and such not everyone has a roof, and people can't just grab stuff outside of the ground floor so a window ledge would make sense.
Probably not one size fits all, really.
"I think the Dugarts ordered something wrong. Or a lot of things"
That's the only explanation that Mom could come up with. The drones had been buzzing overhead all day long. Dad was getting really annoyed when they kept coming at night. Like clockwork, every two minutes, for nine hours and counting.
One would come, drop off the medium sized box on the little 'Apiary TM', fly away, and hit the powerlines.
ZAAAAP.
The lights in the house would flicker, but nothing much past that. The drones, about a meter wide, with eight propellers and those little sick legs, started piling up in the Dugart's and Garcia's back yards. There were hundreds piled up now.
The cops came, and the firefighters too. Eventually PG&E guys came out to shut down the power, but they found that the line was the only one that was providing electricity to the Firehouse. So, to power was kept on. For safety reasons.
ZAAAAP.
Another one dropped the package, flew up, and promptly killed itself. Mrs. Dugart wouldn't tell Mom what was in the boxes. Her face got real red when I asked her. Must be something embarrassing.
Mom said that they tried calling it in, but the hotline directed them to an email to send. So, the cops sent an email. The reply email said it may take two weeks for a response. So the cops drove off. Then the firetrucks left.
ZAAAAP.
When Mrs. Dugart was tols to take her "Rookery TM" down, she thought it was a good idea. Then one of the drones tried to deliver the package to our house. Mrs. Dugart got really embarrassed then. So she put the little platform back up, this time with a tilt so that the packages would just slide off once delivered. She ran around trying to pick them all up just as soon as they landed, dodging the falling drones in her backyard.
ZAAAAP.
I'm not sure how you figure that is the case. Pizza delivery has been a thriving business almost everywhere in the US for decades. Domino's is a booming $10 billion pizza chain built on delivery (sales up over 50% in three years, for a 60 year old business).
You'll find that most every college town even has numerous food delivery options (restaurants & shops that deliver) and that that has been the case for decades.
I wonder if this will be the future of food, more and more smaller franchises that just do delivery for the larger restaurants.
If they can't deliver to you in 5 minutes, you're SOL.
Pizza probably has the benefit of being a food that's not all that easy to prepare at home both because of dough and oven. There are alternative options like the flatbread crusts you can buy but, for the most part, it's a meal that people tend to gravitate to ordering.
Finishing off and cooking is another 15min and you could do multiple pizzas so this scales well.
I make them all the time because I can split the work into 2 short sessions. And if you like simple pizzas, they are super cheap to make and easy to portion control.
Besides the occasional customer, almost everyone ordered by app, resulting in a constant flow of delivery scooter drivers coming and going. She told me that restaurant owners lower prices on the app because app orders are more convenient to them.
This is all made possible by the low wage costs of those delivery drivers, which, as a side effect, also 'pollute' scooter lanes in shanghai (something locals complain about).
I hope this will be more widespread globally in the future, and then probably done by delivery robots
They also cook app-ordered meals quicker, and make in-store diners wait until there's no pending app-ordered ones to cook.
- People prefer to stay indoors. Air pollution that reduces your lifespan exists in cities like Beijing and Hebei - even Shanghai (certain months during winter time). Extreme heatwaves during summer time that has the city cooking in 40-50C....it gets so hot that people sleep outdoors on sidewalks! (Shanghai will supposedly be unlivable in 30 years due to extreme heatwaves)
- cheap(-ish) labor, although now labor costs matches that of Mexico
- shitty food sanitary conditions, now with no storefront. Have fun figure out whether your cheap delivered food was cooked with gutter oil or not.
- questionable food ingredient quality. tons of fake stuff abounds.
Off topic, but I find it funny how society has changed so much in so little time.
When I was growing up in New York, if it was hot, many people in the neighborhood would sleep outside — especially people in apartment buildings. You'd see dozens of them snoring away on fire escapes.
Now those same families probably can't imagine living without air conditioning, even though the city is so much safer today.
When I was an undergrad and spent a couple summers in the city in the Boston area, no AC at all.
If I've been walking round outside at 32–35°C, there's no way I want to be in a room at 16–18°, let alone sleep in one. I usually set it to 28° and slept without any bedclothes.
As a student I lived in the North of England in Newcastle, where temperatures averaged around 0C in the winter and because we couldn't afford heating the house was often around -2C. I would still walk around in t-shirt and shorts without problem. I later moved in with a group of girls who had the heating knocked up to 25C all year round, and within a week stepping out of the door felt like jumping into an ice bath. Rapid temperature change mess up so many of our bodily processes that I'm amazed it's discussed so little. If I don't sleep with a window wide open I know I'll struggle to get even a single cycle of REM sleep, and almost all of the people I've convinced to try sleeping with a window open and the heating off have told me their sleep improved ten-fold after a couple of weeks.
1. "...in 2003, he dropped out, inspired by Friendster, a Facebook precursor, to create a social network for China."
2. "Their 2007 effort, a popular Twitter look-alike called Fanfou..."
3. "In 2010 he created Meituan in the mold of Groupon..."
