The foodoo economics of meal delivery

Maybe KFC, McD, etc. want to retain control of their product up to the time it delivers the items to the buyer/customer.

There was a recent investigation showing s considerable amount of food delivery drivers for hire (door dash, ubereats, etc.) helped themselves to some of their customers’ food.

I’m sure the chains want better control over who delivers their food and in what state.

> "resistance to commodified last mile delivery seems to be large chains, like KFC/McDonalds"

In many US markets, those national brands are all on Uber Eats.

You might want to put a disclaimer at the bottom of your post that you are working in the automated food space (http://infinite-food.com/).

KFC uses Grubhub for delivery, unless something has very recently changed.

But if we make more companies at high valuations fast enough, foreign demand for dollars to buy into these companies will force the central bank to keep pushing the yield curve down in the process of creating more dollars to meet demand!

I’m being facetious.... or am I

I've never understood how you could create a company that operates on the economies of scale by faking the scale part with VC. That seems like an expensive and high speed runway that has tons of risk for failure.

I presume the private equity industry has proven (repeatedly) what you can accomplish with plenty of Wall St capital and confidence alone, regardless of traditional business strategy. Now VCs want to do the same, but almost inverted.

The big question is why can't we just transition from actual operational cleaning/maid companies today, combining the old business + technology, until it goes into a 100% technology based market?

It seems Uber's business model is that the entire taxi industry missed the boat on using smartphones. Many city's taxi companies already had mostly contractors via 'broker' arrangements where drivers own the cars and the taxi companies do the phones/marketing (which most people don't know). I'm sure many of Homejoy's cleaners were independent or semi-independent already too, where it was a gig economy already, just not an efficient one.

So most of the innovation was just the technology part, so why not underpin the new businesses with some actual scale by buying up some traditional market businesses? I understand why old entrenched industries completely fail to adapt, especially those protected by regulatory agencies and city governments. I guess it doesn't make much sense to buy those companies with so much baggage included - or expect the innovation to come from within.

So we're only left with the option of x entrenched market + y technology market, until x doesn't exist anymore. Not some transition between x->y.

Homejoy was a bit different, once you use Homejoy to get a cleaner/plumber etc and you like him/her, you will just contact that person directly, no need to involve Homejoy again.

You dont really etablish a relationship with your food delivery person so you always need a third party like Ubereats.

“Struggle in general with an occasional winner takes all” sounds bad.

But think about a market like... search engines. They struggle in general; almost all of them from the 90s died. There was just the occasional winner, Google, that took it all.

If you think about it that way, a market that can support even a single “winner taking all” is pretty promising and exciting.

Dear delivery drivers: have a chip - I don't mind.

If that's how the survey was worded, it's not super useful. At least with Ubereats, its supposedly not rare for someone to order and then pass out drunk/stoned/unable to go pick up food from driver. In those cases, Uber tells the drivers to do whatever they want with the food.

Agreed, that is a better article, but even so - every time I read about this space I get more confused. I get that very smart people are throwing large sums of money at it, so there's obviously some logic that I'm not getting. For example, the Medium piece says that Uber has a lucrative monopoly, but then goes on to say that it loses 700M per quarter. How is that lucrative? And self-driving cars are held up as the solution to thin margins but to me it seems that the only saving grace for these companies is that they get drivers to bring their own cars, do their own maintenance, pay their own insurance, etc. Considering how expensive driverless cars will inevitably be when they first appear and the sheer number that these companies will require to actually replace their contractors/partners/whatever they call their drivers, 2030 seems a very optimistic target for profitability. But then I'm just some schmuck - surely the VCs have all had those thoughts and are ploughing on regardless because they know something else?

More detail and more examination of the difficulties but their concluding paragraph is still optimistic:

> In the emerging food delivery wars, the stakes are high, the margins are slim, and the competition is vast. Some will fail. Others will quit. But a few of them might just end up delivering the billion-dollar goods.

I doubt it. I think food delivery is something that can only work where the food makers are in control, not the food deliverers.

One of the best lessons I’ve learned: a 1% chance of making 10B is worth 100M. This took a disturbing amount of time for me to digest, but it’s absolute truth. Food delivery has a very slim chance of working, but oh baby if it works.

Especially if you're punjabi