Domino’s launches e-bike delivery to compete with UberEats, DoorDash
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
My local pizza shop just handed me a card with their own site (and app) for ordering delivery and pickup with fewer fees and lower costs than [your-favorite-vc-funded-third-party-food-delivery-service] after I used one of those services to pick up a pizza because it was severely discounted there.
I pretty much have received the same quality of service and high fees from all of these competitors and personally have no loyalty to any one of them. It's all about the cost. If your product is cheaper with one over the other, I'll just use that.
On the bike aspect, it wasn't uncommon to see bike deliveries for Favor in Austin and Caviar in Boston.
What I want is a pure aggregator. Give me a way to order online from restaurants that have their own delivery service. The middleman does nothing more but to give them by order and end there.
I want to say Foodler worked that way (I dont think Foodler had its own delivery logistic?).
[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/81324-yelp-quietly-swaps-resta...
Monthly subscription for the connector = automisation
Thought about it for a long time, bit I'm have other priorities
It's cool to see an established company innovate.
They sell and ship in the US and Europe. I own one, it’s one amazing bike.
From the picture it appears that the bikes are almost fully stealthed for the daytime. Black and dark colours showing to the front which is the direction the collisions come from.
A sit-on scooter typically requires insurance, a drivers license, registration, parking restrictions and cannot ride between traffic or in designated bike lanes ans often the sideway. Battery powered bicycles are not yet seen at "motor vehicles" so they avoid all those issues. This allows them to be cheaper and faster for businesses like dominoes.
You still need a driver's license to operate an under 50cc scooter, but it doesn't need to be a special motorcycle license, a general driver's license that a heavy majority of people already possess is enough.
Especially after they get taken to the Supreme Court and it is determined that what they are doing is in fact illegal.
I think leveraging their core competencies as tech companies that have solved the dispatching part of the problem seems a lot more profitable than burning cash while waiting for self driving technology to become real.
I've ordered from nearby restaurants that have no brand name recognition but simply because they offered the food I was looking for. When finally being in the part of town where they are located, I see the shop for the first time and realize "wow I would never have stepped foot in there". What calculus is dominos doing to think they need their own service, I wonder - aside from being able to afford it and cut out the middleman.
I've also noticed more affluent people not tipping when hanging out with them for rides or food delivery, while people in the industry do absolutely tip.
I don't care if the service fee is a tip or is not a tip, if the app automatically adds a tip as a separate line item, if the service fee and delivery fee is functioning as a tip or not, or if the app service is adequately paying their couriers at all. And that's just in San Francisco! I've done this in many cities and countries where I can totally unsubscribe from tipping culture and not have to even think about the debate because people are not operating under a parallel serfdom regime for wages. I think many "affluent people" have similar multicultural experiences and would just rather not be burdened with the mental exercise. I just have no idea what the apps are doing, I've read enough headlines to assume they're bilking their gig-economy contractors in some way or another, but I accept that it comes with the territory. Why is my total double the price of the single item I ordered? If I make a special request in app and the restaurant actually reads it and does it, I'll definitely tip. (The above rationale is exclusive to food delivery services and tipping couriers. The in restaurant dining experience in the states is one of compulsory tipping.)
Yes, my experience with industry people seems to be a "paying it forward" mentality with no questions asked.
That usually depends on the georphical density of deliveries.
And cars are faster. So that means more deliveries.
So order aggregators should have better economics.
This should allow them to take some fees while still offering a better deal.
Why isn't that the case ?
The furtest one away from me is about 10-15 minutes by bike. And that's at a comfortable pace.
Deliveroo (delivery by bike) is already quite popular here.
The thing with that strategy is, you can only do it once, using your initial capital. After you've set your new prices, new players are free to enter the market and compete with you on cost, driving you back out of profitability.
Take for example a Domino's here in Arnhem:
https://www.google.nl/maps/place/Domino's+Pizza+Arnhem/@51.9...
That outlet is in the middle of a residential area (with a lot of flats). On the map I can see dozens of pathways that cut off a large amount of distance travelled. In this case a bike (or scooter) is going to be much faster than a car.
If you're in the countryside then the math is totally different.
Even pedal-power bikes are usually faster. And these bikes are probably 500W nominal, which is already 5 times as powerful as a typical human rider. US limits top speed to 20mph, sure, but you can still peg that pretty easily, even up hills.
I admit to not having had Dominos for a long time so I don't know quite where it and the other big chains sit on that spectrum but I'm guessing it's mostly on the not good side of the continuum.
"y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery"
I think it does make sense for the pizza companies to own this part of logistics like they already had with the car in this country.
There is one huge food-specific issue here. Bicycles, e-bikes, are narrow. Pizza is not. If there is one think bike riders hate more than sharing a trail with an ebike, it has to be sharing a trail with an ebike that is three feet across due to an extra-large pizza.
Interestingly, Dominos maintains a page on their domain about pizza sizes[0] that fails to disclose the sizes of most of their pizzas (the 10" inch "small" size seems to be disclosed almost accidentally).
And that is coming from a cyclist.
I mean, just order 2 40cm ones in that case. Problem solved, no?
PSA: gatekeeper alert, do not engage. All the symptoms are there:
- Claims to speak for all.
- Divides participants into acceptable/not acceptable.
- Probably wears team kit for a team he doesn’t actually ride for.
- Really bad at measurements, even when the specifications are clearly listed.
If you find you have engaged a gatekeeper, cease engagement at once and go ride your ebike. Because anyone who would rather you drive a car than an ebike isn’t worth the time or aggravation.
Wikipedia suggests about 1 micromort per 10 miles on a bike [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort] so maybe it's 1/2 micromort in an urban area and 1 in the suburbs.
It's quite gamified due to the per drop pricing and tips etc. I found it hard to not ride like a maniac.
And I didn't even need the money, I did it because it seemed funny to basically get paid to exercise.
I'd also suspect that someone who rides a bike for their job is likely likely than the average person to die in a crash. People that die in bike accidents are disproportionately not doing two things:
1. Wearing helmets
2. Being sober (20+% of adult cyclists that get killed are too drunk to legally drive a car [1], and "drunk cyclist sober/car driver" is actually a lot more common in fatal crashes than "drunk driver/sober cyclist" [2])
I don't want to victim blame, but there's relatively easy things you can do that drastically reduce your risk of dying on a bike.
There's also some intangibles, like someone who rides all the time is going to be more familiar with safer routes (OTOH they may be encouraged to ride more recklessly to maximize profits?). Even with a pedal assist bike, I'd also imagine that the health benefits would partially offset that micromort.
[1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/bicyc...
[2]: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Having been a delivery driver, and well, just casually observing others - this is likely to be an enormous factor.
Motorized scooters in particular seem to behave in frankly absurd ways, mounting the pavement at 15mph etc.
Because otherwise you'd have truckers banging it around at 130kmh for 10 hours at a time.