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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

With the pervasiveness of Uber Eats, Door Dash, et al, I'm starting to think there should be an AWS for food.

Imagine some sort of central, industrial-scale kitchen that makes dirt-cheap prepared meals and uses the aforementioned services delivers them to your house, hot, at meal time.

Could economies of scale drive the cost below $5/meal? $2?

If we can obviate server rooms in office buildings around the world, what would it do to make the kitchen an extravagance rather than a necessity?

Or maybe the laundry room is the right target for obsolescence. Most cities already have industrial scale laundries for hotels. Could Uber and Lyft partner with them to eliminate those two giant appliances in our homes, and let us have the space back for our ham radios and stamp collections?

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There are already a handful of laundry services operating in the bay area. They're all roughly an order of magnitude more expensive than doing it myself even as a renter.

Likewise, the overwhelming cost of food delivery services is in the "service" part. Even if you could make the meal for $2, I would still end up paying $10 for a $2 meal, and while it definitely possible to make a nutritious and reasonably palatable meal for $2, it's never going to compare to the $10 meal I can get just by walking down the block to my local taqueria, much less what I can make myself.

When I was living alone as a bachelor, I crunched the numbers and decided it was kind of stupid to do my own laundry rather than drop it off at the laundromat for their wash-and-fold service.

Doing a load of laundry coin-op would cost me about $2/$3 a load. Plus the cost of detergent, fabric softener, and dryer sheets. And the aggravation of going to a grungy, depressing laundromat, waiting around for the washer to run, running the dryer several times because things wouldn't get dry, and then folding it all and lugging my baskets home.

When I was in an apartment that did have hookups, but no laundry machines, buying a basic washer and dryer ran about $1000, unless I found some ticking time bomb of a used set on Craigslist. And then there is the water and electricity costs. Not to mention the hassle of either abandoning them or having to drag them off somewhere else when I moved.

In contrast, I could drop off a huge barracks bag full of laundry at the laundromat once every two weeks, and they would weigh it up, charge me a dollar a pound, then I'd go off to work and pick it up at the end of the day, perfectly washed and expertly folded. Just in the amount of time saved at drudgery, it was worth it, besides the fact that they did a far, far better job than I would do myself.

The difference between you (and me) and an unfortunately large number of people is that they don't have the luxury to trade money for time, even for seemingly trivial things. Spending $3 and two hours at a laundromat might be the only option, as $5-$10 for a service can often be out of reach.

That's $3/load+drying. When I worked as a mechanic that is what it cost me to wash work clothes (didn't want them in my washing machine). I did the same thing--it would cost me ~$20 and 2 hours sitting at the laundromat, wash and fold service was 28. Even for someone making minimum wage, $4/hour is pretty poor value for time.

$1000 sounds really expensive. You can definitely get something cheaper than that, specially if you don't try to purchase something that is also a dryer (drying things on a clothesline is also cheaper...). If you are living alone, you might even be able to get away with an $100 "RV trailer" washing machine.

I think what you were really doing here is finding a way to justify your choice of relying on a laundry service :)

I got a set for $100-200 specifically requesting the oldest ones they had. They tend to last decades with repairs being cheap. Unlike modern ones. About a year later I got some specifics in this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909365

Then the detergent and stuff at Costco so it's cheap. From there, you might also consider your time going to, waiting in, and leaving the laundromat. With your own machines, that pretty much reduces to minutes of walking around in the house. During the wait time, you just do whatever you'd normally do in the house. Saves a trip out.

> Could economies of scale drive the cost below $5/meal? $2?

Even if you have minimum wage employees, you're still paying people $15/hour to make the food, and $15/hour to deliver it. How many servings can a cook make in an hour? How many deliveries can a driver do in an hour?

Ten deliveries an hour gets you down to $1.50 per delivery. In some areas and times of day where deliveries line up just right, they can maybe do more, but if it's hot food, there's a limit as to how much the driver can carry at once. If it's all point-to-point back and forth between the kitchen and destinations, forget it.

Let's say the cook can make 30 servings in an hour. So that's $2 just to pay for labor already. That doesn't factor in costs for ingredients, kitchen space, cooking equipment, and maintenance for that. It doesn't account for marketing. It doesn't account for the R&D required to build and maintain the ordering app/website, or for server costs.

Speaking of space requirements, this is actually really problematic from a cost perspective. You need the kitchen to be within a reasonable delivery time from your customers. For a dense city, you're probably good for volume of orders, but you'll probably need to locate your kitchen inside the city limits, where real estate can be expensive. For a suburb, no matter where you put your kitchen you run the risk of not having enough delivery orders within a reasonable distance.

A company with other revenue could certainly sell this as a sort of loss leader, but I can't imagine a way to do this for $2 per meal, and probably not even $5 per meal. Hell, if I walk to my local grocery and buy ingredients for a basic meal, I'd be hard pressed to walk out of there spending less than $5. Economies of scale could reduce the cost of materials, but the labor and infra costs would surpass the savings.

You see this a lot in SE Asia where there's a lot of housing with no useable kitchens. Because eating out becomes a necessity, there's lots of supply and variety and prices are super low. You don't need economies of scale, just for it to become a necessity/staple rather than a luxury.

SE Asia has other factors affecting the price though. Labor costs are obviously much lower as well as the price of land and more relaxed regulations towards street food and restaurants in general.

Price of land was sky-high in the places I am talking about. And the relaxed regulations happen when eating out is literally the main way the majority of the population gets food.

I've often thought about that. Right now Grubhub and the like are oriented towards restaurant food: e.g. somewhat fancy, with lots of options, etc. Why not just cook industrial size portions of a few items and sell for cheap? You see this in India where they make massive pots of curry to feed thousands of people.

The main obstacles seem to be delivery and people's desire for choice. You might be able to get the price of a fried rice down to $2-4 if you make it on industrial scale. But time customizing it (choice of meats, removing ingredients for allergies, providing extra sauce, etc) and getting it to the customer is more costly because it requires individualized service.

Meal pal is currently trying to do something like this by partnering with restaurants to create on cheap dish per day. It works to some extent but the customer has to pick up the food and only gets on option per restaurant.

Also, "dark kitchens" that support various food delivery services exist: https://disruptionhub.com/rise-of-the-dark-kitchen/

It already exists, called Cloud Kitchens. There are a lot of take out restaurants that really don't need a storefront, so why not consolidsate their operations in a few locations around the city and deliver quickly instead?

The real advantage of cooking at home is that you don't have to pay yourself any salary, which is the majority of the cost in the case of razor thin margins that eventually will be reached in economies of scale.

Dark Kitchens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20021592

I’d never trust a corporation like Amazon to cook my food.

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