Maybe it's just not a very profitable business to send some guy in a Prius across town to pick up a burrito, then drive back across town to deliver said burrito.
I've tried it a few times and it took an inexplicably long time to get my order, and the food arrived cold and unappetizing. Never again.
Grab, Food Panda, Deliveroo, and a couple of others I cant think of, all use Bikes, Motorbikes, and e-Scooters.
The model works really well here because majority of deliveries are short distance to apartment blocks.
I can't imagine it working for long distances though. You would end up with cold food, long wait times, and it wouldn't be very environmentally friendly.
Without China (sold to Didi) and SEA, there's not too much of Asia where Uber still exists. In Japan they do. No UberX there, but Uber Eats look like they might be doing okay there. They are (including UberX) still in Taiwan.
The post was in response to:
>> there's not too much of Asia where Uber still exists
The post was in response to:
>> there's not too much of Asia where Uber still exists
Grab has always been a better experience than Uber too. Uber was expensive.
Uber launched in SG before Grab did. Many drivers preferred Uber - they’re payout schedule and incentive structure was more favourable. Many riders, both locals and expats, including myself, preferred Uber. Grab undercutting Uber’s pricing was a tactic, just like GoJek is trying to chew off a market share by underpricing Grab today.
I never used Uber because it was never cheaper than booking a taxi over the phone.
Grab did a lot more than Uber for their app too. Pretty much from day 1 you could type a taxi stand number in and it would pin the exact location. Uber couldn’t even come close to figuring out where I was standing. So personal booking and usage experience was far better than Uber for sure.
I believe in the US, a car driving license is fairly easy to get and used cars are very cheap. Plus, given the driving culture, I assume that in the US people just don't think about motorcycles unlike in Europe or Asia as a viable way to get around.
- Even cheaper than motorcycles / scooters
- No license required
- Excellent bike infrastructure already available
Singapore is one of the largest exporters of used cars because of this crazy system. It does reduce their emission though and they have an amazing fully automated (driverless) train system.
What they fail to realize is that by centralizing their focus on highly populated metropolitan area like NYC and SF they are essentially trying to compete in markets that I wasn't even aware could have restaurants capable of sustaining their businesses when they don't have the option for delivery.
I mean i've been on treasure island and ordered food from just about every notable restraunt in SF you could think of and they all had in house speed delivery services that were willing to travel that far and still managed to get there within 45-75 minutes of placing the order. (presuming you don't order too close to the nightly commute out of the city)
Where Uber should really focus on promoting UberEats is more rural cities like just about every town in the midwest because out here we have a ton of towns with privately owned restaurants that are extremely profitable and yet don't offer delivery services because it's not profitable for them to do so; but it would be profitable for everybody if Uber offered their services as the middle man for every restraunt in town.
I mean i know of like 4 restaurants in town that 3 or 4 ubereats drivers could provide delivery services for and I know that number of drivers would have to grow to 8 or 12 within a year of providing the service. And there is virtually no competition out here and out here car delivery actually makes a lot more sense than trying to figure out where to park in NYC or SF.
Honestly the fact that Uber isn't already implementing this in my town by now, would concern me enough to consider shorting their stock.
There is nothing more telling in my view that a company is headed into uncharted territory it's totally not prepared to navigate than a company not understanding where they aught to set their heading because they haven't got even the slightest clue in which direction all the booty has been buried.
Scale requires sales reps to sign restaurants, account managers to maintain the relationships with the restaurants, local operations people to recruit, induct, clothe and support the delivery guys, local marketing managers to get the initial userbase.
And that's not even considering the sprawling single-center infrastructure of smaller towns, with most affluent folk that could in theory order takeout every day living outside the immediate center of the town.
You maximize efficiency (cost per order, or in other words how many orders per hour a salaried employee can deliver, or in other words how little you can pay a non-salaried 100% commission-based delivery partner while they still maintain hourly earnings they deem acceptable) by increasing the pace at which deliveries are made by any single courier.
A dense population and a uniform distribution of popular restaurants will result in a courier going point A to B, B to C, C to D. Each node represents both a restaurant and the next delivery location.
A typical small town infrastructure would result in the delivery person going A->B, B->A, A->C, C->A, A->D, D->A. The town's only two restaurants are located in A, whereas B, C and D are delivery destinations. That's double the marginal cost per order.
In nyc it's usually someone traveling 2mi or less on a motorbike/bicycle. The food comes quickly and relatively cheaply.
In the suburbs someone drives a car 10-20mi round trip for what is usually a chain restaurant. No aspect of this makes sense to me economically.
(and I can confirm, it works great, we do it all the time)
While I don't doubt your positive experience, it would be atypical for a suburb to have significant independent restaurants within 5mi of any given point, at least in most of the United States.
Some cities, like Dallas, seem to have a higher percentage of chain restaurants than the average suburb. Other cities, like Seattle, have a ton of restaurants that seem independent but are actually part of a portfolio of restaurants owned by one person, private equity, or a corporation experimenting.
I expect uber eats will scale very well in the suburbs if they can get multiple orders in the same car efficiently. Restaurants are experimenting with food that travels better.
I haven’t used UberEats but at least with GrubHub/Eat34, this was a big problem and they would routinely lie about it, hoping most people won’t call the restaurant to learn that “the kitchen is busy” meant “your food has been waiting for a driver for 45 minutes”.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/28/deliveroo-d...
If there are none then there isn't much you can do, you have to trade off freshly cooked food for the convenience of having it delivered to you
Getting food delivered slowly, cold and squashed into plastic containers is an awful experience, and it ends up costing me thirty bucks.
In the center of a large city, you can order something in a minute, pay a couple dollars extra, and have the food at your door in 10-15 minutes. Deliveries are done by bike or scooter and there are hundreds of places to choose from that’ll deliver within half an hour.
It’s great when you’re in the flow and don’t want to deal with the distractions that walking out the door inevitably entails.
The appropriate comparison is with cooking at home. Takeaway food is a luxury.
I’ve always assumed that DoorDash et al try to do this.
To your point, if I were to use them, quite a few of the restaurants are a good 15 minute drive from where I live. Which is further than I'd bother to go to get takeout. It's also further than I'd probably chance to get, say, a burger delivered as I suspect it would be getting cold by the time I got it.
Uber uses the current fleet for now, but once they have more data to analyze, they can switch to a better operational model which would be hopefully profitable.
What is worrying is the aggressive, anti-competitive, potentially illegal (depending on the country) subsidiaries aimed at killing the local competition.
So they have been burning billions of dollars in the hopes that there might be a business model in the future?
Maybe it's just that VCs were naive to think that taxis and food delivery were good businesses.
"Sure, hun, the Porsche was expensive, but it's not that much in regard to all the money spent in the world!"