4. "...he plans to introduce an Amazon Prime-like subscription service."
I myself don't care if you copy an idea. In fact it seems unavoidable, because "there is nothing new under the sun," "everything is a remix," and "ideas are just multipliers." What differentiates your business is your execution. Apple did not come up with new ideas. They took old ideas and did them really, really, really well. They didn't invent the graphical user interface. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. The iPhone was not the first smartphone. The iPad was not the first tablet computer.
At the end of the day, though, many of those users will churn. I'm happy to pay when VCs subsidize my orders...sounds like a cooked meal + delivery costs less than what the restaurant is paying in food costs. The unit economics of that model are not sustainable.
Or the materials cost is low, the unit labor cost of prep is low, but the unit labor cost of handling in house transactions and service is high, and in-house service and takeout are charged similar prices because having separate prices posted in the restaurant depresses in-house service volume and takeout unit profit without improving takeout volume to match.
(I suspect it's a little of this plus some investor business-building subsidy.)
https://www.sustainweb.org/jelliedeel/articles/dark_kitchens...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-k...
Articles such as the ones you cited talk about the stifling "windowless boxes" but restaurant kitchens have never been windowed comfortable places. At least in the UK these kitchens are subject to the same hygiene and labour laws as any other place where food is prepared. They seem to want to imply that "dark kitchens" flout these laws but I've yet to see any evidence.
They are only restaurants in name. Also I've noticed that these kind of "restaurants" are also appearing in Western food delivery apps too where the price + delivery is actually cheaper than buying from a physical restaurant, I once experienced this buying shawarmas on a food delivery app.
Taco Bell and Pei Wei leap to mind.
It's like they have a grid listing all their few ingredients and constantly try to figure out new ways to combine them into different products.
> With great fanfare Monday, Taco Bell unveiled the Grandito, an exciting new permutation of refried beans, ground beef, cheddar cheese, lettuce, and a corn tortilla. "You've never tasted Taco Bell's five ingredients combined quite like this," Taco Bell CEO Walter Berenyi said. "The revolutionary new Grandito, with its ground beef on top of the cheese but under the beans, is configured unlike anything you've ever eaten here at Taco Bell." The fast-food chain made waves earlier this year with its introduction of the Zestito, in which the beans are on top of the lettuce, and the Mexiwrap, in which the tortilla is slightly more oblong.
http://www.theonion.com/article/taco-bells-five-ingredients-...
The trigger to act commonly occurs when a key ingredient is hit with a supply related crunch. Avian flu just tripled the price of powdered egg whites? Guess we're using another binder for our ToasterOvenPastryTart. Another popular alternative is to stealthily decrease portion sizes.
Is it sustainable? of course not. Does that matter to the people who want ALL of the money, not just some of the money? of course not.
You should really only cook your own meals if:
* You enjoy it.
* You value/need your money more than your time.
* It's difficult to meet your dietary goals with purchased food.
Another factor is health. Maybe in a large city is there is healthy, cost effective take-out but where I live the options are pizza and Chinese food after 8pm.
Note that families also benefit from economies of scale when cooking (buy ingredients in bulk and assign the work to the lowest income earner).
To me, that's the major reason. Meituan is loosing HUGE each month due to subsidies. Don't forget the food delivery giants in Chinese markets with highly concentrated population with billions of subsidies. It only works in selective Chinese Megacities with very cheap human labor and relative cheap and convenient of electric vehicles. It won't work in anywhere else in the world (probably not even in India).
Is my guess.
And, sure, a lot of relatively nit-picky things go into health department restaurant scoring but that seems better than the alternative.
yes food safety is a nice thing to have but overly cautious food safety is not.
In a company I worked before, before the food delivery craze, we were regularly ordering fancy restaurant quality catering into office for like CNY 200 for 20 people. And that in Shanghai.
Nowadays, everybody just orders whatever they want themselves.
One side affect of this whole food delivery is that we are eating more from restaurants compared to before when we used to go and eat maybe once in 15 days.
Add to it there are always deals going on from the delivery companies.
Zomato and Swiggy rule here.
Is it regulatory? Is it restaurateurs here are less quickly at responding to changing markets? not enough cost savings?
https://www.bloomberg.com/bbg-gfx/video_loops/2019-meituan/m...
I really don't know who thought it was a good idea but I'm sure it's fun work for the artists.
further stratification of eating out as a luxury into premium of being at the restaurant and cheaper version of getting it delivered
Honestly this makes me skeptical of an AI delivery person unless it starts in high cost of labor countries like the USA. It would be silly to try to beat the low human labor costs of China or Southeast Asia.
Surely an AI delivery will eventually win in all markets, but who's going to risk trying to build it when the max theoretical benefit is a few dollars per day per worker replaced? In the US the benefit might be 20x that much [1], making the risk worth investing in.
[1] assuming a hypothetical hyper efficient drone deliverer costs $15 / day and a SE Asian delivery worker costs $20 / day, that's $5 / day potential. An American delivery worker that costs $100 / day leaves $85 / day potential, or almost 20x as much.