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Comment by IGotThroughIt | Hacker News Reader

Uber eats is their golden egg. I think it was Stripe's Collison who said that their cohort of businesses - stripe, lift, uber et al - need to first build out their ecosystems then once done, a plethora of other business opportunities will emerge and that's where the profits will emerge from. For instance what uber eats is to uber, atlas and radar are to stripe.

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Sure, but how long will people pay $10 to have a $5 hamburger delivered to them?

Probably as long as you have young affluent urbanites who grew up expecting they could get anything delivered to them or done for them without getting up from a computer.

We had these services before even in 2000. They failed then when the VC money run out, what has changed so much now?

Not that much.

And food delivery in cities has been around long before the Web. Not sure having brochures from the local pizza places and chinese restaurants and making a phone call is all that different from doing it at a computer.

It isn't; it's only slightly more convenient from user's POV. But it offers an opportunity for a middleman to insert itself between the restaurants and the people making orders.

Mapping services are cheap, mobile internet is ubiquitous and everyone has a smartphone.

Yeah the tech ecosystem is buying their own services out of the wages paid by the same companies, on a cloud of of VC cash.

That takes 30 minutes to deliver and is cold.

That is not a problem. Even discounting people too wealthy to care about cooking, a city usually has plenty of people who, on a given day, don't have time or energy to cook a meal.

Problem is, you should've paid $15 for this to even make sense, but here $5 comes from investor subsidies. Eventually the money runs out and the scheme collapses, until next company can convince next round of investors to again try selling $10 bills for $5.

On top of this classic delivery places mainly sell cheap pizza and Chinese food that have high margin for food. This subsidies the delivery and makes it profitable even when people don’t order drinks.

Further, the radius of delivery tends to be smaller allowing a driver to make more deliveries per hour lowering costs.

Forever, once said people realise that a $5 bottle of wine costs $20 in the restaurant.

It's hilarious that people think goods delivery is going to be a money maker. It's ruthlessly competitive.

True but not everyone does it well. Almost everyone sucks at it - long waits, poor selection in terms of product range and sometimes even apps that simply don't work as intended. It's going to take a large player with a wide network to get it done well. There are so many players in the space who've closed shop and will continue to do so. Only a few (2 or 3) will stay put and actually get the job done.

Food delivery is ubiquitous in my country (its cheaper than cooking for me, if you account time wasted). it is free, at 0 extra cost compared to the in-store menu (actually in store costs more) - there's just a minimum cost the order must have. I dont think the ubereats model is scalable in america.

> Food delivery is ubiquitous in my country (its cheaper than cooking for me, if you account time wasted).

Any chance you use dabbawalas? I saw that on BBC and it was such an amazing informal logistics network.

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